Like Joni Mitchell’s spare 1976 masterpiece Hejira, Not Even Happiness is a lonesome travel album par excellence: a document of transience and half-formed inspiration, reveling in riddles and paradox rather than firm conclusions.

Though it runs just 33 minutes, Tourist in this Town feels like a road trip movie, a scrapbook of mixed emotions compiled from postcard-sized travel diary entries.

He’s separated from some of his R&B peers, fellows who douse themselves with sorrow and express their angst through detached, self-centered screeds obsessed with how things should be. Sampha, meanwhile, has an uncanny ability to eloquently express the painful facts of life that we learn to internalize. ... What makes Process exceptional is its delicate focus on relationships corroded and fissured by time and unintentional neglect.

A distinctly contemporary album that is in conversation with trendy, critically acclaimed R&B.

If you gauge artistic success by innovation, you can just filter the best of Culture, a very decent group of Migos songs, into a playlist. But if you appreciate Migos and the sound they ushered into contemporary rap as being one of the genre’s most basic, essential natural resources, it will be easier to let the whole album--a drama of perseverance--ride out.

While Ty Segall may not be his opus, but it’s certainly a testament to his fruitful brain and the unparalleled output that spills forth from it--a mind on a marathon, yet to stumble.

In a genre where “authenticity” is supposedly located in stripped-down effortless amateurism, Priests is at their most authentic when they’re using performance to challenge themselves and their audience.

Japandroids fans will be happy to know that Near to the Wild Heart of Life is a Japandroids album, pushed to 11 even in the quiet moments: towering riffs played on maxed-out amps, drums hit with due diligence, big whoa-oh harmonies, passionate, evocative rock n’ roll songwriting about girls and alcohol.

Here, they’ve crafted a shag and wood-grained interior as remarkably indebted to its predecessors as it is now warm and full and huge.

I See You is still distinctly and deeply an xx album, but in the gap between albums the group has found a way to move unmistakably forward while still sounding like themselves.

Their sound is still thrilling, but it’s an album made by men who have watched lives crumble despite willful rebellion and are picking up the pieces to continue fighting, even as the cycle is doomed to repeat itself.

Not the Actual Events is probably the grimiest Nine Inch Nails release since The Fragile. Rather than running the gamut between overdriven steamrolling and receding, glitchy ambience as on most of the work Reznor loosed between 1994 and 2008, the EP realizes a specific, portentous mood from several equivalent angles.

That combination of bottled passion and efficiency spreads itself evenly through the 11-track set.

The work on PC Music Vol. 2 is more mature, less obnoxious, and much more deserving of the early hype PC Music received.

We Got It from Here could’ve been a self-referential nostalgia piece, a militant call to arms, or a Tribe and Friends-style fame flex, but it transcends such shallow concerns.

Rather than trying to replicate their off-the-cuff studio performances onstage, Gordon and Nace treat the songs as rough outlines for further improvisation, to be colored in as the musicians please.

FLOTUS chases a particular spark of inspiration across its hour-plus runtime, as if attempting to prolong an ephemeral moment when anything felt possible.

While he played the easygoing, likeable mope that rattled through life on Never Hungover Again, Cody is more daring and complex document, bled through with cynicism and exhaustion.

The wealth of talent on A Seat at the Table is well-showcased--it’s among the most exquisite productions of the year, each track silken-smooth and replete with quietly virtuosic instrumental flourishes—and in service of a story of pain and healing.

Campaign--a mixtape in name that feels not quite like a mixtape but not exactly like an album, either--is at its best when it carries on that tradition of richness of sound as a virtue in and of itself.

With help from frequent collaborators Paul White and Black Milk, UK electronic producer Evian Christ, and crate-digging maestro the Alchemist, Brown brings his persistent terrors to life.

The wonder of 22, A Million is how beautifully he melds the disparate forms--inside and outside, acoustic and digital, past and future, ground level and interstellar. It’s a stunning record, well worth the wait.

A lot of a listener’s acceptance of Care depends on their acceptance for nervous candor; for purposeful titles like “Lost Youth / Lost You,” for earnest existential wonderings of what “care” means, for transcribed 3 a.m. chats about how everyone looks at their phones and how warm skin is awesome.

For its all its pleasures, Hard II Love isn’t strong enough to convince you he’s decided to stick to a lane.

Preoccupations works with a richer emotional palette.

By grounding their idealism in simple, anthemic rock and a vague mythology, they’ve created an angsty, mutable codex of sorts, an inclusive machine by which to punch all the hearts.

Even though it’s a brisk seven songs, it lingers as the best pieces of writing tend to do.

The first half of Blonde is astonishing, sustained beauty. The second is more distant, closer to the shower improvs of Friday’s sounds-like-a-soundtrack-and-it-is Endless.