The component parts are limited and austere as always (though this time he’s added on a Roland bass synth to his instrumental palette), which makes it all the more impressive that he’s able to conjure such brilliance out of them.

Think Africa ’70 minus the choruses and sax solos. If that doesn’t sound heretical to you, the groove awaits.

Exhilarating and at times exhausting, the competing rhythms atop call-and-response choruses deliver a jittery math-rock fix cut with humanism, warning against fundamentalists of all stripes even as they embody the multicultural promise of their homeland.

From the rock of “Nganshé” to the roll of “Coco Blues,” two forward-looking cosmopolitans (plus friends) craft new directions in urban sound.

Pretty much every guitar band going is currently toiling in the same ’90s nostalgia mines that Kempner dives into here, but few are able to do so with both technical prowess and its emotive content intact.

He’s chosen good material and done right by it. But Kill the Lights sees him both at an apex and a crossroad.

The new three-piece is no supergroup. Robyn’s best work rises above mere competence, and while every song here will keep people on the dance floor, Love Is Free transcends nothing.

Compton doesn’t need to exist, but it does, and that it’s actually pretty good and fresh in a year brimming with vibrant, relevant young voices, says something.

Abyss weighs unnecessarily heavy at times--the obvious premise and barely-there smack drum of “Simple Death” doesn’t hold up against the other songs’ more nuanced examinations of the macabre subjects--but Wolfe makes a convincing case to follow her into the underworld.

The seven-, eight- and nine-minute lengths grow as wearing as the man’s past releases always threatened to, without actually losing momentum.

Another One is a collection of a few of DeMarco’s best songs to date, all in a day’s work for this normal guy who just so happens to get a little wild on stage.

The Most Lamentable Tragedy can be a harrowing listen, but it’s also laced with jokes and music that’s fun and invigorating.

St. Catherine is just as pleasant than its predecessors, but, ironically, its dusted-off, straightened-out recording and more substantial lyrics point out the music as, well, a little less so.

No one song sticks out so prominently this time around, but that’s just because Star Wars works so well as a cohesive whole.

Dirty Sprite 2 is a tremendous compendium of everything you want from a Future album in 2015.

A couple of wooly moments aside, Monroe’s third album, The Blade, continues a remarkable hot streak for writers Luke Laird, Jessi Alexander, Chris Stapleton, and Monroe herself.

Its stakes are a little lower, and he’s no longer revealing grand truths about life, but documenting once-dire realities from a rosier lens is still a worthwhile undertaking.

Misfires aside, it’s tough to dispute that although Born in the Echoes may not be a great album, it is generally a competent one.

All of these lyrical open wounds could be hard to stomach if not for the salve that Emre Turkmen and Mikey Goldsworthy’s head-spinning instrumentals provide.

In the case of Twelve Reasons to Die II, the glass is slightly more than half full.

The real magic of Currents, though, is in how Parker so effectively (and genuinely, for the most part) manipulates the listener’s emotions without necessarily revealing any himself.

There’s no shortage of potential DJ weaponry on Homesick, but what makes the album truly impressive are the cuts where Matrixxman gets out of his presumed comfort zone and steps away from the club.

It’s tense throughout, but it’s also endearingly frisky, and the poppiest moments have a tendency of landing at just the right time to stave off any potential noise-rock monotony.

No longer ghosts, with this strong, same-as-it-ever-was album, Veruca Salt are now full-on zombies, the riffing dead. They don’t wanna go.

A pleasant surprise.

Maybe not what they originally had in mind when they used to call it “Electronic body music,” but a stunning reinterpretation nonetheless.

This 53-year-old minor folk vet’s drawl doesn’t obscure his flow, making it all the easier to follow his tales in real-time, inhabiting a husband cleaning his deer rifle or the bent-backed Deaver who watched as “Uncle Sam took away the neighbors’ land.”

Why Make Sense? smooths out Alexis Taylor and Joe Goddard’s longstanding, ever-evolving musical partnership and collective existential quandaries into an album as polished as Larry Levan’s disco ball, and their most cohesive as well.

Sauna opens with the hissing and crackling of a steam room, and things get Benji-er from there.

Central bulbs in the now-blinding chandelier of Philly indie-punk, Hop Along’s thrilling sophomore effort plays out like sonic arrhythmia.

FWA is slicker than most mixtapes--and on tracks like the opener, his flow remains a spectacle--but there’s also the pervading sense here that he’s playing it safe.

