When [Albarn] stays away from the light and the mic, Humanz shines.

Consistent with his acclaimed “New History Warfare” series, it captures a human arpeggiator reconstituting post-minimalism, jazz, and metal in growling, moaning pieces with far more syncopated parts--percussion, bass, melody, harmony--than one guy recording without overdubs should rightfully account for.

A couple of the drone bagatelles, though masterfully realized, break Gas’s signature hypnosis and could be mistaken for any number of Kompakt artists rather than being unmistakably his. But at best, Narkopop faithfully upgrades Gas’s murky fundamentals to HD.

Forging modern myth and cryptic missives into something as immediate and accessible as this is no small feat. Almost 25 years on, Ulver has crafted the best entry point for their catalog–a dramatic pop saga impossible to deny.

File it [“NVRLND”], and the rest of 2016 Atomized, with the band’s impressive collection of non-album treasures.

AZD quickly and wonderfully makes clear that neither retirement nor creative exhaustion is in the cards quite yet for Actress.

Kendrick is at his best when he’s rapping through the abyss, and better when his flow pulls in rappers from times past.

All-Amerikkkan Bada$$ manages to find a balance between necessary gravity and inviting wistfulness. The message can be preachy, but the pace is conversational.

Peeling back the density and obtuseness of Xen and Mutant, Arca is his most engaging, emotionally draining and confrontational album to date.

The album presses pause on Holter and her band at an uncomfortable moment of transience--when their relationship to these years-old songs is clearly comfortable but also mildly antagonistic. However, they still manage to bring out the richest valences of Holter’s pristine and eccentric songs, and more than ever before, communicate her incredible skill as a passionate, intuitive, and controlled performer.

Triplicate is not a shining hour for Dylan when put into the full context of his fifty-plus-year career. But nonetheless, his insuppressible spirit is baked into every moonstruck moment.

The failure to evoke anything specific is what gives Silver Eye its aloof, Bond-theme posture, but in another light, it’s alienating.

The result is a satisfying if not uneven release that never drags in its lament, looking toward the next ballad lost among the chaos. Richly produced fuzzed-face guitars and clattering percussion accentuate the band’s classic noise-pop formula without ever feeling staid.

Each trek follows a similar path: a tumultuous hike through sludgy quagmires and craggy doom, culminating in a melancholic, melodramatic guitar solo. This repetitive pattern accordingly obfuscates the LP’s overarching dynamic arc, although the record’s not without its surprises.

With a tangle of voices and viewpoints, both songs [“First Letter from St. Sean” and “A Better Sun”] write beyond Boucher’s near-exhaustive projections-of-self to see things from with a larger, more insightful point-of-view.

The music is melancholic, urgent, enveloping. After more than a decade, her tightly controlled croon has lost none of its flinching effect to communicate shock and smoldering rage. Aside from sparking urgency and indignation, it evokes feelings the other side could use: humility, and shame.

The pleasure they provide is difficult to dismiss; there’s so much life in these new songs, formula or not.

Though Drake’s globetrotting is seeping into American pop (hi, Katy) More Life still stands apart. Its closest recent antecedent is probably Drake’s own Take Care, itself a kaleidoscopic masterpiece that pulled horizontally and vertically from across music.

Hot Thoughts sounds like Spoon and Dave Fridmann’s idea of a futuristic, guitarless record, which is to say it’s full immaculately constructed rock songs arranged on layers and layers of synthesizers and studio fireworks.

Where Turn Into’s multilayered arrangements sometimes felt scrunched, Everybody Works blossoms.

Nothing on Heartworms matches the processional majesty of Port of Morrow’s “Simple Song,” or even the go-for-broke mugging of “Fall of ‘82,” an unholy riff on Joe Walsh, Steely Dan, and Thin Lizzy. What Heartworms does have, though, is the informal approach to formalism shared by another Southwesterner transplanted to Portland, Britt Daniel.

