It's that classic Beastie Boys sound, and a reminder why they've set the gold standard for posse rap.

Young Fathers' alarm at being boxed in has led them to make an uncompromising, and, yes, prize-worthy pop statement.

If neither the lyrics nor bass lines break your heart, you might not have one.

Williams gives her songs more room to breathe than ever before, opening up vast, cinematic visions of the highway and land that inspired them.

Wine Dark Sea is a brilliantly track-listed album, stronger as a whole than broken into parts.

Lyrically, Beyondless is occupied with notions of excess, from the endless cycle of war, to switching one dependency for another, to indulgence and appetite. It works because the band fundamentally thrives in extremes.

These are explosive epics that don't get tired, tied together in an album that's both instantly accessible and grows on you over time.

Cave drops brilliantly funny lines throughout, and his enthusiasm for this project is palpable.

Here we are not even two years later and the band has taken a huge leap forward. Or, more accurately, sideways. Nothing in the angular post-punk of 08's Beat Pyramid suggested the band was capable of something this novel.

Gunn excels at unrushed, meditative songwriting, but this album also finds him giving stronger form to his dreamy creations.

Tillman's voice sounds sublime delivering lyrics about sexy graveyard encounters, ex-girlfriends and the dark side of California living.

Her evocations to dance, be present and claim space are the most potent and political moments.

Mike Cooley steps up with some much-needed light contrast to Patterson Hood’s darker lyrical impulses, which are well represented here, sometimes with touching poignancy and others with blunt force trauma.

While their last four records loosely represented the four classical elements of water, earth, fire and air, The Hunter has no obvious thematic through line, and yet its 13 tracks make for a plenty cohesive listen.

Not surprising, then, that his newest leap into club-inspired techno and house feels just as substantial and weighty as his previous forays into experimental pop.

Slippin' And Slidin' on Harlem River Blues, probably the 28-year-old's strongest album yet, hints at that tendency. Slippin' And Slidin' on Harlem River Blues, probably the 28-year-old's strongest album yet, hints at that tendency.

Once our boy Nick begins his bellicose bellowing, there's no mistaking Grinderman's amped-up scorch for anything but another of Cave's darkly humorous creations of magnificent malevolence. Long may he howl and snort.

In contrast to the neoclassical leanings of Antony and the Johnsons, Hoplelessness is about this particular moment and sounds very of the moment, thanks to beatmakers Hudson Mohawke and Oneohtrix Point Never. Combined with Anohni's trembling and vulnerable vibrato, its grandiose sounds crescendo into a sprawling political epic that could inspire spontaneous bursts of interpretive dance.

The 30 songs follow the scene’s progression: the first half is classically minded R&B and soul that evolves on disc 2 into danceable funk, with Alexander O’Neal’s new wavey Do You Dare and Ronny Robbins’s electro-rap track Contagious.

It falls short of the band’s more certified classics like Death Is This Communion and Blessed Black Wings, but Electric Messiah feels basically satisfying--like a meal ordered from your favourite restaurant. A heavy, greasy, gut-ballasting meal.

It could easily stand on its own without Scott-Heron's raspy vocals, but it's the interplay between his world-weary lyrics and Smith's youthful enthusiasm that makes this an essential companion piece to the original.

The result is often delightfully overwhelming in its heaviness, with the calm moments in between making the ear-splitting loud parts disturbingly jarring. These extreme peaks and valleys elevate the record into the realm of difficult but deeply satisfying art.

Her pipes stand out most on Wait For A Minute: interestingly enough, it’s when she sounds softest (surrounded by cool R&B-inspired synth lines) that she’s most commanding.

Like nothing you'll ever hear on country radio.

A beautifully crafted debut full-length that delivers on the early hype.

It’s also the best Wilco album in a minute, and that’s largely due to its leanness (the run time is just over 30 minutes) and masterfully arranged pop tunes.

Ya boy is back with another dark soul-saturated album in the vein of "The Blueprint."

23 is fundamentally a more interesting album than 04's Misery Is A Butterfly, neither as cartoonishly bleak nor as sonically pristine.

Yes, there are some jazz and soul influences here and a few earnest lyrics, but this is way more dark, futuristic and cutting-edge than you'd guess.

In getting their own group back together, the Internet have delivered their most fully realized project to date.

Wilco's ace eighth album, the first released on their own label, dBpm, is a real kick in the pants.

