The creative zeal McCombs displays on Mangy Love, and his willingness to take some chances, even if low stakes, engages both the heart and the mind.

What makes My Woman great isn't the new synths or the rockier tone. It's Olsen herself, filling these songs with the love, desire, anguish and acceptance that comes from her perspective as a woman.

Despite his grander statements falling flat and a mid album slump, Trick sees Jamie T at his absolute best.

For every low point there’s the unquestionable standouts.

Whether it’s a one-off project or a fleeting affair for all parties involved remains to be seen, though for the time being, the band’s gift for impromptu creativity has served them well.

Wildflower is simply a joy, an euphonious hour-long journey that exists in some wonderfully naive and blissful alternate universe. It’s an aural paradise you’ll never want to leave.

It’s a collection of unsightly surveillances expressed in a magnificent manner, and the work of a man more than capable of out-creating himself.

Summer 08 is good work from Mount, and an album with its fair share of corking tracks.

Blank Face is occasionally too indulgent for his own good, as he also follows trap and net-soul trends in awkward fashion, but the amount of genuine, larger-than-life parables continue to expose an artist who still wrestles with his hard-knock past.

BBNG have always been fluent and sonically articulate, but enlisting the talents of suitable vocalists to thicken their smokescreen strengthens their suit.

There's no denying the adroit songwriting that’s on display here (they are veterans, after all), as they continue to chug along with low-stakes, yet engaging releases that cement their place as living rock royalty who’ve never gotten their due.

Spend The Night With... offers some impressive diversity without sounding tossed off or smashed together, and for all of the sloppiness it's a surprisingly cohesive album.

For All We Know is an extremely accomplished debut from a supremely talented artist.

Gorguts are no strangers to ambition, always pushing themselves to find beauty in the darkest, most sinister tales of our checkered evolution. What’s most surprising, though, is that we finally get to witness a cast of players who can actually give the ever-shifting Gorguts name the treatment that it deserves.

Centres has the ability to both mollify and unnerve, and to think that most of it was assembled through sensitive means speaks volumes of Craig’s greater ambitions.

Rather than taking many risks, The King of Whys polishes the most successful aspects of past Owen albums, making it one of the strongest albums in Kinsella’s vast discography; the home truths may not make it an enjoyable listen, but it’s definitely worthwhile.

Most of Ambulance tends to cast a shadow on their most riotous tendencies, but there are still surprises to be found; the more sanguine Blair Dagger almost sounds out of place with its salacious tremolo strains, though it also highlights the band at their most playfully engaged.

Curiously, Omni could welcome some balance into their arrangements; they’ve already figured out a way to structure their lopsided ideas, which is a crucial element that most aspiring experimental bands with a pop slant struggle with in the first place. And that’s something that cannot be taught.

With The Bride, Khan has created a sublime tale of sorrow and recovery, of accepting loss and working through pain to become a stronger person. Likewise, Khan has taken her interest in similar journeys from earlier albums and used them to make her most consistently captivating work thus far.

Glaspy’s voice itself is eccentric and susceptible to emotional metamorphosis, and some of the album’s strongest moments are when her voice is abrasive in its frustration or contrition: for example the first words spat from the chorus of You and I, or the frantic bursts of urgency amongst the affable stream of the title track. Sometimes, the formula for good guitar music is a simple one.

The more you listen to this record, the more it impresses you, even if their name is downright awful.

Patience is a record that never really takes off, but is a perfectly polished take on their thoroughly original sound.

It’s mesmerizing background music that doesn’t pass judgment if you let it take a secondary role in your daily life.

Fading Lines does leave much to be desired in its implementation, though, but there are multiple hints here that suggest that this is only the beginning for de Graaf.

Mitski’s boldness is hugely impressive, and couple that with the fact the record is so expertly mixed and edited, she has produced one of the year’s more complete LPs.

With Ha, Ha, He., they have refined that formula [of the self-titled debut] further, sharpening up the edges of their sound and ultimately delivering a superb record.

All in all, this is another first-rate effort from one of the most deviant voices in hardcore.

It’s not always the most memorable listen, though through its free-flowing divagations we finally begin to feel more empathy for an artist who’s too perceptive to hide behind his taut guitar accents.

