Hval continues to cleverly connect, and explicitly comment on, matters of sex and politics on her third album.

It’s a record full of fits and starts, baffling successes and giggly failures.

If you’re not feeling Surf right away, stick with it long enough and it just might bring you to its wavelength.

Things appear quieter for Kozelek this year, and the magic of Universal Themes is in the telling.

The results are brilliant, but the album too often focuses on the latter two-thirds of the album title at the expense of the first.

Diplo and Co. threw everything at the wall and turned around, pretending it stuck when all that’s really left is the splatter from undercooked leftovers.

Tucker and Tividad have discovered their indie-pop Neverland, and a fanciful, free-flowing sound to suit it.

It is exceedingly rare to find a producer who does so much, with so little, that he distilled from, again, so much.

Derulo’s latest, Everything Is 4, proves he’s a workhorse, with possibly even (gulp) a vision.

Clearly, it’s also a druggy album, and the highs are high--noticeably on “L$D,” whose stunning production turns from submerged to soaring, the jiggy “Excuse Me,” and the sexy, aforementioned “Westside Highway,” which has A.L.L.A.’s only hummable hook. Despite those peaks, the overall tone is more despondent.

While his latest album is obviously rooted in Nielson’s present, it still brims with the same introspective nostalgia that comes with dusting off those old memories, and old records.

Highlights finds the former remix project paring down to less imaginative drum/guitar basics, sounding like a 5 a.m., post-Tiki party K-hole, or sex with a Cabana boy you thought for sure would blow your mind--and then just laid there like a starfish.

On True Colors, each track tries to be a separate statement as Zedd tries to crash through his own, pre-existing glass ceiling--but the whole falls short of the sum of its parts.

Peanut Butter is far more self-aware, and that leads to music with greater resonance and variety.

We’re supposed to admire the fact that 30 years after their debut album, they haven’t moved an inch closer to definability.

It’s structurally confounding, simultaneously weirder and more welcoming than any of the other material she’s released to date.

The Desired Effect is another gingerly step into the present, Flowers’ present. No one knows how he feels or what he says until you read between his lines.

At almost 30 minutes exactly, PC Music Volume 1 quits while it’s ahead.

It’s an incredible album strewn with highlights obvious and sneaky, the rare debut that holds up the weight of its backstory, with the added brassiness of assuring us that’s just him on the regular. Now we know.

Kouyaté’s new Ba Power offers an even more streamlined and forceful take on West African tradition.

Where the album fails to eclipse its predecessor, and where it fails to match the band’s new Brooklyn buddies, is in Marcus Mumford’s vanilla songwriting.

Though it manages to be both lovely and adventurous, too often MCIII sounds like Cronin falls back on the string beds instead of utilizing them with the same fervor he used to reserve for crunchy, just-this-side-of-DGAF riffs.

It’s hard to remember he was once known primarily as a co-founder of chillwave once you’ve emerged dripping from the warm bath of What For?

Laufer flushes out the dark corners of last year’s blushingly sexy No More EP with velvet-voiced rapper Jeremih, turning it into his most ambitious and cinematic album yet.

When any of Hinterland‘s nine disco-punk tracks gets in the pocket, the bass, guitar, and drums could run out for a half-hour, remaining insistent in their funk without breaking stride or sagging in momentum.

Pulling a Bon Iver-gone-to-Walden Pond move might be grossly overdone by now, but Lord Huron has skillfully overturned the tired mulch in favor of tuneful new growth.

What elevates Ripe 4 Luv beyond four absolute bangers and four darn-good in-betweens is how it uncovers the creepiness of power pop relationship dynamics.

Listening to Non-Believers is like clasping hands with an old friend: It’s warm, accessible, and sweetly familiar.

The strong-heeled Jackie is far from conservative, and possibly more daring, with three of the year’s best songs at the very top, middle, and bottom.

II, like the record that preceded it, is still a seasick and unyielding document of brutalist experimentation. But because the trio is willing to explore different avenues, there’s more corners to get lost in.

With songs and production this pumped, they’ll continue to make waves far outside their beloved home state.

Ultimately, the most appealing thing about American Wrestlers is its lack of obvious guile or pretension.

Rae is an absorbing enough writer to keep F.I.L.A. afloat. He does a good job of sizing up an unquantifiable horror: being too embedded to relinquish one’s bloodletting past ways.

Magic Whip finds enough majesty and intrigue in the band’s more meditative days to remain worthy company to any of the band’s classic LPs.

It’s a cohesive meditation on the legacy of avant-garde greats like Steve Reich and Arvo Pärt and peers such as Tim Hecker--and, of course, an essential part of Stetson and Neufeld’s own impressive canons.

Winging away from Major Arcana‘s dark, tense pockets--the jagged, crackling riffs and the jarring way Dupuis’ voice faltered at the end of her desperately insightful verses, as if she were about to fall off a cliff--stretches Speedy Ortiz thin at times on Foil Deer.