Starter Home is country music for intellectuals, but he still hits those classic country tropes: longing in Waiting and alcohol as a cure for regret in Drinking With A Friend. His voice is velvety and smooth with texture, vital for a mature sound.

Free of misguided anger but with healthy amounts of trademark anxiety and angular riffs, Grace’s expression is powerful.

By tightening things up, another sprightly highlight emerges from this pleasant haze.

There's an underlying complexity here, but ultimately these are bare, potent rhythms created to, in global parlance, make you "werq."

Their riff-heavy songs are brashly delivered – favouring attitude over technique – but it's Turner's keenly observed vignettes of bored text-messaging teens that really connect.

As with his last couple of releases in the American series, his voice no longer commands attention with booming authority, but there's something about that gasping frailty that makes this proud final bow even more endearing.

It's heavy at times, but always thoughtful and interesting.

The most poignant moments involve simple memories.

Touch doesn't live up to the wild standards of the local group's ballistic live shows, but its focus on connection elevates it to more than just riff-blasting fun (although that's in good supply, too).

Not every song sees atmosphere, theme and emotional power meld seamlessly--a collab with composer Sarah Hopkins called Features Creatures feels like a b-side--but when those elements coalesce the result is all-encompassing.

The songs are still simple, but they're delivered with a sophistication only hinted at on her debut.

The overwhelming headiness, relentless heaviness, behemoth riffing, technical proficiency and epic scope of Crack (at least three listens are needed before it all sinks in) should be enough to prove that these guys are the Rush of extreme metal.

Recorded in her cabin in the woods of New Hampshire, the album has a strong connection to nature and draws on themes of survival, healing and spirituality. ... Not all tracks sound like club hits, however. Deep Connections has a soft, ethereal quality created by synthy arpeggios and My Body Is Powerful samples soothing nature sounds – birdcall and distant howls – over a pentatonic scale.

On first listen, the album as a whole seems repetitious--there aren't any 12-minute odysseys like on breakout album Person Pitch--but its diversity reveals itself with multiple listens.

You can't deny how interesting some of these dynamic post-rock explorations are.

Song for song, however, this is the best QOTSA album in a decade, delivering all the swagger and skew of their greatest work without rehashing it.

Songs, though distinct, spill into each other, with heady euphoria tying it all together.

Pallett’s inventive textures lend emotional weight to some of the deliberately mundane lyrical details, so the album is at once beautifully ethereal and painfully real.

The hallmarks of Blood Orange’s sound are all here--breathy male/female vocal interplay, rare groove rhythms, jazzy sax, gliding slap bass, honeyed falsetto melodies and flirty spoken word--but channelled into a reassuring, comfortable space that brings together pop’s supposed polarities of accessibility and specificity. Somewhere in there, Freetown Sound finds its own beautiful sweet spot.

Beneath catchy pop hooks, there’s deep-rooted pain in these love songs.

You’d think this might get messy, but the arrangements are so thoughtful that the result is sweeping and astonishing.

It all makes Glass Swords a vivid, liberating experience (and, as a by-product, makes the canned wobble of dubstep seem oppressive).

It never sounds gimmicky--instead, the juxtaposing of acoustic guitars and synthesizers seems completely natural.

Full of 80s college rock and 90s indie rock feel-goodness, the band’s debut album Football Money will no doubt fool throwback slackers into adopting this band as their own.

For Los Campesinos! to come up with such a strong follow-up not even a year after their last is an amazing feat.

It's intentionally confounding and endlessly ambitious, but also eminently listenable.

Using hardly any words at all, Deacon conveys the freedom, triumph and catharsis that can come from a journey across ever-changing yet familiar terrain.

Thematically the songs stick to the familiar pop terrain of love--the least adventurous thing about them--but Oh No nonetheless makes a convincing case for broadening the term "pop star" beyond the glamazons.

If you don’t drift off too early, though, it all resolves, making for a sonically rich and delicately nuanced album.

While the tone keeps the wistful summer vibes of his earlier work intact, the Brooklyn-based Canadian also gets reflective on this dud-free second full-length.

Even naysayers can't overlook their second album's intelligence, uniqueness and ambition.

Whatever he calls himself, Young Thug is still one of the most distinctive voices in hip-hop, and Jeffery lives up to the best moments from his Barter 6 and Slime Season mixtapes.

So the cookie-cutter joints are tossed out the window for The Renaissance as Q-Tip attempts to show that he can creatively flow over whatever unusual progression or production twist comes along with each successive track.