She misses the mark slightly, and though her take on sweeping and haunting art-pop isn't always the most distinct--especially when compared to some of her like minded peers--it is in the end a truer and more consistent statement of her abilities, and one that also offers a lot more promise.

Mvula has written a hypnotic record that provides a congenial embrace, but it also isn’t afraid to take bold action. A new star is most definitely born.

As strong as the hooks and melodies are in British Home Movies, it’s her artful narratives and evocative choruses that really stick, enveloped in micro stories of traveling along paths that are paved with memories.

Yak haven’t reinvented the wheel, but their work is invigorating in its own right.

From the saucy R’n’B of Tide and Chandelier, the frenetic Choking on Your Spit to the gorgeous, laid-bare swoon of Keep Me, Get Gone is an expertly accomplished piece of work from a band still fledgling in their career.

The album’s title suggests something close to perfection, and 99.9% isn’t too far from being the ideal electronic record.

In substituting the ferocity of their debut for positivity, Eagulls have constructed a very good record that is arguably better than their well-received debut.

The effect is stark, and intensely compelling. At 17 tracks long, this is a listen that plumbs substantial depths, but in Blake’s world, time ceases to be a constraint.

It’s a buoyantly hopeful album where Hyde gives a final wave goodbye to his darkest days before moving on to greener pastures.

Despite not taking any drastic leaps, he’s once again delivered another wide-eyed, hypnotic set that finds a satisfactory compromise between quasi-ambient soundscapes and headphone-nodding grooves.

For all of the melancholy, it's far from a depressing experience; if anything, it's an oddly uplifting album, one that manages to find a great deal of beauty lurking just beneath the ugliness we sometimes find ourselves confronted by.

Holy Ghost just resonates because it’s so deeply felt and passionate--with hardly a wasted moment throughout its brisk 28 minutes--to such a degree that it’s easy to dismiss its songwriting flaws.

By taking various elements from not only their collective past, but also the work they've done separately, Radiohead has created something wholly new and utterly entrancing.

It’s the adequate album to write when you’re on a quest to become something, later to realize that you’ve no idea how to carry on fulfilling that need. It’s a transition that Toledo perfectly captures, one that he’s relieved to have outgrown.

It leaves the impression that The Last Shadow Puppets are principally a conduit for Turner and Kane to demonstrate just how suave they are, and while it’s hard to find many faults with the record, it’s lacking an edge to make it a great one.

Willner continues to move into more exploratory territory, though in taking his music to a denser, more obtuse place, the divine simplicity that’s defined his entire body of work suffers.

Sleep Cycle represents, and unintentionally so, a creative rebirth that goes against Animal Collective’s increasingly evanescent creativity. It took long enough, but the investment was worth it.

The result is a convoluted but accessible record that is perhaps Wilkinson’s best to date.

At times, the irregular rhythmic contours they employ get woefully tiresome, especially in its rigidly monochromatic second half. But Autolux’s dogged pursuit in doing things their way, and without an hourglass by their side, is worthy of admiration.

Over time, Morby should outgrow his occasional Dylanesque vocal quirks and redundant baroque embellishments. Still, Singing Saw will be remembered as a breakthrough moment from an artist who’s now more comfortable articulating his own visual language.

If Anything was good, but this is the work of a band who are well on their way to establishing themselves as key cogs in their category.

Aside from dubstep-resembling "I Don’t Love You Anymore”, a breakup song that doesn’t really mesh within the political context of Hopelessness, there’s hardly any fault to find in Hegarty’s incredibly imaginative portrait of a world that’s in dire need of some reformation.

It makes for something of a experimental jam session where its members are trying to perfect a unified sound alongside different lyrical approaches, which strike a fine balance between campy sci-fi imagery and silly, doom-laden metal tropes. And yet, once it’s fused all together it comes across as one big slab of raucous, careening psychedelia. King Gizzard are still grounded to their garage roots.

Gore is a listen as complex and engrossing as we’ve come to expect from Deftones, and they continue to be a band that matures organically, becoming more and more fluid in their own craft.

