Art Angels is the kind of album that simultaneously captures its era, is made all the better for it (this 35-year-old Beatles fan would’ve given her nothing but bad advice), and obsolesces it overnight.

If He Dies is not only the best iteration of Moumneh’s sound to date, it’s also the clearest showing of his motivations.

The result is a nearly anonymous album of stellar pop music, one where it seems all the attention was placed not on positioning Carly Rae as a cultural force, but on making sure Emotion makes you smile.

A modern pop echo chamber, In Colour pushes the pleasure principle with ease, intelligence, grace, and a myriad of reflections that become one spectrum. RIYL: anything.

Who Me? is another quirky entry in Wauters’s unique discography. But it’s also his most honest, delicate effort to date--two good qualities for a musician with so much natural charisma to explore.

Freedom Tower is a Blues Explosion record, no doubt, and in that sense it’s not for everyone.

It draws a subtle focus and then recedes from the record without resolve. Its tensions remain. If Sufjan is a perfectionist, he is now perfecting the art of stumbling, creating melodies that writhe with uncertainty and voices that echo back on themselves.

Rather, it is not a rap album; it is the absolute rap album. There is craft here (and in fact this is the most musical mainstream rap record since Aquemini) but just enough room for it.

Ryan Adams, is up there with his best work because while it doesn’t have a lot of sweat on it, it’s a record that feels clearly considered enough, and carefully produced to maximize Adams’s strengths.

Even at its most seemingly ascetic, The Moon Rang Like a Bell is among the most generous, tender, radiant albums you’ll hear all year. It just wants your ears.

She continues to prove herself anyway, again and again: here throughout twenty songs, and throughout thirty-five years and beyond.

Aside from its musical merits--like, it’s really beautiful--the City Wrecker EP is interesting in a typical kind of meta-Krug way.

LOSE is captivating because it uses all the right tricks.

The tone is set: They Want My Soul gives pleasures immediate and unlocked, a freshly bitten peach dribbling sweet nectar down your chin.

It’s melodramatic, yes, but the layers to the narrator of Home, Like Noplace Is There are vast. This guy cycles through a series of emotions, each feeling valid, each feeling like an appropriate result of confusion in the wake of a huge loss.

It’s a fun and somewhat liberating thing to listen to, a horribly frustrating thing to try writing about.

It’s in the songs that teeter on the edge, where the twang feels like the last button pressed before an apocalypse, that Shrink Dust becomes special.

Burn Your Fire stands against records that damage and internalise by sticking to their convictions, instead of meta-analysing and working out where the lines are drawn.

It’s the most welcome of dinosaurs: a top to bottom summertime rock album that sounds equally great on a car radio or in teenage bedroom.

There’s nothing knee-jerk about it; just the inexorable sounds of ideas beautiful and terrible unfurling. It’s a careful, masterful record.

To Be Kind is as vital and unsettling as anything they’ve ever done, and displays a mastery of their craft that seems almost automatic at this point.

A simple record to listen to under the sun that has a couple of knowing winks about going steady and treating your pals right, but nothing you need worry about.

The music Real Estate make is so melodic and plentiful that it could capture any feeling it wanted to--Atlas just transposes their sound into the evening.

Christmas Island shoots you down and makes loathing the same thing as self-loathing. But it’s also inspiring to listen to.

Despite a couple of weaker links, Somewhere Else is extremely well put-together, and spilling over with appealing melodies, wit, and truth.

Despite its big, dumb rock ‘n’ roll template and primary color lyrics, albums like Lost in the Dream can be as restorative of faith in old metaphors and storytelling tropes

People have finally started to give this band its due attention, and with Future Islands’s virtually unmatched ability to make such a wide variety of lived experience sound unwaveringly electrifying, it’s no wonder why.

This is a break-up album, a cohesive work embodying a singular mood, and Nadler, like any great artist, sets the scene with such careful, immersive depth that it can be difficult to the seams in her work until you explore every inch.