The cohesion of Pain Olympics is quite the miracle. Even if there are moments that diverge into unpredictable passages, there’s always a sense that Crack Cloud know where the track is heading – it’s obvious that, despite their size, they are always operating from a single artistic vision.

This overall reduction in the reliance on guitar riffs allows for greater flexibility of sound, and as such BCNR wring out more staggering peaks of emotion from Wood’s lovelorn words.

With any luck, Wakin On A Pretty Daze will go down as a document to the workman he really is.

On Island, Pallett reaffirms their status as a special brand of artist. With their compositional flair they can inspire you to bone up on music theory, whilst simultaneously, with a flash of their writerly pen, have the ability to break, rebuild and strengthen your heart.

These are warm, lived-in songs, the sort that feel instantly classic, becoming canon without ever feeling like they’re trying all that hard to.

This is a band operating at their highest, most infectious potency, and the end result is riveting.

It’s Noname’s most convincing album yet – as a whole, it defies any attempt to be embraced as “mainstream” or “digestible”.

The dire gloom of the early years is gone, and the garbled mutations of Some Rap Songs and Feet of Clay have grown in clarity without losing any of their labyrinthine and gothic dynamics. Without calling a masterpiece just yet: this is a very special moment, both for Thebe and his fans. I leave the rest to Two-Face and the flip of his coin.

W becomes more than just ‘another’ Boris album. Like other albums that capture the sublime – be it Kid A, Loveless, Eskimo or On Land – it conjures a sense of presence that is somewhat alien, slightly haunted, certainly physical. It toys with ideas of memories we associate with certain sounds and atmospheres, how our emotions can be formed through sensory experience and time becomes illusory.

Comparing it to where they once were, somewhere middling between post-rock and meandering industrial ambient, the sound of Factory Floor is of a band that is now confident in their own original and entirely dominant sound.

Ocean Roar [is] a truly proper follow-up.

Torres doesn’t really feel like a debut, let alone something remotely self-released–the songwriting ability and surprisingly fantastic and natural production allow for this journal-esque story to get its due.

The record is 15 short vignettes about lost, unattainable, suboptimal, or just plain impossible love, and The Fields nail each and every one.

Once again, Sternberg’s irrepressible, impossibly human spirit shines through the darkness. This is the ultimate power of I’ve Got Me: the majority of songs here focus on negative experiences, but the feeling coming out the other end of listening to it is one of uplift and renewed resolve to make something of one’s life. It’s what makes the album sound both modern and timeless.

Ekstasis is a challenging listen, but a rewarding one.

He’s fulfilled every promise made by Badlands and then some, and despite whatever depths of pain made such an eruption of shattered awesome possible, he’s managed not just one of the best albums of the year, but one of the most genuinely moving, as well.

SICK! is a pure rap album, as only Earl Sweatshirt could deliver.

Sometimes these lyrics are a bit stifling and confusing to place in context, but once more, these songs become something more due to Turner's impeccable vocal melodies.

Despite its short length, Kindred provides as much of an experience as Untrue. And commendably, it's a different one.

The duo retain a stripped down approach and it helps make each production choice and songwriting turn feel pondered and noteworthy, each track carving out its own identity and mood within a larger thematically consistent body.

English Teacher’s debut album is delicate, accomplished, and complete.

Dream River is as evocative a record as he’s ever made and that’s saying quite a lot.

Slaughterhouse is one of the most vital and animal rock records in a recent memory.

They round out the subtle complexities in the seemingly simple story of longing; a tip-toeing toybox melody reflecting the delicacy of the situation, digital glitches suggesting the distance between them, sighs that relay the inner conflict. This precision features throughout Jennifer B, and it’s thanks to these careful touches that each song connects on a deeper level, despite their structurelessness and unpredictability.

The band subvert the expectation by leaning heavier into their complexities to make Endure a triumph. It’s not so much a left turn as it is an evolution in sound, one that manages to cover more territory than their last album – and deliver their message in a way that is both more urgent and more approachable.

Dum Dum Girls always know exactly who they are, play on their own strengths, and leave the audience fully satisfied and happy to come back for more. Simplicity rarely sounds this good.

Spiral is an album to experience as a whole, to be swallowed in and transported by.

There’s a wealth of sonic variety on display but the concise run-time--clocking in at a fraction over 40 minutes--keeps matters focused and thoroughly engaging.

Exquisitely textured. ... Every song has terrific sonic and narrative depth.

The album takes many of Malkmus' favorite indie and classic rock influences and creates something fresh and dazzling.

At this point, it's hard to know what to let go and what to hold onto as a listener of M83, but regardless, Hurry Up, We're Dreaming is a pretty fantastic record.

Allo Darlin' makes this leap on Europe, resulting in an album that is subtly ambitious and surprisingly rewarding.

The band seem focused on a singular mission: to deliver a rich, imaginative work that demands our attention, one that pushes the expectations of listeners as well as themselves. The question is: do they succeed? The answer is a resounding, unequivocal yes: Only God Was Above Us feels in many ways the kind of album we always knew the band had in them to make.

