Like a stew, this album takes energies and flavors from its components, each contribution blending and acquiring the vibrations of everything around it. The songs reverberate, flow into one another, sooth and intrigue.

A big album, grandly ambitious and sonically expansive.

Meshes of Voice is a truly engulfing piece of apodictic expression, and it should be danced, sung, knitted, and talked about, if not because it collapses these categorical distinctions itself so that its blood can run, then because keeping your head still and your voice silent is lying.

A companion album to last year’s Ghost Rock, Invisible Cities again finds the group in fine form, refining their sound and moving gradually further from revivalist afrobeat into a style all their own.

A masterwork that music fans will be listening to for some time in the future.

Though hardly Björk's most pronounced statement, Medúlla is definitely a highlight of her already illustrious career.

Ghost has had his share of ups and downs, but Apollo Kids finds him back near the top.

Cancer 4 Cure is as hard and vital as anything El-P has ever released, and that's no light praise.

The music enables Vega’s voice as his best accompanists have: providing the expository setting and minimalistic bedding necessary for Vega to project his scene upon and float above. His delivery will sound strange to those unfamiliar, but it will be oddly cozy to those who have known it all along.

Despite the flying dog daydream that inspired the record, Cabral often underlines the more fantastical elements of her work with a deep sense of melancholy.

These fine-detail improvements are what make This Is Happening LCD’s best work to date, though mumblings about how Murphy might be repeating himself a bit remain valid.

It’s a solid rock album whose dedication to artisanal noise in some ways negates its ancestry of majestic rock & roll that begs to be heard publicly.

Sleigh Bells have latched onto an exciting undercurrent in contemporary pop music and put their own distinctive stamp on it. In the process, they've made a hard-hitting album that will positively kill on the dance floor.

Beam's voice is streamlined and a little too perfect for fans of his prior music who felt, with good reason, like Beam was serenading them from their living rooms.

They have laid down some astounding tracks here, but as a whole, the album is not on par with any full-length the band have released since Alligator.

Dust is then a remarkable accumulation of disruptions and attachments, gaseous parts and shifting centres. Coherent in their incoherence, playful in their experimentalism, its tracks unfold smoothly, their trunks buzzing with magnetism, attracting the attention of pealing bells, skronking sax, and dub-techno beats.

These pop-forward moments are frontloaded on No Shape, extravagant and baroque. The soaring production value is not accompanied by conceptual upending or reinvention, but rather extends into a grand sort of sequel vision of Perfume Genius.

Though the experience of these songs are much easier to digest than their previous releases, Nick and Paul are still creatively pushing themselves with this album.

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.

Fall Be Kind is yet another reason why Animal Collective TOTALLY TRANSCEND any notion of hipster hype-ism, another feather in a crowded cap. God bless these guys.

It is phenomenal.

There are so many ways into Blood Bitch that it’s dizzying: Chris Kraus, Nino Nardini, the synths, the immensely pillowy hooks, black metal, menstrala. The themes run from menstruation to vampires to capitalism to loneliness to pap smears, and any thread you pick can take you to the core. You have been invited in.

Feels is a psychedelic wonderland filled with life-affirming warmth.

It’s a nebulous, dense, paranoid web of utterly unfiltered expression that’s utterly or negligibly fascinating depending on how much you care about Yeezy.

That Body ends so softly is itself a brilliant resolution, even though its obvious contrast with its first notes is more clever than I care.

Heterocetera is packed with writhing climaxes and blistering comedowns that leave you gasping without ever being able to forget who is behind them. Of course, confronting these contrasts remains a provocation on the artist’s part, but only ever in the best possible sense.

Ephorize is cupcakKe’s most polished statement both sonically and conceptually.

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.