Most songs take the form of this kind of zen guidance, but Eyes on the Lines avoids stagnancy in part due to its relative brevity--only 9 tracks--and in part due to Gunn’s combination of flowy melodies and shifting chord progressions, which can trigger a kind of relaxed euphoria.

Slowly, quietly, with near-complete calm, Fall Forever edges the listener into that space of total fragility.

There is beauty and anguish to poring through Tyler’s songbook, a reckoning with spirits that refuse to die even as the world spins on furiously and without regard for the passages of humankind not willed or fortunate enough to keep up with the storm.

EP 4 is super cohesive, conscious of what unions and dialogues are and what it means to re-union yourself with something.

This music took time, precision, intuition, will. But it is the same. It doesn’t demand reverence, but its immense power might go null if not for the voidless silence that could introduce it, carry it like a medium into your every day everyday.

Chance is no longer quite coming from that place of adolescence that was essential to 10 Day and Acid Rap, but on Coloring Book, he doesn’t yet sound comfortably settled into whatever it is that’s supposed to come next.

Despite references to hard drugs and depression, Boeckner’s songwriting betrays an unconventional joyfulness, marked more by the relief between emotional peaks and valleys than by its strict verse-chorus-verse structures. In fact, in my opinion, this is the first project of his that measures favorably against the solo work of his more cultishly-beloved bandmate and rival.

Teens of Denial vaults through references to stand alone, rapturous and sincere--a fuzzy framework from the floor of all we know.

Like the flatness of a reflective pool, Skip a Sinking Stone stretches out in stunning beauty, giving listeners a gorgeous reflection of soaring, spectral synesthesia. But beyond a skip along the surface, the release is hesitant to move toward anything of a prescriptive statement; though, with lightness and transience so central to its theme, maybe that’s by design.

The Colour In Anything emphasizes the element of trust that collaboration implies and its role in articulating Blake’s feelings.

Konnichiwa confidently struts and showcases the emcee’s vibrant, exciting personality traits perhaps more than pretty much anyone else in Britain, grime or otherwise. Skepta’s music inhabits the good, evil, and the delightful grey areas in between.

Wrapped in a overwhelming number of influences, Oh No vaults across an infinity of cultural milieus to find itself.

Katy B’s stultifying lyrics, paired with an EMI-sponsored coterie of established DJs, producers, and vocalists, surgically selected as if delegates of their respective niches, evince only the sound of the culture industry at work.

Though it shrouds itself in chaos, Bottomless Pit is ultimately Death Grips’ most straightforward, morbid, and brutal report from the deep end yet. Like watching a great beast eat itself, there is little in the way of elegance or grand design to this music, yet it remains throttling nonetheless, as relentlessly blunt as it is overwhelmingly meaningless.

A Moon Shaped Pool is a “grower,” because all music is a grower. Here, there is perhaps a wider opportunity for the music to grow due to there being an audible release of sign and substance as a ghostly after-image of the band’s event-based trauma.

Nothing have definitely learned a thing or two in between albums about using crushing dynamics to great effect. Unfortunately, there are times when the combination of a particular note and lyric rob the band of its power.

The performances in these songs are as dramatic as they are musical: disarmingly direct, phenomenally compelling.

He’s gently guiding, minding small details as they contribute to the success of the larger mission and never forcing their emergence, Eno’s keen grasp of these two forms of songwriting allowing him to easily walk that line.

Lost Themes II isn’t the monster transfigured. It’s an echo chamber for the transforming horror to howl in.

There’s nothing wrong with Atomic. If you like this sort of thing, you’ll probably think it’s as good as Mogwai’s other work; if you’re aware of their career trajectory, it will mean something specific in that respect, too. The problems come down to communicating the weightlessness of the invisible imaginary figures that dance across your mind’s eye when you’re listening to it.

A casual, only slightly-different-than-usual release smothered in atmosphere with one solid R&B song (that’s reportedly been kicking around in a vault for a while) left stranded in the album’s penultimate slot.

This is her second visual album, and Lemonade is best served with the visuals, a semi-autobiographical film with deft dream-logic, a Purple Rain for the internet age. Its waves wash over the political-commercial-aesthetic limits of Beyonce, which at the time of its release felt a generic/political revelation, but now seems watered-down compared to the bittersweet specificity and holler of Lemonade.

These climactic moments of “High Castle,” and the others like it on the record, are a kind of triumph of Forsyth’s musical grammar, too: the efficiency of communication, the transmission of feeling via the blunt physicality of sound.

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

Xiu Xiu Plays the Music of Twin Peaks is a dense album that seems at its best when it sticks to Badalamenti’s template, filling up nostalgia for the show with acoustic intimacy and emotional affect.

Yet if “Shattered” and follow-up “Guaranteed Struggle” are Dälek at their cacophonous and incensed best, subsequent tracks like “Masked Laughter (Nothing’s Left)” and “6dB” reveal a band cultivating a lighter, more introspective side.

The record resists you making sense of it. It hits, laughs, ends.

Silicon Tare sounds like 2010, which could be a good thing, depending on how you look at it.