Matmos have successfully transformed their washing machine into an instrument of righteousness as well as introspection, and while I am not surprised at their continued high level of craft, this one feels especially deep.

A journey into their liberated, tie-dyed consciousness and their best project to date.

For every song that I replay, there’s another that I skip.

While this doesn’t exactly add up to any profound reinvention of genre, Before a Million Universes thrives best without thinking.

His subtle turns of phrase and shifts in volume manage to achieve immersive depth even when the interplay of sax, strings, electronics, and drums otherwise lacks color.

DAZE is a collection of perverted smash hits in overdrive, a keyed up, obsessively concerned, hyperbolic exaggeration along the lines of Werkflow compatriot Recsund’s recent mix for Disjecta.

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.

The other 14 contributions barely stand apart from one another, a rushed bile of the same sounds being used over and over again by unidentifiable producers, with only Bonobo delivering a track whose atmosphere extends beyond that of gimmicky tie-in music territory.

What’s revealed by this new project--call it an album, EP, compilation, mixtape, outtake, sketch--is a fiercely independent artist escaping the trappings of hip-hop conventions, both mainstream and otherwise; he seeks ascetic salvation through intense introspection and, in the process, created a great release, no matter where it’s filed.

Many of This Unruly Mess I’ve Made’s flaws could’ve very well been forgotten, or at least temporarily swept under the rug, had the actual music been good.

While McEntire’s aimlessness feels honest and satisfying in its questing, it also makes for an album with plenty of movement but less, perhaps, in the way of progress.

While Life of Pause appears to lack any songs with the lasting impact of tracks like “Chinatown,” “Only Heather,” “Paradise,” or even the sublimely beautiful “Golden Haze”--well-written works that exhibited a naïve clarity in purpose--it’s certainly a grower.

The timbres of the modular synth, in my opinion, are dull, but that doesn’t mean that Venetian Snares hasn’t created interesting music from his machines.

Love Yes flings the sound skyward and waits to hear what bounces back. The pop haze of In Limbo, the bounce and blip of The Way and Color are rebroadcast as a symphony for synths and hi-hat.

All of the hallmarks of the band’s debut remain blissfully intact, and yet they’ve managed to engineer an LP with even more seemingly absurd outliers than minimalism and Radiophonic blips.

It certainly avoids the epic-lite quality we usually associate with bands in the post-rock mold. There’s no soundtrack material here: nothing to be exploited for the purposes of perfume advertisement erotica or inspiring nature documentaries.

Painting With lacks the consistency to be that work, but its moments of glory provide a welcome return to the melodic mastery of golden ages past.

The production is slick and striking, even when it fades to black (“Xanny Family”) or gets tangled up in layered hi-hats (“Program”)--these tracks sound equally as engaged and provocative as anything on last year’s masterful DS2.

They’re a thrilling pair Richard Bishop and Ben Chasny], giving each other space to stretch out but staying close to cohere. Corsano matches the energy of each with an enviable malleability, staying closer to Bishop than a shadow, then turning around to throw cars, houses, and oil tankers into Chasny’s twisters.

Pillars of Ash is the body in transition, all crumble and ovation, an album that celebrates a human voice and exists in a world without it.

Seasoned fans will be hard-pressed to dismiss I’m Up as a release chock-full of throwaways, but it’s truly a testament to Young Thug’s radical talents as a rapper for keeping an audience thoroughly engaged, even when the studio experiments aren’t always entirely convincing.

This music is uncharted, revelatory, blossoming, and all the more so, because somehow it feels like it might be to Foster as well.

There are only so many times you can key into someone’s heart before they change the code, and after about 20 listens, the veneer crumbles a bit, and it’s a little too easy to see the gears turning underneath. But that’s not the most frustrating thing about the record; the most frustrating thing is that Sia has so much access to us and just doesn’t do much with it.

Islah is one of the more exciting major label rap debuts in recent years, and one positive to being a Gates fan is that you’ll most certainly never get tired with him.

Is the Is Are, like its title, conjures up a nothingness that is suffocating, especially coupled with the way that the band sells this music as if it were some kind of spiritual exercise.

