It’s no wonder the process felt redemptive for Smith; to exorcise years of mounting bleakness is no doubt a relief, but the resulting record is one that’s compelling for the exact opposite reasons. It’s not a light at the end of a tunnel, but luminescence creeping through the crack of a doorway--illuminating just enough to let you realize just how dark everything still is.

Fever Daydream is a surprisingly assured debut that, at the very least, evokes electronic music of the past and present.

ANTI is Rihanna’s first aesthetically personal album, and throughout its disorderly roaming, it remains revelatory in a strict sense; it’s a musical step sideways but an artistic step up.

Plenty of musicians this diverse and dreamy can lose themselves beneath production textures or simply the weight of their own brain, but Hilton doesn’t shy away from indulging in pop, which is as experimental and transitional a form as any other.

PARA, is both exactly what its name suggests and a galaxy of far, far-flung musical touchstones.

As important as the production is, though, it’s still the songwriting that makes Pawn Shop stand out.

The most impressive thing about Moth is the way it manages to wrap a more compact frame around Chairlift’s spiraling colors without dulling the final product.

In trying to transcend dance music, he’s actually made its purest form: an album that’s a listening experience.

While Purple Reign is not a masterpiece, it is a thoughtful, if slight adjustment on the lens of where Future stands, at a crucial moment in his career.

Jonny Greenwood’s electric fuzz, supplementary rhythms, and beloved vintage Ondes Martenot synthesizer add real bulk to this Middle East meets East plus West experiment in cultural diplomacy.

At a relatively spry 62, Maal’s voice retains both upper register strength and youthful clarity.

Night Thoughts honors Suede’s longstanding place in Brit-rock history as theatrical brooders with a penchant for pop and post-punk, while also celebrating the five-piece’s growth by supplying listeners with another round of swirling dance ballads (the gloomy, arena-filling “Outsiders” and the twinkling “No Tomorrow”) and operatic, Dog Man Star-ry ruminations (“Tightrope”).

Sonically, Emotional Mugger lands somewhere between all of these records [Manipulator, II, and Ty-Rex], maintaining the cohesion and (relatively) streamlined arrangements of Manipulator but nodding to the scuzzy ’70s hard rock of the latter two and Segall’s trademark haywire, lo-fi garage.

The tonal palette is warm and lush, with a transporting quality that’s twofold, sending the listener both to the artist’s western locale and back in time.

Her best album-length-EP since Quarantine remains instrumental, but now skitters jazzily.

One of his strongest outings ever.

Despite expert camping, the title track, lodged like a splinter at the beginning of the sequence, strikes as too reliant on wintry rue. But when three-note fuzz guitar blasts answer each lyric in “Lazarus,” or Bowie harmonizes with himself on the nonsense lyric of “Girl Loves Me,” it’s hard to resist 40 years’ worth of craft resulting in so intriguing a record.

There are a few strong sonic ties to God Complex, specifically the works of producer Louie Lastic, but this album has greater balance. The full spectrum of sound explored is even richer this time around.

Jeremih’s no saint, certainly, but this album feels universal in its depictions of desire--his sexiness is satiable, his desires multifaceted, and the way he chooses to explore them deliberately diverse.

Every note fits. Every key has a keyhole. And King Push proper would be hard-pressed to beat this small wonder of great cameos (the always-undervalued Jill Scott, sampled Biggie), productions (in a first, Timbaland manning the boards on the eerie “Untouchable”), and block quotes (“I’m the L. Ron Hubbard of the cupboard”) here.

Whether the devastation of the aforementioned accident has imbued Baizley with new life, or his dual successes in the arts are just making him a fuller person, somehow Purple is still heavier than Yellow & Green despite being a leaner machine.

The occasionally somewhat disturbing words he pens for that medium knock around on the page with the same ease that they roll out of his mouth.

Big GRRRL Small World sounds like the work of someone too tireless to limit herself to genre lines or defined boxes, and it’s hard work resisting rap’s numerous pigeonholes.

