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.