After navigating complex matrices of identity under an indulgent, accessible veneer, Dirty Computer is ultimately--even “simply”--a cathartic assertion of self in a hostile system.

Tracks such as The Fragile’s “Ripe (With Decay)” are these kinds of delightful journeys. “World” and “Over and Out” only display longer extensions of single ideas, which make them still a few points shy of the band’s best.

Musically, the album’s apparent incompleteness--the always dissolving lack of coherence, the mosaic of multiple voices, the chance and chaos by which the songs were arranged--abides by the peripheral pull of curiosity. ... Curiosity perforates the veil and returns, yet remains ephemeral.

Everything about Everything is Love feels superficial, from the artists’ constant pronouncement of their love for each other to their engagement with topics like fashion, art, watches (this gets its own category), social issues, how great their friends are, sports, and, indeed, their own lives. The most boring aspect of the album is its centerpiece: the couple’s obsession with their wealth.

Fractured, inconsistent, broken, torn, OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES aims toward the stylistic grandness of High Pop, and in that inconsistence, it achieves it. ... It’s incredible.

Airs resists the cheap gratification of the indie genre’s tendency of plundering from rock & roll’s rich past with only a passing fancy. Rae’s commitment to serving the dignity and stateliness of those genres is the record’s greatest asset, and with it comes the authenticity of a younger artist who’s keenly aware of her modest place in Nashville’s wide musical tapestry, but nonetheless confident enough to prove her salt time and again.

Although there is no absence of noise on this record, what is quieter about it gives space to hear what was always there: a fully embodied voice that, through pain as through love, ceaselessly gives only herself, an angel whose message becomes indistinguishable in grace from the messenger.

While the songs here are not memorable in the buzzer-beating manner of a title shot, no one would prefer a world where all-star matches were missing.

ye really does what a self-titled album should do: it says “Hey, this is who I am.” Even at 23 minutes, it almost feels like two different albums: an aggressive, dissonant one, and an empathetic, soulful one. Yet, those aren’t the two sides of Kanye, because those things exist in him simultaneously, all the time.

Atonement is the name of the game on this record, and when paired with Tillman’s gorgeous baritone and humble melodies, the self-reflective end result is often heartening. Not every track here captures this doleful magic (“The Songwriter” and closer “We’re Only People” occasionally get lost in their own sorrow), but it’s commendable all the same.

Because the album can’t be one complete thing, Age Of is its own archenemy; its own princess stranded in a high castle; its own climb up the Holy Mountain. A radical incompleteness haunts it.

Puff doesn’t grab your attention directly. Rather, it occupies your subconscious, leaving vestiges of melodies and lyrics behind that lie dormant for stretches of time, resurfacing intermittently and maddeningly.

Even if The Long Sleep is (deep down or hiding in plain sight) a resigned, muted, end-of-the-line Kool-Aid party, the bug juice is delectable enough to call one back from the great unknown for seconds and so on.

Walker is still ultimately a troubadour at heart, a keeper of old languages retelling us stories from years past, and Deafman Glance shows that he’s continuing to sharpen his tongue.

It remains first and foremost a very fun album.

A tightly-controlled, affectively capacious accumulation of sound that communicates beyond speech. In its collection of styles, histories, and genres, it weaves a mesh for the listener to inhabit.

A return to/remaining within form where Carey’s freewheeling guitar and (thankfully) sandblasted and virtuosic voice beam at us from our speakers in triumphant denouement.

Panic Blooms is a long overdue sound from a project that sees the absurdity in holding onto feelings while desperately trying to feel. It’s borderline pop.

Wide Awake! is the album in which America’s most consistent punk band once again distill their myriad influences, this time with a whole new list of reasons why their minds never push the brakes.

At times, the record is just classically Surreal, a bucolic unheimlich provoking a fleeting confrontation with the unconscious. What remains most alluring about this experiment’s broken logic is the sense that you’re furtively occupying someone else’s dream.

Knock Knock is full of surprises, and Koze is floating, in a meditative stance, watching over your shoulder as you revel in its resplendent glory.

The Sea and Cake continue to be champions for the weary and resolute alike, being both the soothing reassurance of beauty and the wistful resolve that the most dogged absolute is the very impermanence of everything. It’s a deceptively tricky feat and one that they continue to thrive on.

