Funk has always concerned itself with liberation, and Dâm-Funk has long been an advocate for funk-as-freedom; he’d like nothing more than to lift your mind, your body, and your soul away from whatever’s holding it down. "Free", the closing track of Dâm’s wordless STFU EP, is a luxuriant ride from the boulevard to beyond the stratosphere. Over a bed of head-snap drums, twinkling Casios, and blunted bass, Dâm breezes down the block and off into the unknown. The eight-minute "Free" is a masterfully composed track, tidy as a cleanroom and filthy as a Black & Mild-stuffed ashtray, every chiming piano and wriggling keytar hanging, seemingly, in midair. More than that, though, it’s a testament to Dâm’s ability to make the music of the past—the mechanized precision of post-disco R&B and the subwoofer-decimating synths of left-coast g-funk—feel an awful lot like the future. It’s like the man said: Open up your funky mind, and you can fly. —Paul Thompson

Dâm-Funk: "Free" (via SoundCloud)

On Multi-Love, Ruban Nielson applied his knack for layered hooks to his own polyamorous entanglement. Multi-Love’s jittery core untangles the anxiety of balancing partners, of unlearning the traditional forms of hetero marriage, and of doing so while that phone in your pocket begs your eyes to stay glued to its screen.

"Can’t Keep Checking My Phone" rattles with a nu-disco beat, finding its pulse in an octave-hopping bass line. Nielson’s production leaves plenty of open air for his blocky vocal phrasings to occupy as he stacks syllables that mimic a clipped long-distance conversation or shards of SMS swapping. All the while, a pitched-down version of his own voice haunts his words, as guilt and a yearning for freedom orbit each other. If "Can’t Keep Checking My Phone" isn’t the first disco slapper about wanting to chuck your iPhone in the nearest harbor, it’s got to be the most unexpectedly tender. —Sasha Geffen

Unknown Mortal Orchestra: "Can't Keep Checking My Phone" (via SoundCloud)

Proof that there’s life in post-punk beyond basic retreads of bands beloved in the 1980s, Detroit’s Protomartyr have restless energy to spare, both in their captivating live performances and their sharply structured songwriting. "Dope Cloud", built around propulsive drumming, a rickety and memorable guitar riff, and blown-out choruses, is both an ode to and a warning about escapism as a survival strategy. Vocalist Joe Casey’s perfectly blasé lyrics and delivery remind us that though it may feel good in the short run to plunge headfirst into hedonism, and that feeling good has value, it’s really not much of a lifelong solution to our continual search as a species for meaning and utility in this random and heartless universe. —Jes Skolnik

Protomartyr: "Dope Cloud" (via SoundCloud)

One of the nice parts about getting older is watching younger people discover things that have been second nature to you for years. Among college-aged musicians playing the sort of lunchpail indie pop they were born too late to hear in the '90s, Frankie Cosmos seems like an outlier. Brief, simple, and direct in word but vast in sentiment, her best songs have the stature of haiku—it takes longer to hear them than it does to listen. "With this I’m scraping by/ I guess it’s cute that I tried," she sings on "Young", a self-portrait of a wallflower who seems to prefer her parties from a safe distance at the top of the stairs, as gentle as a lullaby and as sharply worded as hardcore. It all comes and goes in two minutes, with a five-second silence in the middle. Because wisdom is nice but time—time is of the essence. —Mike Powell

Frankie Cosmos: "Young" (via SoundCloud)

Defying the conventional wisdom that rappers need to flood the market with as much material as possible in order to stay on the radar, Isaiah Rashad has kept a low profile since releasing his sleeper debut Cilvia Demo in early 2014, limiting his output to just a few guest verses and this very subdued single. "Nelly" is Rashad’s down-to-earth answer to every overly enthusiastic song comparing love to a hit single. "We can’t be no number one," he confesses upfront to neighborhood girl who appears to share his lot in life, "but we can be the jam." Like most Rashad tracks, it’s dense with autobiographical detail—in just two leisurely verses, he details his modest upbringing, his practical view of romance, and the low ceiling he sees hanging over his career. He can’t promise the world, and he refuses to feed the false hope that he’ll become a star and magically make this poor girl’s problems disappear. The best he can offer is some empathy, and someone to share a blunt and pass the time with. True to his word, "Nelly" wasn’t a number one hit—not even close—but it was, in its own understated way, a jam. —Evan Rytlewski

Isaiah Rashad: "Nelly"

After the horror of the November attacks in the French capital, Thundercat released a gorgeous track simply titled "Paris". It made its way around the web, and some admirers, in their private moments, griped about the fact that it lasted hardly more than a minute. But Thundercat was involved with another, equally moving track this year with a far more significant runtime: "The Lavishments of Light Looking", which was released by the supergroup WOKE (Flying Lotus, two members of Shabazz Palaces, and Thundercat on bass).

The track was a paean to open-mindedness, approachable in its phantasmagoric psychedelia even as it preached transcendence through music. Its explicit spirituality was a balm for those aching from a news cycle filled with demagoguery, suspicion, and fear. When artists attempt to be political, the risk is often that of reductionism: politics are easier to translate into a speech than into a song. But with "Lavishments", WOKE managed not to evoke the anxieties of the time, but to repel them, appealing instead to a higher sentiment. —Jonah Bromwich

WOKE: "The Lavishments of Light Looking" [ft. George Clinton] (via SoundCloud)

There are two sides to DJ Koze: the hypnotizing shaman who spins one groove into another with ultimate finesse, and the winking illusionist who laughs at the shaman idea and teases you for your mindless devotion. Viewed alongside the finely tuned whimsy of his excellent DJ-Kicks mix from this year, "XTC" is a pretenseless, steady burner. Its lush, trance-inducing atmosphere, detailed with Koze’s typical quirky percussion, makes it one of his most straightforwardly satisfying recent productions. But it's just like Koze not to leave it there: a woman’s voice, ruminating on what ecstasy might provide for someone seeking enlightenment, emerges out of the mix. "I heard you say once that a lie is sweet in the beginning, and bitter in the end," she murmurs. "Is the drug like the lie, and meditation the truth? Or am I missing something that could really help me?"

It’s a straightforward monologue with ambiguous implications. Is Koze cultivating a lie? Is he trying to reveal the truth? As the track progresses, it gets sharper and toothier, generating more and more friction, until eventually the tidal harmonic washes transition into something jittery and obsessive, like a person compulsively playing with a zipper. The question lingers, a nagging dichotomy that nods towards the self-aware state of electronic music. How long will it be before intellectualism and hedonism collapse back together? Are we missing something that could really help us? —Abigail Garnett

DJ Koze: "XTC" (via SoundCloud)

"I Remember" is a song of betrayal, about how the more we share, the more vulnerable we become. Each line carries a small part of a much larger story, and as fragments of hurt whiz past like spinning knives, it mirrors the process of memory itself. Bully's Alicia Bognanno sings in a melodic scream that any '90s alt-rocker could envy over basic-but-catchy punk chords, and the spaces between her declarations hold even more than the actual words: "I remember getting too fucked up...I remember showing up at your house....I remember the way your sheets smelt." That's how our minds work: a picture, a smell, a taste, a box of photos—all become imprinted, the senses bound to feelings that are later assembled into narrative, leading then to the long process of figuring out what it all meant and what happens now. —Mark Richardson

Bully: "I Remember" (via SoundCloud)

With the mythology built into pop music fandom, it can be easy to fall into a "born too late" mindset, where you believe that the music made before your time is somehow more sincere, more real. Obviously, this is bullshit, and every generation has its own version of this FOMO, but sometimes revisiting old sounds yields something so spectacular that the retro-worship urge is irresistible. With Cool Uncle, Grammy-winning R&B producer Jack Splash teamed up with soul singer Bobby Caldwell, who has been quietly releasing records since the late '70s, and hit this precise sweet spot. From the staccato electric piano line, to the swishy cymbals to the background horn section, "Break Away" sounds so pointedly retro you'd be forgiven for thinking it was a cut from some obscure compilation of forgotten slow jams. But the presence of Jessie Ware, who owes considerable debt to Caldwell's contemporaries, gives "Break Away" an undoubtedly modern flair. While it would have still been a brilliant track sung solo, Ware's butter-smooth vocals not only hold their own against Caldwell's seasoned tenor, but form an ideal partnership. It's a perfect balance of then and now. —Cameron Cook

Cool Uncle: "Break Away" [ft. Jessie Ware]

Kamaiyah is a rapper and singer from Oakland with only a couple of songs to her name, and somehow one of them is already perfect. "How Does It Feel" bubbles like the Moët she drinks in the video, a song about the good life from someone who doesn't live it. The music zooms giddily up a West Coast rap highway, touching on electro, G-funk, and the Bay Area sound. Kamaiyah sing-raps about the most American feeling of all: "I wonder/ How does it feel to be rich?" It is celebratory, yearning, triumphant, and bottomlessly sad all at once. It will sound as good the day you get fired and get day-drunk at a TGI Fridays as the day you hire a party bus to celebrate your promotion. It is a song about perseverance and hunger, about ambition and appetite, and every other emotion that has kept the flame alive in hip-hop since it’s inception. Not a bad introduction.  —Jayson Greene

Kamaiyah: "How Does It Feel" (via SoundCloud)

Despite taking place in Los Angeles, Ty Dolla $ign’s opus Free TC most resembles a Broadway play, complete with a wide-eyed, scene-establishing opener, a Babyface-assisted aria, and a closing song literally titled "Finale". The many moving parts hit some kind of crescendo with "Blasé", featuring Future and Rae Sremmurd, which loses all context on the radio and in DJ setlists, but even then is perceivable as part of a larger core. The propulsive banger is something of an outlier in Ty’s long, varied discography—he’s never aimed for a radio hit without leaning on West Coast slap, and "Blasé" is pure blurry, Atlanta-inspired low end. The hook is all about twisting typical hip-hop boasts into "who cares?" declarations—we’re in the club, we’re buying bottles, we’re driving Maseratis, blasé blasé blasé. There’s a slightly menacing tinge in everyone’s voice that makes it seem like this good time might be the last time: "I ain’t scared to die, on my dead homies", Ty sings, straining to hit his upper register. Ty Dolla $ign has made a career out of writing about his needs and how they mingle with disposability—toot it and boot it, how many girls can fit in his cabana, these hoes ain’t loyal—and here he sleepily lands on the most raucous song of his career while sounding like a somnambulant party machine, the guy still going well past 2 a.m. on a Wednesday. But what of it? —Matthew Ramirez

Ty Dolla $ign: "Blasé" [ft. Future and Rae Sremmurd] (via SoundCloud)

What do you do when you realize you have nothing in common with the person you love, when it suddenly hits you that your entire relationship has been a slow process of growing apart? Is there any going back after a realization like that? Natalie Prass isn’t singing in hypotheticals on the lavishly orchestrated opener to her debut album—she really needs to know, and she’s posing the questions to you directly: "Where do you go when the only home you know is with a stranger?".

For all the Dusty in Memphis comparisons her album invited, Prass isn’t a belter like Springfield. She’s got a small, pleasant voice, the kind that doesn’t so much sing over other instruments as draw them in, and on "My Baby Don’t Understand Me", a magnificent congregation of strings, horns, and woodwinds shows up to console her, to offer hope when she needs it most. Like so many classic soul songs, it starts plaintively then picks itself up, and in the spirit of Gladys Knight, it ends redemptively with that most bittersweet symbol of farewells and fresh starts: a train. —Evan Rytlewski

Natalie Prass: "My Baby Don't Understand Me"

Not all great loves make you a better person. Nestled between the party tracks of Shamir’s debut Ratchet is secret weapon "Demon", a downturned love song that draws its fire from the underworld. "I’ve gone and sold my soul/ If I’m a demon, baby, you’re the beast that made me", Shamir sings over one of Ratchet’s sparser beats, "Falling from grace, but falling oh so gracefully". Dressed in sensual tones, "Demon" flips the lover-as-savior narrative on its head. Shamir isn’t looking for redemption, or to be ushered out of a past life into a purer one. Love is a means and an end in itself—and if it happens to corrupt you irreversibly along the way, so be it. —Sasha Geffen

Shamir: "Demon"

Regional rap hits often feel casual and lived-in. If Tate Kobang's feathery "Bank Rolls (Remix)" feels a little extra so, it's because Baltimore's been inhabiting this beat for more than a decade now: it was sourced from an old Tim Trees track produced by Rod Lee, an artist who knows something about being a local hero. Originally a short freestyle, the lyrics are dotted heavily with neighborhoods and street names, but Kobang abstains from boasts and shit-talking. The general mood is "I have friends in lots of these places!", and when Kobang expanded the track upon signing a label deal, the line he spun into a quasi-chorus was, "I love my city/ Ask about me and I bet they know me." 

As baldly personable as Kobang comes off, the star of the track is Lee's beat, a minimal funk oddity that bears the same relationship to, say, the Neptunes' productions as the Ramones do to the Supremes: a stilted, charming facsimile. The watery Rhodes piano lick that accompanies the chorus acts as a sublime counterpoint to the snub-nosed bass bursts. It's a beat that deserved a second life, strong enough not just to hit the same city twice but to propel a favorite son forward. —Andrew Gaerig

Tate Kobang: "Bank Rolls (Remix)"

The first single from Savages' forthcoming album is an exercise in tension-building and suspense—no small feat in the context of a lunging, steel-toe-booted mosh-pit of a song. Gemma Thompson's buzzsaw guitar keeps moving away from its central chord and immediately dodging back to it, with a rhythm that lands just off the beat. (When she finally breaks free of that chord's gravity, more than a minute into the song, it's like a smack to the face.) Thompson, Fay Milton, and Ayse Hassan lock into the song's high-friction riff in a mode that's way too rare these days; for all the comparisons Savages get to late-'70s British post-punk, their rhythm section is closer to the obsessively precise mania of the Jesus Lizard.

What, then, is the answer that Jehnny Beth is whooping and snarling about? Love, but not the fuzzy kind. "The Answer" is about love as a cruel obligation, as fuel for corrosive jealousy, as the gift other people get that you know would ruin you. "If you don't love me you don't love anybody", Beth keeps repeating to someone—or to herself. Whether it's a hope or a fear, it's a desperate one. —Douglas Wolk

Savages: "The Answer"

According to singer Jana Hunter, the initial writing sessions for Lower Dens third full-length were not a merry time. "We hadn’t played together for a while, and we were in a cold, dark space—physically and emotionally," she explained earlier this year. Somewhere along the line, the Baltimore-based band realized that it had fallen into a kind of bad-vibe feedback loop. They took a breather and reconvened a month later with a new goal—to avoid writing miserable music while feeling miserable.

There’s no telling where "To Die in L.A." fell in this process, but I’m guessing it came after the break. The song has many strengths—it's catchy, economical, and perfectly paced. It makes lush and melodic pop seem like a natural extension of Lower Dens’ minimalist aesthetic, rather than a calculated change in scene. It is best, though, in how elegantly it shifts from anxiety to relief. Listening to the first lines, you’d think Hunter had slipped in her pledge toward positive thinking, but when the chorus arrives the music and lyrics align in uplift. It's possible to give the lyrics a darker reading, with the singer confessing a desire to shift positions of advantage ("Time will turn the tide"). But it feels more hopeful than that—an incantation against gloom and a melody you could hold on an indefinite mental loop. —Aaron Leitko

Lower Dens: "To Die in L.A."

If you ask their army of devotees why +@ is their life-changing, vital force, it's because no band gives more of itself. This band does not come equipped with brakes, nor does its leader Patrick Stickles. On a 29-song, double concept album, "Dimed Out" is the loudest advocate for Stickles’ hyper-driven maximalist ambitions, and it manages a trick we usually associate with hip-hop, not indie rock: Coining new slang and using it as a statement of purpose. Yeah, "Dimed Out" probably soundtracked some drinking games this year, but it goes deeper than that: Titus wants to transcend and to take you with them. You can see it in Stickles’ online persona as well, which fosters a cult of personality that can involve starting a one-sided beef with Kendrick Lamar, dominating his own Genius page, and making an overt bid for King of New York. "Dimed Out" overdoes it so you don't confuse it with just punk music. —Ian Cohen

Titus Andronicus: "Dimed Out"

Moses Sumney is one of seemingly hundreds of artists to benefit from rapid advances in both the quality and availability of live sampling, looping, and layering technologies. But while his embrace of these devices adds a dimension to his music, there's an earthy richness to his performances that suggests he could go on for hours with nothing but a handful of jazz chords on his guitar and his astonishing voice. 

That voice is a truly beautiful instrument, whether he’s folding it into pillowy, wordless backing harmonies or using his otherworldly falsetto to put an exclamation point on a verse. He sounds not quite like anyone else, his style a big-armed embrace hugging the expressive jazz of Billie Holiday, Thom Yorke at his most atmospheric, or Antony Hegarty at her most reflective. His guitar here is simple, precise and propulsive, humbly underpinning the haunting drama of the full piece of music, where ghostly choirs swoop in and out, and an icy orchestral blast comes out of nowhere at three minutes to turn the whole thing on its head. Sumney is still at the very beginning of his career, but his utterly singular work so far points to great things ahead. —Joe Tangari

Moses Sumney: "Seeds" (via SoundCloud)

Inspired by New York City, "Ch-Ching" marvels with its magnitude: from the trunk-rattling bass and whip-crack snares to the pop and hiss beneath the meandering melody. Like the city itself, the song's every square inch belies tiered, towering architecture. While its sonic immediacy and textural diversity make it a stellar pop song, the primary source of "Ch-Ching"’s appeal is that it avoids the expected. Listen to the way Caroline Polachek’s willowy soprano shimmies effortlessly among ghostly whistles and hollow whoops, or how the syncopated brass lends the steeled hip-hop framework a bit of antiquated charm. "Ch-Ching" is like nothing Chairlift have done before, and is one of the more bombastic and brassy pop singles in recent memory. —Zoe Camp

Chairlift: "Ch-Ching"

Unsettling in its combination of lyrical bleakness and meditative instrumental beauty, "That Battle Is Over" finds Norwegian experimental artist Jenny Hval capturing 2015’s dystopian global political and cultural climate with terrifying accuracy. Late capitalism has devoured much of our free will, rendering individual boycotts and identification with movements toothless: What, then, is the point of struggle? Over droning organ and rhythmic hand drumming, Hval’s bending and swooping internal monologue, forced outward, wrestles with that question from the position that change is still necessary, even if it seems impossible. What has capitalism done to us? How has it eroded our sense of self? Can we still take care of ourselves and one another in such a world, or are we just going through the motions, despite our best intentions? As we sit perched on the edge of a rotting empire, we find resonance even in knowing others are aching the way that we are. Direct but never didactic, Hval cuts to the marrow. —Jes Skolnik

Jenny Hval: "That Battle Is Over" (via SoundCloud)

Dej Loaf came into the year with the kind of cosigns that dreams are made of: Drake on Instagram, a slew of high-profile "Try Me"remixes, a slot on Erykah Badu’s year-end tour, a feature with Eminem. In 2015, she followed through, putting out her first studio EP #AndSeeThatsTheThing, while touring on Nicki Minaj’s Pinkprint Tour, after getting a shout-out from Nicki herself at the BET Awards.

By contrast, Lil Wayne was dealing with his Cash Money fallout, the indefinite postponement of Tha Carter V, and a slew of disappointingsoloreleases. Remixing Dej’s "Me U & Hennessy" was one of his more successful musical contributions of the year. His involvement brought wider attention to the slow-burning drunk sex jam that had originally appeared sandwiched in the middle of Dej’s Sell Sole mixtape.

Yet compared with some of the other sexytime songs Dej put out this year ("Hey There" ft. Future, "My Beyoncé" with Lil Durk, "Shawty" ft. Young Thug), there’s something a little less affectionate and starry-eyed about this one. The song slides and grinds by the flicker of a "couple candles", and there's an immediacy to Dej's lyrics. But there’s also a more tangible distance between the two, at least for Wayne: "Girl you don’t love me, you just love my doggy style," he drawls. "I guess chemistry is true, but I don’t know if it’s the Hennessy or you"—a brief thought he quickly eschews for more threesome- and dick-related pastures. Dej for one, per her characteristic, slightly-detached persona, is happy to keep it about the moment. —Minna Zhou

Dej Loaf: "Me U & Hennessy" [ft. Lil Wayne]

In rap’s criminal cosmology, the gangbanger was superseded over a decade ago by the hustler. Gangsta rap’s basic themes of allegiance to an effort far greater than one individual person has been replaced with the coldblooded entrepreneurial mindset of the trap era. Yet over the past couple years, gangsta rap’s been making a stealthy comeback, thanks to efforts by artists as diverse as Freddie Gibbs, Kendrick Lamar, and YG. Following up his DJ Mustard produced debut album, My Krazy Life, the one-off single "Twist My Fingaz" reaches back to the mid-'90s for a nasty, funk-fueled beat, as well as lyrics that pair shots at a new generation of studio gangstas with an exuberant evocation of gang’s favorite nonverbal ways of signalling affiliation. Hearing it’s like living in a world where the G-funk era never ended. —Miles Raymer

YG: "Twist My Fingaz"

Like all the best Migos songs, "Whip It" sounds like it is made of pre-chewed gum balls and carcinogens. The beat starts with a dinky piano patch harking back to Master P; it's so dinky that reigning Atlanta Dink-Master Zaytoven might scoff at it. The song is a toy menagerie and iLoveMakonnen is lead toy. He's so sociable he even makes whipping crack sound like a rainy-day project for two ("My friend Makonnen is teaching me how to whip it"). The song is abjectly, joyfully disposable-sounding, but that hook jabs your brain like the upraised staple in the centerfold of a comic book. —Jayson Greene

iLoveMakonnen: "Whip It (Remix)" [ft. Migos and Rich the Kid] (via SoundCloud)

"Downtown" is, on one level, a song about the good times in a relationship, when things are flush with excitement and discovery and everything seems perfect: "Nothing you say/ Will ever be wrong/ Cause it just feels good being in your arms." But the way Devon Welsh sings the words, and the way Matthew Otto's skeletal instrumentation floats around them like a ghost, makes you think that at least some of it can be placed in the past tense. The line, "There is one thing I’ll do, if it ever goes wrong, I’ll write you into all my songs" may be the one thing that exists in the present. It’s hard to know for sure, but when a love song comes this close to an elegy, it brings to mind fellow melancholic romantics like Morrissey, Robert Smith, "God Damn the Sun" Michael Gira, and Leonard Cohen, which is a good place for Majical Cloudz to be at this point in their career. That it includes some of the best lyrics of the year—"And if suddenly I die/ I hope they will say/ That he was obsessed and it was okay"—shows that Welsh can back up deep sentiments with sharp, smart writing. —Brandon Stosuy

Majical Cloudz: "Downtown"

It takes an immense talent like Brooklyn transplant Lorely Rodriguez, aka Empress Of, to write and produce a catchy, heartfelt pop song about income inequality without it feeling forced, corny, or patronizing. There’s no poor-them charity or Hallmark Channel pathos in the gut-wrenching chorus to "Standard", from Rodriguez’s stunning debut album. When "survival" means different things to different people across the globe, understanding the material details of others’ lives can be a catalyst for genuine connection. Instead of preaching, Rodriguez’s empathy resonates on a seriously human scale, getting its multilayered pop hooks into our hearts and heads as we nod along. —Jes Skolnik

Empress Of: "Standard"

In 2015 it became clear that Lana Del Rey's aesthetic wasn't just "a phase," and "High by the Beach" is a song that only she could have sung. For every trite platitude—"lights, camera, acción"—there's an equal and opposite profundity ("You could be a bad motherfucker/ But that don't make you a man"). While "Getting high by the beach" is a vision not totally consistent with the manicured sad-girl aesthetic that has become LDR’s trademark, it's also a vision she executes perfectly—what could've been a painfully-literal complainers' anthem sounds breezy and somehow dignified. It’s moody and literal, sure, but it sounds, for once, like Lana has nothing to prove. —Molly Beauchemin

Lana Del Rey: "High by the Beach"

In 1976, the Isley Brothers wrote and recorded "At Your Best (You Are Love)" for Harvest for the World, their 14th studio album; by then, the Brothers were a six-piece, ringed with gold medallions and bedecked in full disco-fringe, playing a smoother, slinkier iteration of the galloping rhythm and blues they’d built a career around. Almost two decades later, in 1994, seven years before her death, Aaliyah included a cover of the song on her debut LP, and this year, on what would have been her 36th birthday, Frank Ocean posted a high, spectral version of it—just voice and some wobbly keys—to his personal Tumblr. There might be no greater testament to Ocean’s extraordinary skill as an R&B singer than the way he turns the Isleys’ hokey bromides ("You are a positive, motivating force within my life") into something fully devastating, a lament that also feels healing, generative, kind. In Ocean’s voice, the song becomes about the futility of trying to understand a partner who’s dragging around a past you can’t begin to unpack, much less comprehend: "When you feel what you feel, it's hard for me to understand," he sings, his voice unraveling a little at the edges. "So many things have taken place before this love affair began." Feeling the full weight of history and all the complications it has wrought: There might be no better summation of the last 12 months. —Amanda Petrusich

Frank Ocean: "(At Your Best) You Are Love"

Rick Ross’s charade has always hinged on regality over reality, but it’s hard to remain stately in a drought. Last year was tough on MMG, and the cracks in the small empire gaped with the release of two full-length duds from label-boss Rozay himself. On his first lead single of 2015, Ross toned it down for the better. He’s realistic and cautionary about the industry—cutting remarks about malicious publishing deals anchor the first verse—and he’s more endearing for it. A subtle, extended 50 Cent diss hits harder than the corny jabs the two usually exchange; sincerity about Meek Mill is more honorable than bawsy rhetoric. At the bottom of it all, as ever, is money, and "Foreclosures" is Ross’ believable dark side warning. "Learn to walk a tightrope/ Ever seen a rich nigga go broke?" he snarls over a dramatically streamlined J.U.S.T.I.C.E League beat. It’s a delightfully preachy takedown, but before it all starts, Ross admits, "I see it from both sides, I feel a nigga pain." —Jay Balfour

Rick Ross: "Foreclosures" (via SoundCloud)

The rider is a mysterious figure. Bob Dylan sang about two of them approaching in the distance with the howling wind. Jim Morrison saw him as a killer in the night, stalking women and children. D.J. Rogers told us to watch out for the riders, too, and his warning became the core of the biggest, most blown-out track on Hudson Mohawke’s first solo album since he made his name with the TNGHT project. "Ryderz" begins with a mostly untouched minute of Rogers’ original, and it takes a lot of gall to gank a sample that completely. But when the rat-a-tat 808s and neon synthesizers begin to whizz and bang over Rogers’ lyrics, you remember that subtlety has rarely been the point of Mohawke’s most memorable music. It’s not so much a curated Fourth of July fireworks display as it is a match thrown into a car stuffed with Roman candles. The agitation of the sampled vocals is revealed by the colossal drop, which suggests the best way to heed a warning is not with words but with a show of strength. —Jeremy Gordon

Hudson Mohawke: "Ryderz" (via SoundCloud)

Jesus, what an ugly song. The story of a one-night stand in which no one escapes persecution, least of all songwriter/performer/narrator Josh Tillman: He can't get it up and, perhaps more damningly, misidentifies his company's linguistic faux pas as a malapropism. "The Night Josh Tillman Came to Our Apartment" surpasses the already high levels of cynicism and bitterness that exist in Tillman's second record as Father John Misty, the excellent I Love You, Honeybear. It's essential that bile at this level of toxicity be delivered via song, because if someone just started talking like this you'd stop them short and advise them to take a round off.