The music means the world to him, and it's wonderful.

It has the vitality of today's top 40 dance-pop but is full of the kind of wisdom, wit and warmth that can only come with age.

Fade isn't a drastic departure, but when you've polished your eclectic sound as well as Yo La Tengo has, that's not always necessary.

The mood is still dark, druggy and claustrophobic, but this time Tesfaye is channelling a pain that's less about cold emptiness than it is about more traditional heartbreak and longing.

Despite all the gifted-beyond-his-years hype, that over-arching concerns still feel inextricably teenaged, albeit precociously so.

Even if they’re generally delivered with an easier flow and more laid-back vibe, sharp production and catchy hooks increase each track’s impact.

The combo of ethereal prog rock and lead singer Guy Garvey’s hushed, careworn words couldn’t be finer than on mournful, horn-laden 'Weather To Fly,' while sing-along stadium-ready cliche 'One Day Like This' is the only discernible reminder of why I avoided them in the first place.

Totally cohesive and thoroughly bangin’.

There are shades of classic 50s-style crooning in Cox's vocals, but his voice has a sublime spectral quality that adds a lingering disquiet.

The ambitious arrangements that separate this band from their moody contemporaries can actually make the album feel too emotionally intense for everyday listening.

It’s distancing stuff, though also hookier than earlier LPs. But it’s the humanity and levity of the lyrics that’ll really get you on board.

Compton is easily his most introspective album.

The album is a delightful access point to the cloudy emotional zones Bernice have always occupied, from a warm place of Snuggie-bound safety.

The production’s grittier qualities suggest heavy emotions lie beneath his sardonic facade, but the sense that Grant feels liberated in middle age is what comes across most strongly.

The sloppy rockers sound frozen in grunge time on their third release, and it works incredibly well for the dipso punks.

Hard-fought optimism fuels the political fury behind Savages’ buzzing aggression (timely given the momentum behind progressive political movements), but now the manifesto is delivered via more familiar, accessible sounds.

The Stage Names is much more of a balls-out rock album than most of Okkervil River's oeuvre, and also more orchestral and layered, with arrangements that include everything from non-sissy glockenspiel to metronome percussion. The complexity is the perfect counterpart to Sheff's dense writing.

On Overgrown, the chord progressions are more complex and the lyrics less abstracted, but it’s still the James Blake we love.

he band has already built a mystique with their live show (frontwoman Jehnny Beth’s penetrating glare and righteous wail transfixed a packed Horseshoe Tavern at this year’s CMW), but Silence Yourself proves they’ve got the songs to back it up.

It's not always the most comfortable thing to listen to, but like the proverbial car crash, it's hard to tear yourself away.

When you consider that the first song is only a minute shy of half an hour long, this collection of epic ambient disco revisionism definitely counts as a full-fledged artistic statement.

While you might be tempted to skip it, spending some time trying to absorb what he's getting at gives you a much richer context in which to appreciate his songwriting.

This career-spanning retrospective helps put Fucked Up’s unlikely critical-darling status in perspective, and serves as a handy catch-up tool for those who’ve come to the party late.

Vile’s laconic drawl and laid-back guitar heroics are so addictively blissful that eight or nine minutes don’t feel like enough.

The acoustic Clumps strips down for a particularly moving two minutes, but for the most part, Loveless commits to the stunning sonic evolution. Embrace it.

Probably his most personally revealing work yet.

With Rather Ripped they continue their slow but remarkable progression that currently finds them, for the most part, dropping old SY standbys such as long experimental noise passages in exchange for a significantly more sedated route.

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs haven’t changed as much as they’d like us to believe. They still write great pop rock songs.

The result is incredibly potent and human.

If the term “ambient house” hadn’t already been taken by the Orb in the late 80s, it would be a good way to describe this; we’ll just call it really good stoner dance music instead.

The band continues to find new ways to expand within rigid, self-imposed parameters. Although the album veers away from the spaced-out psychedelia of 2007’s Attack & Release, it retains much of that album’s slickness.

Post-Nothing is their eight-song debut, and it goes by in a flash of infectious, sweaty anthem jams about angsty youth problems.

Many great pop artists build imaginary worlds with sets, costumes, music videos and artwork, but Gwenno achieves something similar using a richly detailed soundscapes that gradually draw you in deeper.

In terms of brightness and accessibility, the album feels like an extension of their breakout record, 2008's Microcastle. Yet it's clear the band has matured in the intervening years--and they're better for it.