For the most part, it’s the moments that pivot between shadow and light that provide the most pleasure. “L’Inconnue” emerges from its chrysalis around the 1:40 mark, Legrand singing in French as a heavenly choral loop begins to surround her voice. Both musically and lyrically, the development feels closer to the sound of falling in love than anything they’ve made, an ecstatic payoff that ranks among their finest work.

Maybe much will be made of their newplayful trifling with those muchmaligned indiedancetronica influences, but I don’think this is the mereaesthetic synthwave chill,man plasticity of the endlessly reproducible shoppingmall sunset.

It contains extraordinary moments of dissonance, rhythms coalescing and congealing then melting away, quietly shimmering choral vocoders. It’s (even) less pop-influenced than earlier works of Dalt’s (Commotus, for example). In its latter half, it sometimes errs into a backgroundish quality, disappearing into its own subtlety

In Rebound, Friedberger meets mementos of happier times and opportunities for immediate joy with identical ease. And that is the promise, making her latest album an intriguing open door from an artist who continues to grow in all possible ways.

Caer is a magnificent oasis of feeling and reflection, where self-doubt, confidence, love, and lust live so comfortably alongside one another.

If Snares is complexity incarnate, Lanois is distilled modesty. These are strengths that are realized individually but create discord in tandem. Their pairing is like eating apple pie topped with cheddar cheese: some are sure to find enjoyment in the combination, but for the rest of us, these pairings are best avoided.

A Girl Cried Red replaces Nokia’s NYC authenticity for her inauthentic take on a genre that struggles to maintain itself.

Words behave like beats on this record, raising the question: what isn’t a beat? Drops pervade the tracks. Is every beat a drop? Every drop’s a bounty, certainly.

In contrast to 2014’s colossal Ruins, Grid of Points feels relatively slight, though it remains incredibly spacious.

For an album so complex--one that’s simultaneously funny and fearless--it has an uncanny way of simplifying things

At least Sleep are honest about their decision and are committed to seeing it through to its heavy, bong-rippin’ end. And by that standard, they’ve created another masterpiece.

Underneath Lil Xan’s disengaged delivery, TOTAL XANARCHY ends up slogging through his sketches of abandonment, addiction, and, conversely, fame and success, with total listlessness.

Dimensional People wants to be a major rap album, complete with cameos stacked way high, all epic and prodigal. But it’s just not all there.

Ephorize is cupcakKe’s most polished statement both sonically and conceptually.

Freedom is not a “challenging” listen, but choruses or hummable melodies are few; rather, the album progresses at a loping, steady pace, as if somehow delivered by natural rhythm.

Like an imagined conversation set before the waves, Still Trippin’ folds and unfolds. It is still unsettled, in me and out.

The album’s pervasive sameness hinders sustained interest.

Long’s trax are emotionally at a remove from the soulful sirens who are sometimes associated with deep house--that tension between joyful celebration and a modern-day blues, between major and minor keys.

All At Once suggests, in both form and content, that the human tragedies we keep dipping into can be healed by listening. Its you’s and I’s relate to each other, struggle toward dialogue. Even in rankled romance, listening is vital, probably even more so. The songs and styles wheel freely, matching their subjects.

New Material works as an excellent signpost of where the group has been and where it’s headed.

While How to Socialise isn’t the most musically adventurous album, its moments of humanity are what give the band its subtle edge.

There’s a Riot Going On’s theory doesn’t quite match up to its execution, and its parts are greater than the whole. So, is it more beautiful, or is it more boring? The problem is that it’s often too difficult to tell the difference.

The first time I listened to Now Only, it was raining and I cried for 10 minutes; after it ended, like a body after an exorcism, I felt lighter.

What a Time to Be Alive, the yawp and the yeah and the yowl, is the perfect thesis and pinched nail. It’s the resolution to remain unhampered by despair while excising and atomizing all the moments we have to despair in.

Le Kov is not as cold as Y Dydd Olaf (which was based on a decades-old Welsh sci fi novel)--it’s less machinic and more organic, less 80s and more 70s. As such, it wavers a little, particularly in its second half, where the feel is a little too warmly indistinct, too hazy.

