By embracing immediacy and toning down the navel-gazing, The National have finally created an album deserving of all their earlier acclaim.

This exact formula probably will function well with the new listeners, although it's hard to imagine someone appreciating Buck65 for all he's worth without being familiar with his earlier work.

Like all works of elusive beauty, Lookaftering is something that is so immediate and accessible it will take time to realize just how enriched with subtle evocation it is.

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.

Before Today is the best collection of pure pop songs released this year, and the experimental odds and bits only add to its considerable charm.

Art of the Improviser is a testament not only to the improviser's art, but also to solo and group composition, both in the immediate and overarching sense.

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.

Elverum has never sounded more comfortable as a producer of volume and viscosity.

Beautiful Thugger Girls is remarkable because of its Thugger-ness--it’s a clear step forward at the very moment that Thug-derivation is a particularly viable come-up.

Like a stew, this album takes energies and flavors from its components, each contribution blending and acquiring the vibrations of everything around it. The songs reverberate, flow into one another, sooth and intrigue.

A big album, grandly ambitious and sonically expansive.

Meshes of Voice is a truly engulfing piece of apodictic expression, and it should be danced, sung, knitted, and talked about, if not because it collapses these categorical distinctions itself so that its blood can run, then because keeping your head still and your voice silent is lying.

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.

A masterwork that music fans will be listening to for some time in the future.

Though hardly Björk's most pronounced statement, Medúlla is definitely a highlight of her already illustrious career.

Ghost has had his share of ups and downs, but Apollo Kids finds him back near the top.

Cancer 4 Cure is as hard and vital as anything El-P has ever released, and that's no light praise.

The music enables Vega’s voice as his best accompanists have: providing the expository setting and minimalistic bedding necessary for Vega to project his scene upon and float above. His delivery will sound strange to those unfamiliar, but it will be oddly cozy to those who have known it all along.

Despite the flying dog daydream that inspired the record, Cabral often underlines the more fantastical elements of her work with a deep sense of melancholy.

These fine-detail improvements are what make This Is Happening LCD’s best work to date, though mumblings about how Murphy might be repeating himself a bit remain valid.

Destroyer's new album Kaputt may be one of the most indefensible albums of all time. But it's also a masterpiece.

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.

Sleigh Bells have latched onto an exciting undercurrent in contemporary pop music and put their own distinctive stamp on it. In the process, they've made a hard-hitting album that will positively kill on the dance floor.

Beam's voice is streamlined and a little too perfect for fans of his prior music who felt, with good reason, like Beam was serenading them from their living rooms.

They have laid down some astounding tracks here, but as a whole, the album is not on par with any full-length the band have released since Alligator.

Dust is then a remarkable accumulation of disruptions and attachments, gaseous parts and shifting centres. Coherent in their incoherence, playful in their experimentalism, its tracks unfold smoothly, their trunks buzzing with magnetism, attracting the attention of pealing bells, skronking sax, and dub-techno beats.

These pop-forward moments are frontloaded on No Shape, extravagant and baroque. The soaring production value is not accompanied by conceptual upending or reinvention, but rather extends into a grand sort of sequel vision of Perfume Genius.

Though the experience of these songs are much easier to digest than their previous releases, Nick and Paul are still creatively pushing themselves with this album.

Much as every black witch’s cloak is undeniably part of a discourse that includes both Black Sabbath and Black power, The Haxan Cloak is in a dialogue with contemporary dubstep, and with Excavation, he proves that he has much to add to the conversation.

Fall Be Kind is yet another reason why Animal Collective TOTALLY TRANSCEND any notion of hipster hype-ism, another feather in a crowded cap. God bless these guys.

It is phenomenal.

There are so many ways into Blood Bitch that it’s dizzying: Chris Kraus, Nino Nardini, the synths, the immensely pillowy hooks, black metal, menstrala. The themes run from menstruation to vampires to capitalism to loneliness to pap smears, and any thread you pick can take you to the core. You have been invited in.

Feels is a psychedelic wonderland filled with life-affirming warmth.

