They’re caustic and incendiary as hell, but they’re also unbelievably fun, an exciting and rare quality in music this visceral.

Cherry Bomb is both impressive in its ambition and absolutely stunning in its aimlessness, weaving countless genres into multi-part suites but still coming off undercooked in its entirety.

Second Hand Heart is a whisker less awesome, but in the last month only Earl Sweatshirt’s album could match its acerbic brevity.

The LP is the group’s most enjoyable, but also their most potent, all the more menacing for its unlikely grinning.

As music alone, the band is looser and more flexible than ever, deploying Superchunk’s Jon Wurster for accents and subtleties outside of his main band’s dynamic range, and punching out the gate with highlights as varied as the Louisiana ragtime of “Southwestern Territory” and the punked-up “Choked Out.”

Ivy Tripp cements that Crutchfield is better able to hone in on her fears and articulate emotional realities.

Gibbard’s downcast verses keep Kintsugi all too safely anchored and docked.

It’s far more interesting and hard-hitting, with bizarre hooks where you least expect.... Taken as a whole, The Powers That B (what a title, right?) suffers from the typical overlong-yet-undercooked double-album dilemma that makes it hard to imagine playing either side in a year that isn’t 2015.

Carrie & Lowell is such a deeply, deeply personal statement from Stevens that its smallness sometimes shows. Though it’s easily his best and most powerful album since 2005’s Illinois, it never quite reaches the same sweeping highs of that epic concept album.

The album won't hold you rapt for the entirety of its 45 minutes, but it'll never totally release you from its grasp either, seeping its way into your pores like an insidious fog.

Exchanging their volatile tendencies for restraint and focus, Godspeed You! Black Emperor have created another incredible work and one that finds them again evading the confines of formula--even if it happens to be their own.

The Ark Work is best at its most explorative rather than its most punishing.

The new developments in sound and style of Marling's fifth album--and the way her leading-lady status continues to evolve--leave it as her most captivating yet. Just watch the movie and don't worry too much about the run time.

[A] taut, very good sophomore studio album.

It's the rare rap album that actually rewards its mixtape following.

Time to Go Home breaks new personal and political ground for contemporary goth-influenced music as Chastity Belt trades cliche nihilism for proactively feminist post-punk.

It doesn't excite with sonic innovation and lyrical reinvention, it excites by just sounding really, really, really good, and coming from a voice that, in more ways than one, we've never quite heard before. And that in itself should make it one of the most thrilling albums you hear this year.

The majority of cuts on Goon still feel like demos: languidly spaced chords, carefully measured arpeggiation, and hardly anything so gauche as a groove. The twinkle, such as it is, comes from the vocal.

Lstenability is the difference between the majesty of this 79-minute behemoth on paper, and the songs it needs to succeed. So let's give it up to the astounding thicket of music here, the best-produced rap since the dawn of Drake.

This band has never made an out-and-out bad album, but now it has made an uninspired one.

Fantasy Empire equally splits its time between the physical and metaphysical. It belongs as much in a musty basement as it does in an art gallery.

Rather than diluting Lewis' appeal, the mainstream-accessible, arena-sized sound of Eclipse feels like it's unlocking the potential for Lewis to reach new heights with his indie-dressed soul-pop.

Eat Pray Thug is 11 songs in 40 minutes with the most emotional moment, "Flag Shopping," up soon at track five, paving the way for the intense trilogy that closes: "Al Q8a," "Suicide by Cop," and "Patriot Act."

Ultimately, even in the record's clunkier moments, it's gratifying to hear Madonna leaning defiantly (and gleefully) into what many would consider to be the less savory elements of her personality.

This is the birth of Will Butler, solo artist, whose career seems just as woozily unpredictable and captivating as that of his "day job."

There's no instantaneous party classics on Jack Ü – no worthy successors to "Turn Down for What" despite its obvious influence, but maybe a "Bubble Butt" or a "Big Bad Wolf." As a guileless continuation of the escapist, dub-tinged blowout that Diplo effortlessly pursued with Major Lazer, it's one of the beatiest prizes of the year so far.

Blade isn't quite that esoteric or ambitious, just an adept, hour-long reminder of how 14 years ago these guys turned your average boom bap into elaborate fantasies of iron galaxies and screamed phoenixes.

The weight of Tucker and Roddick's reverb-drenched, synth-stuffed production is such that it's hard for their songs to consistently achieve the kind of liftoff that the pair desires.