Tiller thinly stretches himself to 19 tracks with no added dimension. It ultimately amounts to a checklist for Broke Boys-turned-Hurt Boys, with Tiller listlessly ticking the boxes.

This dichotomy between the album’s two bandleaders makes the album an authentically interesting listen instead of a throwaway reunion effort.

Witness is an album full of bizarre choices--both the DJ Mustard and Hot Chip-produced tracks are, for some reason, ballads--that has the inherent appeal of a spectacular failure, but that’s about it.

It’s hard to overstate how exceptional Ti Amo is: every song is complete in its own way, and while there’s perhaps the slightest softening of focus near the end, it never starts to coast on its sultry aesthetic.

For now, we’re left with a deeply imperfect and too-often derivative album that is not without its charms, but won’t exactly help form the connection with the average listener that Halsey long ago established with her core fanbase.

The brighter moments of the second half can be interesting, but never as achingly perfect as that opening stretch.

There’s something whimsical about the new record that’s hard to pinpoint. The disparity between the lyrics and the sounds is a little disorienting at first, but progresses into something remarkably natural, and invigorating.

It’s a confusing but enjoyable record that sidesteps the rap hand-wringing and telegraphed weirdness of the drama surrounding Yachty.

There’s not even anything very embarrassing about Black Laden Crown, the first Danzig album since 2010’s Deth Red Sabaoth--it’s just plain old boring.

The King & I wastes too much energy centering a known relationship on these formless descriptions, a flaw that turns a 72-minute project into a poshly produced endurance contest.

There is no note out of place or sample used without careful thought. The album asks the listener to unpack each second, find thrills in its surprises and layers, or simply get lost in the rhythms that will make one’s body jerk and jut out in ways not yet defined. It is the work of an exacting mind, one that should challenge other producers and musicians in the future.

Styles plays all his roles gamely but unthreateningly.

It’s a lot to take in, especially from a band formerly so minimalistic, but musically, it holds together.

It’s the band’s brightest, most animated album. The sound is crisp, every layer discernible, lacking the blurs and reverberations that constitute traditional rock production and instead drawing from the rhythmic separations that characterize ‘80s pop and freestyle.

Luaka Bop has done a remarkable job of collecting recordings that were originally scattered across multiple releases and giving them the feeling of a consistent whole.

Sonically velveteen the whole way through, it’s certainly a comforting album, though Gonzalez’s efforts to capture the commanding, immediate quality of the music of her influences feel, overall, a little too cautious.

The fan service can only go so far, though. With each successive spin, the LP’s post-reunion giddiness recedes, revealing the overarching déja vu as a crutch.

No Shape is Hadreas’ longest album yet, and even moreso than its predecessor, it feels like a complete conceptual project. Taken as a whole, it’s a real thicket, imbued with the innocence and horror of fairy tale.

Ultimately, the curiosity of the song selection helps Best Troubador feel like a more thoughtful and earnest tribute. Sometimes the two men’s disparate sensibilities find an appealing point of overlap.

Some of the most affecting writing of Mac’s career.

The narrative structure of nighttime reveries can often feel unsettling, but throughout Slowdive, the band use foggy images and slippery transitions as a soothing sort of déjà vu--you feel like you’ve been here before, even though you obviously haven’t.

The rhythm sections and synths have been crafted with a newfound appreciation for sound, but with unexpected, childlike curiosity. The lyrics retain a relatable amount of simplicity, yet they also portray an intimate exploration of self-worth and image.

Her pop hits remain enjoyable, but what makes Feist’s albums hold up is the unexpected. Pleasure perhaps asks more of the listener than her first two records did, but really, the best pleasures do.

His most concise, transportive record to date. The keys to Consciousness’ triumph: fewer songs, fewer vocals, way, way more gorgeous guitar work.

When [Albarn] stays away from the light and the mic, Humanz shines.

Consistent with his acclaimed “New History Warfare” series, it captures a human arpeggiator reconstituting post-minimalism, jazz, and metal in growling, moaning pieces with far more syncopated parts--percussion, bass, melody, harmony--than one guy recording without overdubs should rightfully account for.