This descent into industrial retro-futurism provides a fitting artistic and aesthetic parallel to the corresponding descent society has made into technology worship, into a disempowering worship of things at the expense of an appreciation of the social, political, and economic realities in which these things are situated.

Hymns, unfortunately, does not mark the logical next step for the band, nor does it exactly tread new ground. Rather, it denotes a descent into self-indulgence that’s paradoxically reckless and complacent.

Duality pervades Gumption. City and country. Natural, machine. Personal, abstract. Song. Noise.

Every aspect of the album sounds like the full-length equivalent of a Spotify Chill Out playlist: flat, disposable, inoffensive (though “technically-sound”) 2010s muzak.

ANTI is folk music played in a video-drome circularly projecting a 360° image of sprawling, semi-wilderness on fire as a compassionate, loving apocalypse. It’s a charged bleeding heart of sponsorship and exclusivity thrown into the throat of Yosemite. It’s a white horse galloping fiend-like across the continental divide, with a hoof-print-tire-tread that could pull the land apart.

There are sounds, but are they melodies? Yes and no. We hear these sounds and get awed by how Lord Raja manages to suspend the belief that they, the sounds, are somehow working to form a whole. Snares and pads and synths. The same formula, a slightly different approach.

His rhythm work is crisp and earthen, not so much pushing forward as flowering outward, the picture of a mind focused on growing and filling out.

By focusing on his aesthetic and retaining an interest in the possibilities that exist within slow music while setting himself time limitations, Porter has created a record that is as bold and as breathtaking as we might have ever hoped for, regardless of the projection it is set to generate.

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.

To call Emotional Mugger a celebration of excess, as sweet as it is, would miss the mark. (Although it’s no veiled warning, either--it enjoys itself too much.) No, this is a bender with an undercurrent of anxiety.

Rather than going full-on honeymoon or dead-end breakup, New View treads a middle ground that would border on the mundane were it not for Friedberger’s own headstrong presence, a matter-of-fact reading that gives the potentially uncomfortable tension of the lyrics a healthy dollop of confidence.

So much of listening to Ardipithecus feels immeasurable by good or bad. Ardipithecus fails as a pop record, because it’s barely aware that it’s a part of that conversation.

While Blackstar features a fair amount of indulgence, especially on the aforementioned 10-minute-long title track, it never feels labored, and the music never even once imitates the nightmarish soundscapes of Scott Walker.

The energy sustained here comes only from scientific curiosity at the permutations offered by a piece of hardware, and it doesn’t really connect beyond that.

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.

The album’s a treasure trove of exciting, sharp production, recruiting some of today’s most tuneful producers (Mick Shultz, Vinylz, London On Da Track, Murda Beatz, DJ Mustard, Soundz) who simply understand what works best for Jeremih’s adroit, rhythmic vocals.

If Melnyk’s technique hasn’t changed, he is breaking new conceptual ground.

Ignoring the conceptual background, Kannon only achieves the very cusp of the transportative, magical power of past Sunn O))) albums.

Musically, the album mines its entire aesthetic from a bargain bin of classicist hip-hop clichés.

In destroying himself, Chasny has unearthed deeper, simpler fundamentals in his craft and, in doing so, breathed new life into his musical voice. With Hexadic II, Six Organs of Admittance is born again.

Ultimately, Sold Out is not doing what its title cheekily alludes to. Although it traverses a variety of genres outside of footwork’s typical territory, DJ Paypal never relents on the actual practice of the juke: the core sound of the beat, getting danced on.

Beyond Belief is at its best when exploring the conflict beneath.

Fast pacing and fragmentary delivery show how Mutant’s tracks operate as experiments in obsessive dysmorphia, taking flaws and magnifying them to scale drama, affect, and beauty out of digital refuse. Exhilarating moments are found next to tracks that only feature impact tail-ends, panned and swirled around a headspace to suspend spatiality further.

You can’t hear The Feeling in his voice, which is still one of the most infectiously beautiful in the industry, because as his faith has saved him from his pain, his production team has saved his voice from Justin. It makes for a series of unbeatable mainstream and crossover singles, and a desensitized, unnerving album.

With pacing like a serial manga franchise, the album shines through its relentless ability to grow on you, despite all odds.

