His formerly hermetic tendencies now firmly a thing of the past, Richard D. James continues his hot streak, dusting off two woozy, low-slung tracks from his famous SoundCloud dump and assembling an entire EP around them. Building the release around the sounds of the Cheetah MS800—described by one enthusiast as “one of the most unfathomable instruments ever made”—James makes the most of the obscure digital synthesizer’s mutable wavetable technology, slowing the tempo, stripping down the beats, and zeroing in on gelatinous timbres. The slow tempos and straight-ahead tones make for what, at first, seems like one of his most uncomplicated releases in ages—but direct your attention just right, and, as with a “Magic Eye” image, a world of detail comes snapping into focus.

Autechre’s live shows, performed in near-total darkness, can be overwhelming experiences. And in recent years, so are the duo’s releases: Their ongoing series of live recordings is nine installments deep and growing, while this digital-only album sprawls across five virtual “discs” and more than four hours. Even if you don’t pony up the cash for the 24-bit lossless version and content yourself with a damn-near Paleolithic 320 kbps, Sean Booth and Rob Brown’s algorithmic free-for-alls have never sounded more vivid, flitting between cellophane crinkle and ice-crystal fractals, and flecked with stray bits of hip-hop and Stockhausen. If you own a quality pair of headphones or speakers, however, the hi-fi version really is the way to go: Staring down the tunnel of a track like “TBM2” or the gorgeous “pendulu hv moda,” the level of detail is so granular, it can practically inspire vertigo. And even if “cozy” isn't quite the right word for it, there is something soothing about Autechre’s music once you let their silvery space-blanket textures envelop you.

Autechre: “c16 deep tread” [Preview] (via SoundCloud)

Over the past few years, a number of stragglers—My Bloody Valentine, Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada, Daft Punk—have finally come in from the cold. The Avalanches, on the other hand, had promised their imminent return so many times that there was little reason they’d ever abandon surfing, or dingo hunting, or whatever antipodean pleasure that was standing between them and their sophomore album. By June, though, that last sample-clearance form must have finally gotten faxed back to them, paving the way for the giddy “Frankie Sinatra” and, after 16 long years, Wildflower. Just like their debut, it's a densely packed collage of disco, soul, and folk that glistens like dewdrops on dandelion tufts; this time, though, Danny Brown, Biz Markie, and members of Mercury Rev, Toro Y Moi, Silver Jews, Royal Trux, and Camp Lo are on hand to inject their soft-focus fantasia with an added element of humanity.

The Avalanches: “Colours” (via SoundCloud)

For an album whose title translates as “Farewell to the Dancefloor,” Marie Davidson’s Cititrax debut pulls no punches: Pairing chilly coldwave synths and even chillier spoken-word vocals with tough drum programming, the Montreal electronic musician offers nine tracks aimed squarely at the small hours in cavernous warehouses. There’s nothing conventional about the way she uses her machines, though. On “Inferno” and “Denial,” she sculpts pummeling repetition into wide, psychedelic arcs, and on bare-bones cuts like “Good Times,” she strips acid house down to its leering, Cheshire Cat grin. “You call me naïve?” she asks, unapologetic, in another spring-loaded track. “I’ll tell you what: I’m naïve to the bone.”

Marie Davidson : “Naive to the Bone” (via SoundCloud)

Where their 2015 album Studies I-XVII for Samplers and Percussion strung together 17 short, minimalist sketches for marimba, xylophone, and other small, percussive sounds, Beatrice Dillon and Rupert Clervaux’s Two Changes takes the opposite tack, with two long, evolving explorations of shifting rhythms and garbled frequencies. “The Same River Twice” offers nearly 19 minutes of rippling techno pulses overlaid with free-jazz trumpet, scraped piano strings, and birdsong, while “A Different River Once” uses vibraphone improv and modular squiggles to suggest dynamic phenomena in microscopic detail, like a molecular view of snowmelt.

Beatrice Dillon & Rupert Clervaux: “The Same River Twice” (via SoundCloud)

On his first album for Teklife, DJ Earl proposes a vision of footwork that's both bumblebee nimble and heavy as a Mack truck. What makes Open Your Eyes so thrilling isn’t just the 808 programming, though his devilishly syncopated rhythms snap with the precision of very expensive robotics; it's the richly colored, keenly textured synths and samples that fill every corner of this deliriously detailed album. In “Rachett,” we get silvery Rhodes and petulant mosquitos; “Let’s Work” gives us disco strings and hyperreal soprano sax. Some of that ultra-vivid sheen probably comes down to Oneohtrix Point Never, who contributes to three tracks. But the rough-and-ready sonics of two tunes featuring DJ Manny and DJ Taye are no less gripping—particularly “Fukk It Up,” which sounds like a turntablist going to town on dub techno pioneers Basic Channel.

DJ Earl: "Let's Work" [ft. MoonDoctoR and Oneohtrix Point Never] (via SoundCloud)

Described by Jaar as a companion piece to Pomegranates and Nymphs, Sirens bundles together all of the Chilean-American musician's interests and talents—slinky house beats, atmospheric collage, and midnight-hued pop—into an expansive, shape-shifting beast. Moving from ambient to song-form and back again, Jaar channels Bauhaus side project Tones on Tail into elegiac jazz piano, filters ’50s rock’n’roll into Gregorian chant, and layers squealing bass clarinets over overdriven drums. Collapsing the personal into the world-historical, he offers a dark, deeply nuanced record that feels especially apt for the present moment. “Chapter one: We fucked up,” he sings on the closing “History Lesson,” counting his way up through the mounting catastrophes, picking his way through the ethical wreckage. The final lesson—“Chapter six: We’re done”—is a wearily familiar one these days.

Nicolas Jaar: “Fight” [Preview] (via SoundCloud)

From the police scanner on the trap track that opens the album to the title “Sawgrass Expressway”—a reference to Broward County’s State Road 869—Jubilee’s debut album couldn’t get much more Floridian if it featured an octopus floating in a parking garage. The Miami-raised, NYC-based producer goes in hard on the whipcrack syncopations of classic Miami bass, but she doesn't stop there. “Wine Up,” featuring the Bronx singer Hoodcelebrityy, is a tough, bass-heavy dancehall tune in which the dissonance between vocals and backing track throws off sparks, while “Beach Ball” projects contemporary bass music through the lens of classic Detroit techno.

Jubilee: “Wine Up” [ft. Hoodcelebrityy] (via SoundCloud)

Kornél Kovács is a cofounder, with Axel Boman and Petter Nordkvist, of Stockholm’s Studio Barnhus label. On his debut album, he smoothes the imprint’s sometimes oddball, sometimes impish style of dance music into a relatively streamlined set of crisp, percussive house tracks. “Relatively” being the keyword here: For all the bittersweet detachment of cuts like “BB” and “Szív Utca,” he can’t quite resist giving free rein to more manic moods on “Gex,” a disco-fueled tune that's primed for conga lines.

Kornél Kovács: "BB" (via SoundCloud)

For an album called Body Wash, Ringgo Ancheta’s slinky second album for Stones Throw feels a lot more like a full-mind rubdown. Taking a page from Dâm-Funk’s SoCal electro-funk squelch—LinnDrum thwacks, legato synth leads—he leans hard on the harmonies, tipping the balance toward the cosmic jazz accents of Flying Lotus and Kendrick Lamar. The blissed-out vocals, meanwhile, amount to subliminal self-actualization messages designed to steer the listener “from where ya at to where ya going” as frictionlessly as possible. Sun-baked, wind-kissed, and West Coast to the extreme, it’s new age for a new era.

Mndsgn: “Use Ya Mnd (Twentyfourseven)” (via SoundCloud)

Kenny Dixon, Jr.’s installment for the German label !K7’s long-running DJ-Kicks series—amazingly, the Detroit veteran’s first official mix CD—mostly steers clear of the house and techno you might expect from him. Instead, he lavishes his attentions on rainy-day soul, shuffling boom-bap, and curveballs like Swedish folkie José González and British electro-poet Anne Clark. Only Detroit could forge a sensibility like this, and nobody presents it more compellingly—or more soulfully—than Moodymann.

Joe Williams’ debut under his Motion Graphics alias floats along at an easygoing glide, but its ideas zip to and fro at hyperspeed velocities. Breathy choirs and sounds of splashing water traverse the real-or-Memorex divide, while trap rhythms cut crosswise against tango nuevo’s bandoneons and marimba patterns inspired by classical minimalism. Over it all, in a cool, calm voice, Williams sings matter-of-fact odes to the way we live now: “Links accelerate/Rendering a time zone/Moving in a mobile home.”

Motion Graphics: “Houzzfunction” (via SoundCloud)

As much as anyone, Larry Heard invented deep house. Now with the revival of the style pushing dangerously close to self-parody, Heard proves how much life there is left in the idea. On his first record in a decade under his most famous alias, Heard breaks new ground yet again. The elements have barely changed—here we have the usual silken pads, brooding chords, and pitter-pat drum programming—but the sound is unmistakable from any of his previous releases, or, indeed, anything else out there. That’s particularly true on the gurgling “Outer Acid,” a barely-there 303 jam that a strong gust of wind could scatter to the four corners, and “Qwazars,” an ambient-techno epic that transmits more genuine awe for the mysteries of the universe than we’ve seen since Carl Sagan departed the planet for points unknown.

Mr. Fingers: "Qwazars" (via SoundCloud)

Seven years after Nite Jewel and Dâm-Funk’s shared appreciation for vintage LinnDrums yielded “Am I Gonna Make It,” a proudly throwback R&B slow jam, Nite-Funk finally got around to making the duo official. They still make no secret of their influences: The anxious “Let Me Be Me” sets freestyle bass synth to the ringing guitars of the early MTV era; “Don’t Play Games” drops a phrase from Prince and Sheila E.’s “A Love Bizarre” into a liquid pool of synth and voice and lets it swirl like purple food coloring. But “U Can Make Me” turns out to be a heartfelt tribute to Everything But the Girl’s soft melodies and sleek house beats—a detour in the duo's nocturnal roadmap that few fans could have seen coming.

Nite-Funk: “Let Me Be Me” (via SoundCloud)

In pop music, hip-hop, and R&B, collaboration is the favored mode these days. That goes for electronic music, too, despite (or maybe because of) the fact that pushing around pixels on a screen is the most solitary of activities. Like many of his peers in contemporary bass music, Brooklyn’s James Hinton, better known as the Range, is deeply indebted to the guest singers whose voices provide the warm, beating hearts for his wistful electronic productions. But his method—sampling amateur and otherwise anonymous strivers he discovers deep down in the nether regions of YouTube, where view-counts might top out in the double digits—is unique to his own practice. The result is a kind of music that feels deeply personal and universal all at once.

The Range: "Florida" (via SoundCloud)

Detroit’s Omar S keeps up a gruff façade; hence tracks like the pummeling acid grind, “Bitch… I’ll Buy Another One!!!,” whose title possibly reflects the damage inflicted upon his TB-303 while making it. But he’s secretly a softy at heart. Behind the ’80s bounce of “Take Ya Pick, Nik!!!!!” bubbles a keening synthesizer melody; “Seen Was Set (Norm Talley Mix - BIG Strick Vocal)” is a loving disco tribute to 1988, “the true Detroit party scene, where there wasn’t no wallflowers holdin’ the wall down.” There’s no shortage of moody, machine-driven house cuts like “Time Mo 1 (Norm Talley Mix).” And the closing “Heard’ Chew Single,” tossed between rolling parade snares and a pensive piano melody, might be the most lovelorn track he’s ever done.

Lilting African rhythms tangle with new wave synths and vocoders in this endlessly delightful album from Shy Layers, an Atlanta-based multimedia artist. Cherry-picking the best tracks from two Bandcamp-only EPs, his debut album, on Hamburg’s fledgling Growing Bin label, is the equivalent of a tropical vacation on wax—a yacht-pop cruise where Kraftwerk, Arthur Russell, Paul Simon’s Graceland, and Cat Stevens’ “Was Dog a Doughnut?” are in heavy rotation.

Shy Layers: "SEG" (via SoundCloud)

On their debut album together, White Material’s Galcher Lustwerk and Alvin Aronson pay tribute to the ’90s outlet of labels like Rephlex and Apollo, using analog (or at least analog-inspired) gear to turn out a diverse, dreamy array of ambient house and techno. They stretch the same raw material into an impressive range of shapes, from the juke-tempo “Speed City” to a pair of tracks, “Session” and “Bent Light,” that reference the rippling machine-soul sound that ruled the Midwestern underground 20 years ago. And few contemporary musicians have come closer to replicating the melancholy vibe of Autechre’s Amber than Studio OST do here with the closing “Whitesands.” File under IDM, but this time, let that stand for “intuitive dance music.”

Studio OST: “Session” (via SoundCloud)

While the world waited for a follow-up to DJ Koze’s Amygdala, the German electronic musician took 2016 to prove why his Pampa Records is one of the most exciting and emotionally unguarded labels currently circulating in house music's outer orbits. While Isolée, Lawrence, Roman Flügel, and Axel Boman all contribute sparkling after-hours anthems in a sentimental mood, Jamie xx and Koze team up on a breathless ode to road-tripping with the top down, and Ada adds to her catalog of unorthodox covers with a graceful flip of Cassie’s “Me & U.” Matthew Herbert’s remix of Lianne La Havas’ “Lost & Found,” meanwhile, is the most affecting song from the UK producer since Koze’s own “It’s Only” remix from a few years back.

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

Inspired loosely by the mating rituals of birds of paradise, and how they mirror the behavior of clubbers, Leon Vynehall’s Rojus is a carefully calibrated display of iridescent color and graceful movement. The album’s swinging, rattling grooves bear the influence of classic deep house producers like Mood II Swing and Pépé Bradock, and rich tone colors swirl together sampled keys, disco strings, easy listening choirs, and even actual jungle birds. It’s a humid, late-night trip to the middle of the rain forest.

Leon Vynehall: "Beau Sovereign" (via SoundCloud)

The music the Berlin duo Amnesia Scanner makes doesn't seem to exist in any knowable zone of time or space. It might be dance music, but it also just be might be a new way of writing a science fiction horror story. The sounds they utilize can feel both primeval and dystopian: existing somewhere between Lotic’s free-flowing club music and Holly Herndon’s postmodern experiments. Their debut release, a short EP of six tracks, is a riotous collection of experimental electronic music. The songs here are all small Frankenstein's monsters of sound art, stitched together with unlikely samples, biological bits and parts, terrifying voices, and gurgling noise. And against your expectations, what these two have created will make you move.

The 14 sections of Arca’s unclassifiable release Entrañas exist as a single 25-minute block of jagged, queasy, and unexpected electronic sound. You’d be hard pressed to know when one section begins or ends, or discern the moments when collaborators Mica Levi, Total Freedom, and Massacooramann enter the scene. It is a rigorous piece of music that bears many of the fluid and rippling hallmarks of Arca’s compositional style, but with a voice even more abject, harsh, and slippery. Here, he takes a turn for the truly nightmarish and gothic, sampling everything from the Cocteau Twins to a Charlotte Gainsbourg monologue. Entrañas in Spanish means “bowels” or “entrails,” a winking nod to Ghersi’s continual project of shattering and transforming the normative sense of disgust into a new kind of pleasure.

Arca: Entrañas (via SoundCloud)

Romance isn’t what first comes to mind when you think of noise music. Jefre Cantu-Ledesma is here to change that. He has described his new five-track cassette release, In Summer, as a “catalogue of photographs,” a strange description for drone. His sweltering and harsh compositions are supposed to be like little snapshots that evoke reminiscence and longing. The listening experience he provides with In Summer often feels extremely tactile and the mood is lush and humid and dreamy. And he does something that seems so unlikely with tape loops and crunching noises, he writes amazing love songs that just happen to make your ears ring.

Jefre Cantu-Ledesma: “Love's Refrain” (via SoundCloud)

Over just two albums, Elysia Crampton has offered a body of work that burrows deeply into American history, sexuality, and community. WithDemon City she has invited a host of collaborators to write what she calls an “epic poem” that looks at 18th century revolutionary Bartolina Sisa and “transformative justice” through music. She has fine-tuned her abilities as a supremely talented electronic collagist: mixing the sonic vernaculars of huayño and cumbia into  a dizzying electronic geography that samples the sounds found in clubs around the world. With this album, Crampton cements her place as one of the foremost minds in electronic music, and in the years to come we’ll still be figuring out what messages she left behind.

Elysia Crampton / Rabit: "The Demon City" (via SoundCloud)

Just a few years ago Fred Warmsley was a Soundcloud producer who worked under the name Lee Bannon. He collaborated with Joey Bad$$ and the Alchemist, making nostalgic hip-hop beats. Then he abandoned all that to make jungle and drum‘n’bass. Now he’s abandoned the name Lee Bannon all together, and along with it the easy logic of dance music to make eerie ambient pieces. His debut full length as Dedekind Cut, $ucessor, illustrates the circuitous journey Warmsley took to figure out what he might be best at doing: making  soundscapes of tape hiss, pained voices, and pointillist synths that are strikingly urgent. His new brand of ambient is in no way music for airports. It doesn’t exist in the background to activate comfortable thinking, but rather combats anxiety by tackling it with tempestuous noise.

Dedekind Cut: “ℐntegra” (via SoundCloud)

Ostensibly, Brian Eno’s The Ship is about the Titanic. In this suite of 48 minutes of palatial ambient, including a cover of the Velvet Underground’s “I’m Set Free,” Eno attempts to tell the tale of “the apex of human technical power” thwarted by the random force of nature. Unlike, say, James Cameron, another great bard of this historical disaster, Eno has no desire to dwell in drama, but is more interested in the creation of startling sensations. At points you might feel like you’re floating in the middle of the ocean, or washing up on shore, or in the middle of a maelstrom.

Takahide Higuchi started making footwork because he thought the feeling it generated was something akin to punk or dub, the creation of its blistering beats was “about an expression, a way of approaching sound that transcends multiple genres.” The special form of footwork he makes transforms the quick pace of the genre into something that mimics the frenetic action of a human body. He deploys belching horns, bright drums, and distended samples that seem to come straight from the churning  stomach of a massive whale.

Foodman: “Mid Summer Night feat. Diskomargaux” (Buy on Bandcamp)

On the back cover of Schaum, Jan Jelinek writes that his collaboration with the Japanese vibraphonist Masayoshi Fujita is in some part informed by an obsession with “the tropics.” This obsession, he continues, is centered around a “specific quality of landscape” that is defined by a “deliriously extravagant unstructuredness.” The tropics to these two might be best be understood as an undefinable thicket shrouded in mist, which is an accurate way to describe how they wend together their specialties of lulling loops and vibraphone exploration. There is a powerfully organic quality to Schaum: the sounds here are wet, diffuse, and filled with samples of chirps and quacks. In effect, it is transportive, and the album becomes a small experiential filter, suddenly changing the space you inhabit into the riverbed of a sumptuous rainforest.

Masayoshi Fujita & Jan Jelinek: “Botuto” (via SoundCloud)

If artists who experiment with the modalities of noise are sculptors—chiseling sine waves to do their bidding—then Tim Hecker is a land artist, bending his surroundings into massive pieces of art. Love Streams, the latest in his fruitful career, finds Hecker working with Jóhann Jóhannsson and an Icelandic chorus to make some of his most textured musical pieces. The songs on Love Streams reimagine the sensorial possibilities of things as basic as voice and noise. His work makes these normalities feel like natural wonders well worthy of inspiring reverie.

Tim Hecker: “Castrati Stack” [Preview] (via SoundCloud)

There is a moment during some club nights, where dry ice fog drapes every corner, the bodies that surround you seem like apparitions, and time moves slower. Brian Leeds (aka Huerco S.) has logged enough hours in clubs around the world to watch this ghostly moment slowly take hold over a crowd. He abandons the strictures of techno and house music’s grid in For Those of You Who Have Never (and Also Those Who Have), for a form of ambient music that can help imagine what it must be like to have a seance on the dancefloor. Huerco’s ambient work is spectral, haunted, and shimmering with moments of romantic bliss. There is no hard beat, percussion, or sense of total rhythm, here, and rather his music exists like a gust of warm wind or a plume of smoke—seemingly ever present and wonderfully ephemeral.

Huerco S: “Promises of Fertility” (via SoundCloud)

More than an album of music, Blood Bitch is what Jenny Hval calls an “investigation of blood,” a celebration and analysis of menstruation, “a poetic diary of modern transience and transcendence,” a cornucopia of sly philosophical musing, and a funhouse romp through a vampire story. She is one of the smartest and funniest musicians currently working, and Blood Bitch is a testament to Hval’s skill as a storyteller and thinker. Her stories are accompanied by breathtaking, atmospheric sound that extract the grandeur of Norwegian black metal, liturgical, and ambient music. Here she reinforces her genius yet again, showing that blood is what we all share and what we should worship.

Jenny Hval: “Conceptual Romance” (via SoundCloud)

At the release party for Ultimate Care II,M.C. Schmidt warned the crowd, "this is genuinely an experiment. It’s experimental fucking music, so we’re going to play a washing machine.” For almost an hour, they did just that, by processing its sloshing sounds through arrays of microphones and samplers, and literally drumming all over the machine’s metal body. Ultimate Care II documents their experiments with their washing machine, and the album extracts a special discombobulating joy from the banal domestic object. It shows thatthe elder statesmen of experimental music are not done thinking outside of the box.