A couple of the drone bagatelles, though masterfully realized, break Gas’s signature hypnosis and could be mistaken for any number of Kompakt artists rather than being unmistakably his. But at best, Narkopop faithfully upgrades Gas’s murky fundamentals to HD.

Forging modern myth and cryptic missives into something as immediate and accessible as this is no small feat. Almost 25 years on, Ulver has crafted the best entry point for their catalog–a dramatic pop saga impossible to deny.

File it [“NVRLND”], and the rest of 2016 Atomized, with the band’s impressive collection of non-album treasures.

AZD quickly and wonderfully makes clear that neither retirement nor creative exhaustion is in the cards quite yet for Actress.

Kendrick is at his best when he’s rapping through the abyss, and better when his flow pulls in rappers from times past.

Whether the album’s title is a plea or a warning does not matter, as the effect is the same: The Chainsmokers have one song, and if you don’t want to hear 12 versions of it, please do not un-click the latch holding this box closed.

All-Amerikkkan Bada$$ manages to find a balance between necessary gravity and inviting wistfulness. The message can be preachy, but the pace is conversational.

Peeling back the density and obtuseness of Xen and Mutant, Arca is his most engaging, emotionally draining and confrontational album to date.

He’s not really in a fun mood, and the music follows. The lushness has diminished, and the work evokes increasing comparisons to ‘70s singer-songwriters like Randy Newman and Harry Nilsson, who hid their acidic commentary within sturdy pop structures.

The album presses pause on Holter and her band at an uncomfortable moment of transience--when their relationship to these years-old songs is clearly comfortable but also mildly antagonistic. However, they still manage to bring out the richest valences of Holter’s pristine and eccentric songs, and more than ever before, communicate her incredible skill as a passionate, intuitive, and controlled performer.

The Far Field can’t match its predecessor, but it isn’t without its highlights.

Triplicate is not a shining hour for Dylan when put into the full context of his fifty-plus-year career. But nonetheless, his insuppressible spirit is baked into every moonstruck moment.

The failure to evoke anything specific is what gives Silver Eye its aloof, Bond-theme posture, but in another light, it’s alienating.

The result is a satisfying if not uneven release that never drags in its lament, looking toward the next ballad lost among the chaos. Richly produced fuzzed-face guitars and clattering percussion accentuate the band’s classic noise-pop formula without ever feeling staid.

Each trek follows a similar path: a tumultuous hike through sludgy quagmires and craggy doom, culminating in a melancholic, melodramatic guitar solo. This repetitive pattern accordingly obfuscates the LP’s overarching dynamic arc, although the record’s not without its surprises.

With a tangle of voices and viewpoints, both songs [“First Letter from St. Sean” and “A Better Sun”] write beyond Boucher’s near-exhaustive projections-of-self to see things from with a larger, more insightful point-of-view.

The music is melancholic, urgent, enveloping. After more than a decade, her tightly controlled croon has lost none of its flinching effect to communicate shock and smoldering rage. Aside from sparking urgency and indignation, it evokes feelings the other side could use: humility, and shame.

The pleasure they provide is difficult to dismiss; there’s so much life in these new songs, formula or not.

Though Drake’s globetrotting is seeping into American pop (hi, Katy) More Life still stands apart. Its closest recent antecedent is probably Drake’s own Take Care, itself a kaleidoscopic masterpiece that pulled horizontally and vertically from across music.

Hot Thoughts sounds like Spoon and Dave Fridmann’s idea of a futuristic, guitarless record, which is to say it’s full immaculately constructed rock songs arranged on layers and layers of synthesizers and studio fireworks.

Where Turn Into’s multilayered arrangements sometimes felt scrunched, Everybody Works blossoms.

Nothing on Heartworms matches the processional majesty of Port of Morrow’s “Simple Song,” or even the go-for-broke mugging of “Fall of ‘82,” an unholy riff on Joe Walsh, Steely Dan, and Thin Lizzy. What Heartworms does have, though, is the informal approach to formalism shared by another Southwesterner transplanted to Portland, Britt Daniel.

These songs are more believable--touching, even, if you’re not put off by the milky expressiveness of his voice--than the multiple attempts at rapping.

