The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We finds Mitski at her most peaceful, hopeful, and, yes, loving.

Monáe is, as always, a true master of melding genres, influences, and styles. Her central themes of identity and internal conflict are as tangible on Dirty Computer as they ever have been.

It’s hard and sinister like a gangster rap album, but it’s also sprawling and even psychedelic at times. Nothing else sounds like it, and that’s a joy to behold.

On folklore, Swift has come of age, emotionally and sonically, and proven herself — not that she needed to — as not only an exceptionally autonomous auteur but a nimble collaborator with an ever-broadening palate.

The band return with a record worthy of their already legendary canon of genre-defining works. Mayhem treat each song as an evil spectacle, pushing it to its most absurd and dissonant limits. There’s no respite here, and it’s one of Mayhem’s best albums because of it.

It’s OPN’s most emotional work to date and also his most ridiculous. Its tragedy is bound up with its humor; its sublimity comes from the places where it feels the most broken.

Deftones have only ever produced good albums, but they’ve also spent the decade since Diamond Eyes exploring textures and soundscapes, sometimes at the expense of songcraft. Ohms breaks that trend, with more focused songs, and a renewed love of hard-rocking guitar riffs that may rekindle the band’s relationship with fans that jumped ship after White Pony.

While DAYTONA could easily have been Pusha-T’s victory lap, it only builds on the heft of his weighty legacy.

Brighten takes it all a step further, and more than measures up to his other solo efforts. Heck, in a lot of ways, it even matches (or even surpasses) a couple of the post-Layne-era Alice albums.

Turn Out the Lights is a rich, moving work that creates a communion of sorts, an acknowledgement that the little victories are worth embracing even if salvation seems utterly out of reach.

It’s a neat inversion that yields some of the most thrillingly ambitious indie rock compositions of this decade, though one that occasionally exhausts the listener into submission.

There's a level of self-editing and consistency that slots 72 Seasons ahead of St. Anger, Hardwired, and Death Magnetic as, if not the best Metallica album of the 21st century, the best thrash album by Metallica of the 21st century. It's the sound of a band having fun, laying into a ton of riffs and embracing its own legacy as metal masters.

Gore could be the Deftones’ best album, but you can earnestly say that about any album they’ve ever created and make a strong argument. If anything, it’s the most modern, and a statement that style and substance are not mutually exclusive. Gore has both.

Potential not only makes a shockingly strong case for the top tier of contemporary sample-indebted achievements (alongside pillars including Burial’s Rival Dealer EP and Jamie xx’s In Colour), but does so while insisting that the universe, much like ourselves, will never be explored in its entirety.

Even with a finale that slightly underwhelms, Assume Form is a remarkable achievement by one of the most original songwriters of his generation. Blake hasn’t lost his love of percussion, and his gift for melody seems without limit. This is Blake at his most focused, stripped of electronic frills, and down to his emotional underwear.

A History of Nomadic Behavior showcases a band that’s able to make its music more challenging while also being mindful of songcraft and being subtle about it in both respects.

Collapse is another entry in a remarkable run of work that Aphex Twin has been releasing since his return from a long and clearly necessary hiatus. It may feel like he is on cruise control a bit, but James’ coasting is any other artist’s magnum opus.

They’ve turned themselves into a ravenous rock deity, a masterful songwriter whose every release demands attention. And while the title of the album refers to one who Chews But Does Not Consume, it’s the kind of project that swallows you whole.

Luckily, Hecker has impeccable taste. Very few composers can achieve this kind of beauty or this kind of experimentation, and yet Hecker does both, time and time again.

Where the freewheeling Benji painted lyrical autobiographies in painstaking detail and Are We There dove headfirst into dark and sometimes overpowering emotions about toxic relationships, HEAL is a mixture of the two, a cleansing document that’s ultimately more hopeful.

The music might seem cold, but when you’re surrounded by it, enveloped in it, it can keep you warm, too, like a glacier cave or an igloo.

The remastering of this album is a blessing to the careful compositions and mannered performances throughout the record.

The original was proof that Nas, a cat known to bathe in ’90s aesthetics, could spin gold with a producer known for the exact opposite. KD2 fulfills that idea, as the pair double down on what worked the first time, toss aside what didn’t, and find the perfect center between 2021 and 1991.

Atonement is an emotionally compelling record that explores concepts of finding strength in one’s being. Between the raw intensity of the instrumentation and vocals, as well as the inspirational elements throughout each song, Killswitch Engage offer a very solid addition to their discography.

Waiting five years to hear previously released tracks is worth it precisely because Radiohead finally feels connected enough to perform them with meaning.

There aren’t any real misses on Deeper Well, and the record feels more like a dreamy mood piece or conversation with a friend than an attempt to round up a collection of chart-ready singles or social media-friendly soundbytes. Musgraves was far more interested in asking the bigger questions — and it doesn’t even seem to matter too much which answers she found. The deep dive was the point.

Ordinary Corrupt Human Love has moving, emotional pieces and sharp performances bolstered by a band clearly stretching out of its comfort zone successfully. The album is a refreshing new shade of their sound without abandoning the band’s core mechanics.

SAWAYAMA appears poised to be one of the best pop albums of the year and sets Sawayama up as a pop force to be reckoned with.