As it is, we have a definite return to consistency, if not form, and a Paul Simon as simultaneously hermetic and engaged as only he can be.

With a steadfast attention to his orchestration, it helps to illuminate his musical exploration of the West.

With a sound that maintains relevancy in the modern age as the band keeps true to a form that’s existed thirty-plus years, Protomartyr’s Detroit Rock interpretation of post-punk seems to gain something with every album they produce, a sensibility that’s somehow detectible but difficult to define or pinpoint.

This is the band’s most mature and consistent record yet.

There's something hypnotic about The Stars that Leave the Stage, one of the most inscrutable and forward-thinking cuts here, on which he establishes a calamitous tension over a spooky piano motif reminiscent of Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds' From Her to Eternity. The band sounds largely more muscular and self-assured, with a terrific rhythm section to boot.

Even if the songwriting didn’t completely explore the full scope of Cobain’s capabilities, Bleach also represents that point in time when money was an object and the music was all that mattered, a precursor to a cultural shift that made Sub Pop a national brand.

They sound as involved as they’ve ever been, the fruits of considering a more improvisational and segmented approach to writing music.

Swimming under the four-on-the-floors and blaring horns, the haunting vulnerability that defined The xx’s beginnings is as potent as ever on I See You. This time, it’s effortless.

At times, the band's genre-bending excursions sometimes result in slightly deformed arrangements that are impressive in scope but not in efficiency. But that shouldn't deter one from Deafheaven's wondrous and impressionistic creation. It is, like most of their polarizing body of work, equal parts off-putting and fiercely inclusive.

It may be his own manifesto, but when the music is this striking, it makes you appreciate life more.

Aromanticism is downright beautiful but is also too enamored with its sensual aura, which sometimes exposes his uneven vocal acrobatics.

In short, it's no Mass Romantic, but it will do quite nicely.

Kozelek’s sixth project under the Sun Kil Moon moniker, Benji, is his most intimate work yet, thoroughly documenting definitive moments that marked his past and continue to haunt his present.

There have definitely been many bold and exciting extreme metal releases as of recent, but As The Stars is not just daring--it’s incredibly listenable, too.

Although it runs a bit too long and some songs blend together, Bird Songs of a Killjoy is a heartwarming and enchanting listen. It’s as far from a killjoy as you can get.

While Marling's lyrics come across as powerful and worldly, it's the conversational tone that makes Semper Femina work so well.

With Furman already establishing a consistent sound over his previous records, it was perhaps expected of him to cover some well-worn ground again here. Instead, and appropriately, Transangelic Exodus is an album that constantly takes left turns and refuses to slow. It turns out that with the right driver, there are plenty of miles left on the old road yet

Smother is an exercise in moderation, trying to find the precise balance between audacious beauty and emotional intelligence. The depraved encounters it presents are brash, risky, and just like its characters, always on the verge of imploding.

Have One On Me is so enrapturing, so imaginative and so delicate, that it feels safe to say that in five or ten years time, you’ll go back to it and discover brand new things--whether they be the meaning of a song you’d never fathomed before or a simple amuse-bouche of a beautifully constructed oboe phrase.

Keeping it abrasive and sincerely metal in execution is its strength.

As far as the songs go, there’s not a bad apple in the bunch. And some, like Lavender and its wonderful one-note melody, or No Reason to Cry and its breezy vocals, are really terrific. But oooooh, the cheese in that sound.

This one is probably the closest rival to Merriweather Post Pavilion we’ve heard this year.

Just when Devotion looks like it could be losing its way, the most incongruous track of the eleven pulls it out of the bag.

Calling Life Metal a great metal/rock/guitar album, ultimately, is a disservice: This is a sonic meditation channeled through humbuckers and hearts.

NO DREAM carries the listener comfortably through Rosenstock’s entire wheelhouse, leaving no genre unturned

With Journal for Plague Lovers, it feels like Manic Street Preachers have finally closed the door on a painful chapter in their career and, rather fittingly, they’ve done it with some aplomb.

There probably aren’t enough moments that make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, but after the initial struggle to get into, it’s a rewarding record to return to.

Whatever shortcomings The Chemistry Of Common Life present, and there are very few, Fucked Up cancels them out with some imagination and a refusal to so easily fit into the Mallternative crowd.

Much of Patience is visceral and fierce, but it is also skillfully melodic (think of Hole's Live Through This, or even Celebrity Skin), the result of a band that approaches pop constructs with abrasive guitar sounds.

Regardless of what the future holds for Led Zeppelin, the record shows that this single concert in the O2 Arena certainly was a celebration day for all.

Both immediate and a grower, Boys and Girls in America stands tall as The Hold Steady’s masterwork – full of grace and gritty charm, full heartbreak and raw emotion.

On Hell-On, Case once again spins the roulette with a treasury of surprises, stimulating lessons that are complex, thoughtful and articulate.

