Cynics might call it selling out or betrayal, but the convenience of bringing Death Grips' innovative and destructive sound to a potentially wider audience is, at the very least, a positive thing.

Exercising a more polished sound than heard on their debut Intro Bonito, which felt somewhat dinky by design--it was often centered around decisively hollow chiptune-inspired arrangements--Bonito Generation is its own self-reflective hit parade carrying with it five pre-album singles and the potential for at least a few more.

Yes, Virginia is the album The White Stripes would make if they were getting more passionate and creative with each successive release instead of lamer and more commercial.

The consistently laudable performances and production of Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon make for something that appears effortless and remains engaging throughout its 70-plus-minute runtime.

Bazan has built his career on the merit of his honesty, and Curse Your Branches finds him exerting that idea more forcefully than ever before, creating a record that beautifully, paradoxically, and soulfully explores the beauty and strife of admitting "I don't know."

Fuck Death will blow your mind.

Despite longer tracks, this album is a more accessible work. The compositions are less fragmented, and the songwriting has also improved.

The Citizens have blended a poignant and fascinating, personal self-image of professional musicianship that elevates the band to unanticipated captivation.

Splazsh evokes mood on a larger scale than Hazyville, increasing possibilities by stepping up production technique and stylistic variety, but it continues to focus on music's effect on the mind by allowing technique to undermine and contradict itself.

To Be Kind launches them further along their trajectory toward this exalted condition, and at its peaks, it witnesses a dawning of an even-more-primary mode of consciousness: love.

Arbouretum succeed through absolute concentration and craftsmanship, eschewing the easy crescendoes of mid-aughts post-rock in favor of more organically evolving swells.

Peasant pulls every strand of Dawson’s work together to create something that might actually resemble accessible songwriting were it not so contorted by its own filthy humanity. It is utterly unique music, reminiscent perhaps of the complex, gnarled story-songs purveyed by Mayo Thompson and Joanna Newsom, but taken to much darker, more physical extremes.

The vicious licks laid down by Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker on "The Fox" are as punchy as anything I've heard them come up with, approaching something like Jack White if Jack White fell in love with The Experience instead of his Johnson. Amazingly, The Woods just picks up from there.

It's good. Very good.

Although it remains, at its foundation, an exploration of themes that Pierce has long explored, Songs In A&E becomes more than the sum of its historical variants by directly placing emotional vulnerability at its focal point.

There's a primeval sense of exuberant abandon here that, again, many bands working in similar territory try to capture, but that is rarely manifested so completely. And for hookiness, this is as habit-forming an album as you're likely to come across.

The songs on Get Behind Me Satan are sturdy.

Although occasional representational sounds intrude on some tracks, it is Sunn O)))’s glacial, thundering voice that carries Walker’s conceptual project forward.

A big album, grandly ambitious and sonically expansive.

The more I listen to Tones of Town, the more I can’t get it out of my head.

Much as every black witch’s cloak is undeniably part of a discourse that includes both Black Sabbath and Black power, The Haxan Cloak is in a dialogue with contemporary dubstep, and with Excavation, he proves that he has much to add to the conversation.

While still retaining that exacting focus that has made Dirty Projectors the unplaceable enterprise that it is, Bitte Orca is merely the sound of an extremely talented group of musicians tweaking and, to an extent, reinventing their approach, stepping a little further away from left field.

Cosmogramma is futurist in form, rather than content. Reliving the future's past through a constellation of references to cosmic jazz, psychedelic funk, hip-hop, and techno, the music of Flying Lotus never fixates long enough to crystallize; any groove that spontaneously emerges is quickly subverted, churned up in favor of a creating new maps and new vectors.

What’s particularly exciting about this disc is the possibility that lies in Gunn’s interleaving of timeless songs and allover “time”--few of his influences and even fewer of his peers have searched in this direction.

The standouts are too numerous to mention, and all in all, Ladytron have set a new peak, getting to the heart of their best previous moments and expanding on them.

This is pop music reinventing itself, reasserting its autonomy. Vroom Vroom offers a brief, appealing glimpse of a world manifest with characters, ideas, and feelings, all presented with a novel exposition.

Puff doesn’t grab your attention directly. Rather, it occupies your subconscious, leaving vestiges of melodies and lyrics behind that lie dormant for stretches of time, resurfacing intermittently and maddeningly.

DJ Earl opens himself up to new approaches, creating a rich, galvanizing sound, full of rhythmic complexity, tonal variation, and melodic intrigue. It’s footwork, but not quite as you know it, a sure sign of the genre’s rude health as it moves into its next phase.