What you find in Transcendental Youth aren't answers to any big questions, but instead questions to a bunch of answers that never meant anything before but now seem exceedingly important.

This is good because Letlive know their strengths here, hooks and Butler, push both ahead to the front, and come out with the best eleven tracks of their career thus far, easily.

The Historical Conquests is astonishing for its depth of exploration in the folk genre.

[“Round We Go” is] a roiling, overpowering emotional mixture, and it fits right in with what I’m Not Your Man wants to accomplish: a forthright treatise on sexuality and relationships, told with an uncanny sense of comedic timing and a penchant for reaching for the throat with its hooks, arrangements, and, most resoundingly, its lyrics.

He displays that it’s just as impressive to make an effective pop song, as it is to create a progressive rock epic. Steven Wilson proves that an artist can venture into uncharted musical waters, even 30 years into their career, for ambitious and vibrant results like these.

It crafts an atmosphere of quiet terror that also just happens to be a flawless sonic extraction of this very moment in history.

On Panorama, they show themselves to be one of the tightest units in music, writing groove after memorable groove. Guitars, bass, and drums meld seamlessly, with no component vying for attention above the others. What stands out is how rarely the guitarists resort to palm mutes, heavy distortion, or even fast strumming. There is an almost improvisational aspect to the music in a lot of these songs.

The ONE… doesn't feel like work for G-Side, rather it feels like a first love, a record that gives a hundred percent to garner every compliment it earns: flowing, smart, sexy, and even global to those who hear it and its grand tone.

Copia is Cooper’s greatest work to date, but it leaves even more roads for him to take.

Without hyperbole, it is one of the most fun, vibrant, rewarding, intelligently structured pop records to shimmy through these parts in quite some time, taking cues from whichever electro-punk-pop-DIY-indie-sludge-rock hybrid 21-year-old Londoner Mica Levi fell in love with when she was 14.

The Tortured Poets Department is a complex album to even perceive because there is an oversaturation of surrounding context. If you whittle it straight down to what matters, however – the music and the lyrics – it’s an excellent record despite its tremendous length and monotonous tempo (discounting ‘I Can Do It With a Broken Heart' here, which is an absolute bop). There are beautiful instrumental accents and interesting production flourishes throughout, and Swift continues to illustrate lyrical growth even though it has always been her strong suit.

Deacon nips the synthetics that allowed Spidermanâ??s sandpaper production to grate, opting instead for smoothly textured layers, a trick that strengthens a brilliantly executed dance album into dramatically structured art.

Less eccentric and exciting than its predecessor, perhaps, but only by choice. Glass Animals are at their peak in 2016, and perfectly content to be slower and quieter, worming their way into your head by inches but settling in for the long haul once they're in there.

Konoyo is a heavy album, emotionally speaking, in a way that is difficult to explain, yet can be expressed in a way that only someone like Tim Hecker would know. By destroying, contorting and reconfiguring these sounds, Hecker draws out the most visceral emotions in himself via soundwaves--his music being his therapy, and us, the audience, being his witness to his solemn excursion into his very soul. It's all too beautiful.

He trumps his incredible debut in every way without resorting to drastic tactics in order to avoid some sophomore slump, instead subtly perfecting his approach to great effect.

It's totally different from everything he's done while still being perfectly, irrevocably Kanye.

With every compilation, tracks are bound to fall flat. However, the turnover rate is relatively low, making Dark Was The Night so refreshing and ultimately a worthy purchase.

There's no pandering to authenticity here, no appeal to the emotion: Love Remains doesn't drag you into its world with any sort of force whatsoever so much as it places square within it, naked and indifferent.

It is absolutely an evolution from his opening trio of releases, and a strong step towards becoming an integral voice in the indie rock scene.

Wilco have had their peaks and valleys, but they have never sounded as confident as they do on The Whole Love.

Slave Ambient is the work of a band making us listen for every piece of them.

A passionately resonating, electronic-underscored tour de force that somehow never betrays their true essence.

Like a pang of guilt does he sample his former self, like a torch carried to its final flicker of illumination. And to hear all that, to be able to almost feel that happening, is to bear witness to an artist working at the apex of his talent.

Continuing to dominate the fusing of musical styles he unintentionally started, the punchy yet gorgeous qualities of Kodama sees an impressive balance of contrasts, darker and more purposeful than Shelter while evolving triumphantly.

If you’ve enjoyed Holter to this point, it is worth investing the necessary time. Aviary touches every corner of her sound, resulting in an enchanting, if slightly dizzying, fifth album.

Gorgeous melodies are painted across a variety of instrumental backgrounds, forming an ideal blend of his more traditional emotionally-charged ballads and bolder, more unfamiliar pieces.

Tears of the Valedictorian is easily one of the best records of the year.

A bold and colorful magnum opus that marks an almost unbeatable personal milestone for Lorde.