Highlights are everywhere if you give them time to reveal themselves.

The sparse musical arrangements and haunting production only serve to heighten the album’s intimacy and ultimately render it a masterpiece of reflection and introspection, destined to be played on repeat in scores of late-night, tired, and lonely rooms.

While Are We There can be taxing at points, by its end, you’ll be overcome by the feeling that you’ve shared in something profound.

To Pimp A Butterfly is a veritable feast for thought--and there are simply too many loaded couplets and unrelenting sonic fakeouts to be unpacked within the confines of a single review.

Art Angels is the maximalist brainchild of a prodigious talent. It’s hugely entertaining. It’s delightfully bizarre. It’s refreshingly caustic.

Whether by Simpson’s own design or in spite of it, A Sailor’s Guide to Earth is ahead of its time.

This is music that operates at full force at all times.

It took exuberance, painstaking detail, and wide-eyed nostalgia for Daft Punk to create Random Access Memories, their best.

This is the Second Coming of D’Angelo, not a close second, but a continuation of that lineage. We’ve waited fifteen years for his finest album to date.

With an extraordinary remix of Sgt. Pepper, Giles Martin has knocked down the wall between the myth of the greatest pop album of all time and the listener’s experience.

What’s left is an artist reframing the landscape, a reverse-chameleon who can’t camouflage, but transforms the world around her instead. “Pop” is the sound of a bubble bursting.

Rival Dealer is only three tracks long but it’s as rich as many LPs.

Pure Comedy’s scope, ambition, and beauty herald something bigger: the year’s first great album.

This one is no less ambitious and rewarding than some of his previous entries.

Julian has been leading us here since First Impressions of Earth, he has finally made his no-fi, bonkers masterpiece.

It’s a rare album that sounds this warm, this easy, this melodic, this fierce, this startling, this unforgettable.

Another rare instance of an artist coming up with a classic a decade after what seemed like the peak of his career (Clipse’s Hell Hath No Fury), and the only thing that could’ve made it better was if he pre-released “Infrared” so that Drake could’ve responded and we could’ve had an album with “The Story of Adidon” on it.

Nothing feels out-of-place or out-of-sync, everything clicks together in flourishes of simple brilliance.

Beach House’s new record 7, lives up to all the hype you can heap on it and more. 7 is massive and intimate, dense yet understandable, fresh yet classic.

This is a new My Bloody Valentine and it is excellent.

Haunting anecdotes make Carrie & Lowell consistently compelling and elevate the storytelling from murky religious contemplation to relatable human struggle.

Poison Season is a caustic, beguiling masterpiece.

Though it dissects insecurities and shortcomings as much as it does success, Dirty Computer unabashedly refuses to downplay or apologize for its behavior. ... With this forthright attitude comes fresh ways for Monáe to play on subject matters.

Twigs’ superb vocal melodies anchor LP1’s flights of experimentation. Were they to be stripped from the album’s bizarre flourishes and dropped into a commercial R&B context, they would stun nonetheless.

Kanye West doesn’t give the listener a second to realize the album is more a masterly response to a masterpiece than a masterpiece itself. With one sweep of the hand, West brushes away expectations. And then he sticks you squarely across the face

M3LL155X, whatever the hell it is, is perfect. Rarely have five songs sounded so cohesive, or made such a dramatic statement.

A Moon Shaped Pool is the best album we could expect from a rock outfit already into its third decade of existence, and a superb work from the last important band left in the universe.

Not since Kid A has an album so superb pushed away and pulled closer its audience, simultaneously and with such aplomb.

The vast majority of The Next Day is vibrant, even delirious, roaring with Bowie’s heaviest rockers and teeming with guitar hooks that just beg to be lovingly re-appropriated by James Murphy.

Their third record is their best, a meandering, wild, untamable masterpiece from a front man who refuses to stop studying and refuses to be predictable.

[A] near-classic, West’s Physical Graffiti, his White Album. The Life of Pablo makes the wonderful Yeezus appear minor by comparison.

Annie Clark stands astride St. Vincent, a colossus in total--and thrilling--command.

American Dream is as close to a unified artistic statement that Murphy has delivered. I’d argue it’s his first front-to-back, total triumph.

Once I Was an Eagle is a singular achievement: a haunting record, peopled with aural ghosts that come gradually crawling from out of the grooves.

It is not a return to form, because how could we expect or want it to be? It is a return to the contextually avant-garde, and for Deerhunter in 2013 that means rock n’ roll.

