Finding new ways to speak old truths. I think that’s why we may be here. I think that’s what Phil and Julie find as they wing and waver their voices around the songs of Lost Wisdom pt. 2.

It is Amon Tobin's richest work, and incredibly aurally pleasing.

LP (2015) is a short and sweet affirmation for the faithful.

While the first disc winds its way sporadically through the humid alleys and hazy bars of a multi-dimensional shantytown, the second half explodes outward upon the magnificent vista of symphonic discotheque.

If you let it work its magic, it will--no matter how unfashionable or cloying it may seem at a glance. It’s music to get absorbed by.

Like all works of elusive beauty, Lookaftering is something that is so immediate and accessible it will take time to realize just how enriched with subtle evocation it is.

Pitiless Censors is a sparkling album, a lo-fi synth pop masterpiece that manages to give endless aural delights while still being intellectually engaging, and despite having been caught at the center of a whirlpool of current movements, all of which reflect some aspect of Maus' style, he has only cemented his identity as a singular, unimpeachable figure.

In bringing to light these stillborn-again pleasures, The Caretaker reveals himself to be nothing less than formidably eponymous.

Traceable by touch, cogent in dreams, the fibers of its text bear the weight of a psychedelic meisterwerk.

The Fiery Furnaces have made one of the most ambitious and, quite likely, one of the best records of 2004.

This is an awesome, magnificent, incandescent, trailblazing record.

Whereas Antony and The Johnsons was a stark, chilling affair that was arresting and perhaps a little disconcerting, this album is a shining beacon of hope and healing amidst ceaseless pangs of heartache and loss.

The beauty of the album rests in Loretta Lynn's exceptional songwriting.

With Ruins, Harris opens up a portal to one of those clearings, and I don’t feel quite as bombarded affectively and aesthetically (by problems, timelines, insecurities, noise, and other people) when I hear its call and disappear there.

The Fiery Furnaces have delivered another great American novel via guitars, drums, bells, and whistles.

They accomplish what most rock bands only dream of: the subtle transcendence of genre, form, and the music itself.

Three months in, DAMN. feels like our first Trump-era classic. It’s as bold and as hard and as hopeful as it is bursting with vitriol. It’s as distracting as it is inciting. It’s as cohesive as it is dense.

Truly, Sweet Heart, Sweet Light is one of those gorgeous things and, if nothing else, the most profound late statement Spaceman has given us in a decade.

This record is full of the illogical, instinctive, incomprehensible poetry that the BEST Rock & Roll lyrics are made of, and contains some of the most distinctive and indeed brilliant music of the last ten years/twenty five years/ever/let's get more carried away.

It's hard to imagine The Decemberists topping such a fantastic and ambitious record, but as their previous albums show, I'm sure they'll have no problem one-upping themselves again.

An astonishingly challenging album in every sense of the word; and for this, it is one of the most fascinating and beautiful things I have heard in years.

Phil presents his thoughts here with stunning candor, using just a laptop and a microphone to capture his characteristically amorphous guitar lines and thin yet comforting balm of a voice.

Be the Cowboy is about capriciousness, denying the contrivances of beauty in some ways while bending to its standards in others. She’s walking the divide between love and heartache, between dejection and fury. But Miyawaki has the talent to straddle that line with poise and aplomb; she’s the geyser and also the slow dancer. She’s singing for herself, but also for her audience. There’s a little Mitski in us all, pilgrim.

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.

This is a major step forward in pushing the IDM aesthetic into the bigger territory of soul and R&B music.

What Lopatin leaves us with is a stunning example in the evolution of an artistic premise and a flawless embodiment of emotive responses to sound, which unite here in their most fractured form: a moving stillness for the digital age.

Good luck finding a better straight-up indie-pop/indie-rock record this year (save TV On The Radio) that's as uninhibited, unique, and flawlessly all-over-the-place as I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass.

While LCD Soundsystem is grounded in the past, quality and talent make it an album deserving to be listened to for years to come. Talk to me in a few months, but I think this one won't be beat.

A beautiful concept that's been beautifully executed.