Your enjoyment of Love Story will directly correlate with the amount that you enjoy Yelawolf’s singing, because boy howdy is there a lot of it here. If you respect Yelawolf’s progression as a musician and wish him luck on his journey to artistic self-actualization, you will be pleased.

On Untethered Moon, the crew sounds as taught and lean as ever.

The desire to show subtlety and restraint is quickly overtaken by their visceral need to go buck wild (“Gimme All Your Love” is the best example of that roller coaster). While that pacing becomes a crack in the album’s otherwise polished veneer, it can easily be overlooked once you’re sucked in by all of the sounds and colors.

Hooks are typically meant to stick, and after the infectious opening tracks, very little of Barter 6 does.

He’s both looking back and moving forward, attempting, successfully, to capture the nervous optimism of youth.

The Dead of the World holds firm to the orthodox occult black metal machinations we’ve come to expect.

Every note sounds instinctual, every moment fluid; this is what happens when good friends come together to watch the world burn.

The album feels epic in scope, imbuing the banality of everyday life with stunning tension and emotional weight in a way few producers can hope to touch.

Shorter track lengths and thoughtful sequencing help Body Pill come off not as a series of sketches, but rather a tasting menu of Naples’ musical talents that’s satisfying even after multiple spins.

The frequent Röyksopp collaborator has clearly learned a thing or two from the dance mavens, sprinkling Ten Love Songs with the mainstream-minded, four-on-the-floor thumping that should make American pop stars seethe with envy.

At its best, We Fall treats its revolving door of guests less like a cavalcade of strangers than a band of familiar colleagues.

After closing the door on her Electra Heart era, Marina Diamandis knew she needed to reinvent her persona. Froot achieves just that, adeptly flirting with chart sugar on the title track and “Better Than That” but more often than not, digging her heels into raw, nail-biting reality.

They’re caustic and incendiary as hell, but they’re also unbelievably fun, an exciting and rare quality in music this visceral.

Cherry Bomb is both impressive in its ambition and absolutely stunning in its aimlessness, weaving countless genres into multi-part suites but still coming off undercooked in its entirety.

Second Hand Heart is a whisker less awesome, but in the last month only Earl Sweatshirt’s album could match its acerbic brevity.

The LP is the group’s most enjoyable, but also their most potent, all the more menacing for its unlikely grinning.

As music alone, the band is looser and more flexible than ever, deploying Superchunk’s Jon Wurster for accents and subtleties outside of his main band’s dynamic range, and punching out the gate with highlights as varied as the Louisiana ragtime of “Southwestern Territory” and the punked-up “Choked Out.”

Ivy Tripp cements that Crutchfield is better able to hone in on her fears and articulate emotional realities.

Gibbard’s downcast verses keep Kintsugi all too safely anchored and docked.

It’s far more interesting and hard-hitting, with bizarre hooks where you least expect.... Taken as a whole, The Powers That B (what a title, right?) suffers from the typical overlong-yet-undercooked double-album dilemma that makes it hard to imagine playing either side in a year that isn’t 2015.

Carrie & Lowell is such a deeply, deeply personal statement from Stevens that its smallness sometimes shows. Though it’s easily his best and most powerful album since 2005’s Illinois, it never quite reaches the same sweeping highs of that epic concept album.

The album won't hold you rapt for the entirety of its 45 minutes, but it'll never totally release you from its grasp either, seeping its way into your pores like an insidious fog.

Exchanging their volatile tendencies for restraint and focus, Godspeed You! Black Emperor have created another incredible work and one that finds them again evading the confines of formula--even if it happens to be their own.

The Ark Work is best at its most explorative rather than its most punishing.

The new developments in sound and style of Marling's fifth album--and the way her leading-lady status continues to evolve--leave it as her most captivating yet. Just watch the movie and don't worry too much about the run time.

[A] taut, very good sophomore studio album.

It's the rare rap album that actually rewards its mixtape following.

Time to Go Home breaks new personal and political ground for contemporary goth-influenced music as Chastity Belt trades cliche nihilism for proactively feminist post-punk.

It doesn't excite with sonic innovation and lyrical reinvention, it excites by just sounding really, really, really good, and coming from a voice that, in more ways than one, we've never quite heard before. And that in itself should make it one of the most thrilling albums you hear this year.

The majority of cuts on Goon still feel like demos: languidly spaced chords, carefully measured arpeggiation, and hardly anything so gauche as a groove. The twinkle, such as it is, comes from the vocal.

Lstenability is the difference between the majesty of this 79-minute behemoth on paper, and the songs it needs to succeed. So let's give it up to the astounding thicket of music here, the best-produced rap since the dawn of Drake.

This band has never made an out-and-out bad album, but now it has made an uninspired one.

Fantasy Empire equally splits its time between the physical and metaphysical. It belongs as much in a musty basement as it does in an art gallery.