Despite looking to set the world on fire with Free TC, his debut, Dolla $ign spreads himself too thin and mostly stumbles over his own lofty ambitions.

Even though songs like the jittering “444Sure” teem with propulsive energy and dynamic peaks, they lack the inventiveness and originality to induce euphoria in any other way, and thus they descend into commonplaces and banalities.

Although Slime Season 2 bears a resemblance to its slimy predecessor, in that both have a jumbled track sequence and silly cover art, it does hold the notable distinction of possessing some much-needed confidence.

Despite its conceptualist sonics and firmly placid surface, Nothing still winds up as Kode9’s most unsettling and miserablist release to date, as well as his most emotionally resonant and straightforward.

Garden of Delete is the exceptional post-performance of the readability conjured in the wake of OPN’s work, and as a result, it critiques experimental culture’s desire to fetishize.

From the get-go, from the very first tremblings of Chris Abrahams’s piano and the hullabaloo of Tony Buck’s drums, the album engineers an atmosphere of beguiling insecurity and enigmatic possibility.

Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings is essentially an audio sketchbook, and its contents are necessarily rough, half-formed, and fragmentary. There is pleasure to be found here, particularly in Cobain’s left-field excursions into Burroughs-ian collage, but these pleasures will hold scant value to anyone not already convinced of the author’s peculiar genius.

It’s a perfectly respectable, fun dance record, but I just wish its grooves came more naturally.

What makes a Wolf Eyes album worthwhile is less the raging skree than their keen application of dark, delectably uncouth fragment. Your head can still wade in this bracken, even if it may not be as tumultuously roiling as it once was.

All this studious box-ticking and attention-to-detail comes at a price, which is that II becomes more of a tribute to the music of yesteryear than, say, a work of art that’s relevant to the world surrounding it.

Divers steps outside of itself. Its lyrics are obscure, and its melodies are more variable and complicated than those of the “overstuffed gorge” some saw in 2010’s Have One On Me. At particular moments, though, it is plainspoken and personal.

No matter her self-presentation, her grip, the music is relentlessly Sad--and exhausting in its sadness.

Through this the mesmerizing plan of the album becomes, at last, apparent. The issue of making sense becomes a far-off one.

Age of Transparency is heady and dizzying, even more unpleasant than Anxiety at times, but it’s keyed in to the zeitgeist in a way that feels genuine, constructive even.

Nevertheless, this unsettled eclecticism notwithstanding, Fading Frontier does in fact sport some of Deerhunter’s most conventional and poppy material.

The music on Safe is embedded in the contours of an anxiety attack itself. Rather than an attempt at inducing states of rest, the music is contrarily restless and embroiled in agony.

Alex G’s first major wax-plated step outside the bedroom is predictably secure. But it’s also exploratory of his changing landscape, one that’s situated like unauthorized speech-class notecards, articulating each situation and character but still allowing for cracks and incongruity.

Holding Hands with Jaime is a remarkable debut album. It ticks off plenty of familiar noise-rock boxes, but Girl Band massages them into a whole that feels authentically their own.

C-ORE offers its own representation, served by the idiosyncratic artists involved.

Over and over, listen after listen and Half Free just plain sends. Mastermind Meg Remy’s first album for the vaunted 4AD label is bursting with vivid, cracked imagination and cool mastery of slippery pop allure.

Dope Body albums have been great in the past because they took familiar kinds of rock melody and put a sinister spin on them, reimagining American popular rock through a spit-smeared lens, reinvigorating it with the edge and causticity those songs could have conveyed in different hands. But they don’t do any of that here. On Kunk, they just screw around a bit.

It’s the subversion of the tyranny of the pop song and the aural manifestation of desire’s drift, or trudge, wherever it goes. In the background, throughout, her voice annotates, in stunning polyphony, like Horn’s watery associations, the unknowable trajectory that each song always already takes.

Of course, songs like the playful “Lost My Head There” and the searching “Dust Bunnies” could just as easily be about the consequences of excessive drug consumption or no-less excessive levels of modern stress, yet the persistence of the self-alienation motif amid slanted nods to his career in music end up strongly insinuating that his growing status as a rock icon is weakening the already weak hold he has over himself.

