Perhaps his greatest record.

The mesmerizing quality they create through drone beats and varied vocals engage the listener in a whirlwind of noise, and it rarely ever lets up.

What is most impressive about New Amerykah is that Erykah simply breathes life into these tracks.

Trial is as rhythmically acerbic and propulsive as the last couple of French Kicks offerings, but the pace is a little slower and more deliberate, the songwriting more cohesive, reflective, and mature.

At the end of the day, Kevin Barnes is really trying to make good pop. Paralytic Stalks is just that, bombast and all.

Its idiosyncratic animus is something to behold, and even if you don’t like it, both the digital age and Burnett himself can reassure you with the verse, “Don’t worry; in a few, you’ll all be somewhere else.”

The goal here is a noise-dance album, and they succeed admirably.

Primitive and Deadly will take you to the highest heights of doom, high enough to see the end in its coming. It’s all over now, there’s no need to come down.

Krzysztof Penderecki and Jonny Greenwood are cultivating a dialogue of past, present, and future ideas, presented as potential energy for creation--and also for acquiring new ways of understanding music.

Xiu Xiu is so earnestly committed to its project that its music inevitably bursts through its own irony to the other side.

These are eight rip-roaring, drag racing anthems mashed together with blood cakes and shards of bone.

The music is great, but it's through his lyrics that Beans really heads out into the stratosphere.

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.

It is an excellent album that has taken them seven long years to finally get to, but those are seven years that have been evidently well spent: After years of mediocrity and being, to some degree, marginalized -- just when the world needed them -- The Roots are back like never before.

Each offering here is meter-perfect and crafted instinctively to flat-out destroy the boundaries of rock music.

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

There are few surprises, but each element finds its own breathing room such that the layered space of each track is fully audible.

A resonant narrative of apocalypse and transformation.

It's got more of an arc and sense of unspoken redemption than most contemporary albums that parade themselves as such. It's also one of those rare albums that starts out great and gets better over its 45-minute length.

Mediation succeeds not only as a stunning instrumental performance, but as an hour of personal storytelling.

A transcendent accomplishment.

In synthesizers, Matmos have found their hearts; through old Cluster records, they’ve created one of the most pleasant surprises of the year.

What falls from the mouth is indeed valuable, in the case of Fear of Men.

It's hip calcified, transformed from posturing into legitimate and exciting experience; it's the channeling of well-defined musical expressions into a more powerful, unified direction.

This is intensely human music.

This is a rare combination of talent, vision and sound.

Every member of this band is wholly present and firing on all cylinders here.

CSS's music is almost immediately infectious and surprisingly poppy.

If you get a kick out of The Fucking Champs riffing on Bach with "Air on a G String," you're on the road to Panda Park.

Security is absolutely accessible, with a broad, potentially surprising appeal for those willing to listen.

All hotly (strangely this descriptor seems almost an understatement) anticipated albums should deliver so profoundly.

Explosions In The Sky continue to tap into this special vector of imagination, emotion, and possibility, making everything that much more vivid.

A great hip-hop album, an accomplishment that whipper-snappers in both hip-hop and the pop-music world at large would benefit from attempting to emulate.

Even with all of this depth, Push The Sky Away finds Cave doing more with less lyrically.

It seems to have brought a band who had so long mired itself in total darkness into the cleansing light of day, and in both cases, the results are awe-inspiring.

An album which will force even the most hardened listeners to throw in the towel.

Nary a fragment of the 10 compositions sounds even a bit out of place; new ideas are explored, and not at the expense of the listener; and, perhaps best of all, a mongrel of a talent finally lets his instincts to ROCK REALLY FUCKING HARD take over.

For going on 20 years, when Xiu Xiu have put out an album, it’s one of that year’s best. It’s no small thrill to see this trend continue.

With Personal Record, Eleanor commits even more strongly to straightforward, sentimental, and concise songcraft.