Rather than diluting Lewis' appeal, the mainstream-accessible, arena-sized sound of Eclipse feels like it's unlocking the potential for Lewis to reach new heights with his indie-dressed soul-pop.

Eat Pray Thug is 11 songs in 40 minutes with the most emotional moment, "Flag Shopping," up soon at track five, paving the way for the intense trilogy that closes: "Al Q8a," "Suicide by Cop," and "Patriot Act."

Ultimately, even in the record's clunkier moments, it's gratifying to hear Madonna leaning defiantly (and gleefully) into what many would consider to be the less savory elements of her personality.

This is the birth of Will Butler, solo artist, whose career seems just as woozily unpredictable and captivating as that of his "day job."

There's no instantaneous party classics on Jack Ü – no worthy successors to "Turn Down for What" despite its obvious influence, but maybe a "Bubble Butt" or a "Big Bad Wolf." As a guileless continuation of the escapist, dub-tinged blowout that Diplo effortlessly pursued with Major Lazer, it's one of the beatiest prizes of the year so far.

Blade isn't quite that esoteric or ambitious, just an adept, hour-long reminder of how 14 years ago these guys turned your average boom bap into elaborate fantasies of iron galaxies and screamed phoenixes.

The weight of Tucker and Roddick's reverb-drenched, synth-stuffed production is such that it's hard for their songs to consistently achieve the kind of liftoff that the pair desires.

I Want to Grow Up involves aspirations rather than answers, and thus little is resolved of the album's many inner conflicts. Only the sweet-and-sour music they're set to offers any kind of relief, deep-fried in fuzz and totally stoked for that Juliana Hatfield Three reunion.

Snip a few of the duds and maybe Future Brown would be one of the most consistently interesting and understandably weird debuts of the year.

More of the same, really, and what same is that anyway? His beats, hooks and musicality tread slightly above water.

This latest effort shift boils down to two key foci: bolder, less guarded lyrical choices (much of the record deals with Paternoster's ongoing battle with chronic mono) and more strategic space for the frontwoman's legendary guitar solos.

Torche's sound is touched by many of these bands, but not beholden to any of them: In fact, the band sounds more singular than ever on Restarter, becoming less sonically limited as their aesthetic grows more defined.

Unlike on his first two albums, González twists the volume knob up just enough here to sonically divert Vestiges & Claws from its predecessors (or bedroom pop pioneers Nick Drake and Elliott Smith).

A Place to Bury Strangers is one of those bands like Clinic; they've never made a bad album even if normal listeners have decided they only need one or two of them. Transfixiation might not be one of those two, but the abnormals have more fun.

Too Late definitely scans as a transitional work, a transfixing moment-in-time sort of recording that sees an unprecedentedly fortified Drake firing off paranoid and power-drunk thoughts from his basement, sounding even lonelier than he does than when he specifically talks about feeling lonely.

Fashion Week is very different from any other Death Grips album just for being so linear, and while Stefan Burnett's guttural, performance art-ish MCing is missed, their astoundingly dark and imaginative sonic palette remains intact.

If Tillman's this brilliantly pointed as a paramour, we're scared to hear the breakup album.

It's more ideation than practice, which is why the too-cluttered American Beauty/American Psycho won't be this band's American Idiot.

This EP is spacious above the obvious clutter, and its grooves more resemble that of a funk garage band, thus there's more to be filled in. The cacaphony of those detuned, clanging metallophones is a compelling listen or three.

Dylan's voice does the same things it does for so many of his own songs: pries open unfamiliar seams of feeling inside phrases long abandoned to cliché. It helps that this may be the best-produced album of his career.

What disappoints most about Full Speed though is how despite the slick sheen, its lasting impression is characterized by a lack of ambition or awareness.

Reflection takes a shallow look inward and a deeper look outward than you'd expect from a nonstop party.

All We Are can be a somewhat tough album to get a grip on, because it invites musical styles that seem to be set in opposition to one another to find chemistry, resulting in a genre that can really only be described in apparently oxymoronic hybrid terms like "discogaze" or "slowfunk."

After a decade of diving deep into the abstract, Björk's now more grounded and human than ever, thanks to the two most unfathomable ideas of them all: love and heartache.

The Pale Emperor plods inoffensively from start to finish with moderate gloom and a similar level of hooks.

Belle and Sebastian's latest full-length succeeds in pointing out societal injustices with just enough sweetness to lighten the bitter frustration lurking within. And yet, at times the endless flutes, synths, and strings risk of giving the listener a cavity.

More than a decade on, this band is peeking out from behind the veil of obfuscation in an effort to stay relevant; they haven't totally abandoned the whimsy and fantasy, but they've toned it down--almost to save themselves.

The problem is that Bada$$ seems to have missed their lessons on levity. His style--often-poetic lyrics rapped in a blunted monotone over moody production--is skilled, but never very fun.

The thought and vision tucked into these constructions are inexhaustibly fun to listen to and unpack.