The effects, walls of noise, sharp changes in tonality and song structure are engaging and well-executed. Despite stretches of atmospheric passages and droning instrumentals, Never Exhale doesn’t ever feel boring. It is deliberate without being robotic, and creates an introspectively bleak mood throughout the record.

Earth Patterns approaches “atmospheric masterpiece” status. It’s full of colorful and refreshing music which captures the essence of beautiful outdoor spaces in the summer or fall (with this sense perhaps encouraged by the gorgeous album artwork).

The lethal grindcore squad hits ten with this new release engrossing a catalogue that knows no missteps just yet. If hell is what you want, hell is what you'll receive. In abundance.

Ecate ended up as the Italians' hardest hitting and most streamlined album so far.

99.9% is an assertion of identity and a rejection of identity and a whole lot of other things all at once, and provides some of the most incredible music of the year all the same. If this is the sound of hip-hop today, we’re in a good place.

Behind The Sun is an early contender for the best heavy psychedelic album of the year, and a mandatory listen for any rock fan.

That's the trick which keeps ANIMA from losing itself in the beat-heavy, extroverted exterior. The Thom Yorke of 2019 has a newfound openness which endears him to us in a way the famously reticent singer never has in twenty-plus years.

Not that his previous POP songs weren't POP, but never before has he sounded so confidently chart-ready in a chorus of his. Likewise, "Justify Your Life" features trip-hop beats, slabs of chillwave layers, and a reverb-full soundscape in an uncompromisingly banging way.

McMahon shows that he still has as firm of a grasp as ever on his unique brand of piano pop-rock, or whatever you’d want to classify it as. This album--while straightforward from a songwriting perspective--is just a collection of powerhouse pop tunes, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that when it’s executed to perfection like it is here.

Miss Anthropocene takes everything about Grimes the musician – her uncanny ability to build a song out of parts no one ever thought to put together before, that idiosyncratic voice, her ear for a classic melody – and concisely packages it into her most penetrating record yet.

The overwhelming sense Everything’s Fine leaves you with is that at some point a deep engagement with your artistic craft starts to look a lot like love--love between artists, between artist and audience, and finally a radical love for the world itself, even and especially because we know things will never be fine.

It is every bit as excellent as I could have hoped for. Museum is a haunting affair, delicate and understated at all times yet bold enough to be decidedly impressive.

Far from the sort of thrown-together collaboration that is generally de rigueur, case/lang/veirs stands out because it remains an accurate representation of the sum of its parts, a catalog of what makes its three artists great.

HEALTH have never sounded as focused as they do here. These are sounds that will grab you by the hair and drag you where you need to go. It’s control of a potentially unpleasant, entirely intoxicating sort.

Disco4 :: Part II might not get everything spot on, but it still stands up to Part I in a way that proves their last record wasn’t a fluke.

Sarah and Josh have created a very well-written balance between depth and melody that sets them apart from many pop acts that are around today.

It’s not as seamless a blend as last year’s Ashenspire, but both idea and execution are exquisitely fresh among the extreme scene. Portrayal of Guilt always had the potential to craft a definitive album, and if Devil Music is not it, then they sure are on the right track.

The band doesn’t quite manage to fire on all cylinders for the entirety of their debut LP (with a few mid-album tracks seeing the quality level slip a bit), but a good chunk of this record is absolutely fantastic, blending grit and melody with an undeniable intensity, both musically and atmospherically. All told, warts and all, this is a record which absolutely merits inclusion among the year’s finest.

Silver Wilkinson is a more streamlined yet enjoyably disparate record.

This album might not flow as perfectly as others or have one consistent style, but what it does have is riffs, balls and atmosphere aplenty, and when creating music based in black metal, it doesn’t get any better than that.

It’s all memorable, and it’s all worth listening to again and again.

The album’s two parts are apparent. It threads in-between two halves, creating a jagged tapestry of lush rock and murky chaos. Outside of that context, a person might find that LφVE & EVφL is a confounding and inconsistent experience; a chimeric monster of conflicting interests and ideas that trades blows with itself amongst a heavy backdrop of metal and noise. But to Boris devotees, it’s everything and more.

Weathervanes is a bit of a downer. Regardless, though, it’s Isbell’s reliably exceptional songwriting, the bursting-out-of-the-gate energy of the 400 Unit (just listen to the barnburner that is “When We Were Close”), and a talent for subtle but inescapable hooks which make the doom and gloom of these songs not only bearable, but rather inviting.

