Seasoned fans will be hard-pressed to dismiss I’m Up as a release chock-full of throwaways, but it’s truly a testament to Young Thug’s radical talents as a rapper for keeping an audience thoroughly engaged, even when the studio experiments aren’t always entirely convincing.

This music is uncharted, revelatory, blossoming, and all the more so, because somehow it feels like it might be to Foster as well.

There are only so many times you can key into someone’s heart before they change the code, and after about 20 listens, the veneer crumbles a bit, and it’s a little too easy to see the gears turning underneath. But that’s not the most frustrating thing about the record; the most frustrating thing is that Sia has so much access to us and just doesn’t do much with it.

Islah is one of the more exciting major label rap debuts in recent years, and one positive to being a Gates fan is that you’ll most certainly never get tired with him.

Is the Is Are, like its title, conjures up a nothingness that is suffocating, especially coupled with the way that the band sells this music as if it were some kind of spiritual exercise.

This descent into industrial retro-futurism provides a fitting artistic and aesthetic parallel to the corresponding descent society has made into technology worship, into a disempowering worship of things at the expense of an appreciation of the social, political, and economic realities in which these things are situated.

Hymns, unfortunately, does not mark the logical next step for the band, nor does it exactly tread new ground. Rather, it denotes a descent into self-indulgence that’s paradoxically reckless and complacent.

Duality pervades Gumption. City and country. Natural, machine. Personal, abstract. Song. Noise.

Every aspect of the album sounds like the full-length equivalent of a Spotify Chill Out playlist: flat, disposable, inoffensive (though “technically-sound”) 2010s muzak.

ANTI is folk music played in a video-drome circularly projecting a 360° image of sprawling, semi-wilderness on fire as a compassionate, loving apocalypse. It’s a charged bleeding heart of sponsorship and exclusivity thrown into the throat of Yosemite. It’s a white horse galloping fiend-like across the continental divide, with a hoof-print-tire-tread that could pull the land apart.

There are sounds, but are they melodies? Yes and no. We hear these sounds and get awed by how Lord Raja manages to suspend the belief that they, the sounds, are somehow working to form a whole. Snares and pads and synths. The same formula, a slightly different approach.

His rhythm work is crisp and earthen, not so much pushing forward as flowering outward, the picture of a mind focused on growing and filling out.

By focusing on his aesthetic and retaining an interest in the possibilities that exist within slow music while setting himself time limitations, Porter has created a record that is as bold and as breathtaking as we might have ever hoped for, regardless of the projection it is set to generate.

It’s good because, beneath his relentless hedonistic pursuits and idealistic belief in the nobility of the unruly drum loops, Future preserves a romantic’s perspective on his panoply of inconsequential street life and crystalline musings from within the studio.

To call Emotional Mugger a celebration of excess, as sweet as it is, would miss the mark. (Although it’s no veiled warning, either--it enjoys itself too much.) No, this is a bender with an undercurrent of anxiety.

Rather than going full-on honeymoon or dead-end breakup, New View treads a middle ground that would border on the mundane were it not for Friedberger’s own headstrong presence, a matter-of-fact reading that gives the potentially uncomfortable tension of the lyrics a healthy dollop of confidence.

So much of listening to Ardipithecus feels immeasurable by good or bad. Ardipithecus fails as a pop record, because it’s barely aware that it’s a part of that conversation.

While Blackstar features a fair amount of indulgence, especially on the aforementioned 10-minute-long title track, it never feels labored, and the music never even once imitates the nightmarish soundscapes of Scott Walker.

The energy sustained here comes only from scientific curiosity at the permutations offered by a piece of hardware, and it doesn’t really connect beyond that.

Oftentimes she’s content to let one spidery riff circle the drain endlessly (“Quicksand”) and more than once she goes completely a cappella, an effect that would normally lend an album a sense of intimacy, but I Abused Animal seems resistant to emotional refuge.

The album’s a treasure trove of exciting, sharp production, recruiting some of today’s most tuneful producers (Mick Shultz, Vinylz, London On Da Track, Murda Beatz, DJ Mustard, Soundz) who simply understand what works best for Jeremih’s adroit, rhythmic vocals.

If Melnyk’s technique hasn’t changed, he is breaking new conceptual ground.

Ignoring the conceptual background, Kannon only achieves the very cusp of the transportative, magical power of past Sunn O))) albums.

Musically, the album mines its entire aesthetic from a bargain bin of classicist hip-hop clichés.

In destroying himself, Chasny has unearthed deeper, simpler fundamentals in his craft and, in doing so, breathed new life into his musical voice. With Hexadic II, Six Organs of Admittance is born again.

Ultimately, Sold Out is not doing what its title cheekily alludes to. Although it traverses a variety of genres outside of footwork’s typical territory, DJ Paypal never relents on the actual practice of the juke: the core sound of the beat, getting danced on.

Beyond Belief is at its best when exploring the conflict beneath.

Fast pacing and fragmentary delivery show how Mutant’s tracks operate as experiments in obsessive dysmorphia, taking flaws and magnifying them to scale drama, affect, and beauty out of digital refuse. Exhilarating moments are found next to tracks that only feature impact tail-ends, panned and swirled around a headspace to suspend spatiality further.