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.

There are more tracks to like than not, even stretching all the way to the end of the record. If you want Starboy to be a good album, it can be that. It may require some personal editing. It also may require that you ignore what even the most sterilized tracks seem to be about.

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

Most of these songs have good parts--they’re just lost in long, boring stretches of the band faintly nodding off to their distant, better work.

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.

It’s understandable that Joanne finds Gaga performing authenticity, if only because it’s the strongest way to convey artistic evolution to the masses in 2016. The image here--the illusion, really--is as imperfect as it is meticulously rendered.

“Outlaws” is a surprising Revolution Radio standout, recalling some of the delicate, Queen-influenced moments from My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade—sensitive music that feels large. The rest of the record varies.

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.

Mangy Love, his eighth album, now finds him on the Anti- label and like the title suggests, it shows divergent aspects of Cass, at his most subtle, resonant, and resplendent, and at others, his most maddeningly repetitive and scabby.