While the twosome’s rambunctious revelry may appear wholly flippant upon first listen, their music, and 10,000 gecs as a whole, is far more sophisticated than it seems.

Due in part to its tonal variety and expert sequencing, Renaissance never feels monotonous, despite its near-relentless forward motion.

Unassuming and refreshingly lacking in the pretension of so many contemporary folk-pop records, Sea Sew makes for both a challenging and a charming proper introduction for Hannigan.

No, it doesn't push the genre forward; in fact, it probably pushes it back, but Black Light impeccably delivers on everything you could possibly want from the 14-year-old band.

The lyrics are endearing in their quirky honesty (he quips of Sean Parker, an ex’s ex: “I think he started Spotify”). But backed by yet another sumptuous sonic tapestry—including finger-picked guitar and spacey sound effects—they sound like nothing less than Tasjan finally figuring out exactly who he is.

illustrates how slight the distinctions between country, blues, and folk genre labels are, and it adds to Elliott's legacy as one of popular music's finest storytellers.

Mannequin Pussy offers an answer in their refusal to accept the status quo. Through a balance of firebrand punk and intoxicating power pop, I Got Heaven is a musical expression of self-governance and all the pain and pleasure that comes with it.

Though Gowns foreshadowed a lot of what Anderson is about (avant-garde noise-folk, elliptical lyrics), going solo has allowed her to make something genuinely personal and almost frighteningly honest.

For those fascinated by the Avalanches's process, as opposed to merely impressed by its most endearing results, Wildflower is a rewarding and challenging listen.

They Want My Soul is both mournful and confessional, its best moments coming when the band members allow themselves to be vulnerable.

What Alive & Wired does best is reconcile the considerable charms of the band's studio output with the immediacy of their live shows' energy, and the Old 97's captured on this essential double-album is a band that lands at the midpoint between Wilco's high-minded songcraft and the ball-busting rock swagger of Drive-By Truckers.

Wall’s band approaches the tropes of western swing with a perfectly light touch, keeping the mood grounded and intimate, never hokey or ironic.

Occasionally, the album’s commitment to juxtaposition feels strained. ... At just 37 minutes, however, Future Nostalgia seems to understand that the best diversions are as fleeting as they are exhilarating, so we should enjoy them while we can.

Distortion gets a lot right.

The album dips and tips and ultimately soars as a result, Rossen and company having turned near-disaster into sonic triumph.

This is pop with a light touch and a tremendously heavy heart; it only qualifies as easy listening if you can distance yourself from Assbring's expressive singing.

With an uncanny melodic gift that enlivens even the most tired sentiments and a chameleonic ability to seamlessly transition between disparate production styles, Jepsen proves she's worthy of those comparisons [to Taylor Swift and Rihanna].

The album suggests that self-adulation can be just as therapeutic as unleashing rage, showing off Rico’s artistic range in the process.

Cardi climbed her way up from the bottom, and Invasion of Privacy is a soundtrack for anyone who dreams of doing the same.

With production assistance from Jay Som, Chastity Belt presents a tangible thickening of the band’s sound, with the introduction of strings on “Effort,” “Rav-4,” and “Half-Hearted” and keyboards on “Split” adding texture to their characteristic fuzzed-out guitar arrangements. Each melody and every drum fill feels intentional, and the group’s shared vocals and light-as-air harmonies seem like a meaningful statement of where they are as a band—and as friends.

It’s perhaps their most confrontational, challenging effort to date, an intricate work that’s more a reflection of than an antidote to the darkness.

By far the bounciest, most ecstatic song cycle of Arca’s career, the album is a celebration of actualization, whether that’s spurned by finding harmony internally or in communion with another.

The album is a sort of homecoming but not a return to basics. As these songs of experience prove, she’s grown far too much for this album to feel like anything but a fresh new chapter, even as it draws a connection to all the places she’s been.

Rather than looking outward or upward, though, Dawn FM is a woozy, psychedelic deep dive inside the artist’s famously twisted psyche.

Damn Right Rebel Proud seethes with an energy and a perspective that's too often lacking today, and it reaffirms that it's far more than just his name that makes Williams one of the genre's most vital artists.