The Buffet is better than just another R. Kelly album, but not enough to be worth saying so outside of a review, much less on a year-end list; call it a good one-night stand.

The tunes on Saint Cecilia--the patron saint of music, as any Art Garfunkel fan will tell you--were largely assembled from past albums’ cutting floors. The title track crawls towards wholeness on the lovely vocal meld of Grohl and Kweller.... Meanwhile, “Iron Rooster” is a bone-tired dragger that’s probably of recent vintage but could date back to Down on the Upside.

Though we may never fully understand BUB’s highly advanced Space Speak comprised of rumbling mix of squeaks, chirps, and squrggles, listening to the ebullient Science & Magic would indicate BUB’s newfound ability to sneak out from under the proverbial bed and bask in a ray of sun.

Even as they add unimaginable depths to a deceptively simple form, Kannon reasserts their commitment to merely existing, unapologetically out of genre and out of time.

What’s most charming about But You Caint Use My Phone is how unpretentiously Badu comports herself, ever-mindful that one of her most special qualities as a vocalist remains her ability to entwine the resilient with the goofy.

There’s plenty of sublime to go with the ridiculous, as well.

To say that PRODUCT leaves you wanting more is an understatement, beginning and ending with EDM you can’t dance to, building and toppling all kinds of aural Legos in between.

The albums ten tracks flow into each other as if conjured by the most sublime after-hours DJ. Atmospheric beatless expanses cascade unpredictably into crashing hi-hats just a track later, and it’s the most laid-back direct challenge to the banal 4/4 thump dominating dance floors since Japanese transplant DJ Sprinkles’ 2009 landmark intellectual deep house revival, Midtown 120 Blues.

With compressed mechanical wheedles circling each other like birds on “Ghosting” and the self-explanatory “Morning Vox,” the machines pumping through Howl are the most organic you’ll hear all year.

Mutant, even as it threatens to filibuster itself at over an hour long, feels like the album that Xen was meant to grow into, with every lesson that Vulnicura taught integrated at a molecular level.

The album is a dense, cinematic, always surprising and often moving album that sounds like it required the full three years that the L.A. crooner and producer spent chipping away at it to get right.

By giving us the best album of his career, and subsequently re-ascending to Top 40’s mountaintop, Bieber’s answered his own question: In pop music, it’s never too late to say you’re sorry.

Halloween’s Slime Season 2 serves as a companion piece that’s smoother, more skeletal, and, by most measures, superior.

In making a record about growing up, Lopatin’s come out on the other side in one mutated piece.

The ten songs that make up the surprise new Mr. Misunderstood are a step back from the arena-scaled grandeur Church has been trading in for the past several years. Many of the songs feel like scaled-down counterparts to some of the best tracks on The Outsiders.

Rustie’s new album doesn’t signal a reclamation of maximalism as much as it’s a return to form, even if it’s likely that many of its themes were inspired by an acid trip more eye-opening for Whyte than necessarily for the rest of us. But what a trip.

The emotional arcs are just as fresh and just as gripping [as Barter 6], but here they’re confined to songs, and sometimes to single verses.

The record’s biggest flaw might be that it stacks the stunning “Sun” and “Lights” as its first two tracks, setting a challenge to which the nine remaining ones can’t quite rise.

In spite of the giddy playfulness, it never comes off as a lark. You’ll get no closer to ascertaining his actual identity, but as the balance between jokes and earnest emoting narrows, Sold Out presents something of an abstract portrait of the man behind the haze.

In her willingness to tread the line between the crushing flood of data and irrepressible pop hooks has created a record so undeniably of its time and place (that is, cyberspace) that it can’t be easily ignored.

Even by Hyperdub’s standards--a 20-year lineage of beats birthed and incubated in London’s most soot-smeared corners (grime, dubstep) and Chicago’s windwept streets (footwork)--this is not a light record.

Finally, she’s embracing the responsibility to provide stone-cold tunes without pretense.

That’s Storyteller as a whole: expertly arranged, dense without overwhelming the force of its captain.

