Everything comes together, creating an album as deep and wide as the vistas it conjures up.

In short, the band brilliantly harks back to the nearly forgotten art of blissful pop.

As soon as the first bright notes of An Object wave you over to the album’s distorted incandescence, you realize that something is going on.

Drenched in echoed vocals and layered synth lines, Howlin maintains an incredibly optimistic, carefree tone.

Gogol Bordello’s incomparable brand of swaggering gypsy punk hasn’t lost a whit of its euphoric urgency.

Paracosm is a beautiful, beautiful album.

Los Angeles–based Superhumanoids explore life’s dichotomies with the sonically atmospheric Exhibitionists, illustrating the contrast between the masculine and feminine aspects of human relationships through vocals, lyrics and instrumentation.

Its inability to be contained within one genre is the band’s strength and triumph.

II is the perfect 21st-century escape from so much banal guitar music.

It comes on slow, seeping into your memory through dusty riffs as expansive as Texas plains.

Although there are moments on the album that, despite its ambition, simply feel like fool’s gold, others—like the honky-tonk-slash-futura-disco of “Phantom Rider”--shine like veritable gold flakes.

It’s not perfect, but strong songwriting philosophy like this deserves to be noted and heard.

Uninhibited and jubilant as it is fully realized, Cedermark might be sturdier than he lets on.

After two impressive EPs for Tri Angle, his debut Without Your Love continues to thrive on subterranean nighttime pleasures.

Ceremony, the second record from Anna von Hausswolff, buffets us with a cold, yawning beauty.

Smooth gems like “Airs” and “Who Buries the Undertaker” offset it with a relatively taut, clean sound that sometimes even recalls major-label-era Guided By Voices.

The Big Dream, like so much of his output, seems gloriously unbothered by chronology or even sense of place.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a more shimmering or sunnier pool party soundtrack.

While it does lack the sprawling, cinematic vibes of the previous two Quasimoto albums (and most of the skits), it will appeal to fresh ears for its lack of the sometimes-difficult segmentation and abrupt change-ups in which those records often mired.

Austra do a stellar job of navigating a sea of vintage synth sounds and applying them tastefully and appropriately so that they sound at once both retro-cool and strikingly forward-thinking.

Make no mistake, Kveikur is another brilliant addition to the Sigur Rós canon; it’s just not, you know...different brilliant.

Lilacs & Champagne are quite successful in setting the mood on their second post-Grails record.

It’s not immediately remarkable but certainly hum-worthy, growing on a listener like flowers blooming after a long winter and timidly warming to the sun again.

It’s more streamlined than their past work, more ornate while simultaneously accessible and experimental, though that may be partially to their producer’s credit.

Despite this dark lyrical shift, the group is still aping sunny surf-rock and collegiate-pop tropes.

While part of this consistency is the cursive guitar work and snappy hooks that adorn many of the tracks, the fluidity within and between songs also plays a significant role. Rogue Wave have risen to the occasion.

A poster child for all things 1970s, Friedberger’s obsession with the decade colors the album with a breezy charm.

Avalanche enjoys an embarrassment of melodic riches and the luminous release blows up the fragile soul heard on the duo’s self-titled debut to heroic proportions.