It’s hard to critique punk music. You’re judging exactly how much someone doesn’t give a fuck and how well they are at expressing that. High Risk Behaviour is an album you can blast on the highway while going 90 or one that you can watch live and get drunk and crowd-surf to.

Production values may have been stepped up compared to its predecessors, but the album retains the same haunting charm.

While her songwriting hasn’t quite made the same leaps that prior records have shown, Out in the Storm offers a unique perspective: that of someone happier and stronger for the pain endured.

It's got that first-take impulsiveness to it, full of tics and eccentricities, and that lack of pretention lets us see Foxygen as the characters they truly are.

At this point, Win Butler is rock ‘n’ roll’s Christopher Nolan, a hyper-literate artist who crafts reliable, intelligent, and challenging blockbuster events that sweep our minds away. With the 85-minute Reflektor, he’s taken his most creative risks to date and at the cost of simply trusting what he sees, who he knows, and where he wants to go.

Ali backs his vitriol and vigor with '70s R&B soul-style beats and a flow that expresses his emotion without being guttural or angry.

Sun Coming Down is succinct without being rushed.

A self-assured sound married to self-analytical songwriting makes Jinx the masterful soundtrack to those seemingly endless, restless nights. If only my anxious thoughts were as lovely a listen.

For a band that just started writing pop songs, this sophomore LP is an impressive outing.

That ability to tell stories of varying depth and importance is what rap is really all about, and in that regard, Swet Shop Boys are ascending fast.

Director's Cut can be seen as new work, because some of these songs are very different to their earlier versions in tone and scale; both sets of work are equally brilliant, but here there is even more clarity of purpose,

Slime Season finds Thugger mastering new conduits to express his idiosyncrasies in addition to spreading like marmalade over familiar territory.

Dedicated to the late Vic Chesnutt, Mr. M will stand as one of Lambchop's finest, most cohesive, and easiest straight-through listens yet, despite its intermediate tendencies.

It’s this fusion of generations that partly makes Loud Bash such a fresh and exciting record. There’s plenty of Replacements hero worship going on with the loud, tumbling arrangements and sweeping vocal hooks, but that’s what being a teenager is all about.

Songs often exist to structure a moment of reflection, to set reality into a structure to breathe for a moment; noise, on the other hand, often embodies the lack of breath. That’s rarely as true as it is with the latest from Margaret Chardiet’s Pharmakon, Bestial Burden.

No Home Record roils with just the kind of catharsis we need in Bad Timeline America. Play it loud, play it often, play it again.

It is a mature and impressive collection that connects love and fear holistically.

This album is not like anything they have ever done, and gives music fans reason to be thankful.

Stay Gold isn’t going to change the world and it won’t kickstart a new rock revolution, but it’s a terrific pop rock record about boys and girls in America.

We’ve Been… is unmistakably the sound of an artist in their prime, hitting at all the conceptual points that they set out to reflect while remaining true to their strengths. ... We’ve Been… is certainly her strongest, boldest experiment as a songwriter yet.

Ultimately, for another sonically cohesive record, the thread that ties this package together is the exploration of American melancholia. ... This is where she thrives. And, thankfully, this is where Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd spends most of its time.

Lush is one of the most engaging and relatable indie rock debuts in quite some time.

Simply put, they’ve evolved from a hype band to something much more coveted: a great band.

It’s not as ambitious as it could have been, but it works due to its sheer expressiveness, one man going through the motions and chronicling every movement, a tirade in the purest sense.

The Bangtan Boys accomplish exactly what they set out to do with this album: bring comfort to their listeners and remind people around the world that they are not alone in their experiences.

The panicked sensation of Nootropics gives way to catharsis as the surrealism intensifies to the point at which change is inevitable.

My Krazy Life dampens many of its heavy questions with refreshing musical forms.

Their immaturity and brusqueness is flavored with a new level of social consciousness and introspection.

Despite its heavy-handedness, the end of the album offers an equitable, full-circle resolution to this human drama: how to love, how to forgive, how to move on. ... However, on this album, compromising for her marriage also means compromising the art she creates.

Are You Alone?, as its title suggests, is an incredibly personal experience, one that benefits from conversing with Welsh as much as he is with you.

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.

To put it bluntly, Taylor's music sounds bad on paper, but good in headphones.

Lupe is still a guy to root for, and Tetsuo & Youth is full of daring songs that remind you of why.

Fresh Blood loses momentum between its peaks.

Despite the wildly ambitious flourishes, it's Django Django's sense of restraint that allows the album to channel not just the sound of The Beta Band, but charm as well.

WORRY. feels like the true start of Rosenstock’s solo career, with a backing band that is finally locked in, a record label 100 percent behind him, and a tower of critical accolades growing taller each day.