Matmos: "Ultimate Care II Excerpt Eight" (via SoundCloud)

The classically trained composer Anna Meredith dove into the world of electronic production and slightly unhinged dance music because she “wanted more volume” than concert halls could provide. Her 2012 debut single “Nautilus,” is a swaggering, imperial march, where instruments chase each other towards a endpoint of chaotic action. Four years later, that single opens her debut LP, Varmints, a set of 11 tracks that move with the same demonically possessed pace. Her music is entropic; these compositions are always on the brink of tearing themselves apart. Across these songs Meredith displays a knack for making inimitable compositions of immense scope and eccentric grace.

Anna Meredith: "Taken" (via SoundCloud)

Meredith Monk has said that philosopher Claude Lévi-Strauss’ concept of “bricolage,” the way cross-cultural myths use the same materials and tools of narrative to create new forms, was one way to model her practice. On her performance piece, On Behalf of Nature, she weaves through 19 grandly wrought exercises of glossolalia, her ensemble of singers and instrumentalists maneuver the human voice through all of nature’s sounds: infantile coos, bird calls, screams, laughs, hymns, and chants. The goal was to speak on behalf of nature, and she does so with panache, celebrating the lexicon of sounds our mortal vocal box can offer and mimic.

Camae Ayewa is a Philadelphia activist, organizer, and a seasoned veteran of one of America’s most fertile and diverse music scenes. Her most recent album as Moor Mother, Fetish Bones, is a focused, dense, and harrowing journey through the history of government mandated racism, housing discrimination, mass incarceration, and all manner of sickening facts that came from centuries of mistreatment folks of color have suffered in this country. Using archival sound, dissonant noise, and insanely intelligent poetry, Ayewa has offered something that throttles a listener with the weight of trauma and the love that can eke out of years of hardship.

Moor Mother: “Deadbeat Protest” (via Bandcamp)

The producer Mikael Seifu hails from the Ethiopian capital city Addis Ababa. After a period of study in the States and an exposure to the tropes of Western electronic music, he returned to Ethiopia with a newfound appreciation for the sounds that eked out of drinking halls and the azmaris musicians on the city streets. He is part of the “Ethiopiyawi Electronic” scene, and Zelalem is his love letter to the homegrown genre that’s emerged in his city. He combines electric pulses and wonky synthesizer work with indigenous instruments like the krar and masinko. On top of all this he gives a beautiful local color to his music by using recordings

Mikael Seifu: “How To Save A Life (Vector Of Eternity)” (via SoundCloud)

Josiah Wise’s debut EP, blisters, pairs his devastating, multivalent voice with the baroque soundscapes of co-producer Haxan Cloak. blisters in some respects is an incredibly chaotic record: a mercurial environment where ancient medieval sounds borrowed from harps, organs, and armadas of string instruments collide into luxuriant electronics. Yet it’s empathetic, emotionally complicated, and controlled by the exquisite power of Wise’s singing voice, which can evoke all the travails that can seem to exist in a single lifetime.

serpentwithfeet: "blisters" (via SoundCloud)

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith is a disciple at the altar of the Buchla Music Easel, a rare synthesizer that looks like an overgrown piece of alien flora. Smith has extracted an extraterrestrial magic from this bizarre object, and EARS, her latest dispatch from the Buchla’s musical universe is a terrarium of hypnotic sounds that meld together influences ranging from ’70s new age, Laurie Spiegel, and Terry Riley. She adds her relaxing voice to a chorus of beautiful sounds and an army of woodwinds provided by Bitchin Bajas member Rob Frye, make for a transcendental experience.

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith: "Existence in the Unfurling" (via SoundCloud)

In the coastal town of Bolinas, California, Suzanne Ciani met Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith at a dinner party, and both musicians are grand masters of the arcane arts of Don Buchla’s synthesizers. After their chance meeting, Ciani invited Smith to be her studio assistant, and their collaborative effort for RVNG Intl., Sunergy is akin to a blissful Matisse-esque landscape painting that crystallizes the Pacific cliffside view from Ciani’s home. Over three pieces, their dialogue is glittering and oceanic: a beautiful tapestry of white noise, drone, and electric magic.

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith/Suzanne Ciani : “Closed Circuit” (via SoundCloud)

Rahel Ali started composing Serpent Music after a stint in Leipzig, looking for an outlet to write about “relationships and stuff.” The album is Ali’s interpretation of soul music, as informed by Throbbing Gristle as Otis Redding. He utilizes a sleepy falsetto, opiated guitars, jagged percussion, and a variety of field recordings that range from solemn choruses to the sound of lapping water. Serpent Music is an astoundingly sensitive portrait of Ali’s emotional range as a producer who can generate a kaleidoscope of moods at will.

Yves Tumor: “Role in Creation” (via SoundCloud)

Lil Peep is not the boy you take home to meet your mother. He may look like a scuzzed-up Justin Bieber but, with his copious face and neck tattoos (including one of Lisa Simpson scorched into his Adam’s apple) and a penchant for lyrics about cocaine and suicide, he makes Justin Bieber look like a picture of pure innocence. The 20-year-old Long Island native is a devotee of both trap wildman Waka Flocka Flame and emo heroes My Chemical Romance, and he’s racked up millions of SoundCloud plays as an unholy combination of the two.

His best song so far, “Kiss,” is a power ballad at its core—but you’ve never heard a power ballad quite like this. Peep sounds like a zombie version of the late Alice in Chains singer Layne Staley as he explores newfound vulnerabilities (“Nobody knows the me that you do”), takes solace in his outsider status (“I’m a freak/That’s why nobody’s friends with me”), and offers some semi-sweet nothings (“I think of you on blow”). A woozy mix of trap hits, tinny guitar strums, and sleigh bells(!) set an ominous tone, but just then, as the song seems destined to fade out, Peep’s voice rings out from the bleakness, begging for one more chance. Give it to him. –Ryan Dombal

Lil Peep: “Kiss” (via SoundCloud)

The opening track toSturgill Simpson’s ambitiousthird LP begins grandly, as Simpson intones, “Hello, my son, welcome to Earth” with the solemnity of a bible reading. He then establishes the record’s themes of fatherhood, love, and selflessness in the beginning of this lovely ballad. But it’s at the 2:43 mark that “Welcome to Earth (Pollywog)” astonishes by breaking out into a wholehearted, exciting honky-tonk jam. Simpson, meanwhile, shifts his tone and sings about the regret he feels, having to tour during the most precious moments of his newborn son’s life. Warmth emanates from Simpson’s greatest point of vulnerability: When lamenting missing his son, the entire thing explodes with love and joy. On an album of universal themes, “Welcome to Earth” is defining and contagious. –Matthew Strauss

Listen:Sturgill Simpson: “Welcome to Earth (Pollywog)”

“Poetry is my hardcore,” the artist Camae Ayewa, aka Moor Mother, told Pitchfork this summer. “Deadbeat Protest,” from her astounding debut album Fetish Bones, is both at once: an 83-second industrial-noise rap with the all-caps ferocity of Death Grips, but irreducible, more explicitly political, more necessary. “I'm in line at the soup kitchen,” she spits with a low, cooly unspooling monotony, as if threading lyrics to hold together a great tapestry of reality. “These pigs wanna blow my mind/These people wanna stop my grind.” The grating abrasion of “Deadbeat Protest” drones on, as Ayewa’s concrete-hard flow curlicues over it. She grunts and roars, shreds her voice, bends it like rubber. It’s a picture of American upheaval, and it seethes, all energy barreling into the future without permission. –Jenn Pelly

Listen:Moor Mother: “Deadbeat Protest”

You might expect a conservatory-trained composer to lack fluency when it comes to electronic music, but Olga Bell makes herself right at home on the dance floor with “Randomness.” Kinetic and catchy, it's among the most straightforwardly clubby tracks on her third album, Tempo, and demonstrates Bell’s ability to flow between dance, R&B, hip-hop, and experimental modes. In fact, you’d never guess that Bell hasn’t spent her entire career as an electronic producer, or that her last record was a Russian-language folk song cycle.

Bell may have set out to use overtly commercial (and even “almost kind of gross”) sounds, but the sheer exuberance of “Randomness” overrides her use of dance music’s most familiar hallmarks. The thumping beat and frosty synthesizer hook are about as true to convention as they come, but Bell brings a distinct spark of personality, her vocals landing with a slight sting. If you’ve never had the pleasure of mouthing the words, “You've got that shit eating grin when there’s nobody smilin’” while going full-tilt in a crush of moving bodies, here's your chance. –Saby Reyes-Kulkarni

Olga Bell: "Randomness" (via SoundCloud)

How is it that Kodak Black—a young Floridian rapper who sounds like a combination of a half-asleep Lil Boosie, a more sing-songy Lil Wayne, and Juvenile minus about two decades of life experience—is able to sound so wise? Part of it is that voice, which manages to croak and float; it doesn’t seem like anyone should be able to do both. The other part is his complete disinterest in being flashy.

“Vibin in This Bih” is just two vocabulary-obsessed rappers doing what they do best. Kodak is a vibrant, economical writer: “People rootin’ for the hustler, I think I’m on next/At your neck, I don’t get tired, I ain’t gon’ rest.” His verse is quietly hypnotic, each line its own story, and then Gucci comes in, palpably reveling in his newfound freedom. They’re a great pair, but Kodak carries the track. He may not be asking for our attention, but he’s already earned it. –Sam Hockley-Smith

Kodak Black: “Vibin in This Bih” [ft. Gucci Mane] (via SoundCloud)

Doubling as Kamaiyah Johnson’s mission statement and her come-up fiesta, “I’m On” is taut, direct, and throwback hazy. Producer Drew Banga bolsters the 24-year-old Oakland, California MC’s vocals with tambourines and splashy tropical keyboards, recalling late-’80s/early-’90s R&B minimalism. Kamaiyah slides effortlessly from rapping to singing and back, retracing bleak yesterdays and brighter tomorrows with a dispassionate, no-bullshit rasp. “Remember when I didn’t have shoestrings?” she asks. “Now I pull up, hop out, watch that coup swing/Big money, get money, we do things.” As she relates, her rise seems equally incredible and inevitable: Her hard pluck overcame the hardest of luck, steering her from going hungry to scoring features on YG and E-40 tracks. In “I’m On,” Kamaiyah seems unfazed by her burgeoning success, but it’s hard not to celebrate her. –Raymond Cummings

Kamaiyah: “I’m On” (via SoundCloud)

No song on Cate Le Bon’s Crab Day better exemplifies the album’s curious balance of sweetness and dissonance than “Wonderful,” a song whose seemingly chipper refrain—“Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful”—belies its anxious, caustic mood. Atonal guitar figures skitter like spiders across pumping barroom piano, marimba flourishes, and sour bursts of throaty saxophone skronk. The net effect suggests a fender-bender between the Slits and the Velvet Underground, with Raymond Scott as the lone eyewitness. As usual, “cryptic” barely begins to describe the Welsh singer-songwriter’s approach to narrative; if you’ve ever repeated a word to yourself until all meaning leached out of its suddenly alien contours, her verses here will have a certain uncanny familiarity. Ultimately, the song adds up to a kind of giddy riddle with an answer only Le Bon knows. But whatever she may mean by the declaration, “I wanna be a ten-pin ball,” knocking down the pieces and picking them up again proves endlessly fascinating. –Philip Sherburne

Listen:Cate Le Bon: “Wonderful”

In inner cities, the saying “when it rains, it pours” often correlates to gunshots. This is especially true in Danny Brown’s hometown. Violent crimes were down 13% in Detroit last year and still, the city still only finished behind St. Louis in murder rates. Brown’s “When It Rain” is a careful taxonomy of Detroit criminology that identifies the many types of gunmen in the so-called City of Boom, what drives them (poverty, mostly, but sometimes greed), and how locals, including Brown himself, try to escape from death’s grasp. His flow is skittering and his vocals bend out of shape into his signature squeal. The way he cuts perspectives together is jolting; he relates with both the shooters and the victims, the jailed and the free. Over a collage of percussive sound that rumbles with a thunderous boom, he is strikingly eloquent: “Dark clouds hanging all over our head/No sunshine and them showers be lead.” –Sheldon Pearce

Listen:Danny Brown: “When It Rain”

Sheer Mag’s “Can’t Stop Fighting” is another entry in their ironclad canon of classic, beefy rock’n’roll. Kyle Seely’s guitar sound is still enormous and catchy; Tina Halladay still comes through with a dominant growl. They make adrenaline-filled guitar music, which is good, because the narrative here starts out rough: The song opens with a scene from thefemicide in Ciudad Juárez. One minute, a woman is walking home after a late shift at the maquiladora. Eight days later, she’s still missing. “We can’t stop fighting, we can’t stop fighting,” sings Halladay. It’s a grisly narrative—one that likely has more in common with Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 than the Philly band’s day-to-day reality. By the end of the song, it’s a battle cry to fight palpable enemies—both the neighborhood assholes and the so-called “friends” who refuse to empathize. Sheer Mag are mad as hell, they’re not going to take it anymore, and they've got hooks. –Evan Minsker

Sheer Mag: "Can't Stop Fighting" (via SoundCloud)

Tellingly credited to 21 Savageand his producer Metro Boomin, the Atlanta rapper’s deliberate, chilling summertime EP Savage Mode worked a few notes (icy synths, ominous low-end, spoken-word delivery) into a fully crystallized aesthetic. “No Heart,” a song that could be summed up as Fredo Santana meets the xx, is the record’s highlight. 21 Savage’s autobiographical imagery could be dismissed as horrorcore but his delivery makes it work as he subtly alters his flow with each verse, signaling a different train of thought. In the end, the song becomes less about its shock value and more about how 21 Savage tells this story—it’s a treatise on the GBE-meets-Ka aesthetic, a wisp of a banger confident in both its content and how it presents its story. –Matthew Ramirez

21 Savage/Metro Boomin: “No Heart” (via SoundCloud)

Pinegrove’s 2015 compilation Everything So Far began with Evan Hall singing, “I resolve to make new friends/I like my old ones but I fucked up so I’ll start again.” It was boisterous and optimistic and rightfully so; making new friends in one’s twenties can be simply a matter of resolve. But it gets harder with every year into adulthood, and this past February, theBritish Journal of Psychology and Pinegrove’s “Old Friends” came to the same conclusion as to why that is: Intelligent people become too goal-oriented and less vulnerable or, as Hall puts it, “Too caught up in my own shit/That’s how every outcome’s such a comedown.”

“Old Friends” finds Hall in one of his solipsistic moods, making hyper-detailed observations of his surroundings yet feeling disconnected from the people closest to him. “I should call my parents when I think of them/Should tell my friends when I love them,” he sighs, the should making it unclear whether he’s had an epiphany or just another clever thought that will come and go like a joke about the Port Authority. Even as the economic and romantic anxieties of millennials continue to be exhaustively documented, “Old Friends” feels like a fresh take—maybe making new friends isn't as important as keeping the old ones. –Ian Cohen

Pinegrove: "Old Friends" (via SoundCloud)

Greta Kline, aka Frankie Cosmos, has a gift for songs that are demonstrably grounded in real life, with arrangements anyone could play, but which still seem like miniature epiphanies. Next Thing highlight “On the Lips” has all the trappings of quintessential indie-pop: keenly observational lyrics, sprightly guitar strums, and a wistful chorus about a kiss that never happens. But Kline packs so much into the track’s sub-two-minutes:musings about watching David Blaine, a curious lyrical aside that gave the title to Cosmos’s 2013 effort im sorry im hi lets go (where “On the Lips” originally appeared, in rougher form), and an existential question that never gets answered. It’s a song less about kissing than about believing, even at the risk of looking foolish. “I don’t want magic that looks real,” Blaine himself once said. “What I want are real things that feel like magic.” That’s an apt description of what Kline accomplishes here. –Marc Hogan

Frankie Cosmos: "On the Lips" (via SoundCloud)

This year, a photo of Rihanna made the rounds in which she’s wearing super pointy heels, a giant coral jacket that might as well be a sleeping bag, and a T-shirt that reads “YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE.” It’s unclear if she’s wearing pants. Seems like a safe bet that’s what she was wearing when she recorded “Needed Me.” Has Rihanna ever delivered a more apt lyric than, “Didn’t they tell you that I was a savage?/Fuck ya white horse and ya carriage”? “Needed Me” may be a steady 110 BPM, but it slinks along like she recorded it in a steam room. Producer DJ Mustard borrows from the UK house tradition of the disembodied voice, and all the cut-up vocals echo like ghosts of the men Rihanna swallowed whole. –Matthew Schnipper

Listen:Rihanna: “Needed Me”

If you follow Alicia Keys on Instagram, you already know she’s drawn to Nigerian pop acts like Wizkid and Davido, part of the ascendant Afrobeats sound. Part UK funky, part soca, part dancehall, part soda pop bubble, this Nigerian/Ghanaian hybrid became the sound of the year, so it made sense that Ms. Keys and producer Illangelo wove those vibrant tropical patterns into “In Common.” It’s a rare, welcome instance of Keys moving out of her musical comfort zone and riding the humid groove, and she took it all the way to the DNC stage. It would have been easy enough to pair that genre’s bubbling rhythm with a lyrical bauble, but Keys instead twists the love song trope of “opposites attract.” “If you could love somebody like me/You must be messed up too” simultaneously indicts and embraces the dysfunction, insecurity, and maddening laws of attraction that undergird modern love. –Andy Beta

Listen:Alicia Keys: “In Common”

Bat for Lashes’ The Bride is a concept album about a woman left stranded at the altar when her fiancé is killed in a car crash en route to their wedding. Overdramatic? Yes. Heavy-handed? Sure. But Natasha Khan has always excelled at sweeping up the listener in grand tides of feeling, and the widowed bride’s emotional rollercoaster ride proves to be an ideal vessel for her songs.

“Sunday Love” takes place after the bride has raced out of the church, jumped behind the wheel of her car, and sped away to embark on a grief-stricken solo honeymoon. The track’s nervous, pulsing rhythm mimics the paranoia of the lyrics (“I see her in every place I go,” “She's in my bedroom/Now I can't fight”), contrasting with Khan’s lilting vocals and harp melody to conjure a swirling descent into madness.The Bride ends with redemption through self-love, but no story earns its happy ending without a fight. “Sunday Love” is the bottom the bride must hit in order to begin her crawl upwards towards the light. –Amy Phillips

Listen:Bat for Lashes: “Sunday Love”

“The thing about getting older is that instead of deciding that you’ve figured it out, you get better at realizing you never will,” Angel Olsen told Pitchfork earlier this year. Olsen reaches a similar conclusion at the end of the ambling journey she takes on “Sister,” the Crazy Horse-flecked centerpiece of her third album, My Woman. “All my life I thought had changed,” she pleads again and again throughout the last half, before an eruption of a solo from guitarist Stewart Bronaugh. Though some may think Olsen is singing about her actual sibling, her inward reflection suggests that the sister is within, the parts of herself that she’s learned to love over time. Like many existential struggles, these are hard-earned realizations, not eureka moments—a fact that’s echoed by the song’s pacing and its video’s loose plotline. Few singer-songwriters could sustain an introspective slow-burn the way Olsen does here, but then again, few singer-songwriters have the lyrical skill and vocal range that she does, either. –Jillian Mapes

Angel Olsen: “Sister” (Buy on Bandcamp)

One of the most puzzling reactions to Donald Trump’s election within the music community has been, “Well, at least there’ll be some good punk rock in the next four years.” As if life in America up until this point hadn’t already been vitriolic fodder for anyone on the outskirts—as if punk had always been the realm of straight, white men, sequestered in suburbia, who apparently needed the threat of an orange boogeyman to bang out a record. In reality, this is merely the moment where the true 21st century punks—the black kids, the queer, the transgendered, the anarchists—are put to an even more arduous task than before. “Give Violence a Chance” by G.L.O.S.S. (which stands for “Girls Living Outside Society’s Shit”) may just serve as one of their anthems, a two-minute call-to-arms to cut the kumbaya and start bashing back. Spewed across a booming buzzsaw riff, frontwoman Sadie Switchblade screams with a rage so potent, you could slice through it with a rusty boxcutter. “When peace is just another word for death/It’s our turn to give violence a chance,” she yells, giving life to a scary realization the vulnerable can face when confronted with hate: You better get them before they get you. –Cameron Cook

G.L.O.S.S.: “Give Violence a Chance” (Buy on Bandcamp)

Huerco S.once described listening to ambient music as a means of coping with anxiety while traveling; he noted, too, that his own most recent LP, For Those of You Who Have Never (and Also ThoseWho Have), had a similar calming effect on him. “Promises of Fertility” is the most distilled example of this, a track that stretches and softens the atmospherics that colored in the grainy house music of his earlier work. It’s comprised of a glistening melody that wanders above tape hiss—vaguely reminiscent of hold music, but decelerated to the point that time seems to disintegrate. The track begins and ends in the middle of a note as if, for seven minutes, Huerco is tuning us into a radio frequency that will transmit this loop forever. It’s dreamy but neutral in its expression and, in turn, utterly narcotic. –Thea Ballard

Huerco S: “Promises of Fertility” (via SoundCloud)

For a little while last year, Ariana Grande seemed close to a Bieber/Britney-esque freefall. After the whole donut-licking scandal, the flop of intended comeback single “Focus,” and her breakup with Big Sean, the familiar narrative of child star-turned-sexpot-turned-trainwreck appeared to be playing itself out again. But the release of the mature, self-assured Dangerous Woman, and the various hits it spawned, ended up crushing haters’ doubts under the spike of Ariana's high-heeled go-go boot.