The strongest songs come at the very end, where Harvey most effectively puts us in the setting she's describing and has the melodies to keep us there.

Varmints is a playfully delirious listen that constantly rewards with new ideas at every corner, one that sketches an idealized pop landscape without recognizing that it actually touches all of its requisite pleasure points.

From the thumping, industrial charge of I Exhale to the sublimely hypnotic techno of Low Burn, Underworld are in full form, giving meaning and substance to every single minute with hardly a wasted moment.

Kendrick Lamar’s talent is superficial in the extreme, plumbing his own creative depths with an unerring attention to detail. With untitled unmastered., he has found another way to sheathe people in his compelling vision.

Weiss is a smart, heartfelt performer whose stories rarely veer into overwrought territory, though the lukewarm acoustic fluff that occasionally lingers throughout Standards bogs down an otherwise affecting and perceptive listen.

While Hitch may kick off poorly, it more than makes up for it by back-ending the tracklist with some of the band's best work.

IV is impeccably produced, one that tailors even the finest details with a delicate brush; even when it disappoints it’s still a joy to listen to since every instrument is mixed to perfection.

Cut for cut, this is a triumph of melody and intelligence, with hooks that aren't cute and noise that doesn't dampen introspection, cosmic and prosaic at the same time. Parquet Courts have conquered rock 'n' roll's biggest hurdle: to move forward while staying true to themselves

There are additions to her guitar-pop foundation here, but they’re mostly limited to the occasional keyboard line or an anomaly like the dreamy synth outro of Outside with the Cuties. Met on its own terms, however, it’s a record that plays entirely to Kline’s strengths and confirms her as a worthy successor to the legacy of indie modesty.

The boys are in peak form in (Girl We Got A) Good Thing, a sauntering piano-led number that has this bubbling, dumb-is-more-fun David Lee Roth attitude about it that could possibly cause one to shed a single, happy tear in its rousing finish. The colorfully romantic Wind in Our Sail is also typically gleeful, detailing a cute meet alongside one of the band’s most memorable choruses since Pork and Beans.

Admittedly, iii flirts dangerously with its commercial sound, to the displeasure of fans used to Miike Snow’s earlier work. But there is no denying the creepy genius of Genghis Khan, the frenzied fun of For U (a collaboration with Charli XCX, no less), or the unapologetic bounce of The Heart of Me.

He’s on a full-on conversationalist binge on Sky, though it’ll demand your extra attention since the album’s turbulent production tends to obscure most of his learned reflections. In spite of this, it wouldn’t be a true Mould record if it didn’t hit you with that pummeling, noisy sheen.

This collection of moods and moments is one of the year's most engaging listens.

Operator is a very good debut, impressively original without becoming too inaccessible, and the debut single that dropped three years ago sounds as fresh and as authentic as it ever did.

Songs distort from their structures, allowing for a gelatinous cortege that serves to distinguish the album with flair and maintain a fetching edginess throughout.

Trust ends with Chapman pleading his object of affection to have some faith in him, though it could also be a message to his listeners: setting aside his lackadaisical manner, Chapman really does want you to care about what he thinks.

As more challenging and artful pieces like The Morning is Waiting prove, the Brewises’ love for intricate harmonies will always go hand in hand with slick pop hooks.

In their dramatic interplay they find their lust for perversion and compulsion, as if exploring the infinite degrees of their relationship with the same piquant allure of Gainsbourg and Birkin (albeit less warm and more interpersonally brittle).

While a lack of editing and consistency may keep neo from being better than promising, the energized rush of holding the void and hyper-melodic the sickness deliver two of the album’s best moments, the latter being the most successful synthesis of So Pitted’s want of strange and aggro.

The talent, confident and imagination on display throughout this album makes it a must-listen, a chance to let your mind wander and to lose yourself in an incredible plangency of strings.

It’s not quite inspiration, or an emotional center. You leave this record thinking about how complex and refined it is, or maybe about how much Jack Tatum has grown as a songwriter. But at the end of the day, the album doesn’t embed itself into your daily life in the way Nocturne or Gemini did.

