At best, the record is filled with remnants of bottled anger and expelled demons. At worst, it’s filled with the kind of angsty cries typically read in pouty 14-year-olds’ LiveJournals.

The result is Björk’s most frighteningly intimate album to date.

Where the album stumbles is in its inconsistency, with some rather uninteresting filler that doesn't do much but flesh out the album.

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

This album has all the presence that you should expect it to have.

Be the Cowboy is about capriciousness, denying the contrivances of beauty in some ways while bending to its standards in others. She’s walking the divide between love and heartache, between dejection and fury. But Miyawaki has the talent to straddle that line with poise and aplomb; she’s the geyser and also the slow dancer. She’s singing for herself, but also for her audience. There’s a little Mitski in us all, pilgrim.

No one is reinventing the wheel here; humility rules, and what makes Gala Mill so impressive is how The Drones wear their emotions on their sleeves and how naturally everything spills out.

Random Access Memories is by no means a perfect record, but it consistently possesses an inspired, organic sense of a vitality, a quality that is often denied by the cut-and-paste status quo of EDM.

Soil is a crucial psalm; crucial for its queerness, crucial for its catholicism, its pagan roots protruding into sidewalks, crucial for its purity of heart, crucial for how it avoids imperative, softly chiming.

The songs are allowed to crack a few knuckles and stretch their legs before they do any heavy lifting, and you’ll find yourself appreciating their roots more as a result.

I simply cannot imagine what it would be like to see these guys live, but follow up that New Order at your next dance party with some Congotronics and people will be bouncing off the walls.

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.

It’s in her artwork’s texture that Hval’s voice fascinates.

On The Suburbs, their third album, Arcade Fire sound more like a band than ever before.

Many of the songs continue to showcase Stevens' avid and passionate banjo-plucking, accompanied by similar harmonized vocals that resonate with beauty and commitment.

At first, you’re itching for her to tear into such a juicy beat. But after a couple of listens, you realize it’s a tactful deference that allows her to be in the mix without commandeering it. She could if she wanted to, but she’s passed that.

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.

As a Bon Iver release, 22, A Million is the band’s most impressive record to date, surging forward with oddities that, while certainly nothing new to adventurous listeners, bridge the gap with satisfaction.

This is mind-meets-body music.

While albums like Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea and To Bring You My Love found her looking inward--Let England Shake sees her peeking beyond her inner observations into the complicated web of English politics.

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.

At points, listening to Bécs is to hear gauze become gossamer, and feel it too.

On this album, Garbus attempts to do this in a sophisticated and admirable way, and in the very form of her music, she offers a potential solution of a sort.

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.

Mirrored is a marvel, dastardly and wholly original as it is, and one of the year’s finest.

Ultimately, Bon Iver, Bon Iver is the sound of growth, of growing pains, and the sound of grounding, of tearing new ground. If it aches, it aches like any natural growth, with beauty and wonder.

Yet as much joy as you can hear in Hercules and Love Affair, it’s impossible to separate the melancholy from the mix.

James is still at the reigns, and Syro is proof that he is still very much the king of his own tangled domain.