It's unlike anything else in Lopatin's discography, not just a bold step sideways, but something like an epistemological break from an artist whose work increasingly bears the weight of something like hegemony.

For the most part, it’s the moments that pivot between shadow and light that provide the most pleasure. “L’Inconnue” emerges from its chrysalis around the 1:40 mark, Legrand singing in French as a heavenly choral loop begins to surround her voice. Both musically and lyrically, the development feels closer to the sound of falling in love than anything they’ve made, an ecstatic payoff that ranks among their finest work.

Return To Cookie Mountain is one for the ages.

Anyone who can sit down in such a short period of time and write this many unique songs has to have something abnormally genius working inside.

Soil is a crucial psalm; crucial for its queerness, crucial for its catholicism, its pagan roots protruding into sidewalks, crucial for its purity of heart, crucial for how it avoids imperative, softly chiming.

Soft Money continues to blur the line between downtempo electronica and underground hip-hop in its own distinct, highly gratifying way.

I can confidently say that this is some of the most astonishingly beautiful music being made today.

It seems as though the quick release of Untrue restricted Burial from burying his emotions underneath layers of alternatively sparse and overwhelming production as he did on his debut, resulting in an album that instead wears them unabashedly on its sleeve.

Quarter Turns embodies a shadowed and daunting environment with such an abundance of beauty that it bears contrast rather than resemblance to that damning abode, for the former remains an uncontrollably agreeable environment, despite its grim and unnerving allure.

A perfect album.

One of the best albums of the year, hands down.

Melodrama overwhelms me. It reaches me at that weird and fragile center.

It sits in the top tier with other indie folk/rock live albums, like Bill Callahan’s Rough Travel for a Rare Thing, Ryan Adams’s Live at Carnegie Hall (the full version), the Elliott Smith bootleg Live at Studion, and, of course, Kozelek’s Live at Biko. But there’s something worthwhile about these albums that goes beyond their technical mastery and the songs they contain.

So come now fans of insidious and wily (yet cerebral) rock, Liars have delivered just what you need... even if you don't realize it yet.

It may end angrily, but when it’s all said and done, Microcastle is a blissful retreat from the known.

The Soft Bulletin provides an exquisite soundtrack to have blasting in the car at night.

RELATIONSHIP OF COMMAND IS THE GREATEST ROCK ALBUM I HAVE HEARD IN THE LAST TEN YEARS.

Perversion packed with allusions -- forgotten titles, purloined and paraphrased sources, pilfered public records and archives. This is what steeps the songs in American history instead of planting them in psycho wards, clinics, and retirement homes.

The lack of vanity, the frank way it strives for accessibility only serves to further magnify the greatness of Anxiety. It does the most ideal thing art can do: it tries to make sense of life itself, without pretense or guile.

Over and over, listen after listen and Half Free just plain sends. Mastermind Meg Remy’s first album for the vaunted 4AD label is bursting with vivid, cracked imagination and cool mastery of slippery pop allure.

Surprisingly, it’s far more tuneful than her previous release, ALL BITCHES DIE, and yet arguably even less listenable. ... Her voice is an astonishing instrument, moving from operatic fullness to hyperventilating shredded shrieks, but always foregrounding intelligibility.

It is phenomenal.

Ultimately, what makes Good News so successful is that it retains the melancholy mood of past works, while at the same time adding depth and maturity.

Destroyer's new album Kaputt may be one of the most indefensible albums of all time. But it's also a masterpiece.

This is a great record, if it is a record.

This is nothing short of a monumental piece of work.

Almost Killed Me is the most authentic, dirty, and rocking album you'll hear all summer.

Here we have an artist who's been making music for nearly 25 years and this album sounds fresh and new. This album is, by far, the best record I've heard this year.

TMLT feels like the Titus Andronicus record par excellence, it pushes and shoves at the boundaries of what such a record could or should conceivably sound like.

I don't know if this is one of the bravest or boldest albums of the year, but its definitely one of the neatest.

Unlike the first three Wilco albums and even more than Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, A Ghost is Born requires careful listening.

Smile is quite simply the greatest triumph in the history of pop music.