As Shepherd’s confidence grows in his compositions, he gives each element of the song enough time to stand on its own, without the bells and whistles of the Ensemble’s (slightly more) enormous orchestra.

While he’s tugging at strings that have been otherwise picked up by the stable of Berlin’s PAN (M.E.S.H., Helm, and Visionist) or his Tri Angle labelmates past and present (Arca and Lotic), his extreme repetition of these familiar sounds pushes them euphoric.

This isn’t quite your weird uncle’s Wolf Eyes, capable of clearing a den and ending the party in 30 seconds flat--but it’s a Wolf Eyes that’s still capable of scaring off half the guests. The other half will find a lot to love here.

If there’s a quibble with II, it’s that like most doubles, it would be more effective as a single disc.

The album’s escapism is alarmingly potent, to the point where it verges into the downright delusional, but its lack of self-consciousness is--somewhat ironically--the thing that keeps it in check.

Divers sets itself apart by expanding into new genres and replacing the whimsy of her earlier material with maturity and solemnity.

Pretend turns out to be an enticing fusion of her wintry, pop-paradise homeland, and the West African musical roots she picked up from her father, the late Maudo Sey, all tempered with raw empathy; her masterful pop-soul captures depressive moments and makes them soar.

Without truly breaking any paradigms, the well-respected veterans in VHÖL do all kinds of things well that evade heavier peers, never relying too hard on the math or surprises for a thrill. If anything, its 42 minutes fly by so smoothly you’re surprised to discover there wasn’t a hitch or even a dead spot.

Beach House’s releases to date have come fogged by intoxicant, nostalgia, and hypoxia, but Thank Your Lucky Stars does what their work has begged for all along and wipes the dew from their rearview mirror. You’re going to like what you see.

Compared to the spontaneous hodgepodges of 2009’s Psychic Chasms or 2011’s Era Extraña, VEGA INTL. Night School is a far more intricately assembled product.

Despite the fact that Carnell appears on the cover of his own record drained of both pigment and life, this record’s full of both--moments of calm that justify the storm, peaceful lapping waves that follow the tempest.

His astounding new Life is even more songful, all the more impressive considering his claustrophobic medium that he gleans so many colorful variations from, à la Fetty Wap.

This album should be met on its own terms; it’s willing to do the same for you.

Deerhunter’s inspiring and surprisingly triumphant seventh album.

It demands attentive listening, only because it can so easily slip into the delirious wonders of foreign realms.

Kelela obviously doesn’t shy away from wearing her label’s signifiers, but on Hallucinogen she transcends them, the same way she outlasted lazy classification into PBR&B in 2013, swimming to the hazy surface of a new kind of future sex/love sounds.

Alex G has always found power in the broken and uncertain. He’s just gotten a lot braver about spinning that chaos into beauty.

Somehow Williams is at his most charged-up and urgent when he’s at his bleakest, though you’d be hard-pressed to remember song titles here.

At times, the very sonic repetition and minimalism that makes much of Why Choose so effective also hampers its output; the second half of the album especially feels monotonous and weighed down by its musical rigor. Yet Why Choose redeems itself with the brisk, mostly instrumental closing track.

Few of the album’s 11 ensuing tracks are quite as barnstorming as “Devil,” but the album remains gigantic throughout.

Age of Transparency is his best album yet.

Forty years down the line, Maiden has proven that they’re still the best metal band in the world; we never had any doubt, but The Book of Souls is one hell of a reminder.

With this new album, they finally sever those last few ties, and forge ahead into the retro future.

Women’s Rights has its share of more complex situations as well, not to mention the occasional fourth chord.

The best thing about Unbreakable is that it proves Janet can still surprise us.

New Bermuda both expands their range and sees them coming further into their own.... Bermuda is ace metal.

The way the album veers between savage energy blasts and more deliberately paced displays of power is extraordinary.

He shows the consistency to scatter those songs throughout Fetty Wap’s 17 tracks and to mostly stick to the limited formula that made them hit as hard as they did on the rest of the record.