Even without the haunting, almost phantasmagoric washes of guitar that dominated the previous two albums and despite the newfound prominence of robust and well-rounded melodic work that was previously largely swept aside by it, Tamaryn’s new late-80s/early-90s sensitive pop still possesses something of the signature melancholia that inspired her earlier output with Shelverton.

Perhaps they still haven’t quite gotten there with La Di Da Di, but they’ve come somewhere close.

Grief’s Infernal Flower is heavy in the best, most gratifyingly melancholy way.

Good Sad Happy Bad is ultimately an optimistic record; it tries to bring out the positive in some of the most negative sounds around.

There’s so much sweet in the bitter here that one might be inclined to think that this is music anyone could get into. But these are songs for Low fans.

Old, tired, and disillusioned they may be, yet Illegals in Heaven sees Blank Realm affirm the necessity of maturing into something more than the abstract projection of possibility.

The memory of the dream’s worth nothing, but you’ll chase the feeling all day. This album is a lot like that.

The playful experimentalism and inherently subversive nature of Dead Petz is enjoyable (in a sickly-sweet way) throughout, yet it’s experimentation is akin to playing absent-mindedly with a shitty synthesizer iPhone app.

While still struggling a bit to overcome their influences, still sound no less than incredible and compelling on their debut.

Poison Season is nothing if not willing to shrug off a few of Destroyer’s newest fans if that means staying true to what the band has done so well for the better part of two decades. More so than on Kaputt, all of the classic Destroyer motifs are on full display.

The Crosswords-“Preakness” is a monster itself compared to the gentle rise and fall of the track’s 2011 studio appearance on the cross-promotional Keep cassette.... The rest of the EP, though, like most of Panda’s recent output, just washes over me lukewarm.

Although it isn’t as full-fledged or layered as a full-length Aphex work, it’s full of minor miracles, advanced lessons in acid appreciation and stirring little lines of drum poetry.

Although warmer, almost folk-rock, Pickpocket’s Locket is as visceral an experience as any Mercer project, albeit in a new way.

This new one is no less heady and singular, and even if it doesn’t do much to advance Jenkins’s captivating line in brain-hop, it solidifies his reputation as one of the most intriguing Wise Guy critics of the “thug life” still branding far too many rappers today.

While the instrumentation gives the impression of self-bricolage, made up of materials from Mac’s own private collection under a particular washed-out filter, the lyrics derive from common property, things like fragments of old clichés and easy rhymes.

DS2 finds a hellish, motivating power by articulating how it’s possible to have the best time of your life during the worst time of your life. And it all sounds so good.

Abyss neatly encompasses the totality of her career, synthesizing the artist’s prolific catalog into her strongest and most ambitious album yet, a cavernous chasm filled with beauty, brutality, and endless possibility.

Compton itself is a part of this little something too, because even though it fails to make a clear artistic statement, it houses some of the finest hip-hop production Dre has turned in for years, and proves that the city has much more going for it than just a bad reputation.

Born In the Echoes maintains a pop-sensitive groove for all but two of its songs.... But the real winners on this record as usual are the curios.

While it may lack the freshness and shock-of-the-new presented by their previous full-lengths, Key Markets marks the next logical step for the band; the sound of Sleaford Mods’ ultimate rejection.

Pain has the audacity to come correct, while so many 90s miners are content to approximate. They place themselves in the pantheon and let the gatekeepers of dubious to imperious distinction do what they will.

The problem is that what’s left--the imagined everything about this record--is that it just sounds like someone lamenting a one-night stand that ended too soon, some kind of physical communication that feels like it could have gone so much deeper and become so much more emotional.

The album’s subtlety and abstract tendencies prevent it from becoming solely a work of stock collage or pastiche appropriation.

While HEALTH and Get Color were cohesive collections of songs that created a snapshot in time of where the artists were when creating them, listening to Death Magic feels like we’re seeing not just the band they are currently, but all the bands they could be.

Here, he’s stripped aside much of the theoretical sprawl, resulting in a work that feels both minor, even by his standards, and gargantuan, even by his standards.