These tracks don’t bear the outward signs of mourning of Rashad’s release, but at their heart there’s a sort of solitude that only occasionally makes its way onto the dance floor.

Though Django and Jimmie could have been a mere nostalgia trip, it’s more akin listening to your favorite uncles at family reunions, telling stories that they aren’t supposed to.

Power in the Blood is the work of an elder working against genre, knowing history, and moving forward into aesthetically unknown territory. For a septuagenarian, the optimism of it is heartening.

Elegant and nimble songs that are intricate in their beauty and restless in their heartbreak.

Turn is a haunting, often painfully beautiful example of how songs that may seem dead and buried can sublimely rise from the grave.

There are no musical clangers, and occasionally the guitar work is more ambitious than it needs to be. Bryan’s voice, when it is low and slow, is more exciting than his bro-holler, but both are pleasure for pleasure’s sake--and pleasure is enough reason to listen to this collection.

Occasional static aside, it seems Refused are really making good on their long-stated goal to take the airwaves back, or at least vibrating a little closer to the right frequency.

Virtually every song slaps like crazy.

Morning/Evening is beautiful in its own right, if you’re patient.

It’s not quite as satisfying as Kaleidoscope Dream, but it expands that album’s palette, pushing Miguel into further depths without submerging him in the squalor.

Lotus and his fellow former collaborator Kamasi Washington turn up again here to add to the downcast din, but their inclusion only highlights Bruner’s dispositional shift.

Recruiting Cursive’s Tim Kasher (on a single that outs the founding fathers as slave rapists) and Laura Jane Grace for 14 good songs in 40 minutes, Oberst’s made his best album since 2008’s addictive Conor Oberst, and ended up with the white male rage of the year.

What it does best is address the simple lament of not having anything to twist to in too long.

It’s hard to imagine a better record to stone and dethrone the three reigning M’s of ’90s indie: Malkmus, Mascis, and Martsch.

On her excellent second album, she brings us the whole block.

Her confidently unsteady voice has a refreshing energy, serving as a cohesive, quivering throughline for her intentionally nomadic debut, The Fool.

The results are hit-or-miss.

Ruess’ songs are a puzzle: They contain no memorable lines but the arrangements act as if they do.

The 14-track effort staggers in its breadth, especially since the album never loses its central through line: his knack for spinning pretty, heavy, and pretty heavy tracks.

This is a concept/protest record about Monsanto, and unless your blood boils as intensely about the issue as Young’s, the protest element of that is handled so clumsily that it sinks the album entirely.

Like all of High on Fire’s efforts, Luminiferous is an extravagance, no doubt, but it’s their most refined. And everyone can afford a few of those every now and again.

Hval continues to cleverly connect, and explicitly comment on, matters of sex and politics on her third album.

It’s a record full of fits and starts, baffling successes and giggly failures.

If you’re not feeling Surf right away, stick with it long enough and it just might bring you to its wavelength.

Things appear quieter for Kozelek this year, and the magic of Universal Themes is in the telling.

The results are brilliant, but the album too often focuses on the latter two-thirds of the album title at the expense of the first.

Diplo and Co. threw everything at the wall and turned around, pretending it stuck when all that’s really left is the splatter from undercooked leftovers.

Tucker and Tividad have discovered their indie-pop Neverland, and a fanciful, free-flowing sound to suit it.

It is exceedingly rare to find a producer who does so much, with so little, that he distilled from, again, so much.

Derulo’s latest, Everything Is 4, proves he’s a workhorse, with possibly even (gulp) a vision.

Clearly, it’s also a druggy album, and the highs are high--noticeably on “L$D,” whose stunning production turns from submerged to soaring, the jiggy “Excuse Me,” and the sexy, aforementioned “Westside Highway,” which has A.L.L.A.’s only hummable hook. Despite those peaks, the overall tone is more despondent.

While his latest album is obviously rooted in Nielson’s present, it still brims with the same introspective nostalgia that comes with dusting off those old memories, and old records.

Highlights finds the former remix project paring down to less imaginative drum/guitar basics, sounding like a 5 a.m., post-Tiki party K-hole, or sex with a Cabana boy you thought for sure would blow your mind--and then just laid there like a starfish.

On True Colors, each track tries to be a separate statement as Zedd tries to crash through his own, pre-existing glass ceiling--but the whole falls short of the sum of its parts.

Peanut Butter is far more self-aware, and that leads to music with greater resonance and variety.

We’re supposed to admire the fact that 30 years after their debut album, they haven’t moved an inch closer to definability.