These are heftier tracks that, because of their added weight, move slower; and like any collection of thematically linked subwoofer-challenging, chart-charting songs, some feel a little Skyped-in--or at least tailored a little too much to their guiding spotlights.

Where the strong Horehound and Cowards sounded interchangeably enough like other White projects, Dodge mostly does not.... Dodge and Burn is one of their greatest.

Spell-casting pop and Twitter branding this is not; the excellent force of this album is how it taps into the sheer pain, anger, and sensuality of the idea of “the witch,” rather than its archetypal signifiers in pop culture.

CHVRCHES aim for nothing less than maximum forward impact at all times. Beneath the ice-floe synths and Mayberry’s cool, collected belting is an anxious impulse to please.

It’s disorienting, upsetting, and edges toward unlistenable in its brutalist structures. But it’s a reminder that even if claustrophobia’s an unpleasant feeling, it’s always a powerful one.

What a Time to Be Alive is not the best album of 2015, but it is the album that best defines 2015 so far.

She fills the space with more intellectual depth than she’s shown before, incorporating T.S. Eliot’s apropos poem “Burnt Norton” as a space-age interlude. Ignoring the most offensively nonsensical of her lyrics (“Baby you’re so ghetto / You’re looking to score”), such a relatively monochrome album spans a breadth of cultural markers.

B’lieve bears a much closer resemblance to Vile’s true breakout, 2011’s Smoke Ring for My Halo. But even though the late-night atmosphere carries over, the haze isn’t quite the same.

On Persuasion, which came out in August, Blondes waste no time stripping three tracks to their most essential elements, decorating them with just scraps of tinsel.

The blunt-tipped guitar chop on the title tune, glassy music boxes and slurping synths of “Give Peace a Damn,” and the more-Stones-than-country “Honky Tonk Rules” are all genuine surprises that no other legacy act is giving up.

She’s never more at home than when BJ the Chicago Kid accepts an offer of her “chocolate covered honey” on the closing “Beautiful Love.”

On Duskland, he veers slightly more into homegrown Kurt Vile territory, especially with the organ-saturated opener “Sundowner.”

Ian Parton's picked up Young Guv’s gauntlet and made the power-pop album of the year.

The album’s others [songs]--all of them, except for the title track and album opener, remarkably stick to five minutes--like the skittering, piston-punctuated “Pacer,” rise to the occasion of possibly even bigger stages.

His well-aged craft shows on his fourth LP in 15 years.

BAIO’s always had strange and smarts to offer in his world-class quartet; The Names finally gives us a first-person view.

Unlike Mirrored or 2011’s underrated Gloss Drop, La Di Da Di is where Battles demonstrate their competence rather than their virtuosity; there’s never that moment of dominos falling to their death or the mutated instruments and real-time looping opening portals to parallel dimensions.

Sun Coming Down is Robin Hood-rich with pithy one-liners punctuated by Keen’s hi-hats, crashing through Darcy’s free-associating swarm of noise like that one person in every New York-based rom-com or sitcom wending his way through an avenue packed with people.

Sparhawk tentatively hits highs in Wayne Coyne territory, imbuing the canyon-filling swirls of background synths and simple, sad, jangly riff with echoes of The Soft Bulletin. “Spanish Translation,” on the other hand, is Low-core and lovely.

This new batch thrashes with abandon (“Punks”) and displays a remarkable leap in instrumental maturity with its airtight chord progressions and unhinged shrieks.

Invite the Light is perfect for those times when you need gentle inspiration for cracking open the blinds and facing the world, but the album’s lithium-like vibes are more stabilizing than invigorating.

The duo leaven Perfect World’s miserablism with just enough smeared hooks and doom-metal licks to make converts of the underground faithful and the casual headbanger; as tortured triumphs go, this debut is a doozy.

The warmth feels sweeter the longer you’ve spent inside.

Blare Falls in the prescribed order, on shuffle, in a plane, on a train: You’ll dance, you’ll cringe, your Mom will freak out, your homies may start rumors about you--which is as it should be.