What A Time To Be Alive is ultimately the kind of release that will be relegated to curio status in the near future. It doesn’t hold a candle to the strength of either rappers best work, and for Future in particular its overall quality feels like a steep dip from the highs of his most recent run.

Taylor's original 1989 is made even more interesting and worthy of discussion by Ryan's overtly classic rock-ified version, while Ryan's version is intriguing as both a personal expression and a reaction to one of the biggest albums we're likely to see come along in our lifetimes.

This is an album for the Spotify era--a disparate collection of eleven singles, with no unifying message or even common mindset I can discern.

Ultimately, though, regardless of whether Hansard is cribbing moves from his own country's heritage, or from one of the biggest rock stars in American history, he manages to make it all his own thanks to the quality of his songwriting and the passion behind his performances.

It's officially a biennial tradition that The Wonder Years release a new record that happens to be their best record to date.

The result is a record that feels as weighty as a work of literature, but also as enveloping and beautiful as the best albums that the folk music genre has ever produced.

Showcasing the very best of Archambault’s lyrics and the band’s musicianship while channeling more post-rock-esque breaks along with diverse shifts in pacing and tone into their brand of hardcore, Abandoned is undoubtedly the essential Defeater release and gold-standard for hardcore in 2015.

For the band's loyal fanbase, Everybody's Coming Down proves an experimental but mostly successful step further down a path of fuzzy, theatrical rock and roll.

Emotion goes to great lengths to prove the advantages of being manufactured, with every piece interlocking with machine-like precision with its surroundings. It’s astonishingly effective, and like the best pop, demands to be listened to ad nauseum in order to gawk at the sheer audacity of the accomplishment.

All told, Positive Songs for Negative People is Frank Turner's most complete album since Love, Ire & Song, and perhaps his best as well.

Though it may be Mac’s tamest experiment yet, it also lends credence to the idea that he truly is this year’s grand romantic.

The quintet have honed in on their strengths and produced their most concise and assured release to date.

In place of Pluto and Honest’s love songs are emissions from the depths of Future’s psyche where light is unable to penetrate and whose denizens are twisted and ferocious.

It’s an intelligent, creative, and engaging album. It’s a blast to listen to, too.

Ditching the psychedelic rock for an album that mines from disco, synth-pop and R&B in equal measure is a move that is sure to alienate some of the Tame Impala fan base, but the fact that Kevin was able to stretch himself into this kind of new territory is undeniably a feat in its own right. It's just icing on the cake that Currents also happens to rival Lonerism as Tame Impala's masterpiece.

No, this is not his strongest work to date, but it certainly keeps him in the conversation.

Isbell isn't your average songwriter, and on Something More Than Free, there's a pretty strong argument to be made that he's outplaying anyone else in the game right now.

Slightly unfocused by design, Lantern broadens HudMo’s repertoire while also reaffirming his status as the premier producer of the sound that brought him to fame.

This record is bold, uncompromising, and one of the best and most important in its genre to come out in an already exceptional year.

Found In Far Away Places shows the band exploring brand new territories both instrumentally and lyrically. A clear ‘Album of the Year’ contender for 2015.

mewithoutYou have done something that feels nearly impossible with Pale Horses, and that’s recreate themselves without losing what made them interesting. It’s so effortless that it’s hard not to wonder if a higher power was involved.

Rather than dialling in the same record with a different twist every two years, Desaparecidos have crafted another mission statement.

[Pageant Material] sounds effortless and fully formed from first note to last.

Dopamine isn't his best record, and it might be his worst, but for one of the slyest songwriters from the past two decades of pop, "worst" can still be pretty damn great.

Universal Themes has the makings to be one the year’s most intriguing collections of songs yet.

As with everything Van Etten puts out these days, it’s an essential release.

While Four Year Strong will never be the band that wrote Rise Or Die Trying again, they prove on their new self-titled record that they have bigger steps ahead than the ones they left behind.

While it may not always work out in his favor, the high points here far outweigh the lows, and the takeaway from At.Long.Last.A$AP should be that Rocky is on his way to something even better once he finds his footing.