Without the distractions and clashing frequencies of a full band, one can better appreciate how the album has been cut together, with subtle musical segues, clever editing, and consideration for overlapping lyrical themes.

Marry Me isn't quite a religious experience, but it's unequivocally divine.

Freed from the aesthetic demands of an odd-couple partnership, Big Boi (Antwan Patton) improves on the standard set with 2003's Speakerboxxx, an ostensibly solo work crystallized inside a double-album set, delivering a record that's rigidly focused and almost uniformly strong.

A stirring, raw masterpiece.

Though the album's most overt trait is tenderness, the hetero-waltz 'The Fix' (featuring Richard Hawley on vocals) and the Zeppelin-esque 'Grounds for Divorce' provide a certain masculine muscle, making Kid feel like a male sibling of the Cardigans' equally exquisite 'Long Gone Before Daylight.'

With Forgiveness Is Yours, Saoudi and company achieve that objective—with a patina of sophistication.

Yet, far from a liability, Clark's bare, sedate St. Vincent persona is the highlight of Strange Mercy, reflecting all the terror, beauty, and allure of her music more effectively than any cantakerous narrator could muster.

The album is an assemblage of smart, new wave-tinged garage-rock tunes, less a labor of love than a near-effortless studio session between two post-punk revival veterans that might have been recorded in the space of a few afternoons.

Not all of Kaputt is so dynamic, and many of the songs require a few listens before they begin to assert their individual identities. But Kaputt does contain riches to rival the previous highpoints in the Destroyer canon.

Like We Have Sound, Leisure Seizure feels inimitable not because of any great innovation or genius, but for the way it seemingly exists in its own perfectly contained universe.

As music that's beautiful simply for the sake of being beautiful, Takk… is an unqualified success.

By matching their sound so adriotly to the content of their songs, Scissor Sisters makes Night Work an album of real structural sophistication.

Everything Is Alive may not boast the lo-fi grit of Slowdive’s earlier work, but the band’s skill for scrupulous melodies is undiminished here. The album evolves Slowdive’s well-established sound with more electronic textures, creating a conceptual sonic landscape that buzzes with life.

Hawk Is Howling is a reassertion of Mogwai's strengths and testimony that they are still credible and productive.

By incorporating country signifiers into what is otherwise a terrific, of-the-moment pop album, Antonoff and the Chicks could have come up with a style that’s even more progressive, akin to the production on Kacey Musgraves’s Golden Hour. If nothing else, that highlights how the Chicks still have room to grow, either with or without Antonoff, as they move into this new phase of their career. Gaslighter may not have been the album that country music needed, but it’s clearly the one that the Chicks needed to make.

This is, after all, Animal Collective's attempt at stuffing a decade's worth of changing tastes into 12 disciplined, bite-sized songs. What's most impressive is that they accomplish this feat without ever letting accessibility compromise their individual preferences as artists, and vice versa.

Open Your Heart shows off a hugely expanded range of influences and an unerring sense of pacing.

Banga itself doesn't exactly break many rules, but it does find Smith rejuvenated, discovering new wisdom in old myths and icons, and in her missives to the young, a renewed sense of purpose.

While Shearwater has always been album-oriented (they've been known in the past, like Okkervil River, for their themed albums) Rook is by far their most successful to date.

It's another welcome reversal for a band that, while keeping true to the same program of intense macabre album after album, keeps finding new ways to vary their ominous approach.

The album instantly feels more purposeful than its predecessor: Where Blood can feel labored over, perhaps too hungry for hits, Lianne La Havas isn’t seemingly beholden to such expectations.

Perhaps above all else, Classic Objects is thoughtful or, really, defined by thought. The song structures are clever, the production is deeply layered, and the lyrics, which largely catalog Hval’s thoughts, are writerly and complex.

Body Talk impresses for its thematic focus and laser-precise editing.

At its finest, the album serves as the ideal soundtrack for a fleet of lonely, grizzled bikers lost on a desert highway: slow-rolling and hardened, simultaneously seething, brooding, and wistful, and armed with the pride of vagrancy.