Bowie’s only consistent trajectory has been one of tearing down his mythos even as his builds it, and his latest manages to knock down yet another wall as he steps more fully into the light than he’s ever dared tread before. On Safe in the Hands of Love, Yves Tumor isn’t concerned with being “experimental;” he’s simply concerned with being.

Perfect pop bliss.

They are radically transformative and marvelously sublime.

Full of so many moments of exhilarating joy and equally exhilarating sorrow.

The production is lush and crystalline, and the melodies are dense and aplenty.

For all its signs of progression, the record is never heavy-handed with its ambition. Its unforced attempt at making sense of the fraught present, at finding shelter without resorting to convenient escape, is a rare and, dare I say, sincere feat.

The band's aching for that contradictory limit can be felt quivering in every inch of Aesthetica. It is to their credit that one feels at peace through the record's most violent and cataclysmic moments.

Like a masterfully carved piece of woodwork, every facet of this record has been lovingly molded such that, when all’s said and done, the finished product looks completely natural.

Essentially, Horses in the Sky adopts a host of varying song mechanics and a wider array of lyrical themes, a broadened pallet that either suggest a band in transition, or a newfound confidence in songwriting.

Is it possible that Gab and Xcel could have improved and surpassed Blazing Arrow's success? The Craft simply says yes.

Surrounded by Silence is at once more scatterbrained and fast moving than any other Prefuse album (even more so than the blink-and-you-miss-the-hook Extinguished), but the difference here is the cohesion of the radically different cuts.

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

It all adds up to The Mountain Goats’ most musically sophisticated endeavor to date. In fact, the music is finally beginning to hold its own with the lyrics.

They have clearly mastered their craft, and have begun to push it beyond its boundaries without betraying its punk ethic.

Logos is an admirably worn, carefully composed record detailing a kaleidoscope of sound.

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.

Jim Guthrie has created a masterful soundtrack of peace and tranquility, similar to the crowning achievement of another earthly troubadour, named Sufjan Stevens.

thank u, next builds on Sweetener by switching modes of scale. It’s less about looking at the world than being by yourself, more focused on the textures of memory than our actions stemming from it. ... thank u, next is also Ariana’s most stunning vocal album.

Every track on Women serves a purpose to the overall stereo image, resulting in a debut that sets the bar very high.

As invigorating as the first half of Wind’s Poem is, its second half is where a filmic sensibility arises and the music becomes at one with the listener, the sounds yielding way to both chaotic and calming images as waves crash and subside.

Jlin has provided us with evidence of veins untapped, an obscure map of zones still to be colonized in the name of the dance. If you care about footwork at all, you need to hear this album.

This uncanny sound field suggests a different set of priorities from the usual transcendentalist rock seekers, and Trust Now is all the better for it.

The aural face of this album is frighteningly flawless: a technical perfection that only lends to the mythic proportions of the songs, behemoths so pregnant with ideas and so rich in sound that they seem to stretch for miles.

Benji, Mark Kozelek’s sixth album as Sun Kil Moon, is as abrasive as Pharmakon, as hauntingly emotive as Dean Blunt, and as disorienting as Oneohtrix Point Never.

A companion album to last year’s Ghost Rock, Invisible Cities again finds the group in fine form, refining their sound and moving gradually further from revivalist afrobeat into a style all their own.

Alias gives us a promise that, after closing a three-year mute gap, after a decade of production and creation, there is still in him an artist to be excited about.

Another Life, chameleonic as it is demonic, aggregates its influences and kaleidoscopes them into earworming shards of electronic puncta, a diabolical mimesis whose loathsome grin belies its functionality as dance music.

Too Many Voices is an immersive experience that builds on the artists’ past without once holding them back.

This will be on most of the indie-ish year end tops charts this year, guaranteed.