There's a ton of posing and preening on Honeybear, and even more during Tillman's excellent live show, in which he fully inhabits his arrogant, louche hippie persona. But when I saw him earlier this year, I found myself hoping he wouldn't play "The Night Josh Tillman…"; Tillman summoning the necessary contempt for the performance seemed like it would kill the party dead. (He never played it.) "The Night Josh Tillman…" is fascinating, darkly thrilling, and vicious. It's like a lot of the unattractive things that people do when they're drunk, or high, or lonely, or horny, or some combination. Tillman's retelling walks the same line between dark humor and obscenity. —Andrew Gaerig

Father John Misty: "The Night Josh Tillman Came to Our Apartment"

Don't let Danny Brown's overstated rep as a drug-rap hedonist overshadow his essential musicality—the yelping sing-song variation of his flow may have been initially inspired by Adderall, but his Detroit-raised enthusiasm for a wide scope of electronic music propels the way he goes in. The through-line between Detroit ghettotech and Chicago ghetto house means the already-eclectic Brown knows what to do over peak-level juke beats from the immortal team of DJ Spinn and the late DJ Rashad. "Dubby" nails the sweet spot between relentless percussion and gliding soul-jazz atmosphere, and with all that lineage to ricochet off, Brown's verses feel as much like a merging of formative interests as it does an opportunity to show off. The graceful rampage of his choppy, on-the-kick delivery ("Idon'tknow'aboutwhereyafrom butthisishow my! hood! work!") makes the track's aggressive joy breathe deep. Never mind getting high to it—get high from it. —Nate Patrin

DJ Rashad/DJ Spinn: "Dubby" [ft. Danny Brown]

After trying on a variety of different stylistic hats over the past few years—folk troubadour, unwitting historian, electronic dabblist, full-time Christmas caroler—the mercurial Sufjan Stevens got back to his roots with Carrie & Lowell, both literally and figuratively. A meticulous examination of his childhood and the complicated relationship between himself, his stepfather, and late mother, the album delivers the kind of emotional wallop that made his early records such commanding listens. It offers the kind of lyrical directness and emotional candor that, from a lesser artist, could be treacly and precious. In Sufjan’s hands, however, the songs soar, offering a reverie bordering—as so much of his best work does—on the religious.

"Fourth of July" is the album’s emotional centerpiece, a rumination on his mother’s death that doesn’t flinch when broaching mortality—both hers and ours. "It was night when you died, my firefly," he sings. "What could I have said to raise you from the dead?/ Oh, could I be the sky on the Fourth of July?" The song itself is a kind of hushed explosion—at once a dialogue between Sufjan and his mother ("Shall we look at the moon, my little loon/ Why do you cry?" she asks him) and bittersweet examination of how we choose to face our ends. It’s hard to imagine too many artists capable of selling the line "We’re all gonna die" and wringing out so many layers of meaning. As the line is repeated—surrounded by hushed piano and a choir of backup voices—it becomes less a nihilist warning or an admission of defeat. It’s a reminder to live, to embrace, to remember, to sing. —T. Cole Rachel

Sufjan Stevens: "Fourth of July"

A nine-song play-by-play of the demise of her relationship with artist Matthew Barney, Vulnicura was one of 2015’s most emotionally rending releases—densely layered, meticulously produced, and as creatively ambitious as anything Björk has ever done (which is no small statement). "Lionsong" is not necessarily the most devastating track on the album, but it’s arguably the best. The song documents a painful limbo—the claustrophobia of being held hostage by someone else’s emotions. "Maybe he will come out of this loving me/ Maybe he won't," she sings, as a cauldron of strings, electronic blips, and her own soaring, multi-tracked voice surges around her. The song is less of a plea for love as it is a request for respect. "I demand clarity," she sings, before admitting, "Somehow I'm not too bothered/ I'd just like to know." Like the rest of Vulnicura, the song seems to exist in a realm beyond intimacy—the sound of an artist at her most stunningly vulnerable. By so fearlessly and meticulously cataloguing her own emotional anguish, Björk manages a rare trick. She explores one of the most primal and well trod of all human narratives—heartbreak, the collapse of family—and still ends up sounding strangely like the future. —T. Cole Rachel

Björk: "Lionsong"

"This Could Be Us" is the most irresistible track on Rae Sremmurd's relentlessly catchy debut album SremmLife. It's the record's ebullient light amid forceful club-ready bangers. While the Sremm brothers spend much of the album doubling up on the success of 2014 hits "No Flex Zone" and "No Type" with songs filled with heavy bass, scattered synth, and loudly chanted hooks, "This Could Be Us" finds younger brother Swae Lee free to sing his heart out. His high-pitched vocals are endearingly sweet, especially when combined with a consistent "Chopsticks"-like piano melody and innocent one-liners like, "I ball like Tracy McGrady." Further, Rae Sremmurd take an otherwise ironic meme in #ThisCouldBeUsButYouPlayin—useful for scoffing at potential paramours’ lack of interest—and use it with complete sincerity to plea for a second chance at love. Such wide-eyed innocence and giddiness give the track a palpable joy. On tracks like this, Rae Sremmurd successfully turn hip-hop into pop. "This Could Be Us" is what happens when they focus hard on just the latter part of the equation. —Matthew Strauss

Rae Sremmurd: "This Could Be Us"

R&B’s tradition of tell-off records runs deep. When the genre was last in the spotlight, in the late '90s, we saw some classics of the form, including Destiny’s Child's "Bills Bills Bills" and Blu Cantrell’s "Hit ’Em Up Style (Oops!)". But those looking for a more contemporary example of the staple should start with the track that kicked off Jazmine Sullivan’s album Reality Show.

Sullivan had grown disenchanted with the music industry after slugging it out in the trenches since signing to Jive Records at 15. In 2011, she announced that she would be retiring. "Dumb" was a ferocious annunciation of her return to music, its drumline rhythms and foreboding Greek chorus supporting her fierce declaration of superiority over the song’s subject, a man foolish enough to cheat. Sullivan has said that the song wasn’t based on anything that had happened to her, but that she wanted to be sure to do "a woman’s anthem" for her first song back. It’s a fitting sentiment for an era where the voices of black women are finding new arenas in which they can be heard, dismissing any and all of those who would deny them that space. —Jonah Bromwich

Jazmine Sullivan: "Dumb" [ft. Meek Mill]

"Live in the now!" Garth so famously beseeched Wayne. That’s much easier said than done, particularly from the dark side of 30. Deerhunter attempt to make this bitterest of pills easier to swallow with maximum yacht pop creaminess on "Living My Life", a languid grudge match between pure mindfulness and past and future ghosts. If "will you tell me how to conquer all this fear?" is a riddle Bradford Cox poses to himself, "living my life" is the mantra-like answer he incessantly chants in reply. Couched in a gauzy, anesthetized splash of guitars and electronics, this dilemma achieves the sort of wary, anthemic grandeur we demand of our high-grade rock'n'roll: a sad song that feels happy, or at the very least capably anesthetizing. Yet no matter how many times any of us listen to "Living My Life" on repeat, a moment will arrive where headphones or earbuds must be cast aside to confront the very frightening, very tense world beyond ourselves, with all its attendant fear and loathing. —Raymond Cummings

Deerhunter: "Living My Life"

On "Angels"—the rumored first single from Chance the Rapper’s next mixtape—which debuted on "Colbert", Chance addresses the flimsy narrative that he’s the conscious pop star ego to Chief Keef’s guttural id head-on, confidently telling the world, "Oooh, I might share my next one with Keef/ Got the industry in disbelief/ They be asking for beef." Take these lyrics to heart: Kill the drill vs. conscious mentality you have about Chicago’s rap scene.

Norwegian producer Lido (Halsey, Banks) channels a sunny day driving down Lake Shore Drive with equal parts gospel harmony and kettledrum, while Donnie Trumpet and the Social Experiment provide a big, cushioned horn section. Not just a feel-good throwaway in a year that needed some sunshine, "Angels" also served as a commendable guerilla radio promotion by a local act that barely saw love on the air. The play worked, by the way. You can hear Saba’s flawless "City so great/ I feel like Alexand'" hook during morning and afternoon rush now. (It’s important to call this out as a lot of local acts don’t get that shine. If you regularly listen to Chicago radio, you’d think Drake was the one born in Chatham, not Chance.)

Be it overhyped controversy over Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq or underhyped controversy over various cover-ups in local government, in 2015 we needed a megaphone reminding the world that these statistics you see on the news are still humans, that good people still live out south in Chicago and that it’s still juking out here. Lucky for us, "Angels" had our back. —Ernest Wilkins

Chance the Rapper: "Angels" [ft. Saba]

After years of searching, Johnny Jewel and his nightbreed cohort have perfected the afterlife love ballad, which means they’ve perfected the Chromatics song. "Shadow", a post-disco "Teen Angel", slipped out this year while we waited for Jewel to finish tinkering with the perpetually imminent Dear Tommy. We’re still waiting, but judging by this necromantic teen dream, like M83 minus the bombast, it will be worth it. With an immaculately moonlit minimal house setting and a radiant hook worthy of peak Cure, "Shadow" is so subtle it blurs out into timeless myth—or maybe it is just a breakup. But the forensic evidence is there. A gleaming knife of guitar is swaddled in black-velvet ambiance like a hidden murder weapon. A couple is driving at night, trying to escape a dead-end town. "We’re watching all the streetlights fade," Ruth Radelet sighs in a silvered voice the size of a drive-in screen, "and now you’re just a stranger’s dream." Think about that—streetlights might recede as you drive away, or just wink out, but why would they "fade"? The verb seems to fatally ricochet back onto the speaker, who must be turning into a ghost to see things that way. Likewise, the amorphous music lingers at a threshold. Precisely where does that haunting stepwise arpeggio, twisting our couple so inexorably toward their fates, overtake that knocking drum, like footsteps approaching down a hallway? Where do the cold vapors trailing from the vocals stop and the warm ones curling off the guitar begin? What’s at the distant end of this purgatorial tunnel of reverb? "For the last time," Radelet sings eight times, as if she knows but isn’t saying. —Brian Howe

Chromatics: "Shadow" (via SoundCloud)

"Sandra's Smile" isn't a protest song as much as a platform for Dev Hynes to grapple with the kaleidoscope of emotions he experienced as a result of the death of Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old black woman who was arrested for a minor traffic violation in July only to be found dead in her Waller County jail cell three days later. A haunting, shimmering slice of R&B with a beat that eerily recalls a beating heart, the track captures a remarkable range of emotions in just over three minutes: exhaustion, confusion, anger, deep-rooted fear, all buoyed by a hopefulness that cannot be extinguished. "Sandra's Smile" refuses to admit defeat, forcing us to confront an ugly—and for too many, literally deadly—reality head on without sanitizing its message so that it goes down easier. —Renato Pagnani

Blood Orange: "Sandra's Smile"

"Singing in G.L.O.S.S. is kind of like getting to be a superhero," Sadie Switchblade told Bitch earlier this year. "Like weaponizing a lifetime of anguish and alienation." On their demo tape, the Olympia hardcore band burn the no-future scripture of punk history to the ground. Its opening track is pure insurrectionism—Sadie delivers a monologue for her fellow transwomen with a thrilling rage ("we’re fucking future girls, living outside society’s shit!"), before blasting off into a 90-second blur of furious noise. And she makes the group’s total irreverence unmistakably clear: "The straight boy canon is a royal bore," she shouts, emptying her lungs with soul-cleansing gale-force. It’s a tough-as-hell mission statement from the most necessary hardcore band of 2015. —Jenn Pelly

G.L.O.S.S.: "G.L.O.S.S. (We're From the Future)" (Buy on Bandcamp)

Alan Palomo, one of the earliest and strongest voices of chillwave, released two Day-Glo bright albums before vanishing from sight for four long years. In the meantime, his peers moved on to fuzz-rock (Toro y Moi), garage rock (Ariel Pink), and screwed-down strangeness (James Ferraro). When Neon Indian broke his sabbatical this summer with "Annie", he doubled down on his '80s obsession. But instead of returning to chillwave’s vision of warped VHS tapes and MTV memories, now Palomo immersed himself in the decade’s songcraft, from its biggest freaks (Prince) to its one-hit blips (Matthew Wilder). "Annie" is the best Balearic song of the year, the sort of silken, breezy, featherweight faux-reggae, faux-tropical pop synthesis that acts like Scritti Politti and Duran Duran confected for play on la isla bonita. It sounds sterling in the present even as it inhabits a bygone time where there were such things as "answering machines." —Andy Beta

Neon Indian: "Annie"

The Electric Lady bonus cut "Hell You Talmbout" was already eye-opening in its original form, evoking claustrophobia in a wide-open space as its street-crime snapshots intruded on lives spent trying to be lived. But after the events of the past couple of years, Monáe tore every allusive word out of the original and brought her crew in to replace them with a cry of rage and a seemingly endless roll call. The names in themselves speak volumes: there are the familiar ones that brought the Black Lives Matter movement into the fore (Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown), the ones less instantly recognizable but no less demanding of justice (Tommy Yancy, Jerame Reid, Philip White), and the ones who evoke not-so-distant memories of cases that turned a national spotlight on trigger-happy police (Amadou Diallo and Sean Bell). As a musical performance it all cuts to the essence, riding off rolling-thunder drumline momentum and a church mourner's chorus, a marcher's anthem that keeps its structure simple and strong enough to carry the burden of all those names. It's what happens when the demands for recognition that "I Am—Somebody" are ignored by the people with your life in their hands, beats for the streets when the streets are taken over by the people. —Nate Patrin

Janelle Monáe and Wondaland Records: "Hell You Talmbout" (via SoundCloud)

Nicolas Jaar leaked music slowly this year. Outside of his unofficial Soviet movie OST Pomegranates, his only 2015 releases came in the form of Nymphs, a series of three new singles released periodically from summer through fall. Capping off the chain is the standalone "Fight", an eight-and-a-half minute exercise in snaking beatwork and destabilized melody. Jaar slices up his voice and tosses the resulting syllables into the fray, grinding his upper register in the nervous machinery. The track doesn’t follow lyrics so much as it lets phrases glance off its central apparatus like pixels of light off a disco ball. "So don’t you fight," Jaar insists at the dissolving finish. "Fight" takes an explicit look at the workings of the human body, how they connect and disconnect from the sounds they process. Jaar finds sympathy with the body’s quieter experiences, the ticks and hums that move in the background of our inner lives, and Nymphs as a sequence not only echoes those movements but extrapolates on them. Here’s a producer who’s always been as interested in the murk beneath the surface of his work as the surface itself; on "Fight", he finds plenty of glitter in both. —Sasha Geffen

Nicolas Jaar: "Fight (Nymphs IV)"

"Dream Lover"’s unruly saxophones squeal a filthy poem of irresponsible adventure and unlikely romance. It sounds exhausted, and liable to collapse—as if Dan Bejar were acquiescing to just one last romp before seriousness sets in. "I think I used to be more fun," he admits. As much as the 43-year-old Canadian tries to act the Scrooge of indie rock, even he can't completely negate the joy in his own music. It was recorded with the studio doors flung wide, horns squalling at full blast, and made it onto Poison Season in spite of the inherent pop DNA that Bejar found so aberrant. —Laura Snapes

Destroyer: "Dream Lover" (via SoundCloud)

Earl Sweatshirt is good at writing about anxiety, and writing about anxiety is difficult. Perhaps the only thing more difficult than writing about anxiety is writing about good writing about anxiety. And when you live with anxiety you tend to cherish the rare art that manages to hit such a high level of simplicity as to relieve it. So why shake that all up and start over again by trying to break down "Grief" for you? Wouldn't retracing his "I just want my time and my mind intact" a few dozen times consecutively in a Jack Torrance style do more justice to this work than any amount of half-baked word goop about how well Earl distills the boom bap nihilism of Mobb Deep into Tumblr generation numbness or whatever? I mean let's be real—you are not going to read anything as beautiful, calming, or complete as even the shallowest bar on this song anywhere on the Internet today or tomorrow or next year. So go outside and like shit already. Earl did that so we don't have to go through that. —Andrew Nosnitsky

Earl Sweatshirt: "Grief"

With "Inhale Exhale", London upstart Nao—Caracal scene-stealer, ex-Jarvis Cocker backup singer, and possibly-maybe foil for international man of mystery Jai Paul and his brother A.K.—offers up a smash-that-wasn’t, a rippling bundle of nerves in the guise of a brilliantly ambiguous pop song. Through a stream of scattered imagery—rivers, oceans, churches in the wild—"Inhale" finds Nao cataloging her demons over what sounds like a spaceship gaining sentience; "it’s me," she insists a little past the halfway mark, "it’s not you," marking what may be the first time in history that particular kiss-off is delivered in earnest. The tightrope-walking "Inhale" inhabits that all-too-familiar space between composure and abandon, when you and your cool are separated by a single breath. —Paul Thompson

Nao: "Inhale Exhale" (via SoundCloud)

"Oui" is easily the least debauched song on Jeremih’s shamelessly pleasure-seeking third LP Late Nights, and it’s all the better for it. Taking a page from The-Dream’s catalog of similarly lovelorn R&B stunners, "Oui" is like a shot of warm sunlight in Late Nights’ nocturnal glow, a heart-in-your-throat, no-frills love song that breaks devotion down to its simplest terms ("There’s no oui without you and I"). That clever sweetness paid off in a big way, making for an instantly likable comeback single. Jeremih saves his best trick for last, when the beat falls away on the bridge to make room for a vocal riff on Shai’s 1992 hit "If I Ever Fall in Love". With "Oui", Jeremih made it stunningly clear—there’s no other R&B lothario we’d rather spend time with. —Eric Torres

Jeremih: "Oui"

The discussion around climate change is among the grand farces of our age, pitting the endless labor of scientists and activists against a general state of political inaction and conciliatory half-measures from powerful nations. "4 Degrees", the first song released from ANOHNI’s upcoming HOPELESSNESS, for which the singer formerly known as Antony collaborated with producers Hudson Mohawke and Oneohtrix Point Never, cuts to the quick of the issue with a disturbing ferocity. An apocalyptic vision of extinction, it equates a central shrug of indifference ("It’s only 4 degrees") with purposeful, systematic violence, turning it into a death wish for all life on Earth. Curling out of a steadily intensifying boil of drums and orchestration, ANOHNI’s distinctive vibrato becomes a violent oscillation, the voice of an avenging angel bent on punishing the innocent. A catalog of dying animals calls to mind an anti-Noah’s Ark narrative, the enlightened human willing each one in turn to its death.

Even more powerfully, the song coincides with ANOHNI’s own decision to leave the name Antony behind and release music under the name she uses personally. How much courage and how much anger does it take to make such a brutal statement alongside your own professional reinvention? J. Ralph, the composer who worked with ANOHNI for the music in the documentary Racing Extinction, recently commented on the idea of mass extinctions whittling the world’s sounds down to a single voice. "4 Degrees" is the prelude to that moment, a savage stirring of frustration and catharsis run through with bitterness. —Abigail Garnett

ANOHNI: "4 Degrees"

Few modern artists communicate longing as well as FKA twigs does, and on "in time", she nestles snugly into the idea of a future that may never come. Over pinched but percolating synths, she pines for the familiarity she and her lover knew before they slowly became estranged. She illustrates this disconnect in the little asides: "In time, your hands on my body will resonate through me/ Like they did before." It's a half-hearted attempt to convince herself things will get better or that they even can. "in time" is one of the most sumptuous moments on the singer-producer's EP, M3LL155X, a stunning audiovisual experience that encapsulates her strengths as an artists and auteur. twigs and co-producer Tic crank out a production that clicks and bumps in bursts, creating the little pockets though which her muted voice breathes. "in time" is the centerpiece that anchors the project, rounding out her previously shapeless and wispy soundscapes into something more solid and whole. —Sheldon Pearce

FKA twigs: "in time"

As a boy, David Robert Jones loved a book called Starman Jones by science fiction icon Robert Heinlein. It helped spark Jones’ fascination with space, one that’s sustained him throughout the decades, long after he changed his named to David Bowie and launched his career in earnest with 1969’s "Space Oddity". Bowie’s latest single, "Blackstar", is both an extension of that fascination and a reinvention of it. Unlike the relatively restrained astral voyages of "The Stars (Are Out Tonight)" and "Dancing Out in Space" from his last album, 2013’s The Next Day, "Blackstar" is one of Bowie’s cyclical retreats from rock convention; its 10-minute sprawl is fractured, episodic, and experimental, with a chant of Gregorian proportions bleeding into movements of jazzy syncopation, atmospheric pop, and breathtaking orchestral ecstasy.

The overall impression is one of cosmic awe—a filmic immersion in Bowie’s science-fictional universe that doesn’t even need the song’s astounding video to vividly evoke. Bowie’s longtime producer Tony Visconti has admitted that Blackstar, the upcoming album due January 8, was influenced by Kendrick Lamar, and that’s evident in the single’s fluid lushness and elastic dimensionality. Still, there are plenty of clues in "Blackstar" that Bowie still genuflects before Scott Walker, from the art-rock gauntness to the cryptic mystique of his refrain, "I’m a blackstar". Bowie’s timbre is haunting and stentorian, and that enormity is driven home by the scope of his vision: Steeped in pomp, space, and myth, "Blackstar" not only rekindles his conceptual fire, it reestablishes his nomadic orbit around science fiction. —Jason Heller

David Bowie: "Blackstar"

Kurt Vile is the pied piper of easy vibes and carefree contentment. His voice is a graceful, assured mumble, and his songs take their time to make their points, suggesting that the singer rushes to do little but relax. Sometimes, though, even bros get the blues. During "Pretty Pimpin", the anthem of and thesis for the anxiety-tinged b’lieve i’m goin’ down…, Vile awakes to a state of "Once in a Lifetime" confusion. He’s caught off guard by the face staring back from the mirror and the circumstances that brought him to this moment, as he brushes his teeth and considers (at least briefly) combing his cascade of curls back, like an adult working a normal 9-to-5. "Who’s that stupid clown blocking the bathroom sink?" he quips. Even though slightly out of his mind, Vile sidesteps his worries long enough for a sly smile, realizing that, in spite of onset of middle-aged responsibility, the man in the mirror remains "pretty pimpin." —Grayson Haver Currin

Kurt Vile: "Pretty Pimpin"

Dissonance and distortion have never played a big role in Beach House's music. For all their pervasive melancholy, they tend to keep their harmonies consonant and their signal clean. But both qualities creep into "Sparks", a song whose very name implies friction. The gleaming guitar lead is caked in fuzz, the looped vocal that runs beneath is encrusted with static. But it's the organs that really buzz, throwing off harmonics like a sharpening wheel tosses tiny points of light, in a steady cycle of tension and release, tension and release. It's not all so rough—Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally singing in unison is as smooth as the onset of night, and the whole song radiates a hush reminiscent of Yo La Tengo's nocturnal And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out. The lyrics suggest a hazy vision of homecoming and all the bittersweet emotions that come with it. "And then it's dark again/ Just like a spark," they sing, in a twist that is subtle but significant: treating sparks not as a symbol of light, but its opposite. Everything fades to black eventually, just some things quicker than others. —Philip Sherburne

Beach House: "Sparks"

Where 2013’s Cut 4 Me showed off Kelela’s dexterity with languorous, metallic club music and R&B, on "Rewind" she increased the pace to a well-suited sprint. A standout from this fall’s Hallucinogen EP, "Rewind" uses heavy, So So Def-nodding bass and lazy keys to speak to that singular, spark of a moment when you connect with another person, drawing on "the narcotic that is loving someone," as she explained. "It makes you feel drained, it’s in your body and it affects you so completely." It’s fitting, then, that "Rewind" is so utterly catchy, with a spacious, lean bounce to it that lends itself exceptionally well to dance (see: the runway models who memorably broke out into elaborate choreography during the song at an Opening Ceremony fashion show this fall). The song’s ecstatic pulse and Kelela’s airy, polished vocals are enough to make you as lightheaded and in love as the song’s dizzying subject. —Eric Torres

Kelela : "Rewind" (via SoundCloud)

Dem Jointz get the production credit for "Genocide", but it's tough to listen without hearing Dr. Dre's fingerprints on the brash, frequency-hogging mix. Blame it (or celebrate it) for chasing older ears, this brittleness demands attention from the motorcycle-revving opening seconds. While Dre brags about loading up Pro Tools over a loping groove, the song opens up like a trap door beneath the listeners' feet. Candice Pillay's patois leads into Floetry's Marsha Ambrosius, singing a hook that would have fit a No Limit CD two decades earlier. Neo soul and gangster rap, past and present, murder and mass killings, a tree and its forest: "Genocide" suggests a multitude of perspectives vying for dominance, and an uncertain verdict. The album's heart pumps with the charged energy of a younger artist throughout—weariness seems anathema to Dr. Dre. Yet Compton was a definitive product of 2015, its age showing in the colliding visions of its collaborators, with only Dre's unifying sensibility holding everything together. His weather-damaged vocals color the record with the desperation of a race against time. Yet despite some fraying around the edges, he remains bellicose and confrontational. His chest-beating verse clears the way for Kendrick Lamar, who leads the song to its darkened exit: "Fuck your hope." —David Drake

Dr. Dre: "Genocide" [ft. Kendrick Lamar, Marsha Ambrosius, and Candice Pillay]

For his latest album as Oneohtrix Point Never, Daniel Lopatin has created a rich (if opaque) narrative about an adolescent alien, a narrative buttressed by digital ephemera outside the album proper. The fake Twitter accounts and rabbit-hole websites that sit outside Garden of Delete’s running time provide an interesting way to ponder the record’s engagement with juvenile dolor, but none of that would have mattered if the music didn’t also communicate Lopatin's themes. Referencing nu-metal riffs, black-metal blast beats, and dance music hooks, "Sticky Drama" isn’t just the album’s most immediately arresting cut. It’s also the album’s best advertisement for Lopatin's kitschy evocation of teenage sadness. It helps, too, that the song’s lyrics are rendered fully unintelligible by Lopatin’s filters. Just as with opera, sometimes you don’t need to follow every word, precisely. The range of instrumental color tells you what the singer is feeling—and what the composer thinks about the character’s psychology. —Seth Colter Walls

Oneohtrix Point Never: "Sticky Drama"

During her five years away, Joanna Newsom tied the knot and became a film star; given her knack for turning personal conflicts into wild musical imbroglios, this album could’ve gone anywhere. Divers’ first single, the poetic nonfiction piece "Sapokonikan", was reliably ambitious. Drawing parallels between historical, romantic, and cultural forms of erasure, it felt closer in spirit to a Harper’s pitch than any familiar folk idiom. Followup "Leaving the City", however, suggested she’d been wrestling with the same shit as many of the rest of us. A reflection on urban aspiration vs. rural modesty, it takes a macabre trip through gold fields where "the light will seep and the scythe will reap" towards a remarkable chorus. As a cacophony builds, internal rhymes fidget anxiously down its meter. From the soul-searching emerges a catch-22, that the price we pay for slowing time is an intimate awareness of its passage. —Jazz Monroe

Joanna Newsom: "Leaving the City"

This is peak Courtney Barnett: "I think you’re a joke," she incants, kicking out the final couplet of her most genius chorus, "But I don’t find you very FUU-uuu-UUU-uuu-UUU-uuu-UUU-uuu-NNY!" Barnett hollers that word for five full seconds—a drawl that’s so monotone and unhinged it’s like she’s finding some power inside her that she never knew was there. It sounds like the kind of confident psychic joyride that introverts typically only have in their own heads, but Barnett projects it to the heavens in one long taunting exhalation—a shy girl’s dream.

