Can was light years ahead of their time, and the ideas they present in Tago Mago and sequential albums are still incomprehensible even in today's eclectic and varied music scene.

The Wonder Year’s hard work and dedication has more than paid off with their newest album. I don’t see anything topping it anytime soon, at least not in the pop-punk spectrum. It challenges the limits of the genre.

Every song possesses a distinctive identity, a different color fleshed out by its instrumentation. And the lyrical wonders Lamar works on top of all this is even more worthy of praise.

It’s another masterpiece that will forever be enshrined in his ever-growing legacy. Absolute perfection.

For those wanting Untrue levels of output, that album will forever be at your disposal. An album designed as worship has now entered that same vault of romanticized antiquity.

DAMN. remedies a lot of its predecessor's mistakes and gives us something better--a Kendrick not seen since Section.80, throwing tonally and stylistically inconsistent songs together in a desperate scramble to tell us just what the fuck he's feeling. It's slipshod, haphazard and rocky to listen to, and that's the Kendrick I've been missing for the past few years.

No one could have crafted this masterpiece quite like Nick Cave, and the staggering amount of material over his nearly four decade long career doesn’t prepare for what we have here. This stands as possibly his greatest achievement, as much a sorrowful exploration as a loving sendoff only for his fans, but more importantly, for himself.

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

It illuminates very real, very constricting emotions that you know you’ll have to either deal with in true form, or kindle within someone you love upon your own passing.

What results is another quality release that cannot help but make music fans excited for what this gifted outfit are to bestow upon us on their next offering.

This newfound willingness, even ability, to just be nakedly emotional and let the melodies lead is the best weapon this new Black Country, New Road have at their disposal. Isaac Wood, who once seemed right on the edge of slipping into complete post-ironic-irony with his spoken word drawl, sings the entire album in a delicate quaver which is a perfect fit for this new vulnerability.

Deafheaven’s second outing is wondrous celebration of boundless ambition and pure artistic vision.

One that sounds like a veteran band falling in love with playing music and being friends again. This newfound comfort outside the comfort zone yields some truly spectacular results in the album's staggering midsection.

When Underoath hits it they hit it well, and Lost in the Sound of Separation is still a very good record despite its faults.

Change is what led them to write the album they needed to, and in turn, left us listeners with the album we needed to hear. Change reminds us that we didn’t know Every Time I Die like we thought we did--but they sure read us to a tee with From Parts Unknown.

With Channel Orange Frank Ocean has proven himself as one of the most significant artists in popular music today; his next effort will definitely have the potential to be a genre classic.

At the end of the day, there is little doubt that listeners will enjoy The Satanist, because it provides in copious quantities what has made Behemoth a staple in the extreme metal community for over twenty years, while keeping their shortcomings to a minimum.

You can chalk Carnage up as anything from a zeitgeist experiment to a flawed masterpiece, but there’s something precious and compassionate at its heart that I honestly believe will make the world a better place in its own peculiar way, beyond the scope of critical evaluation.

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

Set My Heart on Fire Immediately is an important album for Hadreas because it opens so many doors for the future – but if he really wants to set our hearts on fire, I’d advise him to once again unleash the bombast.

Red – both in its original form as well as with these welcome additions – is an absolute triumph.

It is all about being strong. It reaches out and tries to help make sense of it all. It's a comforting empathy. The stories are intensely personal but are so easily transferable beyond their original inspiration.

The Myth of the Happily Ever After serves as an excellent and shockingly ambitious outing from a band that seemed to be trending in all the wrong directions not long ago. With this album, they’ve reclaimed control of their story.

It wouldn’t just be inappropriate to listen to Coin Coin Memphis casually, while playing a video game or doodling in the background, it would be impossible, so arresting and bracing is the experience.

Without recounting every track, most of the highlights here come from Stevens’ willingness to tinker with perfection; not every live track is as haunting as its corresponding original, but he never fails to deliver that authentic live experience.

There’s unhinged beauty meeting catchiness, a cabal that draws in its listener despite its inherent capriciousness. Hidden History of the Human Race is an irrefutable classic, dispelling any doubt that Blood Incantation are one of this generation’s leading death metal acts.

The Archandroid is everything her fans had been hoping for and then some; Monae has earned her place at the forefront of black music in 2010. This ballsy, funky, and furiously intelligent album is pop as everybody wishes it would be.