On Elemental, Demdike Stare give us glimmers of melody - looped chimes or listless piano figures - shivering out from the cloud of reverb, but for the most part what we get are dub shadows of songs, low on contrast and grainy with dust particles, uncanny echoes and malevolent drones.

It’s good because, beneath his relentless hedonistic pursuits and idealistic belief in the nobility of the unruly drum loops, Future preserves a romantic’s perspective on his panoply of inconsequential street life and crystalline musings from within the studio.

One of the most masterful things about the album is the way it flows, highlighting fugitive detail the way clothing highlights body parts, abandoning the traditional ups and downs of verse/chorus structure. Double Negative owes this poise to its intentional construction--a collaboration and a transferring of creative heft

Sir Lucious is all but hiccup-free, exceptionally consistent in its mad musical mission. Each track on the record is an explosive standalone statement within a greater unifying framework; it's an album, but these songs are pipe bombs.

What makes these songs so positively delicious, in the same way that going on a bender can be a welcome alternative to crying into a pillow, is that Barnes realizes how seductive misery can be.

Ultimately, that’s what it all comes down to: not necessarily violence, but feeling. That feeling when a tune hits you right in the chest, connects to you in a visceral way, spreading bubbles across your skin like spilt champagne. That feeling, so brilliantly conveyed by AJ Tracey on this album, of no longer just surviving but actually living.

A dizzying synergy of heavy brains and chemistry, culminating in blissfully fun, irreverent, and engaging brand of record-making magic.

For as spare as her pallet is (many of the songs consist only of Fortino’s single or multi-tracked vocals accompanied by her own acoustic guitar), there is a staggering diversity in tone and feeling throughout the album.

This is a profound and giving music.

Takes the listener on an unmitigated aural journey through the outer reaches of electronic music.

Gira and company have put a lot of care into this project, crafting a beautifully-recorded, exquisitely-packaged set that stands as the obvious next best thing to actually seeing the band in the flesh.

Armed mainly with just his guitar and voice, Panda Bear creates some of the most longing and heart-rending songs you'll ever hear.

In House of Sugar, Alex Giannascoli relinquishes the ownership in authorship, providing a venue for those voices that regale him to decompress, elongate, saunter. It is roomy in House of Sugar, where possession recedes into usufruct.

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.

A highly successful debut release.

The Endless Not is ultimately a testament to getting it right, even after a lengthy separation, and proves that getting old doesn’t mean that you have to suffer loss of potency.

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

Beautifully crafted, complex music which intrigues and begs for another listen.

This sits up quietly but pointedly as a quiet rebuke to records that won’t try to render the depth of the world in a layered and crafted way, those that prefer to just wink, shrug, or laze.

Blunt’s not a master of wordplay, and he’s certainly not trying to be a good technical rapper. But his flow, his delivery, is entrancing.

Ratchet is one of the most purely pleasurable records I’ve heard so far this year, and one of the strongest debuts in several years.

Issuing such a thorough CD document of a vinyl trilogy winds up not so much a simple change in format or an exercise in excess, but rather a telescopic glimpse into the rapidly expanding Demdike Stare universe.

Engravings, his first full-length, evokes a grayness of place so completely that it is utter, that there is no there there because there is only there there.

Apparently revitalized and rejuvenated after a long dead period, Built to Spill pour a glowing display of exploratory zest and energy into the confines of each YIR composition.

Fearing that these songs were indicative of indie-pop conformity would not only be ignoring the group's rich and varied history with melody and rhythm, but also underestimating the ingenuity and convictions that Longstreth has consistently boasted throughout his recorded career.

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.

Interior Architecture is presented as a clear tome of mind, four slabs of endless, drifting synthesis, abstract in concept yet rich with neural networking.

There isn't a weak track on the album.

For an album constructed from so many constituent parts, Person Pitch is amazingly warm and inviting at times, wrapping around the ears, nestling the head, and squeezing like a nice familial bear hug after years of no contact.

Dirty Gold feels like a statement, an arrival.