It’s a testament to Barnett’s considerable talent that the most epic song on her debut LP is also the most fun. The subterranean blues of "Pedestrian at Best" are spit too fast for anything like Dylanesque cue cards, but you try and catch them all: "The rats are back inside my head/ What would Freud have said?" Barnett speak-sings, and while she sets her stakes high, she is not self-serious, as her conclusion attests: "I’m a fake! I’m a phoney! I’m awake! I’m alone! I’m homely! I’m a Scorpio!" If you’re a quiet person with an overactive mind, prone to self-deprecation, you’ll feel seen in Barnett’s music, but "Pedestrian at Best" does one better. It offers an invitation to shout it back, to laugh, and maybe, for a second, to even feel cool. —Jenn Pelly

Courtney Barnett: "Pedestrian at Best"

On his breakout single "Type of Way", Rich Homie Quan couldn’t suppress the tinge of guilt he felt about his own success. He could sense the jealousy that his car, his watch, and his general good fortune stirred in others, and judging by his remorseful croon it genuinely pained him. Two years later he's over all that. On "Flex (Ohh Ohh Ohh)" he flashes not one luxury watch but six of them, relishes his penthouse view, and broadcasts his latest windfall to the world ($100,000 for just two days work, on top of that cold $2 mil he made off a mixtape). If those figures make anybody else in the room feel some type of way, so be it. Over a springy, Mustard-on-Prozac beat from Nitti Beatz and DJ Spinz, Quan hopscotched through the most jovial rap single of the year, and his cheer was infectious. And that’s to say nothing of the video, which spawned one of the year’s most memorable dances, a flamboyant victory strut as slap happy as the song itself. —Evan Rytlewski

Rich Homie Quan: "Flex"

If we’re ranking Future personas (and we always should be), the shit-talking "I do these drugs, they don’t do me" Straight Outta Zone 6 Future should garner as much hoopla as "bummed out with love while floating in a sea of codeine" Future. While the latter brings us some downright scary moments, the former often gives us better music. Take "I Serve the Base", a damn near perfect song. As the unofficial intro to DS2, Future uses a beat from Metro Boomin that sounds like Atlanta-by-way-of-Spacely Sprockets to get everyone on the same page, letting you know things are better on his end since the Ciara breakup and subsequent Beast Mode/Monster/56 Nights three-play. "They tryna take the soul out me/ They tryna take my confidence and they know I'm cocky/ Fuck another interview, I'm done with it/ ...A nigga was depressed/ Now my mind back healthy" and that it’s back to business as usual. —Ernest Wilkins

Future: "I Serve the Base"

In 2000, Sleater-Kinney ended their riot-grrrl fatigue anthem "#1 Must Have" with a powerful reminder: "Culture is what we make it, now is the time to invent it." Fifteen years later and they’re still looking to invent a new kind of culture, except this time the prospect is more hopeful, re-energized on their song "A New Wave" as a call to action. "No outline will ever hold us," Carrie Brownstein sings in between playing masterful, howling electric guitar solos. "It’s not a new wave, it’s just you and me." This is a rousing song about breaking through the confines of ceilings and ill-fitting labels, the means of destruction being the realization that there’s much more to being than boxes, bodies, or waves. "I am raw material, make me plastic make me fuel," Brownstein sings, every word in strong enunciation. Vague regarding its targets, "A New Wave" emerges as a universal song for anyone who wants to exist without outlines, to get to a basic foundation where to measure power is to measure love. —Hazel Cills

Sleater-Kinney: "A New Wave"

There was much talk in the year following Yeezus, as Kanye West campaigned (and succeeded) to needle his way into the mercurial fashion world, of the Chicago hip-hop polymath having lost touch with the pulse of black America in his quest for personal recognition. In his proper return to rapping this year, after the campfire singalongs "Only One" and "FourFiveSeconds", West made damn sure to snap back hard, reading the riot act to detractors high and low with his most statistically profane performance to date. "All Day" is unadulterated swag rap of the grittiest variety, and you can feel in it the percolating frustration of the post-millennial black creative to leverage community cred against success in society proper. It sucks that hip-hop is a world where our freest thinkers have to continuously cycle back and flash their bonafides, but as a poignant reminder that Kanye West is indisputably black and unapologetically Chicago, "All Day" stings. —Craig Jenkins

Kanye West: "All Day" [ft. Allan Kingdom, Theophilus London, and Paul McCartney]

"Kill V. Maim" is Art Angels’ most bracing action scene—and, as ever, Claire Boucher plays all the roles. In a sole pre-chorus, over stadium-crushing beats, you can hear a whole lineage of pop defiance: Grimes morphs from a metallic growl à la Onobox to a sly Barbie-via-Nicki hair-flip to a deranged cheerleader taunt (with the particular ear-piercing squeal of Brittany from "Daria"). At least conceptually, her pivoting vocal escapades recall Kathleen Hanna in Bikini Kill—how Hanna contorted her voice to show that identities are performed (indeed, Art Angels feels like the album that Hanna’s l'écriture féminine Julie Ruin character dreamed of). No one can sing the words "Italiana mobster looking so precious" with quite the naturalistic ease of Grimes; still, "I’m only a man, and I do what I can" might be her most subversive and quotable couplet ever. "Kill V. Maim" is Grimes as pure iconoclast. No one else in pop—mainstream, avant-garde, or otherwise—could do this, and it’s hard to imagine that anyone would even try.

Boucher says "Kill V. Maim"—with its storyline of an unstoppable villain on her worst behavior—was "written from the perspective of Al Pacino in The Godfather Pt. 2, except he’s a vampire who can switch gender and travel through space." It’s some kind of a miracle that you could start there and end up with an interstellar banger like this. Even among Art Angels’ raw balladeering and its throat-scraping screams of Pharmakon-calibre, "Kill V. Maim" emerges as the record’s daring peak. It’s a hype song for all the kids who almost got beat-up at Homecoming—the sound of a secret pep-rally for the freaks. —Jenn Pelly

Grimes: "Kill V. Maim"

In the past, a honey-voiced kid like Justin Bieber would have ruled the Rat Pack, a bad boy belting out unbeatable pablum. Now he’s a weirdo too, at least thanks to Skrillex and Diplo (recording here as Jack Ü). On "Where Are Ü Now" he sings like an angel with a voice made of pure sunlight, and then Diplex just kinda screw around with him on their computer, transforming him into the year’s catchiest dolphin for the hook, rewinding him, and all sorts of other kooky shit. Great songs are often made of either beauty or madness, and often we settle for neither. "Where Are Ü Now" is both, pushing music forward while keeping it on the straight and narrow with his exceptional skills. —Matthew Schnipper

Jack Ü: "Where Are Ü Now" [ft. Justin Bieber] (via SoundCloud)

Even if she hadn’t re-emerged with her first studio album in seven years, Janet Jackson was already embodied in R&B’s 2015 landscape—the sound of her work with producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis was everywhere. Janet’s defiant spirit echoed in the likes of alt-R&B stars like FKA twigs and Kelela, her coos in more mainstream singers like Tinashe and Jhené Aiko, and in Carly Rae Jepsen’s recent work with another Jam-Lewis acolyte, Dev Hynes. Even the men amalgamating pop, R&B and rock—Miguel, Jason Derulo, and the Weeknd—worshiped at her altar.

When Jackson returned with "No Sleeep" she embraced her status as elder stateswoman. Rather than bend to the current trends of uptown funk and electronic hybrids (ground she’s already trod in her formidable catalog), she returned with an air of assurance, never needing to rise above the purr of pillow talk to set the mood. Working with Jam & Lewis to conjure this quiet storm, Janet also documented the wee hours of the night. She sings of a time that’s around "half past five," but here it’s a time where touch and feel is the realest of sensations. —Andy Beta

Janet Jackson: "No Sleeep" (via SoundCloud)

It’s hard to find much to complain about in the dazzling slow-motion rave of Jamie xx’s In Colour, especially when it comes to what is possibly the album’s most euphoric highlight, "Loud Places". But still, many crowed about how the track, featuring vocals from his xx bandmate Romy Madley-Croft, not only works better as an xx song proper, but is the best xx song released since the trio’s self-titled debut in 2009. But this is a fundamental misunderstanding of "Loud Places", which doesn’t really belong to any one person or group, Jamie included. Instead, it’s a love letter to both the records that shaped him (it’s built on a generous sample of Idris Muhammad’s joyous 1977 dance-funk track "Could Heaven Ever Be Like This") and the people who helped him reach such lofty heights. "Didn’t I take you to higher places you can’t reach without me?" Croft sings just before the swelling nu-gospel hook kicks in. The answer is a grateful, emphatic yes. —Zach Kelly

Jamie xx: "Loud Places" [ft. Romy]

Built primarily with trap snares over a four-note piano line, "Energy" is largely without flourish. It also finds Drake at his most dismissive. He's got countless responsibilities and daily frustrations, so instead of fighting back against everyone "trying to drain [him] of [his] energy," he just brushes them off. Why should he concern himself with anyone else when he's the one at the top of the game? "I got people talkin' down, man, like I give a fuck," he raps. And so while he was lyrically cryptic in his past feuds with the likes of Common and Kendrick Lamar, Drake stuck to his "Energy" mantra and wasted little time on his beef with Meek Mill—just two quick, successive diss tracks. It's been some time since he's needed the "sensitive" angle to find success, and he no longer relies on the myth-building of "Started From the Bottom". "Energy", with its hater-baiting video, is Drake's standing magnum opus: Complain about him all you want, try to take his crown from him. He'd like to see you try. —Matthew Strauss

Drake: "Energy"

Despite how it might look, the nickname D.R.A.M. has nothing to do with "drama," though the Virginia rapper found plenty of that with his deliriously bubbly "Cha Cha". D.R.A.M. stands for "Does Real Ass Music," so it follows that "Cha Cha" is a real-ass song. Though the original version of "Cha Cha" samples some of the illest fire ever recorded, D.R.A.M. maintained the song’s bounding energy in future, royalty-free versions in a way that attracted inevitable attention.

To be sure, "Cha Cha" is a horndog’s anthem. D.R.A.M., rippling with enthusiasm, is at the bar where Latin girls go, hoping to score with a "Dominican that resembles Taina." D.R.A.M.’s equipment is minimal—that looping SNES beat complete with the Mario "coin" sound, a little functional Spanish, a fondness for Latin cuisine, a splash of liquid courage—but the appeal is universal. The joy in "Cha Cha" will be sensed mañana, and every future mañana. —Corban Goble

D.R.A.M.: "Cha Cha"

When a parent becomes terminally ill, one of the first things the children may experience is a vertiginous feeling of unreality. Time moves in a different way than you're used to. Things that seemed important a day before become suddenly trivial. The future collapses and rockets ahead simultaneously, like one of Hitchcock's dizzying dolly zooms.

For anyone who has been through it, the way Noah Lennox recounts his own family's experience of his late father's cancer will probably feel eerily familiar, from the initial denial—"When they said he's ill/ Laughed it off as if it's no big deal/ What a joke to joke no joke," he sings, in a dazed deadpan—to the unexpected forms that acceptance may take. When I met up with Lennox in Lisbon earlier this year, he explained that the song's more cryptic lines ("Sick has to eat well too") were a way of expressing "sympathy for disease, trying to forgive disease"—of seeing disease as "just another thing in the universe that's trying to survive."

It's an unusual perspective, but from the sound of the song, you can tell he's not being ironic: Rarely has Lennox's falsetto sounded more like a choirboy's, and the combination of the "Last Post" bugle call that introduces the song and the misty Tchaikovsky harp that comprises its melody perfectly evokes that fragile serenity that comes when the worst is finally over, and there's no longer anything to be afraid of. —Philip Sherburne

Panda Bear: "Tropic of Cancer"

Pop hits have the habit of dismissing pessimism and angst as uncomfortable, unsellable emotions—mere hurdles meant to be cleared. It could feel as though, to make it to the top of the charts, you needed to approach PSA levels of positivity, assuring everyone everything will always get better. But what about those who are cool with feeling bummed out and serving as the perennial wallflower? Enter Alessia Cara’s "Here", written by the teenager after suffering through a night at an insufferable party full of boys who wouldn’t leave her alone, music she didn’t like, and cliques with which she never even hopes to click. Cara’s lyrics sport the specificity of a diary entry, with in-the-room details making these three minutes vivid. And above a stomping, defiant beat, her voice dips into low, annoyed murmurs and leaps into strident, sure-of-herself commands. Unapologetic but not rude, Cara argues that indifference is OK and that being uncomfortable isn’t unacceptable. She is positive about seeming negative. "Here" is an overdue anthem for a choir of universal introverts—happy to be singing in the privacy of their own homes, alone or in intimate, familiar groups.  —Grayson Haver Currin

Alessia Cara: "Here"

Buried within saxophonist Kamasi Washington’s sprawling three-hour debut album, The Epic, "The Rhythm Changes" is a bit of a digression, an island of R&B shuffle in an ocean of blissed-out and ebullient spiritual jazz. Sung by Patrice Quinn, it has the lush arrangement and easy-going feel of a '70s Stevie Wonder tune. It also has the positive message—about the nature of change, about the passing of time. But "The Rhythm Changes" does not feel out of place, even when juxtaposed against the record’s screechier extremes. It comes off like a secular prayer, a call-and-response hymn that offers a different path to the transcendent mood that preoccupies the bulk of The Epic. Though Washington and his bandmates spend the middle of the song swapping solos, it’s only in the outro—when the whole ensemble chimes in together, buoyed by a string arrangement and then a choir—that the song reaches its heady, slightly cosmic, culmination. —Aaron Leitko

Kamasi Washington: "The Rhythm Changes"

Sometimes I like to treat myself to a Missy Elliott video mini-marathon. I watch as many clips as I can stand in the middle of my workday before my fidgeting can no longer be contained in an office chair (usually three or four). I was reminded I was overdue for a Missy session the first time I watched the video for "WTF (Where They From)", Elliott's first single in years. The first time I watched it, I could feel the grin spread across my face, and then I watched it again. And again. You can measure the success of a Missy Elliott single by the force of its liberating glee, and she was having more fun here, sounding freer and more invincible, than she has since 2007's "Lose Control". —Jayson Greene

Missy Elliott: "WTF (Where They From)" [ft. Pharrell]

The music of L.A. art-pop composer Julia Holter usually comes pre-loaded with big ideas that might carbon-date back to Ancient Greece or Jazz Age Paris. But beyond passing thoughts such as "I should read Colette" or "What’s ekstasis again?", listeners mainly jettison this stuff, like the bundled software you delete from a new laptop to make it yours. What we care about are the wondrous musical forms Holter spies through her erudite keyholes, and she flings the door wide open on "Feel You". Though she can’t be pinned to a single cultural register, many of her most striking songs are roughly one part '70s West Coast pop and two parts early music. She flips the ratio on one of the most luminous songs ever set on a rainy day. "You know I love to run away from the sun," Holter sings in a powerful, purposeful flit. There’s something of baroque music in the buzz of a harpsichord and the ingenious chorus, where a thorny scale stands out against the easily resolving chords of the verses, but a pert bubblegum bounce dominates. Though thoughtful and unique, the song is perfectly immediate, and there’s a type of artistic maturity in that simplicity. Music can always borrow gravitas from scholarly footnotes, but here, the Rosetta Stone is Holter herself, though not in a "confessional" sense. Rather, she records her direct impressions of an inhabited world, not of her reading. The impetus becomes the sheer capacity of her nimble, emotive voice and the stickiness of her un-automatic melodic choices. A festival parade passes by; the mist is smeared with city lights; someone was wearing a raincoat—these are the kinds of glimpses one actually remembers, outside of the stories constructed in memory, much less narratives polished smooth by antiquity. After all the studious settings, Holter turns out to be her own best subject. You feel her. —Brian Howe

Julia Holter: "Feel You"

In what should have been the lead single for her critically beloved but relatively inert third album E•MO•TION, Carly Rae Jepsen shot another Cupid’s arrow right at her sweet spot of transcendent genericism and got something explosively romantic as a result. "Run Away With Me", like Annie’s "Heartbeat" or Robyn’s "Dancing On My Own", is purified and paradigmatic; Jepsen goes so breathless with longing that the object of her affection begins to seem less like a person and more like pop music proper, its solitary and universal embrace. The track begins with a blistering riff—some bagpipe-cum-saxophone-cum-trumpet monster, woozy with rainbows and a slight kazoo fizz—and then kicks into Jepsen’s babydoll verses, as triplets beat softly underneath. The drums build, fill, metastasize, and by the chorus, "Run Away With Me" is racing.

It’s a Gravitron of the genre—neon, dizzying, and ruinous, built with factory precision. Embedded deep within the machinery are six Swedish sorcerers pulling the biggest levers in their possession. The track’s centrifugal yearning pins you fully, blasts glitter into the sky. —Jia Tolentino

Carly Rae Jepsen: "Run Away With Me"

Throughout 2013’s "Heartbreaks + Setbacks", Thundercat surveyed the gradual decline of a relationship. On "Them Changes", the bass virtuoso has moved beyond the day-to-day struggle and has fully arrived at devastation. His heart is no longer breaking—it’s gone. "Nobody move," he instructs, "there’s blood on the floor." Right at the jump, he instills a sort of crime-scene panic, and soon enough, he sheds some of the hyperbole and gets to the heart of the matter: He’s been dumped and is getting very drunk to dull the pain. His burbling funk jam about feeling debilitated and broken is, ironically, fueled by the same Isley Brothers beat that’s sampled on "It Was a Good Day".

Such a shitty day needs a banger, and it’s only appropriate that Thundercat’s powerhouse collaborators/besties Flying Lotus and Kamasi Washington come through with contributions. Washington’s wildest solo begins right as the song fades out, and Lotus’ work is largely atmospheric. In its position as the centerpiece of his otherwise sedate mini-album The Beyond / Where the Giants Roam, "Them Changes" also serves as the midpoint between Thundercat’s two best overall looks: It’s got emotional turmoil sung in a bruised falsetto, and it’s got expertly performed six-string bass funk. This year, Pharrell pledged his allegiance to Thundercat after hearing "Them Changes". "He is a necessity," Pharrell said, and he isn’t wrong. —Evan Minsker

Thundercat: "Them Changes" (via SoundCloud)

"Eventually"—what a loaded word Kevin Parker used to name the bittersweet ballad at the center of Currents. Likewise, it's a thought you'll find at the crux of pessimists and optimists alike, the hinge of their secret doubts and quiet hopes swaying back and forth as it's pushed along by time. And it's true, only time will tell. To hear Parker sing it himself in all the song's warm technicolor glow, you'd peg him a reformed defeatist, if only because, after all the times he's seen love go south, there's probably nowhere to go but up. It's right there in that heart-wrenching chorus, those two lines delivered in the weightless breakdown of Tame Impala's rockist synth-pop: "But I know that I'll be happier, and I know you will, too." Parker can't see the future, but damn if he hasn't been through this before.

Why "Eventually" stands out among an album of wall to wall masterworks is its apparent duality, the tension of someone wanting to believe what experience plucked from their heart. Sure, the band's crystalline chords shimmer, their slinky bass lines sway, their drums bounce and pop, but you can't escape the trampled empathy in Parker's voice. That dichotomy sets us up for the song's best trick, one second of bated-breath silence after the music swells to the rafters. It's our moment of truth, the hinge on which we can move on from our deep-seated doubts or cling to them like a deflated life raft. "Eventually" won't tell us what happens next, but it sure does make the future look bright. —Patric Fallon

Tame Impala: "Eventually"

So this guy shows up all of a sudden, and it's that one guy. Fourteen years ago you thought you had something good going, and all of a sudden he ghosted—stopped returning your calls. Or anyone's. Every so often you heard a rumor about him: he wasn't doing so hot, or he was trying to pull himself back up from not-so-hot. You'd basically given up hope and moved on. And now here he is on your doorstep... and goddamn is he in incredible shape. Kinkier than ever, too.

That's how "Sugah Daddy" presented D'Angelo at the tail-end of last year. It supercharges its funk by understating it: a clap-slap-snap beat, staccato piano stabs, and a dubbed-out, phased-up horn section, just barely tracing the contours of a groove that swings like hip-bones. Nothing obscures D'Angelo's voice, or rather his voices, as they casually dive and flip between registers, the kind of vocal performance you can't pull off unless you're utterly sure of your power. Every line is either an offhanded aside or rendered in harmonies so tight that no single melody dominates them. There's a bit of Prince in his phrasing, a bit of Funkadelic, and a lot of a knowing smirk—when you lean in to make out what he's singing, that's when he makes his move. "Sugah Daddy" plays on the pop history of both of its title's words; its lyric just barely stays on the right side of the line between super-creepy and super-hot. And it's definitely the sexiest song ever to mention a queef. —Douglas Wolk

D'Angelo: "Sugah Daddy"

By dancing like nobody’s watching in that liminal space between the personal and the universal, Erykah Badu’s "Cel U Lar Device" deserved more than its share of any "smart" gadget's data plan in 2015. Drake, of course, picked up this game of telephone with his meme-able, undeniable "Hotline Bling", which itself reaches back to communal memory via a sparse '70s soul sample that could evoke civil rights protests, radio background music, or Virginia hip-hop up-and-comer D.R.A.M.’s own 2015 hit "Cha Cha". And yet OVO Sound's "Marvins Room" drunk-dialer can’t help but invest his Proustian mobile-phone reminiscence with ickily in-character, psychosexual condescension. Not his sometime mentor Badu, whose gender-flipping "Hotline" rework doesn’t seem overly fussed about her missing caller. The Toronto rapper/singer's successful slickness becomes the Atlanta R&B/hip-hop crossover godhead’s transcendent absurdity, four minutes turn into six-and-a-half, and—as she and co-writer Seven, her son with André 3000, put it here—"such ‘n’ such"; the difference is embodied in plainspoken "cell phone" for Badu’s whimsical yet sophisticated "cellular device." Since expanded into an entire But You Caint Use My Phone mixtape, "Cel U Lar Device" solidified a commercial smash as part of Internet-era folk culture, and confirmed that we’re connected most deeply when we’re casually, cosmically (maybe a little weirdly?) ourselves.

Plus, like the Slits’ "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" or Ananda Shankar’s "Jumpin’ Jack Flash", you can play it around people who’re sick of the original. When the gong hits, the bass drops out, or the actually hotline-style pre-recorded greeting rings out about DJing a relative's Slip N Slide party, the moment will feel like yours and yours alone. —Marc Hogan

Erykah Badu: "Cel U Lar Device"

As all great street rappers do, Future walks the line between hero and villain, and the divide is typically defined by a listener's willingness to fully engage with his work. From a distance, he's an artist who glorifies Xanax binges, but if you let his music engulf your spirit you'll realize that it's about how there's no glory to be found in a Xanax binge because the world is a horrible place and only pain is real. (Fig. 1.) Usually his tales are in the sound itself—he raps in brutalist nursery rhymes that reveal meaning through repetition and over beats that derive their power from the amount of pressure they put on your chest—but "March Madness" is the one track in his recent output that explicitly connects his struggle to the struggles of the world around him. "All these cops shooting niggas—tragic" is an incomplete thought, like basically every phrase to fall out of Future's mouth this year, but it might just provide a tangible enough source of trauma through which literal-minded listeners can recognize his more abstract cries for help. —Andrew Nosnitsky

Future: "March Madness"

It took virtually no time for "I was running through the six WITH MY WOES!", from Drake’s "Know Yourself", to become pop music’s decodable du jour. Whether you choose to acknowledge Drake’s definition of "woes"—it’s an acronym for a mantra his crew lives by, working on excellence—or have decided to remain blissfully ignorant in keeping with an entire lane of Internet-y Drake merchandise, it matters not. What matters is that that particular musical moment (about 1:47 in, right when the beat drops) disabused listeners from the notion that this was your run-of-the-mill retail mixtape.

In a year splattered with Drake’s agendas—fuck Meek Mill! New Raptors jerseys! I made a mixtape with Future! I can dance!—it’s best to default to one of his older maxims. Once the beat dropped in "Know Yourself," nothing was the same. —Corban Goble

Drake: "Know Yourself"

"The biggest hypocrite of 2015" is the title that Kendrick Lamar gave himself on the opening verse of "The Blacker the Berry". That ain’t true. Objectively, subjectively, there are no advanced metrics or corrupted voting committee that would give Lamar that designation. Except that the only person who matters in that assessment is the one with the mouth that declared it true. Lamar is his own harshest critic, and when he closed the song saying "Why did I weep when Trayvon Martin was in the street/ When gangbanging made me kill a nigga blacker than me," there was rightful questioning of respectability politics.

But that reading didn't take into account Lamar’s nuance. The fuller context of To Pimp a Butterfly showed Lamar’s double consciousness tossing and thrashing with every issue: black-on-black violence, systematic racism, the strife of fame, and frustration over none of what’s he’s achieved being able to change all of that. Back in 2011 on "Ab-Soul's Outro" he calmly rapped, "See I spent 23 years on this earth searching for answers/ ‘Til one day I realized I had to come up with my own." "The Blacker the Berry" showed neither a sell-out nor revolutionary, but freed Lamar to once again wander unmarked trails, looking for guidance. —David Turner

Kendrick Lamar: "The Blacker the Berry"

In some respects, "Trap Queen" is a song that only could have become popular now: It’s a genre-bending collision of styles that worked its way up from an unknown rapper’s SoundCloud to nearly the very top of the Hot 100, and getting millions of unsuspecting pop fans singing along about the process of buying, processing, and selling bulk amounts of cocaine. But in most other ways, it’s really a timeless song. In cascading, melodic waves it replicates the giddy, weightless sensation of falling in love as effectively as anything by the Beach Boys or the Jackson 5, and if you peel away the Jeezy-ish level of technical detail about cooking crack you’re left with same themes of devotion, trust, and domestic eroticism that people have been writing lyrics about for centuries. Fetty’s method of infusing trap with an addictive bubble gum rush proved the validity of this sugary wave of pop-rap, and in coming years we’ll most likely see his formula copied more times than we can count, but what will make "Trap Queen" a classic is the way it makes the familiar seem so new, just like any good longterm relationship. —Miles Raymer

Fetty Wap: "Trap Queen"

Vince Staples could be one of the great gangsta rappers of his time, if he weren't utterly appalled by the notion of selling inner-city despair as breezy entertainment. "I'm a gangsta Crip/ Fuck gangsta rap," he sneers on "Norf Norf", and it's an important distinction. Yes, he spent his youth running with the Crips, and while he doesn't apologize for that, he's not trying to glorify it, either.

Staples dedicates much of his bracing debut album Summertime '06 to sucking the glamor out of the gangster fantasy, needling listeners with unceasing descriptions of violence and dehumanization, and refusing to offer a hopeful takeaway. He narrates without editorializing; usually his disdainful voice telegraphs his disgust for him, but on "Norf Norf", he relies on another tool to underscore the cruel absurdity of the street life: a seasick Clams Casino beat. A demented drone set to the stalled sputter of a motor that's been gutted for parts, it neutralizes the machismo in Staples' outlaw raps. —Evan Rytlewski

Vince Staples: "Norf Norf"

The thing I thought most about while listening to "Gosh" wasn’t Special Request or Zomby or any of the other early-'90s rave revivalists you could easily slot the song next to, but Talking Heads’ "The Big Country", a ballad by an art-school band about a man who can’t grasp America until he sees it from a plane. Like "The Big Country", "Gosh"—and all of Jamie xx’s In Colour—is a study in perspective: How cars become ants and roads become veins and how things that are very far away can suddenly seem uncannily close. Or like photography, the way taking certain angles on certain objects render those objects abstract, forcing you to see them again for the first time. As "Gosh" dilates slowly from close-up to panorama, it’s like that: The farther away we get, the more intimate the picture becomes.

Twenty-three years ago the electronic label Warp put out a compilation called Artificial Intelligence, which took dance music out of the clubs and domesticated it for home use. The cover was a drawing of a skinless alien blowing smoke rings from a Barcalounger. Now aliens can take their earbuds on the subway, "Gosh" rattling around their heads like an urban lullaby. —Mike Powell

Jamie xx: "Gosh"

Grimes has always treated "REALiTi" as a purely practical matter. The song arrived earlier this year in demo form as an apologetic gift to fans: "poorly recorded in the first place and never meant to be heard by anyone," wrote Claire Boucher, "so it’s a bit of a mess haha." Recorded during a fairly fruitless period of creative isolation in Squamish, it finds Boucher contemplating the divide between her old life and the one she lives now, with no trace of drama, regret, or ultimatum; that’s just is how it is these days.

