Its sweep across genres and eras is exactly the point. The time-traveling heroine of "The ArchAndroid" aims to uncover previously hidden points of harmony amid chaos. In this case, it's a big risk that brings big reward.

Though not quite as instantly catchy as its predecessor, it expands on its widescreen musical reach and introspective intensity, and sharpens the political perspective until it draws blood.

[Siamese Dream has] more focused, sturdily constructed songs and even more fastidious production [than Gish].

The word "cinematic" gets thrown around a lot in describing densely orchestrated music these days, but "Smile" was among the first albums to achieve that distinction in the rock era, conjuring movie-like images in the listener's mind with its vivid blend of instruments and sound effects (the crunch of vegetables, the tapping of nails, the riotous conversation of barnyard animals).

With Burton as his accomplice, the singer has learned how to juxtapose contrasting textures and emotions for maximum impact, and it makes for one of the year's most consistently engaging listens.

I Like to Keep Myself in Pain works as both a career summing up and a fascinating introduction to one of the most accomplished, underappreciated vocalists of the last two decades.

Somehow, the Australian singer-guitarist has made something fresh out of everyday vignettes performed on everyday instruments (guitar-bass-drums). She sounds like she's day-dreaming out loud instead of singing, but she's deceptively incisive as a lyricist. Her guitar-playing, while never particularly showy, can be subtle or scalding.

It all builds masterfully to a powerful, closing one-two punch.

The album (and the Detroit quartet's career so far) peaks near the end with two brilliant songs, in which the humanity that underpins this bleak, bracing music finally becomes undeniable.

If an album can be both chilling and beautiful at once, Undun is it.

The entire album plays like an Ocean view, clear and uncluttered by outsized cameos.

The album is full of those kind of unexpected juxtapositions, a stunning statement from an artist who shows no signs of slowing down.

As good as “No Burden” was, Historian is better: songs like short stories; sneakily hard-hitting arrangements; dreaminess and catharsis, often in the space of a few verses.

With R.A.P. Music he's added a must-hear chapter to the hip-hop bible.

That sense of teetering on the ledge of chaos, of mayhem fighting melody for control, makes Wild Flag a debut for the ages.

The Jagger on Blue & Lonesome is 73, three years older than Waters was when he died in 1983, and Richards is 72, Watts 75 and guitarist Ronnie Wood 69. In a sense, the Stones have become their elders, and their seasoning as a first-rate blues band is evident.

Damn. strips down the rhythms to their essence, flavored with the occasional cameo (notably Rihanna and U2). Lamar’s voice does most of the heavy lifting, playing multiple roles and characters. His supple singing complements a variety of rap tones and textures.

It makes for an entertaining rollercoaster of a listen.

A typically diverse, trippy ride.

Williams lets the songs burn slowly and sensually until there's nothing left but smoke and ash.

The tracks tumble out in short three- and four-minute bursts with barely a pause. The density of the wordplay heightens the dizzying momentum.

Nothing else on the album can top 'Russian Roulette,' but they certainly complement it, and make its startling conclusion feel sadly inevitable.

Fortunately, the music and, above all, the voices of the two singers fight through the darkness. The voices complement, converse and contradict, like sisters finishing or amplifying each other's sentences.

What made "Surf" and now "Coloring Book" compelling is his ability to let his personality seep into the broad canvases on which he and his collaborators paint.

Few artists create a tougher, colder world as convincingly.

The tracks brim with sing-along choruses, strutting horns and bright melodies that evoke the heyday of Philly soul, the mystic optimism of Earth Wind & Fire and the "Car Wash" soundtrack.

The tension between Van Etten’s melodies and Congleton’s sometimes chaotic sonic coloring makes for a bracing listen on the album’s best tracks.

Savage Young Du contains nothing less than the foundation of that towering legacy.

Still feisty after all these years, his entanglements with love and aging [are]documented with wicked wit and an attitude that is anything but sentimental.

Rome does one better than conjure nostalgia; it puts those vintage signifiers in service of fine, contemporary songs.

The quintet likes to pull melody out of dissonance and repetition. Now they've also found the soul.

It's actually quite good; not exactly a return to the band's mid-'90s Brit-pop peak, but a welcome progression beyond. Blur delivers a stranger, more atmospheric but still melodic brand of electro-folk salted with rock guitar and orchestral sweep.

Though the album is less immediate than “Body Talk,” the choruses not as insistent, it exudes a hypnotic pull nonetheless: this is a gentler brand of body music about absence and need.

With "The Courage of Others" (Bella Union), Midlake singer Tim Smith sounds like a refugee from the late ‘60s English-folk scene, with songs delivered in an unaffected, understated voice that could’ve easily complemented Sandy Denny or Anne Briggs, or fit in with Pentangle or Fairport Convention.

