At last, everything Escovedo does well is represented on a single disc.

This album is a stylized, slightly-paranoid romp sure to pluck the heartstrings of anyone who has ever lived life with reckless abandon.

Illmatic is timeless because of Nas’s introspective, hyper-detailed approach to his daily life--even to moments that don’t seem particularly notable.

The whole thing has a beautiful and unexpected tenderness to it.

Boucher's production prowess, beautifully complex and ambitious songwriting, is self-evident on Miss Anthropocene.

Free of misguided anger but with healthy amounts of trademark anxiety and angular riffs, Grace’s expression is powerful.

Weariness gives way to willingness as Solange unpacks and ultimately celebrates Blackness, from the politics of Black hair in Don’t Touch My Hair (featuring Sampha) to a reclamation of Black masculinity in Scales (featuring Kelela).

It’s sometimes surprising when you discover that pop songs, as loud and vibrant as they often are, can be quite devastating. This is especially true on Mitski’s excellent fifth album. ... It’s a bold record, rising and falling over the course of 14 tracks.

Kweli's curse- 'n' cliché-free rhyme-ripping proves he needs no help on the microphone. He outshines his celebrated guests, including labelmate Grae, KRS-One, Norah Jones (!), Sonia Sanchez, UGK's Pimp C and Bun B, Musiq Soulchild and Raheem DeVaughn.

Throw in some elegant, economical strings arranged by Owen Pallett and touches of harmonica, vibraphone and sax and you’ve got the best 32 minutes of music you’ll hear anytime soon.

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

You can hear allusions Dylan has made to some of these lyrics in his own work over the last few decades, which makes the collection all the more revelatory. And he sings as gorgeously and clearly as he possibly can, as if it’s more important to him than ever that we feel his love.

Piano, reverb and guitar fuzz make it Del Rey’s dreamiest and most cohesive album since 2015’s Honeymoon and her most rock-inspired since 2014’s Ultraviolence. The National Anthem singer adds new shade to her ongoing California period, re-evaluating the narrative of life in the United States that she’s built her brand on.

It's full of breathtakingly beautiful harmonies and spiralling narrative lyrics that balance complex emotional subject matter with pitch-perfect delivery and hummable melodies

Pretty much every track is a head-turner.

Wilco's ace eighth album, the first released on their own label, dBpm, is a real kick in the pants.

Art Angels is a major victory for deep weird.

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.

One of the year's most imaginative albums.

This is the album I've been waiting nearly 10 years for them to make. Better late than never.

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.

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.

The lyrics are brilliant and subtle.

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.

Strangely enchanting.

As with his last couple of releases in the American series, his voice no longer commands attention with booming authority, but there's something about that gasping frailty that makes this proud final bow even more endearing.

The songcraft is high, balancing repetitive groove with dynamic surprises. There's so much variety here, from icy Joy Divisionesque excursions (Silhouettes) to Guided by Voices-through-an-echo-chamber mood (Continental Shelf) to melodic hooks (Bunker Buster) to howling post-punk fury (Death). It lends huge excitement to the project.

Mix this lovable simplicity with brilliant guest turns by Cam’ron, Lil Wayne and Rick Ross, amazing production by the Runners and Bangladesh, and Gucci’s exhilarating turns of phrase, blunt humour and excess charisma and you’ve got rap’s album of the year.

While there's still mystery and misdirection on his new album, Poison Season is nakedly ambitious and utterly satisfying.

Though the songs here are so much crisper and more exciting, they don't sacrifice the easygoing looseness of Apostle's Folkloric Feel debut.

Like nothing you'll ever hear on country radio.

It’s a bummer that Slayer’s November 13 Air Canada Centre show, and their entire tour, has been postponed due to lead singer/bassist Tom Araya’s back problems, but we can console ourselves with their excellent new album, which finds the dark-minded, serial-killer-obsessed California thrashers keeping all things in balance.

Murphy is still a brat, but this is a more emotionally mature and personal album than most of us thought him capable of.

A chameleon with an endless stream of alter egos and the vocal chops to pull them all off.

At 18 tracks, Honest doesn’t feel bloated. Future takes his time on slow, sensitive jams.... But for every tender ballad, there’s a classic Future banger in which he yelps the hook over and over, lest you forget it, on top of harsh beats.

Beyond the amber waves of grain, Purple Mountains offer fans a feast of food for thought.

Remy is at her most confident as a writer and singer on Poem, and, by working with others, she’s created the fullest realization of U.S. Girls yet.

he 10 unconventionally structured songs are less shaky-tent-in-a-snowstorm and more ambitious-skyscraper-blasting-into-the sky.

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.

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

I remember being disappointed after subsequently discovering Bleach, the band’s debut. It didn’t have Nevermind’s hooks, precise quiet/loud dynamics or Butch Vig’s glossy production. Years later, it’s those attributes that make Bleach so endearing.

It all makes Glass Swords a vivid, liberating experience (and, as a by-product, makes the canned wobble of dubstep seem oppressive).

The choruses are stronger, the harmonies, guitar and banjo lines as tasteful as ever, and the brittle edge that crept into 2003's Soul Journey is nowhere to be found.

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

Think of it as avant-garde composer John Cage trying his hand at disco and getting it right.

Even when West’s going in uncomfortable directions, his music feels alive.

It's eminently clear these producers know exactly when to assert themselves and when to stay out of the soul legend's way to achieve the most captivating results possible.