“Into You” has haunted pop radio for the past several months, as songs produced by Max Martin tend to do. A throbbing, slow-burning come-on, “Into You” captures the thrill of the moment just before an illicit kiss, when the will-they-or-won’t-they tension becomes almost unbearable. “A little less conversation and a little more touch my body,” she demands, channeling Elvis and Mariah Carey, the progenitor of Grande’s particular strain of vocal bombast. And now we know: Ariana Grande is not going away any time soon. –Amy Phillips

Listen:Ariana Grande: “Into You”

There’s a beautiful irony in Deakin’s “Golden Chords.” The album it comes from, Sleep Cycle, was born from a controversial Kickstarter project long delayed due to Josh Dibb’s creative doubts and “fatal perfectionism.” That delay upset many, but the final music was worth it—not despite the struggle, but because of it. “Golden Chords” is an honest meditation on uncertainty and self-esteem, an attempt to escape artistic paralysis by, as the Animal Collective co-founder sings, “shak[ing] these broken chords till they turn gold.”

Dibb gives himself this pep talk using soft acoustic guitar strums, subdued percussion loops, and a whispery falsetto. He opens the song so confused about how to combat his creative funk that every solution feels wrong. Yet small stabs at positivity build up until Dibb sounds nearly restored: “In time/You’ll revive what you thought dead … Stop believing your being’s beenshattered and distorted/’Cause, brother, you’re so full of love.” That he’s right makes “Golden Chords” a meta-victory: a song about how strife can lead to triumph that proves its own point. –Marc Masters

Deakin: "Golden Chords" (via Bandcamp)

PJ Harvey’s “The Wheel” is a song haunted by war and human rights atrocities, but it’s no dirge. Everything is handclaps, saxophone, and momentum leading to a call-and-response singalong chorus. “Watch them fade out,” she sings at the end, repeatedly, about the wall of “sun-bleached” photographs of the disappeared. Then, the song itself abruptly fades. Harvey has written about global conflicts before, but “The Wheel,” about the state of Kosovo, could well be her most vibrant attempt—a potent combination of rock’n’roll gusto and stone-faced reporting. –Evan Minsker

Listen:PJ Harvey: “The Wheel”

“What’s going on? Quasars.” The spacey sample is repeated a handful of times across this slowly evolving six-minute track by Larry Heard, aka Mr. Fingers. He’s engaging in a bit of mystery-building, one that has been central to dance music for decades: Make some common elements—a pulsing synthesizer, some hi-hats and a snare that have been shifted off-axis just so—feel stranger than they really are. Though he’s working with pretty simple stuff, that does not mean what Heard has done here is easy. The opening kick drum and pulse land so softly that “Qwazars” feels like a baby shampoo version of Heard’s rawer work under the Fingers alias 30 years ago. The ringing tones that dot the track are given their star moment in the final minutes. It takes a deft hand to recreate what the future sounded like in the mid ’80s; it takes an old hand to realize that’s what we still want the future to sound like now. –Andrew Gaerig

Mr. Fingers: "Qwazars" (via SoundCloud)

The lead song and title track on serpentwithfeet’s debut EP, “blisters” might have been spontaneously produced from the ether, so airy are its harp and strings and so weightless serpentwithfeet’s own falsetto. But it is also a song about suffering, from its title to its sorrowful subject matter, in which unrequited love stands in for a more existential kind of trauma, one connected to ideas about blackness and sexuality and articulated in the heartbreaking refrain, “Forgiveness has not forgiven it.”

serpentwithfeet is no stranger to contradictions—his forehead bears tattoos reading “SUICIDE” and “HEAVEN”—and the Haxan Cloak’s production on the song does an admirable job of living up to the singer’s multitudes. The funereal drumbeat’s handclaps sound like splashing water; a lonely clarinet traces a line of flight out of the song’s gridded repetitions. But even these sounds pale next to the vividness of the singer’s own richly imagistic lyrics. In just six carefully chosen words—“Concrete has hurried itself into blue”—serpentwithfeet gives us one of the year’s greatest opening lines, the kind that sinks its hooks into you and refuses to let go. –Philip Sherburne

serpentwithfeet: "blisters" (via SoundCloud)

Skepta’s “Man”lays out some friendly parameters for how not to ingratiate yourself to this Mercury Prize-winning grime icon: Don’t seek attention, don’t tell people you’re his cousin, and, most of all, don’t ask for a pic for the ’gram. Driven by an excellent Queens of the Stone Age sample and ominous, relentless bass, the frenetic track is one of the most concise singles on Konnichiwa.

This year has highlighted how audiences expect pop and rap artists to reinvent themselves regularly if they want to hold our attention. However, it’s equally rewarding to hear Skepta refine his voice as he stays loyal not just to his friends and family, but to the sound he’s helped build. Plus, “Man” sneaks in one of the best disses of 2016: “Dressed like I just come from P.E.,” he brags to an interloper. “You’re dressed like you just come from church.” –Thea Ballard

Skepta: “Man” (via SoundCloud)

The Brooklyn rapper Ka likes to keep things economical. His introspective music is self-released and nearly always self-produced. By those standards, “30 Keys” counts as a lavish indulgence: Roc Marciano provided the beat, and you can make out some drums. “In this trade, ain’t afraid to get splashed or busted,” he recalls, slipping the borders between past and present. “Even for small numbers, none are vastly trusted.” His frayed rasp frames crime as an existential act: “I don’t wanna do it, gotta do it.” Ka also directs his own videos, and this one cuts between shots of the MC in sparse rain and scenes from old blaxploitation movies, lingering on incidental details; the opening is somebody loading a DVD for half a minute. Extreme close-ups cut off the top half of Ka’s face. Like much of his work, “30 Keys” uses abstract language to yield bigger truths. –Chris Randle

Listen:Ka: “30 Keys”

“Pick Up the Phone” is nominally a Travis Scott song, but in nearly every way that matters, it belongs to Young Thug. That’s Thug leaning like grandma, comparing cheating to treason, paying his sisters’ tuition in crumpled fives and 10s. It’s Thug rapping “Mama told me don’t hate on the law/Because everybody got a job/Because everyone wanna be a star,” a tossed-off parable that doubles as a reflection of modern state violence. For him, “Pick Up the Phone” is a tour de force, a reminder that no matter how scattered or inscrutable his solo output becomes, he can cut through the din with a perfect piece of pop. By the time Quavo swoops in to coin the word “discriminize” and say, “I thought I was right/Then I had to man up/I was wrong,” it’s already a wrap. –Paul A. Thompson

Listen: Travis Scott & Young Thug: “Pick Up the Phone” [ft. Quavo]

The 1975’s “Somebody Else” describes someone caught between the emotional phases one passes through after a breakup, as if stuck between colors in a gradient. It touches on the kind of confused feelings people usually bury for fear of looking like an asshole—but the 1975 frontman Matty Healy isn’t afraid of looking like an asshole. “Somebody Else” embodies this post-breakup ambivalence in both its lyric and its sound—there’s a swerve to the opening synths that makes it seem like they’re evolving from one hue to another, a damp echo to the atmosphere that makes every instrument sound slightly hazy and drunk and too cool for itself. Unlike their previous singles, the band sound like something less defined and more introspective, a position from which they are able to give shape to something vanished. “I don’t want your body/But I hate to think about you with somebody else,” Healy sings, drums pulsing behind him like the vague, sourceless ache of a hangover. –Brad Nelson

Listen:The 1975: “Somebody Else”

Like a lot of rap pairings, this Schoolboy Q/Kanye West track is less a meeting of minds than a negotiation between agents. Nearly anybody can land nearly any feature for the right price, and at first Kanye almost seems to be mocking the transactional nature of guest verses here, filling an alarming number of bars with the word “OK”—you can almost imagine Schoolboy’s face sinking when he heard it for the first time. It’s a fake-out, though. Soon Kanye is feeding off the energy of his fellow hothead, firing off some of his most memorable zingers of the year (“Rich n*gga, still eatin’ catfish/That bitch ain’t really bad, that’s a catfish”). And in what could be an apology for all those “OKs,” he even throws in a wild, half-improvised walk-off verse where he brags about having Scottie Pippen at his wedding and comes this close to making a Ray J reference but stops short, just to fuck with people. Never let it be said that when you pay for a Kanye verse, you don’t get your money’s worth. –Evan Rytlewski

Listen:Schoolboy Q: “That Part” [ft. Kanye West]

There are two sides to Moses Sumney as we understand him now. The first is the solo live performer, a powerful presence that constructs sonic journeys onstage using only his voice, his hands, a guitar, and some loopers. The second is the recording artist, a more reclusive specter that has just begun to take shape in the world’s eye. After channeling Nina Simone’s pained timbre in the verses, Sumney slowly reveals “Lonely World” as an attempt to extend his insular artistry. It’s a sonic mission that recruits some of the most viciously capable contemporary musicians—Thundercat, Animals as Leaders’ Tosin Abasi, Son Lux drummer Ian Chang—to craft counterpoints and supporting textures for Sumney’s intricate harmony stacks. The result is a song that begins as a flickering flame, eventually fanning into a chaotic wildfire before it’s extinguished with a whisper. –Noah Yoo

Moses Sumney: “Lonely World” (via SoundCloud)

These are usually some of the most fun rap songs: When a newly famous artist returns to his neighborhood to flaunt his newfound stature for awed childhood friends and rub his success in the face of anybody who doubted it. For a victory lap, though, Isaiah Rashad’s trip back to his native Chattanooga, Tenn., is pretty bumpy. On “Smile,” the TDE rapper wakes in a fog of depression, gets in a seriously ugly spat with his baby mama, picks a losing argument about Lil Wayne’sTha Carter IV, and struggles to resist the bar of Xanax tucked in his back pocket. The beat is convincingly triumphant—a Southern-fried flip ofa savory Brazilian soul number—but when Rashad brags about kicking back and enjoying his worry-free life, the person he’s most trying to convince is himself. –Evan Rytlewski

Listen:Isaiah Rashad: “Smile”

This year brought to light the talents of Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, whose use of the Buchla Music Easel announced a new voice on the device. Her third album, EARS, was one of the most exhilarating experimental albums of the year, an ever-shifting landscape in which to lose yourself. And it all led to the majesty of the closing track, the 11-minute epic “Existence in the Unfurling.” Amid the fretting arpeggios of her Buchla, Smith’s digitally warped vocals emerged from the circuits, only to camouflage themselves anew amid the timbres of fluttering woodwinds and saxophones. As the piece expands past the three-minute mark, it transforms into a sonic odyssey, exploring a realm between minimal composition and transcendental electronics, providing in this wearying year a much-needed source of wonderment. –Andy Beta

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith: "Existence in the Unfurling" (via SoundCloud)

In the first verse of “Prima Donna,” the highlight from his hard, baleful EP of the same name, Vince Staples buys a new house and blows his brains out on the kitchen wall. Women stop by afterward to admire the splatter, thinking it’s modern art. That’s a Vince Staples joke. Ha ha.

Vince has never really been one for inclusive humor: He wants it to hurt when he elbows your ribs. The production by DJ Dahi hurts, too: Each downbeat sounds like a collapsing column Staples barely dodges. When he makes fun of himself, the pain is still there: As a newly minted star, he is going to “pull a Wavves on the Primavera Stage,” maybe the least glamorous self-destructive behavior a rapper could boast about. His airless squeak of a voice bounces around inside a hollowed-out beat, which nosedives and the end, his voice disappearing into a blender with an A$AP Rocky sample. When it's over, we’re left with ashes and ambivalence,as we are with every great Vince Staples song. –Jayson Greene

Vince Staples: “Prima Donna” [ft. A$AP Rocky] (via SoundCloud)

Nao’s particular variety of R&B has the efficiency and even the pneumatic qualities of good design, every instrument angled or curved so that it sounds assembled without any human intervention. The chorus of “Girlfriend” is like this: the guitar, synth, and Nao’s voice collapsing into a single harmonic cylinder. If it could be hung in an art gallery, it might look like a tube of neon. But within this precisely shaped environment, Nao primarily expresses anxiety, as if she’s reacting to a kind of airlessness around her. “Feels like pretty doesn’t know me/Only shows up when I’m lonely,” Nao sings, her voice generating internal harmonies like Prince, from whom the phrasing of the chorus is sort of borrowed, and from which the fractal design of her harmonies is certainly borrowed. The song’s construction is sensitive to this; whenever Nao’s vocal doubles or triples, the track itself seems to hiss with pleasure. –Brad Nelson

Nao: "Girlfriend" (via SoundCloud)

Rap crews and studio wizards have long known that a hit song comes when you capture the vibe of friends wildin’ out and crystallize their energy as sound. No song this year did that better than Young M.A’s self-released breakout hit “OOOUUU.” The title alone is a kind of litmus test: How you say it reveals your level of excitement and conviction. The Brooklyn rapper sing-slurs it, confident and drunk, boasting and charismatic, six letters that spelled arrival when “OOOUUU” made rounds on the street before rap royalty started jumping on remixes. M.A and her crew stunt in the video—another winning vibe that has landed more than 100 million party-crashing views. A young brown lesbian bending a male-dominated industry around her flow—this is a story we need to hear and repeat. But what’s the limit of a vibe? Explaining how she wasn’t going to explain a line in the song, M.A said: “All the dykes out there, they know exactly what I’m talking about. It ain’t for a guy to understand. If you don’t understand, you don’t gotta understand it.” –Jace Clayton

Listen:Young M.A: “OOOUUU”

During the intro to “The Greatest,” right as the ladies of KING ask, “Who wants a run with the number one?”, there is a short glissando on the keyboards. This sound, and all its variations, is one of the best things you can hear in an R&B song: a cue to get ready because it’s. About. To. Go. Down. The band immediately delivers on this promise, letting the synths kick fully before launching into three minutes of pure electro-soul bliss. The track’s harmonies and retro flourishes give it the feel of an ’80s R&B love song. And while that’s certainly part of the story, KING are more concerned with self-love: the belief that you can be the best at whatever you set your mind to. The single, off their debut We Are KING, was written in honor of Muhammad Ali, “the modern marvel man to stand behind.” A few months after we got “The Greatest,” we lost the Greatest—making what was already a terrific song work doubly as a tribute to Ali’s legacy of winning. –Vanessa Okoth-Obbo

KING: “The Greatest” (via SoundCloud)

“Adore” was born as a song about Savages frontwoman Jehnny Beth’s refusal to suppress her desires. “Is it human to adore life?” she asks over and over, pitying the repressed and their prudish norms. Nearly 12 months and untold tragedies later, her question now sounds like a radical act of resistance. She repeats it with a cool steadiness, as if jutting her jaw in the face of someone who’s determined to break her; when the chorus drives towards a crescendo worthy of Queen, Beth pulls back and lets her question hang as a lonely provocation rather than a proclamation of false triumph. Clinging to hope in a condemned landscape, she pulls off the grave romance of the great fado and cabaret singers—until she turns her question into a statement. “I adore life,” she intones, first sadly, but then as a rapturous invocation, her voice ascending through key changes and effervescing alongside Savages’ apocalyptic climax. As we enter 2017, hope is a privilege, but love and truth are still the path to the sublime. –Laura Snapes

Listen:Savages: “Adore”

When he first started Porches, the New York musician Aaron Maine played charming indie rock only really set apart by his insouciant tenor. On this year’s Pool, his first album on Domino, he almost completely ditched the guitars to make an off-kilter, laconic dance record, one in which his minimalist approach yielded to a new intimacy and lyrical sparsity. Like all good synthpop songs, “Be Apart” is immediately catchy, its keyboard line bouncing off like a poolside volleyball no one can be bothered to chase. “I wanna be apart/Of it all,”Maine croons, stuck in limbo between the exuberant discovery and blasé isolationism of youth. You can't get much more bedroom-pop than a song literally about not leaving home, and the anxious melancholy that seeps out of “Be Apart” is palpable. –Cameron Cook

Porches: “Be Apart” (Buy on Bandcamp)

A good Cass McCombs song is like a locked door: mysterious, resolute, matter-of-fact, inaccessible. Whether there’s anything behind it or not is irrelevant. “I’m not here to convince anyone to like what I do,” McCombs said about his most recent album, Mangy Love. “I’m really comfortable with people disliking it,” he went on hermetically, adding that he wasn’t sure he liked it himself.

“Sent a letter to my congressman, the Ku Klux Klan, from my pierced hands,” he sings on “Bum Bum Bum.” “They sent me back an Apple phone, a fine-hair comb and a bell tolled.” In one line, he plays the cynic, the satirist, the surrealist, the citizen of disgust—in other words, an authentic Californian, wise to bullshit but still up for the occasional smudge stick. The band grooves behind him like soft-rock scarred by an indigestible truth. Never the kind of guy for whom people start fan clubs, McCombs continues to find his purpose outside comfort, in the lost art of questioning everything. –Mike Powell

Cass McCombs: “Bum Bum Bum” (Buy on Bandcamp)

In an era when Drake songs about women feel colder than a Toronto winter—callous, hardened, without optimism—“Controlla” is a reminder that he can still turn on the charm when he wants to. Rather than stew in his usual contempt, Drake spends the duration of the VIEWS hit attempting to prove his worthiness, emphasizing his dedication (“I made plans with you, and I won’t let them fall through”) and willingness to take her needs seriously (“I do it how you say you want it”). And, because it’s Drake, being a little bit extra: “I think I’d die for you/Jodeci ‘Cry for You.’” The music slinks down the Jamaican coastline, painting in reds and oranges rather than his usual muted blues and grays. “My last girl would tear me apart, but she never wanna split a ting with me,” he sings, yearning for true collaboration. It low-key might be the romantic thing Drake has ever sung. –Renato Pagnani

Listen:Drake: “Controlla”

London’s Sampha has made his name so far as a guest vocalist, singing on tracks by SBTRKT, Drake, Jessie Ware, and more. His ability to blend in with such different surroundings speaks to his flexibility and expressive range; his great skill is to find the essential feeling at the heart of a song and amplify it. “Blood on Me,” a single from his forthcoming debut album (due early next year), is a song built around a single emotion: fear. As Sampha moves through the breathless set-up, we follow him as he flees nameless and faceless pursuers down dark alleyways. Somehow he manages to convey paranoia, anxiety, panic, and desperation while never losing sight of the melody, and when the chorus arrives and the tension explodes, it’s pure catharsis. –Mark Richardson

Listen:Sampha: “Blood on Me”

This was another boundary-bulging year for R&B, but every experiment needs a control group. Maxwell played that role beautifully with “1990x,” a song that sounds old but doesn’t feel it. The gleaming chamber-funk arrangement is zippered together with contemporary tightness, while the music is both hard and soft, as if made of the glares and glints of a revolving diamond. All this incandescence is faintly ironic: Though he now often sports perfectly tailored suits, in the ’90s Maxwell was part of a countercurrent to the shiny suit era, dousing R&B in oceanic cool, beatific consciousness, and earthy threads alongside the likes of Erykah Badu and D’Angelo. He’s always been a little out of time and off-trend, which is apt of his music’s fundamental appeal—an insistence on revving up weathered musical modes with fresh insight and an evolving perspective.

In a year when R&B was ruled by youthful passions and roiling politics, Maxwell brought back classic soul with lyrics that weren’t about protest, predation, or property, but about what it’s really like to be in love, a bubble he has a rare talent for pausing and thinking inside of. “1990x” is sex music for grown people who’ve gotten past all that conquest and insecurity stuff, somehow capturing the silence of the romantic moment in lush, vivid sound. It’s music for having, not for wanting; a song for knowing who you are, not searching for it. –Brian Howe

Listen:Maxwell: “1990x”

Drop “L.A.” into a song lyric (as Whitney do in the third line of “No Woman”) and it will generally establish a few basics—announcing the song as part of a long pop continuum of songs about Los Angeles, evoking a mindset and a myth as well as the actual city. A brief mention of L.A. is the only concrete detail in “No Woman,” and it acts as a floating emotional signpost as much as a physical place. Starring Max Kakacek and Julien Ehrlich, both ex-Smith Westerns, and drawn from their affable debut Light Upon the Lake, the song is a tale of lost love and wandering, with no fixed narrative and a distinct lack of resolution. The “haze” Ehrlich sings about pervades “No Woman” like both California sunshine and the unnamed presence Ehrlich mourns. Produced by Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado, it also fogs over a cleverly unfolding arrangement that achieves density without drama, light percussion never quite succumbing to melodrama while horns and strings sway like props in the gentle breeze of the stage-set version of L.A., the one that lives most vividly in the imagination. –Jesse Jarnow

Whitney: "No Woman" (via SoundCloud)

Young Thug is rap’s enigma wrapped in contradiction—an ATLien swathed in Greek mythology, an androgynous fashion cognoscente who packs a pistol. And the paradoxes continue on “Digits.” Thugger counts his cash and flashes his ice on the song, but this is no gaudy show of strength. Over London on Da Track’s creeping keyboard riff, the rapper sounds mournful as he contemplates the unbreakable patterns facing all hustlers: “You can lose your life but it gon’ keep goin’.” But it’s the virtuosity of the performance—his nimble, infinitely melodic flow at its most tuneful—that makes this a standout moment from an artist who takes joy in eluding any type of final form. –Dean Van Nguyen

Young Thug: "Digits" (via SoundCloud)

As I type this, another police officer has gotten away with killing a black man. This time, in Charlotte, North Carolina, where a prosecutor has determined Brentley Vinson’s actions were justified in the September shooting of Keith L. Scott. It’s the latest in what feels like a brutal assault on black people at the hands of law enforcement: Eric Garner, Philando Castile, Sandra Bland, and the list goes on.