Across all of Blue Weekend, one thing is very clear – this is Wolf Alice’s best offering to date, and clearly one of those albums that qualifies as an event. It’s emotionally stirring, sonically riveting, and just as unpredictable as always. It’s the full realization of everything Wolf Alice ever aspired to be: poignant and melodic, raucous and edgy, and certainly every possible shade in between.

On SOUR she was a budding superstar; on GUTS, her sound has fully bloomed.

The level of emotional proximity, at times, will be enough to make you fight back tears.

No Cities To Love is a triumph. Not only does it meet every one of our over-the-top demands as fans, it serves as a great entry point for those new comers who have yet to be introduced to one of the most important bands of the last quarter century.

Punisher is a product of the times, but it’s also one that could have only been made by Phoebe Bridgers. She’s the only artist I can think of who has the ambition and elegance to tackle two crumbling worlds at the same time: the one in her mind, and the one outside her doorstep. It's an album characterized by its finality; a series of lasts in a time where preparing for the end is starting to feel less and less absurd.

Some tracks make notable improvements – a subtle lift on "This Love"'s gorgeous arrangement boosts one of Swift's most forgettable ballads to a late tracklist highlight, while the new version of "Clean" emphasises producer Imogen Heap's vocal offerings so resplendently that it's a crime she doesn't receive a feature credit – yet others are misplaced in their adjustments.

The good-not-great quality of much of The Land… is at once its strong and weak point, enhancing the highlights but exposing concrete shortcomings. Simultaneously, this album is a highly productive move for Mitski, opening up a wide array of new possibilities for future endeavours.

Architects have never shied away from clarion calls to action, but this is the band at their most inspiring and effectual, filling in the empty space left behind after a monumental loss. It is an epitaph that nonetheless suggests a bright future ahead.

That an album can match enjoyment with artistic merit in a year that has largely seen albums go one way or another is a joy in itself.

This is an album made by a bunch of dudes in their absolute prime, and while it’s easy for one to assume that the disparate styles being straddled here would make the LP less cohesive, it’s just not the case; Paradise Lost don’t lose an iota of focus or momentum in the making of this concise project – the scenario only serves to strengthen Obsidian’s case for being their most revered album for the years to come, and is one hell of an act to follow up on.

Jama Ko is, for twelve of its thirteen songs, political in the best way, using a deeply focused aesthetic both to engage with and as a momentary escape from the social environment which produced it.

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.

The overarching weakness seems to be that, while this is a set of songs being performed by talented musicians clearly having the time of their lives, it often feels like nothing more, simply a (great) set of songs rather than a coherent album statement. The previous paragraph’s fleeting criticism is just that, though: fleeting. The Record, when compared to Boygenius, inevitably comes out much ahead, reflecting the singer-songwriters’ substantial growth as musicians in the intervening half-decade.

Kenny Segal, a true and varied talent in and of himself, has a firm grasp on the gift that billy woods possesses, and has doubled down on his instinct to assist, to foreground the whims of a true poet in prime form. billy woods takes the bearing, and we follow.

St. Vincent is a challenging art pop album that convincingly balances the beautiful with the ugly, and ultimately stays human despite its futuristic leanings.

There are some nods to years past, and most longtime acolytes will be satisfied with what is mostly testament Converge; but the band's causal nexus doesn’t exist in a vacuum, or in the grips of GodCity Studio, but out there, rooted in the mundane and then amplified to hysteria. Much of The Dusk in Us seems to obsess over the everyday, or maybe more accurately, our demons lurking on the cusp of day and night.

Outside of “Love Again,” the album is chock-full of jams from front to back, and RTJ2, in its astonishing scope and finesse, continues a tradition of greatness for the unlikely duo, and serves as one of the more distinguished bright spots in an otherwise stale year for hip-hop.

Ten tracks, forty minutes really is the perfect package for a pop record that oozes sophistication while not taking itself too seriously, and that knows when to trade the bomb-ass-thicc with lovers' lullabies.

There’s no other band out there that can write such hopeless lyrics while also managing to make me feel so alive.

Without polish or overproduction, Wednesday sound is a powerful exclamation of a narrative, full of noise, beauty, and deeply relatable feelings and stories. It may not feel perfect, but it’s real.

