It’s the ultimate inner battle of good and evil, one that even the best of us wrestle with when making ourselves vulnerable to the entanglements and snares of love, and one that Khan has found her most confident and enthralling voice in yet.

As the name suggests, the tracks on Early Fragments are disjointed in terms of their release date and the band’s maturity. But this is to their credit, as the juxtapositioning only adds to the unpolished, lo-fi nature of their material.

Expo 86 just straight up rocks. It never lets up on the monstrous riffs it delivers in its first 10 seconds.

It represents the peak of their career to date, excising the self-indulgent tendencies of before and replacing it with raw, spontaneous, and unfettered power and release that simultaneously addresses the visceral and refined.

Boston Spaceships is his most accomplished musical vehicle working right now, and Let it Beard is one of the finest releases in his endless discography. Period.

This Is Happening is a record that knows -- made by a band that knows -- that disco is better when it's just not so satisfied with itself.

While the album has the signature Wavves sound, the songwriting and production is taking on a sophistication that only comes with a progressing level of musical maturity.

Heems and Kool A.D. might be deconstructing rap for the purposes of delivering ingenious and challenging verses, but Relax is one of the best capital R rap albums out this year.

Molina has created a genre all her own, and Un Dia is its pièce de résistance.

It's rare to find a band with such breadth of vision, and although indie kids might balk at Saint Dymphna's shameless embrace of the dance floor, the rest of us will be lost in its agitated reverie.

This semi-collective sound-making only adds to the expansiveness of the band’s gestures.

Darnielle’s lyrics never let nostalgia float off in the ether. There’s a geography to Goths that adds complexity and specificity.

Atlantis is a shining example of pop music in the 21st century should be.

She continues to extend a thoughtful arm, whittling intricacy into something poignant and manageable.

He never panders to them; instead, Plastic Beach's guest vocals are anchored by Albarn's own melodic flair. His falsettoed ennui shines through, and the songs are loaded with Albarn's pet sounds.

Still only 20 years old, Lorde could have been forgiven for floundering under the weight of expectation. Instead she’s reasserted her status as today’s ultimate alt-pop artist with a record that balances the contemporary with the classic in typically immaculate style.

Unknown Mortal Orchestra has produced the rare indie pop record that seizes you on the first listen but also rewards repeated playing.

The songs never sound cluttered despite the cavalcade of divergent sounds that make up the album, and Pearson’s vocals are adeptly deployed as just another instrument.

This is a very different record from Summertime ’06, both thematically and sonically, but it’s no less incisive, challenging, or flat-out excellent.

Aesop Rock's None Shall Pass is filled with precise lyrical detail and head-nodding production, and the result is his most accessible record of his career to date.

Five Roses is far from mere homage. This is the work of a precocious and incredibly ambitious songwriter who is playfully navigating the history of pop music.

West's writing and delivery has improved since "The College Dropout," though they're still marked by both a cleverness and a clumsiness.

Watch the Throne is as much of a celebration of the A-list prominence of its two marquee stars as it is an exegesis of all of that fame's attendant complications.

The Fragile Army is the Polyphonic Spree's most consistent album, and it thunders with an assurance that was missing from "Together We're Heavy."

The songs on Armchair Apocrypha are broader, more sweeping in content and delivery than their immediate predecessors.

As of right now, the main emotional component of this music is the whiplash thrill of hearing rock music played on the edge of sanity, but if we can be nudged into feeling something in our hearts more affecting or cerebral, something more powerful than an echoing warstomp, then we've got a landmark album on our hands.

That flash of a golden moment in between something sparking in the air and fading quickly away is all The Clientele are living for in this batch of heart-breakingly beautiful tunes, and its what Bonfires on the Heath seems to hold in the center of its heart.

Rock music's era of overarching influence on culture has no doubt passed into the historical twilight, but artistry and ambition in the form is alive and well on records like Hp-1.