On “VRY BLK,” singerJamila Woods fights racial oppression with a regal sense of purpose, declaring her blackness with the utmost pride and nobility. Woods asks bold questions, holding cops accountable for their actions. “If I say that I can’t breathe, will I become a chalk line?” she wonders. “Your serving and protecting is stealing babies’ lives.” This song—like others from her excellent debut album,HEAVN—outlines the beauty of being black, using cavernous soul to punctuate the theme. It speaks to the connection you feel with fellow people of color. No matter who you are, you’re still family. –Marcus J. Moore

Jamila Woods: “VRY BLK” [ft. Noname] (via SoundCloud)

If you had to name the most ubiquitous debut of 2016, it would likely be Desiigner with his mega-hit “Panda.” While the general public’s introduction to the song came through Kanye’s The Life of Pablo, “Panda” quickly took on a life of its own and became unavoidable—it got played in the club, blasted on the street, and stuck in your head for hours at a time. “Panda” is ominous but also great fun thanks to its knocking drums, lurching strings, and constant stream of ad-libs. It’s a case study in the modern conglomeration of rap: A New York rapper buys a beat from a London producer he’s never met and crafts a Southern hip-hop song that ends up topping the charts. –Noah Yoo

Desiigner: “Panda“ (via SoundCloud)

“First Day Out Tha Feds” is a homecoming anthem in the truest sense. Gucci Mane wrote the lyrics during a three-year stint in federal prison, recorded the vocal within an hour of returning home, and released the song less than 24 hours after his release. But even though this song introduced the world to Gucci Mane 2.0—trim, self-possessed, exacting in his delivery—it’s hardly triumphant. The new Gucci is sober in more ways than one: Off alcohol and drugs for the first time in 17 years, he’s now taking an unflinching look at his former life. The track’s accounts of prison life are harrowing, but its most striking moments occur when Gucci turns his focus inward. “I did some things to some people that was downright evil,” he raps, before admitting, “My own mama turned her back on me/And that’s my mama.” Thankfully, the story has a happy ending: Gucci has never looked better, often appearing so grateful to be on earth that he’s downright beaming. But as “First Day Out Tha Feds” reminds us, this happiness was hard won. –Mehan Jayasuriya

Gucci Mane: "First Day Out tha Feds" (via SoundCloud)

“Hallucinations” solidified dvsn. It was the fourth and final single released ahead ofSept. 5th, the debut from the once-mysterious Toronto duo of Daniel Daley and Nineteen85, who up to that point had specialized in slow jams. While the song didn’t rewrite dvsn’s entire ethos, it finally showcased Daley’s impressive vocal capabilities, reaching higher places with newfound verve. Nineteen85’s production chops were never in question—he’s the architect behind some of Drake’s greatest pop hits—but instead of providing atmosphere, “Hallucinations” builds with Daley’s falsetto in mind. Lyrically, Daley conveys only necessary details, leaving enough room for listeners to fill in with their own memories. Most who’ve endured heartbreak can understand how disorienting it feels to now only see the one you love in dreams. dvsn capture the haunting accurately, with wounded beauty rather than gut-wrenching pain. –Matthew Strauss

dvsn: "Hallucinations" (via SoundCloud)

The lines between hip-hop, house, R&B, and bass music have never felt as blurred as they have in the past few years, with 2016’s most compelling example arriving via Kaytranada. The Montreal-based, Haitian-born producer’s debut, 99.9%, shows off so many different ways to build a groove that singling out a centerpiece feels reductive. “Glowed Up” is a standout in part because it powerfully contrasts the slippery elasticity of the upbeat dance cuts. Consider it a dizzy comedown after a steady dose of stimulants, a mid-album respite of E-funk that’s halfway between L.A. Reid and L.A. beats. That latter factor is not just Anderson .Paak-driven, though the obvious charm comes from his wiseass strut-drawl—half toilet jokes (“No bullshit in mi casa/Laxatives in your chowder”), half resilient artistry in the face of fame’s looming pressures (“Even when you’re far out there in the sun/You’re still in the hands of the one who cares for you”). It’s also the fact that the beat’s air-suspension glide really does shine like a full-spectrum light, warm chords where Brian Wilson’s theremin meets Junie Morrison’s ARP. That it finds an extra gear to rev low in during the left-turn third verse is just showing off, and the best kind of it. –Nate Patrin

Listen:Kaytranada: “Glowed Up” [ft. Anderson .Paak]

On June 12, 2015, a still-unknown assailant opened fire on YG outside an apartment complex in Studio City, California. One bullet hit the rapper in the hip; YG and his friends drove to the hospital. He refused to cooperate with the cops and checked himself out after less than 24 hours. For a year after the shooting, YG’s only comment of substance on the incident was an aside in his song “Twist My Fingaz”: “I tried to pop first, got popped at/Got hit in the hip, couldn’t pop back.” But “Who Shot Me?,” the second song from his superb Still Brazy, deals with the psychological fallout. The color of his would-be killer’s pistol sticks in his brain, beside a list of suspects and designs for potential R.I.P. t-shirts. Through it all, YG’s more concerned with the mental states of his friends and family than he is with beating his chest. He’s cool and calm, unnervingly so. You learn a lot about yourself in a crisis. –Paul A. Thompson

Listen: YG: “Who Shot Me?”

Emily’s D+Evolution, Esperanza Spalding’s first album since besting Justin Bieber at the Grammys, has finally earned the jazz musician plaudits beyond the world’s music students and academy elders. “Earth to Heaven” isn't the most surprising cut on the album—see the plunging vocals of “Good Lava” or the cover from the Willy Wonka soundtrack—but it’s the most indicative. There’s funk and art-rock in the hopper, but also Joni Mitchell and Stephen Sondheim. Spalding’s phrasing is that of an actress, flipping nimbly from coy to blunt in the space of one line. There’s plenty of material to work with here: Spalding’s pilgrim’s prog moves dispassionately from Ecclesiastes to science to earthy self-help. It always returns to the same idea, though: getting to heaven, maybe, but in the meantime driving a groove into the ground. “All legacies end here,” Spalding sings. Theologically, perhaps. Musically? Not remotely. –Katherine St. Asaph

Listen:Esperanza Spalding: “Earth to Heaven”

Parquet Courts have a reputation as the kind of obtuse, smirking lit-punks that built the indie rock pyramids of yore, so it’s notable that “Human Performance” is about pop music’s most basic-ever sentiment: grieving lost love. The song contains no double entendres or glancing witticisms; even the central conceit—that, minus love, singer Andrew Savage is a husk merely acting as a human—is well-trodden ground. The change in tone makes you realize how Savage’s lyrical jigsaws can be affecting instead of dazzling, how he’s able to turn familiar sentiment into striking lines by breaking in odd places and lovingly positioning his syllables. It is the first Parquet Courts song I have walked away from feeling that Savage is not smarter than me, but sadder. –Andrew Gaerig

Listen:Parquet Courts: “Human Performance”

We’re not used to hearing Aphex Twin dole out slow-motion, four-to-the-floor beats—and at just 100 BPM, “CHEETAHT2 [Ld spectrum]” dips about as low as techno is inclined to go. But that sullen andante trudge allows the British electronic musician to get the most out of the unusual instrument that the song pays homage to, and which he presumably used to record it: the Cheetah MS800, a digital synthesizer known for its woozy timbres (and once described as “the most difficult instrument to program on the planet”). Here, that translates to background pads that shimmer like a heat mirage, and a midrange bass melody that writhes like a greased pig on ice. It’s unusual to hear Aphex Twin strip his tracks down like this, but that focus on the texture of his sounds—and few producers know how to program a synthesizer quite like he does—ends up making this no-frills record one of his most immediately satisfying releases in ages. –Philip Sherburne

Listen:Aphex Twin: “CHEETAHT2 [Ld spectrum]”

“E.V.P.” starts with a fat synth belch, like rubber boots squawking on wet linoleum. A studio rat as well as a solo act, Dev Hynes is especially good with evocative noises, and that synth seems to arrive straight from New York’s Danceteria circa-1982, still draped in scarves and trailing glitter. The song it announces is the centerpiece of his luminous and compassionate album Freetown Sound, and it pulls all of that album’s various threads—yearning for freedom, awareness of injustice, unbridled joy at the presence of the body, fear for its vulnerability—into one dense, breathing heat of tangled limbs and yearning.

On an album containing a metropolis of characters, cameos, and sonic details, “E.V.P.” is the most populous: Every sound, from the neener-neener synth whines and stiff funk guitars evoking “Slippery People” to the scratchy Arthur Russell strings, impart some indescribable flavor to the broth. It all resolves into a melody so generous it nearly overflows the borders of the song. No one wrote a chorus of this scale all year, or even seemed to try. In “E.V.P.” Hynes is alone, soaring unaccompanied in the sky. –Jayson Greene

Listen:Blood Orange: “E.V.P.”

Chance the Rapper does not want you to ride home in his car. To hear Knox Fortune, the Chicago singer and producer who lilts the song’s boozy hook, tell it, this ungenerous theme was the original concept behind “All Night.” But Chance is nothing if not magnanimous. The reasons he gives for refusing to chauffeur our drunk asses—we talk politics, we falsely claim to be his cousin, we fart—are amusing enough to be worth the rejection. Kaytranada’s tipsy instrumental, which posits Chance snugly within Chicago’s deep house legacy, also evokes SaveMoney crew founder Vic Mensa’s 2014 house love letter “Down on My Luck” (previously remixed by the Montreal producer). But like Chance’s gleefully eccentric, shape-shifting lyrical observations, the strobe-lit four-on-the-floor thump here is irresistibly inviting. Turns out, the most extroverted song on Coloring Book was a sly curmudgeon’s plea for privacy. –Marc Hogan

Chance the Rapper: “All Night” [ft. Knox Fortune] (via SoundCloud)

Hamilton Leithauser didn’t need RostamBatmanglij’s help to go pop—fans of the singer’s old band, the Walkmen, know that his voice alone can convey the urgency of a radio jam. So just short of the 30-second mark on the tragic “A 1000 Times,” when Leithauser uncorks his signature yelp, it doesn’t feel like something new. It feels like rediscovery, a welcome return. That sensation is a perfect fit for a song that drifts through the past as it charts the winter to come, acknowledging both the constant temptation of unrequited love and the hard reality that it’s all an overbaked fantasy. Meanwhile, Batmanglij’s touches—the playful keys, the harmonies, a carnival atmosphere reminiscent of Vampire Weekend’s best—offer the type of subtle accompaniment that takes a song from good to great, forging a wistful epic that’s in line with the hurt at the song’s heart. –Jonah Bromwich

Hamilton Leithauser + Rostam: “A 1000 Times” (via SoundCloud)

“I Have Been to the Mountain” is a misleadingly upbeat track that’s actually about the death of Eric Garner, killed by police after repeatedly saying, “I can’t breathe.” The song, built on a tense bass line, guitar skronk, a horn section, and a choir, is also an explicit rejection of cynicism. Kevin Morby’s voice has settled into a curved and pockmarked take on young Bob Dylan, humming with wisdom and, because it’s necessary, some spite too. “I Have Been to the Mountain” is about injustice, and helplessness in the face of injustice, but it’s also about that feeling that when things go inexorably wrong, the only thing anyone can do is work to make them better. –Sam Hockley-Smith

Kevin Morby: “I Have Been to the Mountain” (Buy on Bandcamp)

“Come Down” is equal parts celebration and warning. Anchored by a fat G-funk bassline, the standout track from Anderson .Paak’s solo breakthrough Malibu sways under the weight of the artist’s hard-earned braggadocio. Even though he knows ascending to greater heights could lead to a longer, harder fall, he can’t help but flirt with the edge. One moment, a group of onlookers taunts, “You might not ever come down!”; the next, he flips it and channels James Brown, shouting, “Wanna get down!” The Hi-Tek production is remarkably spacious, but .Paak finds a way to fill out that space by imagining the people and sounds in it, including rowdy crowds, his own multiple personas, and—why not—a clip from the 1978 Malibu surf movie Big Wednesday. It’s his world, after all. He can get as high as he wants. —Minna Zhou

Anderson .Paak: "Come Down" (via SoundCloud)

Save Money crew-member Joey Purp’s latest, iiiDrops, tackles the multitudes of his native Chicago, veering between frustration and frivolity, political verve and spiritual angst. One of a few excursions is standout jam “Girls @,” buoyed on a Neptunes-catchy Knox Fortune beat and heaps of irreverent glee. Purp spends half of it winking to the camera, seemingly fretting over “Where the girls at?” while playfully notching up his date demands: credit cards, heels, Birkin bags, and a topless Benz. In truth, he sounds more impish than self-serious, like a cruising bachelor giggling to his buddy in the passenger seat, indiscriminately firing champagne emoji into their address books. When Chance chimes in, he’s all lovable chutzpah: He eyes a bookworm “reading Ta-Nehisi Coates, humming ‘SpottieOttieDope’” then goofily asks to borrow a girl’s iPhone and car. His absurd charm—“Where the mid-sized girls? You bad!”—should make Purp’s flash ridiculous; instead, they sync like a glorious double act. –Jazz Monroe

Joey Purp: "Girls @" [ft. Chance the Rapper] (via SoundCloud)

French Montana has made a career out of being upstaged. On song after song, he has charmingly brought someone more popular to the party, like Nicki Minaj or Drake, and proceeded to bask in their glow. But the Bronx-raised MC has quirks and chops worthy of a main attraction, and on “Lockjaw,” he graduates to big-brother status and invites upstart Kodak Black to shine on his dime. They’re not an obvious pair—Kodak slurs out in croaks, French mumbles in a conversational sing-song—but the duo are entirely complementary in the moment, boasting through gritted, MDMA-addled teeth. The beat’s hard drums make it instantly familiar as its eerie background echoes ensure this song never grows old. It’s an anthem that demands open car windows and doors, an invitation to bite down and stunt. –Jay Balfour

Listen:French Montana: “Lockjaw”

“Sorry” is not sorry. Not even close. Beyoncé’s most flagrant kiss-off of the year is cold as fuck, but there’s no angst, no furrowed brows, no lashing out. She glides through her revenge as effortlessly as a figure skater, carving an outline of her oppressor’s severed head into ice. She flips the bird for fun. She has the balls to grab her crotch. She turns two words—“boy” and “bye”—into a devastating GIF factory.

The essential video only goes deeper, as she expands the song’s meaning across time and place. The interiors were shot at Louisiana’s Madewood Plantation, a grand locale that once hosted brutal beatings of slaves and now hosts Queen Bey in a throne and Serena Williams as her twerking accomplice. Beyoncé and her chorus line of ancient spirits also sport body paint from the Yoruba tradition, white ink imbued with a lasting sacredness. And then there’s Becky and her good hair—a throwaway whodunit wrapped in pointed racial signifiers. At the end of the video, Beyoncé lets out a photo-ready smile before quickly turning deadly serious and delivering that guillotine chop of a final line. She’s in complete control. She’s having a great time, but she’s not kidding around. –Ryan Dombal

Listen:Beyoncé: “Sorry”

Hip-hop has always been mercurial, but in 2016, fluidity itself—from form, to function, to delivery—became rap’s defining trait. Young Thug’s “Kanye West” is this trend crystallized, melted down, and imbibed via ayahuasca ceremony in an Atlanta club basement. The track went through several working titles—“Elton John,” “Wet Wet,” “Pop Man”—but the final is most fitting. Just as The Life of Pablo tried to turn the idea of an album into an ever-changing endeavor, Thugger sees music as a product of the moment; titles matter little, albums less, and songs gush from the internet like water from a spigot. The production is almost totally removed from a traditional trap sound, filled with humid tones, booming 808s, and childlike flourishes—it’s as if Phil Collins, circa Disney’s Tarzan soundtrack, made a song about anal sex and female ejaculation. Then there’s Wyclef laying down dad-rap couplets goofy enough to soften Young Thug’s filthiest metaphors: “Play truth or dare/Jumpin’ in the pool with no swim wear gear,” he sings. That the two vastly different artists collaborated at all boggles the mind, but the result is Young Thug at his most fully realized and fully weird. –Nathan Reese

Young Thug: “Kanye West” (via SoundCloud)

You’d be hard pressed to assign a single genre signifier to what Jessy Lanza does in this song. Somehow, she crams Yellow Magic Orchestra, Mariah Carey, feverish footwork, and an infectiousSouth African tabla beat into a terse and tightly compressed floor-filler. The more time you spend with it, the more it opens up and the more its composite pieces become mysterious. Her voice is just as coolly inscrutable as the beat as she hammers away at a few simple phrases: “When you look into my eyes boy/Then it means I love you.” Even when she disappears into the song’s thick shroud of beats, her confident presence remains palpable, and the song lingers in the ears like a fresh secret. –Kevin Lozano

Jessy Lanza: “It Means I Love You” (Buy on Bandcamp)

The soft-rock melancholy of Weyes Blood’s “Do You Need My Love” has the faded feel of a lost classic—a ’70s AM-radio gem unearthed from a box of dusty 45s. The easiest comparison to make is to the bittersweet ballads of the Carpenters, and judged on that scale, Natalie Mering holds up well. Her wistful voice and the music’s richly textured arrangement strike a tone both soothing and sobering. She even adds a chorus of “ba-ba-ba”s to remind us this is pop music, not Sylvia Plath poetry.

Still, “Do You Need My Love” exudes a darkness that even Karen Carpenter didn’t touch often. Mering’s opening sentiment—“tired of feeling so bad”—pervades the song. She sounds weary and lost, stuck in an eternal limbo of unrequited love. “Passion is the only thing/Passion must mean everything,” she insists, rationalizing her inability to think about anything else. As her doubts gather over swelling chords, “Do You Need My Love” starts to sound as much about our modern problems as hers. Like many people alive right now, Mering is caught in a land of questions without answers; hearing her give that feeling a voice is pretty inspiring. –Marc Masters

Weyes Blood: “Do You Need My Love” (Buy on Bandcamp)

Noname is here to remind us of Chicago’s most lasting hip-hop tradition, one that provides a throughline from Chance to Kanye to Common to No I.D., leading all the way back to the city’s history as an incubator for jazz and soul. Her debut mixtape, Telephone, hearkens back to these roots; its sound is warm and sepia-toned.

Fittingly, the album’s opening number, “Yesterday,” is all about remembrance. Noname memorializes a departed grandmother and brother, longs for her own childhood, and wonders who will remember her when she’s gone. The song’s chorus is simple, direct, and utterly heartbreaking: “When the sun is going down/When the dark is out to stay/I picture your smile, like it was yesterday.” As always, the future of Chicago rap remains inextricably bound to the city’s rich musical past. –Mehan Jayasuriya

Noname: “Yesterday” (via SoundCloud)

According to the entry dates on his demo/diary collection, untitled unmastered., Kendrick Lamar recorded this track just six days after he turned 27—an age that’s assumed grave significance in the annals of pop history. Fittingly, “untitled 02” represents the purest, most potent distillation of the survivor’s guilt that wracks so many of his rhymes. It may not have made the cut for his 2015 masterpiece To Pimp a Butterfly, but in its Compton-via-Cotton Club trap-jazz sprawl and the conflicted ruminations on what it means to be a successful black man in modern America, “untitled 02” retroactively previews Lamar’s next album. It’s part Top Dawg Entertainment office party, part funeral for the friends who got locked up or gunned down. And nowhere is that inner tension and turmoil felt more acutely than in the line where TDE president Dave Free rolls up to show off his brand new Porsche 911, and all Lamar can think of is planes crashing into buildings. –Stuart Berman

Listen: Kendrick Lamar: “untitled 02 | 06.23.2014.”

Plug, load, bitches, dough: Judging by the evidence of “2 Phones,” Kevin Gates’ life is more complicated than most. But on the song of his career (so far), he juggles the difficulties just fine. “2 Phones” is a song about distrust and near-paranoia, yet it feels fearless. The chorus is so catchy it invites mimicry, even parody—try replacing “phones” with two of whatever happens to be lying around you—but Gates isn’t joking, and the song is an anthem of desperation. His multiple phones are a necessity, as an alternate means for survival had music not panned out. Fortunately for Gates, that urgency manifested into a triumphant performance. Whatever the reason, the phone keeps ring ring ringing. –Matthew Strauss

Kevin Gates: "2 Phones" (via SoundCloud)

Chance the Rapper’s “Summer Friends” packs an astonishing amount of detail into less than five minutes. By the time the Chicago rapper runs down the people, places, and things that surrounded him as a kid—from JJ and Mikey and Lil Derek to day camp to the dollar bills he folded like lawn chairs after mowing yards—you feel like you’re watching a film with wide shots and saturated colors, eyes darting from one image to the next. Chance’s rapid, uninflected sing-song delivery jumps from section to section in order to get everything in; he’s sitting with us in the present moment, while the ghostly vocals carry the ache of the past. His story juxtaposes the simple innocence of childhood with the danger and complexity that, for those who grow up in a certain time and place, is always lurking just outside the frame. –Mark Richardson

Chance the Rapper: “Summer Friends” [ft. Jeremih & Francis & The Lights] (via SoundCloud)

People love an underdog story. We also seem to love goofy songs about weed. “Broccoli” is both. Virginian font of sing-song hip-hop euphoria, D.R.A.M., in his joyful warble, recounts with touching matter-of-factness how he went from a precocious preschooler to the 26-year-old owner of an unlikely 2015 hit called, of all things, “Cha Cha,” and then on to noshing on lox and capers at a restaurant as strangers gawk. Now 28, he has another sleeper success in this collaboration with likeminded Atlanta rapper Lil Yachty. Released first on SoundCloud, consisting of little more than Yachty flirting around and D.R.A.M. braying infectiously (also “sleazily,” “greasily”) about pesos and Alfredo, all over a cheerful keys-and-claps loop, “Broccoli” ended up going top five. In February, it will vie for a Grammy against Drake’s “Cha Cha”-indebted “Hotline Bling.” If grinningly ridiculously ear to ear for almost four minutes is therapeutic, then loving “Broccoli” may actually be good for you, too. —Marc Hogan

D.R.A.M.: "Broccoli" [ft. Lil Yachty] (via SoundCloud)

Essentially a microcosm track of The Life of Pablo, “No More Parties in L.A.” may just be Kanye West’s most urgently scatterbrained banger. Despite 12 songwriter credits, it seems nearly accidental, like West’s real-time fever dream jammed between conference calls, gym sets, and Twitter bouts. So swathes of Walter Morrison, Ghostface Killah, Larry Graham, and Johnny “Guitar” Watson cuts are accordioned into tangled, thorny funk; so guest MC Kendrick Lamar, reveling in his recent triumphs, is at his punniest here. (“Come Erykah Badu me/Well, let’s make a movie.”)

