It’s the dazzling culmination of Jamie xx’s last six years of work, gathering up elements of everything he’s done--moody ballads, floor-filling bangers, expansive and off-kilter collaborations with vocalists--and packing them tightly into a glittering ball that reflects spinning fragments of feeling back at us.

For the most part, it settles somewhere unusual, if not original.

At long last, a real sense of identity has begun to coalesce in Rocky’s work.

She’s not an ostentatious player, although she certainly has the chops; she seldom solos and usually avoids the fussy filigrees that demonstrate technique as much as they serve the song.

Tthere’s a palpable narrative here, a sense of loss and stillness, and it reanimates Dalton, if only for a moment. It’s good to have her back.

As a whole, Have a Nice Life stands as a decent collection of songs that, while palatable, casually floats by in a sea of average beats by Jesse Shatkin, who produced much of the album.

This is Nielson's most accomplished album, though it's not his most direct, or brash, or explosive.

It’s this unabashed ambition that makes You Should Be Here resonate long after one has internalized its motivational urges ("Can't nobody love somebody that do not love themselves") and tender observations on the mechanics of relationships (see the wistful "Unconditional").

They’re modest songs for modest moments, occupying the space between the hookup and the breakup, of getting hired and getting fired, that manageable lovesickness, regret, and anxiety that underlie just about every URL and IRL interaction.

True Colors does traverse familiar, populous formats that may be difficult to innovate on top of, but other posi-tinted, mass audience-focused projects have found success by mixing their own cocktails of EDM, soul, and of-the-minute rap production. Zedd’s True Colors, though, feels underformed and unoriginal.

Despite the wide scope of her project, Herndon’s ambitious efforts are appealingly multifaceted and personal, and Platform may turn out to be the most thought-provoking experimental electronic music release of the year.

It sounds different from the old version of the band, but not that different.

Welcome Back to Milk scans as an overhaul of its protagonist’s romantic history, a poised reassessment of domestic situations that seemed okay at the time, but maybe weren’t the best, after all. Wherever her gaze turns, Houghton’s conviction is lethal.

Maybe it's good for a laugh, but only as a defense mechanism against the cringe-inducing experience of watching artistic expression abandon a heartbroken man at his lowest moment.

It’s always just one move too many.

Why Make Sense? is probably the fourth-best Hot Chip album. But that’s not necessarily a knock, because their fourth-best album is still a very good album.

The music is colorful and bright and dizzying. It recalls the energy and wall-of-sound quality of Konono No 1, except more frenzied and texturally varied.

Peanut Butter is a chaotic listen, powerful in parts and fragile in others, and often both at the same time. No matter where it goes, it's always running away from itself.

Set aside the negligible opening and closing tracks, and Sol Invictus has just eight tracks spanning 34 minutes, an underwhelming running time considering how long Faith No More have been away. Such brevity could be overlooked if Sol Invictus was accompanied by a significant shift in the band’s sound, but many of these songs feel like retreads.

PC Music is escapism whose primary effect is to remind us of what we’re trying to escape. We can’t trade body for avatar; we can’t displace longing forever. But for the space of an album--the sheer forcefulness of this intention smashed into a dizzy half-hour span--the sincerity within our most fundamentally artificial impulses comes calling.

Wauters has always seemed breezy but never quite so meek.

On Ratchet, an honest, earnest pop record, Shamir elaborates on the gutsy melodies of those early demos and singles and makes good on the hype.

He has his handful of obsessions, his rules, his limitations, and once in a while he returns and gives us a record like this, something that will be sounding good five or 10 or 15 years from now, or whenever the next solo record comes along.

It’s almost as if the first half of the album is comprised of songs that Crocodiles had finished writing by the time they got to the studio, and the second half is all of the stuff that they came up with while they were there. And this exploratory spirit is where Boys finds its strength.

Anamai may not be as pummelling as a HSY record, but their metaphysical weight makes up for it, producing an even more striking result than Mayberry’s other band.

With Niagara, he's taken strengths from his entire oeuvre to reach deeper into himself and produce what may be his best record yet, one that brings all the fulfillment of noise and transcends them all the same.

It is rewarding to have Herren's voice at the table again, to remind the world where a sizeable chunk of this sound derived.

A charitable perspective might see the band's embrace of pub rock as a conscious rejection of political correctness in the form of so-called good taste; the reality is that it seems like a last-ditch attempt to aestheticize a sublime lack of inspiration.