It may have taken them too long to get here, but on To Drink From the Night Itself, they recapture their heyday while leaving their imitators in the rearview.

In the Rainbow Rain isn’t always this thematically dense, though, and its more laid-back songs help loosen the philosophical knots that tracks like “Human Being Song” tie.

Mark Kozelek is a thoroughly modern album, one doesn’t separate the art from the artist but collapses the two completely.

True to form, the record hides moments of grace within an impenetrably violent landscape, capturing a rupture at the boundary of what is bearable. The songs gain intensity as the album progresses, leading the listener deep into a hell of the Body’s careful making.

With Sam Prekop on vocals, though, a Sea and Cake album is genetically incapable of sounding like anything other than a Sea and Cake album.

For all this record’s hubris, the long-touted “generational voice” that is Alex Turner has never sounded more real, or more himself.

Murmurations represents a breakthrough. It’s thrilling to imagine where Simian Mobile Disco might go next; here’s hoping they get the chance.

On 7, all the contrasts that mark their music are dialed up to blinding; you are plunged into darkness and then showered in light. The experience is so enveloping that you find yourself contending, once again, with that familiar itch to locate meaning.

The best thing an album like DNA Feelings can do to you is make you feel lost, and it does, frequently.

Singularity is ultimately grounded in the personal, not the cosmic, which is what makes this head music so rich.

These songs pull their power from slow reflections, from a series of sights that have been seen and pondered during long drives down open roads or quiet nights of deep thought.

It’s an album full of interstitial forms that flicker in between fixed states, and its magic lies in that liminal no-man’s-land.

SR3MM ends up being their clearest personal statement yet, finding their voices almost coincidentally.

It’s sexy like the Stones, and, in moments, unbearably tender. But it’s also funnier than anything the Stones ever did, and infinitely more self-deprecating.

Dove’s punchy ruefulness benefits from sparkling production by Tom Gorman and Paul Q. Kolderie, with whom Donelly has been working since her time in Throwing Muses.

On Good Thing, Bridges has kept his heart on his sleeve but updated his parlance to something a little less affected, a little more believable.

While Lost Friends’ slow-building ascents and soaring choruses function as necessary release valves for the unrest bubbling up from Joy’s lyrics, over the course of 12 tracks, a certain identikit quality takes hold.

Lanois and Funk demonstrate that even the briefest pause can reveal a more becalmed state of being lying just beneath all the noise and bustle.

Its pieces are beautiful and always different, and yet always the same, generic without losing character.

On Beyondless, Iceage reach for grandeur with more tenacity and suspending energy than ever.

There are elegant touches like this on each of Hollow Ground’s 10 songs, resulting in an album whose familiar melodies don’t demand your full attention but earn it anyway.

Rebound isn’t seismic—longtime fans will have no trouble cozying up to many of these songs. There are elements, however, that separate the album from its predecessors and suggest some tentative movement toward a new way of working.

If Knock Knock is a more conventional album than the more psychedelic and twisted Amygdala, it’s also a more affecting one. The fact that some of the guests appear more than once (Murphy gets two turns, as does Sophia Kennedy, the vocalist who released her strong debut album on Pampa last year) lends cohesion, and the production is extra lush.

At times it’s almost impressive how long an album called Beerbongs & Bentleys can go without cracking a smile. It is more assured and impressive than its predecessor, Stoney, but it’s also more exhausting.

Monáe has given us a pop record that feels gleefully youthful, perhaps even the album she wishes she could have had as a teen in Kansas City. The songwriting is precise if not always flawless.

Taken together with her other albums, it’s a part of a motley crew of modes that is shaping Princess Nokia into a great experimentalist. On its own, it lacks the completeness of a coherent project of genre hybridization, and lacks a standout single on the level of, say, “Tomboy” or “Kitana.”

There’s a palpable joy to these performances that distinguishes this album from its two immediate predecessors, even as its kinship with Roll With the Punches and Versatile underscores how Van Morrison’s latter-day music is all about the present moment.

Grid of Points burrows back into ambiguity, the vocal harmonies overlapping in foggy indeterminacy even when they are unaccompanied by any other instrument. And yet they are more heavenly than ever, Harris’ melodies drifting in almost liturgical directions.