“No More Parties” feels vital and alive because West seems to have more thoughts percolating than he can express. All is breathless shorthand: the gesticulated self-mythology surveying, the Glamorama SparkNotes, the over-specific sex-talk, that cock-eyed callback to “Real Friends,” the unmistakable impression that West’s got more creative irons in the fire than there are hours in the day. “Pink fur, got Nori dressing like Cam/Thank God for me” segues neatly into “Whole family getting money/Thank God for E!” The lyric, like the song as a whole, links West’s past, present, and future—he is rapping like we never thought he would again, even though he’s light-years removed from the baller with a backpack who used to wear bear costumes on his album sleeves. –Raymond Cummings

Kanye West: "No More Parties in L.A." [ft. Kendrick Lamar] (via SoundCloud)

We Got It From Here...Thank You 4 Your service operates on several levels: It is a revival and a requiem, an affirmation and a farewell. “Dis Generation” functions as its fulcrum, providing a pivot between A Tribe Called Quest’s past and a hip-hop that will exist without them. To that end, Q-Tip nods at Joey Badas$$, Earl Sweatshirt, Kendrick Lamar, and J. Cole, but he’s not so much passing the torch as placing the new guard into a continuum that predates him.

Even so, the hazy, soulful shimmer of “Dis Generation” deliberately evokes A Tribe Called Quest’s prime. In sampling Musical Youth’s “Pass the Dutchie” for its hook, they draw a direct line back to 1992, when the same song provided a rhythm for the “Vampire Mix” of “I Left My Wallet in El Segundo”—and the group revels in the lush production, trading jokes, devoting a large passage to compatriot Busta Rhymes, and looking at the present with clear eyes. In “Dis Generation,” A Tribe Called Quest bridge eras with poignant joy, writing with a sense of middle-aged wisdom about what’s been gained and lost, still hopeful for what’s to come. Even if things won’t be like they once were, culture is built upon the passing of generations. –Stephen Thomas Erlewine

Listen:A Tribe Called Quest: “Dis Generation”

Drake’s business model has proven to be very successful. It’s basic licensing: When he hears something he likes, he stamps his name on it, adds a few verses from his tried-and-tested playbook, and calls it a hit. So it goes with “One Dance,” arguably the earworm of the year. The song includes two features: one of them a sample of the all-but-unknown singer Kyla Reid, whose velvety voice provides an essential hook, along with echoey punctuations by Nigerian artist Wizkid. These valuable outsiders provide the foundation to which “One Dance” returns whenever Drake’s stock melodicism needs a jolt of momentum. But is Drake’s strategy canny tastemaking or stealth exploitation? Kyla was thrilled when the song was released with her name on it; she pissed off her neighbors by blasting it 20 times in a row.“Once Dance” has since hit No. 1 in over 10 countries. It becamethe most streamed song in Spotify’s history. The business model works again. Everyone’s happy. —Jonah Bromwich

Listen:Drake: “One Dance” [ft. Wizkid and Kyla]

Bon Iver’s 22, A Million is far from the kind of music made for mass consumption, yet something about it resonated for many. Through a thick haze of newfound inscrutability and looping weariness, Justin Vernon’s voice emerges as one of the most powerful tools in music. Opening track “22 (OVER S∞∞N)” is comprised of sounds that often seem broken, or maybe just organized with chaos in mind. But his voice corrals everything together, allowing those brief pockets of sweet saxophone hiss, swells of strings, and spectral choruses to have direct emotional impact. The tangling of Vernon’s recent digital inhumanity with warm empathy makes for something that is poignant for reasons that are hard to articulate, but viscerally felt nonetheless. –Kevin Lozano

Bon Iver: “22 (OVER S∞∞N)” (Buy on Bandcamp)

Lemonadeis Beyoncé’s most reflective album, as she refuses to play the one-dimensional scorned woman the past few years of tabloids have reduced her to. “Hold Up” finds her peeved (to say the least), but she doesn’t sound peeved. The samples are a bit prickly, a bit twitchy, but the track ultimately projects calm—an Andy Williams fragment ends up somewhere between new age and reggae—and the video is as much about smashing shit as dancing around the shards with the whole neighborhood. It’s a stream of consciousness—Beyoncé’s vocals and lyrics outpace the track throughout—but for all the emotional liability, the fears about “looking jealous or crazy,” and the vow to fuck up a bitch, the lyrics are ultimately completely contained. As always, what Beyoncé presents the listener is utterly unflappable, idle musings upon lodging a baseball bat into the windshield of the unworthy. To call her “crazy” would be wrong; it’s a mark of skill and gravitas that “Hold Up” makes perfect sense. –Katherine St. Asaph

Listen:Beyoncé: “Hold Up”

In a break between sessions for what would become Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds’ 16th album, Cave’s 15-year-old son Arthur fell to his death from the white cliffs of Brighton. And while the music was mostly arranged and all the lyrics written by that point, that tragedy shadows Skeleton Tree like a ghost. For grief of this magnitude and proximity, words founder for even the stoutest of poets. And while Cave’s ink-black prose has detailed death of every sort over the decades, on “I Need You,” you can hear him abut that wordless void, dealing with a pain that rekindles in line at the grocery store. “Nothing really matters” and “I need you” are as timeworn as any string of three words can be, but even if Cave can’t quite suss a new metaphor, he contorts his voice to convey the anguish instead. He drawls out these lines like an old country act as Bad Seed Warren Ellis shadows that heartache via his microKORG. Wringing the rrr of “matters” and eee of “need” like a dishrag, Cave reveals an unsounded sadness and the paucity of language to express it. –Andy Beta

Listen:Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: “I Need You”

Several tracks on Atrocity Exhibition portray Danny Brown in a state of private anxiety, but “Really Doe” displays the MC at a peak of ebullience and oddball sociability. Over droning bass tones and a manic xylophone loop, the Detroit rapper proffers sex brags full of unexpected metaphor (“That hoe want my piccolo”), and compares the force of his rhyming to the blast from a C4 explosive. His emphatic release is matched by everyone else on this posse cut: Kendrick Lamar switches up speeds and rhythmic stresses, handling the chorus with a couplet that claps back against rivals. (“I ain’t boomin’—that’s a goddamn lie, whoa/Really doe, like really doe.”) Earl Sweatshirt pivots from “countin’...dubs” to hanging “on a mountain with monks.” And Ab-Soul giddily recalls snatching his mom’s wedding ring for a session of elementary school “show-and-tell.” The upside is obvious: When you’re getting sick of your own interiority, invite some of your more intrepid friends over to the house. –Seth Colter Walls

Listen:Danny Brown: “Really Doe” [ft. Kendrick Lamar, Ab-Soul, Earl Sweatshirt]

In the years since 2012’s magnificent Channel Orange, we eventually stopped asking when, but if there’d ever be a new Frank Ocean album. He’d drop a song or two, tease us with sporadic Tumblr posts, then fade into the ether just as abruptly. So in a way, Blonde opener “Nikes” encapsulates everything Ocean has been to us in his career: moody, elusive, mysterious, heartwarming. Pitched to a nearly chipmunk falsetto, the singer looks at himself and his environment, wondering what’s become of such a beautiful mess. It’s woozy and all over the place, steeped in drunken sadness and off-the-cuff reflection. “Pour up for A$AP,” Ocean muses at one point. “R.I.P. Pimp C/R.I.P. Trayvon, that nigga look just like me.” Still, “Nikes” isn’t just about societal ills, it’s a kiss-off to gold-diggers looking for a pay day: “These bitches want Nikes, they lookin’ for a check/Tell ’em it ain’t likely.” That sentiment isn’t a shock coming from a guy like Ocean, of course: You can get a piece of him, but don’t get too attached. –Marcus J. Moore

Listen:Frank Ocean: “Nikes”

“Daydreaming” begins—like countless Radiohead songs before it—in the midst of a nebulous disaster. But something’s different here. In an oeuvre animated by technological angst, political indignation, and the threat of ecological catastrophe, this song is rare in that it exists “beyond the point of no return,” instead of on its cusp. “It’s too late,” Thom Yorke concedes, his tone dripping elegant defeat. “The damage is done.”

The song’s innocent title is misleading—there is a sense, in the sleepwalking piano motif and disembodied vocal fragments, of a post-traumatic, amnesiac daze. That the narrator’s circumstances remain shrouded feels less like Radiohead-being-Radiohead than a sort of radical expressionism, the work of someone who has waded so deep into troubled thoughts that only abstractions remain. Yet there is room, in Yorke’s coda, for a flicker of exposition: “Half of my life,” he sighs repeatedly, vocals reversed and entombed in reverb. Yorke, 47 when A Moon Shaped Pool came out, had recently separated from his partner of 23 years—about as long as Radiohead have been releasing music. “Daydreaming” is a reckoning with those years, and, in one way or another, an elegy to them. –Jazz Monroe

Listen:Radiohead: “Daydreaming”

For decades, David Bowie dropped the best breadcrumbs in rock, and embraced the fans who did the sleuthing: What fate befell Major Tom? Was the Thin White Duke steeped in the occult? So when his 25th album, Blackstar, closed on an overtly cryptic note, it was easy to fall down this next rabbit hole, and wonder what, exactly, he was sing about atop this inquisitive jazz-pop. “With blackout hearts, with flowered news/With skull designs upon my shoes,” he sang resignedly—but was that a grace note of frustration? And how about that warbling, plaintive melody—what bounty was he withholding?

It was the shortest Bowie or his followers ever reveled in one of his mysteries; two days after Blackstar’s release, he passed away. And so we learned that this beguiling, openhearted performer had created a gracious farewell with his final album, and particularly this song—the last this shepherd of the fringes would ever sing to his flock. It’s a gentle confirmation of what we knew: that he still had worlds within him, and that he would never have time to express them all. Because every time the song ends, Bowie is gone again. –Stacey Anderson

Listen:David Bowie: “I Can't Give Everything Away”

In Chris Kraus’ I Love Dick, romantic rejection becomes its own form of creativity. Spurned by the sociologist Dick, Kraus in turn rejects consummation as the end point of infatuation, and in doing so, interrogates the intersection of failure and desire. Named for Kraus’ “conceptual romance,” the centerpiece track of Jenny Hval’s Blood Bitch finds the Norwegian visionary opening a similar portal. On the precipice of heartbreak, she loses herself in her “combined failures” rather than succumb to sentimentality, and she arrives at a revelation. “I understand infatuation, rejection/They can connect and become everything, everything that’s torn up in your life,” she sings, a faint trace of hysteria shaking her calm voice. Here, sensation and loss aren’t the voids they’re usually framed as, but the tangible fabric of existence. “Conceptual Romance” is an anthem for over-thinkers and individuals, for those who value anticipation over payoff. Though going by Hval’s insidious, dusky melody—the very best of her catalog to date—she’s more of a natural at seduction than she’d like to let on. –Laura Snapes

Jenny Hval: “Conceptual Romance” (via SoundCloud)

The personal is the political. And in Solange’s “Don’t Touch My Hair,” the political is black agency and resiliency in the face of the everyday. Blackness comes with certain truths in this country. Our blackness is laden with history, adversity, and overcoming. For black women, that is especially true. Admission into white society often inscribes sacrifice of the mind and body. We suppress our emotions in the face of hate. But recently many black women have refused to suppress their hair and, in the process, reclaimed bodily autonomy. We will no longer conform.

“Don’t Touch My Hair” gives these ideas musical form: “You know this hair is my shit/Rode the ride, I gave it time/But this here is mine,” Solange sings in the chorus. She has gone through the process of reclaiming her coils. And although its height and structure and beauty leave others in awe, her hair is not something to sully with your confusion or questions or hands. They are “the feelings I wear,” Solange sings, but also her “pride” and “glory.” It's not just hair. It was never just hair. –Britt Julious

Listen: Solange: “Don’t Touch My Hair”

Car Seat Headrest’s Will Toledo burst through this year like he’d been preparing his whole life for it, making his previous work seem like merely a dress rehearsal. Throughout the dense and knotty songs on Teens of Denial, his first album of new material since signing to Matador Records, you can hear Toledo’s attempt to divulge all he knows: about drugs, about friendship, about youth, about life. But its opening number, “Fill in the Blank,” compressed the album’s 70-minute sprawl into one vicious rock song. When Toledo, dressed a bit like the cool older brother at his sister’s Bat Mitzvah, performed the song on Colbert this summer, he made its energy physical, stuttering and shaking with the song’s all-caps lyrics sheet projected behind him (“YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO BE DEPRESSED/YOU NEVER TRIED HARD ENOUGH TO LIKE IT”). Even as Toledo sings about having seen too much of the world, he doesn’t seem like he’s about to turn away in defeat; he’s now ready to take it all on. –Sam Sodomsky

Listen:Car Seat Headrest: “Fill in the Blank”

There’s a beautiful story about Leonard Cohen that starts after his father’s funeral. Cohen was nine. Mourning, confused, faced with the infinite mystery of death, Cohen snipped the wing of one of his father’s bow ties, stuffed a small note inside it, and buried the tie in the yard. “I’ve been digging in the garden for years, looking for it,” Cohen said later. “Maybe that’s all I’m doing, looking for the note.”

The story’s themes–ritual, testament, the unearthly ways we bear our earthly pain–became the anchors of Cohen’s songs. His 14th and final album, You Want It Darker, opens with its title track, written in direct address: “If you are the dealer, I’m out of the game/If you are the healer, it means I’m broken and lame.” Thirty years ago, he would’ve said the same thing to a lover, but at 82, he talks mostly to God. You think his voice—spectral, bottomless, the sound of wind sweeping across an empty cave—indicates a connection to the beyond, but Cohen’sexplanation was more terrestrial: “500 tons of whiskey and, you know, a million cigarettes.” But that is—or was—Leonard Cohen, an artist for whom the gutters of life were shortcuts to heaven. –Mike Powell

Listen:Leonard Cohen: “You Want It Darker”

In between two incongruous moments—a tossed-off reference to the aggressively hip boutique hotel chain the Ace and a sped-up sample of country singer Jim Ed Brown’s “Morning”—something truly strange happens to Bon Iver’s “33 ‘GOD’”: It is besmirched by bird shit. You ears might not have noticed, but it's right there in the lyric video: What could pass for a manipulated string sample is rendered, in the style of a stage direction, as “(bird shit).” Its intended purpose is as inscrutable as anything in the song’s free-associative lyrics, which veer from diaristic fragments (“Sent your sister home in a cab”) to perfect couplets marrying the sublime with the quotidian (“I could go forward in the light/Well I better fold my clothes”). But that very inscrutability goes to the heart of what makes the song so fascinating—not just lyrically but also musically, as Vernon’s ruminative piano chords are tossed this way and that by odd squalls of digital interference.

There’s clearly some kind of crisis of faith going on here; the song is prefaced by an excerpt from this oft-quoted passage from Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish?” But Vernon’s willingness to crap on his own canvas proves his disinterest, even in the eyes of God, in taking himself too seriously. Perhaps everyone writing tortured genius exegeses of songs that were never meant to be unpacked should take a page from his book.–Philip Sherburne

Bon Iver: “33 "GOD"” (Buy on Bandcamp)

Dancing and self-consciousness make for one of the uneasiest combinations in music. But Anderson .Paak makes it work on “Am I Wrong” by sneaking it in under the cover of a supremely self-assured performance, shooting off about free time being precious and social effort not going to waste. As far as deflections go, Schoolboy Q playing retro-disco “Love Boat” guest star is a major one; you'd be excused for thinking it's the heart of the track, all no-worries party liberation. And that electric-piano glow sparks daydreams of unheard circa-In Our LifetimeMarvin Gaye/Donald Byrd collaborations, but still pulses like it’s too wavy for ’80. Time’s precious, but only an extended 12” mix could make “Am I Wrong” sink in deeper—and leave plenty of room for ambivalence and confidence to hash things out. –Nate Patrin

Listen:Anderson .Paak “Am I Wrong” [ft. Schoolboy Q]

The lead single from Puberty 2—the album that tookMitski Miyawaki from being a good, heartfelt singer-songwriter to the architect of her own graceful vision—is a perfect glass terrarium of a song. Within it, heartaches grow like moss: the desire to be seen for who you truly are by the person you love, the chill of knowing that even the most tender touch can’t bridge some cultural gaps, the knowledge that you’ll have to say goodbye sooner than you wanted to. It’s both universally resonant and personally specific. Even the rock convention she adopts—contrasting spacious, stripped-down verses with a blown-out, full-bore chorus—is done deftly, and lands with a hollow ache. Turn this song in any direction and you’ll find a new perspective to view its tiny, complete world. –Jes Skolnik

Mitski: "Your Best American Girl" (via SoundCloud)

Dev Hynes is one model of what a pop auteur should aspire to in 2016: sonically omnivorous, constantly evolving, driven by righteous anger against systemic injustice while empowering marginalized people. But his best-known songs are about the way people hurt each other in the most intimate spaces. “Best to You” leaps from its hazy, funkadelic surroundings,a poison-penned duet wherein Hynes’ female counterpart plays against type. Empress Of’s Lorely Rodriguez begs to forfeit her independence and identity to be nothing to a someone of her choosing: “I can’t be the girl you want but I can be the thing you throw away.”And surely, some took Rodriguez’s airy delivery, the percolating, chillwave-meets-Afro-pop percussion, and the song’s title at face value and ignored the lyrics, including it on Spotify mixes as a presumptive love song. But the key is right there on Freetown Sound’s cover: That young couple in their bedroom might appear temporarily immune to the indignities that Hynes documents painfully on the rest of the album, but they're not safe from their own private cruelties. –Ian Cohen

Listen:Blood Orange: “Best to You” [ft. Empress Of]

“Real Friends” is a sober moment amid Kanye West’s chaos. Primarily produced by West, the beat is relatively throwback and very tight, with echoed boom-bap drums and ambient keys that ring out, sad as hell. Here, Kanye delivers The Life of Pablo’s truest lines, a litany of complaints and regrets against himself, his family, and his friends. “When was the last time I remembered a birthday?/When was the last time I wasn’t in a hurry?” he asks himself, as if poring over diary pages. Then Ty Dolla $ign swoops in, backing him up, his golden warble the emotional underline to Kanye’s acid. The song nearly ends with Kanye vowing to “throw dirt” on his enemies, but then a chorus of angels enters from stage left and blesses the whole sorry state of affairs. It’s not a flashy song but an honest one. –Matthew Schnipper

Kanye West: "Real Friends" and "No More Parties in LA (Snippet)" (via SoundCloud)

Whether he’s casually sidestepping the Grammys, following up a No. 1 album with minimal tour dates, or emerging from a thorough profile with his mystique intact, Frank Ocean’s disregard for the status quo has defined his year. This fact is also evident throughout “Pink + White”’s chill-inducing waltz. The song relegates the world’s biggest pop starto an uncredited support vocal spot. Meanwhile, Frank’s lyrics flow in a stream of consciousness too meticulous to be candid. The images he paints feel at once heart-achingly intimate yet vague. He doesn’t name his muses. His stories arc without exposition or resolution. All this while he strings scenes of a post-Katrina New Orleans (“In the wake of a hurricane.../Nose dive in the flood lines/Tall tower of milk crates”) and waning childhood (“Remember life/Remember how it was/Climb trees, Michael Jackson, it all ends here”) into one of the sweetest melodies of 2016. At this point, it’s futile to try and pin Ocean down. His art is paradoxical at every level. The more critics attempt to parse his identity, the more fluid it becomes. –Corey Smith-West

Listen: Frank Ocean: “Pink + White”

“No Problem” is nothing but infectious. There’s a chipmunk soul vocal loop (not a sample), an instantly memorable and recognizable hook, and a callback to another great rap song. But despite its vibrancy—Chance the Rapper’s primary mode throughout Coloring Book—the song is a departure for Chance.Blessed with a voice that transitions seamlessly between rapping and singing, the Chicago artist has never leaned on Auto-Tune or other noticeable vocal enhancements. His light rasp and trademark yips are part of his charm. But on “No Problem,” he adds just enough of a computerized touch to make the song stand out without entering robotic territory. He also includes two big-name veterans on the track: Lil Wayne and2 Chainz drop by and Chance laps them both, but there’s nothing competitive or bloodthirsty about the song. “No Problem” is Chance’s unsigned-artist manifesto, his way of him telling the major labels, “I can do what you can do, only much, much better.” –Matthew Strauss

Chance the Rapper: “No Problem” [ft. Lil Wayne & 2 Chainz] (via SoundCloud)

Rappers can often be heard observing (and decrying) the differences between idealism and practicality. But on A Tribe Called Quest’s “We the People...”—the second track from their refined final album—they take this yardstick to the nation at large. After a synth-led introduction, Q-Tip’s first rhymes momentarily stall the song’s forward motion, as he throws down a challenge to the Constitution’s opening statement: “We don’t believe you/Cause ‘We the People’/Are still here in the rear/Yo, we don’t need you.” With the culture in a “killing off good young nigga mood,” the MC reports on a chasm that still exists between the nation’s abstract virtues and its daily, lived reality.