As a word of warning, though, this brilliant, but lengthy double album may not be the best beginner's guide to Nick Cave. However, for anyone who is a fan of the duration of his career, this album rewards the listener with a bit of the best of everything he has to offer.

Black Messiah was crafted painstakingly, that’s evident, but it never sounds labored over. It sounds loose, on fire, and huge, like a truly Christian sermon.

This is one of the albums of the year: completely out of left field and completely solid from start to finish.

The result is Björk’s most frighteningly intimate album to date.

The first time I listened to Now Only, it was raining and I cried for 10 minutes; after it ended, like a body after an exorcism, I felt lighter.

Beyond the Fleeting Gales is a genuine and unpretentious promise from Crying that they are here, and so are we, and together we can save the world, even if it’s just for a moment.

Fractured, inconsistent, broken, torn, OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES aims toward the stylistic grandness of High Pop, and in that inconsistence, it achieves it. ... It’s incredible.

If you're not moved in some way, you don't move.

The middle of the album is as hard-edged and relentless as anything of Squarepusher's, if not more.

The band's most ambitious, mind-blowing, and best record yet.

No one is reinventing the wheel here; humility rules, and what makes Gala Mill so impressive is how The Drones wear their emotions on their sleeves and how naturally everything spills out.

To Pimp a Butterfly requires an extra commitment. Even the most casual attention to the lyrics can unveil the complexity of Lamar’s critique of institutional racism, consumer capitalism, hip-hop culture, justice, and his own choices as an artist, as a black man, and as a human being.

This isn't an edgy, experimental record. It instead explores human nature through conventional tonality and flow, delicately combining melancholy, detachment, and exhilaration.

Crackles with sparkling guitar work and [is] simply a great, fun, rock n' roll album.

A mandatory release for all Les Savy Fans, both serious and casual.

The Seer delivers on its promise. It's an exhausting and maddening document, but one can't help but emerge from it filled with a renewed radiance.

Blue Eyed inarguably sets Hollon as one of the finest artists in electronica today, and it would be a shame if you were to miss out on this release.

Too Bright boasts harder-hitting lyrics, more sophisticated arrangements, and his best-fitting production yet. Its musical successes are obvious in their immediacy and variety.

This is the sound you need to get for right now, and it’s built to last well past that.

[A] gleaming, polished gem.

Son should stand as one of the most beautiful and inspiring albums of 2006.

This is her second visual album, and Lemonade is best served with the visuals, a semi-autobiographical film with deft dream-logic, a Purple Rain for the internet age. Its waves wash over the political-commercial-aesthetic limits of Beyonce, which at the time of its release felt a generic/political revelation, but now seems watered-down compared to the bittersweet specificity and holler of Lemonade.

No Flashlight is the most sincere album I've heard in so long that it fills me with a joy that couldn't possibly only come through the music.

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.

This very refusal to cohere, to make sense, to play the game of identity and otherness, of harmony and disharmony, makes Bish Bosch this year's only necessary work of art.

Frequently labeled as a lecherous rogue or public provocateur, Gainsbourg is also one of the most important artists of the 20th century, and this masterpiece is the proof.

The songs here represent more than just a band; they represent the myth, the sound of “beautiful losers,” as Buck describes them, making good on the promise their sound always presented.

This is techno at its most individuated, the drama of small, melodic transitions between layers of simple, emotive phrases sought in weirdsigged box jams.

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.

A memorable, impermanent joy, it restores, rather than disturbs, the equilibrium--a feat of engineering in the service of artistry.

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.

This album is ridiculously rhythmic.

It’s in her artwork’s texture that Hval’s voice fascinates.

All works of art, like all minds, have the potential to overcome mere sentiment. And that potential is glimpsed here in 10 restless hatchlings that make up Carla Bozulich’s new and perhaps most essential record.

On Komba, their beats are deeper, darker, and more powerful than before, pointing the way towards a new direction for the band and, consequently, their audience.

Bestial Burden, in its immediacy, in its primal, abrasive engagement with the senses, reaches across the division of bodies to speak directly to you.