It’s post-punk theatre through and through, full of bright colours and left turns, with enough returning cast members to keep the old heads in their seats (“bring back the old Ought!”).

If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power is on an upward trajectory in terms of Halsey releasing quality music. By and by, Halsey may not have love, but her latest record is power.

It's a remarkably restless and hungry 40 minutes of music, maybe bordering on scattershot, if not for one thing holding it all together. That would be De Souza's own vocals. Put simply, she gives the best performance of the year on this album, her powerhouse voice bursting out of the seams of every song like it simply can't be contained.

DAMN. remedies a lot of its predecessor's mistakes and gives us something better--a Kendrick not seen since Section.80, throwing tonally and stylistically inconsistent songs together in a desperate scramble to tell us just what the fuck he's feeling. It's slipshod, haphazard and rocky to listen to, and that's the Kendrick I've been missing for the past few years.

Depression Cherry is a startlingly easy record to get lost in.

In These Times is an alluring listen because it is multi-faceted and fun.

A record imbued with the distance between people and places, the impermanence of stories and emotions, and one that finds it ever so hard to stay in one place for too long. ... It’s a damn fine National album.

As with so many flashy and polished pieces, often the initial effect far outweighs the real underlying substance. For now, though, we’re just going to have to enjoy Hope for what it is: an insanely catchy record from an indie-pop juggernaut that has likely just set the standard for radio-friendly folk.

It's undoubtedly his most impressive collection of songs in over two decades.

The Jacket is an excellent foray into dream pop, country, indie, music, textiles, life, the stratosphere.

Mainstream baiting notwithstanding, With Light & With Love is the best Woods record yet, a tinkering of the charmingly sincere folksiness of Bend Beyond into something even more muscular and full-bodied.

In spite of its more defined nature, Microtonic is an entirely immersive affair. There’s tiny sonic motifs littered across the record, connecting each moment to the next and making everything feel like one well-rounded experience.

ATGCLVLSSCAP will be different for everyone. But undeniably, it's an entrancing piece of music, collecting every bit of Ulver's legacy and throwing it to the wayside, making room for something transcending the band's 30 year existence.

While Heritage is the strongest of this new trilogy, as well as laying the blueprint for this current era, Sorceress is able to push the adventurous qualities further to outstanding effect.

What makes Repave different is that it’s the result of multiple creative minds at work, and that synergy is what makes the record so invigorating.

Freed from the weight of being some kind of statement on a legacy impossible to define, and sans the walking-on-eggshells of the first CZARFACE/DOOM collab, Super What? looks more and more like three excellent rappers just chipping away in the studio, no expectations or external pressures.

To the world outside the next thirty-six minutes: I'm sorry, you just don't exist while The Hands are at work. There’s little you can do to break the immersion, and even less you can do to break Andreas Werliin’s stride.

UNLOCKED's best features are its brevity and simplicity. Songs drop in, do what they need to and cycle to an end without melodrama.

Radical is by no means a reinvention or revelation for the band, but I wouldn't want it to be. In refusing to fix what ain't broke, ETID prove themselves once more as the reigning king of their peculiar, blood-splattered bouncy-castle.

Lo Moon isn’t afraid to step outside of its comfort zone, and it’s a big reason why the album feels like such a distinct triumph over the genre’s familiar tendencies and tropes.

Saya Gray’s newfound streamlined approach comes at little cost to her oddball M.O.. She is remarkable for how she irons out what would once have been a lone idiosyncratic contour into the basis for a full track, stuffing verse/chorus structures with ideas so prickly that it’s a wonder to hear them sit so naturally in a conventional framework.

It takes several spins to fully comprehend the ambitious scope on display here as this is the kind of record that unravels the longer one ventures into its gorgeous textures, subtle progressive leanings and consistently clever lyricism.

This is, arguably, the most consistent sounding album she has ever produced, and although it may not appeal to every one of her fans, it’ll certainly have old fans relishing in the brooding spiritual journey it provides.

Brimming with the caustic darkness of his later material, the album feels wholly new while still featuring the same haggard nihilism that Wrest is known for.

An album like 7 easily sets itself apart from any other record Beach House has recorded thus far; it's far more easier to write it off as a derivative indie album, but to do so would discredit the obvious effort it took to actually record something so different from every other album they've done yet.

Sometimes, Forever is the most colorful album of Allison’s career, but once all her skeletons are revealed, that’s when she’ll reach her true peak. Until that moment arrives, this is the most convincing and complete package from Soccer Mommy to date.