Blood Moon I is also the heaviest and most impressive expression of Chelsea Wolfe and Ben Chrisholm's music, powered by the incombustible force of Converge and the everlasting spirit of Cave In, and resulting in one of the most impressive collaborations of this kind. Blood Moon I is, truly, an essential album for 2021.

As is typical on Run the Jewels albums, every feature is perfectly placed, but the inclusion of Mavis Staples and Josh Homme may be El-P’s finest production moment yet. Homme’s ghostly wailing and questing guitar provide a backdrop for Staples to sing an image that perfectly distills not only RTJ’s oeuvre but the bloody centuries of America’s history.

After a series of good-to-great efforts, the self-titled manages to present a much more unified mood than its predecessors and additionally cuts out the spoken word moments which (in my opinion) greatly detracted from previous albums. Here, it all comes together.

Olsen has created an undeniable stunner that should go down as one of the strongest folk albums of the year.

The best parts of classic rock find a home in Holy Vacants without ever seeming forced.

Humble, modest, unassuming, and attentive to its runtime and the need to make a better song; in a year where Migos, “Mask Off,” and DAMN. have dominated the conversation, Big Fish Theory sticks out as the most consistent and well-versed rap album of the year.

It’s a waste of time to recount highlights though, because this whole album is essential, and to skip from one point to the next without experiencing the journey along the way is sort of the opposite of how Golden Hour deserves to be listened to.

Another stylistic pivot in the future could prevent Waxahatchee from settling into too predictable of a groove, but even if she stays the course, it's clear with Tigers Blood that she's discovered a sustainable winning formula.

This is grounded, back to basics writing that becomes the breath of fresh air for the album. This is the record the band should have come back with post Paul Gray’s death; it has all the hallmarks of what made Slipknot great in the first place, but it contains a lot of the good elements that came from .5: The Gray Chapter as well.

It is perhaps the most unforgettable work of her career.

Merriweather Post Pavilion is heartbreaking and heartwarming, and you can either disregard what is one of the most pleasing, enjoyably rich and rewarding releases of the past decade or you can rally with the rest of us, and clap, and sing, and blare it through the earphones on your iPod because we are still all the things outside of us.

It may be early, but get ready to etch their name alongside some of the all-time greats. Bright Green Field is already an album rife with the qualities of a classic.

At once exquisitely beautiful and deeply tragic, and imbued with a bucolic sense of a rural England full of villages and country lanes and woods and fields, I Am Not There Anymore is a journey that you won’t readily forget. Flaws and all, it’s both a worthy comeback for an excellent band and one of the year’s finest releases.

As with Lover, folklore wears out its welcome by containing too many tracks. A tighter song list would have done a world of good.

For being so politically and socially charged, American Band is not a divisive album.

Everything about Only Built 4 Cuban Linx Pt. II demands worship and solidifies Raekwon as one of history's best with a continuation that exceeds his original debut in every way imaginable.

30 might not have been the cleanest of breakups, but it more than translates in lyrical form.

It's not only his best (yes, even better than Lonesome Dreams), but also his lushest and most emotionally absorbing. Acoustic guitars shimmer like diamonds on the surface of a still lake, while Ben Schneider's melodic verses echo a magical blend of nostalgia and romance.

Conquering does nothing genuinely new, and that’s genuinely okay. The basics are the basics for a reason and, as Employed to Serve demonstrate, executing them with passion and precision is sometimes all that you need.

This album is the sound of an excellent singer, songwriter, arranger, and, I’d argue, thinker translating those strengths into some of the most stirring music you’ll hear this year. Loud City Song may not be loud, but the echo it makes is unforgettable.

This may not be Radiohead’s most experimental album, but it is without a doubt their most sonically pleasing, elegant, and acoustically immaculate offering to date--and it just might be their best, too.

Dream Weapon, bold reimagining that it is, could well be the line in the sand that releases the four-piece from the shackles of their historic hallmarks. The dream of another Dead Mountain Mouth or Board Up the House may have been shattered, but a new, better dream may yet be forged from the pieces. Here’s to finding out.

A Chaos of Flowers marks a productive new chapter in their trajectory, sure, but above all, it represents the very best of what Big|Brave have to offer: emotion in desolation, destruction in grace.

Compared to previous outings, this may be the most bold and unabashed offering of Annie Clark’s career. It certainly isn’t her best collection of songs outright, but there’s a certain amount of style points that she garners for remaining so committed to bucking the expectations set by her audience and industry.