They patented a style and on their fifth studio album, Snakes for the Divine, see no reason to change it.

"Falling Off the Sky" sounds like the work of a band still very much at the top of its game.

The second disc is lower key, a less varied collection of music than Disc 1. Though it might have made sense for tonal variety to distribute the acoustic pieces more evenly between the two albums, they work together in creating a sustained mood piece.

Surf integrates a mish-mash of sounds, genres and guests into a relatively coherent whole, textured and nuanced in ways that demand repeat listens.

Channel Orange creates a state of mind with words and sound.

Drake’s increasing mastery of not just rhyme, but tone and inflection is readily apparent.

Mood frequently trumps melody, but the music is rarely flat or monochrome.

It's a unified album, in which sound is every bit as crucial as craft. Despite the formidable solo careers involved, The Both improbably sounds like the work of a band.

"Playful" isn't often the first word that comes to mind when listening to music with this kind of cerebral veneer, but it's a perfectly apt description of Battles' subversive and frequently delightful brand of avant-pop.

Distortion-saturated guitars, synthesizers squealing like tea kettles and tribal drums give country tradition a swift kick in the back side. This carnage doesn’t belong to a genre, it’s more like a feeling: Side 2 of Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s “Rust Never Sleeps,” ZZ Top demos after three cases of Tequila in a Texas roadhouse, a hurricane.

Her producer and co-songwriter Bjorn Yttling (of the Swedish rock band Peter, Bjorn and John) keeps things from sounding like mere revivalism.

Sons and Daughters add to their canon of murder ballads, then finish the album with the sound of a rain storm on a beach enveloping Bethel's ghostly vocal, a sound that seems to linger long after it fades from earshot.

Though the album hits a few sleepy troughs along the way, it gets progressively stranger and more aggressive, with distorted bass (“Trick Pony”), tribal drumming (“Voyage”) and T-Rex-style boogie (“Dandelion”) giving Gainsbourg room to stretch.

They're deceptively laid-back satirists who deliver their smackdowns amid da-da streams of consciousness, sometimes with such subtlety that by the time the joke finally registers they're off on a fresh, equally strange and frequently hilarious tangent.

It’s slower, dreamier, with songs that prize atmosphere above immediacy.

WAVIP closes the album with an anti-climatic "we are all V.I.P." chant, the only dud on an album that otherwise makes even the hardest-hitting messages sound care-free and danceable.

Americana reveals the hard truth inside songs that have been taken for granted.

Though Battles might be viewed from a distance as a potentially daunting listen, “Juice B Crypts” provides multi-faceted kicks, whether on the dance floor, through the headphones, or riding, screaming with joy, on a rollercoaster.

All We Love We Leave Behind occupies the unruly intersection of metal, punk and progressive music, weeding out the weaknesses the band perceives in each genre and saving the good stuff for its rigorously constructed songs.

The details – the drone of a guitar string, the reverberation of a drum mallet, the swoon of a string section --- are reason enough to reward a close listen.

With each album the Detroit quartet retains its deceptively casual air while pulling triumphant moments out of the noise. It can also conjure surprising tenderness when you least expect, or turn darkly comic in one verse, and lash out in the next.

The singer with the feathery falsetto creates a fluid, dreamscape environment that floats across eras with a connoisseur's discerning feel for the telling detail.

Silver Age affirms what he does best.

The music is as consuming and intoxicating as the lifestyle Cudi describes. On two albums, the stoned-and-alone rapper has created a world built for one.

It's rare for an artist entering her fourth decade to keep releasing music of such high quality, but Phillips sounds like she's rejuvenated--and never better.

The album peaks in its second half, with a series of songs in which Cave doesn't just again walk the narrow line between love and death, but ponders whether "nothing really matters anymore."

Previous albums saw the band go for a murkier, more spaced-out vibe, but this time it's more about concision and songs.

Untitled, Unmastered is presented as an unfinished work, though it rarely sounds like one.

Their largely instrumental compositions, for all their technical prowess, have always been visceral, less about conjuring air-guitar solos than melodies you can hum a week after hearing them. They double down on that approach on “Nighttime Stories.”

The payoff is the trio of reveries that closes the album: “Always,” “Despair” and “Wedding Song” build on the disarming vulnerability of “Maps,” and deepen it.

It’s a microcosm of Brexit England and Trump America, a distillation of pressure points that becomes audible with the ominous clickety-clacking drums and bass that usher in the staggering “Colossus.” And yet Talbot’s narrators find a way to rise above, and the songs turn strangely celebratory just when things seem to be bottoming out.

Ratchet refines the rawness of the EP only slightly, its punky minimalism echoing some of the outsider edginess evinced by early '90s house innovators such as Green Velvet.

With its array of loops, chilled keyboards and rhythmic accents ranging from the Caribbean to the Mississippi Delta, Sun makes Marshall's sultry, darkly shaded voice sound almost playful at times.