It’s a nebulous, dense, paranoid web of utterly unfiltered expression that’s utterly or negligibly fascinating depending on how much you care about Yeezy.

That Body ends so softly is itself a brilliant resolution, even though its obvious contrast with its first notes is more clever than I care.

Heterocetera is packed with writhing climaxes and blistering comedowns that leave you gasping without ever being able to forget who is behind them. Of course, confronting these contrasts remains a provocation on the artist’s part, but only ever in the best possible sense.

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

Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is Spoon’s finest release since 2001’s "Girls Can Tell" and fills me with a happiness rarely delivered in a genre filled with groups that never improve upon their debuts.

This recording renders music back into its essence, that language that, instead of communicating meanings, is, as Adorno has it, the human attempt, doomed as ever, to name the Name, which has been dispersed.

Sigur Rós are still significant, but Takk sounds safe.

Part of how Cronin succeeds in making the listener feel good are his failures: the outsized ambition and the pushing of his practical capacities remind the listener than they’re being spoken to by an everyman.

While spare in its construction, Copia offers a bounty of emotion for those who give it the chance.

The Serpent is, in many ways, more reminiscent of 2002’s The Mantle than it is of Marrow, but with a refined and elegant brutality that Agalloch lacked in their earlier form.

The Worse Things Get is a no-brainer Album of the Year.

This record transcends genre and everybody knows it. Country music is haggard and calloused and hung up on itself, and Introducing Karl Blau is none of those things.

There isn’t a misstep to be found here. There are a couple moments that veer close to an overly-maudlin tone (namely when the piano shows up on the sixth and final tracks), but this tone is just part of the strange alchemy of traditional singer-songwriterisms and fumbling tremulousness that make these 45 minutes so curious.

It's good. Very good.

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.

The band's most ambitious, mind-blowing, and best record yet.

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.

Unfortunately, The Pretty Toney Album falls short in replacing what Raekwon had contributed to Ghost's previous album releases, causing the album to feel essentially incomplete.

Perhaps Negro Swan is merely a step along the way, as Blood Orange continues to contend with monolithic, difficult ideas, but for now, this patchwork of sweltering grooves, amicable conversations, and urban ambience remains limited in its vision.

The stakes are low for Super Furry Animals, with their dedicated fanbase and slim commercial prospects, and the music reflects this. They’re a legitimately great band, but sometimes one can’t help but escape the feeling that all of their dedication is in service of a joke.

For about an hour, if you can allow Fuck Buttons to control your responses, to embrace the clusterfuck of noise and emotion, then Tarot Sport might be one of the strongest albums of this year.

The most frustrating thing about Currents is that, for probably the first time, it seems like Parker is writing songs that would be pretty decent and probably interesting if he freed them from this musty aesthetic and gave them room to express themselves.

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.

The strings and tympani gradually fade out until we are left in silence. The moment serves as an appropriate conclusion to a singular work from an extremely talented new voice.

This is the crux of the album’s difficulty: it feels personal and scans as though it should be, but time and time again, it leaves me not quite sure whether I know a single thing about milo, the person.

On A Shadow In Time, Basinski tries not merely to locate Bowie’s ghost in the machine, but to find its cross-dressing, orange-haired, anisocoric-eyed soul locked somewhere inside the hard electronic casing of the world.

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

Where music fails to tell a story, Beam’s lyricism fills in the details.

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.

This is a major step forward in pushing the IDM aesthetic into the bigger territory of soul and R&B music.

It has to be said that A U R O R A easily justifies its existence, and that even if its quasi-independent emotional domain won’t empower us to do away with the niggardly concrete bases of its emergence, it will at least beautify them for 40 minutes.

Although disintegration’s reach is far, infinite abandonment, even imagined, can’t be contained, but it can be uttered in a cry. All vibrantly tactile, this realization that it took self to cry for a self with which you’re now commingled in song.

It’s an honest delivery, but they are essentially preaching to the choir.

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

Asunder, Sweet And Other Distress’ is not a failure; it’s merely familiar.