...And Then You Shoot Your Cousin is a trim 35 minutes in length, with 11 tracks and eight proper songs, zooming through its disjointed structure without much padding. This slimness functions as a counterweight to the often stifling subject matter, as the group employs its soul-influenced backdrops in a way that feels totally opposed to what most modern hip-hop is doing.

His most personal album to date.

Only three of the album's 14 tracks exceed two-and-a-half minutes, but Mitski manages to pack so much into those scant running times that they play more like miniature suites.

O'Regan's voice is the centerpiece. Unlike seemingly every other bedroom music maker these days, there's a real power and discernable confidence to his croon.

The Weeknd is in full command of his craft, and at this point it's almost impossible for me to imagine that he won't deliver on the finale. He's earned my trust, as would any other artist who had already released two of the year's best albums.

Imagine a mirror which distorts not just the reflection, but reality itself, and you have a fair idea of the stunning legacy to which Syro triumphantly belongs.

Unlike albums such as David Bowie’s Blackstar or Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’s Skeleton Tree, both of which confront death head-on, 12 is decidedly more reserved in its reckoning with human impermanence. Yet, even if it’s less forceful in its execution, Sakamoto’s poetic, metaphysical approach—a paradoxically delicate yet fearless plunge into the unknown—is equally as daunting and devastating.

Prima Donna's standout title track encapsulates Staples's appeal as a lyricist—and the appeal of the EP as a whole.

Knives Don't Have Your Back is a striking contrast--and a poignant, subtle companion--to last year's Live It Out.

Hotspot is stuffed with both instantly infectious melodies and lyrics that flaunt the Pet Shop Boys’s fierce intellect. Eternally sly postmodernists Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe are at their funniest here, embedding bouncy synths with barbs directed at failing political institutions across the globe (their own kind of hotspot), social hypocrisies, and even themselves.

A Color of the Sky is an enchanting cache of guitar pop with echoes of Talk Talk, Cocteau Twins, A Winged Victory for the Sullen, and Emmylou Harris.

The Orchard is no less sweet or sentimental than its predecessor, but it's a stronger, more complete record.

Consolers of the Lonely, despite its surprise entrance, is predictably pleasing, a fine collection of shit-kicking rock n' roll just varied and experimental enough to sound original and unbored.

Earle's decisions are always in service to the individual songs and complement Jackson's dynamic performances without overshadowing them.

The songs here are at once deeply intimate and broadly accessible, like selections from an alternative universe where modern mainstream country radio isn’t all pandering, homogenized slop.

Another feather in his crowded cap, Hold Time is further proof that Ward provides a powerful jolt to what might otherwise be a tired genre.

The album seamlessly blends the nightmarish and the romantic, interweaving our perennial hopes and the terrors we can’t shake off.

Anima still achieves a sonic and thematic through line. The album’s juxtaposition of lyrical techno-dread with austere, ghostly electronic music is satisfyingly unsettling. The lyrics are evocative in their economy, and rather than feel like guide tracks, the arrangements feel more fully realized than on Yorke’s past albums.

While welcome, a more ambitious sound may very well soon make way for another round of succinct instant-classics like the recent “Cohesive Scoops” and “The Rally Boys.” For now, it’s worth appreciating this exciting outlier and a Guided by Voices that can be led triumphantly into uncharted water by its intrepid captain.

Even as the album moves between sleepy, whispered gentility and brief outbreaks of shaking guitar noise, the sullen mood and expansive echoing textures make Dead in the Boot feel of a single piece.

And speaking of nervous systems, if Visiter doesn't make you tap, nod, shake, or just plain move, then you don't have one.

What results is a swirling accumulation of sound, forming into manic campfire roundelays emphasizing themes of community and recovery, the scrappy spectacle of beauty shaped from shiftless sonic waste.

Playing Favorites proves that Sheer Mag can show off their softer underbelly just as skillfully as they do their fangs.

His winking in-jokes and one-liners might have gotten the Internet's attention, but Ratchet wins you over when it reveals that this smart-aleck's got a beating heart too.