After noting how gentrification threatens vulnerable communities, Q-Tip proposes a cynical redraft of the national credo: “All you Black folks, you must go/All you Mexicans, you must go/All you poor folks, you must go.” For good measure, he includes some other targets of resurgent white nationalist politics: “Muslims and gays, boy, we hate your ways.” The melody he attaches to this chorus is pointedly simplistic, near-monotone, and devoid of the vibrant personality of his opening bars. In the second verse, it’s up to the late Phife Dawg to reenergize the culture under assault. He does so with boldness and wit, nominating Tribe’s pluralist swagger as an aphrodisiac: “We got your missy smitten, rubbing on her little kitten/Dreaming of a world that's equal for women, with no division.” –Seth Colter Walls

Listen:A Tribe Called Quest: “We the People…”

“Black Beatles” is the moment Mike WiLL Made-It discovers a new universe while Rae Sremmurd find new ways to plug their irresistible voices into the pocket. There’s an elemental depth to the composition—Mike WiLL is on some Steve Reich shit. Such an industrial, looming beat became the soundtrack to the viral Mannequin Challenge where people froze, a tacit acknowledgment that the song’s buoyant flair is tempered by a monolithic quality so immense it stops time (fittingly, the Mannequin Challenge helped the brothers overcome underperforming album sales and score their first #1 record). With the fatherly presence of Gucci Mane, hot off his rejuvenated life post-prison, the song crams as much joy into itself as possible, the two young rappers and their Atlanta dad trading bars, comparing themselves to the most hallowed group in rock history. Swae Lee, the same guy who penned the irresistible Beyoncé hook “OK ladies, now let’s get in formation,” turns a meme (“Get you somebody that can do both”) into a sweet croon. By the time Slim Jxmmi declares, “Me and Paul McCartney related!” near the end, this pair has efficiently turned the song’s simple conceptual gag into a reflection of their own songwriting prowess. –Matthew Ramirez

Listen:Rae Sremmurd: “Black Beatles”

For the longest time, it seemed like “True Love Waits” would remain one of the great songs never put to tape in a studio. Originally written around the time of 1995’s The Bends, Radiohead have played it live for years, and its ever-evolving form—from a delicately strummed version to one made opaque by reverb—has been chronicled by bootleggers and fans along the way. Though the band did release an official, stripped-down concert recording of the song in 2001—which producer Nigel Godrich once called “that shitty live version”—the mystery remained.

But then, 21 years after it first graced a stage, “True Love Waits” showed up to close A Moon Shaped Pool. Fans have speculated that Thom Yorke’s own broken heart resulted in this definitive take; it’s more cracked and brittle than any bootleg, with pianos that pull at the singer’s voice like spirits tugging at the corporeal world. Lines that once felt like a plea—“just don’t leave”—sound hopeless now, Yorke singing to his departed lover. Whatever the reason the band felt the song was finally ready, “True Love Waits” is an elegiac coda to one of Radiohead’s most inward-facing albums and a fitting treatment to a song that many already considered a classic. The wait was worth it. –Nathan Reese

Listen:Radiohead: “True Love Waits”

Angel Olsenopens My Woman with a dreamy prediction that she will “fall in love with you someday.” That haze is short-lived; when “Shut Up Kiss Me” rolls around a few minutes later, she’s suddenly full of determination. “Someday” now translates to “immediately.” There’s no time for debate in her demand to “shut up kiss me hold me tight.” My Woman’s most rockin’ number cuts straight to the point.

Olsen is no stranger to frank expression, but the dogged determination of “Shut Up Kiss Me” shows off many new tools in her arsenal. After her initial attempts at reconciliation prove futile, Olsen pulls out her final tactic: throaty temptation. As she offers herself as a vessel for her lover’s anxieties (“I could make it all disappear/You could feed me all of your fears”), something within Olsen snaps, and the gravity of the situation is truly felt for the first time. In the song’s self-directed video, this moment is represented by Olsen being dragged away on her roller-skates until she falls to the ground, her voice spinning off-kilter until it dissolves past words. There’s no resolution here, but there’s also no doubt that Olsen will get back on her feet and keep trying. –Quinn Moreland

Angel Olsen: “Shut Up Kiss Me” (Buy on Bandcamp)

It’s likely that the sweeping popularity of Rihanna’s “Work” led the way in a windfall of dancehall-inspired pop tunes throughout the year, from Tory Lanez’ “Luv” to Sia’s Sean Paul-featuring “Cheap Thrills,” bringing Caribbean riddims and vernacular to the top of the Billboard 100 for the first time in about a decade. (In a year where ethno-nationalism swept the United States, this feat proves Rihanna can be just as political as, say, the Knowles sisters.)

Elsewhere in “Work,” Drake is at his earnest best, playing the emotional foil to Rihanna’s chorus while assuring her that he’d pick her over an equally hot, talented twin. The beat is magical and minimal, with Boi-1da leaving enough space to allow the two superstars to propel the song forward. In a year that gave us two AubRih songs (and plenty of relationship-status speculation), “Work” stands out in its urgent beauty. –Noah Yoo

Listen: Rihanna: “Work” [ft. Drake]

At the center of Luigi Russolo’s 1913 manifesto “The Art of Noises” is a letter from his friend and fellow Futurist F.T. Marinetti. It is a punch-drunk, stream-of-consciousness string of gibberish meant to replicate the concussive tumble of trench warfare—a breathless, onomatopoeic blast of “zang-tumb-tuumb” climaxing in an “orchestra of the noises of war swelling under a held note of silence in the high sky.”

A “held note of silence” isn’t a bad description for the way Anohni’s voice cuts through the rapid-fire chaos—the rat-a-tat drums, the martial fanfare—of Hudson Mohawke and Oneohtrix Point Never’s production in the devastating “Drone Bomb Me,” which she has described as a “love song” from the perspective of a 9-year-old Afghani girl whose family has just been killed by a drone strike. But when she sings “I want to die” in a voice so clear it could stop bullets in mid-air, she turns the Futurists’ macho posturing on its head. In place of noise, Anohni gives us a melody that’s almost unbearably gorgeous. In place of Marinetti’s lust for war and “scorn for woman,” she posits radical empathy—an empathy so extreme, in fact, that it may make you a little uncomfortable. “Blow my head off,” she sings, giving voice to the little girl’s extravagant death wish. “Explode my crystal guts/Lay my purple on the grass.” –Philip Sherburne

ANOHNI: “Drone Bomb Me” (Buy on Bandcamp)

There is no resurrection in “Lazarus.” The song arrives as a moment of tension: a lumbering melody tugged along by mournful saxophones and guitars that sound like heavy doors slamming shut. In it, our narrator finds himself in danger. He drops his cellphone and heads to New York City, desperation never too far behind. He has a fleeting vision of himself in the not-so-distant future: “I’ll be free, just like that bluebird.” After a chaotic squall—the kind of wild, jutting rhythm that Bowie used to ride toward the heavens—things abruptly fade, giving the song an eerie, elliptical end. In his last video, Bowie acts out that finale, looking terrified before flashing a sudden devilish smirk and retreating into the darkness. You forget for a second that he’s acting; then you remember he’s not. –Sam Sodomsky

Listen:David Bowie: “Lazarus”

“Oooh I could hate you now/It’s quite alright to hate me now,” sings Frank Ocean with all the tenderness in the world, “but we both know that deep down/The feeling still deep down is good.” A shimmery guitar intertwines with his voice, and the snake-space formed by their movement is mesmerizing. The only other musical element in this ballad of reflection and regret is a bassline whose understated propulsion allows for subtleties of timing that a rhythm section would deny. Love songs that trade in high-contrast emotions draped over straightforward song structures may be aspirational but they rarely ring true, which is why this love song stays with us, irrefutable and unexpected: “I had no chance to prepare/Couldn’t see you coming.”

After climaxing with a scream, “Ivy” ends amid a scrabble of indeterminate noise. By including the sound of a song being abandoned, Ocean voices what every bruised lover knows: Messiness both fucks with grace and makes it possible. –Jace Clayton

Listen:Frank Ocean: “Ivy”

“Cranes in the Sky” is a wondrously wrought song about emotional precarity and recovery. If the body and mind are some personal city unto itself, for Solange, the cranes looming above are powerful symbols of how omnipresent and ugly the work of self-care can be. With the help of Raphael Saadiq’s magnificently spacious production, she weaves together a series of defeats and diversions into some landscape of possible healing. It’s a small epic about coming to grips with yourself, framed as a deep, warm, musical embrace. –Kevin Lozano

Listen: Solange: “Cranes in the Sky”

No one was quite prepared for Beyoncé’s “Formation.” The video dropped with little fanfare—just an unlisted link on her website during a Saturday afternoon in the dead of winter. But by the next day, when Bey appeared at the Super Bowl halftime show with Coldplay and Bruno Mars, a new era had dawned. Both song and video were defiant, proud, political: Beyoncé flicked off the camera, sprawled before us, drowning atop a police car. She was taking a stand for herself and for larger issues like Black Lives Matter and police brutality, no longer conforming to the structures around her.

Mike WiLL Made-It’s production begins piercingly, with sparse trap beats rolling into a marching-band stomp. Spindly synths bubble below the surface, a complement to aggressive, proudly black lyrics: “I like my negro nose with Jackson 5 nostrils,” Bey sings at one point. Here, plainly and strongly, is a woman redefining her long-established role as an entertainer; a few months later, upon the release of Lemonade, we also learned that this was a woman advocating for the resiliency and internalized power of all black women in a world that denigrates our minds and bodies. –Britt Julious

Listen:Beyoncé: “Formation”

I’m tryna keep my faith. But I’m lookin’ for more. Kanye West has always stood before us a troubled, hungry soul, a Rorschach blot of desperation and exuberance. Duringhis frantic, decade-long scramble to the pulsing center of pop culture, he has often seemed a man cursed by dissatisfaction, doomed to pull repeatedly from a thermos of salted water. It’s been hard not to wonder, whether you hated or loved him: What drives this guy? Can anyone keep this up?

Somewhere I can feel safe. And end this holy war. As 2016 dawned uneasily, West seemed, for the first time, capable of succumbing to the exhaustion that was the flip side of his blazing creative energy. He was in the second half of his 30s; he’d had his second child; he was trying to corral an unruly mess of an album that seemed to keep defying basic order and structure. So he opened the album with a prayer. The song is at least 30 percent silence. Silence is not a common guest on Kanye West’s albums. Here, it is the star.

Pray for Paris. Pray for the parents.“Ultralight Beam” is an exalted space, a promise of redemption and healing that felt more fragile and unlikely as the year wore on. It is a song of Godlike perspective from a man who spent most of the year appearing to have none. It’s a Kanye West song with almost no Kanye West in it. Oh, he is responsible for it—technically speaking, he is the reason that Kirk Franklin and Kelly Price are here, sharing space with The-Dream and Chance the Rapper; he’s the motivation behind this thumping, sleepy beat and those rafter-quaking gospel harmonies. But apart from dispensing some words of kindness and benediction, he barely appears. Whatever we are meant to experience inside of this little space, we need him out of the way. He seems to understand this.

This is a God dream. This is everything. Not much felt safe or certain in 2016, the year of crumbling structures and looming threats realized. Humanity’s penchant for destroying itself, for tearing at societal bonds, took its raging turn in the spotlight. There was precious little empathy or palpable love to be found. We all seem exhausted. On November 22, West checked himself into a hospital, shortly after unraveling onstage, for “temporary psychosis due to sleep deprivation and dehydration.” He spent Thanksgiving there, canceling future tour dates. Weeks earlier, his wife had been held up at gunpoint in a brutal robbery. As the darkness closes in, “Ultralight Beam” pulses outward, neither dimming nor brightening as it offers its unchanging message: This is a God dream. This is everything. Everything. –Jayson Greene

Listen:Kanye West: “Ultralight Beam” [ft. Chance the Rapper, The-Dream, Kelly Price, and Kirk Franklin]

Rapper 21 Savage and producer Metro Boomin’s Savage Mode is a heavy, dark collaboration between these two young Atlanta stars. Though many artists draw their verses from lived experience, there is something uniquely dour in Savage’s storytelling. His narratives are accented by the production’s rhythmic twitches; low, round bass buoys his flat, vocal fry monotone. Flutes, xylophones, and old video game effects contrast with the harsh whisper of Savage alongside Future on “X.” “Feel It,” a love song, seems hopeless, but Savage’s near-percussive repetition of “I can feel it in the air” is intoxicating. This record presents a slow burn and a singular mood: grim music for grim times. –Erin Macleod

Listen:21 Savage/Metro Boomin: “No Heart”

Since Aaron Maine began releasing music as Porches, his style has evolved from down-home alt-country to synth-streaked, lo-fi pop. Pool, Porches’ second album and first on the indie mainstay Domino Records, was another shift, diving headlong into the lacquered keys and prickly guitars of quintessential ’80s pop in a way that recalls circa-2009 chillwave. With mixing by ace Chris Coady, the bid for professionalism paid off in a set of elegantly restrained, melancholic synth-pop tunes that showcase Maine’s aching falsetto. The laconic yet vivid lyrics, with references to weed, water, and other music, belie Maine’s background in painting. There's even a heartstopping saxophone solo. What saves Pool from getting lost in its own glossy vibes is an underlying sense of intimacy, helped no doubt by its being recorded mainly in Maine’s Manhattan apartment, and by some warmly enigmatic backing vocals from Greta Kline, better known as Frankie Cosmos. A follow-up EP of Pool demos, Water, further attests to the sturdiness of Maine’s craft. –Marc Hogan

Listen:Porches: “Underwater”

Greta Kline is the girl on the F train scanning the subway car’s bounty for inspiration, scribbling her thoughts in a notebook. As Frankie Cosmos, her muses include New York City, animals, the touring life, memories, friends, growing up—big topics that she distills with a few carefully chosen words and notes and sounds. Near the end of her brief, brilliant album Next Thing, backed by a simple backbeat and ringing guitars—think the Strokes minus any and all machismo—the 22-year-old breaks down nothing less than the paradox of life in two tidy lines: “When you’re young, you’re too young/When you’re old, you’re too old.” The record’s 15 songs all clock in around the two-minute mark, a brevity born of wisdom rather than laziness. Kline is a keen editor of feelings and fragments. She knows exactly when to end a song, which can be just as important as knowing when to start one. –Ryan Dombal

Listen:Frankie Cosmos: “Outside with the Cuties”

On A Good Night in the Ghetto, the young Oakland MC Kamaiyah captures lightning in a bottle. Confident and nuanced, it’s a self-contained piece of Bay Area hip-hop with clear lyrical nods to Too $hort, as the funkified, fleshy beats recall DJ Quik. Kamaiyah chronicles her young life via a series of drunken and stoned nights (“Out the Bottle”) and a supply of sexual conquests (“Niggas,” “Break You Down”) that are notable in how bold and plainspoken she is about them. Kamaiyah’s style descends from fellow West Coast rappers like Suga Free, but it’s also very much her own, blending equal loves of Cali hip-hop and ’90s vocal groups like TLC. Bay Area producers such as P-Lo, 1-O.A.K., and Trackademicks blend new jack swing and radio R&B samples for this young, agile rapper. The YG-featuring “Fuck It Up” and life-affirming hit single “How Does It Feel?” leap out of the speakers and onto many DJ sets, but it’s the overall triumphant vibe of A Good Night in the Ghetto that merits repeat listens. –Matthew Ramirez

Listen:Kamaiyah: “How Does It Feel”

The Montclair, N.J. group Pinegrove have two logos: one, a small box intersected with an identical box, is favored among their legions of young and tattooed fans, as evidenced in an endless stream of RTs on the band’s page. The other is an ampersand. This summer, when Pitchfork interviewed the band’s frontman, Evan Stephens Hall—a 27-year-old of highly enthusiastic, bookish charisma—he said he’d thought about publishing a pamphlet on Pinegrove iconography. Both symbols, he said, are intended to reflect an ethos of multiplicity, of many simultaneous realities, and thus of radical empathy. 

On Cardinal, Hall’s plainspoken lyrics belie this epistemological headiness, but you can feel the compassion in their raw alt-country arrangements, in phrases that reach and erupt. Pinegrove songs are appealingly episodic. “Aphasia,” the best one, is about moments when language falters. The narrative leading “Size of the Moon”—moving furniture to dance, the liminality in love—is basically Taylor Swift’s “Out of the Woods.” When people call Cardinal“emo,” what they mean is there’s bracing lucidity to lyrics such as “I saw Leah on the bus a few months ago/Saw some old friends at her funeral,” or “Maybe I should have got out a bit more when you guys were still in town/I got too caught up in my own shit/That’s how every outcome’s such a comedown.” Life, as ever, demands such clear-headedness. It demands we learn how to talk with one another. Cardinal contains that power and hope. –Jenn Pelly

Listen:Pinegrove: “Old Friends”

In a post-truth age, who needs words, anyway? Certainly not William Tyler, whose guitar talks the talk on Modern Country, his fourth album. A former member of Lambchop, Kurt Wagner’s long-running Nashville-based country-soul collective, Tyler’s ambitions always pointed further out than just being a solo guitarist. When he released his debut in 2008 (under the name the Paper Hats), Tyler’s instrumentals mixed in drones, and subsequent releases have featured clattering avant jams (2014’s Blue Ash Montgomery cassette) and pedal steel-laced krautrock covers soaring towards the Western horizon (2014’s Lost Colony EP). But like the genre it takes its name from, Modern Country is extremely accessible. Welcoming of every experimental deviance, the album firmly establishes Tyler as a link in the chain of experimental American guitarists who know that sometimes, lyrics just spoil the fun. –Jesse Jarnow

Listen: William Tyler: “Gone Clear”

At the time of this writing, Kevin Gates’ major label debut, Islah, is one of only two rap albums released this year to be awarded platinum certification by the RIAA (the other being Drake’s massive, guest-star-laden VIEWS). It’s a remarkable accomplishment for an album with no featured guests, apart from the Ty Dolla $ign/Trey Songz/Jamie Foxx trifecta on the bonus track “Jam.” It’s all Gates, a summation of his career that pushes him into new but logical directions. At once too-much-coffee intense, disarmingly gentle, and unfashionably sincere—often all at the same time—Islah is a lot to take in, but having zero chill is one of Gates’ greatest strengths. On “Ain’t Too Hard” he raps, “Sometimes emotions get the best of me clearly/And I ain’t never try to straddle no fences.” May he never aim for the middle ground. –Renato Pagnani

Listen:Kevin Gates: “2 Phones”

Though Natalie Mering wears her ’70s rock influences proudly on her sleeve, Weyes Blood is careful not to rehash the past. Gorgeous synth strings, blocky piano chords, and vast harmony stacks lift her powerful, baroque voice. She often sings about modern topics; on “Generation Why,” she amusedly recounts her fractious relationship with technology. “Goin’ to see end of days/I’ve been hanging on my phone all day/And the fear goes away,” she lilts as phantom background vocalists rise alongside a rumbling organ and acoustic guitar plucks resound, seemingly from a dream. Front Row Seat to Earth has many of these moments, where Mering’s vocals and arrangements coalesce into a melancholy, beautiful cry to the heavens—not a plea to a higher power, but a declaration of worthiness in the present day. –Noah Yoo

Listen:Weyes Blood: “Generation Why”

Vince Staples cites “Kurt Cobain dreams,” but the suicidal Nirvana frontman serves as a stand-in for anyone who ever felt the walls close in. If rock/rap star alienation is its own genre, Staples rehabilitates it on this barely 20-minute EP—part F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up,” part psychedelic gangsta rap industrial rave brawl soundtracked by James Blake, DJ Dahi, and No I.D. Unlike his more self-pitying peers, Staples lucidly dissects his psychological disintegration. We see the pitfalls and contradictions of celebrity—the pressures that mount when you need to escape poverty and violence but can’t turn your back on the place that raised you. Prima Donna is existentially trapped music—when you’re too wealthy to complain but branded a consumer product, forced to answer condescending questions, and smile for inane selfies. When Staples sings in that wounded croak, “this little light of mine,” it’s hard to imagine anyone else so artfully distilling the darkness. –Jeff Weiss

Listen:Vince Staples: “Prima Donna”

Huerco S.’s ambient album For Those of You Who Have Never (And Also Those Who Have), was this year’s great salve. Itevoked that liminal state between awake and asleep, when your whirring brain slows down enough to let your body rest. The burbling, drunken loop of “Lifeblood” is in constant danger of being overtaken by a lush drone, while “Marked for Life” drags warmth from what sounds like the flickering glow of a million computer screens. But the real feat of this record is the sequencing, beginning with the pillowy ambient of “A Sea of Love” and ending with a look to the stars via “The Sacred Dance.” In between, the album lurches and drifts through underwater atmospherics, subtle sonar pings, and blunted nostalgia trips via the sound of ’70s science films. At the right volume, it can muffle the outside world entirely.