For a record preoccupied with usefulness, it’s unsurprising that that’s the case. There’s no room for artifice; he’s got to tell it like it is, because the telling is the moving, and the moving is the riding, and the riding is the living.

Dude Incredible is every bit as lean as its older siblings when it comes to reverb, overdubbings, FX, and samples.

Now, equipped with the stylish, but too-often substance-less Tha Carter III, Lil Wayne seems poised to flip the script on the “rapper racists” (radio stations, MTV) by evolving into the “biggest” rapper alive.

At its best center, Infinite Worlds gives the song back to the person.

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

The only drawback is Hutch Harris' vocals.

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.

A mandatory release for all Les Savy Fans, both serious and casual.

This record is full of the illogical, instinctive, incomprehensible poetry that the BEST Rock & Roll lyrics are made of, and contains some of the most distinctive and indeed brilliant music of the last ten years/twenty five years/ever/let's get more carried away.

Like the guileless ballers on the screen, Delicate Steve's got surprisingly smooth moves, and the album lets you see the wonder of each one. It goes for the layup every time, sinks it, and you'll have no problem cheering along.

This is complex, life-affirming music that's both serious and playful, steeped in tradition yet as highly original and forward-thinking as anything you're likely to hear this year.

It might be "teenage" in its orientation, but it is an adult album in its serious and mature rumination--and affirmation.

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

Drawing from the rock pantheon as well as personal experience and fascination, Chris Forsyth presents a guitarist’s record that is decidedly group music, and Solar Motel should whet appetites and blow minds of shredders and weirdos alike.

Oftentimes she’s content to let one spidery riff circle the drain endlessly (“Quicksand”) and more than once she goes completely a cappella, an effect that would normally lend an album a sense of intimacy, but I Abused Animal seems resistant to emotional refuge.

This is, after all, a rock album, so don’t expect anything too innovative, but do expect moments of beauty and lots of writerly oversharing.

Ultimately, Soft Sounds is an uneven experience, stylistically and in terms of (this listener’s) engagement. But still, in the shimmering hooky synthpop of “Machinist,” the Morrissey-esque lilt of “Boyish,” there are bright stars hanging in the firmament.

Like blues, the disco formula works--it’s both beautiful and timeless (well, timeless since the late 70s). But it doesn’t always feel as fresh as it once did--paradoxically, given the heavy-lidded sensibility the music embodies.

There’s little sense of genre in an record-industry sense here. The pieces Moodymann mixes together, like the downtempo house of Daniel Bortz’s “Cuz You’re The One” and Swedish folksinger José González’s mournful “Remain,” shouldn’t work, but they keep the calm atmosphere going.

Portastatic is exactly as advertised: catchy, sometimes dumb, occasionally rockin', but always at least competent pop.

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

Lambchop’s albums often come off as minor masterpieces--not quietly stunning but aesthetically proclamatory, carrying material enough for a listener to stay with and dwell on. FLOTUS is no exception.

He reins in some of his rougher edges, offering listeners a more streamlined sound.

Ekstasis is a lovely record. Bedroom pop that floats and swoons, it has a lightness to it at the same time as a real sense of seriousness and ambition.

Badu has refined her authorial vision on Return of the Ankh, creating one of her most vital records to date. Despite her frequent afronautic impulses, Badu succeeds in simultaneously keeping her head in the firmament and both feet planted firmly on the ground.

Need to Feel Your Love is musically propulsive and provides evidence to the talk that a guitar band in 2017 can be a source of ingenuity without pulling excessive tricks and mutations upon the craft.

Harmonicraft is a short, sweet collection of pop-metal confectionery, irresistible if not unforgettable.

It represents an astounding step forward in its scope and ambition. The claustrophobia of Loud City Song and the self-imposed aesthetic limitations of Have You in My Wilderness have given way to wide-screen, exploratory, celebratory triumph.

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.

In the end, it’s the vague, shapeless, and undefined nature of the fancies her protagonists chase that partly undermines the album’s substance, since without any clear delimitation of their supposedly particular aspirations it’s a little hard to sympathize with her characters and see in them anything more than cowardly, flighty children who ought to grow up.