By embracing immediacy and toning down the navel-gazing, The National have finally created an album deserving of all their earlier acclaim.

In the same way Radiohead took an impeccable album like OK Computer and stepped into unfamiliar territory with Kid A, Liars have sidestepped the majority of their familiar styles and broken free towards new explorations.

Badu has refined her authorial vision on Return of the Ankh, creating one of her most vital records to date. Despite her frequent afronautic impulses, Badu succeeds in simultaneously keeping her head in the firmament and both feet planted firmly on the ground.

It’s not every day (or month or year) that an album like Rosebudd’s Revenge comes along, one that packs a novel’s worth of imagery, mood, characterization, conflict and theme into practically every line; one that presents scenes so meticulously crafted they inspire us to pick up the narrative threads ourselves, to explore where they came from and try to figure out where they lead, which is always farther than the story tells.

In contrast to 2014’s colossal Ruins, Grid of Points feels relatively slight, though it remains incredibly spacious.

If the album can be considered R&B proper, it’s one of the most consistent and fulfilling longplayers the genre has yet birthed.

Living With War is instantly the most incisive and penetrating album that Young has released in years, and it is arguably the most vital of his career.

Possibly the most confident and successful of this third phase of Black Dice, the pieces here make no claims to exist as anything but the welcoming and obtuse freaks of rhythms gone awry.

Travels With Myself and Another is the best thing this crew has ever made. It’s got all you could ask for: hooks, riffs, volume, wordplay, razor-sharp absurdity, and Jack Egglestone’s incomparable power drumming.

They finally turned their funhouse mirrors inwards and crafted a Mature Album in a way that only they could, refracting their own past work through the same broken prism that they’ve spent years pulling pop and rap through.

Age of Transparency is heady and dizzying, even more unpleasant than Anxiety at times, but it’s keyed in to the zeitgeist in a way that feels genuine, constructive even.

Its sharpness in wake of modesty might make it The Cinematic Orchestra’s biggest accomplishment to date.

On this album, Garbus attempts to do this in a sophisticated and admirable way, and in the very form of her music, she offers a potential solution of a sort.

Even in the project’s continued restless but shrewd eclecticism, this album lives up to its title with an epic, spring-clean screed of passionate grievance in the face a recently re-accelerated, ancient malignant patriarchal tyranny that’s only just starting to get called out for a reckoning at its extremities.

Titanic Rising is even more accomplished than putting Mering’s state of grace to music; with her 70s-inflected approach to songwriting, she succeeds in nothing less than recalibrating time.

Listen to NYC, HELL 3:00 AM close enough and you’ll hear them drumming at the windows of your mind’s storefront.

Music dignitaries and primordial fans will be contented. If they’re smart, they’ll rejoice.

As good a distillation of pop's best qualities as I've heard all year.

There are gestures in her music that are so touching, or so beautiful, they leave me dumbstruck.

There’s a newfound purpose to his dilettantism, one that invests the album with more weight than anyone had any right to expect.

The real genius of this record, and of Ghost Box's output more generally, is that it works even if you don't 'get' the references in anything like a conscious sense, even if they don't make you feel 'nostalgic' per se.

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.

Savage Imagination, the duo’s second full-length album, arrives little over a year after Toropical Circle and represents a remarkable upgrade to their shared sound, blasting their day-glo explorations through a mosaic approach to sound source layering and live multitasking

North Start Deserter, however, is in a class of its own.

Feathers is a thousand times more focused and mature than [Shivering King], and it's all for the better.

Ultimately, the album represents a refinement of every base Liars have covered prior to it, coupled with a mixture of musical maturity and an exploratory vigor that make for an altogether astonishing experience.

Twin Sister ultimately make music seemingly wired to appeal to our most intrinsic pleasure centers, and--as befits the album's title--it's nothing short of rapturous.

Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is Spoon’s finest release since 2001’s "Girls Can Tell" and fills me with a happiness rarely delivered in a genre filled with groups that never improve upon their debuts.