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

Big Thief proves that it can feed your head, your heart, and your hands in equal measure. Like the musical giants of old there is nothing they can’t do, ably going from strength to strength. Two Hands serves as the band’s call to arms.

Home Video is a more noticeably more mellow affair. Musically, it can be a little thin. Her strength as a lyricist is unwavering, even on her sparest, most nondescript ballads (Thumbs). But, as perkier indie-rock tunes like First Time and Brando prove, her careful arpeggios can also shine when she lets a little looser.

It's a moving, eclectic return that longtime fans will admire—and find themselves surprised to discover them for the first time.

Tomorrow’s Harvest, the duo’s latest, is a perfect reminder of how well these two can bring their unique aesthetic to life through music.

Slight missteps do little to deter what is some of the band's most instantly likable tracks in their career, where they turn up one rave-up rocker after the next with wide-eyed fury. Having proven themselves time and time again, they've far outpaced those unwilling to grow up with them.

St. Vincent's most sonically rich effort to date.

A fully conceived album of beautifully crafted songs, and a real treat for fans and newcomers alike.

With an immediate appeal and an evocative and nervous twitch throughout, Mating Surfaces maintains a gratifying pace, balancing energy and peculiarity throughout its 29-minute runtime. ... They manage to be playful without being poppy, succeeding in this case where a lot of modern punk rock fails.

From Old Skin to Harmonia’s Dream, I Don’t Live Here Anymore has plenty of new War on Drugs classics that will sit comfortably next to Red Eyes and Strangest Thing on a setlist.

The National's latest is easily up there with the very best indie-rock records of the year.

Even though we get a catchy moment of goofy, snarling country midway through, the album is a result of the emotional clarity that a year in quarantine provided. Swift has written about curdling relationships splendidly in the past, but there's a new dimension to her writing that wasn’t there before. Onward.

No amount of musical pedigree can save her commonplace lyrical sentiments, though, which are too noticeable to ignore. Which, to a degree, slightly misstep a personal journey where she takes account of a bevy of life experiences with genuine autonomy.

Overall, Amo is a strident record, difficult to categorize and, in a good way, uniquely spliced and sequenced with little fear of crossing boundaries--but part of mastering this dark art is knowing when to put the paintbrush down.

It’s hard to find fault with the record since anything you think might be lacking, melodic interest, harmonic development, rhythmic drive, etc, was certainly left out deliberately.

Elverum has created an album that demands your time and attention, not to mention any memories you may be willing to part with.

She provokes an emotional groundswell in the quietest of moods, one acoustic song at a time. But the knotty, country rock groove of both Head Alone and You Were Right show that she can also shake off those doldrums. Maybe not as much as we’d like, but as she repeatedly denotes in Crushing, healing is an everyday process.

Graceful, inviting, and evocative as ever, Dan Bejar's assembled the necessary parts for an early-year success.

Mental Illness is first and foremost an album about achieving self-sufficiency through trail and blunder. And in doing so, she once again stands tallest, and quietest, in an exceptionally consistent career.

A Hero's Death is not about growth: it's a band assessing where they stand as rising up-and-comers and having the impulse to express themselves differently. Maybe their sulking comes with a bit of affectation, but at least it's a convincing portrait of keeping true to themselves—soaking in everything that surrounds them.

Simply put, Post Self is another stunning addition to Godflesh’s uncompromising thirty-year run.

There's a hard-won maturity here that makes every single line of hers deeply felt, even if it also emphasizes the more cloying elements of her songwriting.

While Fantasy Empire is definitely still more of a tweak than a departure, when you’re still producing albums as monstrously savage and bewildering as this over 15 years into your career, those tweaks can still sound pretty damn significant on their own terms.

A finely crafted collection of indie rock.

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.

Bits of Medulla sound similar to Vespertine, but there’s a marked distinction in the means of delivery and enough change to keep things interesting.

Complete Mountain Almanac is a superficially pretty album, but you’ll need to afford it your full attention to unearth its full charms and appreciate its emotional depth. Grab your best headphones and really listen; you’ll soon discover there’s something very special going on here.

For all the missteps along the way, El-P arrives somewhere quite poignant, and although he may not have paved his own way there, his route is quite impressive, and there is no wasted beat and no unseen seriousness and intensity.

Though not quite the standout the band promises early on, it does end things on a mournful yet triumphant note. It caps off one of Pallbearer's most approachable statements to date, where they bring new life to their usual approach as they stick to their core sound.

This Is Happening is looking back on a life well lived and well learned, the final cap on a perfect career.

Their call-and-response breakdowns are still as impassioned as ever on tracks like Drippy and Cruise Control, where they place the hooks and melodies right on the surface. The use of ambiance over their riotous songs isn’t just an asset, it’s also the essence of No Age.

Weaving in dustier threads to Beach House’s ever shimmery fabric proves that the cyborgian approach of mixing the organic with the mechanical is an increasingly winning formula.