It's a refreshing enough sentiment, but "REALiTi"'s transcendent vibe eclipsed its plainspoken origins. As with Julia Holter's Have You in My Wilderness, the links to Boucher's past work are clear, but the composition behind its burbling synths and handclap rhythms feels fathoms deeper. Testament to Boucher’s skill as a producer, that depth isn't a matter of extra reverb, as it might have been on 2012's Visions. When Boucher revamped "REALiTi" as a CD- and digital-only Art Angels bonus track, she ditched the blur of the demo in favor of pin-sharp focus that captured its iridescence—the way it glimmers melancholy and euphoric depending on the light. "REALiTi" is an aura photo of a perfect pop song, one whose flowing color reveals all Boucher’s unspoken defiance and anxiety in nuance. The more you listen, the more it gives—it’s no surprise to find a seamless 10-hour loop of it on YouTube. —Laura Snapes

Grimes: "REALiTi"

Chance the Rapper cooked up a star-making campaign this year, and "Sunday Candy", off Donnie Trumpet and the Social Experiment’s Surf, was its warm, gooey center. An impossibly sweet, plainspoken song that compares love to holy bread on Sundays, "Sunday Candy" was written for Chance’s grandmother, an unmatched force of positivity in his life growing up in Chicago. That quality alone gives the song an aww-inducing relatability for a lot of us ("you singing too, but your grandma ain’t my grandma!"), but the love that "Sunday Candy" describes can be paired with just about anyone, from a crush to a parent to a friend. Surf had no shortage of joyful live instrumentation, but it all comes together best here, with piano, trombones, trumpets, a chorus, and a gorgeous vocal turn from Jamila Woods that makes the song feel like the final, breathtaking moment in a musical (that perfect, Grease-indebted music video certainly helps). "Sunday Candy" is uplifting in a way no other song in 2015 could possibly be, a moment of much-needed love and joy from an artist filled to the brim with both. —Eric Torres

Donnie Trumpet & the Social Experiment: "Sunday Candy"

Now that 25 is the fastest-selling album in the history of the galaxy and Adele has single-handedly saved the music industry, resurrected the monoculture, and brought about world peace, it’s kinda weird to remember that there was a time when her triumphant return was not a sure thing. Adele’s years away from the spotlight had potentially portended a lengthy (or permanent) retreat from public life. Or, God forbid, a comeback full of happy songs. But the gale-force wind storm whipped up by "Hello"’s first "HALLO FROM THE OTHER SIIIIDE" blew away all that: the high priestess of heartbreak was back, and heartbreakier than ever.

"Hello" proves that Adele continues to be better than anybody else in current pop music at communicating the misery of lost love. It’s a rock-solid, no-frills torch song that makes absolutely zero concessions to the fact that it was released in 2015. (The sepia-toned video, starring a flip phone and an old-school British telephone box, drove that point home.) It sounds like it could have been written at pretty much any point in history since the days of Alexander Graham Bell. But thank God it came out now, when we needed Adele the most. —Amy Phillips

Adele: "Hello"

"I wish I could paint our love," Miguel sings at the beginning of "Coffee", and the design of the song itself is painterly, a surreal, weightless swirl, like milk blooming through a cup of joe. Miguel wrote a song about love and lust and located all of its tension in a precise image: making coffee for someone else. Of course, he makes this very small, terrestrial image sound like falling through infinite shapeless atmospheres, because, as with 2012's "Use Me", Miguel's artistry is in conveying closeness and vulnerability as they actually feel, as ambiguous blurs of pressure and release; because intimacy is about bodies and their positions in space but is also about achieving a kind of bodilessness; because just after waking, reality still contains some of the texture of a dream. —Brad Nelson

Miguel: "Coffee"

If, in 2015, women of a certain age and circumstance find themselves being consistently thwarted by any one behavior, it’s instinctive, nonsensical apologizing. Earlier this year, "Inside Amy Schumer" featured a skit—"I’m Sorry"— in which a panel of highly decorated women dependably and repeatedly sorry’d for things that were plainly not their fault: Dude brings you a cup of coffee when you asked for water? Fuck an apology, friend! Thus, when Rihanna released "Bitch Better Have My Money"—arguably the least apologetic song of the millennium, if not in the whole of recorded music—it felt like a revelation, a corrective, a necessary and instructive text. Rihanna has never been much for equivocating (if she believes "top" and "car" rhyme, who are we to suggest otherwise?), and her agenda here is straightforward: Pay me what you owe me. Don’t act like you forgot. She flatly delivers her demands over a big, echoing beat; her Barbadian patois imbues the words with an unexpected loveliness. It’s hard to imagine any other contemporary artist delivering these lyrics quite so convincingly, or with such beautiful bile. —Amanda Petrusich

Rihanna: "Bitch Better Have My Money"

Cocaine. Once again, Abel Tesfaye is talking about cocaine. For years, it’s been easy to knock Tesfaye for the avoidability of his self-inflicted hell. It stands to reason that if one feels bad about taking drugs and having sex, one might simply stop taking drugs and having sex. But there’s a levity to "Can’t Feel My Face" absent from the rest of Beauty Behind the Madness. The snappy bass line is excavated from Off the Wall-era Michael; the Jacksonian sweetness of Tesfaye’s voice counterbalances the potential severity of his lyrics. He’s singing about the possibility of overdosing on cocaine and/or his lady love, but he sounds happy about it. He loves it! If it’s a lie, he sold it well enough to become a bonafide pop star for the first time in his career. —Jeremy Gordon

The Weeknd: "Can't Feel My Face"

As with the rest of Sufjan Stevens’ masterful Carrie & Lowell, "Should Have Known Better" derives much of its force from its harrowing autobiographical account of Stevens’ relationship with his late, troubled mother. ("When I was three, three maybe four, she left us at that video store.") Yet most of the song’s emotion is directed inward, as Stevens’ grief ripples into regret and self-recrimination, with his lyrics illustrating just how difficult it is to write any truly happy sentences that begin with the words "I should have".  Before the song draws to a close, however, its singer has internalized enough tough wisdom ("The past is still the past, a bridge to nowhere") to permit in a glimmer of light, "My brother had a daughter, the beauty that she brings, illumination," granting both song and album a rare moment of peace and the prospect of renewal. —Matthew Murphy

Sufjan Stevens: "Should Have Known Better"

While being black in America has never been easy, being black in America in 2015 is culturally, economically, and politically nightmarish in ways that are nearly existential. It’s often possible to fall into a double-bind of perceived judgments, where others’ seeming disdain becomes a lens through which to view one’s own appearance, speech, mannerisms, even skin tone. The first full song on Summertime ‘06 confronts this notion head on. "I’m just a nigga," Vince Staples begins, his flow flailing somewhere between swagger and shrug, "until I fill my pockets/ And then I’m MisterNigga." From there, the Long Beach-born MC is off and loping through rhetorical thickets so dank and dense with allusion that true meaning becomes a quest without tangible rewards, and paranoia and reality blur deceptively. Producers DJ Dahi and No I.D. grind together pensive, bleary synthesizer chords so cryptically that the song’s vision of daily life floods with haunted house dread. Yet the throbbing chorus of "Lift Me Up"—brightening slightly, multiplying Staples into titular echoes—eases this polemic into the realm of uneasy triumph. This isn’t the discernible tenor of Black Lives Matter protests; it’s the bass pulse rumbling inaudibly, just beneath the surface of things. —Raymond Cummings

Vince Staples: "Lift Me Up"

According to TripAdvisor, there are precisely five "Things to Do" in the Melbourne suburb of Preston—and coming in at number two on that list of attractions is…the local library. This is the humdrum setting of "Depreston", which finds Courtney Barnett considering a move away from the town’s quaint coffee shops to a place further out, where green space is plentiful. But whereas previous generations found solace in the predictability of tree-lined streets and boxy houses, this 28-year-old can’t help but feel depressed while eyeing the innards of a deceased estate, the ghosts of the past tugging at her in the form of left-behind war photos, sugar cans, and, most pointedly, a handrail in the shower. The house may have been someone’s dream, but not hers.

The minor tragedy plays out in Barnett’s calm, scratchy drawl along with a vaguely country-fied guitar and backbeat. "Depreston" could not be more low-key if it tried, like an old Jeff Tweedy demo, but this does not make its emotional climax any less devastating. When the hook finally comes around—"If you’ve got a spare half a million/ You could knock it down and start rebuilding"—Barnett’s scattered observations come into focus. This is a song about not being able to own things. About letting go of ancestors’ desires. About the price of denying death. It’s a generational anthem that’s not anthemic at all. —Ryan Dombal

Courtney Barnett: "Depreston"

"I don’t know if I trust you, but I really love you," whispers a woman credited as just Gina, in Spanish, at the end of the dark, stringed, flamenco swoon that introduces "Really Love". Her voice fades like a memory, and a harp from a dream sequence dissolves the scene; the beat and the soft-shoe bass start knocking, and the track—an indelibly cinematic single and instant classic off D’Angelo’s magnificent surprise album—sweeps you off your feet.

Written closer to Voodoo’s release than to the Santa-like drop of Black Messiah and leaked in 2007 by Questlove to Triple J, "Really Love" feels as worn-in as it does serendipitous. It’s a relationship that’s teased and frustrated over a decade, which rises, in this six-minute rekindling, to the level of the streetlights and stars. For the length of the track, a hundred dusty particulars weave into a fantasia, in which love sounds effortless but tastes hard-won and real. "I’m not an easy man to overstand," sings D’Angelo, who falsetto-croons his affection like he’s cajoling, even apologizing: "I’m in really love with you." By the end, your heart has synced up to that lopsided, soft, gilded refrain. —Jia Tolentino

D'Angelo: "Really Love"

In the three years since Visions launched her into the upper echelon of indie stardom, Claire Boucher made headlines more as a fashion icon and a lightning rod than as a musician. But any doubts about her skill as a consummate polymath producer were detonated with the release of "Flesh Without Blood". A deceptively joyful combination of a hopscotching beat, lilting melody, and Boucher’s featherlight cooing, Art Angels’ lead single is the rare breakup song about a non-romantic relationship. (Grimes says she doesn’t write about love anymore.) Written "for a former best friend of mine," about "being really disappointed with someone who you really once truly admired," "Flesh Without Blood" contains some of the most quietly devastating lines of the year: "I don’t see the light I saw in you before/ ...And now I don't care anymore." It served as a razor-sharp reminder that Claire Boucher is a musical force to be reckoned with, a woman remaking pop in her own image. —Amy Phillips

Grimes: "Flesh Without Blood"

Young Thug released a lot of crucial music in 2015, but few songs make a better case for him as a virtuoso vocal performer than "Constantly Hating", the snaking opener from his debut retail release Barter 6. Thug turns a shrinking violet of a beat, from Atlanta's newest master of understatement, Wheezy, into a playground for his wildest improvisations. The song is one continuous zig-zag. He creates extreme dynamics at unexpected junctures, delivering much of the first verse in a facetious stage whisper. Though they build carefully on one another, every sticky phrase sounds like some crooked fractal of the whole, and could be the basis of an entire song for a lesser artist ("I'm a beast, I'm a beast, I'm a mobster," "I let that choppa go blocka blocka, get back son," "I can’t stop stacking fucking figuuures"). Eventually, Birdman drops in like a block of granite. Run another two or three times through "Constantly Hating", and every mischievous detail embeds itself into your longterm memory. —Winston Cook-Wilson

Young Thug: "Constantly Hating" [ft. Birdman]

"Let It Happen" functions as the neon-trimmed, infinity-mirrored portal into Currents, an album that sees Kevin Parker expunge the last vestiges of weed-scented elephantine riffage from Tame Impala’s arsenal in favor of shimmering soft-rock, digi-R&B beats and French house filters. You can hear that process of abandoning past orthodoxies play out in both Parker’s zen-koan lyrics ("Try to get through it/ Try to bounce to it") and the song’s labyrinthine structure—when the track locks into a looped synth-stutter near the halfway point, it serves as both a nostalgic throwback to the sound of skipping vinyl and a battering ram into a new dimension. And true to the song’s fatalist philosophy, Parker uses the recording console like a Ouija board, sliding in and out of the song’s many sections as if guided by some subconscious, supernatural force. But despite its seven-minute sprawl, "Let It Happen" remains a highly intimate, interior experience. This isn’t so much psych rock as psyche rock—the sort of insta-jam that feels like it’s being broadcast to you via telepathy rather than a stadium PA. —Stuart Berman

Tame Impala: "Let It Happen"

To Pimp a Butterfly was rolled out with a feint ("i") and a pump-fake (an unreleased, untitled record that only appeared live on "The Colbert Report"), followed by advanced hype from Pharrell, who promised an "unapologetically black" and "AMAZING" single that might set the world ablaze. In talking up its musicality, Pharrell may have set expectations too far afield for a record more interested in sly cleverness than brash novelty. "King Kunta" is less concerned with capital-I Innovation, instead unspooling an interconnected web of references musical and lyrical, historical and emotional.

Produced by Terrace Martin and Sounwave, the uptempo, four-on-the-floor breakbeat channels Curtis Mayfield via DJ Quik, its musical touch-points as layered in potential interpretations as the lyrics themselves. Witness the friction of its contradictions: a universally compelling funk groove that's survived generations of barbecues carrying its gravely serious conceit, a reference to the torture of Roots' protagonist. Meanwhile, Kendrick grins knowingly, his bemusement front-and-center while the details shift, oblique one moment and transparent the next, depending on your perspective. In a snap, a private joke becomes pregnant with significance. Just one example: a line about "sharing bars" now sounds like prophecy, while reinforcing the song's unspoken promise—to endure in the name of principle. —David Drake

Kendrick Lamar: "King Kunta"

The first time through Jamie xx’s In Colour, "I Know There’s Gonna Be (Good Times)" might scan as the album’s outlier, coming as it does after the dizzying pinnacle of "Loud Places". Profane instead of reverent, sun-bright instead of club-dark, drunk instead of ecstatic, "I Know There’s Gonna Be (Good Times)" is about getting low instead of climbing high. Built from little more than a snare roll, finger snaps, and chimes, Jamie xx made a breezy pop confection that alights on dancehall, trap, as well as doo-wop without ever settling on any one sound. On top of the beat, Jamie relies on the yipped boasts of Young Thug, the toasts of Popcaan, and deft placement of a sample from a cappella group, the Persuasions. When reached about the news that his old band’s 1972 song had been sampled, Jimmy Hayes of the Persuasions explained the song as a come-on: "I ain't got no money in my pockets, they don't jingle, but as long as we can get together everything is gonna be alright," and Young Thug updates that sentiment, crowing, "I'ma ride in that pussy like a stroller." The repeated shout of "I know" becomes a protest in its own way, three very different people uniting in defiant belief. —Andy Beta

Jamie xx: "I Know There's Gonna Be (Good Times)" [ft. Young Thug and Popcaan]

"Hotline Bling" is the Drake singularity, the moment where he becomes self-aware and he wields his infamy like a weapon. Even the song's rise to fame mirrors the kind of "Started From the Bottom" myth Drake loves—it dropped unceremoniously with minimal promotion and gradually became inescapable. And why not? "Hotline Bling" took the wispy stale air of sad-drunk, “Marvin’s Room” Drake and suffused it with warm, tropical colors. It’s the perfect thing to soundtrack the end of summer when the sky gets a little pinker and your summer flings come to an end.

That "Hotline Bling" found such immense popularity illustrated an arguable skill of Drake's to pluck songs from their regional hit purgatory and put his own stamp on them, with the original performer usually left to languish in Drake's shadow. "Hotline Bling" is essentially a reworking of D.R.A.M.'s "Cha Cha", which is in turn a reworking of Timmy Thomas' ’70s hit "Why Can't We Live Together; by autumn, the song slipped out of Drake's control entirely, becoming fodder for jokes, wedding DJ sets, and gimmicky covers and interpretations. Erykah Badu reinvented it with a version almost as good as the original, while Justin Bieber pulled a stunt that required fans to call an actual hotline to hear Bieber croon the song into their earpiece. It wasn't Drake's song anymore—it was everyone's.

In typically calculating fashion, Drake absorbed all that attention and then spun it back on the public. Dropping a music video—a vision of Drake pulling awkward shapes against pastel-colored James Turrell walls, purportedly designed to encourage fans to make their own memes and jokes—almost five months after the song first debuted made it an event all over again. Because if there's anything Drake knows, it's that people can't be laughing at you if you're laughing with them.

That idea is core to "Hotline Bling." That one of the softest Drake tunes ever dominated airwaves in the wake of the Meek Mill beef was the best revenge he could hope for—the words "you gettin' bodied by a singin' nigga" from "Back To Back" became a self-fulfilling prophecy. As huge as its success was, "Hotline Bling" still never gave Drake that coveted #1 spot; he was held at bay first by his fellow Canadian the Weeknd, and then by Adele (or maybe it was the fault of his own business decisions). Whatever it was, it hardly mattered, because at that point, "Hotline Bling" was barely a song at all anymore. It was one big goofy, self-aware cultural force. And there's nothing that sums up Drake—as shrewd, manipulative, and lovable as he was in 2015—better than that. —Andrew Ryce

Drake: "Hotline Bling"

When To Pimp a Butterfly was released in mid-March, it was not quite a third of the way through what, by any measure, has been a miserable year. The world, and America in particular, and for minorities specifically, has experienced a veritable buffet of social garbage. And it looks like there's a decent chance the same will be true next year, too. Will we be alright, as Kendrick Lamar assures? And who is that "we"? In the realm of the pop anthem, "we" have had a long life. Perhaps it’s the "we" who are champions, who will rock you. But more likely it’s the same "we" who shall overcome. "Alright" spoke to black Americans oppressed and murdered, these days so frequently by those on the government payroll and sworn to protect. "We hate popo," Lamar raps, "wanna kill us dead in the streets for sure." It’s a basic sentiment that in this country has become undeniably truer day after day.

But after Lamar’s dirge comes the chorus: "We gon be alright," an ebulliently simple five-syllable refrain, a future-tense assertion of delivery to a better, more peaceful place. In more than one instance, the song’s chorus was chanted at Black Lives Matter protests. It has soundtracked a movement. That's largely due to its holistic sentiment as a siren against innumerable injustices, but it has just as much to do with the fact that it's a great hook on a ferociously catchy song, produced by Sounwave and Pharrell Williams, with marching band propulsion and a jazz band's breezy reeds.

On it, Lamar acts as master of ceremonies as much as rapper. He starts the song with an incantation borrowed from Alice Walker: "All my life I had to fight," before detailing a world wracked with addiction, lust, greed, and Satan—basically all the sins and their mayor. Then Pharrell comes in to sweep it all away. "We gon' be alright!" That this chorus is so infectious is no accident; it’s sung by the same guy who made "Happy".

An argument could be made that the track's power is in the hook, the verses superfluous. And that might be true. Surely you can recite the chorus with no knowledge of the song, or even who sings it. Isn't that anonymous accessibility what makes an anthem? In that sense, with "Alright" did Kendrick Lamar write something timeless by writing something bigger than himself, something whose jubilant recitation turns us all into the author?

That future tense is always coming, and in a sense it already came. In the time since the song was released, there’s been the murder of Freddie Gray, the suicide of Sandra Bland, the recent police cover up in Chicago, the shootings in San Bernardino, in Colorado, massacres in Beirut and Paris. Things, may in fact, be getting worse. Will we be alright? Who knows. But we’ll at least be together. —Matthew Schnipper

Kendrick Lamar: "Alright"

Teens of Style is not technically Car Seat Headrest’s debut, but a greatest hits, a career retrospective, a rarities comp, and a remix album all rolled into one. In the last five years, frontman and band mastermind Will Toledo has been churning out a steady stream of music, recording first in his family car and later in his dorm room at Virginia Commonwealth University. Before signing to Matador Records, he had released via Bandcamp 11 albums of original tunes, an output that approaches that of his hero, Robert Pollard. For his proper debut, Toledo re-recorded 11 older songs, fleshing out fairly skeletal arrangements to create towering monuments to indie rock. The result sounds like both the closing of one door and the opening of another.

These songs sprawl in ways they never did before, in ways they never could before, but what’s astonishing is just how much detail and nuance Toledo gets out of the lo-fi setting. His band layers chiming power-pop post-punk guitars, thrumming synths, and intricate Beach Boys harmonies to say something essential about millennial angst. Especially given its lyrical shout-outs to Michael Stipe and Matador Records exec Chris Lombardi, among other insiders, the whole thing could have sounded purely academic—the sound of a young man playing to his record collection. Instead, Teens of Style explores the ways that our favorite music and our biggest heroes can serve as conduits to the larger world, and Toledo sings like he can’t wait to provide that experience for others. —Stephen M. Deusner

Car Seat Headrest: "Times to Die" (Buy on Bandcamp)

Is it cheesy to say that Elysia Crampton’s American Drift feels like the type of art that belongs in a gallery? Unlike most of contemporary music’s quick thrills, this album is a pastiche that seems more in line the work of a super exciting young painter, like Jamian Juliano-Villani, who makes massive portraits of messed-up people, or maybe the kooky set builders Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe, who literally built a meth lab for people to walk around in. Like the most aggressive pursuers of the weirdly beautiful, this heady producer infuses ponderance and pleasure into her work through the simple fact of its literal and spiritual enormity.

American Drift crushes genres as it piles on disparate elements: Lil Jon samples, cumbia rhythms, deeply reverent freeform poetry. The album’s funkiness is almost secondary to the fun of just listening to its many parts bob and weave through the baseline of electronic ambience. The Bolivian-born artist uses her singular sonic vocabulary to reflect a world that is breathless and difficult while wrestling with the many threads culture creates. American Drift feels like an attempt to illustrate everything—but instead of boiling the universe down to one complete thought, Crampton sploshes around paint and then scratches at its layers until she’s got a strange and delightful canvas. —Matthew Schnipper

Elysia Crampton: "American Drift" [ft. Money Allah] (via SoundCloud)

Damon Riddick (aka Dâm-Funk) is both a traditionalist and an innovator. On Invite the Light, he enlists a 1970s funk original (Junie Morrison of the Ohio Players), a G-funk hip-hop legend (Snoop Dogg), and a new-age psychedelic eccentric (Ariel Pink) for the same tracklist. It’s all in the name of breaking ground in familiar land. In the lead video for Invite the Light, Riddick caresses a keytar in a smoky room as his refrain turns over on itself: "We continue." It's a thesis. Taken at face-value, Dâm-Funk might seem like a revivalist mining a decades old aesthetic, but instead of a carefully executed schtick, his music is revelatory: funk is timeless, and evolving. And he has an inimitable knack for conjuring it up. —Jay Balfour

Dâm-Funk: "We Continue" (via SoundCloud)

"Damn I’m so little but I’m feeling like Shaquille," Dej Loaf raps on the chilly opening to her brisk #AndSeeThatsTheThing EP, and rarely has an artist offered a statement of purpose as efficiently. This is the rare major-label rap debut that delivers on the promise of an Internet phenom without compromise. Radio hit "Back Up" with Big Sean churns a Detroit electro sample into a bristling self-affirmation anthem, but it’s the guarded moments of tenderness that linger, from a duet with Future to "Butterflies", which is more like a spacey dream-pop ballad than a rap song. Dej is easy to root for because her writing is so forthright and frank, and on this sweet, short EP, she nails her entire dynamic in just six songs. —Matthew Ramirez

Dej Loaf: "Back Up" [ft. Big Sean]

If Rimsky-Korsakov’s "Flight of the Bumblebee" were a footwork track that was part "Music for 18 Musicians", part funk carioca, it would basically be the title track of Sold Out. Like the rest of DJ Paypal’s mini-album, "Sold Out", is a testament to the elasticity of footwork as much as it is to his genius.

In November, the Berlin-based, North Carolina-born Teklife producer dropped this EP, his most adventurous and emotionally incisive work to date, as well as first-ever footwork release on Brainfeeder. Throughout the record, DJ Paypal layers in '70s-era soul vocals, twizzling jazz sax lines, chintzy synths, and bubbling perc-u-lator sounds à la Cajmere. And he makes it sound like he’s beaming it in from an alternate universe, one accessible only to a Chosen Few. On the exuberant-turned-manic "Slim Trak", West African tam-tams punch through chants stacked so high they threaten to collapse in on themselves. "On a Cloud" sounds like vocoder aliens equipped with arcade lasers and the singular mission to get faded.

It's been an important year for footwork, in part because it’s been the first full year without Teklife founder and big brother, DJ Rashad. Many producers haveexpressed a heightened sense of duty to do right by the man, to work towards fill the gaping hole he left behind. And so, they’ve been turning it out. DJ Paypal, along with his generation of younger footwork peers like Jlin, DJ Earl, DJ Taye, and some of his own tongue-in-cheek Mall Music crew, all dropped EPs or albums this year. Footwork legends RP Boo and DJ Spinn did as well. It’s fitting then that Sold Out closes with a track called "Say Goodbye", which could easily be read as an adieu to Rashad. It’s an expansive, skies-wide-open track, a shimmery unfurling of memory and longing. —Minna Zhou

DJ Paypal: "Awakening" (via SoundCloud)

DJ Richard’s Grind is Music for Airports gone techno. Yes, many of these songs have a consistent beat suitable for dancing (or at least nodding your head), but they just as frequently drift off into the abyss. This is a loose, unhurried album that works best when processed as one clump of electronic music with micro-movements and moods. For example, halfway through the song "Vampire Dub", gentle '90s IDM textures are suddenly accompanied by an extremely aggressive drum—the kind of wet, heavy snare a metal band would use—but it only lopes along, a trope of hardness that never turns particularly mean. The drum leaves, comes back, leaves again. It’s like the aural equivalent of someone who has a very important point to make but keeps forgetting it. There’s a beautiful charm to listening to all this unfold. It could have been a messy jumble of thoughts, but instead it’s a sneak peek into a busy, bright brain, working it all out on his own time. —Matthew Schnipper

DJ Richard: "Vampire Dub"

In concert, Downtown Boys command all of your attention. The Providence, R.I.-based punk sextet is intense, combustible, and overflowing with conviction. It’s risky to check out and gaze at your phone, lest you wind up clobbered by a flailing saxophonist. They have the kind of energy that’s difficult to recreate on a recording—their music is an experience dependent on the band, but also the feedback and presence of an audience. So, it’s a relief that on their debut record, Full Communism, Downtown Boys still sound and feel like themselves. Recorded at Chicago’s Electrical Audio and produced by the band alongside Don Giovanni label-head, Joe Steinhardt, Full Communism documents the band’s raw, weird energy with little in the way of embellishment or refinement. There’s no getting around it: Downtown Boys are an earnest band. But despite their passions, they never register as smarmy. Part of the joy of being a Downtown Boys fan is bearing witness to a group of people with such a level of enthusiasm and conviction—about politics, about noise-making, and about community. Even on their cover of Springsteen’s 30-year-old hit "Dancing in the Dark", Downtown Boys seem like they’re 100% in the moment. —Aaron Leitko

Downtown Boys: "Wave of History"

No one had the run Fetty Wap had in 2015: After "Trap Queen" blew the doors open, he placed three songs simultaneously on the Billboard Hot 100 chart—a rare feat usually associated with established names like Lil Wayne and Eminem—and nabbed four spots on the Billboard Hot Rap Songs chart, an unprecedented accomplishment in the 26-year history of that list. His eponymous debut album pulls off an equally uncommon task by maintaining the maximal exuberance of those hits for more than an hour. The self-contained record shares a similarity in execution to Waka Flocka Flame’s career-defining 2010 salvo Flockaveli, where the creative spring of a single mind is extracted and bottled for eternity in one full-length package. Fetty’s raps are the perfect alchemy of clumsy and charming, which might be an issue if most of the songs didn’t deliver hooks at this rampant a clip—17 songs with 17 unassailable choruses in a row. Fetty could retire now and he’d still have an all-time run, and an all-time hip-hop debut record to boot. —Matthew Ramirez

Fetty Wap: "679" [ft. Remy Boyz]

Girlpool's debut LP bursts with the pressure of its own fragility, the duo of bassist Harmony Tividad and guitarist Cleo Tucker singing sweet melodies to each other while steadily plucking at their instruments, harmonizing to the heavens. It's the sound of two best friends navigating uncharted territory, walking down their street "a hundred million billion trillion times," as depicted in the title track. It sounds like learning to cook in your first apartment, or realizing you're the age your parents were when they first met. The best albums are the ones that give way to the creation of a self-contained world, every note in its rightful place. By boiling their songs down to their bare essence, Girlpool have achieved just that. —Cameron Cook

Girlpool: "Before the World Was Big" (via SoundCloud)

The wiry, bookish sound of Painted Shut will endure as long as MFA candidates pick up guitars, and Hop Along are at their vanguard. "By the time it’s old/ My face will have been seen/ And I’ll share a very/ Common poverty/ It’s a very common kind," Frances Quinlan sings on "Waitress", a vignette about a disgraced diner server. It’s the only guitar-rock lyric I heard this year that reminded me of Italo Calvino’s description of "habitual faces, whose features the bar mirror has watched thicken or sag,” for certain, and Hop Along spend all of their stellar third album leaping to capture these specific sorts of honors.