The album finds a way to weave together multiple emotions, sounds, and genres and shows off Frangipane’s versatility as an artist while still acting as an incredibly cohesive and seamless album. She explores more ideas in one album than many do in their entire career. Do not underestimate Halsey.

The singles have zing, the pacing is superb, and the back half is just as fun as the front. With i,i, you feel the whole last decade: the exploration, the lessons learned. i,i is a mature masterpiece and a stunning marriage of ambition and technique.

Whereas I Learned the Hard Way suffered from a lack of variation in songwriting, Give the People What They Want transverses the dictionary of soul and pulls out a few different entries, making it a much more engaging record.

The missteps on this record are rare, and the consistent growth they’ve displayed with each release is all the more impressive for a band not even 10 years old.

Final Days cements itself as Cult of Youth’s most rhythmic album: a somehow upbeat and still apocalyptic leap forward fitting of a finale, whether it ends up being one or not.

DS2 is his strongest campaign yet, and it’s the first time a new Future album has met all expectations.

While much of contemporary folk lacks the political bite of Woody Guthrie or Pete Seeger, Segarra, who identifies as queer and listened to Bikini Kill growing up, brings a progressive and empathetic mindset.

It digs a little deeper at the lofty topic of love, creating an intense album with rhythm, heart, and plenty of horns.

These basement-dwellers alienate themselves, and--like the great lo-fi bands that came before them--their unlistenability is their charm.

Aero Flynn is an engrossing artistic statement born out of tumultuous circumstances. This one mesmerizing piece is worth savoring all on its own.

Incredibly tight, flashy and evidently abhorrent in its messaging — we’re all doomed, but at least Lamb of God make it sound good.

More than another album of tastefully done guitar pop, Silver Age is the sound of an artist learning to come to grips with his legacy.

The industrial and atmospheric elements of the album all convey a sense of searching and often of rushing away from one thing and toward another. Even the blurred cover image of Hatchie suggests a feeling of constantly being in motion. It is through this searching and continual movement that Hatchie etches her own lines to define her persona through her music, constantly propelling herself and her ideas in new directions and trusting that we’ll keep up.

Eight albums in, Gorillaz are still capable of producing a fresh, rich album that spans genres and moods, with so many different textures and sonic fabrics that they have cultivated a musical universe of their own.

When you turn on a Dinosaur Jr. record, the thinking goes, it should always sound like a Dinosaur Jr. record. I’m happy to report that Sweep It into Space does, in fact, check this box.

In a career predicated on being album artists showing the powerful link between repetition and expectation, Elbow appears to have hit a stride again.

Gentleman Jesse's positive energy is as infectious as the hooks in his songs, but it's the sonic uniformity of those songs that make Leaving Atlanta overbearing when consumed as a whole.

The good news is that her songwriting is stronger than ever. Along with co-executive producer A.G. Cook, Charli XCX has put together a delightful album of high-end pop confections. Charli packs in plenty of wow and proves to be more than worth the wait.

These brooding, darkly shaded arrangements run the risk of being kitsch. But when Timber Timbre drop the horror pretense and focus on the neurotic ticks and inadequacies that come with romantic obsession, the band are at their best.

Night Thoughts is a fine entry in their already strong discography.

On If I Can’t Have Love, there’s romance, there’s sadness, there’s plenty of trademark defiance, but some of the album’s best moments are the most intimate.

Despite its mixed offerings, Club Meds is a fascinating and unpredictable new direction from Mangan, surviving its own missteps. A few risks fail, but everything’s more interesting.

While solid, Still Life would need an extra push to reach an even higher tier.

The result, if you are willing to engage and get just as vulnerable, is unforgettable. For those who are feeling lost and needing to really listen, Salt will speak loud, and McMahon’s music will remain a steadfast and spectral companion for a very long time.

Give a Glimpse of What Yer Not isn’t perfect, but it’s yet another solid record from a band that has rarely sounded better.

O’Brien, or Villagers rather, succeeded in creating an album rife with adventure and tragedy, made even more addictive with each listen.

Megan is her own best advocate, and Traumazine is a testament to this principle. Elsewhere, Megan displays her penchant for bringing out the best in her collaborators, molding herself to bring out the most recognizable aspects of their style.

The producer being so secondary here is certainly a missed opportunity. The album still ends up being a thrill, due to the duo’s sheer talent, but its caution undermines its competence. .Paak has insisted that Yes Lawd! is not an Anderson .Paak album, but it sure sounds like one.

After 41 minutes, Leave Home doesn't linger like a flashback, it sticks like a demented structure that's mysteriously magnetic and, in the end, really fun. No wonder this stuff is addictive.

Okay, so how do they still fare? With The King of Limbs, reasonably well.

The album’s 13 tracks hit some serious highs and a few middling snags, but that’s to be expected from a band’s debut, even if that band features a modern day hero like Hanna.