An album where the reminiscence of rock is revitalized by The Men’s gift of genre hybridization.

This is a record where the sum is greater than the parts, whereas The Epic was its parts (and having a lot of them). Harmony of Difference is another win in Kamasi Washington’s book.

Richard D. James has successfully crafted one of the most stunning records of his career, and he did so by exercising a deft amount of self-control.

This is music that moves the body along with the spirit, a damn fine step in the right direction.

What a breathless--and breathtaking--comeback it is.

Roosevelt listens less like a dynamic pop album and more like a static soundtrack that only becomes more and more significant as time goes on.

It sounds great while it’s playing and means nothing except that it sounds great and will sound just as great 10, 20, 30 years from now.

Tell Me How You Really Feel peaks midway, on “Nameless, Faceless”. The album’s lead single, with its descending guitar notes and a Margaret Atwood reference, finds Barnett employing old tools to tackle a newsworthy social ill. It’s breathless and gutting, a short and sweet examination of sex and violence. It draws blood, but so does the rest of the album.

The crowd-pleasers are big and full, richly accessible and eccentric at the same time.... And yet even at its most infectious this music can pivot on a dime, emotionally, and the effect is often shattering.

Truthfully, every song is a goodie, except “Sense”, which is a minute of breathing room which won’t kill you to listen to.

The experimentation keeps things interesting and is a rare and welcome sight for a musician in his fifties, but it’s the songs that aim for summer afternoon in the suburbs of “Gold Soundz” or “Range Life” that are his forte and the album’s best.

Torres is an album that is pulsating with life.

The record may be about repeating, but Jaar has yet to repeat himself.

This is an album that belongs in a 2016 time capsule, and one that any indie bard hopeful should be required to hear.

The best release from one of the most exciting artists of the 2010s.

1989 isn’t a “crossover” success. It’s the album every subsequent blockbuster must now reckon with.

Do It Again is foremost a marvel of mood and pacing. The trio doles out their riches with utmost care.

Volcano Choir’s second album is filled with memorable hooks, hummable melodies and arena-worthy choruses.

They have crafted a sound that is new for them and unique in its context, but that falls neatly into what we have come to expect from a trio whose power and creativity runs consistently unchecked.

So spend your capitalist dollars on this album. He’s worth them.

Her signature honest, unpretentious vocals shine through on each track, conveying her struggle with each note she sings.

These eleven joyous anthems and campfire sing-alongs find Harvey striding across fresh stylistic ground. Despite their bleak topicality, vibrant optimism radiates out from lyrical melancholy. Sonic warmth envelops the album like a sumptuous blanket.

Savages’ smart reorganization and shuffling of punk, post-punk, krautrock, and noise music into something brutal, jarringly confrontational, and completely singular is a breath of fresh air and an unignorable statement of power and resistance.

What he’s presented us with, essentially, is the skeleton of Animal Collective’s fleeting creativity, stripped down to its roots, revealing that even at its rawest, purest form the music still has an instinctive grasp of sincere emotion and beauty.

No matter how successful an individual composition is, though, each of these songs stand atop a sturdy foundation of life-affirming lyrics and towering melodies. Few bands can deliver music so uncynical, so exultant, and (yes) so hummable without skidding into schlock.

What truly makes Ultramarine penetrate beyond the passé realm of feel-good electropop, are the subliminal hints of evanescent existence scattered amidst the stardust.

The album thrums with vitality and elation.

For anyone who can appreciate emotional breadth that music is capable of conveying, make Wild Light a part of your life. It may be the best instrumental album you hear this year.

This is an enthralling, stunning, deeply emotive album that perfectly marries understated electronica to sublime vocals and melodies.

Luciferian Towers is a better album than Asunder. I’d venture that it’s even better than 2012’s Allelujah! Don’t Bend, Ascend! by virtue of its interludes not being completely disposable. It’s less bold than their earliest and best work (I wish they’d make another double LP one of these days), but it bodes well for their future, and stands as one of the best albums of the year.

It goes down like a reimagined debut, because it introduces a newly carefree, naturally focused Neon Indian.

Planetarium demands repeated listening, the passages and movements make individual songs stand out less as it is not completely obvious when one track is ending and another is beginning. The record almost sounds modular in the vein of Brian Wilson’s technique on Smile.

It may not be the most talked-about rap record of the year, but it probably deserves to be. Long live Ramona Park.