Quinlan’s rough voice always sounds on the verge of giving out, but as a writer she is a tender guardian who sees dignity everywhere she looks: On "The Knock", she is moved to tears by the beaming Jehovah’s Witness who knocks on her door ("I never once seen a teenager look so radiant"), and "Buddy in the Parade" recalls the spectacular public breakdown of early-20th century cornetist Charles "Buddy" Bolden, who started frothing at the mouth during a parade performance and spent the rest of his life in a sanitarium. The songs are furiously angry in their energy and endlessly compassionate toward their targets, backing you into a corner and hugging you fiercely, like someone staging a very determined intervention on your behalf. —Jayson Greene

Hop Along: "The Knock"

Lisa-Kaindé and Naomi Díaz’s debut album as Ibeyi opens with a sacred call to Eleggua, the deity of communication in Yoruban religion, a practice usually meant to signify the opening of a spiritual channel. As such, it’s a worthy placement: over the following 12 songs, Ibeyi conjures soulful, invigorating, and wholly spiritual music, inspired by swooning R&B-electronic practitioners like James Blake as much as by the French-Cuban twins’ deeply musical Yoruban heritage. The album is dedicated in part to their late father, Anga Díaz, a percussionist in Buena Vista Social Club, whose presence figures most prominently in Naomi’s stark use of the cajón and Batá drums that carry the album along at an arresting, breathless rhythm. But his ghost, and others, are all over Ibeyi: in the clipped vocal sample that opens the trip-hop-indebted "Think of You", in the narratives that drive somber ballads "Mama Says" and "Behind the Curtain", and in the many instances in which the twins break out into Yoruban chants, as on gorgeous, river goddess-dedicated, Beyoncé-approved "River". What makes Ibeyi truly exceptional, though, is the sisters’ obvious synergy, each breath and drum between the two suggestive of something both sacred and intangible. —Eric Torres

Ibeyi: "River"

You could chalk up the impressive strides that Lower Dens made on Escape From Evil to just smart business sense. Having watched Baltimore buds Beach House and Future Islands dramatically increase their festival-billing font size in recent years, Lower Dens hit the bullseye between the former’s wistful melodicism and the latter’s synth-pumped propulsion. But as you listen to singer Jana Hunter ache, quiver, grimace, and seethe her way through the record’s 10 songs, another motive becomes apparent. Lower Dens transformed from shadowy drone-rock experimentalists to a diamond-chiseled electro-pop crew because that’s precisely what these unflinching, at times brutally honest songs demanded: clear lines of communication, the static and noise scraped away to maximize their emotional impact.

Consistent with the album’s glassy, austere sound, Hunter sings like someone with the stoic resolve to get herself through the most discomfiting of conversations, but with an underlying unease that suggests she could break down at any moment. But for Hunter, even the most difficult exchanges are something to cherish. Escape From Evil demands face-to-face interaction, whether it’s delivering bald expressions of desire ("Quo Vadis"), the last goodbyes in a broken relationship ("Ondine"), or remorse over inflicting psychological damage that can’t be undone ("I Am the Earth"). It’s easy to interpret that album title as a comment on the extremist forces currently hellbent on destroying America from without and within, but the real battleground surveyed on Escape From Evil is the one connecting our heads and our hearts, the space where our insecurities take root and stifle the sort of open, meaningful dialogue this album so bravely encourages. —Stuart Berman

Lower Dens: "To Die in L.A." (via SoundCloud)

Levon Vincent has always had a fierce independent streak, releasing his music largely through his own label, mentoring young producers, giving away digital versions of his vinyl-only tracks. The release of Levon Vincent, his debut album, seemed to take his proclivity for DIY to almost troll-ish levels. The album arrived (digitally) via a WeTransfer link in a tweet. If you were fortunate enough to get your hands on a copy of the (reasonably priced) 4xLP set, it arrived in a bubble-wrap pouch, four slabs of vinyl in unmarked sleeves, each labeled with a unique sticker hand-cut from a magazine. A re-printed handwritten note served as the tracklist; "Special Thanks to Everyone," it reads.

All of this is notable only because the music matches the medium. Levon Vincent comprises 11 craggy, pockmarked tracks full of synths that refuse to march in exact lockstep with the drums. It offers up melodies that carry on a few bars longer than expected. Vincent plays with the conventions of techno the same way you might play fast and loose with a recipe’s ratios: a dash of extra krautrock here, a pinch of dub there. It's a cliche when talking about techno—machine music—that you can really hear the person behind it. On Levon Vincent it's more difficult to locate the machines behind the person. —Andrew Gaerig

Levon Vincent: "Launch Ramp to tha Sky"

Draped over gorgeous fingerpicked guitar melodies, Jessica Pratt’s voice is a singular, otherworldly instrument. Yet the Californian sounds grounded and self-assured throughout her second album, On Your Own Love Again. In almost every song, she reaches out to someone who’s standing directly in front of her, but the distance is both palpable and insurmountable. Tears and pleas have given way to the sober realization that she’s arrived at a new phase in her life ("I see that you’re leaving, so what can I say"). It’s tempting to read some of Pratt’s real-life narrative in these songs. She’d lost her mother and ended a very long relationship. The album was home-recorded in a state of isolation—L.A. was right outside her window, but Pratt stayed inside, repeatedly playing these songs until they were exactly right (and her fingers began to hurt). She harmonizes with herself and occasionally tucks into full-on psychedelia, letting her voice and guitar melt into an entirely different register. Every song packs the unmistakable whiff of lingering pain, but there’s also acceptance—the sound of someone charting a new course in the face of loss. —Evan Minsker

Jessica Pratt: "Back, Baby" (via SoundCloud)

Across Protomartyr’s three albums, the Detroit band’s essentials have gone largely unchanged. Joe Casey’s poetry, for one, has always been engaging—a teetering pile of references and odd conversational phrases where rage, melancholy, and absurdity melt together. The band is often described as post-punk, which is probably due to Casey’s deep voiced bellow and overall intensity. It really depends on the song, though, since Greg Ahee’s guitar can either provide breakneck razorwire punk or glossy anthemic sheen. On their latest album The Agent Intellect, they’ve undergone their biggest change to date: They’ve become a better band. Casey’s ragged, slurred vocals from the debut album are long gone. Here, he turns in the best performance of his life, offering greater impetus to focus on his words. Alex Leonard’s drumming seems to have improved. It’s also their most kinetic album, offering very few pauses across its 44 minutes.

With a few subtle tweaks and improvements, Protomartyr accentuate their strengths. Even better, there’s something intrinsically risky about the album’s most delicate moments. This band could have easily coasted on the garage rock immediacy of their debut album No Passion All Technique. Instead, they deliver the lengthy, patient "Ellen"—a love song about Casey’s mother. Instead of leaning on his more verbose inclinations, Casey repeats just a few lines over his band’s most beautiful music to date. It’s one of several moments where you get to peer into Casey’s experiences—"Why Does It Shake" is something his mother asked about the tremors in her hand, and "I Forgive You" references a chemistry teacher from Casey’s old high school who was recently locked up on child pornography and molestation charges.

Those moments are what make Protomartyr such a captivating band—the promise that even though we might not always understand what every line means, there’s an implication that everything here comes from a place that’s real and personal. People don’t just pay attention to Joe Casey because of his voice or stage presence—people want to get to know him through this music. That’s partially why their annual hometown Jumbo’s gig on December 26 has become flooded with "false friends" and "weird faces"—"I don’t like it," he sings of the phenomenon on "Pontiac 87". If he keeps making music this good, he’s probably going to have to get used to the unwanted attention. —Evan Minsker

Protomartyr: "Why Does It Shake?" (via SoundCloud)

Perpetual collapse and implosion: It’s a tough dynamic to sustain across a single song, let alone an entire career of them. Yet Dominick Fernow, who creates multi-faceted noise music as Prurient, has been at this game for many years, culminating in the double album Frozen Niagara Falls—a suite of 16 tracks that’s fearless in its utter capitulation to fear. On "Myth of Building Bridges", a modulated symphony of static dissolves into a muffled, digitized rebirthing ritual; on "Every Relationship Earthrise", he uses icy, fragmented synth-pop as the foundation for a sustained spasm of screaming that ultimately devours itself. The deep catharsis, though, comes more potently on the album’s semi-acoustic songs such as "Greenpoint" and "Christ Among the Broken Glass", which treat folk guitar like some ancient artifact and whispers like bloodcurdling, lung-melting confessions. If fear has become the blank canvas of our collective existence, Frozen Niagara Falls poignantly, harrowingly scrawls a map across it. —Jason Heller

Prurient: "Greenpoint" (via SoundCloud)

"Many people will get hurt," Norwegian pop songwriter Susanne Sundfør cautions early on her sixth album, with a coldness that leaves no doubt as to who’ll be administering that pain. As the title promises, these 10 songs are technically about love, but Sundfør’s conception of romance owes more to the brutality of the Kill Bill movies than the Hollywood idealism of Casablanca. "Silencer" opens with her standing over her lover's still-warm body clenching a gun. On "Delirious", she at least gives her paramour a head’s up when she vows to push him over the edge—it’s a threat, yes, but by this album's cutthroat standards, it’s also an expression of love.

Sundfør backs up her bluster with some of the most unabashedly audacious pop compositions of the year. A sinister church organ rips through the gothy "Accelerate" with hellfire fury, while the raved-up EDM synths of "Kamikaze" hit like shocks from a downed power line. And for her grandest display, she’s assisted by M83’s Anthony Gonzalez on the 10-minute "Memorial", which plays like a mid-album classical recital break yet somehow fits right in on this bold, violent odyssey of a record. —Evan Rytlewski

Susanne Sundfør: "Delirious"

We’ve reached the point where we naturally assume a record this complex, where sounds intertwine so thoroughly, must be the product of looping and layering, but Stetson and Neufeld played the whole thing live in the studio, just her violin and his battery of reed instruments and the occasional wordless vocal. Much of the record is built around interlocking patterns, with Stetson using circular breathing to keep up with Neufeld’s violin. Together, they create surging soundscapes that have some of the same rushing qualities as Philip Glass or Moondog, but with an entirely less precise and more melancholy outcome than either of those forebears. The highly rhythmic approach of the album’s showcase tracks is balanced by more delicately melodic pieces—"Won’t Be a Thing to Become" is gorgeous and dusty, relying on simple themes to perfect its chilly atmosphere, while the title track is like a huge, eight-minute sigh of exhaustion.

Though they’re perhaps best known for their mutual association with Arcade Fire, Neufeld and Stetson actually met before his involvement with that group, and this is their second collaboration, after 2013’s original score for Blue Caprice, a movie based on the story of the Beltway snipers. Their work together is assuming an identity as distinct as any of the myriad other projects either has been involved in. —Joe Tangari

Colin Stetson and Sarah Neufeld: "The sun roars into view" (via SoundCloud)

Some bands run hot and cold, but very few inhabit both temperatures at once like Viet Cong. The music on the band’s self-titled debut LP can be as stark as its black-and-white cover, and as frozen as their Calgary home. Yet these seven songs pump with boiled blood and stung nerves, as red as your hands when you’re worried they might be frostbitten. This bi-thermal, dark-and-light aura draws its energy from '80s and '90s post-punk, and it’s what makes this quartet exciting outside of the surface of their songs. They inject a fervent catchiness into their dour post-punk that makes tunes like "Silhouettes" sound as much like Blondie as Joy Division. So even though Viet Cong concludes with a bludgeoning 11-minute track called "Death", the song itself ends with a joyous burst of sprinting guitars. Viet Cong may sound like they live in a tunnel, but they always have their eyes on the light at the end of it. —Marc Masters

Viet Cong: "Continental Shelf" (via SoundCloud)

Young Thug’s forebears, Lil Wayne and Gucci Mane, were moved to the same type of stylistic experimentation and excess as their successor. But Tunechi and Gucci spread out their quality offerings; neither came close to releasing something like the concentrated, cohesive double-dose of quality music represented by the combined 40-tracks of the Slime Seasonmixtapes. The tapes, put out in quick succession this fall, are a world unto themselves, a Halloween horrorshow built from rotting organic matter as Thug piles reference upon reference to flora and fauna, fungus, bees, cabbage. Listening feels like living in Poison Ivy’s greenhouse. Even the diamonds resemble pimples. The consistently high quality of what seems like a collection of odds and ends is notable. But more compelling is just how deep these 40 tracks take us into Thug’s self-made Hades.

Throughout his career, Jeffrey Williams has most often been concerned with the joys of sex, violence and twisted verbalization. But on Slime Season 2, a new element emerged to accompany his famously bizarre style. It was apparent in poignant details, like this extra-musical tidbit: Thug is introducing us to a track’s producer, and mistakenly calls him an engineer. And then, bashfully, he apologizes: "I’m high, sorry." It’s a moment of tenderness that doesn’t explicitly evoke sex, a glimpse of Thug’s vulnerable underbelly. When someone speaks and/or raps in a nigh-incomprehensible slang, it’s reasonable to assume that he is trying to keep others out. But when that same dude releases 40 tracks spotted through with moments like these, it might just be a sign that he’s attempting to let us in. —Jonah Bromwich

Young Thug: "Raw (Might Just)"

At once vast, inventive, unfashionably earnest, and rapturously liberated, Blackheart is a stunning personal statement from Dawn Richard. Recorded around the time of her grandmother’s death and father’s cancer diagnosis, as well as the demise of her former band Danity Kane, the album is deep and raw, emotionally epic even in its sonic plateaus. Its genre-busting scope is also a form of catharsis, coming from a 31-year-old industry vet who is finally her own boss (not to mention manager, label, and publicist). "Blow" pledges to "Forget this modest shit/ We taking all of it". The beats, co-produced with Noisecastle III, are a revelation, sending R&B spinning into any and all nearby galaxies. Blackheart’s sounds are ambitious not just in breadth and scale (though highlights "Calypso", "Warriors", and "Castles" are staggering by any metric) but in their detail, too. As "Projection" simmers down, ambient afterthoughts swing in and out of earshot in parabolic arcs: Synths undulate, Björk-ish vocals teem, woodwind flutters, shutters flicker. Though it’s part two in a slated trilogy, Blackheart feels like the completion of an artistic vision. —Jazz Monroe

Dawn Richard: "Phoenix" [ft. Aundrea Fimbres] (via SoundCloud)

What made Natalie Prass’ first album stand out from the seemingly endless pile of Authentic American Roots Music wasn’t how real it felt, but how artificial. Like Elvis in Hawaii or a leather sofa with a plastic slip cover, Prass and her collaborator Matthew E. White’s blend of '70s soul, variety-show country, and music theater is a perpetual mixed signal. Gritty one minute and detached the next, it's confessional in subject matter but brittle, even chilly, in delivery. The façade is moving in part because of the occasional ways it cracks. Take "Christy" ("a name that isn’t too short or too sweet… Christy"), a song Prass says she wrote as a study on the idea of the Other Woman but didn’t register until a few years later, when the song happened to her. All from a former teenage LARPer who once had an epiphany about the majesty of life while dressed as a werewolf and staring at the moon. Sometimes it only takes a whisper to say how you really feel; sometimes it takes a hundred flutes. —Mike Powell

Natalie Prass: "Bird of Prey"

It'd be fine if all Shamir Bailey had going for him was the virtuosity of his voice—his countertenor is capable of subdued softness and piercing force in equal measure. But it's the place that voice is coming from, and the people it's built to connect with, that brings Ratchet to light as something more than just a hell of a performance.

Shamir is an outsider with a lot of territories to be outside of. He was raised in a tourist city that he depicts in the deceptively bubbly leadoff cut as more of a temporary destination than a permanent home ("Vegas"), simultaneously living through and numbed to the social connections of party culture ("Make a Scene", "Hot Mess") as he carries a binary-rejecting genderqueer identity. So his only recourse is to stand defiant with a voice that shuns the simplicity of macho posturing for razor-witted shade ("On the Regular"). That perspective is essential to his songs' insight, a wide-scope view that makes the emotions that drive his desire the great equalizer. There's a lot of ambivalence, guilt, and fear in his music, whether he's letting a relationship corrupt him ("Demon") or fighting through the repercussions of it all to try and come out stronger in the end ("Call It Off"). With producer (and former Pitchfork contributor) Nick Sylvester warping versatile post-Jaxx house into immediate pop and R&B, Ratchet is one of the best albums in recent memory that damn near anyone can get psyched up—or introspective—to. That Shamir pulls it off in a way that sounds so joyous and anthemic, well, that's what a virtuoso does. —Nate Patrin

Shamir: "Call It Off"

While DJ Koze’s playful, low-key attitude has always made him one of dance music’s more peripheral figures, it’s also made him one of its most valuable resources: The studiously unserious guy who makes you wonder what seriousness is for. It’s one of the reasons the DJ mix suits him so well—DJ mixes being a form of collage and collages being a form of joke, a place of distant connections and unusual juxtapositions. Amongst the heavy-lidded hip-hop and effervescent, late-night house on his contribution to the DJ-Kicks series, we get Koze’s idea of a climax: William Shatner doing faux-beatnik spoken word—surprising not because of how much it stands out, but by how cosmically it fits. —Mike Powell

DJ Koze: "I Haven't Been Everywhere But It's On My List" (via SoundCloud)

"Hollywood", the centerpiece of Tobias Jesso Jr.’s debut album Goon, offers a cautionary tale to those enraptured by bright lights, huge billboards, and glistening walks of fame. "Think I’m gonna die in Hollywood," sings Jesso, who spent some of his twenties haplessly trying to become a big time pop songwriter in Los Angeles, dreaming of working with his favorite artist, Adele. It is a somber song about failure, written by a guy coming to terms with his own youthful illusions.

So it’s more than a little ironic that "Hollywood" caught Adele’s ear earlier this year, causing her to enlist Jesso to write for her record-busting new album. If Jesso’s unlikely redemption story was the plot of an actual Hollywood film, it would be tough not to call bullshit. But at the same time, considering the plainspoken glories of Goon, his breakthrough makes a certain kind of cosmic sense. Jesso’s years as a wannabe songwriter weren’t fruitless after all: along with supplying some character-building roadblocks, they helped him hone a durable, open-ended technique. Throughout the album, he tackles subjects that know no expiration date—desire, heartbreak, betrayal—with arrangements and melodies that Paul McCartney could covet. As if to test the foundations of Goon’s songs, Jesso and his jazzbo live band spent the year showing off dramatically revamped renditions in styles ranging from reggae, to dixieland, to metal, to funk. Indeed, these shameless musings of a lovelorn fool hold up quite well. Some Hollywood stories never get old. —Ryan Dombal

Tobias Jesso Jr.: "Hollywood"

There was something reassuring about Jim O’Rourke turning up in 2015 and using the title Simple Songs as a banner to tack across a set of deeply quixotic music. The album’s often difficult, sometimes purposefully stodgy, with O’Rourke carrying a newly gruff voice that bears a sailor’s bark, sometimes recalling unlikely figures like British bawler Joe Cocker. If it shares a singular trait with the other "pop" albums he’s made for Drag City, it’s in its complete removal from time and space—now, as then, this music exists in a vacuum, the result of a rare vision, moving from weathered to cozy, pushing and pulling horns and strings into places only O’Rourke can fathom. It can seem impenetrable at first, with tracks often deeply compressed under the weight of ideas. It’s in the passing of time that Simple Songs finds its shape, causing it to slowly take on new, largely autumnal-shaded colors. Mostly, the power of allusion is foregrounded—you never get a great sense of who O’Rourke is from this music, with vague trails of humor and sadness and anger left behind, all left to make sense (or not) in the mind of the listener. —Nick Neyland

Jim O'Rourke: "Friends With Benefits"

Jazmine Sullivan’s return to music after a four-year silence is inspired by lives both imaginary and tragically personal. In 2011, she abruptly declared on social media that she was leaving the recording industry; the announcement represented a breaking point after quietly suffering in an abusive relationship. Sullivan was later rejuvenated by writing lyrics that empathized with all women, no matter their circumstances: the carefully preserved beauty who trades on her looks in "Mascara", the unemployed single mother turned bank robber in "Silver Lining", the "Stupid Girl" who is objectified and then cast aside like a used toy by men. Delivered with a spirited voice, and a sense of purpose, these songs could be a musical accompaniment to Alice Walker’s "In Love & Trouble". "My flaws don’t look so bad," Sullivan sings on "Masterpiece (Mona Lisa)". "Every part of me is beautiful, and I finally see I’m a work of art." The 27-year-old Philly artist may have outgrown urban pop radio; her third album is the first in her career that hasn’t generated a major hit (although it found some success in urban adult contemporary). But Reality Show is a significant milestone for Sullivan, and for those of us who believe that modern-day R&B, despite its increasing blandness, can still inspire life-affirming art. —Mosi Reeves

Jazmine Sullivan: "Let It Burn"

Dan Bejar's stabs at what it means for indie to sound both "pop" and "mature" (scare quotes intended) hit a lavish peak with 2011's Kaputt, but it also stirred his ambivalent reaction to its place in his world. Refinement doesn't always require second-guessing, but when that does happen, you can get something as stirringly anxious as Poison Season. Like Alex Chilton inverted, Bejar sings of dream lovers and trips to Bangkok, only in ways that reveal the disillusionment inside the rock'n'roll fantasy—the fatigue of an alt-pop hero who strives to sidestep the limelight. And in the process, Destroyer snatches irony from the grip of cheap comedy and resettles it in chilly melancholy.

The bookend songs take the thought of falling in love with Times Square or a radio station, scrub it clean of the scuzzy romance of '70s NYC singer-songwriter myth, and reveal it to be a case of corporate Stockholm syndrome. Big cities are boundaries to escape (the John Carpenter-alluding "The River") or speculation-damaged husks of their former selves ("Oh, it sucks when there's nothing but gold in those hills," from "Girl in a Sling"). And the haunting moments out of vanished-past arrangements—Nelson Riddle strings and soured Chicago horns—are the compellingly bitter flourishes to an album where nostalgia feels less like an escape than a reminder that the ways things go to shit simply shift with the tides. Even the Roxy/Springsteen charge-ahead wallop of "Dream Lover" feels like a deliberately hollow victory, the closest he gets to fun being "someone's idea" of it. But sometimes, intangible ennui is a great way to connect. —Nate Patrin

Destroyer: "Dream Lover" (via SoundCloud)

In a year when women werefurther solidifying Audre Lorde’s ideas on self-care as a radical act, Jenny Hval’s Apocalypse, girl rang out like a call of dissent. "What are we taking care of?" she sings on "That Battle Is Over", as she questions the messages the media feeds her about personal fulfillment via childbirth, via marriage, via consumption. Above all, Apocalypse, girl is a darkly composed treatise on having a body as a sort of peculiar plight, with Hval wrapping her lingering questions about sexuality and politics in minimalist, slow-jazz instrumentals. A sense of chest-clutching spirituality lingers throughout, with Hval’s voice moving between whispering confession and wailing over organs like she’s experiencing Saint Teresa’s transverberation herself. On Apocalypse, girl the body is a thing to subvert: to find ecstasy in metal binds, to soften canonical cock rock, to embrace self-doubt. To take care of oneself, Hval suggests, is to keep questioning how exactly one is supposed to physically exist in this world. —Hazel Cills

Jenny Hval: "That Battle Is Over" (via SoundCloud)

The biggest difference between the Late Nights With Jeremih mixtape and Late Nights: The Album—the R&B star’s long-delayed, exquistely executed third record—is space. The mixtape was an exercise in how much Jeremih could wring from an ever-shifting background of luxurious-sounding beats and an impressive Rolodex of features (the answer: a lot). The album sounds like the result of three years of a continuous stripping away, to the point where the appearance of 2014’s (excellent!) single "Don’t Tell ’Em" is jarring, perhaps indicative of another direction Jeremih thought about going. Every song finds Jeremih exploring how much room he can chisel between the air in the beats. Label drama, tonal shifts—none of this matters in the rarefied air Jeremih’s breathing. Whether it’s the potential wedding jam "Oui", the wheezing drone of "Royalty", or closer "Paradise", which works an orchestral fake-out before giving way to a finger-picked groove, Late Nights launches every sound, every syllable, every beat, every verse into a heightened reality where alcohol doesn’t lead to hangovers, drugs are purely a pleasurable experience, and sex is without regrets. —Matthew Ramirez

Jeremih: "Oui"

If there were ever a place to get lost inside yourself, it’s Gary, Ind. I’ve only stopped there to get gas, but I’ve probably driven through it 100 times: The factory stank is oppressive enough to make you roll up the windows. It’s been hemorrhaging residents and funds for decades; in 2013, Gary’s redevelopment director wagered 6,500 of the 7,000 city-owned properties were abandoned. And that’s where Jlin, the woman responsible for the year’s most haunting footwork album, lives.

"I can’t create from a happy place. It feels pointless," Jlin said of Dark Energy. From the start—"Black Ballet"’s doomy strings and operatic wails, churning in vicious spin-cycle—this is music that evokes unnamed, encroaching panic above all else. "Guantanamo" loops a small girl’s voice: "Leave me alone, leave me alone." Often the percussive stabs sound like sharp little sighs. Footwork as a form has always been in direct conversation with the body, even its name addresses the music’s physical effect. But Dark Energy feels more interested in exploring the psyche—a portrait of the dark corners of the human spirit in a ghost town of steel and smoke. —Meaghan Garvey

Jlin: "Erotic Heat" (via SoundCloud)

Holly Herndon’s Platform was named for the work of design strategist Benedict Singleton, and it’s a title that packs a lot in: the geometric language and corporate obfuscation of media-tech talk, a space for boosting fellow artists’ work (which, it’s worth noting, Herndon does; on Platform she curates the work of dozens of others), the sense of something elevated. Indeed, each track on Platform bursts with more ideas and theories and gorgeous musique concrète scrambling than many artists manage on entire albums, and proves Herndon’s whirlwind imagination as a composer. The through-line, though, is an argument for the undervalued artistic utility of the voice.

Herndon goes beyond the standard voice-as-instrument tropes, the pitch-shifting and snippetizing that are pro forma for art-pop these days—though she certainly excels at these, such as on "Chorus", which comes off as a cappella performed to the beat of a crumbling tectonic plate. Herndon’s interest, rather, lies in the human element, and how it can be exploited. Sometimes it’s playful: the voiceover-perfect advertising timbre of "Locker Leak", which pulps Philip Glass, Greek yogurt, social media jargon, and contextless taglines to dizzying effect. Elsewhere it’s disarming; the surveillance agent of "Home" evokes EMA’s "Neuromancer" ("I know that you know me better than I know me") but has less to say about Technology These Days than about loneliness, and desire, and how closeness never quite guarantees connection.

