After years of Boston's repping itself on the national stage with scally caps and mime make-up, the promising prospect of a blog-stoking, pant-tightening, fresh-making outfit like the Pit feels long overdue. The good news is, it sounds only slightly so.

Within and Without is chillwave 2.0. It takes the same hazy late-night bedroom synthpop, but amps it up exponentially, with live instruments (cello, bass, violins, drums), guidance from superstar producer Ben Allen (who co-produced Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion and Deerhunter's Halcyon Digest), and more meticulously crafted songs.

It's perhaps overly long (53 minutes) and hard to penetrate, but Animal Collective's creativity glows brighter than Ric Flair's hair.

Here's one of the few first-quarter releases of 2011 that people will still be listening to in 2012.

With your headphones strapped, the album's dirty optimism will brighten even the darkest, stalest airport-layover experience (true story).

Unavoidable comparisons to the Icelandic princess and her early years aside, Both Ways Open Jaws sounds familiar while breaking new ground.

Like a perfectly attired woman, the National are fleetingly alluring, never gaudy, subtly enchanting.

These 11 new songs represent some of the strongest material of their career.

Together, the group's fifth record, is explosive and infectious yet tight and glossy, a far cry from the proverbial seat-of-the-pants audacity of their 2000 debut, Mass Romantic.

Though the Random Axe effort is relatively high-profile, these three conjure one another's grimiest gusto.

MTMTMK is infinitely more fascinating when it's pushing the envelope, mixing weirdness and darkness into the radiant multi-culti stew.

Fire from the Sky fully returns the band to what made Shadows Fall so appealing in the first place--without taking a step backward.

The sweetest instrument, however, is Wyatt’s voice, whose fragile, high, quavering tone is honest to the core.

Dee Dee delivers an album that sounds like Chrissie Hynde backed by Hüsker Dü. Only in Dreams could make you wonder what other indie bands would jump up and thrive if only they had steamroller production.

There's so much going on, all of it so intricately plotted and clean, that you're left to wonder: by the time the rest of the electronic community catches up, what will Sepalcure be onto next?

It's a gorgeous performance that anchors Mothertongue with its strength and solemnity.

It's taken Isbell three albums to find his comfortable post-Truckers solo-artist groove, and on Here We Rest, he settles in quite nicely.

These 11 tunes deliver both the thematic and the sonic hugeness we expect from U2; you only have to proceed about 80 seconds into the opening title track before the Edge is spraying his trademark guitar sparks everywhere and Bono is observing that infinity is a great place to start.

Tomboy is a tricked-out, big-budget epic built for IMAX.

Onwards is, at its heart, just one big suicide tease, which is what makes it so fantastic.

Throughout this emotional maelstrom of an R&B album, Rihanna keeps finding gripping new ways to transform regret into a kind of threat.

If Apollo Kids is a warm-up, we can expect monster things from Ghost in the New Year.

On Shields, they achieve a fluid synthesis: Rossen and Droste still share vocal duties, but they often tag-team the same track, trading off lines and writing melodies for one another's voices. Their styles coalesce so smoothly, it's often difficult to tell where one singer-songwriter starts and the other ends.

It's all a lot to wrap your head around, and depending on your mindset, you could either follow the sound collage down the rabbit hole or simply ride the surface-level groove.

P.O.S. must have known he had a near-classic on his claws with Never Better.

House of Balloons is a gorgeous album that pairs moody beats and samples with morbid lines about drugs and late-night encounters, all of it caulked with sex.

In the M83 universe, emotion comes before logic, and for all 72 fascinating minutes, Gonzalez has you in the palm of his sweaty hand.

As long as Brit keeps the ballads to a minimum and plays to her strength as a willing pop renegade (which she does here more than on any of her previous albums), she will continue to make exciting, groundbreaking modern music.