Formula of Love could have been trimmed to 10 strong cuts and I am sure it would have been one of the tightest Kpop albums in recent years. It’s easy to dismiss it due to the genre it represents, but there was considerable effort put into most of these songs, so it’s worth some listens.

Katie is making a point of saying more with less, taking potent emotions and quietly tucking them into a plain white envelope for us to open and interpret. She’s as lucid as we’ve ever heard her, stripping down to her emotional core and daring us to make eye contact.

One of the best albums of 2008, Dear Science, is an album you can ramble on about for nearly 600 words before you realize you forgot to mention 'Golden Age,' arguably the best song on the album.

Truth be told, it's the kind of album rappers should be dying to make: smart and sensitive, beautiful and brutal, uncompromising in doing exactly the things it sets out to do.

When Only God Was Above Us isn’t shattering glass ceilings, it’s delivering some of the most beautiful but disquieting indie-rock in recent memory.

RTJ 3 is both a sprinter’s dip and a victory lap – it is neither as sinewy as RTJ 1 nor as effusively vivacious as 2014’s RTJ 2, but still finds itself imbibed with the kind of assured professionalism that is only permitted to those who have previously done enough to be granted a low-pressure outing.

The songs are fun, intimate, personal, and at times simply epic.

This is a significantly more rustic album than All Mirrors, with major country and folk influences joining that album’s lush art pop sound. Even the songs which lean towards the latter style are often gentle and delicate. It’s also a record which feels infinitely more personal.

Magdalene sees FKA Twigs reach a wholly satisfying pinnacle that is unlikely to be rivaled by any of her peers in 2019.

In some ways the album works better as a slightly blemished and broken piece, because like its protagonist it exits quietly while still leaving so much to say, and it's those pieces of work that weeks later are still being debated over that stand the true test of time.

The music within the album has many sides to it, and the execution gives each aspect enough emphasis to add to the sound without creating clutter or over saturation.

With their newest release, Eric Wunder as loosened the tether and slipped into the savage void. The band is all the better for it.

Two new tracks make this compilation all the worthwhile, with the devilish funk of "Fill My Mouth" being one of the best tracks the band has ever released, and the creeping incantation of "Queen of the Underground" wrapping up this collection of essentials from the Swedish collective.

Bandana is terrific because it makes you yearn for that imagined history, the struggle from page to audio that surely happened to produce such a god-given chemistry. Freddie's deep, choppy flows might initially seem somewhat at odds with Madlib's production but that's why it works, because playing too much to the soul-soaked nostalgia robs the proceedings of their bite.

Converge has become synonymous with consistency, and the band's latest effort proves that after seven albums they still have what it takes to put their listeners through hell in the best kind of way.

By combining these previously worked on sounds in new ways Thursday have created an album that is not only new and unique, but also unmistakably their own.

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.

A doubling down on their unapologetically weirdest influences; instead, a scattershot sampling of basically every sound they can conjure, recorded in every different way. The only thing Dragon... cements is that nothing about Big Thief is set in stone, which is in its own way an absolutely remarkable achievement.

Wildlife was a great leap forward, and Rooms Of The House further evolves their sound.

A well-earned victory lap for a band that pulled itself back from the brink of oblivion to sound stronger than ever. A source of pure joy, indeed.

The Hardest Part contains some of the most genuine sounding country/pop that has been released in quite some time.

Save for a few stretches of inconsistent detours, You're Dead! is another reliable entry into the canon of one of the most brazen and forward-thinking producers out there.

Science Fiction is a bold, legend-making statement well worth the eight year wait. If it ends up being their swan song, then we can rest assured that Brand New is going out on their own terms: in peak form, bearing no regrets.

Exit is a classic, a refreshing and rewarding experience that is sweet and euphoric and brilliant. Exit should make Tokumaru a star.

For Emma, Forever Ago is a heartbreaking and heartwarming album that ventures deeper than the its simple history could predict.

Back with a bang so refined it’s positively deafening, BLUE LIPS is an intriguing, befuddling, unique collection of songs that signals the start of a new era for ScHoolboy Q: the man who survived the CrasH.

Deciphering the message in her words relies on just how much time the listener is willing to devote to the album, but with music this brilliant, the task seems all the more alluring.