Though it may seem like Vile tends to waver on just how he wants to be perceived, the lack of commitment is nothing if not intensely deliberate.

TNGHT may clock in at under 16 minutes, but it's the most satisfying quarter-hour blast you'll hear this year.

The way your patience is so handsomely rewarded is what truly makes Lonerism such an engrossing spectacle.

An aura of mystery and ambiguity hangs over Impersonator. The emotions and resulting thoughts are always present and felt, but their cause isn’t always clear.

AM is a pitch black party record, full of menacing pop and grimy, indelible grooves drowned in bourbon.

Albums like this are rare and special, highlighting pop’s capacity to sculpt our emotions and steer us towards something better beyond the horizon.

Lesser songwriters might stop there, and accept lyrical maturation as the only necessary step toward a sophomore effort, but Crutchfield also uses Cerulean Salt as a way to expand her sonic palette beyond the crackling acoustic guitar ballads that marked her previous work.

When a flower blooms, it changes shape and appearance but not its biological essence; similarly, for all its subtle differences, Bloom avoids shedding the bittersweet swells that have become the duo's stock-and-trade.

Strange Mercy is the lonely next door neighbour who could be just as popular if only you took the time to get to know her. Instead she is left to turn introspectively, which might not produce quite so brilliantly chromatic stories, but they can be just as – if not more – compelling.

The core of the album's success is its fantastic establishment of tonal environment--a brooding sexuality both sadistic and carnivalesque.

Yo La Tengo feel more alive on This Stupid World than they have in years – which isn’t to say that their more recent efforts were lacking in any way. The songs here just crackle and spark with an innate energy and unpredictability not heard since 2006’s I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass.

From epic opener "The Grey Ship," to the equally epic closing track "Red Star," Past Life Martyred Saints is an album that captivates, provokes, and pleases.

Any apprehensions about whether or not Cults could turn "Go Outside" into a successful full-length should be hastily put to rest.

My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross, in turn, shows Anohni pivoting between stunningly direct and entrancingly oblique manifestos. A listener is left voyeuristically spellbound, striving to reconcile what they’ve encountered with the life they’re currently living.

With patience, Hummingbird's panorama comes into full view, and it is one full of arrestingly arranged set pieces and an impressive sense of economy.

On MCII, it’s a dual-edged sword that he brandishes skillfully into a scintillating sophomore record, one stacked with some of the year’s best pop-rock tunes.

It's an album that ceaselessly overflows with love and a desire to reach out and relate, and it's this that makes such a heavy album so accessible and so resoundingly good.

Nü Sensae are one of the most formidable punk outfits working right now and Sundowning is the work of a band whittling themselves down to occupy the very tip of fury.

God Save the Animals’ production approaches are understated compared to those employed in previous work yet still precisely rendered. What stand out – prominently and unabashedly – are Alex’s impeccably crafted and irresistibly delivered songs.

It's rare that an artist finds a voice in the unsaid. You could call her loss our gain.

The effort put into creating the dark atmosphere is gratuitous, but in the context of the album it works perfectly. Add to this the fact that every song carries a killer hook and you have one of the must-hear albums of the year.

Allelujah! seems more immediate and more organic, but instead of feeling blown away by it's unreachable drama and grandeur, with a decade of age behind us and the band, it feels inhabitable in a way Godspeed never has before.

Sigur Rós have already proven themselves across their lengthy career, and now, they’re peaking their heads out yet again and making clear they shouldn’t be counted out.

With additional help from fellow musician and frequent collaborator Justin Vernon (whose vocals are the only overdubbed aspect of the music), the songs on To See More Light are as devastatingly personal as they are emphatically otherworldly--inhuman sounding even. This stark dichotomy of sound and intent throws Stetson’s music into austere relief.

Fans of the harsher tone and aesthetic may grumble at him leaving the sound of NEGRO behind, but it couldn’t be clearer that his nearly manic, uncontainable sense of creativity is not only still present, but is grasping further, sounding more expansive and less controlled than ever here. For those in a rut over the seemingly endless absence of Kendrick Lamar, you need look no further for boundlessly creative and irresistibly unique hip hop than GUMBO’!.

With true, human conflict between happiness and sadness on full display, Man Alive! is unequivocally King Krule’s, or better yet, Archy Marshall’s most sobering work yet.

He achieves a lot with a little. He never gives us filler. He continues to innovate. He has provided us with a great album, one that is a sure sign his velocity has not been slowed.

The dead air that seemed to sometimes crop up previously has been filled or chopped out completely, creating a record with taut and purposeful momentum.

Life is Good the most exciting Nas album to come around since It Was Written.

The album may be a little homogenous for some listeners, but this is a narratively and emotionally precise set of songs, set to sneakily indelible melodies. Nastasia has never written with such vivid truthfulness, such earthen brutality.

2 finds Mac DeMarco growing as an artist, settling into a workman-like rhythm and puttering through some of the catchiest tracks of the year.

