While many artists choose to play it safe on their debut album, Doldrums has decided to take us on an untidy journey into his own headspace. Lesser Evil is an unflinching and unashamed document of that trip, like a travelogue of a doomed vacation through Woodhead’s brain.

This is the aching beauty of Obsidian: its ability to be so matter-of-fact and reposition the taciturn as commonplace.

If there’s something holding the album back, it’s that the band is almost too efficient and unforgiving in its editorial choices.

On a superficial level, Trouble Will Find Me, the National’s latest full-length LP, probably won’t convert any listeners who’ve written off the band’s music as boring.... Of course, the power’s in the poetics, and Berninger concocts some truly heart-wrenching images this time around.

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.

This is a remarkably self-assured album, precise in its themes, particular in its language and modest in its ambitions.

Although the dark, pulsing beauty of “Katla” feels like an appropriate close, somehow No One Dances Quite Like My Brothers feels too brief in relation to the depth of its emotions.

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.

The album jumps all over the place, showing little interest in staying true to a single genre or style, but even in the darker, heavier moments these songs are unified by an urge to please and the untamable desire to move onto the next thing as soon as possible.

[A] sprite, beguiling collection of songs.

Pure X may not be particularly pure anymore, but it’s a pleasure to have them down in the muck with the rest of us.

While maintaining her space as neither and sexpot diva or a grossly doe-eyed ingenue, Little Boots remains unapologetically sincere in her words, and the crowd will still mainline the disco beats and, save for a few lulls, dance until we die.

While frontwoman Jehnny Beth’s theatrics take up most of the listener’s attention, it’s the rhythmic duo of drummer Fay Milton and bassist Ayse Hassan that keeps the band on track

His ability to craft and tell stories in a captivating way has not gone unnoticed, and while Prisoner Of Conscious will not go down as his best album, it does display how versatile of an artist he is.

Deerhunter wins more than it loses on Monomania.

This new album of old ideas hits hardest at its softest, most melancholy moments.

Elephant Stone is a thoughtful and concise album that showcases not only precise musicianship from all members of the band but a distinct growth in songwriting.

With Sister Faith, their fourth album in nine years, Coliseum offers up its most palatable set of tunes yet, a continuation of the dirty-pop paradigms set in place by 2010’s House With A Curse, and the Parasites EP released the following 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.

Having spent so much time racing from one experiment to the next, it’s fun to hear the band settle in and take stock in its own legacy.

Thematically, the album is rich and varied, but there is a slight inability to maintain a through-line musically that can prove to be jarring on occasion.

If Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix was the band hitting its stride, then it’s likely that Bankrupt! is the music playing during its medal ceremony. It’s not a radical step forward but it’s not a regression either.

It unravels itself while unraveling you at the same time. It’s happy-go-lucky on the surface, more mellowed out underneath.

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

Floating Coffin sees Dwyer and company pulling off another successful paradigm shift, a step toward the sinister but with ample amounts of the flower-power charm that made them such favorites among psych snobs in the first place.

Charli XCX isn’t smashing any glass ceilings in pop; she’s perfectly roughing up the edges of a long-standing mold.

For all its ambitious digressions, conceptual gambles and silly experiments, it’s that spirit of adventure that makes the album so visceral.

Lerner released two solid albums of guitar-and-drum-led rock, but he grows on Dormarion because he is finally willing to knock over the boundaries he built for himself.