Nothing on Settle is left wanting. Disclosure’s debut full-length, after a series of tight and well-curated EPs, has high points as high as any record this year.

Sunbather is every bit as explosive and engaging as any metal album you’re likely to hear all year.

Vampires Of The Modern City stands to become the group’s Paul’s Boutique, raising the bar from being a fun but safe band to breaking ground ahead of their peers.

Too Bright is a near immaculate work. It’s bold but vulnerable and finds Hadreas taking risks in structure, content and sound.

Harmonicraft isn't just the best Torche release: It's a contender for one of the best loud rock releases of the year.

By teaming up with the visionary mastermind Adrian Younge he’s created an inventive and thrilling album that will go down as one of his best.

Hauschka’s ingenuity to rework his instrument into a entire orchestra is astounding. But his ability to avoid the usual, overtly romantic notions of forgotten cities and instead replace it with a portrait of refined desolation is equally impressive.

Where For Emma, Forever Ago thrived on its sparseness, the new record's sound is richly and carefully layered.

Blake and Childs have no need to prove why they're considered some of the U.K.'s best songwriters and musicians, but Jonny does just that.

Everything feels full and complete, with each song taking a life of it’s own, while still contributing equally as much to the larger concept.

You’ll be hard pressed to find another album that’s this much fun to crawl inside.

It will give you, near exactly, what you put into it. That’s what makes Nepenthe relevant: its masterfully complex compositions come across as simplistic; they’re accessibly intellectual.

Unbound by convention, Daft Punk seamlessly included whatever the hell they wanted on this record. Not just because they’re musically sublime robots from a future of hovercrafts and Judy Jetson discotheques, but because Daft Punk knows when to edit and when to fall free.

With her experiences and experimentation, she has combined and refined her sound to make it something that is similar and yet totally separate from anything she’s done before. St. Vincent isn’t afraid of being different or taking risks, and thinks we shouldn’t be either.

The Dap-Kings prove once again to be an almost mind-bogglingly crisp backing band, with tickingly taught percussion, sticky bass lines and sweat-inducing brass. But it’s Jones, of course, who holds together every song with her now-classic vox.

The perfect concoction of guitar riffs, synthesizer wails, the mullet, 1980s reverb and two awesome animals, the dinosaur and the walrus.

It's a wise, mature labyrinth of an album that's both filled with vibrant life and haunted by death.

This album has an eccentric palette and shows off Streten’s wide-ranging tastes; if you can’t find something to enjoy here, you’re not looking hard enough.

The record is engineered so that he never has to. Listen past the last track and be introduced to Acid Rap all over again as a voice promises on loop that it’ll be “Even better than the last time.”

Luckily, Picture You Staring does deliver on the promise of its lead single.

The sounds are bigger on Junip, but it’s the audible give and take among the performers this time that makes the album intimate.

The tracks are truly hidden gems, kept from mass appraisal via DIY distribution methods in the '80s, home-recorded cassettes and vinyl. Vasicka and Peanut Butter Wolf's efforts here revive and catalog some truly infectious would-be synth classics.

As depressing as it may seem for Defeater to tell a story with no happy ending, it’s only by confronting those feelings of disillusionment and hopelessness head-on that they achieve some sort of catharsis. Letters Home does just that.

July’s strongest points come when Nadler has the most room to stretch her vocal muscles.

The songs are catchy and celebratory in every way we could hope, and what’s more, this album itself is a cause for celebration.

On the whole, So It Goes covers a wide range of ground musically, sometimes making it hard to comprehend as a cohesive piece in its entirety. By doing so however, Ratking has made a rap album that is truly fitting for the modern New York.

A passive 12 song set that toes the line between nostalgic sadness and bright optimism with remarkable ease.

Even at its most far-out, the songs on Culture Of Fear always seem to know where they're going, even if they choose to take the scenic route to get there.