Making music this fuzzy and wonderful is a notable feat. Making tunes that make you want to jump into a time-travelling DeLorean and materialise in yester-year, desperate to reenact the same wanton mistakes that you made the first time round? That’s a real achievement.

After Dark 2 is a confirmation of his prowess and vision. It is proof and testament that the reignited flame of Italo-disco can endure through the tempests of shifting tastes.

For Sigur Rós, Kveikur is their most gloves-off release to date and they land the punch.

Olympia inhabits a strange realm of saturnine electronica meant for cathartic swaying rather than choreographed movement.

Kanye West doesn’t give the listener a second to realize the album is more a masterly response to a masterpiece than a masterpiece itself. With one sweep of the hand, West brushes away expectations. And then he sticks you squarely across the face

It’s the duo’s most sinister and fascinating collection of songs, enrapturing the listener with dystopian soundscapes and frustrating arrangements.

Acid Rap is the summer action blockbuster of mixtapes, where the audience need not dig much deeper than the surface to enjoy the best of what the production has to offer.

Camera Obscura are old enough to know what they’re are capable of, and they do it passionately and with a practiced hand.

Fanned by an intelligent approach to production, Disclosure’s fire has started to burn, and is destined to whip itself into an inferno this year.

Once I Was an Eagle is a singular achievement: a haunting record, peopled with aural ghosts that come gradually crawling from out of the grooves.

What Avalanche may lack in immediacy, it makes up for with the gloss and professionalism that coats each of its songs like a gossamer gown. The quality of Hannibal’s handiwork and the sheer passion of Coco’s vocals speak for themselves.

...Like Clockwork is a droning, incoherent endeavor, and it simply doesn’t reward the attention it’s asking for.

As a whole, Lesser Evil can be a lot to take in: it’s hyperactive, unstable, and disoriented. Most of the time it feels like all three at once. Yet Doldrums’ ability to hop genres with ease, write catchy melodies, and--above all--sound like he’s having fun doing it renders his place unique in an overcrowded genre, and his debut a promising one.

Ultimately Cold Spring Fault Less Youth is a fascinating record, a series of varied and elaborate soundscapes that find the right balance of mood and melody.

The eleven tracks on the album, while almost uniformly unpleasant, all share an underlying moroseness sewn together by Bianca Casady’s unnerving vocals.

As an entity, Obsidian is neither more nor less accessible than Cerulean. Ultimately, your mood as a listener--and perhaps the weather--will dictate how often you’ll return to Obsidian‘s bleak and beautiful world.

It is an album that needs to be experienced in its entirety, but in the age of remixes, the blogosphere, and Adderall, who will have the time or patience to dig into Impersonator? Those who do will find parts of it beautiful and rewarding, if they can stomach the emotional drain.

It took exuberance, painstaking detail, and wide-eyed nostalgia for Daft Punk to create Random Access Memories, their best.

A collection of remarkable songs by a group of musicians that compliment one another as well as any group over the last decade.

Flawless transitions are endemic to the record, and necessary in order to cram this many ideas into an attention-deficit 32 minutes.

As an album set out to reappropriate pop rock, MCII succeeds.

It does not always work, but in short, orchestral bursts, MS MR demonstrate that they can transcend the confines of goth synth-pop, and produce one of the most memorable debuts of the year.

Nothing feels out-of-place or out-of-sync, everything clicks together in flourishes of simple brilliance.

Savages’ smart reorganization and shuffling of punk, post-punk, krautrock, and noise music into something brutal, jarringly confrontational, and completely singular is a breath of fresh air and an unignorable statement of power and resistance.

Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward continue to prove She & Him is more than mere novelty. Now we just need some richness and depth.

Little Boots knows how to write a hook.

It is not a return to form, because how could we expect or want it to be? It is a return to the contextually avant-garde, and for Deerhunter in 2013 that means rock n’ roll.

THR!!!ER is a remarkably fluid album, transitioning seamlessly between songs and only rarely getting mired in moments of subpar music.