Perhaps the most misunderstood track on Platform is "Lonely at the Top", which ruthlessly exploits the disembodied close-mic’d intimacy and swaddling femininity of ASMR. It’s as close to a shortcut to immersion as audio’s got, and Herndon and vocalist Claire Tolan use it to deposit the listener, quite literally forcibly, into the megalomaniacal and quite possibly sexual fantasy of an executive weaned on Tolan’s just-world-hypothesis coo: "All of your achievements just seem like your natural right." The effect is rather like slipping into a warm bath, then realizing it is poison and under your skin. —Katherine St. Asaph

Holly Herndon: "Chorus" (via Bandcamp)

Arca’s 2014 masterpiece Xen was a dense, gnomic self-portrait of producer Alejandro Ghersi as a cryptically erotic extraterrestrial, and many of the obsessive fans that came up in its wake were still untangling its plentiful knots when he dropped Mutant just over a year later. Of the two records, Mutant is less fraught, and more direct. Ghersi’s insistence on avoiding straightforward, repetitive beats makes it hardly more danceable than its predecessor, but the album frequently offers meaningful nods to less thoroughly deconstructed forms of electronic music on tracks like "Alive" and "Snakes" that seem to have sizeable chunks of jungle and breakbeat hardcore in its heavily altered genetic code. Arca’s work is best appreciated when you take your attention away from the intricately wrought details and let it just wash over you. The sensation this time around is warmer and tinged with uncomplicated hedonism, the sound of Arca’s alien alter ego getting past its issues and going out clubbing. —Miles Raymer

Arca: "Vanity" (via SoundCloud)

“Should I be afraid?” Lorely Rodriguez asks in the opening seconds of Me, her debut LP under the Empress Of moniker. She sounds hesitant, but Rodriguez has little reason to be—over Me's 10 tracks, she makes a strong case for herself as one of the most confident, skilled pop artists of the year. The delicate, '80s-nodding Systems EP from 2013 laid the groundwork for Rodriguez's technical prowess, but Me presents the Empress Of project at its boldest: Rodriguez's voice is front and center, and the melodies that anchor it are contained in airtight, dancefloor-ready synths. It's unsurprising that Rodriguez wrote and recorded the entire album herself during an isolated five-week stay in Mexico, pressure-cooking all of her ideas into existence.

Rodriguez is adept at negotiating her status in the world through song, whether it be scrutinizing privilege or vilifying cat-callers. She just as easily taps into the emotions around spiky relationships, too: "Got to get high to get by without you," goes the chorus of "To Get By", a depressing sentiment tempered by the song's giddy electro pulse. As its title suggests, Me is a reflective debut, but it's far from self-obsessed; in the middle of fitful pop gem "Need Myself", she lasers in: "I think I'm the one I need." Rodriguez is sharing a secret, telling listeners that loving yourself—no matter how impossible it may seem—is always within reach. —Eric Torres

Empress Of: "How Do You Do It"

Janet Jackson's Unbreakable marks a return to form but, like her best records, it's also a gentle expansion of that form. Jackson, and her longtime collaborators, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, bend their flexible R&B so that it absorbs a wide range of aesthetics, from DJ Mustard’s space-age electro, to Joni Mitchell’s acoustic contemplation, to a kind of blurred country soul. It is a record about intimacy and relationships—personal, political, metaphysical. Even Jackson’s single concession to EDM, "Shoulda Known Better", flows and recedes with the drift of a magnetic field as she sings reflexively against the shimmer. Throughout the album, the bass tones are either subtracted or located exclusively in the drums, giving these songs the unstable gravity of a feather. It’s a shaky weightlessness that mirrors the vulnerability and wisdom of Jackson’s own voice. —Brad Nelson

Janet Jackson: "No Sleeep" (via SoundCloud)

VEGA INTL. Night School has one golden rule it requires of listeners: get dancing. It’s an easy request to make, considering that Palomo has pushed his solo act to its most enjoyable, accessible peak. Over an hour of catchy electro-dance tracks, Palomo draws on all the style, energy, and excess of the '80s for a set of glitchy, sample-happy romps. Many songs here openly call back to his past solo work as VEGA, coming across as an extended DJ set best suited for gleaming discotheques where clubgoers are dressed in garish get-ups, everyone’s eyes are a little glazed over, and last call never, ever comes. Palomo stretches his production dexterity into other genres with VEGA INTL., too, threading songs like "Annie" with dubby reggae and “The Glitzy Hive" with bright-eyed disco. There's an extended techno breakdown ("Techno Clique"), an ode to an '80s porn mag ("Dear Skorpio Magazine"), and a sultry murder mystery ("Baby's Eyes"). It's a lot to take in, but VEGA INTL. Night School is one of the most rewarding trips into lurid '80s nostalgia in a year filled with them. —Eric Torres

Neon Indian: "Slumlord" (via SoundCloud)

"Pop music is a challenge." No one knows this better than Carly Rae Jepsen, who stumbled into one of the decade's most ubiquitous songs and then had to stumble out from under it. ("I, personally, am sick of hearing myself on the radio," she recalls saying around the time the dust had settled.) Jepsen spent two years convincing her label to let her write her own songs, finding the right collaborators, and even appearing in a Broadway musical for a change of pace. She came out the other side with E•MO•TION, an album that highlighted her gifts, captured the hearts of a newly dedicated fanbase, and went criminally overlooked commercially.

The album's chart performance is a shame, because E•MO•TION deserves more than a cult following. Jepsen is a songwriter capable of wringing exceptional things from standard pop forms, and she sells it so well that you might not even notice its genius until you really listen. She has a way with odd turns of phrase ("Who gave you eyes like that/ Said you could keep them?" or "Warm blood feels good"), she can frame simple ideas in beautiful ways ("When I'm close to you/ We blend into my favorite color"), and she can bend clichés to her will and make them feel vital and new again ("Run Away With Me"). And that doesn't even cover half the songs on the record.

Every song on E•MO•TION takes a different feeling and makes it seem like the most important thing in the world. The album is always on the cusp of something—of falling in love, of heartbreak, or even, in the most Carly Rae Jepsen of all feelings, of just finally realizing that you might kinda like someone. An artistic triumph if not a commercial one, this record proves Jepsen's point: Pop music is a challenge. But on E•MO•TION, at least for an hour, it sounds totally effortless. —Andrew Ryce

Carly Rae Jepsen: "Run Away With Me"

Archy Marshall’s A New Place 2 Drown feels like a record found underneath a chair in a pub’s dark corner, down there with blackened coins and decades-old cigarette butts. The music gurgles like something coughed up from a manhole, a supremely atmospheric mix of beat styles ranging from '90s rap to early '00s grime. The Londoner Marshall, best known for his King Krule project, vocalizes in a space that triangulates between singing, rapping, and heavily intoxicated slurring. When he delivers lines like "Even though you fucked him I don’t really give a shit" and "When it rains it fucking pours/ Sky opens its mouth and spits to the floor," he hints at a grim and broken world, one where you expect the worst and usually get it. —Mark Richardson

Archy Marshall: "Arise Dear Brother"

After a gestation so lengthy it threatened to replace the Beach Boys’ SMiLE as most tragic victim of its auteur’s unassailable perfectionism, it turns out Dr. Dre’s fabled third album Detox had to die in order for the good doctor to serve his hungry base with fresh prescription. Using the occasion of the N.W.A. biopic Straight Outta Compton as both muse and news peg, Dre set about the seemingly insurmountable task of bridging three generations of California gangster rap on a record both of-the-moment and observant of the history that made all of it possible. From the ashes of Detox rose Compton, a self-mythologizing swan song that unfurls the story of the man and his city in pristine, cinematic sound.

Like 2001, which painted Dre as mentor and studio maven extraordinaire, Compton deftly recasts its creator’s lengthy waits between albums as a mogul’s never-ending quest for capital. That it succeeds, while uniting Cali rap talent from the '80s (Ice Cube), '90s (Snoop, Above the Law’s Cold 187um), '00s (The Game), and today (Kendrick Lamar, Anderson .Paak), speaks to the enduring legacy of Dre as one of hip-hop’s great business and creative minds. That Compton slaps from end to end while sounding like little else than itself? That’s why you wait on genius. —Craig Jenkins

Dr. Dre: "Genocide" [ft. Kendrick Lamar, Marsha Ambrosius, and Candice Pillay]

When L.A. artist Kelela announced her Hallucinogen EP, she said of its themes: "It speaks to the narcotic that is loving someone. It makes you exhilarated, it makes you feel drained, it’s in your body and it affects you so completely." But if love is the drug here, Kelela's not an addict jonesing for a fix, she's a soothsayer on a vision quest. The record's six tracks—ranging from glossy R&B to freestyling dance-pop to minimal trip-hop—each find her cool, smoky voice illustrating one illusory exchange after another. She doesn't impart the visions themselves, but rather interprets how they manifest before her. We see desire as imagined glances across a room, sex as a rush of chemicals and phantom gestures, heartbreak as a silhouette lost to a crowded dancefloor, regret as calls and letters left unanswered.

Kelela's way with rich imagery made Hallucinogen deep as the burgundies and purples in its artwork, but her natural charisma is why it felt so magnetic in the first place. Hers isn't just a voice you want to hear, it's one you want to hear from. Flanked by the likes of Arca, Kingdom, and DJ Dahi on production, Kelela gives every outré beat a center of gravity, every reimagined trope a touch of singularity. She's come a long way since Cut 4 Me in 2013. This year solidified the hunch that Kelela wouldn't—no, couldn't—stay secondary to her big name collaborators. —Patric Fallon

Kelela : "Rewind" (via SoundCloud)

Bradford Cox has called himself a terrorist, received oral sex from a stranger while singing, demanded the need for more ugly people in music, and claimed that as a homosexual, his only job is to sodomize mediocrity. Gentle Ben he is not, and when we last heard Deerhunter on 2013’s Monomania, they’d acquired an aggressiveness that reflected Cox’s antagonism toward social complacency.

Then, Cox was seriously injured after being hit by a car in late 2014. The incident gave him some perspective, and presaged Deerhunter’s return to a softer, psychedelic, unabashedly gorgeous sound. Call it the cosmic Americana: Fading Frontier’s influences are hook-heavy, radio-friendly rock acts like Tom Petty and R.E.M., as refracted through the prism of Deerhunter’s weirdness. It sounds like light emitting from the stars, framing Cox’s preoccupation with mortality—a recurring theme for the band, but now contextualized by a literal bodily threat. He worries about going to the old folks’ home, and asks how to conquer the the fear that consumes his day-to-day. "I’ve spent all of my time chasing the fading frontier," he sings, afraid of giving up after coming so far. On that song, he chants "I’m living my life" over and over, like a man hypnotized into a routine.

But all that heightened sensitivity doesn’t mean Deerhunter’s lost its nerve. "Snakeskin" is one of the friskiest songs they’ve ever written; its first lines, "I was born already nailed to the cross/ I was born with a feeling I was lost," could open one of Faulkner’s Southern gothics. They still sound like Deerhunter, basically—older, and a little worse for the wear, but on their feet. They feel the black shroud at all moments, but they’re finding a way to live. That’s something to be monomaniacal about. —Jeremy Gordon

Deerhunter: "Snakeskin"

Amidst a year of protests across American cities and college campuses, you may have noticed the unexpected persistence of a little song called "Swag Surfin’". Logic would dictate that the lead single from Fast Life Yungstaz’ only album, 2009’s Jamboree, should not have made it this far: history hasn’t been especially kind to the swag-rap era, and F.L.Y. almost immediately faded into obscurity, jewel-toned polos and all. Yet there was the triumphant black student body of the University of Missouri, swag-surfing en masse to celebrate successful protests against campus racism. A silly song, maybe, but one that brought light!

It’s too soon to say for sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a similar fate befell the brothers Sremm, who dropped the year’s most exuberant, hit-heavy rap album in the first week of January so that everyone else could spend the rest of the year geting esoteric and emo. The duo’s sound is darker than F.L.Y.’s, but they share a distinct "T-T-T-TOTALLY DUDE" ethos: a pious devotion to partying, dumb jokes, casual (protected!) sex, and everything else great about being a young adult with newfound disposable income. SremmLife was a burst of minimalist stadium-trap, ecstatic Spring Breakers-core EDM, and giddy strip club joints with secret Jeremih bridges. It single-handedly sustained Mike WiLL Made-It’s relevance and made grumpy dad Kanye smile. It was the album everyone in Atlanta was too depressed or sedated to make. Music like this renders the concept of the "novelty song" meaningless: its weightlessness is its purpose. —Meaghan Garvey

Rae Sremmurd: "No Type" (via SoundCloud)

Beach House’s fifth collection, Depression Cherry, often sounds like nothing they’ve done before. There’s hazed-out synth noise and rattling electronic drums backing gently warped harmonies, a fragile ballad featuring an eight-person community college choir, distorted guitar psychedelics, percussion that comes off like a woodpecker or a clock attacking a metronome. Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally take bits that would normally function as quick introductory snippets and let them overflow and guide entire compositions: shots of noise that, in the past, might float somberly in the background now swallow an entire song. Conversely, they're not afraid to loop Legrand's crystalline vocals or bury them in fuzz.

The record feels intimate: two people outside of their comfort zone with just four hands to piece it all together. It hearkens to their first couple of pre-Sub Pop records, but with the skills they picked up and displayed on career pinnacles, Teen Dream and Bloom. Even with the return of Chris Coady as co-producer, it’s not as "perfect" as those albums, but the scars make it all the more beautiful. —Brandon Stosuy

Beach House: "Sparks"

Sleater-Kinney returned with a song about exhuming your idols, and their comeback album hit like a fist through a grave. The reformed Portland trio were hungry, and they knew that we had been starved of a successor. Corin Tucker, Carrie Brownstein, and Janet Weiss rekindled their unique language and taunted us with it, crafting jut-jawed cadences that were often impossible to sing along to. They tainted their eighth record's wall-to-wall firebrand choruses with their signature drop-tuning, which hardened their agitated declarations against softening to easy slogans. It couldn't have been anyone else, but it didn't sound like anything they had made before. Even now, 11 months after its release, it still sounds jarring, corroded and full of fight.

No Cities to Love finds Sleater-Kinney pile-driving through corrupt power and fear, through the enablers of mediocrity. It's a timeless record about a marginalized struggle—a song like "Fangless", about the impotence of patriarchy, will never go out of style—though its nuanced take on liberation is novel. Sleater-Kinney may fight back and celebrate togetherness, but they also illuminate the ongoing battles inherent in sustaining pleasure: the way love can become "a ritual of emptiness," the loneliness of "the shout of a room." No Cities' best line was its simplest. It comes at the end of gruff Go-Go's romp "A New Wave", when Brownstein moans, "I can be, I can be, I can be-e-e." That swaggering openness to unlimited possibility was what made Sleater-Kinney's comeback so potent. They returned to see what they would become, rather than to rehash what they had been. —Laura Snapes

Sleater-Kinney: "Bury Our Friends" (via SoundCloud)

New Bermuda’s five songs are howled tales of sickness and health, alternating stories of lost ambition with frantic fever dreams. The gut-wrenching noise that spills forth from lead singer's George Clarke’s throat transcends its tone of shrieking menace, his lines filled with unsettlingly beautiful imagery: man’s passion being carried off "by some lonely driver in a line of fluorescent light," humanity’s "ugliness stretching toward the chandelier." But Deafheaven don't just rattle off romanticist tropes, and the narrative power of New Bermuda has a strength that’s independent of its lyrics. They illustrate and expound upon the words with huge shifts in dynamic range, from the sublime crescendoes at the heart of "Luna" or cross-genre experiments like the post-rock meeting gritty thrash on "Baby Blue". The result is a crushing, concise, and unexpectedly celebratory journey, the sweet, molten earth to Sunbather’s ghostly air. —Zoe Camp

Deafheaven: "Brought to the Water" (via SoundCloud)

On "Grief", the lead single from I Don't Like Shit, I Don't Go Outside, Earl Sweatshirt proudly confesses, "I ain't been outside in a minute/ I been living what I wrote." That sentiment does not apply to his previous work: his violent and fantastical debut mixtape EARL, and 2013's Doris, a playground of wordplay with a wide range of beats. It was a foreshadowing for the album that was to come, one that finds Earl more focused than he's ever been as a lyricist, songwriter, and producer.

In his own words, Earl is "grown." For him, being an adult means he takes responsibility for his actions ("Trying to pay my momma rent, figured that's just what I owe her"), guards himself from outsiders ("I only trust these bitches 'bout as far as I can throw 'em"), and maintains a thorough work ethic ("My days numbered/ I'm focused heavy on making the most of 'em"). In addition to what he's saying, Earl's also condensed how he's saying it. He still has the ability to spin dizzying internal and end rhymes, but instead chooses to emphasize diction, clarity, and pacing to truly emphasize the gravity of his words. I Don't Like Shit captures a particular moment and specific murky, grated sound, in which it revels for only about 30 minutes. I Don't Like Shit is a just brief foray into Earl's psyche, but it might be as long as he can handle someone else in his head. —Matthew Strauss

Earl Sweatshirt: "Grief"

Death is the scariest, most certain thing we’ll all ever face. As sure as you’re reading this, you will die, and you can only hope for a peaceful transition to the other side. Thundercat has been preoccupied with the topic for the past few years: 2013’s Apocalypse was shaded by the death of his friend and collaborator, Austin Peralta, and his work on Flying Lotus’ You’re Dead! helped convey what the spirit might endure as the body passes away.

But while FlyLo used frenetic psych-jazz to conceptualize death, Thundercat takes a reflective stance on The Beyond/Where the Giants Roam, using improvised funk and R&B to mourn. On "Hard Times", Thundercat channels what the soul must feel when death takes hold. By the last song, "Where the Giants Roam", he’s at peace with the afterlife, even if the journey is unclear: "Nothing in this world I know/ Can you tell me who you are?" The Beyond continued where You’re Dead! left off, when the pain of dying fades and the darkness slowly sets in.

Thundercat’s EP helped cement a great year for Lotus’ Brainfeeder label. Along with You’re Dead!, the bassist appeared frequently on Kamasi Washington’s The Epic and Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, two landmark albums that celebrated blackness and kept jazz at the forefront. Thundercat was especially brave on The Beyond, walking through a world many of us don’t want to acknowledge and making it sing. —Marcus J. Moore

Thundercat: "Them Changes" (via SoundCloud)

On his sixth album, our journey to the center of the Kurt Vile is lubricated by production that's as warm and smooth as a slug of whiskey. Recorded mostly at night, partly in the desert, and buttressed by banjo and piano, it's a quiet, hold-you-close record that goes easy on the effects, and values presence above all else. Incongruously, it's also fueled by jokes. Vile has always been sly, but here, as often as not, he's a real knee-slapper, whether it's his headache "like a shop vac coughin' dust bunnies" or a lyrical cameo from the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man—and that in the album’s emotional center of gravity, too: "That's Life, tho (almost hate to say)", a bittersweet bout of philosophizing that doubles as a eulogy. His acid sense of humor lies just beneath the surface of his idiosyncratic tone—a drawl that shifts between Leonard Cohen and Joey Ramone and Bob Dylan and Black Francis—and it surfaces unexpectedly in his odd stresses and enjambments, his quixotic determination to squeeze any thought into the space of a bar, to hell with the rhythmic feet.

"Hopefully I just get a little more fine-tuned and a little more real and vulnerable all the time," Vile told the A.V. Club, trying to pinpoint what was different with this album. Which brings us to "Wild Imagination" and one of the best lines on the whole record: "I'm afraid that I am feeling much too many feelings simultaneously, at such a rapid clip." It's the game face he wears when feeling those feelings, and staring down that fear, that makes b'lieve i'm goin down such a delight. —Philip Sherburne

Kurt Vile: "That's Life, tho (almost hate to say)"

Years ago, a friend and I half-jokingly came up with a genre to describe how Noah Lennox always sounded like he was singing while stuck down a very deep well: cavewave. In 2015, it doesn’t seem like Lennox ever emerged from the underground. His music as Panda Bear is hallucinatory and slippery, always on the verge of dissolving into shadow while still managing to keep a firm foot on the ground. He doesn’t literally come face-to-face with Death on Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper, but the album hides his increasingly adult concerns—fatherhood, middle age, his dog—within all that melodic weirdness. On its most haunting track, "Tropic of Cancer", he sings about watching his father submit to brain cancer, a harp looping against what sounds like wind blowing through the trees. Lennox, whose koan-like observations have never suffered from obfuscation, beautifully sums up how the death of a close one sections off a life we knew: "You can’t come back to it."

The shortest song on the album takes its name from Shadow of the Colossus, a video game about a young man who navigates a mysterious land in search of nameless monsters. The protagonist’s name is Wander, fittingly, because you’ll walk and walk and walk, exploring your surroundings with no destination in sight. It’s how I see Lennox: an explorer moving through the fog, bumping into life’s overwhelming realities and finding a way to meet the challenge. —Jeremy Gordon

Panda Bear: "Boys Latin"

The most important song on Surf, the blindingly optimistic album that Chicago icon Chance the Rapper released this year with his crew instead of a proper solo follow up to Acid Rap, is called "Wanna Be Cool". That’s because the chorus is "I don’t wanna be cool," repeated joyously and relentlessly, and the rest of Surf drives this point home with the zeal of an anti-drug a cappella group invading your fifth-grade lunchroom.

Consider: Chance made this album with a guy who goes by the name "Donnie Trumpet," which wouldn’t even be a cool sobriquet among marching-band geeks. He invited goofballs like Big Sean to do fake-Lyricist Lounge raps on it ("My older bro was on the honor roll/ And the other one was always up in front of the honor, so/ I’m in the middle like the lining of divide signs") and got current-day Busta Rhymes to sound happy again (on "Slip Slide"). He snagged the funniest verse King Louie spit all year ("If your bitch from Paris, then Paris is terrible") and put it on a pop song that sounds like a circa-'99 Sugar Ray single. The album makes your cheeks hurt; it feels like doing the chicken dance at your cousin’s wedding.

This energy is Chance the Rapper’s gift to the universe, the superpower he brings to rap. "Don’t you look up to me...if you learn one thing today," he chides tenderly. The album has the aura of the kind of big brother you fantasize about even if you have a big brother: wise, funny, concerned, engaged, no-bullshit, authoritative but equal. And it is so committed and nuanced, even with all of this sunshine, that it reminds you that joy is an emotion with millions of gradations, a feeling you can soak in, nurse, and cultivate the same way you might do with melancholy. —Jayson Greene

Donnie Trumpet & the Social Experiment: "Sunday Candy" (via SoundCloud)

Sam Shepherd, the nexus of Floating Points, has always produced tracks that just skirt the fringes of the dancefloor and its mercurial trends. Early singles like "Love Me Like That" and "Vacuum Boogie" playfully bounced between rubbery disco and boogie at a time when his fellow countrymen were making warehouse-shaking dubstep. Even when he embraced bass music, it was garlanded with vintage soul voices and sumptuous strings.

So it’s not unexpected that seven years into his career, he’s eschewed easy categorization on his debut album, Elaenia. Helixed into Elaenia’s DNA is everything from primitive circuitry pulses to Alice Coltrane’s divine songs, from Herbie Hancock’s ARP thrusts to late ’60s soul. The album moves between solo exploratory electronics to full-blown ensembles taking flight and makes it all sound of a piece. It’s that rare album that speaks to the current year yet could have emanated from 40 years prior. Outside of time, Floating Points’s closest peers could also be found well beyond the electronic idiom: His spiritually questing music has more in common with jazz players like Kamasi Washington, Joshua Abrams, and Gregory Porter than what turns up at your local club’s DJ sets. In taking a divergent path, Floating Points soared skyward. —Andy Beta

Floating Points: "Peroration Six" (via SoundCloud)

Fingering the bleakest moment on Future's DS2 is more of a barstool debate than a critical one, but I'll take it up anyway and point to the interlude on "Kno the Meaning", deep into the record's latter half. Future stops rapping, which he's only half-doing at this point anyway, and outlines in loopy spoken word what happened after his DJ, Esco, was arrested in Dubai: "People didn't even understand that my hard drives that I recorded all my music for two years straight was on this…was on this one hard drive that Esco had and he was locked up with it so I had to record new music. That's when I did Beast Mode." It's as if he's so dejected by this loss (of music—no mention of the 56 nights Esco spent in prison) that he couldn't pull together a cohesive verse and just had to talk out his heartbreak. Is this what it sounds like when Future goes to therapy?

If not straight lamenting, the rest of DS2 feels equally bummed out. Future's best songs have always been his heaviest, and here he wastes no time swatting at sunshine. DS2 is 18 songs with just one feature (Drake). The rest is Future alone at his rawest, song after song. The sound of his voice here is tinged sour, scratchy like he never stops smoking and/or just woke up. But his rapping is nimble and dreamy, partially because he never seems to fully pronounce anything, even when he hits double time. It’s a strange effect. And it’s a strange record. The production is mostly slow and sad, peppered with alarms, weezy keyboards, hi-hats at the tempo of anxious toe-tapping. On the verse before the interlude on "Kno the Meaning", Future says the best thing he ever did was fall out of love. He says it like it’s nothing. What kind of darkness is this guy experiencing? On "Rotation", he outlines some of the more money/more problems aspects of his life as a rich person. Sure, shortly after he says with a glint of pride, "Ask me how it feels to be a millionaire." But notice he doesn’t answer the question. —Matthew Schnipper

Future: "I Serve the Base"

If Holter’s past work—capital A art-pop, by turns inscrutable and bewitching, or both at once—has resembled a series of deeply considered treatises on the past, on Have You in My Wilderness she sinks more fully into the character (and characters) of her songs, their desires and fears too urgently present to tolerate any overarching, sense-making narrative. While the resulting shapes are broadly familiar, they’re rendered alien and strange by the sheer closeness of details, like placing your eyes almost against the skin of a lover.

Anything can happen in these songs. A boot-knocking country shuffle can suddenly become submerged on a reef of moaning strings, or a gossamer-winged pop song drowned in a multi-tracked rainshower of a thousand little Julia Holters, because she has the commitment to follow through exactingly on each of her smallest and most fragmented impulses, and then to forge them into songs like skyscrapers, their greatness the exact sum of their glittering parts.

Like past alchemists Robert Wyatt or Jane Siberry, Holter combines meticulousness and lightheadedness, a studied discipline with a wide-eyed bewilderment. She’s like a scrupulous technician tasked with producing moments of seemingly unselfconscious immediacy. "Show me now/ Show me your second face," she asks on "Night Song", but it’s the album itself that offers a parade of second faces, ornately sculpted masks as windows to the soul. —Tim Finney

Julia Holter: "Sea Calls Me Home"

Drake undertook a hard-left personal rebranding in 2015, a process he kicked off in early February with his fourth full-length, If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late. Every action flowed from his warning shots on "No Tellin’": "Please do not speak to me like I’m that Drake from four years ago/ I’m at a higher place." If everyone called him soft, the muscles and abs he put on constant display on Instagram said otherwise. The toughness of the album’s opening bars pushed back against accusations that he was just a singer ("When I pull up on a nigga/ Tell that nigga back back/ I’m too good with these words/ Watch a nigga backtrack"). Too calculating? Remember, this million-selling album was scheduled to drop for free.

