Acid Rap is the summer action blockbuster of mixtapes, where the audience need not dig much deeper than the surface to enjoy the best of what the production has to offer.

The crowd-pleasers are big and full, richly accessible and eccentric at the same time.... And yet even at its most infectious this music can pivot on a dime, emotionally, and the effect is often shattering.

It’s nerves are uneasy, but Lost in the Dream stands as Granduciel’s most open-armed record yet, filled to the gills with selfdom and sprawling musicality.

Untitled Unmastered provides a spectacular contrast of sounds gallivanting under the same roof.

Poison Season is a caustic, beguiling masterpiece.

Judicious use of the skip button to find the tracks on which Andersson’s transfixing voice is front and center, results in a much more rewarding, immediate experience.

This is the kind of album you might find yourself less inclined to play all the way through than scroll through the tracklist and queue up songs at will, but there’s enough great music here that you could have a new favorite song every day.

So spend your capitalist dollars on this album. He’s worth them.

Paak’s got the musicianship down to a science. Now it’s clear he’s working on what his music feels like.

It’s a different kind of thing now, even if the fundamentals are unchanged. It finds the National snapping out of the comfortable groove they’ve settled in over the last decade, fuelled by strife, battle-tested wisdom, and a touch of righteousness.

The best record of the xx’s career.

The sparse musical arrangements and haunting production only serve to heighten the album’s intimacy and ultimately render it a masterpiece of reflection and introspection, destined to be played on repeat in scores of late-night, tired, and lonely rooms.

This is an excellent and refreshingly tense album.

“Soothing” sounds legitimately fresh in a way very little new music does, and while it carries inescapable echoes of other artists (the bass line reminds me of peak career Tom Waits), the overall impression is that Laura Marling is paving new ground in her brand of folk music. Unfortunately--you knew there was going to be an “unfortunately”--there are only small glimpses of that innovation on the rest of the album.

A great way to approach I’m All Ears is by thinking of it as a jam session, where both Walton and Hollingworth experiment news ways of making music and detailing experience. It allows for a mishmash of elements and influences to come together in a bizarre and ultimately rewarding experience.

While Goodness doesn’t match the raw feeling or sincerity of Home, Like Noplace Is There, it’s well worth the time of any self-respecting emo junkie.

Pure Comedy’s scope, ambition, and beauty herald something bigger: the year’s first great album.

It’s the duo’s most sinister and fascinating collection of songs, enrapturing the listener with dystopian soundscapes and frustrating arrangements.

Beyoncé waited for the last moment to unveil 2013′s finest pop album. It arrived too late to enter our top ten lists, but just in time to own the year.

The more you listen, the more you’re likely to find, and the more you find, the more you’re likely to like Beautiful Thugger Girls. It’s not quite as endlessly explorable as Jeffery and doesn’t quite project the same confidence and swagger.

Flower Boy has elevated Tyler closer to the line. An unexpected move to be sure, but no less impressive whatsoever.

It feels like a natural evolution of what Coltrane was doing, anyway.

Emily’s D+Evolution is a tight package that should appeal to fans of Janelle Monáe and Joni Mitchell’s more jazzy endeavors, or anyone who is looking for some well crafted, ambiguous music, with elements of jazz, rock, and folk accompanied with some stellar singing.

The result is a record that stands at the crossroads between assurance and insecurity. In the hands of lesser artists, this dichotomy would be an obstacle to surmount, but for Ørsted the disparate strands of her identity combine like a binary chemical cocktail and ignite into something dangerously and delicately sublime.

A collection of remarkable songs by a group of musicians that compliment one another as well as any group over the last decade.

What he’s presented us with, essentially, is the skeleton of Animal Collective’s fleeting creativity, stripped down to its roots, revealing that even at its rawest, purest form the music still has an instinctive grasp of sincere emotion and beauty.

There’s no flash here, just a finely crafted batch of searingly personal indie rock songs. Unless you never had to grow up, it will resonate.

More often than not, however, this album brings you into its world and convinces you that love really is redemptive, that it can hold back the hounds at the gate.