Each voice is allowed to shine here, and through them, the voices of so many women who continually find themselves stifled in the country music format.

Twins works to include both the bombastic noise that made Lemons a cult hit, and redefine any notion of what Segall is capable of.

These compact morsels of art-folk grandeur set the scene perfectly for one another.

One Breath is a dynamic statement from a young woman who could very well be the next David Bowie or Nick Cave.

Each of its eight tracks--most of them gems from punk stalwarts such as Against Me! and Smoking Popes--use solo-Kinsella’s musical tricks to convert aggression into snow-sprinkled majesty, revealing a tenderness and surreal imagery that weren’t as apparent in the original versions.

As a new release, it’s got more than enough exploratory factors to keep the band from sounding stale, but it also stays true to the sounds that have turned us all into maggots in the first place.

Love, Damini delivers like an 80-pound baby. The Afrobeats album gets into the soul with Burna’s typical flair, but the insights are deeper.

As an 11-song, 39-minute distillation of his fascination, Lazaretto works more or less as well as 2012′s Blunderbuss, his solo debut.

Visions is a remarkable outing for Boucher in that it manages to showcase her knack for spinning bits and pieces from all points on the musical spectrum into crafty, easily digestible pop.

The album is plenty of fun, even if its entirely unoriginal. Like a great house party, Thunderbitch is gone too quick, a little bit rowdy, and soundtracked by jams that facilitate a good time, even if they don’t demand much of your attention.

Dessner’s skill lies in sustaining this hazy, gray feeling without letting the songs sound drab. Hannigan radiates enough joy--even in the darkest moments--to keep the affair from being a downer.

Amidon sounds equally curious about the songs he picked up from his parents as he is about those he picked up from the radio; so naturally, juxtaposition plays a huge role in this album.

When the record does stumble, it’s because he’s trying to juggle too many ideas at one time as opposed to a lack of effort. Mostly, City Music succeeds at displaying Morby’s strength as a rocker, and along with Singing Saw, the two together paint him as an artist truly coming into his own.

Their dreamy, romantic and melancholy music is the perfect accompaniment to hope, the kind that can pull you through, and in a time of timidity, they are true believers.

Now that the former [Comets on Fire] has been on hiatus for about four years, Ascent proves that he [Ben Chasny] can fit those electric riffs in seamlessly with the latter's [Six Organs of Admittance] ritual depth.

Swing Lo Magellan is an album that will break hearts, bring joy, and deliver emotional notes that few others could.

The Dusted Sessions leaves you unsure of what you’ve just heard, like seeing a natural wonder for the very first time and feeling like a speck in the vastness of it all.

Personality reigns, because a cursory glance at the album’s tracklist would have you believe this is an absolute clusterfuck--after all, there’s a track by Irish comedy hip-hop duo The Rubberbandits right smack in the middle. Yet such eclecticism happens to be its strong suit, and winds up embellishing the strengths of its younger selections.

While the arrangements show collaboration, the lyrics sound like the work of the lonely mind. Powerplant is full of the solo enterprise of watching.

Nightmare Vacation is an excellent look into the many cogs that make Rico’s brain work without setting up a definitive future direction. It’s this unpredictability that makes her exciting and shows how she has enjoyed longevity in this fast-paced world.

The accumulation of these ideas can become monochromatic, meandering, and repetitive; apt background music for loitering in the bath. The most pleasurable and moving, even unsettling, moments on Blue Banisters arrive when Del Rey breaches, however gently, her own boundaries.

Port St. Willow is its own project, and one to watch at that.

While the connective tissue between the record’s highlights simmers at the same temperature as much of Low’s back catalog, The Invisible Way flows as a satisfying whole.

Existential Reckoning is certainly another worthwhile effort from the acclaimed singer and his ever-revolving musical collaborators.

Fresh ideas abound nearly everywhere on Gigaton.

Even with quiet moments that forget to entertain, Nguyen sounds like she’s having more fun than ever before on A Man Alive.

Face Stabber stands as arguably Oh Sees’ most mature and nuanced work to date, and as evidenced by this album, the band is riding a steep, upward trajectory that has continued for an astonishing period of time.

Slow Focus wears its time well and matches their grand sights.

While they still wander adventurously, Locrian’s soundscapes are beginning to resemble fully realized songs with a beginning, middle, and end.

Pillars of Ash rockets through 11 tracks without looking back, without room for breath. The songs tend to blend together in the spin cycle, one screamed vocal track melting its way into the next, one thundering drum fill inseparable from another.

Here, QOTSA play it pretty safe. That might have been a necessary step to help Homme feel sheltered enough to show off his still-fresh wounds, but, on the whole it keeps the evolution of the band from reaching that next crucial step forward.