These songs are more believable--touching, even, if you’re not put off by the milky expressiveness of his voice--than the multiple attempts at rapping.

FORGET sets out for new terrain with an expanded collection of collaborators, but isn’t far from what you’d expect from the project at this stage.

Why Love Now is reserved in its sonic experimentation. But for a band as sharp and capable as this one, that’s not really a problem. Beneath the acerbic jokes, Korvette is a humane and considerate writer and performer.

FUTURE is lively and engaging, with production and rapping that feels consciously animated.

A conduit for sound at its most expressive potential, No Home of the Mind squeezes all it can from the five-person form into something warm and full and unprecedented.

The contrast between his interiority and the sturdiness of his compositions is striking. So, too, is the contrast between this album and Heartbreaker, his lauded solo debut. Ranking breakup records is a ghoul’s errand; suffice to say that loss was Heartbreaker’s fuel. Here, it’s turned to fumes.

A generous, pacifistic record about the dynamics of friendship and the grace of listening--both, however coincidentally, apt palliatives for a tense, hostile global moment.

Doing away with his human human voice entirely in favor of an android’s syrupy drawl would seem like a logical next step for Sakamoto’s music, and it’s tempting to wonder what Love If Possible would sound like if he’d further indulged his more experimental tendencies.

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.

The strength of and the Anonymous Nobody... remains how it holds together as a complete, cohesive listen.

Dead Ringers embraces zero-gravity keyboards, clean vocals, and the spaced-out guitar sprawl of the best Popol Vuh records. It’s the farthest he’s gone from traditional metal signifiers, but it’s proof that inky bleakness is no heavier than blinding light.

Aside from a new perspective on Myrkur’s music, Mausoleum provides a welcome diversion from the general praxis of live albums as we know them.

There are pleasures to be found on SremmLife 2 once you adjust your expectations and realize that it’s not a “No Flex Zone” sequel. Instead, it charts a different but still familiar path: Every youth explosion is eventually tempered by the grind and hard-won rewards of grown-man work.

Episodic is a steady, ten-track affair that doesn’t overstay its welcome, and it leaves on an anxious note.

Thee Oh Sees are always the same but different, drifting through genres before twisting them out of shape, from the bubblegum of Castlemania to the metal-tinged Floating Coffin. On A Weird Exists, they do this more successfully than ever before. [Sep 2016, p.80]

This is the soundtrack for when everything feels like static and you can’t bear to press on.

Those noisy, waxy workouts (“Tarpit,” “The Post”) that served to make the hookier tunes even brighter on the ’80s Dinosaur albums have mainly been left behind with the band’s youth since their 2007 return. But the swaying, softer respites on Not prove just as effective.

Far from a run-of-the-mill concert LP, Live provides a much-needed reminder of Pylon’s understated genius--not just as a live act, but as unparalleled, influential alt-rock progenitors.

Even at the EP’s most florid moments--say at the 11-minute mark, where they zone out for a minute of cobweb-like arpeggios--it remains music of immense impact and gravity.

The best bits are when the band’s own drummer Dale Crover picks up the bass for a third of the album’s 12 tracks.

They maintain a slow, directionless drift that weights their third record with the dread of what’s beyond the sky.

Late Nights: Europe is a dirty, delectable paean to the mischief that takes place after three in the morning.

[A] sensational debut--she’s evolving into an artist serious pop listeners can commit to.

Everybody Talking might not be the very best record Gucci’s ever released--as much as everyone’s rooting for him right now, it’s hard to say whether this album can displace Chicken Talk or Mr. Zone 6 in his vast canon. But it’s by far the greatest cause for celebration in all of Gucci’s career; the iceman comebacketh.

The band sounds better than ever, too, mounting a muscular four-way attack that captures the immediacy of their frenetic synchronicity better than any non-live album of theirs to date.

By seamlessly incorporating disparate collaborations into the fabric of this City, Crampton summons a greater collective strength than they’ve exhibited on their own--and implies that, going forward, her muse could lead her anywhere, with anyone.