This resilience against the facts of life wavers from song to song, giving us a divine spectrum of her fragile existence at the time of their creation. ... It’s in the final three tracks of songs where the membrane between songwriter and broken-hearted woman is at its thinnest, where Lenker renders her deep, soulful ache in the most poignant of ways.

Yeah Right’s dual interests in songwriting and guitar explorations end up being its greatest strength.

It has the potential to sidle next to records like Movements and We Are Monster as a genre classic, but it's just as assured to find a broader audience as well.

For all its horror trappings and flat-out aggression (the album-closing title track even ends with one last fakeout jump-scare blast to the face), We Are Always Alone is a deeply emotional record. It is catharsis writ large; a writhing, wailing, violent resistance against the injustice of a cruel world full of self-serving people.

So much talk of tempo and expectation must not overshadow the greatest triumph that 4 has to offer: progression.

Shrines functions just fine as a collection of Purity Ring's work thus far, but it also functions as a singular, cohesive artistic statement, a capital-a Album, and that's much more rewarding.

Unpredictable it is not, but taken as a study of sound and mood, it’s kind of perfect.

An essential and enlivening record from start to finish.

Tramp is simply her most fully-realized album yet, and that's all there is to it.

Labyrinthitis is Bejar’s best work since Kaputt. At this point, Bejar has several classics under his belt, so there’s no desperation here to create another one, but he manages to do it with ease.

It is an unmistakably raw first album of ripe potential, and one of the more memorable releases of the early weeks of this year.

Possibly the most intelligent album about love this decade, Water Made Us gently and disarmingly humanizes Woods while maintaining a me-positive stance.

Hopefully Slave Ambient will do for The War On Drugs what Smoke Ring For My Halo did for Kurt Vile and place Adam Granduciel as one of the musicians with serious talent and songwriting acumen in modern indie rock.

YTILAER finds Callahan at his most personally enigmatic, taking inspiration from his own life and filtering those experiences through a prism of modern folktales. He offers us all the most enticing details but manages to keep it wonderfully vague at the same time, a treasure trove of musical obscurantism.

It’s not an album that immediately reveals itself, but when it lets you in it’s hard to find your way out.

Digging further into the singer-songwriter aesthetics of Seven Swans and Carrie & Lowell, Stevens has crafted an element of rare beauty, meticulously extracted from a host of sorrows, affections, and other confounding sentiments.

With the triumvirate of googly-eyed rhythms, sinfully catchy melodies and a breeziness that seems only fitting, they’ve served up one of the most auspicious debuts of the year.

While her method of intermingling a vibrant array of synthesized sounds remains from previous records, there is more musical complexity, which yields a pure joyousness that comes bouncing out. She has energised her productions with greater depth, more interplay across the stereo field.

Ssss is absorbing techno to listen to and proof that well written music outscores clever production tricks any day of the week.

Modern Vampires of the City finds the band in both familiar and unfamiliar territory, and it’s pure pleasure hearing them navigate these waters.

Even without the context of her back catalog, these songs are strong in their own right.

Thirty tracks and seventy-five minutes, Fabric 69 is a work of incredibly sturdy sonic architecture; it’s hardly inert or monotonous, yet at the same time it takes techno’s notion of repetition to what might be considered a logical extreme.

Frank Ocean might have a gutsier pen game–and Usher more moves and Miguel more sex appeal--but 20/20 is easier to fall into a groove with than any of the best contemporary pop/R&B albums out right now.

By reaching every-damn-where he could, ASAP Rocky both sidesteps this pitfall and becomes one of the year's most exciting voices.

Seabed is a luscious album that implores you to dive into the gorgeous depths of its sound and atmosphere.

Here he has never sounded more confident and purposeful, building layered and incredibly rich compositions out of his blissful loops that more than justify the length they inhabit.

The album’s brevity only adds to the allure, as it is stripped of any excess, and devoid of a single misstep. It is a distinct departure, but ultimately unsurprising in its flawless execution.

Both in its challenging nature and its status as an emblem of everything that the Motion Sickness of Time Travel project has dealt in to date, it functions, without a doubt, as Evans most accomplished release of her career and one of the more accomplished ambient albums in recent memory.

The trance-like pace of II serves to reinforce the album rather than weaken it.

Over the course of the album, we seem to hear Fohr coming to terms with the vastness of mortality, and realising that it is in itself beautiful – it is what makes life precious. With the enormity of that acceptance gradually arriving, her soul emerges, no longer eclipsed by grief, shining brighter than ever.

One of the more vocal complaints about The Weeknd's second mixtape was its lack of immediacy, which Echoes of Silence certainly outgrows.

Keepers of the Light is as much of a singular expression of the hardcore continuum as it is an exploration of it, but maybe the best way to soak in its two and half hours is as a richly constructed sound world unto itself.

Nepenthe isn’t The Magic Place, but it certainly sounds like she’s found another special site of inspiration. Thankfully for us it’s just as prodigious and marvellous as anything else Barwick has put out before.

It is him following a path of lesser resistance through the landscape, writing actual choruses and melodic hooks, and finding that there is just as much natural brilliance and artistic merit to approaching his work in this manner.