HEAVN is musically spry and spiritually hefty at 41 minutes, the questioning half of a nationally fraught Q&A that’s long deserved the answers, none of whom are currently running for president.

Like all of Four Tet’s work, New Energy can be viewed as an addition to this unlikely canon, whose practitioners share a desire to remove a listener from their surroundings and bring them someplace higher, no matter the means.

Kelela proudly stands within the genre’s tradition. For the most part, she avoids making any grandstanding romantic or political statements, but Take Me Apart finds its purpose within the subdued complexities.

Though energetic, their danceable chassis and sprawling melodies nevertheless feel weary, as if constantly grinding against some looming, countervailing force. It’s true that wearied, furtive anthems have always been Wolf Parade’s thing, but they feel especially right for these enervating times.

While mediating the difference between bitterness and hooks was such a hallmark of past releases, it feels good to hear them find catharsis here, even if it’s in small doses.

Wonderful Wonderful is the Killers’ strongest statement since 2005, a more than okay affirmation of their power to keep a global audience.

The dreamy project leaves the snide social critiques and radicalisms to the wayside for 36 minutes that feel of its own realm, where the dichotomies and bodily desire feel self-contained. The intimacy is never lost within the set’s high concept: For an album centered on lonesomeness, Aromanticism feels warm.

Three Futures is a slow burn, but Torres doesn’t require speed, not when she can hold our attention with something more akin to intense eye contact.

Taken together, Cold Dark Place affirms the band’s pursuit of technically ambitious rock with high production value, while continuing to disrupt traditional notions of genre and song structure.

These are passive recollections that come off as quietly rebellious, because he plainly acknowledges the value of the black voice, as well as the weight of its silence.

Grohl and his pals never set out to write the gospel on modern rock--they only sought to preach it, hammering it into our heads by way of biting hooks and anthemic melodies. There’s more than enough red meat to go around on Concrete and Gold, the band’s ninth album.

A decade-plus of refining this particular sound has led to the purposeful pop of Okovi, her sixth album. Danilova’s vocal performance momentarily recalls darker and more secretive Sia songs.

The libretto and effects boards on Sleep Well Beast may signal doom, but the replenished energy in the music feels life-affirming. Somehow, the most despondent album they’ve ever made still sounds like a celebration.

An album that’s fundamentally modest, even as it stretches to be both looser and more technically ambitious.

You certainly won’t find a clunker among Hitchhiker’s more familiar cuts, though few of them surpass the official versions. ... Young’s talent is vast and his art contains plenty of contradictions. Hitchhiker stands as proof that no matter how strange his creations might sometimes seem, he always draws them from the same well.

American Dream is good enough to dispel all of those concerns. The passing of their imperial phase has left them like any formerly Teflon hipster: honest, and ready to move on from whatever they found at the heart of the party. Admitting for real that they’d lost their edge is one of the most interesting things they could’ve done, and hopefully they keep making more records after this one.

A Deeper Understanding feels like the ideal War on Drugs album--the one where the songs are the strongest and the instruments the most uniquely cathartic, and with a mist that gives it all an alluringly blinding sheen.

A stunning, sprawling sucker-punch of a finale equally amenable to die-hards and newcomers, Science Fiction is a worthy (if bittersweet) send-off to one of the most brutally honest, forward-thinking rock bands of the new millennium.

Though Villains is a perfectly solid, occasionally bloated QOTSA album, it’s the first to really feel like a missed opportunity.

Throughout the record, words are just pathways through which the melody travels from one sweep to the next, but nothing really comes into focus except an almost free-floating regret and confusion.

Rainbow is a document of Kesha coming into her own, blossoming into the artist she’s always truly wanted to become.

Cost of Living outpaces its predecessor in large because of Downtown Boys’ newfound mastery of dynamics in their performances.

Though the album’s lyrics are occasionally vague, the moments of specificity induce raised eyebrows.

Lust for Life is a spectacular 72 minutes long. It trades in the same intently, atmospherically narcotic sound Del Rey and primary producer Rick Nowels have favored since the beginning.

At its best moments, the EP is experimental and detail-oriented. At its worst, it sounds like an empty pastiche of ideas drawn from a time-tested deck of Reznor-patented Oblique Strategies. ... If consistent, headline-grabbing smaller releases are the way to keep music fans listening and interested in Nine Inch Nails, then keep them coming.

Though it lacks the electrifying newness of the Sung Tongs era, Eucalyptus is nonetheless a success. It is a patient, reflective, and decidedly low-key work, one that seems content to thrum along in its own corner of the universe without much regard for whether anyone’s there to receive its generous gifts.

Even at roughly the same length as past Waxhatchee albums, Storm feels more compact. The second half sags briefly between the undifferentiated buzz of “Hear You” and delicate breathiness of “A Little More,” but in the final stretch, the band pulls through.

Jealous Machines tends in a darker, more modernist direction. On Lese Majesty, Shabazz Palaces leaned towards the indulgent, with a scattershot track sequence that was heavy on under-developed ideas bordering on interludes. This time, Butler and Maraire tighten their focus even as they serve up twice as much music.