For all its eccentric details and occasionally fractured flow, the songs brim with ecstatic blasts of saxophone and undulating waves of rhythm that suggest Afro-pop's endless groove.

In striving for more self-less version of self, Pecknold and his excellent band have made an album that embraces modesty.

Grass Punks, from Los Angeles-via-North Dakota singer-songwriter Tom Brosseau, sounds at first like the perfect album for winter shut-ins: a quietly seductive combination of acoustic stringed instruments, serene melodies and pristine vocals. But the songs are too prickly to be reduced to background music for a gray, melancholy afternoon.

The onetime bedroom artist now makes first-rate pop anthems, gleaming rocketships of sound that wouldn't sound out of place on the radio next to Rihanna or Nicki Minaj. The tone might seem out of step with the lyrics, but it speaks to a certain resilience.

The result is her most vital album in years, one that not only carves out a niche for her in contemporary dance music but also digs deeply into her gospel and soul-ballad roots.

Torche perfects its volatile mix, a work that at least matches the potent Meanderthal (2008) as a career peak.

If you're looking for a relatively concise 10-track, 36-minute introduction into the best of Segall's music, this is it.

On the follow-up, Adore Life (Matador), the fight in this band is still audible. But there's something else too--desire, cutting humor, vulnerability.

Much of the album has that feel, a collision of grandeur and emptiness, a meditation on the disconnect between the artist's intent and the public's perception.

The music--a volatile mix of crashing guitars, drums and pile-driving bass funneled into shout-from-the-balcony choruses--destroys any hint of self-pity. But as Grace searches for a world that would allow her the freedom to be herself, she finds solace in the album's most subdued moment, and it's beautiful and moving.

Friedberger’s economical way with language, the way she can pack complex emotions into the space of a few lines, testifies to her craftsmanship. Though its origins are relatively modest--a woman alone with her thoughts and a cheap keyboard--Rebound doesn’t sound like a bedroom record.

Its records can be exhausting listens, buried in mulch, but Fantasy Empire cleans things up a bit without reining in the intensity.

It’s music, fighting to be wild.

What makes this album so powerful and moving is the way that innocence erodes in its second half.

Somewhere Else [is] her third and best album.

["Compton" has] one of the few predictable moments on an album that otherwise brims with comedy, complexity and the many voices in Kendrick Lamar's head.

It's an impressive consolidation of his strengths, tightening up his songwriting and sharpening his often disturbing wordplay.

Fragrant World may initially come off as messy, even chaotic. But the trio of Anand Wilder, Chris Keating and Ira Wolf Tuten are on to something worth absorbing all the same.

The songs marinate in sexual imagery, but it's more sensual than explicit.

Together they create absorbingly terse songs, and prove that the indie-rock trend of minimalist, two-person bands still has some kick in it.

At a distance, the album can feel like an ambient mood piece with some pretty moments rising from the mist. Listen closely, however, and something changes. The album becomes a meditation on pain and wonder, an apparent duality that Cave’s narrator turns into an acceptance of what it means to live.

He's aiming for harder truths, creating pop that also works as a commentary on choice and consequence.

White's subversive way with a hook and her ability to effortlessly blend dance beats from around the world make "Master of My Make-Believe" a deceptively breezy and enticing summer album.

It distills what has made Trupa Trupa a must-see in past years at music conferences such as South by Southwest in Austin, Texas.

Erickson's voice transparent and vulnerable, the lyrics direct yet poetic, sifting through years of pain for signs of hope. With the exception of the howling "John Lawman," the music is contemplative and atmospheric, a mix of field recordings from the past and unfussy, live-in-the-studio interactions.

It in many ways is the most danceable LCD album yet, a celebration of losing yourself in semi-darkness and a sea of undulating bodies between the speaker cabinets.

Hunt's refusal to be pigeonholed killed his major-label career, but without bean-counters looking over his shoulder, he sounds frisky and playful.

There are a couple of less-inspired contributions, notably the glossy country-pop “You’re My Love,” which Kenny Rogers recorded in 1986. But the overriding impression is wonderment: Prince was on such a roll that he was giving away tracks that could’ve provided the backbone for at least another terrific album of his own during this era, music that ranges from the funk mischief of “Jungle Love” to the falsetto tenderness of “Baby, You’re a Trip.”

Her solo debut, “Jaime” (ATO), breaks ground sonically and lyrically. It’s both more personal and daring, steeped in ‘60s and ‘70s soul-funk-R&B but with a rules-are-meant-to-be-broken twist.

The first half of the Roots' ninth studio album, How I Got Over, sounds like a hangover, a brooding meditation on a world teetering toward anarchy.

On this quiet beauty of an album, she once again makes a virtue of her modesty.