Every member audibly leveled up with each LP and Formal Growth in the Desert again takes it up a notch. There are bits of everything the quartet crafted so far and more, all incorporated into a cohesive and intense narrative. As the instrumentals become more evocative, so does the storytelling.

Along with Coagulated Bliss, this is one of the finest examples of audacious sonic development in the genre in recent years. It’s not what I expected, but it’s what I wanted and so much more.

Like the album it constitutes, ["Emptiness Will Eat the Witches"] rarely illuminated, yet beautifully moving and unquestionably engrossing.

The transitions are what make the thing, equally as important as the actual songs here. Bad Witch finds Trent at a rare peak in terms of song flow and focus, and as a piece is absolutely deserving of the LP distinction, brutally short runtime be damned.

Few Good Things is a vibrant, technicolour celebration of life's triumphs and joys.

OneRepublic’s latest effort proves that they are at the top of their respective genre, and it may be time to stop looking at them as the prince waiting-in-the-wings and finally hand them that goddamned crown.

Kenny Segal, a true and varied talent in and of himself, has a firm grasp on the gift that billy woods possesses, and has doubled down on his instinct to assist, to foreground the whims of a true poet in prime form. billy woods takes the bearing, and we follow.

Seed of a Seed doesn’t quite reach the heights of I Need to Start a Garden (and let’s be honest, that’s a HIGH bar to clear as it is), but it’s still quite an impressive offering. Instead of lazily rehashing what made her debut so special, Heynderickx decided to expand on it and give her songs a more panoramic space to roam in. Most importantly, the core characteristics of her style weren’t lost in the process.

Sure, IM NAYEON is all glossy sweetness and may lack nutritional value, but does that really matter when the final product is this easy to sink your teeth into?

Minaj’s latest release is a complicated being, one that might never sit easy, but the layers she provides for the listener to peel through provide for an engaging and ultimately satisfying experience.

Truth is, none of that intimacy [in For Emma] has gone, just the direction it's flowing has changed. Bon Iver today has traded that one-to-one, man-to-listener intimacy for the many-to-many intimacy shared between Vernon's circle of collaborators.

The record still varies its tempo from time to time, resulting in some truly gorgeous gems.

Any Human Friend cements Hackman as one of the most intriguing figures in indie-pop/rock, if not for her lyrical antics then for her ability to constantly reinvent her music.

It's not the kind of album that wastes time on flashy features and big beats to demand your attention, but if you come to it anyway, you might find more to Elephant In The Room than you would have expected.

Eternal Blue’s introduction makes way for it’s more poignant and celebrated ending.

Omens is an excellent album, one that is both familiar for fans and a step further in Elder’s sonic evolution. All the noodling and meticulous structure developments paid off, since all songs flow impressively smooth.

Wakin On A Pretty Daze comes into focus with context, though, as does any accomplished record.

Animaru is as gorgeous as can be, and undeniably triumphant as a debut. Mei’s music has all the exuberance of a sprint imbued with the mindfulness of sitting with your eyes closed; it fits just about every occasion. “There’s something I like about it” indeed.

The band are at their best in short, sharp, concentrated bursts of euphoria, which Late Developers delivers in spades. More importantly, they finally seem to have recognised that it's not impossible to balance their slyly wandering spirits with their wryly written pop sensibilities to rediscover themselves at their very best.

The Amulet won’t necessarily bring instant gratification to all of its listeners, and it’s difficult to assess how it will be perceived by dedicated Circa followers. However, it is certainly one of the most well-composed alt-rock/post-hardcore albums of the year, and it seems to bring a newfound sense of maturity to both the songwriting and production aspects of the group’s sound.

It’s that vital connection between Lorde’s present-day ruminations and the uncanny way her music hits on such a fundamental level with all that dirty, romanticized nostalgia that makes Pure Heroine such a success beyond "Royals'" ostensible aim of looking down its nose at the Miley Cyruses and Taylor Swifts of the world.

RTJ 3 is both a sprinter’s dip and a victory lap – it is neither as sinewy as RTJ 1 nor as effusively vivacious as 2014’s RTJ 2, but still finds itself imbibed with the kind of assured professionalism that is only permitted to those who have previously done enough to be granted a low-pressure outing.

