A Seat demands a careful listen, and rewards it richly. This is Solange's strongest album to date.

It's a reclamation of a history that often doesn't tells stories about black cowboys or black musical innovations. However, it is a recollection of what inspires Solange, and more importantly, how she wants to inspire the next generation from Houston.

The album is a tad long, but the diversity in sounds and use of ambient noise make it clear this is to be listened to from beginning to end. There are plenty of single-worthy songs for casual listeners, while offering dedicated fans a more fulfilling experience by pacing the record's heavy moments.

Apple's most ingenious collection of songs to date.

They embrace vulnerability, taking time to address modern issues (read: symptoms of capitalism), while also imbuing a real sense of fun, artistic merit and instrumental democracy in the record's 11 tracks.

Women in Music Pt. III flips between the band's least and most processed work to date. Both sides yield highlights. ... It's as multifaceted as the music it encapsulates and the women who made it.

What makes We're New Again so fascinating lies in the fact that Makaya McCraven benevolently and sonically recognizes Gil Scott-Heron's grief, joy, and legacy, making sure these vital expressions remain the album's true focus.

Swift is still unquestionably a pop artist, and folklore is unquestionably a pop album, albeit a quiet one — and as is the case with most recent pop albums, it's about four songs too long. It's hard not to wish that Swift would apply her written concision to her tracklisting, to do away with the stream-grabbing bloat and deliver something more thoughtfully tailored. Still, it's hard to complain about too much of a good thing.

They have both found, on their eleventh album (and best since the early 2000s), a renewed purpose and direction in this time of existential crisis for America.

Russian Circles' fifth studio album has a bolder, more polarizing sound than previous efforts.

Song for Our Daughter is a touching recording, and it demonstrates that, no matter the sonic style she chooses to play with, Marling remains at the top of her game.

These songs proudly flaunt Lipa's affinity for all things pop, disco, and funk, spanning multiple decades.

It's the sound of an artist operating at the peak of her powers, employing all her greatest strengths at once to create an assured, moving work that corroborates what Have One On Me already suggested: that Joanna Newsom is one of the finest songwriters of this generation.

Adele has deepened the niches that made her preceding songs so powerful. But instead of playing it safe with only those established tricks, her bold exploration of new terrain on "Cry Your Heart Out" and "Oh My God" help Adele not only become the world's top hitmaker, but also a pop music visionary.

Most vividly, Loud City Song evokes the easy, tingling drift of early Robert Wyatt.

That lack of tension and urgency throughout stops A Moon Shaped Pool from being a classic on par with Radiohead's best work, but then, perhaps that's the wrong standard to reasonably hold an album that trades the band's trademark anxiety for acceptance, their experimentalism for elegance.

Dream Weapon is a transportive odyssey that casts humanity's end as an inevitable reality with an opportunity for renewal, and offers a space where listeners can reflect on what that might mean to them, or just lay back and enjoy the ride.

Despite electric amplifiers and a plethora of pedals, BIG|BRAVE have created an album that sounds like it's existed since the dawn of time. Tears will be shed and embraces are encouraged.

Clark promised us "sex and drugs and sadness" on MASSEDUCTION, and while that sounds like a recipe for clichéd disaster, she kept her word and managed to fashion a totally refreshing take in the process.

Saint Cloud is a refreshing listen from an exceptional singer-songwriter that shatters the myth of hard-living artists and proves that great artists can make great art without a drink.

Vampire Weekend have lost the carefree immediacy of some of their best-loved work; there's nothing on Only God as viscerally addictive as "A-Punk" or "This Life," and there's a prog-like complexity to these performances that's geared more toward the head than the heart. But there's also just enough stripped-down beauty — like the balladic "Capricorn," or the swooning brass outro of "The Surfer" — that Only God Was Above Us remains emotional as well as academic.

Tyler has delivered a project that yet again pushes the boundaries of his music while simultaneously being a culmination of everything that he's done so far. It's yet another impressive outing for an artist whose reign doesn't seem to be stopping any time soon.

If "bloody," "urgent," "enraged" and "heartening" were enough description to sum up El-P and Killer Mike's latest Run the Jewels album, this review could end here. But they aren't; this late 2016 LP, along with the duo's various collaborative tracks with several DJs and rappers all year, have officially placed RTJ high on the shelf of the "hard to describe" category.

As the album comes to a close, "Rest" and "Hidden" begin to work off of fuzzy, pulsating beats and slow, trancelike synth passages, proving that Rival Consoles certainly holds a blueprint to the dreamworld contained within Persona.

Paas has said that her music explores themes of non-romantic love, and while her operatic delivery tends to highlight emotion over enunciation, Anything Can't Happen is peppered with these moments of startling melancholy.

This album melds its many ideas into some larger parts, with just nine songs clocking in at roughly 40 minutes. But true to form, POST- is still all sorts of bonkers in mostly the right ways.

It's the sound of all of pop history cast into the void of space and sent careening back, transmuted by some unknown force. The ghosts of lost icons hurtle through these songs — passing by in molecular form are the sparkling ethers of Prince and Bowie, the curdled spectre of Genesis P-orridge.

The current king of rap manages, yet again, to offer a searing insight into his life, past and present. The songs on Alfredo are fun even when the themes aren't.