It’s structurally confounding, simultaneously weirder and more welcoming than any of the other material she’s released to date.

The Desired Effect is another gingerly step into the present, Flowers’ present. No one knows how he feels or what he says until you read between his lines.

At almost 30 minutes exactly, PC Music Volume 1 quits while it’s ahead.

It’s an incredible album strewn with highlights obvious and sneaky, the rare debut that holds up the weight of its backstory, with the added brassiness of assuring us that’s just him on the regular. Now we know.

Kouyaté’s new Ba Power offers an even more streamlined and forceful take on West African tradition.

Where the album fails to eclipse its predecessor, and where it fails to match the band’s new Brooklyn buddies, is in Marcus Mumford’s vanilla songwriting.

Though it manages to be both lovely and adventurous, too often MCIII sounds like Cronin falls back on the string beds instead of utilizing them with the same fervor he used to reserve for crunchy, just-this-side-of-DGAF riffs.

It’s hard to remember he was once known primarily as a co-founder of chillwave once you’ve emerged dripping from the warm bath of What For?

Laufer flushes out the dark corners of last year’s blushingly sexy No More EP with velvet-voiced rapper Jeremih, turning it into his most ambitious and cinematic album yet.

When any of Hinterland‘s nine disco-punk tracks gets in the pocket, the bass, guitar, and drums could run out for a half-hour, remaining insistent in their funk without breaking stride or sagging in momentum.

Pulling a Bon Iver-gone-to-Walden Pond move might be grossly overdone by now, but Lord Huron has skillfully overturned the tired mulch in favor of tuneful new growth.

What elevates Ripe 4 Luv beyond four absolute bangers and four darn-good in-betweens is how it uncovers the creepiness of power pop relationship dynamics.

Listening to Non-Believers is like clasping hands with an old friend: It’s warm, accessible, and sweetly familiar.

The strong-heeled Jackie is far from conservative, and possibly more daring, with three of the year’s best songs at the very top, middle, and bottom.

II, like the record that preceded it, is still a seasick and unyielding document of brutalist experimentation. But because the trio is willing to explore different avenues, there’s more corners to get lost in.

With songs and production this pumped, they’ll continue to make waves far outside their beloved home state.

Ultimately, the most appealing thing about American Wrestlers is its lack of obvious guile or pretension.

Rae is an absorbing enough writer to keep F.I.L.A. afloat. He does a good job of sizing up an unquantifiable horror: being too embedded to relinquish one’s bloodletting past ways.

Magic Whip finds enough majesty and intrigue in the band’s more meditative days to remain worthy company to any of the band’s classic LPs.

It’s a cohesive meditation on the legacy of avant-garde greats like Steve Reich and Arvo Pärt and peers such as Tim Hecker--and, of course, an essential part of Stetson and Neufeld’s own impressive canons.

Winging away from Major Arcana‘s dark, tense pockets--the jagged, crackling riffs and the jarring way Dupuis’ voice faltered at the end of her desperately insightful verses, as if she were about to fall off a cliff--stretches Speedy Ortiz thin at times on Foil Deer.

Your enjoyment of Love Story will directly correlate with the amount that you enjoy Yelawolf’s singing, because boy howdy is there a lot of it here. If you respect Yelawolf’s progression as a musician and wish him luck on his journey to artistic self-actualization, you will be pleased.

On Untethered Moon, the crew sounds as taught and lean as ever.

The desire to show subtlety and restraint is quickly overtaken by their visceral need to go buck wild (“Gimme All Your Love” is the best example of that roller coaster). While that pacing becomes a crack in the album’s otherwise polished veneer, it can easily be overlooked once you’re sucked in by all of the sounds and colors.

Hooks are typically meant to stick, and after the infectious opening tracks, very little of Barter 6 does.

He’s both looking back and moving forward, attempting, successfully, to capture the nervous optimism of youth.

The Dead of the World holds firm to the orthodox occult black metal machinations we’ve come to expect.

Every note sounds instinctual, every moment fluid; this is what happens when good friends come together to watch the world burn.

The album feels epic in scope, imbuing the banality of everyday life with stunning tension and emotional weight in a way few producers can hope to touch.

Shorter track lengths and thoughtful sequencing help Body Pill come off not as a series of sketches, but rather a tasting menu of Naples’ musical talents that’s satisfying even after multiple spins.

The frequent Röyksopp collaborator has clearly learned a thing or two from the dance mavens, sprinkling Ten Love Songs with the mainstream-minded, four-on-the-floor thumping that should make American pop stars seethe with envy.