FORGET sets out for new terrain with an expanded collection of collaborators, but isn’t far from what you’d expect from the project at this stage.

The most arresting moments on Tears in the Club come when he is working with singers. ... The rest of Tears in the Club is instrumental, aside from the snatches of sampled vocals that Kingdom has long favored in his tracks, and the mix of formats renders the album a somewhat inconsistent listen.

Why Love Now is reserved in its sonic experimentation. But for a band as sharp and capable as this one, that’s not really a problem. Beneath the acerbic jokes, Korvette is a humane and considerate writer and performer.

FUTURE is lively and engaging, with production and rapping that feels consciously animated.

A conduit for sound at its most expressive potential, No Home of the Mind squeezes all it can from the five-person form into something warm and full and unprecedented.

The contrast between his interiority and the sturdiness of his compositions is striking. So, too, is the contrast between this album and Heartbreaker, his lauded solo debut. Ranking breakup records is a ghoul’s errand; suffice to say that loss was Heartbreaker’s fuel. Here, it’s turned to fumes.

A generous, pacifistic record about the dynamics of friendship and the grace of listening--both, however coincidentally, apt palliatives for a tense, hostile global moment.

Doing away with his human human voice entirely in favor of an android’s syrupy drawl would seem like a logical next step for Sakamoto’s music, and it’s tempting to wonder what Love If Possible would sound like if he’d further indulged his more experimental tendencies.

Like Joni Mitchell’s spare 1976 masterpiece Hejira, Not Even Happiness is a lonesome travel album par excellence: a document of transience and half-formed inspiration, reveling in riddles and paradox rather than firm conclusions.

Though it runs just 33 minutes, Tourist in this Town feels like a road trip movie, a scrapbook of mixed emotions compiled from postcard-sized travel diary entries.

He’s separated from some of his R&B peers, fellows who douse themselves with sorrow and express their angst through detached, self-centered screeds obsessed with how things should be. Sampha, meanwhile, has an uncanny ability to eloquently express the painful facts of life that we learn to internalize. ... What makes Process exceptional is its delicate focus on relationships corroded and fissured by time and unintentional neglect.

A distinctly contemporary album that is in conversation with trendy, critically acclaimed R&B.

If you gauge artistic success by innovation, you can just filter the best of Culture, a very decent group of Migos songs, into a playlist. But if you appreciate Migos and the sound they ushered into contemporary rap as being one of the genre’s most basic, essential natural resources, it will be easier to let the whole album--a drama of perseverance--ride out.

While Ty Segall may not be his opus, but it’s certainly a testament to his fruitful brain and the unparalleled output that spills forth from it--a mind on a marathon, yet to stumble.

In a genre where “authenticity” is supposedly located in stripped-down effortless amateurism, Priests is at their most authentic when they’re using performance to challenge themselves and their audience.

Japandroids fans will be happy to know that Near to the Wild Heart of Life is a Japandroids album, pushed to 11 even in the quiet moments: towering riffs played on maxed-out amps, drums hit with due diligence, big whoa-oh harmonies, passionate, evocative rock n’ roll songwriting about girls and alcohol.

Here, they’ve crafted a shag and wood-grained interior as remarkably indebted to its predecessors as it is now warm and full and huge.

I See You is still distinctly and deeply an xx album, but in the gap between albums the group has found a way to move unmistakably forward while still sounding like themselves.

Their sound is still thrilling, but it’s an album made by men who have watched lives crumble despite willful rebellion and are picking up the pieces to continue fighting, even as the cycle is doomed to repeat itself.

Not the Actual Events is probably the grimiest Nine Inch Nails release since The Fragile. Rather than running the gamut between overdriven steamrolling and receding, glitchy ambience as on most of the work Reznor loosed between 1994 and 2008, the EP realizes a specific, portentous mood from several equivalent angles.

That combination of bottled passion and efficiency spreads itself evenly through the 11-track set.

There are more tracks to like than not, even stretching all the way to the end of the record. If you want Starboy to be a good album, it can be that. It may require some personal editing. It also may require that you ignore what even the most sterilized tracks seem to be about.

The work on PC Music Vol. 2 is more mature, less obnoxious, and much more deserving of the early hype PC Music received.