On the whole, Blonde is more assured and consistent than Channel Orange. It inherits the bagginess of his overstuffed debut, but lacks the thrill of groundbreaking novelty. Frank Ocean is an outlier, an artist who can produce an album this phenomenal and nevertheless fall a bit short.

Hot Thoughts is another top tier indie rock record from the most consistent band in the game.

As patient and even elegiac as these sounds get, both “sides” successfully split the difference between, shall we say, swelling waves heard from a distance and the clatter and buzz of gadgets tuning up all around you. And a lot of the implicit distance in between. Buy it.

Shabazz Palaces are often as mystifying as they are mind-bending, but they’re in a class all their own.

Singularity is the follow up every fan would hope for. It's larger; it's denser; it's quicker. It’s a 63-minute microhouse masterpiece. It rebroadcasts Hopkins’ sound as a more atmospheric, clearer vision.

The best record of the xx’s career.

Vulnicura is a harsh and demanding album, one to sink into with a good set of headphones. But it’s also Björk’s most--if not first-- personal record.

A collection of remarkable songs by a group of musicians that compliment one another as well as any group over the last decade.

Deep Fantasy is an exceptionally produced collection--really, it’s probably the finest recording job you’ll hear on a rock album this year.

A collection of emotionally evocative soundscapes punctuated by more conventionally structured compositions.... It's an ear candy confection of the highest order.

Morning Phase never sounds anything less than opulent.

Though it’s a tad long, and there are points where I get the sense that the band is still feeling out this new sound, Darnielle and crew have crafted a marvelous record that earns its place in the esteemed Mountain Goats canon while standing tall on its own merits.

Ultraviolence, a collection of mid-century ballads spiked with blues-rock, is a stunning accomplishment. Its eleven songs whimper and howl, soothe and taunt, hypnotize and thrill.

It’s a different kind of thing now, even if the fundamentals are unchanged. It finds the National snapping out of the comfortable groove they’ve settled in over the last decade, fuelled by strife, battle-tested wisdom, and a touch of righteousness.

It’s a hearty mix, but that’s not to communicate that Superorganism are just good curators, they also are fresh creators.

It simultaneously respects and warps electronic machines, making for an ideal entry point into the disparate segments of digital life: the horrifying as well as the beautiful.

Though at times it rages, it also rebukes division and seeks dialogue. In the same way black art is enriched by its complicated history, A Seat at the Table shines due to Knowles’ unwavering commitment to her own complexity, both musically and personally.

To Be Kind is a loving ode to chaos, full of deranged, mutant energy and even more brilliant for it.

Even songs that aren’t so charged are worthy of our attention, either for her vocals or some other worthwhile detail.

One thing you should never underestimate, though, is the power of a good story, and Danny Brown has a wealth of them, which makes Old not just the best hip-hop album of the year--but a major factor in every discussion of album of the year.

Their approach works because the songs are so excellently written than they’d be praiseworthy coming from a less capable, more pedestrian group

It’s as good an album by a Rostam-less Vampire Weekend in 2019 as we could have possibly gotten, and the sound is a return to Vampire Weekend and Contra except arguably better with the ‘upgraded’ production and thoughtful textures. The change from indie to mainstream in the tiniest of microcosms: a Vampire Weekend album.

Within himself he finds the strength to embrace existence, an epiphany achieved after ‘processing’ his feelings thoroughly and honestly. And like the loneliest whale, he did all while sounding like nobody else.

After Dark 2 is a confirmation of his prowess and vision. It is proof and testament that the reignited flame of Italo-disco can endure through the tempests of shifting tastes.

The inventive production and songwriting transform result in monolithic, almost sculptural works that rarely make more than half-hearted gestures to anything specific outside themselves.

Beyoncé waited for the last moment to unveil 2013′s finest pop album. It arrived too late to enter our top ten lists, but just in time to own the year.

Ultimately, easily one of the most simultaneously hardest and atmospheric hip-hop albums of the year.

So, bottom line, you’ve got a few pieces of trash, a couple of sketches whose mileage varies on how well you dig their hooks, and plenty of fantastic stuff that ranks with M.I.A.’s best work, and M.I.A.’s best work is fascinating and damned fun.

Semicircle’s many pleasures--of melody, of tone color, of ideals never losing the beat--deserve an essay’s worth of exposition (no, really).

It is by no means comfortable, but it results in an album that is experienced rather than simply listened to.