The album stands out as often exhilarating collision of disparate elements.

Against Me!'s roots in punk and newfound interest in arena-rock should make them doubly disposed against any kind of subtlety, which makes it all the more refreshing when White Crosses only occasionally veers into the self-serious terrain for which both genres are known.

The album seems to suggest that Bon Iver is transitioning from a band in the traditional sense of the word into a looser collective. Despite the album’s intense pessimism and anxiety, Bon Iver’s organization speaks to the power of forging a community to battle back against darkness.

The album is murky and claustrophobic but still consistently melodic.

As memorable as the lyrics are on Moms, its biggest strength is the way Harris and Seim's already quite similar vocals and contrasting worldviews effectively intertwine.

The irreverent, snide wit and easy self-deprecation prove to be an effective, if surprising, fit for Tegan and Sara's brand of genial indie-pop, elevating Sainthood beyond mere snappy diversion.

No matter the tempo or setting, though, Raven is fully aware of how the body can both entrap and liberate. It’s an innovative use of music as a vessel to capture both.

It may not be the album many critics and fans were expecting from Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but it's undeniably the right record for them at the right time, a shrewd display of awareness of both craft and, more importantly, of self too often lacking in modern rock.

Ghettoville is a 70-minute high-wire act, equal parts musique concrète and concrete jungle, its enveloping darkness in tension with a few precious rays of light.

Fortunately, throughout the rest of the album, the band writes songs that allow them to excel as they stay well within their limitations. These are tight, economical pop songs actually worthy of Pavement comparisons in terms of not just sound, but melody.

One of the year's more understated and beautifully paranoid gems.

The album is alive with energy and playfulness.

The taut and engaging first half of Down to Believing juxtaposes formidable country-rock like "I Lost My Crystal Ball" and the garage-rock-at-heart "Tear Me Apart" against more poised and controlled expressions of emotional unrest.

The album turns out to be missing link in Young’s catalog as much for Shakey’s emotional life as it is for his stylistic choices.

Divine intervention aside, it's a matter of the unparalleled depth of LaVette's interpretive skill that she can take a covers album and make it sound like a collection of originals.

At the stage in their career when most bands are content to just repeat themselves, the unfamiliar palette of Continue As a Guest is a revelation, and certainly doesn’t preclude the other members of the New Pornographers from making their presence felt. Most notably, Zach Djanikian contributes tenor and alto sax on several tracks, expanding the album’s timbre in new and unexpected directions.

Trouble in Dreams is full of complex and sophisticated songs, so it's probably unfair to focus on one to the exclusion of others, but 'Shooting Rockets' deserves a little more attention, since it's the best evidence of the fact that, when it comes to proggy indie rock, Bejar's really in a league of his own right now.

Consistently literate and full of the comfortable resonance of his unique voice, Eagle once again proves Callahan to be as ageless as the forest.

The feverish approach lends Odd Blood a slithering lo-fi ecstasy, elevating it beyond the similarly buzzing, synth-infused efforts of Yeasayer's peers.

It's a complete, self-contained work that's just as finely crafted as its musical predecessors.

Boo turns footwork’s roots—hip-hop, house, IDM, and drum ‘n’ bass—and spins them into something that sounds like a totally new language.

By turns baroque, jazzy, morose, and enraptured, they're a perfect opportunity for Wainwright to showcase his capacity as a singer in terms of tone and melodic emphasis. And showcase he does, deploying his dulcet foghorn of a voice with subtlety, grace, and elasticity

The most arresting of Twelve Reasons to Die's many pleasures is how out of time the album feels: Its pointed narrative distance from straight-faced gangster rap is very 2013, but the simple virtuosity of the small moments smacks of eras in both rap and soul that passed long before Ghost ever stepped to a mic.

Pick of the Litter really is just a sampling from a catalogue that begs closer examination.

The freeform Return of the Ankh is what it would sound like if 4th World War drank three whole jars of holy water. It doesn't sound one bit like her debut (as early reports indicated), but it does bear the mark of its creator having rolled through the full cipher.