Thankfully, Vol. 3 takes full advantage of its longer runtime, stretching into more places than the fairly self-contained first two volumes could

It just finds this fantastic middle ground, not only in the way that its frantic smattering of ideas somehow presents not as overwhelming, but comforting - the exuberance infectious, the fuzz electric - but, also, in how Night Palace ties in with the broader Elverum catalogue.

Hedvig Mollestad Trio have stepped up their game in every aspect, coming out with an instrumental album that's dexterously performed, often inventive and always compelling.

This is the kind of record that never loses sight of a desire to learn and change. Whenever Remind Me Tomorrow circles in on starry-eyed nostalgia -- that vile, misleading thing -- it rearranges the fabric of its composition and converts idealism to retrospect.

Dope Body have managed to modulate their sound without watering down the characteristics that made them unique in the first place. In consequence, Lifer is a ferocious record that deftly coalesces noise rock with early grunge and psychedelic flourishes. It's a trip down memory lane well worth taking.

Monomania demands an undivided attention and continuous play to truly see the beauty within its surrealism.

Change is what led them to write the album they needed to, and in turn, left us listeners with the album we needed to hear. Change reminds us that we didn’t know Every Time I Die like we thought we did--but they sure read us to a tee with From Parts Unknown.

What the album lacks in refinement and songwriting polish, it gains in the unflagging energy these tunes emanate.

Spoon’s bravest excursions to date, brilliant and distinct in their own way.

For all intents and purposes Clairo’s debut album, Immunity proves to be everything that people who’ve watched her ascent could hope for. She has set the stage to dominate her own slice of the forlorn indie-pop niche, alongside peers like Baker, Heynderickx, and Soccery Mommy.

To put it mildly, Little Dark Age isn’t a success story, nor is it a comeback for anyone other than the most nerdish and devoted of us, and it doesn’t matter anyway. This isn’t the best this band has sounded in years, it’s the best they’ve ever sounded.

No matter what musical approach is being explored on Is This The Life We Really Want?, it never abandons being clever and lyrically adept.

A non-household album by an oft-overlooked electronic artist/producer, Queen of Golden Dogs is an intriguing, mysteriously intelligent dark horse of a record. Fans of broader electronic/experimental pieces, prepare to be delighted in the delirious lunacy of Vessel’s apex-to-date.

We've Been Going About This All Wrong reflects on the darkest moments of her earliest work with a newfound sense of confidence and control fully discovered in the Remind Me Tomorrow era.

These two seemingly disparate parts combine in an off-putting but refreshingly rough-and-tumble way.

The album's congruence in theme, tempo, and tone is both consistent and coherent. Together with Butch Walker, Catherine Popper, and long-time running mates Ian Perkins and Alex Rosamilia (among others), Painkillers is a carefully-cultivated record that Fallon categorically needed to write.

One Of Us Is the Killer is the explosion all of us were hoping it’d be, and yes, lethal as ever--now it’s just easier to pick up the pieces afterwards.

Big Ups combine the elements in such a way that compliments their signature style without ever compromising their identity; Before a Million Universes will almost certainly be one of the most interesting punk releases of 2016 because of that.

Bandana is terrific because it makes you yearn for that imagined history, the struggle from page to audio that surely happened to produce such a god-given chemistry. Freddie's deep, choppy flows might initially seem somewhat at odds with Madlib's production but that's why it works, because playing too much to the soul-soaked nostalgia robs the proceedings of their bite.

On Little Oblivions, she's taken the spaces in her music that used to be empty and filled them with churning, beautiful noise.

Filled to the brim with consistently excellent songs, Once More 'Round The Sun serves as a blueprint of how to go commercial without sacrificing one's artistic identity.

The Now Now feels shockingly complete.

Whether or not you’re a fan of their earlier, grittier material or their newer, more polished recordings, Is Survived By is a massively engaging and surprisingly triumphant record, and you cant expect anything but for them to continue to add to their ranks of love-moshing fans with an album that is just so damn solid.

Make no mistake, the payoff that Promises promises is by no means immediate. This is music to savour with eyes closed in a dark room, headphones on and all other distractions firmly yeeted from sight.

Physical Thrills demands your focus and immersion, a clear sign that Silversun Pickups are accessing their artistic side and perhaps better than they ever have before. What felt like a band in decline just a few short years ago has been given a shot in the arm.

The Worse Things Get is a listen that tears and breaks, an album defiant and loud as often as it is anxious and sad.

All in all, Scurrilous succeeds at all levels. It takes the tediousness out of technicality, and injects more hooks than a tackle box into the Protest the Hero formula.