There’s reason to believe that the kind of soppy, mellow pop they write just doesn’t have a place in our current times, that it reeks of starry-eyed nostalgia. But as every generation has a Seth and Summer romance for younger audiences to scrutinize and fawn over with episodic foresight, there will always be a platform for heart-on-sleeve songs to track the high and lows of a teen soap opera.

Music for Listening to Music to isn’t just a background pleasantry; instead, it may very well be the one that could move Goodman into the foreground of her career.

While every song here makes note of the relationship at the center of School of Seven Bells, this is not a downbeat album. Instead, it's a record that showcases everything the band is about.

Human Ceremony is an instinctive record, with the band more than happy to act on an impulse. The enthusiasm of the band is infectious, always remaining grounded but delightfully exploring their own infinite limitations.

Skilled Mechanics is an intelligent, pertinent piece of work that shows just how fresh the ideas of Thaws remain.

Every track is a potential hit, and Sia’s use of pure pop hooks, coupled with an astounding control over her rampant voice, makes this a very good record.

Pop. 1280 are still concerned with the dark underbelly of the human experience, though the sneakily measured Paradise proves that even the most degenerate souls deserve some sanguine aggression, too.

Suicide Songs juggles anguish and optimism in equal measure, somehow mournful and triumphant in search for some kind of personal salvation.

All in all, the result of Chairlift dabbling in the mainstream pop archetype is the duo’s best and most cohesive album to date.

Vile Child is a debut LP that is rife with a resounding honesty and an airtight dexterity.

Smith doesn’t make any compromises to make things any more agreeable--in fact, the album’s bloated runtime and cogent lyrical content makes it a somewhat weary listen that rewards more when taken in short, sporadic sessions.

Throughout Emotional Mugger’s 39-minute runtime, Segall is comfortably out of step, abandoning the pop refinement of Manipulator to creative self-sabotage with some of the more album’s more electrified moments, which, while highlights, don’t constitute the bulk of the album.

Adore Life, in particular, isn’t so much a maturation but a continuation for Savages.

Leave Me Alone is giddy with joy, cackling with sun-drenched vibes and that captivating youthful energy, and it’s impossible to listen to tracks like Easy, Chili Town and San Diego without leeching off it.

With Blackstar, Bowie disengages himself once again from popular opinion and scoffs at the idea of taking the righteous path, finding inspiration in what is immoral and contentious. But in doing so he also finds an artful niche that suits his sixty nine years of age.

The record’s lack of organization and resistance to stasis work against its accessibility. Those willing to mine such a dense work will be rewarded in a visceral sense, but may be left groping in the darkness for a specific, externally-fabricated meaning. Either way, the abstractness and wandering abandon of Mutant define not only the album, but Alejandro Ghersi’s approach to music.

PRODUCT is truly what you make of it - both highly addictive and somewhat unfinished, it leaves a good amount of open space for the listener to construct a set of vivid, imaginary images into something personal, even meaningful.

Jamie Woon has dropped a second LP every bit as captivating as his first, and it’s hard to find any faults with this piece of work. Sumptuously slick, and with the humidity of a tropical locale. Make sure you make time for Making Time.

Like all Newsom’s albums, it is full of beautiful music and lyrics that initially appear enigmatic but are in fact simply dense, but it’s the first one to embed within itself, on various levels, the necessity to continue mining its depths.

Beach Slang are well-aware that there are people out there who feel just as they do, and they reveal their allegiance through the power of a good ol’ rock song.

Are You Alone? only reveals itself more dependent upon the listeners’ own experiences, and since we’re dealing with heartbreak here, its potent message will never cease.

The finale isn’t particularly grand, but Holding Hands With Jamie does much to harness the passion of "left of the dial" indie rock while paying attention to now, eschewing accessibility and melody for the sake of finding something aurally distinct.

The unpredictability factor will cause some to turn to something easier on the ear, but if you were to persevere with 1000 Days, it’s very likely that you would appreciate it.

Half Free is both a revelation and a breakthrough, one that finds Remy elevating her songwriting panache while carrying a certain mysticism that seems grounded in both plausibility and commonality.

Lost Worker Bee makes for a lovely epilogue to this period of the band's existence, incorporating the best of their qualities while also diving into previously unexplored musical landscapes.