Wrecking Ball is an album that will reinforce most everyone's preexisting opinion of The Boss, whether they be good or bad.

On her sophomore effort, Monsters, Kennedy doubles down on the eclectic nature of her music, offering up a lengthy set of songs that range from experimental electronica to a capella ballads.

Tilt is the music they are dragging you onto the dancefloor for, and with most of these songs playing over the speakers, you’ll happily join them.

Berninger’s vocal delivery is largely muted; the mercurial and even passive-aggressive eruptions of the 00s are all but gone; rather, there’s a downcast directness here, which at times is compelling in the way that self-revelation and truth-telling can be; at other times, such singularity seems glaringly reductive, a listener wishing for the metaphors, tortuous narratives, and volatile phrasing of earlier work.

This album finds them going all-out in swashbuckling revelry for the most part, and it suits them better than anyone might have expected.

Despite its flaws, Sun is not a complete failure and does deserve to be mentioned alongside the rest of her work, if only for the comparison of how she once tried something different--a flawed but worthwhile attempt.

Hackney Diamonds is a really great late Stones album, albeit just a pretty good rock album in the canon of history. That’s a compliment.

Double and triple albums naturally sprawl, yet there’s an unexpected compactness to PARANOÏA.

This collection of radiant jangle pop songs, burdened by nostalgic love and depressive yearning for something real, ultimately loses its luster. Everything else blends into one garbled, hazy murmur that ensues without much variance.

Take the strong songwriting, add the excellent production by David Barbe, and the tight and first rate playing, and you've got an album that truly showcases just how skilled and versatile the band is.

It’s not bad music per se, but lacking Weiss’ sharp drumming and the virtuoso guitar work the two are so good at, there’s not much left of what made Sleater-Kinney exciting.

The album struggles to find a particular voice, and make any sort of statement, leaving me more than a couple of steps off using the album's own title to describe my opinion of it.

It's one of the most back-to-front solid and uncompromising Berlin techno full-lengths this year.

3D Country is a fun album, and it gives the band a more definable personality – even if it’s bonkers.

As major label rap debut albums go, Live from the Underground is a relative anomaly in that the artist seems to have escaped with most of his integrity intact.

For the many Heartbreaking Bravery will help rekindle an interest in Krug once more.

It isn’t as impactful as Isolation, but there are plenty of moments on this record where Kali shows great potential that she may yet make that truly fantastic Spanglish R&B album.

On Storm Queen she’s an actor given complete creative freedom with a classic text; the voice of an avenging angel; a ballet dancer performing with a sharpened sabre in hand. Summoning thunderclouds and hurricanes with her inflections and rippling vocal cords, she is the Storm Queen through and through.

Overall, the album occurs as less incendiary than previous work (with the exception of the opening track), DBT at least temporarily setting aside their polemical blowtorches, instead mindfully venturing into vivid inventories of their own lives, choices, and karmic trajectories.

It’s one of the young year’s best all-out rock records, the kind of fantastic full-length that some kid in a garage will one day look back to themselves, maybe when plugging that guitar in for the first time.

The album is an alluring, heady mix of skewed folktronica, avant garde noise and opulent orchestral tones which combine to cement Eartheater’s place in every discerning music fan’s end of year lists.

Both fun and grounded, the charm of Nayeon is irresistible and whether you enjoy K-Pop or not, this is worth checking out if you are a poptimist in general.

On World’s Most Stressed Out Gardner, Chad VanGaalen indulges his inner experimentalist more than on its more recent predecessors, albeit with the same giddy, goofball disposition we’re used to.

Viagra Boys have successfully captured a side of the working class that demands empathy, and it’s their strongest statement to date.

Anxiety matches the emotional heights and immediacy of the music Ashin was inspired by, but what arrives from his limitations--as a singer, as a DIY-ist--adds to the record a personal foundation and raw authenticity no amount of budget could erect.

Westerman may not have found his footing with his debut record, but there are enough parts to the whole that should keep listeners looking forward to what he does in the future.

The fact that TANGK captures a band boldly going out of their own depth doesn’t take away that IDLES come on a little too strong too often, compelling you to swipe left more often than right.

All of it is minuscule and done in a minor setting, but it’s also meaningful. Tracks appear like brief sketches before dissipating into the air. It’s the low-key nature of this mixtape that makes Still Slipping Vol. 1 a compelling listen.