If we pretend that on some level this album doesn’t contain the cringe-worthy hetero-male angst of early-2000s rock, we’d be lying to ourselves, but the technical quality of the work renders it engrossing nonetheless, especially taken alongside its odd tenderness, its prescient cultural relevance, and its culmination of the fluidity of gendered tropes that ran throughout their career, where the concept of aggression becomes as much a floating signifier among a sea of textural dynamics as a reification of rage.

This is pop music reinventing itself, reasserting its autonomy. Vroom Vroom offers a brief, appealing glimpse of a world manifest with characters, ideas, and feelings, all presented with a novel exposition.

Parquet Courts are confessing to their own messiness and, in doing so, have delivered their most fully realized project to date: a disillusioned work whose allure reaches far beyond the instruments being strummed on it.

Blunt’s not a master of wordplay, and he’s certainly not trying to be a good technical rapper. But his flow, his delivery, is entrancing.

Its purpose is to cement Underworld as elder statesmen of minor-arena-filling, rather than “floor-filling,” amorphously electronic music. It’s not hip, but it’s not square either.

Next Thing moves.

Slime Season 3 is as celebratory, emotionally rich, and life-affirming as a good funeral should be but never is. And this isn’t the end; it’s only the beginning of a brand new chapter.

An almost abstract series of daubs, here, there. Melodies submerged in machinery.

The experience is nothing less than fully immersive by the time we’ve made it through “Shelter Is Illusory,” the closest the album gets to true pop (aside from Armstrong’s co-written “Adamah”), replete with a gorgeous quasi-operatic upward-searching chorus from Armstrong and a keening processed-strings backing.

Even if there are more than a few moments on Drink More Water 6 that feel like obligatory retreads, there’s a lot to be said for iLoveMakonnen’s sheer charisma and for the immensely unique voice that he flaunts here more effortlessly than ever.

Matmos have successfully transformed their washing machine into an instrument of righteousness as well as introspection, and while I am not surprised at their continued high level of craft, this one feels especially deep.

A journey into their liberated, tie-dyed consciousness and their best project to date.

For every song that I replay, there’s another that I skip.

While this doesn’t exactly add up to any profound reinvention of genre, Before a Million Universes thrives best without thinking.

His subtle turns of phrase and shifts in volume manage to achieve immersive depth even when the interplay of sax, strings, electronics, and drums otherwise lacks color.

DAZE is a collection of perverted smash hits in overdrive, a keyed up, obsessively concerned, hyperbolic exaggeration along the lines of Werkflow compatriot Recsund’s recent mix for Disjecta.

There’s little sense of genre in an record-industry sense here. The pieces Moodymann mixes together, like the downtempo house of Daniel Bortz’s “Cuz You’re The One” and Swedish folksinger José González’s mournful “Remain,” shouldn’t work, but they keep the calm atmosphere going.

The other 14 contributions barely stand apart from one another, a rushed bile of the same sounds being used over and over again by unidentifiable producers, with only Bonobo delivering a track whose atmosphere extends beyond that of gimmicky tie-in music territory.

What’s revealed by this new project--call it an album, EP, compilation, mixtape, outtake, sketch--is a fiercely independent artist escaping the trappings of hip-hop conventions, both mainstream and otherwise; he seeks ascetic salvation through intense introspection and, in the process, created a great release, no matter where it’s filed.

Many of This Unruly Mess I’ve Made’s flaws could’ve very well been forgotten, or at least temporarily swept under the rug, had the actual music been good.

While McEntire’s aimlessness feels honest and satisfying in its questing, it also makes for an album with plenty of movement but less, perhaps, in the way of progress.

While Life of Pause appears to lack any songs with the lasting impact of tracks like “Chinatown,” “Only Heather,” “Paradise,” or even the sublimely beautiful “Golden Haze”--well-written works that exhibited a naïve clarity in purpose--it’s certainly a grower.

The timbres of the modular synth, in my opinion, are dull, but that doesn’t mean that Venetian Snares hasn’t created interesting music from his machines.

Love Yes flings the sound skyward and waits to hear what bounces back. The pop haze of In Limbo, the bounce and blip of The Way and Color are rebroadcast as a symphony for synths and hi-hat.

All of the hallmarks of the band’s debut remain blissfully intact, and yet they’ve managed to engineer an LP with even more seemingly absurd outliers than minimalism and Radiophonic blips.

It certainly avoids the epic-lite quality we usually associate with bands in the post-rock mold. There’s no soundtrack material here: nothing to be exploited for the purposes of perfume advertisement erotica or inspiring nature documentaries.

Painting With lacks the consistency to be that work, but its moments of glory provide a welcome return to the melodic mastery of golden ages past.

The production is slick and striking, even when it fades to black (“Xanny Family”) or gets tangled up in layered hi-hats (“Program”)--these tracks sound equally as engaged and provocative as anything on last year’s masterful DS2.