It’s not hard to hear City Music as a lament for lost innocence, a pledge to maintain optimism and humanity at a time when those qualities don’t just feel like vestiges of youth, but of some better civilization that’s rapidly disappearing. In his best album yet, Morby makes a prayer out of the squall.

The Singles traces both Can’s genius and how they ultimately ran out of ideas, losing all of their Vitamin C.

House and Land don’t just make these songs their own: they effectively reclaim them, illustrating that they’ve always been theirs.

It’s a shame there’s no such thing as a subtitled listening experience because OUÏ is rich with brilliant, funny ideas about conception, nurture, and identity.

Whatever plane The Fifth State of Consciousness represents, Peaking Lights make it sound like gold at the end of a rainbow.

The raw, carnal fervor of Booker’s punk numbers is still present--and sometimes it’s more pronounced--on Witness’ acoustic and naked electric blues and soul, when the opposing forces of a lush or refined landscape and Booker’s gravely voice work in concert.

Boomiverse doesn’t have the same freewheeling, blitzkrieg energy as Sir Lucious, but it reestablishes Big Boi as a dependable record maker who will always make music worth checking for, no matter what else is going on around him.

Adiós doesn't add much to Campbell’s legacy--the comeback records of recent years formed a fitting final act--but it’s a pleasant postscript, a wistful reminder of the joys a great musician once gave.

Weather Diaries is no Tarantula-sized affront to Ride’s legacy, but neither is it a Going Blank Again-style triumph of reinvention and focus. Weather-wise, it is an overcast day with a hint of sun: promising but never quite satisfying.

Despite Isbell’s general aimlessness, The Nashville Sound features several winning moments.

While Trouble Maker doesn’t usurp the band’s primordial peak, it’s far and wide their strongest effort since 2000’s excellent self-titled.

Lorde captures emotions like none other. Her second album is a masterful study of being a young woman, a sleek and humid pop record full of grief and hedonism, crafted with the utmost care and wisdom.

Crack-Up contains his most compelling writing to date because it’s so damn relatable in 2017--reacting and retreating inwards as people and institutions fail to meet the standards set in one’s head.

He struggles to let his guard down, and ironically, operates best when he keeps it up. Tiller comes off not as the passionate lover, but as the sappy everyman—too bland and full of tropes to be the new hero pouring his heart out in a thunderstorm.

Overall, Sugar at the Gate is a compact record from a band chugging along smoothly, unspooling sweet rhythms like it is finally their job.

Coffman doesn’t necessarily transcend the cornerstones she’s sampling on City of No Reply, but she’s not aiming to.

With Witness’ confounding combination of songwriting sloppiness and sleepiness, broad strokes are the really the best Perry can hope for these days.

Droptopwop, his full-length collaboration with Metro Boomin, is Gucci’s first post-prison project that truly gels. This is thanks in no small part to Metro.

She is in touch with love’s fragilities and understands that it is worth protecting, there is just a lot of tireless work to get it. The record is all the more beautiful for it.

Dawson grows as a singer throughout these songs, sometimes with humorous results.

The Chuck Berry template rears its head, for better and worse, throughout Chuck.

It’s the slowest and least cluttered instrumentals that feel here the most effectively expansive, capturing the scope of the quartet’s chosen themes without collapsing beneath symbolism and meaning-making.

The melancholy saunter of Henriksen’s lines is isolated and sculpted by glimmering, whirring atmospheres full of emptiness and portent. Testing different ways to contrast eloquent material and enigmatic medium, the record plays like some lost collaboration between Wynton Marsalis and Brian Eno circa Ambient 4: On Land.

Platinum Tips + Ice Cream presents a most curious contradiction: it’s a greatest-hits album designed for die-hards.

Saint Etienne never identified as Britpop, and fair enough. But with Home Counties, they give us a glimpse of what cutting-edge ’90s pop could have become if it had evolved into adult music with a more earthbound point of view.

Pixx is at her sharpest when her doubt and discontent are animated by something more acute.

After the strong, finger-picked Buckingham solo feature of “In My World,” however, the rush of hearing these two pop-rock titans team up starts to wear off. ... Granted, successful moments are sprinkled throughout the whole album.

Capacity is a remarkable record, one that proves that Big Thief are not a one-trick pony, they are the full circus.