It can be strikingly narrow, to impressive ends--not many producers would be able to wring so much emotion from stoned, spacey, minor-key arrangements year after year. ... But in other ways, the results can be mixed.

From the moment that crystalline keyboard riff and sparse drum machine open the first track, “And That, Too,” it’s clear the band has raised the stakes to match the talent they’ve been hanging out with.

Psychopomp is a 25-minute-long dream-pop album that feels like much more: a sharp-edged exploration of how loneliness and longing form into brittle personal shields.

Not everything works, and the second side maybe gets bathed in one too many foggy organ dirges, but I, Gemini is like the chorus subject in weirdo-pop single of the year “Eat Shiitake Mushrooms”: Never invincible, but never predictable.

[A] crop of relatively cheerful-sounding — not to mention industrious, and never dull--tracks.

It’s not at all certain that this lovely, gentle record will ever get a follow-up--fortunately, it already sounds damn-near timeless.

Sweetly alienated knockouts like “Ice Cream (On My Own)” and “Sometimes Accidentally” lend a gravitas to twee as shruggily out of place in 2016 as Tallulah was in 1987--and every bit as necessary.

It’s not easy to homogenize the opposing forces at play, but everything here feels like a genuine rumble through a mind scarred and inebriated by the reality of gang life and chasing the American dream while the room spins.

Nice as F**k are not a “girl group”; they’re a Spoon that owes two dozen quarters to a washing machine.

Cheetah is warm, rudimentary (lotsa 808s), and demurely catchy--making it the poppiest record of this career phase by default.

Wildflower is a shaggy document, to be sure. Not everything’s a stunner like “Because I’m Me” or “Harmony”--sometimes there’s moldering AM Gold like “Light Up.” But now it’s not about the journey into paradise, more like a rush to the finish line. They’re out of time, but they still made it.

A mature but still totally floor-ready return.

Ladyhawke’s long-awaited Wild Things is both a Tegan and Sara-worthy fever dream and a Little Boots-ian collection of expertly rendered synthesized-rock.

The Julie Ruin’s second full-band album, Hit Reset, slides with similar grace [as “Rebel Girl”] between the personal and political--between funny (or sad) polemic, and sad (or funny) pop romance.

She’s flipped the script on us, and in doing so has created her most cohesive work--and maybe even her happiest ending yet.

So assured of its luxuriance that it clocks in at a trim 46 minutes, blackSUMMERS’night nonetheless leaves one sated. This distillation is purest Maxwell.

This isn’t just glassy-eyed ambition--Hynes seems to have deliberately made this his blurriest effort to date, a blending of his chosen genres and ideas in a disorienting collage.

The Mountain Will Fall is only somewhat transcendent in its quiet moments, and the highs are too few and ephemeral. It’s quaint--a step away from the zeitgeist, but not quite future enough.

Even though The Glowing Man offers a satisfying, substantial conclusion to the Swans discography, listeners shouldn’t expect a now-or-never, paradigm-shifting opus.

This is Jonas’ complication: talking his way into, and then through, sexual minefields. The theme suits his peculiar pipes--the jutted-jaw pout, the texture he scratches into his more insistent notes--which, in turn, take the burden from the compositions.

It successfully excavates old and gorgeous Garbage: digs it up, dusts it off, reassembles it, and lovingly crafts replacements, piece by vivid piece, for the strange little sounds that have rotted away.

On the leaner, extraordinarily concise Magma, you hear Gojira becoming even more fully realized.

YG has gone and done himself one better, creating a record that stands tall alongside the full-lengths he once mined.

Puberty 2 isn’t shaped like an opus; it’s jagged and slight and the auteur has already expressed second thoughts about the liberties taken with its addiction-themed coda. But it’s a high-watermark of post-irony indie, a cracked safe of perspectives previously unheard in lump-throated punk.