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.

It’s certainly a bit early to be throwing around "Album of the Year" type accolades, but Cellar Door is arguably the crown jewel in an already incredible body of work.

Biophilia the "Bjork album" stands with the best of them.

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.

My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope To the Sky, from the title's evocation of righteous death on down to its suffusion with keening strings and other touches of sonic Americana, is an attempt to come to terms with the dark heart of history, with that ultimate question: if we are born into crime and monstrous darkness, how do we become more than that past?

Again and again, Antony gestures toward a light: a crying light, a swanlight, a luminous impossibility that beckons, ultimately serving only to illuminate the sadness of this world.

These songs are history, and have now become it again, renewed.

Maraqopa is a shooting star, an album bursting with presence of mind, a testimony to emotional rebirth buoyed by recurring themes of freedom and transcendence.

What separates Boss from any cynical cashing-in critiques is that the Markers went above and beyond to actually create an album that nearly contradicts their constructed identity.

Unless you’re already a Music Tapes fan, chances are you haven’t experienced anything quite as exquisitely raw, effortlessly transportive, and charmingly distinct in a long time.

While it may be the most unfamiliar work of Herren’s discography, it’s still one of the year’s first great albums.

The Thin Black Duke is a concentrated work of beauty and malevolence that will go toe-to-toe with any other rock record released this year, and likely beyond. Oxbow can take twice as many years to make their next record, as long as it results in something this magnificent.

[A] near-masterpiece.

Explosions In The Sky are the only instrumental post-rock band that matters, and The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place is proof.

Janelle Monáe’s The Electric Lady is simply wonderful.

Sonically, Rise Above is just another healthy dose of what Longstreth does best. Anomalous harmonies, quirky time signatures, and spontaneous rock-outs punctuate the album’s 11 tracks.

To Realize, the superb sophomore full-length from the band, finds them wholly embracing what was once merely hinted at.

This album has all the presence that you should expect it to have.

While everyone else tries to steal from the greats, The Icarus Line have done an impressive job at continuing the great traditions in rock music.

Both claustrophobic and breathtakingly expansive, The War on Drugs’ latest effort is their best.

What is absolutely impressive about MF Doom is his ability to craft unique, memorable characters with each consecutive album release while still imbuing a sense of unity and dynamic interplay.

Both infectiously danceable and highly intelligent.

Tempest's epic scale and grandeur makes his few previous albums look like short stories leading up to a great novel.

II is gonna get you. It's gonna fold you up, flatten you in its steel press, and make a revolting panini outta ya. Then it's chow time. So long, sucker.

This is the crux of the album’s difficulty: it feels personal and scans as though it should be, but time and time again, it leaves me not quite sure whether I know a single thing about milo, the person.

What you can expect is what makes My Morning Jacket tried and true: bigger-than-life lyrics, classic rock swagger, and the need to move forward.

Some of the catchiest songs he's ever written.

Every song lands, resounds, resists, and repeats true to its aim.

A danceable yet heavy album.

Distrust is crucial not only as the resurrection of the passion and soul of hip-hop in the face of the overwhelming monetary success of pop-hop, but as a vital questioning of feudal policy, raising awareness, and sounding good doing it.

For the Ghosts Within provides another oddly-shaped window into the labyrinthine mind of Robert Wyatt, nearly as vital in its own way as Shleep or Rock Bottom.

Call it experimental muzak, call it cultured post-bop fueled by the internet. Either way, it’s interesting to hear Ghostface sink so smoothly into their rhythms.

The contemplative Mary's Voice may win over listeners who couldn't stomach the unrefined energy of The Music Tapes' older work, with artistic integrity intact.

With pacing like a serial manga franchise, the album shines through its relentless ability to grow on you, despite all odds.

On 200 Years, Ben and Elisa play their mortality out, unnerved and reassuring, wisely, beautifully.

On Everything Else Matters, the band funnels the Kansas post-rock group Appleseed Cast’s delay-pedal wizardry and open-ended song forms into bright pop that’s more in line with Astrobrite alum Andrew Prinz’s Mahogany.

With five songs, Jack establishes himself as a well-schooled artist in musical history and a fine performer with his traditional adaptations.

The result is a rap album that fundamentally challenges the notion of what a compilation is.

It's sucker punch after sucker punch of syllable-swapping fun.

Face the Truth won me over by showing all the sides of Steve that drew me to him in the first place, along with a few new surprises.

Really, the only downfall of Bitter Tea is that it reeks of a transitional album.

Here, then, are 10 more steps on the path, 10 more keys in the song of life and death.

This release feels freer, though--not easier, necessarily, but delivered with a clarity of purpose not quite as muddled, consumption-wise, by sheer weirdness as was their previous LP, Tears Of The Valedictorian, for instance.

I think Keveikur will, for awhile, make a lovely soundtrack as I walk along the shore.