Most of these songs have good parts--they’re just lost in long, boring stretches of the band faintly nodding off to their distant, better work.

We Got It from Here could’ve been a self-referential nostalgia piece, a militant call to arms, or a Tribe and Friends-style fame flex, but it transcends such shallow concerns.

Rather than trying to replicate their off-the-cuff studio performances onstage, Gordon and Nace treat the songs as rough outlines for further improvisation, to be colored in as the musicians please.

FLOTUS chases a particular spark of inspiration across its hour-plus runtime, as if attempting to prolong an ephemeral moment when anything felt possible.

It’s understandable that Joanne finds Gaga performing authenticity, if only because it’s the strongest way to convey artistic evolution to the masses in 2016. The image here--the illusion, really--is as imperfect as it is meticulously rendered.

“Outlaws” is a surprising Revolution Radio standout, recalling some of the delicate, Queen-influenced moments from My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade—sensitive music that feels large. The rest of the record varies.

While he played the easygoing, likeable mope that rattled through life on Never Hungover Again, Cody is more daring and complex document, bled through with cynicism and exhaustion.

The wealth of talent on A Seat at the Table is well-showcased--it’s among the most exquisite productions of the year, each track silken-smooth and replete with quietly virtuosic instrumental flourishes—and in service of a story of pain and healing.

Campaign--a mixtape in name that feels not quite like a mixtape but not exactly like an album, either--is at its best when it carries on that tradition of richness of sound as a virtue in and of itself.

With help from frequent collaborators Paul White and Black Milk, UK electronic producer Evian Christ, and crate-digging maestro the Alchemist, Brown brings his persistent terrors to life.

The wonder of 22, A Million is how beautifully he melds the disparate forms--inside and outside, acoustic and digital, past and future, ground level and interstellar. It’s a stunning record, well worth the wait.

A lot of a listener’s acceptance of Care depends on their acceptance for nervous candor; for purposeful titles like “Lost Youth / Lost You,” for earnest existential wonderings of what “care” means, for transcribed 3 a.m. chats about how everyone looks at their phones and how warm skin is awesome.

For its all its pleasures, Hard II Love isn’t strong enough to convince you he’s decided to stick to a lane.

Preoccupations works with a richer emotional palette.

By grounding their idealism in simple, anthemic rock and a vague mythology, they’ve created an angsty, mutable codex of sorts, an inclusive machine by which to punch all the hearts.

Even though it’s a brisk seven songs, it lingers as the best pieces of writing tend to do.

Mangy Love, his eighth album, now finds him on the Anti- label and like the title suggests, it shows divergent aspects of Cass, at his most subtle, resonant, and resplendent, and at others, his most maddeningly repetitive and scabby.

The first half of Blonde is astonishing, sustained beauty. The second is more distant, closer to the shower improvs of Friday’s sounds-like-a-soundtrack-and-it-is Endless.

The strength of and the Anonymous Nobody... remains how it holds together as a complete, cohesive listen.

Dead Ringers embraces zero-gravity keyboards, clean vocals, and the spaced-out guitar sprawl of the best Popol Vuh records. It’s the farthest he’s gone from traditional metal signifiers, but it’s proof that inky bleakness is no heavier than blinding light.

Aside from a new perspective on Myrkur’s music, Mausoleum provides a welcome diversion from the general praxis of live albums as we know them.

The new Fishing Blues feels so rote you’ll have to play the old records to remember that it’s not the Atmosphere norm.

There are pleasures to be found on SremmLife 2 once you adjust your expectations and realize that it’s not a “No Flex Zone” sequel. Instead, it charts a different but still familiar path: Every youth explosion is eventually tempered by the grind and hard-won rewards of grown-man work.

Episodic is a steady, ten-track affair that doesn’t overstay its welcome, and it leaves on an anxious note.

Thee Oh Sees are always the same but different, drifting through genres before twisting them out of shape, from the bubblegum of Castlemania to the metal-tinged Floating Coffin. On A Weird Exists, they do this more successfully than ever before. [Sep 2016, p.80]

This is the soundtrack for when everything feels like static and you can’t bear to press on.