It's true that we've come to expect a certain level of genius from this band, but when they actually exceed expectations, as they do here, it's a clear sign that Radiohead will continue to reinvent themselves and drop more jaws along the way.

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.

Farm actually bests "Beyond’s" triumphs.

His arrangement choices are flawless. While guitar stays front and centre, piano, strings, group vocals and slide guitar make fleeting, effective appearances.

With a band made up of old friends, Love has made a seemingly effortless record that reveals more with every listen.

It's a near-constant barrage of fist-pumpers built to fight back the sunrise, from the opening pummel of Throwaways to the Replacements-indebted pop power of closer Dirty Lights.

The main attraction is still Baird's and Weeks's haunting voices, which turn a risky experiment into a genre-defining classic.

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.

Although the presentation has changed, the raw emotional power at the heart of Bon Iver is intact.

It's lush, sophisticated pastiche, best epitomized by debut single Running.

Comeback of the year.

The five-piece Montreal/Toronto noise-pop band keep things compositionally complex throughout, and each song rolls seamlessly into the next.

Her great success is making these protest songs personal, and she does it in a most profoundly moving way.

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

Not a dud in the entire meticulous love letter to a da-do-ron-ron era.

Depeche Mode have dropped the best album of their career.

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

Goon is an indisputable triumph and a staggering opening statement from pop music's newest Piano Man.

Hopefully there’s still enough room on people’s psych plates for Odd Blood, a masterful follow-up that deserves to get into your ears.

Her music is generous in its illumination of depth. There’s a sense of solace on the record. Everything before was a hard reckoning, and she knows trouble is never far off, but she’s breezy here. Comfortable, even.

Isis’s four previous full-lengths have clear story arcs, but Wavering Radiant’s themes are open to interpretation, giving it added appeal. Close to perfect.

It’s a rare and amazing thing when an indie musician finds ways to keep chugging along on her own steam for years and then releases an album that brings together in the most powerful way everything she’s learned. Moncton singer/songwriter Julie Doiron has accomplished this with her eighth album.

A stellar offering.

Toy manage to be psychedelic and craft memorable pop.

On 2014’s Too Bright, Hadreas expressed liberationist sentiments, played with gender and made his queerness confrontational. This time, those themes are felt more heavily in the way he channels familiar riffs, structures and themes into something so singular, unsettling and beautiful.

Fucked Up's grand ambition may one day be their downfall, but right now it has produced an intricate, rewarding beast of an album, their magnum opus.

A master class in School of Iommi doom metal.

It's common for heavily hyped albums to fall flat, but Arcade Fire's long-anticipated third LP hits with the satisfied thud of met potential.

What’s most impressive about Attack & Release is how they’ve raised their vocal and compositional game in accord with the sonic enhancements, bringing an unexpected poignancy to their earthy funkiness. Every track is a stunner.

Auerbach delivers the goods with spooky, sleazy and soulful style.

Seven songs and zero duds--this is the must-hear of 09.

She adds magic to the mundane, cracking it open to reveal multifaceted nuances: longing, pleasure, resentment, jealousy and also self-love.

While Bejar's arrangement decisions challenge popular notions of what delineates good and bad music, shaking off preconceptions in order to immerse yourself in Kaputt's nighttime world is worth the effort.

On this trippier, more scattered collection, it emerges in the looming calm, the open moments that peek through pneumatic melodies, beatific, druggy vocals and that throbbing, omnipresent kick.

This is Ghostface's best album.

Gorgeous fuzz guitar leads and glam rock glitter dominate, offset by soft layered harmonies and dreamy textures.

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

Andy Shauf’s new songs are fictional but feel oh so real, especially if you live in Toronto and even more especially if you live in Parkdale and frequent Skyline, the diner where most of the Toronto-based musician’s new album takes place. ... There are new melodic and rhythmic risks taken.

Just 30 minutes long, Castlemusic demands repeated listens.

The real shift is in their attitude, which allows them to embrace earnestness and write some straightforward love songs. It’s a strategy that could have backfired, but instead it has inspired their strongest and most consistent album so far.

Whether howling eerily over a low, rhythmic pulse or riding a huge riff, Calvi's sensuous presence brings much-needed sexual heat to today's tepid rock 'n' roll landscape.

She gives everything, and it’s impossible to be unmoved.

It’s eclectic, eccentric and yes, essential.

His clever quips, wonky wordplay, raunchy voice and oddball timing combine into something beyond reproduction by anybody, not that any other MC is daring enough to try doing this type of grimy, soulful crunk-hop

Not surprising, then, that his newest leap into club-inspired techno and house feels just as substantial and weighty as his previous forays into experimental pop.

With this single self-produced masterstroke, Alela Diane has effectively shaken off all the ill-fitting labels of “new weird America” and “freak folk” and given notice that a warmly expressive and unique voice has arrived with stories to tell.

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.

Fallen Angels is a hazy, laid-back history lesson with as many enigmatic twists and turns as a classic double-cross caper. It subverts archetypes of romance, heroism and interpersonal connection to reveal something more sinister about human intent, all packaged in beautiful musicianship of the highest order.

The revelatory stuff is contextual.... One of the greatest rock records ever.

They're the kinds of songs that make you want to run into the street and scream to the universe that life is beautiful and magical, which is a pretty nice feeling as long as you can stop worrying about whether people think you're crazy.

Together is the flawless execution of can't-shake-loose melodies, genius arrangements (oh, those group harmonies!) and production that leaves you energized.