Caveats aside, All Nerve is a fresh reminder that Kim Deal is still a fount of inspiration and should keep it going, be it with The Breeders or otherwise.

Time & Space explodes with positive energy, emphasizing the rebuilding of oneself while the band itself builds together as a unit.

Drift is a step up from Devil’s Music (2016), which attempted to recreate Leave Home’s career-making abrasion with little of its viscerality. On the other hand, with nearly every song on the album performed in a different style, Drift lacks the cohesion of The Men’s less acclaimed albums.

Neither a remix nor a remodel, even less a tribute to an inspiration, these songs sound the same yearning breathed in different breaths.

With only six tracks, Lala Belu shows that being hypnotized is what we secretly want.

If $ucessor is the finality of the final, then Tahoe is the beginning that begins. Tahoe is a voice that emerges after the rupture, the voice that creates itself anew, settling into itself as into a home.

Even though Glass has a lot of physicality to it, it’s gentle in the ways in which it fills our space with its presence. It’s a record one loops for the evening and unconsciously forgets about it, only to wonder what is missing when it stops playing.

Despite Shame’s lyrical foibles, they evince a prodigious adeptness for musicianship, and though Songs of Praise isn’t the most arresting debut by a garage band, there are far worse places to start.

Even in the project’s continued restless but shrewd eclecticism, this album lives up to its title with an epic, spring-clean screed of passionate grievance in the face a recently re-accelerated, ancient malignant patriarchal tyranny that’s only just starting to get called out for a reckoning at its extremities.

While it may not carry the same intrigue of a college student self-recording a lo-fi opus between classes, this new Twin Fantasy elucidates the masterfulness of an incisive indie savant whose creative reach had, until recently, exceeded his grasp.

Pressed together, it becomes apparent how pleasurably the band’s entire discography has crystallized. Capturing the quicksilver violence of youth may be beyond us now, as it is for Wild Beasts, but we still make time to celebrate the night’s dark chemistry.

At its worst, it wants memory over future. At its best, it wants to remember who sings next, after the shades fade.

Disquieting but somehow quite familiar, the record contorts the warm sounds of yacht rock and island music into something primal yet alien. The end result is a sound that you’d swear has been done countless times before in the avant-rock pantheon, but in reality, its direct musical forebears are few and far between.

It changes the sounds of the band from the bombastic elastic to the crouched minor. It changes the hopes of the band from boundless to restrictive. It limps, self-conscious and careful.

Culture II is very long, yes, and vulnerable to momentum-killing duds like “Beast,” but to assess the album as an irreducible work is to cling to an entirely outmoded conception of how music is consumed.

A Day with the Homies is a generous record, littered with gestures of friendship. The music is pleasant and simple, the melodies nurturing and whole.

Goblin is simultaneously a patchwork project and a genealogy of Segall’s influences, operating on a confidence that’s as emphatic as it is earned.

It’s a solid rock album whose dedication to artisanal noise in some ways negates its ancestry of majestic rock & roll that begs to be heard publicly.

Despite its many retreads, Semicircle is still occasionally enjoyable, and that it manages to exist without a modicum of urgency or intellectual rigor is okay with me.

Austere without the compulsion of self-restraint and experimental without the drag of formlessness, The House confirms Porches’ primacy as indie-dance mavens.

Tommy is exhausting, refreshing, new.

They are radically transformative and marvelously sublime.

Two Trains could be pared down to a gorgeous EP.

On Pop 2, Charli XCX returns for more profligacy, yet this time with a keener perspective recalibrated by the nuances of young adult maturity.

The Greatest Gift may not contain all the insight and manifest artistry of one of Stevens’s studio albums, at the very least, it reasserts his perspicacious understanding of his complex emotions and propensity for self-evaluation.

Beach House 3 is a strong, strong effort: universally pleasant in the same way as its antecedents, but given a thorough sonic update so as to keep pace with modernity.

Even if her catalog was small, the 25 tracks on this set won’t likely leave anyone wanting.

