Ultimately, Airtight's Revenge joins Erykah Badu's Mama's Gun, Van Hunt's Popular, Meshell Ndegeocello's Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape, Rahsaan Patterson's Wines & Spirits, Joi's Amoeba Cleansing Syndrome, and Sy Smith's Conflict as a generation-defining masterwork of unflinching vision that captures the artist at the very moment in time that it is released.

Gas Mask is simply a strongly appealing hip-hop record with just the right balance of guests to keep his voice from becoming stale.

Tigermending has everything that a superb record requires: heart, soul, mysticism, unpredictability, and complexity, which is never sacrificed for accessibility.

It’s an album that genuinely feels like SZA’s singular vision, which is eye-opening for those who may be more familiar with the New Jersey singer as a guest vocalist.

There are outstanding performances throughout Sundial. Rapper billy woods in “Gospel?” spews magma, and Chicago legend Common drops a verse on the song “Oblivion” that could have easily fit into his great album Be from 2005. The singer Ayoni adds her voice on two tracks to make Sundial feel like a momentous occasion.

The individual tracks offer empathetic portraits of people and places that he presumes have been undeservedly ignored or overlooked. The album’s underlying theme concerns Weiner’s growth as the world changed around him. Musically, Low Cut Connie embrace Reed’s textured approach to pop music.

Like its overall theme of love, Honeybear can be as intoxicating as it is messy. But given the rewards, it’s totally worth the plunge.

Excavation is entirely capable of conjuring up all sorts of images in your mind while the music plays, but Virgins keeps you focused instead on what’s happening inside of it; for music with so few conventional entry points, Hecker has again managed to make his work structurally and viscerally gripping.

Specifically, Mitski focuses on the loneliness of a "lone ranger" lifestyle and expresses it profoundly through the musical choices accentuating her lo-fi indie rock aesthetic.

Above all though, xx is a thoroughly cohesive, moving and accessible album.

There’s a danger of Illuminati Hotties’ music being defined by these, her most gleeful and attention-seeking songs. Still, after her sunscreen washes off in the pool and the mist of icing sugar settles, it’s her more measured, perhaps overshadowed, tracks in which the album’s heart is found.

Channeling whatever ceremonial endeavors (or imbibing whatever substances) are required, Goat has come up with an exuberant album filled to the brim with potent mysticism; World Music is fittingly possessed by a sprit of pure adventurousness.

Numero Group has performed a great public service here for aficionados of joyful noise. Anyone who spent time left of the dial during the heyday of college radio should pick up this collection.

As foolish as it seems to say that any music is 100 percent new, I've never heard anything like this before.

In terms of epic grandeur, though, Ohms somehow surpasses even the band's most ambitious middle-period work. If past albums in the Deftones discography defined key points in the story of your life, you can expect to be thoroughly engrossed by the latest chapter in a remarkable musical journey that, against all the odds, just got more compelling.

Electricity thrills from start to finish, yet another well-crafted work from a band that continually shows itself to be unbound by categories of space, time, and genre. This is past, present, and future funk all rolled into one and ready for a fantastic time.

The record is easily accessible on a surface level, and as a series of irresistible moments, it’s almost unparalleled.

It has no chance in hell to answer to all the hype and buzz around it, it’s not going to impact the dance music scene that reveres the robots so and you might as well be playing it on shuffle, but it’s a rich and warm musical experience that suits both the dancefloor and concentrated headphone listening in equal amounts that forms an important part of the duo’s musical journey.

The album is a visionary statement of arrival, a potent and singular masterpiece that exposes the deepest chambers of a fiercely beating heart with a singular purity of focus. It's a mesmerizing journey of self-actualization in an era when constant connection makes that all the more difficult. After soil, Wise's reach seems infinite.

Despite a somewhat stifled mix, and the fact that Butler’s romanticism has been replaced by moments of bitterness, and in some instances petulance, what makes the new CD a worthy successor is what made us fall for this band in the first place: the music’s unflagging passion.

Unheard Songs is a revelation; a more fitting tribute to a troubled artist could not be imagined.

A carefully layered, multifaceted album in terms of its sound, music, lyrics, and thematic cohesion -- in short, a great musical achievement.

At once ancient and modern.

Norman Fucking Rockwell is Lana Del Rey unfiltered, full of beauty, emotion, heartbreak, and devastation.

Phenology is stunning, ranking right up there with the best hip-hop music of today.

Shall We Go on Sinning So That Grace May Increase? comes a bit out of nowhere and is surely the most impactful release he's ever made, Matmos included.

They’re solid songs with winning grace notes—”My Kind” opens on a 20-second orchestra-tuning cacophony before finally kicking into power chords, and “Hopeless” bursts into a furious if regrettably brief guitar solo before the final chorus. But they primarily work to show just how much better—both tighter and weirder—the rest of the album is.

In a Poem Unlimited offers certainty over contradiction. Remy may loathe violence but understands the pleasures of getting mad. The songs offer a release from moral uncertainty.