Much has been made of how these tracks cut off abruptly, like the producer didn’t know how to end them. It’s consistently jarring, but it also makes sense. Endings require answers—or at least some gesture toward certainty. But when that certainty is impossible, For Those… acts as an antidote. –Sam Hockley-Smith

Listen:Huerco S.: “Promises of Fertility”

The core of the album by the pianist Vijay Iyer and his mentor, the trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, is its title suite, commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a tribute to the late Indian artist and photographer Nasreen Mohamedi. The suite ranges in mood from the quieter “Uncut Emeralds” to the rumbling intensity of“A Cold Fire”—all titles stemming from Mohamedi’s diary entries—and coheres into a minimal yet layered partnership that connects two generations and two approaches, as well as echoes the thoughtful minimalism of the visual artist. Iyer and Smith worked together previously in Smith’s Golden Quartet, but this is the truest expression yet of their relationship: Here, they are united in palpable fondness and awe. –Erin Macleod

Listen:Vijay Iyer/Wadada Leo Smith: “Passage”

For Moodymann’s entry in the DJ-Kicks series he creates a hazy world, feeling free to invent a space where singer Cody ChestnuTT’s blunted “Serve This Royalty” is mashed up against Detroit rapper Dopehead like they were always meant to play next to each other. It’s not about making a huge statement, it’s about making a series of small ones. Years and genres are disregarded as Moodymann pieces together a mix linked by disconnect. Each of these tracks is just slightly off—marred by a drum stutter, a muffled throb of bass, or a piece of fuzzy sound. By the time he gets around to revitalizing Jai Paul’s modern classic “BTSTU”—which sounds like a revelation here—it’s clear that there’s another subliminal theme at play: Each song is an epiphany, a bedroom artist pushing his or her idiosyncratic tendencies into the world at large. –Sam Hockley-Smith

Listen:Dopehead: “Guttah Guttah”

Like Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle or Clipse’s Lord Willin’,Blank Face LP is gloriously, unrepentantly street, an album disinterested in crossover or concession. Shadowy and ochre and starkly soulful, it dips low and knocks hard. Miguel, Kendrick Lamar, Kanye West, Jadakiss, Vince Staples, and others drop in and out, but almost as soon as they’ve surfaced, dense plumes of figurative Cali weed smoke swallow them whole and you forget they were even there. The scenery-chewing Schoolboy Q won’tbe faded or upstaged as he spits clipped, curving darts straight into your consciousness. Redemption isn’t necessarily foremost on the South Central L.A.’s rapper’s mind here: For every “Let’s put the guns down and blaze a spliff,” there are eight or nine equivalents of “I was out here sellin’ dope at 14, what it do?/I was out here fuckin’ hoes at 14, what it do?” Blank Face’s triumphlies in how it weaves these extremes into a realized, lived-in world, each vignette bleeding naturally into the next, and in Q’s lyrical and tonal commitment to a version of his youth that past releases only touched on. –Raymond Cummings

Listen:Schoolboy Q: “THat Part” [ft. Kanye West]

KING’s first album is rendered in just the right number of brushstrokes; songs like “Carry On” rely heavily on negative space, free of clutter and pretense. Their competence and earnestness is also reflected in three tracks that reappear from the trio’s 2011 EP, presented here in “extended mixes” that display a half-decade of shrewd tweaks and revisions. All these fragments coalesce into one synth-led, R&B-heavy, deeply soulful whole. KING work best as impressionists; “Red Eye” sounds like a bout of sleep deprivation mixed with a little desperation and a good bit of sex. The signature song is “The Greatest,” a delightfully off-kilter ode to Muhammad Ali: It’s no wonder Prince spoke so highly of these new Los Angeles royals. –Paul A. Thompson

Listen:KING: “The Greatest”

On the first Tuesday in July, police killed Alton Sterling. On Wednesday, they took Philando Castile. The following day, Jamila Woods showed us HEAVN and reminded us that despite everything, there is still hope.

In her glowing solo debut, Woods seeks and creates her own refuge, proclaiming graceful pride in her blackness and her hometown of Chicago. On “LSD,” an ode to the city (via Lake Shore Drive) featuring Chance the Rapper, she sings, “A body of water inside me/Reminds me of oceans, though I’ve never known one/I’m born by a cold one”—in one fell swoop, linking Lake Michigan to the Atlantic, and herself to her ancestors. On “VRY BLK,” Woods flips the children’s clapping game Miss Mary Mack into a quietly devastating commentary on police brutality. She also stitches anecdotes from other Black women into her songs, telling of a place where Black girls with “braids filled with bubbles” chants Assata Shakur, where the CD man still walks up and down 79th, where young love blooms on Emerald Street. Throughout HEAVN, members of Chicago’s young musical vanguard lend themselves to Woods' warm vision:Noname delivers poetic raps, Nico Segal offers jazzy trumpet lines,oddCouple makes cushy beats. Chicago is her heaven, which, she comes to realize, was also inside her all along. –Minna Zhou

Listen:Jamila Woods: “HEAVN”

Hamilton Leithauser, late of the Walkmen, and Rostam Batmanglij, formerly of Vampire Weekend, took a nod from David Byrne and Brian Eno when deciding how to bill their album together, and that was telling: Like those pioneers’ two classic collaborations, I Had a Dream That You Were Mine keeps both of its creators’ identities intact. In combining two of the recent indie-rock realm’s more distinctive artistic sensibilities, though, this first full-length from Hamilton Leithauser and Rostam transports both someplace altogether wonderful and different. What would the disheveled-yet-debonair voice of the Walkmen sound like over finger-picked classical guitar? ...with saxophone? ...alongside the dulcet Angel Deradoorian on a Disney-esque symphonic reverie?

Now we know. Between dry shooby-doo-wops and barstool howls, with a slide guitar here and a smattering of synths there, I Had a Dream updates mid-20th-century pop tropes—and tweaks its makers’ musical trademarks—for a thoroughly engrossing, richly enjoyable album rooted in nostalgia and loss. “I use the same voice I always had,” Leithauser roars early on, and it’s true of both parties here. Although Leithauser is touring the material without Batmanglij, who’s increasingly busy as a pop producer, let’s hope that, unlike Byrne and Eno, it doesn’t take them 27 years to reunite. –Marc Hogan

Listen:Hamilton Leithauser/Rostam: “A 1000 Times”

By most accounts, classic rock had a good year in 2016. Beyoncé sampled Led Zeppelin. Frank Ocean sampled the Beatles. The Oldchella Festival found the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, and Neil Young uniting for a block of music that previously existed only on classic rock radio. And then, on a more modest scale, there was Kevin Morby’s Singing Saw: an album steeped in this tradition with ideas so ingrained in our collective conscious as to feel idiomatic. But the most striking thing about Morby’s music is less his set of influences and more his ability to locate the internal geography that has informed them all.

The album, tellingly named after an instrument whose eerie warble sounds like wind howling against a window, finds wisdom in the natural world. Morby lets his songs unfold with an organic sense of inevitability. When he asks for trumpets in “Destroyer,” they appear. In the title track, he wanders behind the house as percussion chirps around him like crickets. And in “I Have Been to the Mountain,” the album’s most momentous anthem—one that eulogizes Eric Garner, giving Singing Saw its deepest sense of urgency—Morby gazes heavenward to find he’s become a part of his surroundings, and that they are as attuned to him as he is to them. “A sky that mirrors,” he muses. “A sky that stares as I sing.” —Sam Sodomsky

Listen:Kevin Morby: “I Have Been to the Mountain”

Though blackSUMMERS’night was Maxwell’s first album in seven years, the final product doesn’t sound overwrought or overworked—in fact, parts of it seem half-erased or smudged. In that sense, it recalls There’s a Riot Goin’On, where the number of overdubs melt and obscure the original tracks until the voice at the center seems to be singing against a production of ghosts. The horns that were central to Maxwell’s previous album are now almost parenthetical, swelling out of the corners of songs like “Fingers Crossed”and then sinking back into silence. This makes for an album the pleasures of which, beyond Maxwell’s newly grainy voice, can be as abstract as they are immediate: The disco pulse of “All the Ways That Love Can Feel” exists between two margins, a stereo space in which guitar and organ sounds merge like inkblots. “The Fall”’s drums give the song a jazzy digression that resembles the shiver of autumn leaves. Beneath their generous detail, though, the songs on blackSUMMERS’nightare still Maxwell songs; it’s music as furniture—not in the Erik Satie ambient sense, but music you can sink into and feel something resembling an embrace. –Brad Nelson

Listen:Maxwell: “1990x”

Elza Soares’ story ought to be a tragedy: The 79-year-old Brazilian singer has survived political exile, enduring racism, and marital abuse by a national icon. But since emerging from the Rio favelas in the 1950s, she has channeled that horrific biography into an display of perseverance in the face of adversity—both her own and her country’s. “While there are still black people taking a beating, we will have music to make,” she has said.

Soares recorded her last studio LP, 2004’s Vivo Feliz, with her 26-year-old rapper husband. Its follow-up, again made with artists decades her junior, is a work of staggering, coruscated beauty. Musicians assembled from São Paolo’s samba sujo (“dirty samba”) scene abrade and mutilate Afro-Brazilian rhythms, with staccato guitars that splice eerie post-punk with primal post-hardcore. Soares’ what-is-this-shit rasp thrashes through the noise. In the chorus of “Pra Fuder,” or “To Fuck,” she pelts out the titular refrain like a dancer on hot coals; on “Maria da Vila Matilde,” she offers her domestic abuser a faceful of scalding water, then calmly refills the kettle to welcome the cops.

She is always in character, but often that character is Elza Soares, the Brazilian myth. On the title track, written in her honorby Rômulo Fróes, Soares attends an apocalyptic carnival, seeming to hover overhead. She wanders through the “confetti rain,” past “angel wings…scattered on the ground.”“There, in the parade,” she growls, as the chorus explodes like so many streamers, “I left my black skin, my voice...My home, my solitude...Woman at the end of the world, I am.” InA Mulher do Fim do Mundo, she has made the album of her life, in every sense.“I go on singing,”she croaks finally, “Till the end.”–Jazz Monroe

Listen:Elza Soares: “Mulher do film do mundo”

Emerging from the ashes of Smith Westerns, guitarist Max Kakacek and Julien Ehrlich created a sound tinged with late-’60s, harmony-soaked nostalgia. Ehrlich’s lyrics are winsome, celebrating an America of yawning skies and infinite possibilities, and the arrangements are big, fitting forWhitney’s large touring presence. “No Woman” uses strings and horns as perfect punctuation, while the “na-na-nas” of “Golden Days” call for arms-around-the-shoulders-style camaraderie. Light Upon the Lake isn’t about grand statements or shifting paradigms but is instead a place of escape and comfort, a perfectly rendered example of guitar-pop at its best. –Nathan Reese

Listen: Whitney: “No Matter Where We Go”

BeforeEmily’s D+Evolution, Esperanza Spalding was a certain kind of artist—the kind who performs at the White House, who wins Grammys as reliably as you and I file taxes. Somewhere along the line, she must have squinted at all this and decided it was boring, because on Emily’s D+Evolution—a runaway buggy of jazz fusion, folk rock, and prog—she exploded it. Sinewy, lean, and containing some three-dozen hairpin turns across its 12 tracks, the album feels pitched somewhere between master’s thesis and decathlon. It is a heroic feat that would feel fatiguing if Spalding weren’t nearly cackling with glee through it all. Even when the music conjures Joni Mitchell fronting Yes, Spalding sings and plays with mortal urgency, exploring questions about gender roles, about the existence of evil and temptation, about humanity’s ability to self-destruct, and about the need for love and courage in the face of it all. “We could change the whole story of love,” she pleads on the open-hearted ballad “Unconditional Love.” By the ferocity of her conviction, you are almost swayed into believing it. –Jayson Greene

Listen:Esperanza Spalding: “Earth to Heaven”

Exploring the Buchla synthesizer, says composer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, has led her to think differently about her surroundings: “When I hear any sound in the entire world, I end up thinking, ‘How would I have made that?’” This appears to be the challenge she presented herself while creating her masterwork EARS. An uncanny valley of burbling aquatic sounds and the chatter of birds, insects, and amphibians mark “Wetlands,” while “Rare Things Grow” is full of sloshing, dripping movement. Smith has discussed the patience required to understand a modular synthesizer, and that manifests in this slow-building music, which blurs the line between organic and synthetic. Vocals are processed beyond comprehension; woodwinds tangle with Smith’s electronics. The album’s artwork is a painting full of flora and fauna, some recognizable while others are seemingly fictional. Similarly, EARS teems with life both knowable and incomprehensible. She’s built a world of her own. It’s a good place. —Evan Minsker

Listen:Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith: “Existence in the Unfurling”

Months after breaking through with his vibrant, heartfelt album Malibu, Anderson .Paak continued to drape himself in his most garish threads—literally and metaphorically. On Yes Lawd!, his collaborative project with bohemian beatmaker Knxwledge, you can picture the satin-smooth soul man peacocking in a blaxploitation joint, draped in a gaudy-as-hell coat with matching fedora. Knxwledge, meanwhile, chops up the samples into quick-fire sonic sketches; this is a beat tape of lean soul, grubby basslines and hard drum loops. .Paak delivers his low-level hustler anecdotes with a broad grin etched across his face. This is old-school gold, as vintage as .Paak’s plaid jackets. For best results, try bumping it on a convertible’s tape deck. –Dean Van Nguyen

Listen:NxWorries: “Lyk Dis”

Aside from their name, an emerging rapper’s hometown is one of the most important details to know about her. On Telefone, Noname’s stunning debut, her native Chicago is a central character; even though her chosen moniker hints at a guarded public persona, any reservedness disappears as she takes us through the Windy City. Sometimes she evokes the nostalgia of childhood summers, eating ice cream on her front porch as she watches her friends hit the “Diddy Bop.” Then, abruptly, she describes her peers as being “Casket Pretty,” because any one of them could be buried looking just as beautiful as they are in the instant before their life is taken.

Similarly dark prospects are juxtaposed with happy beats throughout Telefone: warm church organs, snapping fingers and major-key vocals from friends and collaborators like Cam O’bi and Eryn Allen Kane. The record would be completely devastating if it weren’t so charming. Any city, even one whose narrative isfrequently reduced to one of danger and unrest, is inhabited by people who want the best for themselves and their loved ones. On Telefone, Noname invites the listener to see this through her eyes by opening up about her joys, her loves, and her losses closest to home. –Vanessa Okoth-Obbo

Listen:Noname: “Diddy Bop” [ft. Raury and Cam O’bi”]

The Brooklyn band Parquet Courts have the misfortune of seeming smart, which they are. But under the art-punk jigsaw puzzles and copious amounts of thinking, there are feelings, too: ordinary ones like I miss you (“Berlin Got Blurry”), nobody understands me (“Paraphrased”), and I feel kinda lonely (“One Man No City”). They are clearly felt if not always clearly stated. Romantics at heart, Parquet Courts keep their wits up; sensitive, they yell as often as possible. Even richer and more layered than Austin Brown and Andrew Savage’s lyrics is the band’s music, which sounds both working-class and sophisticated (“Human Performance”), country (“Outside,” “Pathos Prairie”), and city (“Captive of the Sun,” “Two Dead Cops”). It is as psychedelic and gristly as Manhattan traffic at dusk. In other words, Parquet Courts continue to rock, with and without quotation marks. –Mike Powell

Listen:Parquet Courts: “Outside”

Many talk about it, but this year, a handful of guys—DJ Paypal, Sporting Life, and this crazy kid from Quebec—actually stomped on the line connecting archival black music tropes to the ever-branching threads of electronic music. 99.9% got everything right by “Track Uno”(among the best song titles of the year): the junk-bin funk sample lands like a transmission from the early-’80s radio sets that birthed Detroit techno, even leaning back into scratchy A.M. static before the drums plunge. Kay’s drums are like his glasses: at once nondescript and trademark, their Dilla-ish wonkiness frame the many different voices he invites to play throughout the record. From legitimizing Craig David’scomeback to prodding Syd tha Kydout front, Kaytranada might’ve made R&B great again by dancing around it like an election pun. Still, turn up your bass and blast “Lite Spots,” and it becomes quickly apparent how futile it is to overthink his style. For every R&B remix that inspires a thousand Soundcloud jockeys, he drops an inimitable freak-out like this Portuguese chop job—hard evidence that a featured guest or obtuse sample can’t distract from his strong hand when he chooses to show it. –Matthew Trammell

Listen:Kaytranada: “Glowed Up” [ft. Anderson .Paak]

This is how bands are made in 2016: Not in the garage or in the basement, but in the backseat of your mother’s car. Graduating from a period during which he released approximately 11 albums of smart but scrupulously ambition-free indie rock through Bandcamp, songwriter Will Toledo stabilized his lineup, expanded his sound, and resigned himself to his talent. 

A feel-good album about people chemically incapable of feeling good,Teens of Denial reckons mental illness, alienation, and a blooper reel’s worth of false epiphanies without angst or coddling, the only real redemption being a chance to fuck up again. And if you don’t have the time for lyrical exegesis, you can pump your fist instead—the music certainly warrants it. How Toledo manages to keep such close company with depression and still find the will to rock is a mystery. That he does it with humor is a miracle. Pray that he never takes happiness seriously. –Mike Powell

Listen:Car Seat Headrest: “Fill in the Blank”

Midway through pop avant-gardist Jenny Hval’s sixth album, Blood Bitch, her frequent collaborators Annie Bielski contemplate the record’s concept. “It’s about vampires…. It’s about blood,” Bielski concludes. True, as Hval has said, Blood Bitch is indeed a look into “the purest and most powerful, yet most trivial, and most terrifying blood,” but it is also about desire, capitalism, and self-discovery. As she considers these ideas, Hval's voice floats skyward, tethered to her worldly concerns only by pulsing beats that conjure the throb of menstruation. Rarely does an album focus so fully on the dignity and beauty of female fluids. This year saw the female body and her rightsattackedrelentlessly, as if the capacity to reproduce automatically prohibits autonomy. Blood Bitch gives power to the rejected body with a simple encouragement: “Don’t be afraid, it’s only blood.” –Quinn Moreland

Listen:Jenny Hval: “Conceptual Romance”

The pivotal moment on YG’s set-throwing sophomore album, Still Brazy, is “Who Shot Me?” a song that attempts to uncover who exactly tried to kill the rapper last June. It’s like opening a film with a flash-forward to the violent, climactic ending, narrated by the victim, who’s reflective and conscience-stricken. In his 11th hour, isolated and angry, YG scrolls back through his memory bank seeking to identify the shooter from the long list of enemies he’s made as a rich gangsta. What spirals out is a polished gangland parable, brimming with paranoia and panic. YG assesses the short history of his wrongdoings, and subtly examines the cycle of bloodshed incited by sporting colors. His resulting value realignment brings about a turn toward social consciousness, producing snapshots of black American ghettos, addressing race relations and police brutality, and offering up the most succinct and righteous denunciation of Donald Trump on record—the useful chant of “Fuck Donald Trump,” devoid of any substantial politics, filled with literal vitriol. As it smoothly stitches together swatches of g-funk and P-Funk, Still Brazy coolly stares down the barrel. –Sheldon Pearce

Listen:YG: “FDT” [ft. Nipsey Hussle]

Before hearing JEFFERY, you could be forgiven for not buying into the hype around Young Thug. Maybe you thought he was sub-verbal, notpost-verbal, and the only talent Jeffery Lamar Williams had was a knack for getting attention; even wearing a dress on the album’s cover seemed like a stunt.

But JEFFERY’s opener, “Wyclef Jean,” laid down the gauntlet in bar one: “Ok my money way longer than [a] NASCAR race.” The magic is partially in the words and the silliness, but also in Thug’s melodicism and attitude—that slurry, undeniable voice, urging you to imitate him. Then the song unfolds into one of the most unpredictable pop jams of the year, with a mid-song rappity-rap showcase unfurling into JEFFERY’s crowning achievement. If you don’t get hype to “Future Swag” or “Floyd Mayweather,” or aren’t prepared to respect the fury of “Harambe,” you are the one left in the cold. On “Kanye West,” when you hear Wyclef Jean’s voice bringing things full circle, Young Thug demands to be celebrated. And so we do. –Jonah Bromwich

Listen:Young Thug: “Kanye West”

Patience has always been a part of the Nicolas Jaar experience. His melodies and references reveal themselves slowly. Though he’s been consistently active as an artist and label owner since his debut LP, Space Is Only Noise, a formal follow-up was slow to materialize. When Sirens arrived, its cover was obscured by scratch-off foil; the first track is an amorphous, 11-minute sound collage.

Sirens is more assured and aggressive than Space; “No,” the album’s centerpiece, is a lightly stepping pop song, sung in Spanish. Jaar hasspoken eloquently about how Sirens straddles the political and the personal but in the music itself, the contradictions feel smaller and more ethereal. The first half of the album ends with “Leaves,” another collage, wordless until he shares a snippet of himself, as a child, having a discussion with his father. This is peak Jaar: equal parts intimacy and obscurity.