Above all, Drake dripped sauce and self-confidence, so much that even the ghostwriting allegations—audio included—from his beef with Meek Mill couldn’t slow him down. His barbed words even clashed with upper management on "No Tellin’": "Envelopes coming in the mail…hoping for a check again, ain’t no tellin'." The title of the album was widely interpreted as a contract-releasing taunt to Cash Money boss Birdman, but it could have summed up his year: On If You’re Reading This, the goal is forward motion, and allowing the past to remain rather than endlessly mining previous sorrows. With each step of progress through white society, black people are told not to ask for what they’re owed; not to flaunt confidence, or reach boldly for what brings joy. If You’re Reading This was not an album for reserved satisfaction. Instead, the opener clearly set out its goals: "If I die I’m a motherfucking legend." —David Turner

Drake: "Know Yourself"

FKA twigs always felt fully formed, but with M3LL155X, her third EP and first release since LP1, Tahliah Barnett grew into her dualities: calmly commanding, fierce yet tender, by turns threatening and submissive. On "Figure 8", she’s an angel whose "back wings give the hardest slap that you’ve ever seen." "Glass & Patron"’s narrator feigns insecurity–"Am I dancing sexy yet?"–before twigs flips the script, singing as a menacing photographer over a dystopic dance-studio beat. Even when vulnerable, on the exquisite "In Time", she radiates wisdom. Lyrically, the song maps love’s extremities—heightened states of yearning, idealism, and resentment—and climaxes in a romantic bust-up. But the vocal, navigating a precarious beat, surveys the wreckage from a safe space. The narrator suggests that, having dredged their insecurities for verbal ammo, the couple have emerged stronger. The vision is piercing and true, even if delirium never seems far off. —Jazz Monroe

FKA twigs: "In Time"

On Vulnicura opener "Stonemilker", Björk phrases an early lyric—"Find our mutual coordinates"—in such a way that it spotlights the phrase "mutual core," the name of a song on 2011’s Biophilia. It’s one of many dredging processes employed on Vulnicura, a shattering breakup album that tempers its literal account of midlife divorce with deconstructions of love, grief, and selfhood. It’s ultimately the melodrama that makes the album click. Witness her soaring demand for "emotional respect" on "Stonemilker"; her contempt of her partner’s "joy peak, humor peak, frustration peak" on "Lionsong"; her extraordinary claim, in "Black Lake", that "I honored my feelings/ You betrayed your own heart/ Corrupted that organ." So raw is that song that she later admitted, "I was really embarrassed ... I can still hardly listen to it." Having renounced its shame, Vulnicura becomes a one-woman rhapsody so radically cathartic it is practically avant-garde. —Jazz Monroe

Björk: "Lionsong"

When Young Thug announced that he would be swiping his album title from Lil Wayne's Carter series—a homage that later morphed into a diss—the popular assumption was that he would be following the lead of his primary influence and making Barter 6 a proper crossover release. It turned out to be just a mixtape, hastily compiled in an effort to preempt the impending leak of 100+ songs from a stolen laptop. If anything, Barter 6 has more in common with Wayne's less heralded post-Katrina masterwork Dedication 2—a ferocious display of rapping qua rapping by an artist in his prime with zero concern for the marketplace.

It's an unexpectedly subtle tape from an artist who is so frequently pegged as a weirdo rapper. Thug's eccentricities are undeniable but they take more nuanced shapes here. He stretches tire screech ad lib into new vocal dimensions and indulges his oft underrated lyrical side through De La Soul-type flits of structure like "Motor running/ Spent them commas/ Now it's thunder." And by the album's second half he all but completely abandons the sort of spastic pressure-and-release flows that defined hits like "Danny Glover", instead hammering away endlessly at the same rhyme patterns in the service of tragedy. He'll frequently lock into a single rigid flow and stay trapped there for several more bars than he needs to, still escalating the intensity by the sheer rising stress in his voice. This tension isn't fully resolved until the album's final seconds when the beat fades to silence and Thug finally gets a chance to clear his throat. —Andrew Nosnitsky

Young Thug: "Constantly Hating" [ft. Birdman]

Since her 2004 debut, scribblers like me have been trying to find useful ways to talk about Joanna Newsom’s wildly idiosyncratic, anachronistically baroque brand of music-making; fact is, her work is so novel and unprecedented it’s nearly impossible to effectively contextualize. Divers, her fourth full-length, is a folk record that’s remarkable not for its smallness but its ambition—its vast, unspooling arrangements, its points of unexpected intersection, its newness. Despite all that, Divers never feels over-thought. Instead, it’s marked by moments of tremendous, startling vulnerability. "Anecdotes", the record’s opener, contains what might be the most heartbreaking coda I’ve ever heard sung: "Nor is there cause for grieving, nor is there cause for carrying on", Newsom announces, her voice high, calm. Divers is lousy with these sorts of perfectly drawn endings, like on "Waltz of the 101st Lightborne", in which she gives a startlingly clear-eyed summation of love and its disrepair: "But there was a time/ We were lashed to the prow of a ship you may board, but not steer/ Before ‘You and I’ ceased to mean ‘Now’". Newsom is often praised for her virtuosity—both as a harpist and as a writer of odd, looping melodies—but here, it’s just as often her lyrics that do the undoing. —Amanda Petrusich

Joanna Newsom: "Sapokanikan"

Boredom may be the privilege of people who don’t have to struggle to stay alive, but you can’t blame Josh Tillman for feeling so…blah. Tillman looks at America and sees a hollowed-out middle class, a generation obsessed with their phones, mass culture used by the bourgeoisie to keep people sated and divided. That’s enough to make anyone cynical, regardless of their comforts.

Bearing witness to his pomp and circumstance as he portrays Father John Misty, the one guy who really knows how it is, can be like arguing with the smartest philosophy major in the freshman dorm: Sure, he gets it, but you still want him to get over it. But what grounds Tillman’s sense of superiority is how he believes in the oldest and corniest solution for all the world’s troubles: each other. I Love You, Honeybear is the story of his courtship of his wife, Emma, and his jesterly antics can’t hide the way he’s taken over from the inside-out by his love for her. "People are boring," he sings, "but you’re something else." Tillman sings about making spontaneous love in the kitchen, smiling as he walks with Emma, rolling around in the dirtied sheets, and wanting to settle down in spite of his doubts about everything. The music is warm, sensuous, and ambitious, a wino singing like Gram Parsons as he’s backed by an orchestra.

Though his cynicism remains, it’s made secondary to something bigger than himself. "Maybe love is just an economy based on resource scarcity," he asks, "But what I fail to see is what’s that gotta do with you and me?" There are uncomfortable moments—Tillman turns vitriolic when his wife gets hit on at a bar, and he’s downright demeaning about a kind of woman he hates, even after they’ve gone home together. Still, this lingering combativeness feels honest—an admittance that where there’s love, there’s hate. The clarity of his belief in the former makes I Love You, Honeybear believably and compellingly romantic, filled with sentiment as it avoids sentimentality. It’s one grand joke he’s letting you in on, and if it doesn’t tug on your heartstrings or tickle your funny bone, Tillman has a question: "Why the long face, jerkoff?" —Jeremy Gordon

Father John Misty: "Bored in the USA" (via SoundCloud)

Being a teenager is complicated. Daniel Lopatin’s ambitious electronic album Garden of Delete focuses on the angsty rock music that soundtracks so many teenage struggles and then splatters it against the wall. In an interview with Vulture, Lopatin said, "I want the kid that works at the mall to like this record," and you really can imagine that kid finding something to latch onto in G.O.D.’s brilliant, teeming universe. G.O.D., which Lopatin has called "a self-portrait", comes off like someone channel surfing at 3 a.m. on a weekend.

Unlike past OPN outings, the record features a variety of vocals (somber, warped, violent) and shredding guitars amid the hairpin turns and digital age pyrotechnics. It’s Lopatin's heaviest album so far, but also his most fragile. At times, you’ll find yourself wanting to figure out how to dance to its weirdo rhythms. Or you’ll think of a Nine Inch Nails cassette melting in the sun. Mashing together power ballads and warped takes on pop hits with grinding noise, techno, melancholic drone, and blunted hiss, G.O.D. is romantic, frantic, chilly, jubilant, ghostly, and sometimes sad. There are references to troubled kids and kids just saying the dumb and brilliant stuff kids say: "I'm just going to start off by doing some stupid stuff because that’s what I do. It's in me, my blood," one brags in “Mutant Standard". G.O.D. does an incredible job of evoking the gorgeous, thrilling mess we needed to get through to finally enter adulthood, except you can tell it’s been painstakingly pieced together, nothing left to chance.

Before the record was released, Lopatin offered up a G.O.D. cosmology, one that featured an invented band, Kaoss Edge, and a teenage alien collaborator/troll with bad skin named Ezra. You can go to real blogs and Twitter accounts and other pages run by these entities, and they often interact with Lopatin’s online. Of course, you can safely assume Ezra is part Lopatin—he’s said so himself—but the bigger idea is that we all were at some point. —Brandon Stosuy

Oneohtrix Point Never: "Ezra" (via SoundCloud)

For a minute there Kamasi Washington was The Guy Who Played Saxophone and Created the Jazz Arrangements on the Kendrick Record, but it didn’t take long for his astonishing album The Epic to develop a life of its own. Nothing about its success makes sense: a triple album with almost three hours of music, featuring a 10-piece jazz band, often augmented with a string section and a full choir, released on Flying Lotus’ Brainfeeder imprint? In an era when we supposedly measure the direction of our consciousness by counting clicks, it didn’t add up. But The Epic turned out to serve a need many people didn’t know they had.

Here’s one possible explanation: With reissue culture and the vinyl revival in overdrive, people are rediscovering jazz created when the music was a more significant part of the cultural conversation. The work of John Coltrane, Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago offered an avant-garde that was formally daring, grounded in the history of American music, and, for many of these musicians, deeply political and connected to the African-American struggle for equality. The Epic taps into this spirit but forgoes the fiery and explosive jazz of the late '60s for the period just after, when jazz, pop-soul, and R&B came together to find common ground after the tumult of the previous decade. Free jazz players incorporated vocals, and song-oriented superstars were thinking about how their art might expand and change the world.

The Epic has plenty of straightforward jazz and solo trading, but its most striking elements are when genres clash in unpredictable ways—songs that sound like they floated in from a Broadway musical ("Henrietta Our Hero"), impossibly grand massed vocals and strings that could soundtrack the next Flash Gordon reboot ("Askim"), brilliantly textured mood pieces evocative of Miles Davis’ mid-'60s quintet ("Seven Prayers"). It’s a lifetime of creative thought packed into one release, and the grand scope and sweep of the thing was an act of generosity in itself. —Mark Richardson

Kamasi Washington: "Miss Understanding" (via SoundCloud)

Courtney Barnett's debut album has the kind of weary worldview usually associated with an artist's later efforts. She scares off expectations by roaring, "Put me on a pedestal and I'll only disappoint you" because she knows she's "just a reflection of what you really wanna see." And who really knows what they want? Not Barnett. Sometimes portrays a young woman struggling with how to be for other people when she's not sure how to be for herself. The 28-year-old Australian barely ventured a viewpoint in her songs without retracting it a line or two later. "What do I know anyhow? … Guess everybody's got their different point of view."

Sometimes is full of wry epics spun from insignificant seeds, whether house-hunting, buying fruit, or sleepless nights spent staring at the ceiling. In a way, Barnett's tangent-prone songwriting style reinforces her point about reflections: everything is copy and any angle is possible. (Though good luck writing it as well as she can.) Spotting a newspaper story about dredging when you're in an existentially bad mood can lead to morbid contemplations about the point of it all, sure. But from her counter-arguments and shrugs, a subtle, certain songwriter emerges. Barnett tries out a lot of different modes on Sometimes: laconic country-tinged ballads, Nirvana ragers, and Lemonheads-y choogle. She sticks to one voice though. Literally a monotone, but a funny one, where roadkill is a "possum Jackson Pollock". It's a marvel of intensity and feeling that quietly questions where we find value, and its price. —Laura Snapes

Courtney Barnett: "Pedestrian At Best" (via SoundCloud)

That moment when an artist throws taste to the wind and the results aren’t self-indulgent, but revelatory: that’s when he’s reached the pinnacle of his skill, earned absolute trust from his audience, and that’s the blissful high Miguel sustains on Wildheart. Three years ago, he signposted his ambitions with a record title like Art Dealer Chic. Now he nails everything he tries, from the chugging guitars of opener "A Beautiful Exit" to the appearance of Lenny Kravitz—hardly a critically rehabilitated guy—on album closer “Face the Sun”. Throughout, he writes about sex with enough candor and playfulness to make everyone else sound like high schoolers bragging about their imagined conquests.

Everything on Wildheart is a risk, even the tracks that seem conventional. “Waves” could have been awkward leisure-suit funk, the kind of thing that dragged down Giorgio Moroder and Nick Jonas this year. But Miguel is both a beefier vocalist and a more imaginative producer, and “Waves” is one of the album’s highlights. His charisma, a sheer omnivorous force of personality, turns whatever he touches into into jams. "Hollywood Dreams" treads approximately zero new ground, but Miguel tears into California corruption like he’s annexing it all for himself.

Miguel’s passions are clear—kink, futurism, '70s rock—and singularly his. "The Valley" is set to scattershot percussion and noir clank that would be at home on a Holly Herndon album; its follow-up, "Coffee", balances porn with lyrics so intimate they could only sketch a single specific person. Wildheart’s most autobiographical track, "What’s Normal Anyway", skirts the line separating "disarmingly earnest" and "uncomfortably on the nose", but never comes off as anything other than exactly what Miguel wanted to say, exactly how he wanted to say it. —Katherine St. Asaph

As a song called "1000 Deaths" chugs to life on D'Angelo's first album in 14 years, the voice of Black Panther Fred Hampton is heard decrying the "megalomaniac" powers that be who stand in the way of peace for blacks and whites alike. "We've got to fight them," the controversial civil-rights leader concludes, "to make them understand what peace means." At age 21, Hampton was shot and killed in a police raid on a Black Panther base on Chicago's West Side in December, 1969; though the authorities claimed that they were justified in the incident, a subsequent federal investigation found that only one shot was fired by the Panthers, while nearly 100 were let off by the cops. Forty-five years later, and just eight miles south of Hampton's slaying, an unarmed 17-year-old named Laquan McDonald was shot 16 times by a single police officer—the latest atrocity involving America's lethal refusal of black being.

The intractability of this refusal is drawn out within the layers of Black Messiah, through the scarred guitars, the murky vocal harmonies, the grooves that never fully settle. It's a sad testament to an enduring struggle D'Angelo himself describes as a "charade"—though the album's grainy black-and-white cover looks like something from Hampton's heyday, it was actually taken during Brooklyn's Afropunk Festival in 2014. But for all of its somber complexities, Black Messiah still manages to cling to its title's sense of rejuvenation. It's not all hopeless. A self-described optimist, D'Angelo also sings of sex, love, nostalgia, and faith across the record, which breathes with enough analog warmth to convert the staunchest vinyl skeptic. "Another Life", the album's finale, is a tribute to the smoothness of Philly Soul, a style that soundtracked America's burgeoning black middle class in the mid-'70s. The song fantasizes of a forever romance as heavenly piano chords and D'Angelo's pure falsetto slide it into the slow jam canon. And yet, at its core, the track feels like a mirage. It's no coincidence that Black Messiah's most luscious moment is also the one that looks beyond our own world. —Ryan Dombal

D'Angelo / The Vanguard: "1000 Deaths"

We’re only getting better at distracting ourselves from death, which makes sense, because death is terrifying. We get lost in screens, sex, stories, drugs, dreams, work, and music to forget the fact that, one day, the planet will spin without us; if there is noise, then there is not silence. Over the last 15 years, Sufjan Stevens has employed a particular sort of overflowing aesthetic maximalism to stave off that empty feeling. His songs are often marked by melancholy, but then strings, horns, blips, and banjo enter, and we’re swept away, saved from the bottomless pit below. On Carrie & Lowell, though, he forces himself—and his listeners—to face the brink with a stripped sound. The album’s first song is called "Death With Dignity" and its opening lines are delivered in a hush: "Spirit of my silence I can hear you/ But I’m afraid to be near you".

Carrie is the troubled mother Stevens hardly knew, who died in 2012; Lowell is the loving step-father who to this day helps run Stevens’ independent record label. They seem to represent the entirety of this songwriter’s psyche: the interminable longing for and eventual loss of the woman who gave him life as well as the tremendous gratitude for and admiration of a man to whom he has no blood ties. While Carrie & Lowell is certainly not a party record, it’s not a pity party record either—it never devolves into mere mope for mope’s sake. Even if Stevens is making less noise than usual, these 11 elegies fill up a grand space. In the end, there’s comfort in knowing that this album will outlive us all. —Ryan Dombal

Sufjan Stevens: "Should Have Known Better"

Oh, you were getting used to Kevin Parker as a contemporary guitar hero? Too bad, because he's apparently been listening to a lot of Air and DeBarge, on headphones, in his bedroom, with his axe tucked away in its case. He's gone past the title of 2012's Lonerism to total desolation on Currents, whose every lyric makes the absence of anyone else in his studio evident. Even when he's talking to someone else, it's someone who's not in his life any more. (The chorus of "'Cause I'm a Man" pretends to be defensive bluster, but its context makes it clear that it's an outburst of shame addressed to an empty space.)

There's still a bit of Parker's elegant guitar here, but he's mostly rerouted his perfectionistic craftsmanship to synthesizer tones and drum programming. If you want the old Tame Impala back, that's not about to happen: "Maybe fake's what I like," he murmurs on "New Person, Same Old Mistakes". The weightless, drifty sounds in the foreground of Currents conceal the jagged edges of lyrics whose core topics are failed romance and emotional paralysis. The album's centerpiece, "Eventually", anticipates the slow, merciful erosion of heartbreak, and Parker sings it as if a perfectly breathy falsetto was the only thing that could cushion the blow of a breakup. —Douglas Wolk

Tame Impala: "Let It Happen"

Jay Z famously said, "Y’all respect the one who got shot, I respect the shooter." Vince Staples lets you understand both perspectives better than anyone else currently rapping. You sense the powerlessness that leads someone to pull the trigger, their rage at having their story dismissed, the corrosive socioeconomic conditions that end in pine boxes, wilting roses, and another set seeking retribution.

Summertime '06 chronicles the north Long Beach of nearly a decade ago, the city where the skinny carry strong heat, where the bandanas are brown "like the dope daddy shooting in the kitchen." The ex-shooter eulogizes the corpses, the snitches, and those condemned in the penitentiary—tracing his own escape route to sober celebrations on a mezzanine in Paris, lamenting those who never made it out.

He’s not a conscious rapper, he’s a conscience rapper—attempting to make it to heaven in spite of those he may or may not have helped to hell. He says more in a bar than most say in an album ("I need to fight the power, but I need that new Ferrari.") No one has done contrition like this since Clipse.

It’s all here: semi-automatic blasts and seagull sounds, Christ juxtaposed with crip walking, suntanned assassins trapped in surf-adjacent slums. He riffs on racial profiling, drug addiction, educational failures, police brutality, and white folks chanting "nigga" at concerts. He’s the halfway point between Ice Cube and Ian Curtis.

Listen once more to the doomed pop of "Summertime", his voice practically disintegrating as he repeats, "this could be forever, baby." He’s scarred enough to know that’s it’s a lie, still hopeful enough to believe that if he says it loud enough, things could actually change. —Jeff Weiss

Vince Staples: "Señorita" (via SoundCloud)

"B-E-H-A-V-E never more!" sneers Claire Boucher, like a subversive punk cheerleader, on the stadium-worthy "Kill V. Maim". "You gave up being good when you declared a state of war," she proclaims, delivering the final three words in an intense, throaty scream. The little snap from a traditionally feminine pop vocal into a full-on battle cry sounds like a slap in the face to an industry that regularly demotes Boucher’s artistic status to that of a "girly" female vocalist. Because Art Angels makes it clear that Grimes is not a voice on the sidelines, but a player in the field: a music producer who’s honing her skills like she’s sharpening a well-crafted sword. The move from the ghostly electronica of Visions is not Grimes "going pop,” but rather evidence of her musical touch growing more versatile and vibrant.

The album teems with bubbly, maximalist pop-leaning music, all jangly guitar samples, thumping bass drums, and Boucher’s voice layered and warped into addictive sing-alongs. It has two distinct personalities: the dark, fighter-stance synth-pop of songs like "Kill V. Maim" and the Janelle Monáe-featuring club-ready banger "Venus Fly", or lighter, bubblegum jams like "California" and "Belly of the Beat". Whether over minimalist piano ballads or macho guitar rock, Boucher faces those who’ve doubted her, tackling fame-hungry vampires, platonic heartbreakers, privileged men, and more. She's taking all the heat and intensity that comes along with an Internet-fueled spotlight and radiating that energy outward, blinding detractors and putting on an epic light show for everyone else. —Hazel Cills

Grimes: "Flesh Without Blood"

The Persuasions' "Good Times" is one of those songs where the good times are always just about to come. "I can’t afford the fancy dancing places/ But as long as you have faith in me/ We’ll have ourselves a grand time", the a cappella group proclaims on its 1972 single, locked in the future tense. Jamie xx sampled a line from the song for In Colour’s dancehall-tinged song of the same name, but he tellingly lets the original track play in full during live performances. The point is obvious when the sampled section hits: This was clearly the right selection.

In Colour is an album full of perfect decisions like this. The London producer honed the knack for subtleties that he first flashed in his 2011 solo one-off "Far Nearer" and on Gil Scott-Heron’s remix album We’re New Here, establishing himself as a solo force in his own right. The album tread broader stylistic territory than the hushed guitar minimalism of his main group the xx, from Popcaan and Young Thug’s gleeful profanity on "Good Times," to the Aphex Twin ambient lullaby "The Rest Is Noise," to the fractured vocal samples of "Sleep Sound," which recalls the blissful techno shimmer of the Field. The wistful thread tying this all together was that unbridgeable distance between past and present: You heard it in the soaring synth melodies and disembodied rave chatter of the opener, "Gosh". But it’s "Loud Places", where Jamie xx takes fellow xx-er Romy Madley Croft’s vocals to one of those "fancy dancing places" in search of "someone to be quiet with, who will take me home," where the good times are closest at hand: "I feel music in your eyes/ I have never reached such heights." In Colour distills that feeling. —Marc Hogan

Jamie xx: "I Know There's Gonna Be (Good Times)" [ft. Young Thug and Popcaan]

At this point, it should be no surprise that Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly is the Album of the Year on numerous lists, including this one. Upon its release, it was universally lauded. It was only March, but the writing was on the White House walls: To Pimp a Butterfly was an opus, a statement, a feat. It felt weighty, labored, accomplished. One hour and 20 minutes of big ideas handled with complexity, it was a dextrous addition to the canon of art expressing disenchantment with fame and success. It launched a thousand thinkpieces, and forced critics to think deeply about music—to the point that it was still generating back-and-forths about its merits, as late as last month, eight months after its release. Commercially speaking, it set first-week streaming records on Spotify, meaning that it was being listened to as fervently as it was being debated.

It's also Black as fuck. "Blackness" is a concept that remains fluid and intangible, but so solid that one can feel it when it’s present. And it was all over Butterfly. From the opening notes (a sample of Boris Gardiner's "Every Nigger Is a Star") to the closing—a fabricated conversation with Tupac Shakur—the album is packed with Blackness. Kendrick may not have given the public much advance warning for Butterfly’s rich sound—the luxe spillover of stripped funk and jazz grooving of Terrace Martin, Kamasi Washington, Flying Lotus, Thundercat, and many others—but he made his thematic intentions abundantly clear with the pre-release singles. The first, "i", with its Isley Brothers sample and message of self-love, was initially overlooked for its subversion; while Black folk were telling the world that #BlackLivesMatter, Kendrick turned the message inwards: "I love myself." It was the amendment to his controversial statements to Billboard magazine that veered uncomfortably close to respectability politics. ("What happened to [Michael Brown] should've never happened. Never," he told the magazine. "But when we don't have respect for ourselves, how do we expect them to respect us? It starts from within. Don't start with just a rally, don't start from looting—it starts from within.")

At a moment when his peers remained fixated on finding worth and esteem from the world and things around them—the power of celebrity, the trappings of material excess, the numbing of drugs, the escape of sexual conquest—Kendrick emerged as a grounded Black hippie. He was enthralled with all of the same things as other rappers, but not beholden to them. He escaped into pussy on "These Walls" but philosophized as he stroked: "Walls telling me they full of pain, resentment/ Need someone to live in them just to relieve tension/ Me? I’m just a tenant." When he got drunk on "u", he turned to self-loathing: "Mood swings is frequent, nigga/ I know depression is restin' on your heart for two reasons, nigga." When he gassed up his luxury vehicle on President Obama's favorite song of the year, "How Much a Dollar Cost", he encountered God in the form of a beggar.

None of these things are explicitly Black, but the lens through which they were filtered was undoubtedly so. From its vernacular to its point of view, To Pimp a Butterfly was about dealing with the survivor's remorse of escaping the poverty of Black America, while also relating to those still there. On "Institutionalized", when he took one of his hood friends to the BET Awards, he noted: "You lookin' at artistses like they harvestses/ So many Rolies around you and you want all of ’em/ Somebody told me you thinkin' 'bout snatchin' jewelry."

Nowhere is Blackness more front and center than on the album’s second single, "The Blacker the Berry". It was the song that most clearly announced Kendrick's lack of fucks about the comfort of his white audience. Perhaps it was a retort to his previous Grammy snubs; maybe it was a reaction to seeing "Swimming Pools (Drank)", his anti-drunk song, turned into a pro-drunk song in the mouths of bros. Whatever his reasoning, "The Blacker the Berry" provided white people with no entry into the song: There is hardly anything on the song for Taylor Swift to lip sync in her car unless she was going to deal with psychic turmoil of mouthing "My hair is nappy, my dick is big, my nose is round and wide/ You hate me don't you?/ You hate my people—your plan is to terminate my culture/ You're fuckin' evil, I want you to recognize that I'm a proud monkey." He labeled the song as the "emancipation of a real nigga" and, even in a society where whites regularly rub ears with the n-word, it was abrasive and unsettling.

All of this Blackness is important. Important because sometimes white people need to take a metaphorical seat—to sit down, shut up, and listen to conversations in which they are a cultural object, not the center. This is not an easy task. White people have been way too comfortable for way too long in this country, in this world. Way too comfortable with the way they choose to see reality solely through their own gaze, way too comfortable with their sense of entitlement over the planet and its resources, way too comfortable with their appropriation of culture in ways large and small, way too comfortable with the stories they tell, the lies passed off as the history of mankind. Way too comfortable with the things they pick up, way too careless with the way they put them down. But Kendrick was willing to discomfort the comfortable. He took all of the acclaim he had received as a critical darling from his major label debut—the rightfully extolled good kid, m.A.A.d city—and doubled down on his Blackness, not for the entertainment of white people, but in near-total disregard for their experience of his conversation. He was Miles Davis playing with his back to the crowd, and in that sense, it's a miracle that this record has found the audiences that it has found.

It's an album by the greatest rapper of his generation, where his rap skills are perhaps the least noteworthy talking point. An album so dense with ideas that it made the novelistic turns of his debut—a thoughtful and textured, gang culture-adjacent coming-of-age story—seem quaint and straightforward by comparison. It's an album that is on this list not only because of its merits, but because it's presumably why so many albums are not here, this year—it's not a stretch to reason that To Pimp a Butterfly had something to do with why Kanye West and Drake didn't release proper studio albums in 2015. It's an album with such gravitas that the runaway success of Adele's 25 seems inconsequential. It's not just the album of the year; it's the voice of a moment in time. —kris ex

Kendrick Lamar: "Alright"

On their third album, this Richmond doom band's guitars come together with frontwoman Dorthia Cottrell’s calm, haunting voice to make memorable anthems. Produced by Jack Endino, Grief’s Infernal Flower is filled with fuzzed stoner metal marked by a thick, molasses tone, soulfulness, and hooks as big as they need to be.

Windhand: "Crypt Key" (via SoundCloud)

Danish multi-instrumentalist Amalie Bruun’s debut album is an immersive collection of classic-sounding black metal and Scandinavian folk that features chilly piano, melodic ghost-choir interludes, passages of frozen noise, clamoring industrial bits, and a gong. Bruun writes the music, sings in both a crystal clear and gnarled voice, and also plays piano and guitar. She recorded the album in Oslo, co-producing the 11 songs with prolific musician and producer Krystoffer Rygg, aka Garm, the mind behind Norwegian black metal legends Ulver and one of the genre's important shaping forces.

Myrkur: "Nordlys" (Buy on Bandcamp)

Noisem’s debut, Agony Defined, was an exhilarating mix of old-school whammy bar-rich thrash and death metal with little bits of grind and punk thrown about; people were fair when they brought up Slayer and Napalm Death's Scum. The group’s second album, Blossoming Decay, is burlier. The playing is sturdier, faster, and more hulking. The blazing solos are still there, but the actual riffs pull just as much of your attention. And the singing is freer, gnarlier, and more rabid—it's a nonstop vocal attack that comes off more punk and personal than Agony. And these nine songs are not about horror films, they're about the personal horrors of life and living. Blossoming Decay is a metal record that'll appeal to punk kids—and Trash Talk fans—as much as it'll blow the minds of metalheads.

