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.