All in all, A Celebration of Endings is a curious, often potent blend of sounds and influences. While lyrically dark, its exploration is more often than not a very satisfying ride into the unknown.

Being interesting, unique, fun and damn good is near impossible to pull off. Sleigh Bells has done it on Treats, and goddamn is it good.

This is The National’s 4th or 5th comfortably strong album in a row, another slight variation on a tried-and-true theme.

The resonance of Let Them Eat Chaos is mammoth, and Tempest’s lexical flair is the difference maker.

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 eleven robust tracks on Entrench are memorable not simply because of their animalistic intensity, but because they’ve taken that energy and fine-tuned it into some expertly crafted songs.

The album packs a lot of ideas—and songs—into its brief 33-minute runtime, preventing almost any song from overstaying its welcome. ... The result is some of their loosest, most fun work.

There's such an embarrassment of riches in Lost and Safe.

There’s nothing new here, but it’s a strange feeling of someone else repeating back what you’ve probably been thinking. Tempest acknowledges she’s not saying anything revolutionary, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth saying.

Make no mistake: it may be a good two decades late, but ONoffON is the follow-up that Vs. has always cried out for. And as a result, it’s one of the finest records I’ve heard all year.

Fall Be Kind shows the band on the path to becoming an even mellower band and nothing here is exceptionally energetic except for the last half of Graze.

She follows her curiosity with abandon, deconstructing pop modalities with space and patience—from the strings-drenched chamber jazz (For the Old World) and the warped avant-garde of the title track to campfire folk (Spirit in the Eye of the Fire King,") her wildly eclectic, though sometimes distancing, choices sound familiar, yet completely their own.

For music that's this visceral, every heart-rending confession can feel like a victory lap—but even the best runners have to take a breather to renew their energy.

The great achievement of Feels is that it throws everything at every track yet never loses sight of the tunes themselves.

In Western Stars, the old adage about finding meaning through the journey couldn't feel truer. And that's an idea that Springsteen can relate to—leaving a little bit of yourself in a landscape that feels immortal.

It’s a dense, difficult listen, nigh impossible to compare to the rest of Kanye West’s work, and its rewards come slowly.

Even with the songwriting differences, Hope Downs sounds like a unified partnership between five musicians who've known each other for most of their lives.

In many ways, his music is more punk than punk music is nowadays-stripped down completely to only the most basic and bare of instruments, the tiny Kristian Matsson manages to live up to his name as The Tallest Man on Earth.

Whereas Pratt once settled on a colder and more reserved state, Quiet Signs manages to present a more empathetic side of her that was once concealed. It's still quaint by comparison, though, a delicately-crafted acoustic set that offers insight into her deepest fears and truths without letting us encroach into her private space.

One of the best debuts of the year.

Certainly, it feels as though Takk emerges from a group who, despite arriving at the zenith of their capability, has, at least for the time being, run out of things to say.

MCII sounds much more concise and meticulously assembled than any of Segall's efforts.

That's quite a timespan, though, and it does mean that one minute you're reeling from the hormonal stench of a roomful of anguished shoegazers and the next you're surrounded by happy little Japanese girls wearing anti-gravity shoes and doing Steiner dancing with wafty pastel banners. But that's just as it should be.

It’s hard to deny that this record is driven by texture and aura, rather than directly relatable content and meaning. But if you’re like me and can totally get with some heady sonics, this one’s a gem.

On this, her latest and most emotionally charged album, she's managed to create a painful outpouring of honesty, one that strikes that coveted balance of both melodic and lyrical expression; her message is equally powerful from each direction.

Halo is just as effective when taken purely as an aural experience; just like the symbolic spirit she invokes, her challenging and throbbing entanglements are impossible to turn away from.

One of his consistently best albums and the one that perfectly captures the restless creative spirit that continues to push Yorke beyond his comfort zones at a time in his career where other artists would likely be happily settling into theirs.

All Nerve is not in the same league as Last Splash, but it is an exhibition of a band with alarmingly strong musical chemistry making relevant music--and enjoying doing so--a quarter of a century on from their most notable landmark.

It’s an honest, soulful and superbly well-executed body of work, and one of the best British rap debuts for a long time.

It’s still hard to truly get Leonard Cohen right, and Thanks for the Dance sadly sounds like an easy approximation of his sound.

The first five tracks are some of the rawest the nine-man conglomerate has ever served. But this all transpires within the first fifteen minutes of the disc. From there Pretty Toney takes a few ugly turns.

Negro Swan is another sure-footed step forward. It’s rare that an artist can operate within the pop template, collaborate with household names and still produce work that can be considered as significantly culturally important, but that’s what Hynes manages.

Due to awkward, clunky sequencing, Dark Days/Light Years takes longer to reveal its charms than maybe it should. Despite this, it’s still a marvellous record and evidence that despite their increasing years, Super Furry Animals are a long way from being out of ideas.

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.