Noisem: "Cascade of Scars" (Buy on Bandcamp)

Tanner Anderson is the driving force behind Obsequiae (formerly Autumnal Winds), a Minneapolis trio who blend Medieval harp and Medieval lyrical stylings with raw black metal on songs with titles like "Orphic Rites of the Mystic". I first became aware of Anderson a few years ago through his ambient, naturalistic funeral doom project, Celestiial, where he wove field recordings of streams, rustling leaves, and birds into his heavy, often industrial-seeming tones. On Aria of Vernal Tombs, there are church bells, echoing vocals, the sound of a dark forest, and solo harp pieces accompanying the blast beats, and it all works. Someone should honestly book them at a Renaissance Faire. Genre name suggestion: "Black Madrigal."

Obsequiae: "In the Absence of Light" (via Bandcamp)

The Minneapolis band False play swirling, full-speed black metal chaos that features two guitars, bass, drums, keys, and a rabid vocalist named, simply, Rachel. This untitled LP follows a 2011 EP with no name. The songs do have titles, though, and carry a crusty punk naturalism (and nihilism): "The body decays and becomes the Earth/ Death is welcomed, not to be dead, but to feel the Self dying/ To cleanse the idea of self with the deluge of blood from flesh/ This is the rebirth through pain, in which we embrace the sensuality of nothingness." It’s ritualistic and cleansing, its five songs stretching to an hour. The album reminds me of Weakling in some ways, but it’s harder and more warped sounding and less dreamy—this is more war march, less nocturnal dream. It’s like they’re racing to a finish line that never comes.

False: "Saturnalia" (via Bandcamp)

The third and best album from Pinkish Black finds the Fort Worth, Texas duo mixing deathrock with krautrock, analog drone with glimmering melody, and the solitary atmosphere of horror movie soundtracks with the welcoming voice of Daron Beck. Think Christian Death morphing with Tortoise, or Ian Curtis guesting with Goblin. Beck may also bring to mind a goth Mike Patton, Peter Murphy, or Killing Joke’s Jaz Coleman: At times he snarls and howls like he’s in hell, but he mostly croons, chants, and pushes his crystalline baritone skyward. All these elements come together in a dense, seven-song collection that’s about as majestic as it is creepy.

Pinkish Black: "The Master Is Away" (Buy on Bandcamp)

San Francisco’s Vastum create suffocating, masochistic, warped death/crust metal that sounds like it was recorded in a wind tunnel (or a sewer). The raging vocals of Daniel Butler and guitarist Leila Abdul-Rauf feels like a gang mugging, but there’s an odd catchiness to the chaos—even with song titles like "Sodomitic Malevolence" and "Hole Below (A Dream of Ritual Abuse)".

Vastum: "Sodomitic Malevolence" (Buy on Bandcamp)

The sludgy Oakland stoner trio High on Fire, fronted by one of our greatest living guitarists, Matt Pike, have been so all-around solid for such a long time that it can be easy to overlook just how flat-out great they’ve become. They’re my generation’s Motörhead, and this relentlessly revved-up collection is one of their strongest offerings.

High on Fire: "Carcosa"

The San Francisco four-piece Kowloon Walled City slow things down on their third album, Grievances, which blends post-rock, sludge, and references to Unwound with tons of space. They take their time with each of the record's seven tracks and aren’t afraid to grow nearly silent before exploding into another tortured howl from vocalist/guitarist Scott Evans, who will remind you of your favorite '90s noise rock or floor-punching hardcore frontman. The songs are heavy, distraught, and, in the end, very beautiful.

Kowloon Walled City: "Grievances" (via Bandcamp)

This knockout band features John Cobbett and Sigrid Sheie from folk-inflected progressive metal heroes Hammers of Fortune, YOB frontman/doom legend Mike Scheidt, and kvlt punk Aesop Dekker, the drummer for one-time SF black metal legends Ludicra and currently of Agalloch. Deeper Than Sky is a tour through classic metal with everything slightly cracked. You get twisted, ebullient thrash metal and power metal folding in on itself; impressionistic guitar solos alongside vocal parts that make me think of Queen; and a piano piece set to d-beat drums. Scheidt’s vocal performance is a revelation, as are the colorful acrobatics of the band tearing things up around him.

VHÖL: "Deeper Than Sky" (via Bandcamp)

The Finnish funeral doom band’s first album since 2008 is an eight-song, 78-minute evisceration of the soul in slow motion. Vocalist Matti’s growls are deep and gnarled; the music around him is often light, precise, almost gentle. (It can also get fittingly theatrical when the keyboards and strings reach for the sky.) Featuring six new tracks along with two old ones, Ordeal was recorded live in front of an audience in Turku, Finland, and the setting gives these elegantly crushing excursions an especially vibrant life force.

Skepticism: "March Incomplete" (Buy on Bandcamp)

The seminal gothic metal/doom band Paradise Lost have been around since 1988. Their 14th studio album, The Plague Within, continues a run of amazing mid- or late- or whatever-career offerings that started with 2009’s Faith Divides Us—Death Unites Us, a personal favorite, and continued with 2012’s Tragic Idol. This is heavier and harsher than those two albums and finds them shifting back to their earlier death/doom days, with Nick Holmes shredding his voice. But don’t worry, there’s still plenty of stately gothic metal, too. Like Swans, Paradise Lost prove that some bands get even better with age.

Paradise Lost: "No Hope in Sight"

The Bay Area duo Bosse-de-Nage create hyperactive post-black metal punk with Slint moments and highly sexual lyrics along the lines of: "At night she reenacts scenes from her passion/ She kicks and screams on all fours." Their latest album follows their 2012 split 12” with Deafheaven and travels to a much creepier place. Bryn Manning’s lyrics read like short stories—like Pig Destroyer’s best work, or Calvino or Borges penning pornographic parables. "I come from the City of Hair beyond the Wrinkled Mountain," one character notes, "and I will not rest until I’ve washed every penis in this room." It wouldn’t be wrong to think of a twisted version of Sunbather penned by a Bataille fanatic and released by AmRep.

Bosse-de-Nage: "In a Yard Somewhere" (via Bandcamp)

Dominick Fernow’s Prurient discography is extensive—I’d venture to say there are more than 150 releases of some size or another with his name on it—so it feels stupid to call any single release his "best." But the sprawling, 90-minute Frozen Niagara Falls has made me consider it. It’s a record that ties together Fernow’s rawer past and points toward something new. There are meditative moments followed by industrial implosions, moments that will make you want to dance, and stretches that will make you want to smash your head against a wall. It is pained and also ecstatic; cinematic and very personal. It’s also maybe the most romantic harsh noise album ever made.

Prurient: "Greenpoint" (via SoundCloud)

Over the last 10 years, the music made by prolific Chicago/Baltimore trio Locrian has always been tough to categorize: Is it noise? Black metal? Dark ambient? Industrial? Drone? Things get especially complicated on Infinite Dissolution, where they manage to be more triumphant and bigger than before. The nine-song effort, recorded at Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio and produced by Greg Norman (Russian Circles, Pelican), is a concept album about the extinction of the human race, but you’ll find yourself pumping your fist as frontman Terence Hannum’s haunting black-metal vocals slither through a melancholic, melodic mix of fuzz, hiss, and riffs. Stitched together by woozy instrumentals that feature birds chirping and iron scraping, the album marks a new peak for the creatively restless group.

Locrian: "Heavy Water" (via SoundCloud)

Sannhet, the instrumental Brooklyn trio of bassist AJ Annunziata, drummer Christopher Todd, and guitarist John Refano, are one of the best live bands going. Onstage, they’re a marvel; Todd in the middle and up front, a drummer nobody can stop watching; Annunziata manning an intense light show with his foot. Then, when you listen to their excellent second album, you wonder how all this noise could come from just three guys. They make soaring-but-concise post-rock anthems that will make you punch the air and maybe (probably) cry.

Sannhet: "Lost Crown" (via SoundCloud)

Horrendous honor old school death metal by taking it apart and putting it back together again as something entirely new. The eight songs on their third album are mournful, mathy, anthemic, pristine. You’ll hear Swedish death metal, American thrash, majestic doom, bits of gnarled black metal, and even a stirring post-rock outro. They’re technical but soulful players, and though the solos and time shifts can make you gasp, it’s the music’s emotion and guts that stay with you.

Horrendous: "Polaris" (via Bandcamp)

On their third album, the Polish black metal duo Mgła offer up six perfectly paced tracks—the efficiently titled "Exercises in Futility I" through "Exercises in Futility VI"—that respect the black metal template but push things subtly, capably forward. There’s nothing especially fancy here; Mgła make perfect use of the ingredients of basic, raw, melodic black metal. The tracks are imposing and blistering, but approachable: If you’re someone who can also hear hooks in Watain and old-school Burzum, this will come off like nihilistic pop.

Mgła: "Exercises in Futility I" (via Bandcamp)

The Dallas, Texas collective Dead to a Dying World’s second album moves through apocalyptic crust punk, post-rock, black metal, doom, and exultant stringed soundscapes to create an album focusing on our failing environment and earth and that feels like Godspeed fully giving into their metal tendencies. Here, the seven-piece group, which features multiple male and female voices along with guitars and orchestra bells, is supplemented by guest vocals from Pallbearer’s Brett Campbell, Pinkish Black’s Daron Beck, and Jamie Myers-Waits of Sabbath Assembly, among others.

Dead to a Dying World: "Cicatrix" (via Bandcamp)

Purple is the first album since Baroness’ near-fatal van accident, and the first to feature the new lineup that came together after two members left the group following the crash. It’s shorter and more precise than 2012’s Yellow & Green, and they left Relapse to release it on their own imprint, Abraxan Hymns. These are some of the biggest, strongest songs Baroness have written; it's rock music that folds in their more metal leanings, along with something more delicate and spare. The choruses are their best—maybe because each and every one of them is life-affirming. (Watch the in-studio video for "Chlorine & Wine" to get a sense of this jubilation.)

Baroness: "Chlorine & Wine"

The Denver quartet Khemmis’ excellent debut LP features six muscular, melodic songs that flash between vintage doom, heavy blues, and classic rock’n’roll. Their two vocalists overlay clean and gnarled vocals—you hear Candlemass one moment, a floor-punching hardcore sermon the next. Like fellow modern purveyors of the old guard Pallbearer, Khemmis nod to the classics just enough to remain pure and update them enough to be your new favorite band.

Khemmis: "Serpentine" (via Bandcamp)

Autumn Eternal concludes a trilogy by Minnesota-via-Kentucky multi-instrumentalist Austin Lunn, aka Panopticon, who plays everything here outside of a violin. He powers into more traditional atmospheric black metal and dark folk-inflected naturalist metal featuring subtler banjo/fiddle accents than before. There are acoustic guitars and nocturnal field recordings, but the real draw is the rich, gorgeous guitar tone, amazing drumming, and melancholic (and, at times, vicious) atmosphere. You may think of vintage Katatonia, but, like Agalloch, this music was pulled directly from the American landscape.

Panopticon: "Sleep to the Sound of the Waves Crashing" (Buy on Bandcamp)

If someone close to you has died, you know that mourning can be a lonely and suffocating experience: Bell Witch, who named themselves after a poltergeist from Southern folklore, evoke these sorts of feelings. The Seattle duo's haunting take on funeral doom is melancholic, heavy, slow, and beyond minimal. It evokes burial. Four Phantoms is gut-wrenching and cathartic in the way the saddest things can be.

Bell Witch: "Judgement, In Fire: I – Garden (Of Blooming Ash)"

Tribulation’s 2013 collection The Formulas of Death added progressive rock, clean guitars, piano interludes, and flanged Eastern elements to the group’s thrashing Swedish death metal. Children of the Night is more focused, nailing a vintage heavy rock feel—think Mercyful Fate with a gnarlier vocalist. The songwriting is mind-blowingly on point, the hooks hummable after one listen. Though they're quite different than recent tourmates Deafheaven, they share an ability to make "extreme" music catchy. And unlike a lot of forced kvlt stuff these days, you could actually start a cult around this music.

Tribulation: "The Motherhood of God"

Somehow, the Los Angeles band made an album that’s even better than their classic-seeming Sunbather. New Bermuda’s heavy parts are heavier, the quiet moments prettier, the push and pull of its overall sequencing perfect. It’s the first proper full-length recording from a lineup that’s been touring together for the past couple of years, and they really gel here, each player striving to reach their limit. The album is moving, romantic, and powerful, and sounds great in a large room or when you’re just lost in your own head.

Deafheaven: "Baby Blue" (via Bandcamp)

The year’s big Jim O’Rourke news, of course, came with May’s release of Simple Songs, his long-awaited return to discrete and discernible songcraft, where reflections of Van Dyke Parks were more apparent than his love of, say, Akos Rozmann. But earlier in the year, O’Rourke and the musician who has become perhaps his closest collaborator—the drummer, guitarist, and sound artist Oren Ambarchi—issued Behold, their second duo album. A two-side set of slow-moving, groove-oriented tones and drones, peaks and lulls, Behold suggested a jam band working to adhere to several tenets of modern design—clean lines with negative space, striking colors, and an understandable palette. The piece accomplishes a lot even as it goes almost nowhere, with Ambarchi and O’Rourke electing to accessorize and fill in their simple rhythmic design rather than force it into new shapes. Listening to this is like sitting in a museum and staring at a painting, noticing new layers and elements even though you know it and you remain still. —GC

Oren Ambarchi & Jim O'Rourke: "Behold (excerpt)" (via SoundCloud)

France’s Delphine Dora and England’s Sophie Cooper have both made impressively uncategorizable music over the past decade, and while they’ve been mutual supporters (Dora released Cooper’s excellent Our Aquarius on her Wild Silence label last year), this is the first time they’ve played together. Improvising in a echo-laden church in West Yorkshire, the pair found a sound distinct from their respective individual work. Their voices fill the space in a haunting-yet-reverent way; some of the tracks are like wordless hymns sung by ghosts. Distance Future’s surrounding ambience reminds me of the holy drones of Charlemagne Palestine and Janek Schaefer on Day of the Demons, but where that record’s power came in clarity, Dora and Cooper’s work is more mysterious—and ultimately something only these two could conjure. —MM

Delphine Dora & Sophie Cooper: "Les Differences S'unissent" (via SoundCloud)

Alexander Moskos can really take a song apart. His work as Drainolith is all about splitting the atoms inside of tunes, breaking out all the sonic elements so they separate while still overlapping. On Hysteria you can watch his songs fuse and disconnect in real time. Every moment feels like an altered state, and most of them induce one too, changing your perspective about what exactly constitutes a song. In this way Moskos shares some deconstructional affinities with Neil Hagerty, who produced this album. But Moskos’ cloud of confusion is unique, and on Hysteria he’s perfected that haze. —MM

Drainolith: "No Name (Dany Kane's Blues)" (via SoundCloud)

Phil Tortoroli’s second release as James Place is a masterpiece of understated exploration. All of the tracks have a cool, detached feel, but that subdued exterior masks a wide-ranging sonic ambition, as Tortoroli delves into ambience, minimalism, techno, glitch, New Age, and tons more. In places you can hear the echoes of Fennesz’s faded memories, Forest Swords’ disembodied voices, and Labradford’s slow burns. But Tortoroli avoids mimicry and pastiche by allowing all kinds of sounds into his patient vision. Think of it as calm excitement: Living in Superstition massages brain waves as it simultaneously toys with your pulse. —MM

James Place: "High Rise (Rainier)" (via SoundCloud)

The realm of solo instrumental guitar music is typically dominated by white male musicians. Maybe by coincidence, maybe not, Footfalls Records broadens the scope of practitioners with its debut release, a two-guitarist split between the Bhutan-born Tashi Dorji and Oregon’s Marisa Anderson. Dorji explores his acoustic as if it’s an unmapped territory: During his three songs, he picks up the slide, scrapes the strings, plays thin notes, offers broad chords, chimes out harmonics and rattles around the neck. Still, these songs somehow maintain a sense of melody, where the tune itself matters just as much as the texture it conjures. Anderson, on the other hand, steadily plucks an electric, her patient melodies curling from thick strings with full body. But it’s her sense of time—contracting, expanding, quickening, slowing—that feels revelatory here, as if she exists at a flexible nexus of the past, present, and future. When she massages together the standards "The House Carpenter" and "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean" into a song that feels like her own, you realize maybe she does. —GC

Tashi Dorji & Marisa Anderson: "Karma Lata" (via SoundCloud)

After years of making music (under her own name and as Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier) that was often dense and heavily layered, Félicia Atkinson turned quieter and more intimate on the transfixing A Readymade Ceremony. Her vocals—mostly delivered in soft spoken-word—are so present it’s as if she’s sitting right next to you. Yet for all its clarity and immediacy, A Readymade Ceremony still feels like a dream; the songs’ strange internal logic heads straight for the subconscious and at times even resembles ASMR therapy. The intoxication of Atkinson’s music works on many levels—you can zone out, you can zoom in, or you can drift somewhere in between, but no matter what angle you approach A Readymade Ceremony from, it ends up enveloping you. —MM

Félicia Atkinson: "L'Oeil" (via SoundCloud)

The bulk of Busman’s Holiday, the second collaboration between American noise masters Kevin Drumm and Jason Lescalleet, is totalitarian in its approach to volume. Opener "The Hunt", for instance, seems to be an exercise in how far and how slowly the pair can ramp the knob to the right, a shard of controlled static growing so loud it eventually overrides all other thoughts. And with its Sunn O)))-sized bass rumbles below and hovering electronic hiss above, "Belligerence" seems keen on crowding out all frequency interference, of fending off any intrusion into the world Drumm and Lescalleet have created. Indeed, as they write in the liner notes, "This album is a meditation on the inner mental environments of work-related travel" and, as such, is intended for careful listening in those situations. That is, it shuts out the crying baby in the next row. But there are quiet moments here, too, parts so silent relative to their surroundings that one must pay steadfast attention in order to hear what’s happening at all. Somehow, these are more isolating and magnetic than all the electronic power this duo can otherwise mount. It’s OK to put your hands over your ears in public, right? —GC

Kevin Drumm & Jason Lescalleet: "The Push (excerpt)"

Rick Brown and Che Chen both have long resumes, but their duo 75 Dollar Bill began about as primitively as possible. Early on they busked on New York sidewalks, with Chen playing guitar and Brown beating on a plywood box (which also serves as his chair) that he found on a street corner. Two years and several releases later, their sound has grown and expanded, but still has a primal energy. Chen’s guitar winds helixes around Brown’s deceptively simple rhythms. Even though 75 Dollar Bill’s music is rooted more in blues than jazz, these tunes share an aura with some of the best horn/drum improvisers, in the way subtle variations and tangential runs can open up whole worlds. A few meditative horn duets also add texture, but it’s the guitar-box jamming on Wooden Bag that echoes long after 75 Dollar Bill’s songs fade away. —MM

75 Dollar Bill: "Cuttin' Out" (via SoundCloud)

During the last two decades, Pacific Northwest noise lord Daniel Menche has issued a few albums each year, alternating between militant percussive collages and slowly developing barrages. His pace has slowed during the last few years, but his new collaboration with Faith Coloccia and Aaron Turner, or Mamiffer, makes up for the lost time. A half-decade in development, the six-track Crater is a vivid exploration of uncanny sonic phenomena. During "Maar", a pretty piano line dissolves inside a bath of distorted guitar, as though separate signals have been routed through the same broken amplifier. "Alluvial" sends pedestrian field recordings into distant orbit, with long tones stuck inside a slow, steady vortex. And the brilliant "Breccia" laces the beauty of a gamelan orchestra beneath the terror of a power electronics roar, the juxtaposition daring you to choose between backing off or leaning in. —GC

Daniel Menche & Mamiffer: "Calyx" (via SoundCloud)

Jaime Fennelly’s music as Mind Over Mirrors has always felt massive; the hypnotic loops he creates with Indian pedal harmonium feel endless. But The Voice Calling is more expansive than any previous Mind Over Mirrors record, primarily due to the project itself having gotten bigger with the the addition of Haley Fohr of Circuit Des Yeux. Fohr's vocal layers—mostly wordless—add a new dimension to Mind Over Mirrors, and every track on The Voice Calling shoots straight for the stratosphere. Part of that effect comes from a slight retro feel—classic Terry Riley comes to mind—but Fennelly and Fohr still sound absolutely present, caught up in the real-time magic of their attention-demanding music. —MM

Mind Over Mirrors: "Calling Your Name" (via SoundCloud)

Over the years, Jon Mueller has been the powerful, full-kit force behind Death Blues, Collections of Colonies of Bees, Volcano Choir, and Pele. Solo or with a wide net of collaborators, he’s combined his drums and electronics with force and fascination. Alone, on the two-track A Magnetic Center, he does all of that with his voice, one hand-made and hand-held Arabic drum and a system of loops. The first side is pure trance, the intoxicating rhythms and chanted glossolalia turning into a mental cobweb that Mueller breaks only at the end with stirring yells. On the flip, a dead-ahead drumbeat provides the tension against his reversed, chopped-and-screwed voice, which suggests an ecstatic choir of true believers speaking in simultaneous tongues. Mueller’s work sounds exhausting to make; it is life-affirming to hear. —GC

Jon Mueller: "Trace Essential" (Buy on Bandcamp)

In the past few years Letha Rodman Melchior carved out a home between composed music and field recordings, building it with 2013’s Handbook for Mortals and truly settling in with this year’s masterful Shimmering Ghost. Weaving sounds, events, and arcs together in a manner both concrete and abstract, Rodman Melchior tells stories that feel real yet also evaporate before your eyes like apparitions. The album’s most stirring track, "Southern Highlands", presents a male voice telling a "sonic ghost story" over simple, moving piano, his words fading into the chords like fog melting into the ground. Tragically, Rodman Melchior passed away in September of 2014, and Shimmering Ghost serves as a strong reminder that her fantastically creative spirit remains with those of us lucky enough to experience her art. —MM

Letha Rodman Melchior: "Edymion Mwcie" (via SoundCloud)

Thomas Brinkmann doesn’t want you to know what he thinks. On his maddening and delightful 11-track opus What You Hear (Is What You Hear), the German producer sets up distinct looping rhythmic systems and lets them run their course. Sometimes, they are slow and soft, suggesting the stillness of ambient hums. Other times, they are vivid and quick, indicative of the sweaty mess of a late-night dance floor or the oscillations of industrial-sized exhaust fans in factories. And on the short, caustic finale, the system recalls a harsh noise band, guitars howling in an infinite din of feedback. Each piece is intended as a Rorschach Test of sorts, meant to let the audience decide the source, direction and intent of the musician behind the machines. Brinkmann is in absolute control of this elaborate, immersive material. But he has no sovereignty over his, or your, response. —GC

Thomas Brinkmann: "Agent Orange" (via SoundCloud)

That I Abused Animal is Heather Leigh’s first proper studio album seems irrelevant—she’s made many great solo records without needing a proper studio, and her music is less about polish than discovery. Yet the increased sonic clarity of I Abused Animal is important, because it matches the bracing clarity in Leigh’s laser-focused songs. Every aspect of her playing feels spiritually possessed, intently zoomed in on a single emotional target that Leigh hits repeatedly, backing her dexterous vocals with simple instrumental figures. The way her patient songs sound like both far-reaching experiments and devout hymns has little parallel; the only other work in this range would be the reverent meditations of Richard Youngs. But Leigh’s music has a power all its own. —MM

Heather Leigh: "Fairfield Fantasy" (via SoundCloud)

For the first two installments of her audacious Coin Coin series, the saxophonist and singer Matana Roberts commanded impressive bands. As Roberts explored her ancestry as an African-American woman, the ensembles she’d built swung between bedlam and sophistication, jazz, and chamber music, old spirituals and new adaptations. But for river run thee, the third chapter, she decided to go it alone in the studio after a long, solitary field-recording trip through the South. She played over a tape of her recordings and then did it again and again, eventually arriving at a seamless collision of both her and the nation’s past and present. Aging American standards and individual recollections funnel into an abstract yet vividly personal exploration of time and place. These recordings position Roberts as a modern answer to Laurie Anderson, able to ask the big questions through perplexing music and guarantee that there are no easy answers. —GC

Matana Roberts: "always say your name / nema nema nema" (via SoundCloud)

Sonnet is not a huge shift from the music Thomas Meluch has previously made under the name Benoît Pioulard—nor should it be, as his discography has been consistently stellar. But there’s a sense of purpose to the 14 tracks on Sonnet that pushes Meluch’s sound into a new stratosphere. Every moment feels focused, as if each segment of drifting ambience is blown by one unifying wind. You might have heard these sounds before, but you’ve never heard them put together this way—and given how ephemeral and transitory they feel, you might never hear them this way again, either. —MM

Benoît Pioulard: "So Etched in Memory" (via SoundCloud)

For the last decade, Byron Westbrook has built careful, site-specific sound installations with explanatory but suggestive titles—"Two Rooms on a Closed Circuit", "Landscape Conversation", "Room Within a Room". He’s also recorded and performed as Corridors. You can sense the same fascination with space and architectural systems on Precipice, Westbrook’s first work under his own name and a short but beguiling listen. These four pieces play alternately like maps of intricate interiors or scores for travelogues. The stunning 16-minute opener "Spectral Ascension" builds from the patter of a small beat into Terry Riley-like arpeggios, coming down eventually into a calming, restive drone, as if soundtracking a journey into enlightenment—and the slow drift back into reality. —GC

Byron Westbrook: "Spectral Ascension (Edit)" (via SoundCloud)

Experimental music tends to deal with process more than place, but Duane Pitre’s Bayou Electric perfectly points to the area from which its title and sounds comes. The New Orleans composer, sound artist and guitarist captured field recordings on a stretch of Louisiana land his family has owned for nearly a century, and then built a tidal drone around it. The result is transfixing, so that a symphony of cicadas sings in unison through an electronic glow that suggests a setting sun or oppressive Deep South humidity. It is an environmental album, not only in the sense that it suggests its surroundings but also in the way you can sit still and be content with it, listening intently for 48 minutes while the scene around you slowly shifts. —GC

Duane Pitre: "Bayou Electric (Excerpt)" (via SoundCloud)

As Joshua Abrams explained to us earlier this year, Magnetoception was the result of a challenge he took upon himself: to see what his ensemble Natural Information Society could do with longer, more gradually developing songs. The concept may seem like overkill—Abrams already made very patient music—but in execution it turned out to be glorious. Stretching out his elemental loops, Abrams discovers new levels of mood and tone; his pieces seem to escape time completely. His comrades lock directly into that meditative mindset, wrapping wiry guitar, rotating percussion, and other accenting elements around the hypnotic cycles of Abrams’ Moroccan lute known as the guimbri. The result is a perfection of Abrams’ sound, a magnification of his bandmates’ talents, and an inflation of his ideas into a realm beyond musical space-time. That may sound lofty, but Magenetoception deserves all the superlatives it inspires. —MM

Joshua Abrams: "Translucent"

As American psychedelic music goes, Tom Carter is a modern titan. From his pensive folk manipulations with Charalambides to his noise sprees with Mudsuckers, and from his jams with Bardo Pond and Badgerlore to his own albums of individual ascendance, Carter has long shown the transcendence of exploration, of taking a familiar form farther than one assumed possible. Given his résumé, then, it’s surprising that Carter has never clocked into a studio by himself and clocked out with a proper solo guitar album.

He must have been waiting to make a masterpiece: Long Time Underground, his seven-song cycle through riffs that rise into unexpected shapes and take on unforeseen timbres, is a remarkable display of just how far six strings can go with no overdubs and one take. "Carvedilol Cowboy" starts as a somber instrumental strummer but ends as an acid-wrenched stunner. "Into the Out" begins as a gentle purr of amplifier but, 13 minutes later, becomes a wall of noise, melody flickering inside like a candle flame trapped in a gale. Carter alternately sounds like he’s playing bagpipe, a synthesizer, a full rock band or an army of guitars. But when Long Time Underground ends with the beautiful "Colors for N", you realize again that it is only the sound of one of the most thoughtful, imaginative instrumentalists working today, harnessed at last in proper, perfect fashion. —GC

Tom Carter: "Entreaertne" (via SoundCloud)