Oftentimes, Gallarais is resistant to shape, with collages like “Grottovox” and “Beansidhe” balancing the reveberations of airplanes gliding above with earthy drum sounds and even echoes that seem to emerge from within the depths of the tunnel. These sections are balanced out by tracks like “Underlight” and “Mouthtoum” that demonstrate O’Dwyer’s effortlessly sorrowful approach to flute and harp, providing a musical grounding that still feels as improvised and as accidental as any of the less-controlled tones

Part rumination on engaging with the pop icon and part deep end even after eating the meal, Reputation keeps the ball in the air, argues for moving forward, even if it’s herky jerky.

As social commentary, it feels ineffectual and dated, its tone resembling someone’s morally mediocre guy friend who is eager to reconcile his own shortcomings by engaging a willing interlocutor. As music, though, the album glistens. Unfortunately, these two registers can’t be unwound, and so the listener is left liking the music despite, not for, its paratextual inflations.

Saturn Over Sunset is imperfect and timeless nonetheless.

With a sotto voce that at times leans too hard on the adenoids, Will knows better than to preen his voice for Top 40 radio. His home is with the glitch crowd. But pop star or no, Wiesenfeld, as Baths, taps into those universal feelings that makes pop music so accessible and so, well, popular.

Hanged Man absorbs the worries of a world (Leo’s and ours) and reflects on it, rolling with the inconsistencies and fractures to make something better.

Phases nevertheless reaffirms its singer’s preeminence in the current milieu of indie rock. Pulling from material as recent as January and as early as 2010, the album aggregates Olsen’s previously unreleased work into a collection that vacillates between retrospection and contemporariness.

Dance music gets one step closer to an honest depiction of euphoria; yes, yes, you’re drooling quite heavily, but at least you’re drooling through an earnest smile.

In other words, without being a mere sonic record of actual Is-ness (a field recording), A flame my love, a frequency relays an Is-ness. This is both mono no aware, the sadness of things, but also their joy, and beyond either, the experience of Being.

It’s more akin to a journal of the individual’s emotions amidst this state of the world. Constantly on the edge between sadness and rage, its disillusionment becomes anger, brought on by the feeling of helplessness in the face of global violence.

The music maintains its drive as it moves, risking the occasional drag in the more languid sections, but never succumbing to a total loss of momentum.

Each song of eight on the album develops its own world of feeling, each in a different mode and with a unique musical setting.

Mike Eagle manages to balance the sense that he is speaking for many with the certainty that no one else could do it quite the same way.

The lyrics can’t support the music, and vice-versa. That’s not to say there aren’t some great moments for people who’ve been following Bejar’s work--“Ivory Coast” and much of the second half of the record have a lot of noteworthy moments, in both their musical adventurousness and lyrical successes. But the interplay between flatness and richness that Bejar describes as integral to his lyrics--and that can be extended to its interplay with his music--isn’t here a lot of the time.

While the album isn’t exactly synergistic in its coupling of the two singers--neither Kurt nor Courtney achieve their lyrical or musical apex here--Lotta Sea Lice nevertheless intimates an unrelenting kinship between its two auteurs.

Colors dispels a greater notion of contemporary selfhood with its sheer tastelessness. It holds status as the most truly perplexing move from the artist to date. Unfortunately, the result of that move is borderline unlistenable.

Younger Now is a hookless, joyless, profitable success.

For the most part, Take Me Apart is sonically more akin to a soundtrack, one for neon-tinged late-night driving. Or for bedrooms with ceiling mirrors--those slippery reflections.

Equally informed by universal human crises as it is by contemporary imbroglios, the album aims to disorient, alienate, and dismay the listener. The band is usually able to do all three in a single song. Often in one line.

Antisocialites may not be a manifest step forward for Alvvays. Quieter than its predecessor on many of the songs, the album sacrifices immediacy for Rankin’s occasionally mawkish but otherwise astute poetics. But the tradeoff is worth it.

The shallow cynicism and apathy that animates so many of its songs are under-interrogated by its writers, instead finding form as a pessimist’s non-committal, inconclusive pouting.

On the whole, these tracks feel partially-realized, like demos that didn’t get wholly fleshed out.

Define artistic success as you will, but it’s beyond question that Mount Kimbie have here translated, and therefore transmitted, an entire state of being.

The breadth of sounds covered will scan as inconsistency to all but the most pious Uzi devotees, but it’s hard to imagine anything else serving as a more comprehensive document of rap in 2017.