To this day, Dylan regards the studio as an artifact-making machine and not a magical chamber freezing definitive versions of his songs. The Bootleg Series has bolstered this opinion before but never presented his creative process so nakedly. For any music fan, this is pure treasure.

Lamar sounds simultaneously like a man firing on all cylinders and struggling to keep it together.

Countless rappers claim to have transcended the game. Kendrick Lamar actually does. There’s the sense his ambitions on DAMN. are even larger, reaching toward something more universal, fateful even spiritual in its reach to find the link tying all contradictions together.

Once again, he brilliantly distills years spent studying the arrangements and analog recording techniques of that music into a personal style that carves out its own space between rhythm and melody.

On much of Skeleton Tree, it sounds as though the Bad Seeds are doing their best to stay out of their frontman's way. It's an album of pure, direct emotion.

While curiosities and lost tracks usually only appeal to the fan who has everything, this album stands as a perfect complement to Springsteen's mid-70s work.

He celebrates his contradictions with such musical flair, it's a thrilling listen from beginning to end.

A Crow Looked At Me is an unsettling, awkward listen and it might (probably will) make you cry. It’s also a tribute to an amazing 13-year love story (the penultimate song Soria Moria encompasses Elverum’s childhood longing, how he met Castrée and their instant connection) and may turn out to be one of the strongest albums of the year.

What sets Lemonade apart are the ways it continually highlights the fine line between empathy and anger. It’s a line Beyoncé walks with supreme confidence.

You can spend hours dismantling Sunbather and cooking up a neat sub-sub-genre for it (post-black-metal-gaze-death-dreamcore-whatever). Or you can just call it one of the year’s best records.

Of course, being an audio document, you miss out on the entertaining high-handed flourishes of González at the piano and Bárbarito Torres showboating by playing the laúd behind his back, but it’s still a stellar document of a special performance, the likes of which we’ll never encounter again.

You Want It Darker is frightening, aching and, finally, sad. But, on this gorgeous, essential record, the sadness is illuminated. It glows.

The much richer sound on these formats spins songs recorded as many as 40-plus years ago eerily into the moment. It’s as if you’re listening at the exact instant of recording, making the music as personal as a direct memory.

It's simultaneously of the moment and an undeniable classic.

Titanic Rising is a leap forward for the self-described “nostalgic futurist,” yet Mering’s core musical gifts remain intact. Her voice holds you like a steady flashlight beam in a meadow fog.

Throughout the nine tracks, the band maintains a grown-up punk sound rooted in air-tight musicianship.

Lamar's invincible on good kid, and reveals just how deft his hand is.

Its intriguing combination of 70s Bowie glam, James Brown soul and Outkast weirdness can't really be taken in after one spin. True rewards come from repeat listens. Finally, something worthy of the hype.

It's a mind-bogglingly superb testament to an artist at peak power.

A triumphantly outspoken, brash blast of incisive songs informed by inequality, displacement, joy, loss, humour, working, time’s passage, wit and sick production.

It's easily his most personal work yet, and even though the story of his mother's difficult life is hardly universal, the results are deeply moving and richly evocative.

The 10 songs are tense and commanding, loaded with nervy post-punk charge, ricocheting rhythms and electric guitars both zippy and busy and wild and bucking.

Big Boi's lyrically on point, too, balancing cavalier wit and grown-man profundity that puts this album among Outkast's best. Your move, 3000.

Both emcees are incredibly versatile, switching up speed, style and tone, playing off each other one minute, one-upping each other the next.

Whereas Chaplin's sharply drawn social comment is rightly considered a modern classic, Dylan's Modern Times -- sung in a strangely affected croak you'd expect to hear from Leon Redbone's grandfather -- comes off like a feeble anachronism in which our man cynically attempts to pass off public-domain blues and folk tunes as his own by changing a few words.

Here twigs sounds even more poised and self-assured.

Her sad-girl persona, thrust upon her unwittingly by music media, transforms into its most dramatic form. It’s a brazen sadness echoed through crashing symbols and spacious synths. The songs are devastating, but also nourishing: it’s a whole new version of Olsen.

It has the bigness and accessibility of a major hip-hop album thanks in part to zeitgeisty guests like Justin Bieber, Future and Young Thug.