“Space Is Only Noise had all these little tunnels in it, and I’ve tried to go into every single one of those tunnels ever since,” said Jaar earlier this year. The tracks on Sirens feel like those explorations: They take unexpected turns, double back, break for a sandwich. Jaar is investigating these tunnels on Sirens; we wait, patiently. –Andrew Gaerig

Listen:Nicolas Jaar: “No”

After seven LPs, Rihanna finally made a great album, rather than a collection of zeitgeist-dominating bangers surrounded by filler. What makes ANTI work (work work work work) is the presence of Rih’s no-fucks-given (but secretly a few fucks given) attitude in every crack and corner. Her stoner queen comes out in“James Joint,” an all-too-brief gem of Stevie Wonder warmth. The savage boss she perfected in “Bitch Better Have My Money” (and across social media) comes full force on “Needed Me,” the quintessential “Oh, you caught feels?” anthem. It’s only as ANTIcontinues that Ms. Fenty realizes maybe no woman is an island, no matter how many platinum records she racks up, diamond ball gowns she wears, or skull-sized blunts she smokes. By the time we get to old-school piano ballad “Higher,”Rihanna raspily belts out what is essentially a drunk voicemail to a man she has to admit she still thinks about. Whoever he is, he doesn’t deserve her. –Jillian Mapes

Listen:Rihanna: “Work” [ft. Drake]

Mitski Miyawaki’s Puberty 2 is a case study of the modern condition, a record for this era crippled with worry. The Brooklyn musician told Pitchfork in June that one of her goals as an artist is “to always make clear that I am a real person,” and on her fourth album, that realness is a bittersweet proposition. Puberty 2 is vividly, excitingly, and sometimes crushingly human, containing all the ups and downs of maintaining emotional sanity as told through her guitar’s indie fuzz. To convey a range of tenuous emotion, Mitski uses uncomfortable metaphors, nuanced lyrics about instability and unpaid rent. On “Happy,” for instance, contentment is a one-night stand that leaves just as quickly as it came. The song “Fireworks” may or may not be about pushing back distressing tears, but when its chorus explodes into a starry crescendo, it feels like a liberating cry shared amongst friends who need it most. Even with its nerves, there’s something incredibly comforting—hopeful, even—about Puberty 2’s half-hour minutes of catharsis. –Alex Frank

Listen:Mitski: “Your Best American Girl”

You Want It Darker will always be linked with Leonard Cohen’s death. Singing while seated in his living room medical chair, he calls himself “broken and lame.” He looks back on his past, with regrets, and says goodbye on “Traveling Light” and “I’m Leaving the Table.” Several times, he notes that he’s out of the game. He’s joined by the choir from his childhood Montreal synagogue and sings the same prayer that was offered at his funeral just three days later: “Magnified, sanctified be Thy holy name.” You Want It Darker is one of the world’s greatest poets putting his house in order.

Through the darkness and mortality, there’s levity. Backed by gospel organ and a bluesy guitar solo on “If I Didn’t Have Your Love,” he sings about the revitalizing powers of love. At one point, asubtle dick joke even finds a place in the mournful fray. As usual, Cohen oscillates between heft and humor, love and death. It closes with a string reprise of “Treaty”—a gorgeous requiem followed by just a few more words from Cohen. “I wish there was a treaty between your love and mine,” he sings. And with that beautiful notion of surrender, he’s gone. –Evan Minsker

Listen:Leonard Cohen: “You Want It Darker”

Even Kendrick Lamar’s afterthoughts are fiercely thought-provoking. Last year, his To Pimp a Butterfly—an 80-minute opus of plush jazz-funk grooves, intricate rhymes, and ruthlessly self-interrogating philosophical excursions—was close to a consensus album of the year. This March, Lamar followed with untitled unmastered., a work that’s as different from TPAB in presentation as it is sonically and thematically similar. Its cover is an unadorned green box, and untitled is a 34-minute set of eight numbered and dated tracks. It further cements Lamar’s singular position in both hip-hop and popular culture while deftly sidestepping the non-musical noise that generally accompanies such lofty status. At its best, untitled is just as potent as TPAB. Where TPAB breathed the sound of jazz back into rap, untitled more closely embodied the jazz spirit: living in the moment, embracing mistakes, and foregrounding the music with the quiet confidence of a virtuoso bandleader. –Marc Hogan

Listen:Kendrick Lamar: “Untitled 02”

Nick Cave’s songs have always been the scrim between the visceral dark of this world and the promised light of another; the Australian songwriter, our high priest of goth, is the docent moving freely between them. He has for years offered this sweaty and bloody vision of life: at times bawdy and carnivalesque, other times fueled by ample heroin, libido, and hair gel. Though Skeleton Tree was released following the tragic death of his son Arthur, it is still another excavation of humanity, this time deeper and more austere, taking place in a zero-gravity cathedral of grief. Here, Cave steps into the hereafter to look beyond the simple rituals of mourning and into the state of the soul. Where goes love when it is interred?

Instead of succumbing to the weight of death, these songs have a certain airiness. Above the music of Warren Ellis and his fellow Bad Seeds’ latter-day tranquility, Cave’s words float unbound. Always one to avoid mawkishness, Cave reveals the ugliness within himself with gruff self-examinations like, “You believe in God but you get no special dispensation for this belief now” (“Jesus Alone”). These articulate moments are surrounded by more surreal imagery—rabbit’s blood, mermaids, stars splashed across a ceiling. But the faith that hums in Cave’s sacrament is not vengeful or supernatural; it’s vulnerable and uncertain. Through his art, Cave has tried to wrest some good from so much evil. One cannot exist without the other, and so this, his most painful and human album, is filled with love and the divine. –Jeremy D. Larson

Listen:Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: “I Need You”

It seemed overnight that Dev Hynes, a London ex-pat who’d arranged himself as defiantly individualist, was seized by the cause for representation, sparking dialogue in stylish circles that had largely avoided such messy threads. This was Freetown Sound’s primary concern: enlivening genres and eras past, people in margins, and cultures in shadows. Hynes’ patented style of nimble, vintage quirk funk carries excellently on “Best to You”—Empress Of remains an effortless duet partner—and is pushed to its conceptual peak on “E.V.P.,” a Downtown ’81 pose made even sharper with help from Debbie Harry. The format blossoms out by the second half, with vaporous meditations like “Hadron Collider” and “Thank You” bearing Hynes’ most palatable writing and production work yet. On the latter, he sums up his shrewd sheepishness through vocals from Ava Raiin, one of 11 female guests: “Thank you for all your praise,” she sings, “even if you promise me a way out of your gaze.” Freetown Sound stirs up the hymnal punk of Coastal Grooves and runway soul of Cupid Deluxe, combining all of Hynes’ most fascinating angles to earn the ogling it got. –Matthew Trammell

Listen:Blood Orange: “Best to You” [ft. Empress Of]

There are better songs than “The Waters” on Anderson .Paak’s star-making 2016 release, Malibu, but none lay out his musical history with the precision of its opening lines: “Tried to tell n*ggas/In 2012, n*gga/Working hand to hand and no avail/Volume one was too heavy for you frail n*ggas/So I got leaned like codeine and pills.” So he’s been hustling, making soulful music for a minute. But he couldn’t find an audience until the machete-sharp verses he contributed to Dr. Dre’s Compton made him a name to watch. All of a sudden, an audience was there. A couple lines later, .Paak says, “I can do anything but move backwards.”

By 2016, the Oxnard native understood what the most precocious people take the longest to learn: Try to do everything and you won’t be the best at any one thing. On Malibu, .Paak’s focus is primarily on his voice and his flow. He learned to trust his collaborators, and got a slew of amazing beats in return. That’s how you make dreamers like “The Bird” and “Your Prime,” inventive combos like “The Season/Carry Me” and funk bangers including “Am I Wrong” and “Come Down.” And while for .Paak, success must have seemed like it was a long time coming, for the vast majority of his fans, Malibu was only the beginning. –Jonah Bromwich

Listen:Anderson .Paak: “Come Down”

Bon Iver’s first two albums trafficked in distinct emotional impressions. They evoked three-dimensional spaces: whether or not one knew the real-life backstory, For Emma, Forever Ago conjured the den of a small backwoods cabin, while Bon Iver, Bon Iver rang out from a mountaintop. But 22, A Million takes place solely within its own stereo image: It’s an electroacoustic obstacle course that constantly destroys and rebuilds itself, smudging out prospective mise-en-scènes before they can fully form. When the ol’-reliable, fingerpicking Justin Vernon rears his head at the beginning of “29 #Strafford APTS,” he quickly falls victim to a series of elaborate pranks: Tracks speed and slow abruptly and non-sequitur horn fanfares, seemingly borrowed from a lost Moondog record, bleed into the mix. Versions of himself sing different lyrics on top of each other, rendering his emotional pleas inscrutable.

Why did Vernon force that lovely Lyle Lovett-as-choirboy voice of his into dubious battle with those vocal shadows, plusa chipmunked Mahalia Jackson? To test whether his voice was strong enough to shine through it all? If so, he passed the exam: His stylistic signatures remain intact even in the record’s most deformed moments, especially his rare ability to transfer the natural rhythms of breath and speech into vivid melody. The incongruities of 22, A Million hammer it home: This is a record about the perpetually dissatisfying search for the divine, or really anything to hang one’s hat on, within an overwhelming, constantly regenerating digital present. –Winston Cook-Wilson

Listen:Bon Iver: “29 #Strafford APTS”

Danny Brown is great on social media and an engaging interviewee and he puts on a good show, but solitude is the essence of his art. His music always circles back to one man in a room, struggling with his demons. In Atrocity Exhibition, the scene is set from the first verse, with Brown sweating like he’s at a rave though he hasn’t left his room in three days—he’s forever the guy who gets all the teeth-grinding anxiety of the drug experience but none of the communal joy or release. But then, “mind expansion” has never been the point of Danny Brown’s experiences with chemicals; he smokes blunt after blunt because he’s trying to poison the thoughts that plague him, fill them with so much dope that they drown in the bathtub and leave him at peace. And the fact that he finds a way to share those thoughts, bouncing horror against dark humor, makes his listeners, at the very least, feel less alone. If XXX was a room-clearing explosion and Old found him picking up the broken pieces to see how they fit together, Atrocity Exhibition is where Brown slows down and sinks deeper, exploring how wisdom might possibly emerge from pain. –Mark Richardson

Listen:Danny Brown: “Really Doe” [ft. Kendrick Lamar, Ab-Soul, Earl Sweatshirt]

For a band that has cultivated a roughly 25-year bond with their fans through alienation and obfuscation, the plucking of heart strings on “Burn the Witch” signifies a new mode of operation: less clever, more giving, more human. For once in Radiohead’s career, there are other people on their album: the beds of violins, violas, and cellos are played by members of the London Contemporary Orchestra, then arranged by Jonny Greenwood in a newfound romanticism. Songs are archly composed, as finely detailed as ever—and at times, like on “Daydreaming,” monumental. Whereas The King of Limbs was anemically written using proprietary computer software, A Moon Shaped Pool was recorded to tape on 8- and 16-track recorders, capturing the early, genius impulses of the group.

The other person who orbits around this album: Thom Yorke’s former partner of 23 years. Impressions of loss ring out; in his heartbreaking turn of phrase, he is “trapped in your full stop.” There’s something elliptical about this album, best represented by the long-awaited studio version of a fan-favorite track from the 1990s, “True Love Waits.” By the end of the album, we are inches away from these sustained piano notes, so much so that we can hear the felt of the keys rubbing up against each other. Yorke’s pure tenor is recast as the voice of a man who just woke up, exhausted and phlegmatic. After eight albums of labyrinths and paranoia and rabbit holes, Radiohead finally let us in. –Jeremy D. Larson

Listen:Radiohead: “Burn the Witch”

By all accounts, Angel Olsen didn’t set out to make a pop record with My Woman, and while it remains funny to call any album with a nearly eight-minute centerpiece a “pop record,” her fourth LP is concentrated and undeniable—more confident and less dissonant than her previous work. Olsen, whose voice is resolute but still soft in places, sounds like a person who has figured out much of what she needs and what she’s willing to endure to get it. “I want to follow my heart down that wild road,” she sings on “Sister,” the album’s long, anchoring jam. Her vocals have taken on a wizened texture, the warmth of knowing, of having lived and discovered. “You learn to take it as it comes, you fall together, fall apart.” –Amanda Petrusich

Listen:Angel Olsen: “Intern”

If war is politics made physical, and politics is war made verbal, then ANOHNI howls from the sliver of sanity between the two. On “Drone Bomb Me,” she whimpers, taking the voice of a young Afghan girl, asking that a random strike “Blow my head off/Explode my crystal guts.” Of global warming, her lips curl into a sneer: “I wanna hear the dogs crying for water/I wanna see the fish go belly-up in the sea.” She lobs similar vitriol at Barack Obama, NSA surveillance, Guantanamo Bay, and any other matter of CNN carnage. This would founder as a dire sermon from other musicians, but ANOHNI’s voice is as lucidly beautiful as her prophecies are grotesque. Her range is wide, from low soprano to racking falsetto, and her tone quavers with tearful, light vibrato that dances over Oneohtrix Point Never and Hudson Mohawke’s stuttering production. Even a simple line like “I don’t love you anymore” is a shot through the heart; when she turns that acuity towards her more topical subjects, it is debilitating. On HOPELESSNESS, ANOHNI’s songs reflect horror at every turn; eyes wide, she wails upward as the weapons rain down. –Stacey Anderson

Listen:ANOHNI: “Drone Bomb Me”

Even in their heyday, A Tribe Called Quest were often mistaken for soothsayers. It was an easy error to make if you weren’t listening very closely—if you focused on the lilt of their voices, say, or their spacious, inviting beats. But Tribe were always revolutionaries. And on their first new album in 18 years, a miracle that the year 2016 barely deserved, they are returning to fight. “The Space Program,” for one, is a song-length metaphor for gentrification, dedicated to “Tyson types and Che figures.” These are the radical spirits Tribe are calling for, the energies they wish to summon. The rounded stand-up bass plunks genially along in the background, but Q-Tip uses his time to salute Bree Newsome, the woman who scaled the South Carolina statehouse flagpole to remove the Confederate Flag nine days after the hate-fueled 2015 Charleston killings.

The vibe is welcoming, as ever: You can come in and wipe your feet on the rhythm rug, but after that, it is time to confront some sobering realities. On “We the People...,” Q-Tip addresses state-sanctioned figures and paranoiac actors who find themselves in a “killing-off-good-young-n*gga-mood,” and on “Whateva Will Be,” he envisions an uprising, signing off with, “in some universe, this verse will be true.” He sounds older; they all do. The mixing seems purposefully ragged, with echo trails left on many of Phife’s vocals, Jarobi’s mutters buried. Q-Tip’s production leaves some wrinkles in as well, with unusually sharp drums that hit like peeling soup can lids. Maybe this is an honest way of acknowledging their age while showing their character. It was a final ride into the sunset for the most beloved rap group in history—its outcome assured, its standoff graceful. –Jayson Greene

Listen:A Tribe Called Quest: “We the People...”

On Coloring Book’s “Same Drugs,”Chance the Rapper sings, “Don’t forget the happy thoughts/All you need is happy thoughts.” On the Chicagoan’s third mixtape, he believes in the power of positive thinking. But the closer you listen, the more complicated the record becomes. While light in tone and sound, Coloring Book also touches on sin, veering track-to-track from “God song” to “flawed human song.” Chance parties “All Night”; he deserves a “Smoke Break”; he’s got “No Problem” threatening major labels. On “Blessings,” he bestows his most praise on God, simultaneously accepting goodness and admitting helplessness. “Blessings keep falling in my lap,” Chance sings, because it is out of his control; they could just as easily fall to the person next to him. Coloring Book glides across the surface, full of wonder, but it remains a truly special record because of the existential concerns that simmer just below. –Matthew Strauss

Listen:Chance the Rapper: “Blessings”

Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo may be a masterpiece, but it’s a lumpy one. It’s got tracks that play too long, songs that barely feature Kanye, perfect moments scattered deep, deep into the tracklist. So while not flawless in a traditional sense, TLOP’s hyperactive bent is what makes it great. Consider its most memorable moments, all unhinged and/or collaged: West praying for Paris, Kelly Price belting it, Future’s Young Metro warning, Madlib’s boom bap, André 3000 harmonizing with Arthur Russell, Max B calling from prison, approximately seven seconds of Young Thug. Remember the blown release dates, the title changes (R.I.P. Swish), the schadenfreude of catching Taylor Swift in a lie. The pleasures of Pablo are varied and tactile, sometimes extramusical, sometimes illicit, sometimes religious, always scarily committed. It’s a record for the greedy made by a glutton willing to share.

The man’s overzealousness can lead to some strange places: Recently, a sleep-deprived Kanye declared his allegiance to Donald Trump, which was an odd moment from the guy who scared the shit out of Mike Myers by saying “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” on live TV when no one else would. Soon after the recent outburst, he was hospitalized. Whatever he genuinely believes about the people running this country, it seems clear that he is a musical genius who appears to have some serious problems. His baser instincts may reveal him as a stressed-out perfectionist, which, while not a lifestyle to ascribe to, makes his artistic output pretty much unparalleled. In his search to create Pablo is a messy marriage of his previous two albums, Yeezus and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy; its production is not as tight as the former, nor are its wild moments as blissful as the latter. But the album can be as compelling as those anointed classics, its highs arguably higher, its lows a lot weirder. Listening to Pablo is a chaotic experience, so seems about right it was made by someone with a unique perspective on reality. –Matthew Schnipper

Listen:Kanye West: “Ultralight Beam” [ft. Chance the Rapper, The-Dream, Kelly Price, and Kirk Franklin]

It’s hard to escape the gravity of an album that offers up an artist’s farewell. That task is even more difficult when the record includes a song entitled “Lazarus,” or a promotional video laden with sickbed imagery. But when listening to David Bowie’s final studio set, it’s important to avoid letting the singer’s death dominate your thoughts entirely—if only because Blackstar is so creatively alive.

Before fans knew Bowie was ailing, before hiscollaborators confirmed that they knew he was suffering, what we had, on release day, was one of the artist’s best records. The singles demonstrated that Bowie had outdone a prior experimentation with jazz textures (on 1995’s Outside). Here, his decision to collaborate with saxophonistDonny McCaslin’s band paid off handsomely. The ensemble is capable of moving between hurtling rock and the more abstract atmospherics heard during the title track’s transitional sections. By the time the last song “I Can’t Give Everything Away” hits, there’s an exuberance that’s miles away from the mood of the grim opener. Bowie’s brief harmonica tones communicate some weariness, but also joy. McCaslin reaches for exultant high notes while soloing behind the singer. Ben Monder’s guitar spirals through lines of bluesy invention. Though it has the limitations of life in view—right down to its title—the track also makes good on a death-defying boast offered by Bowie, several songs earlier: “I’ve got drama, can’t be stolen.” –Seth Colter Walls

Listen: David Bowie: “Blackstar”

This year led to a lot of re-imaginings, including a colossal re-think of what we mean when we talk about protest music; suddenly, the old definitions don’t make sense. Lemonade, Beyoncé’s sixth solo album, isn’t expressly political in the grand, didactic tradition of “Blowin’ in the Wind.” But these songs (and the album's accompanying film, a densely layered portrait of what it means to be a black woman in America in 2016) still feel like a call to arms—a mandate to reassess everything, whether it’s relationships with those we hold dear or the methods by which we fight for what we believe. The institution Lemonade critiques most explicitly is marriage: On its surface, the record is a recounting of infidelity and betrayal (or, possibly, a sneaky meta-commentary on celebrity coupledom, a way of actualizing and profiting off the rumors that have dogged Beyoncé and Jay Z for years). But it doubles as a how-to guide for anyone keen on self-reclamation. Here, Beyoncé suggests, is how you get yourself back: by transforming anguish into art. That lesson—and others, about conviction and forgiveness, and how those things can co-exist—feels more essential than ever before. –Amanda Petrusich

Listen:Beyoncé: “Formation”

The oddest image Frank Ocean’s Blonde conjures is one of his former arch-nemesis. In 2006, Chris Brown accepted the trophy for Best New Artist at the BET Awards, and, reading from notes scribbled on his hotel card envelope, he thanked, “My manager Tina Davis, who I brought up here, who been with me from day one, pushing me, telling me to sing—I ain’t no rapper. Smile.”

Frank Ocean ain’t no rapper. He doesn’t sing all that forcefully either. And he certainly hardly smiles. His hook has always been his glowing pen, which he used to complicate the image of a male R&B artist through his awe-drawing lyrics on nostalgia, ULTRA and channel ORANGE. So, throughout Blonde, it’s fun to hear him indulge the inner-rapper we’ve occasionally seen him flash, in content if not form: the groupies on “Nikes,” the Jagger-swagger on “Solo,” the interlude on “Good Guy,” the “I been out here head first/Always liked the head first” on “Nights.” After creating as much room around himself as contracts and silence would allow, he filled the moat with dense verses, only iced with melody. “Self Control” even opens with a pitched-up bar or two, before melting into the album’s highpoint: “Keep a place for me,” a helium voice sings, “I’ll sleep between y’all, it’s nothing.” Ocean’s gift, toyed with on Endless and crystallized on Blonde,is his ability to find space where there shouldn’t be any. It’s no coincidence he came up with rappers, and a blessing that he didn’t end up one. –Matthew Trammell

Listen:Frank Ocean: “Nikes” 

“And do you belong? I do.”

The assertion sits atop anessay that Solange Knowles wrote in the waning weeks of summer. In the text that followed, she recounted a painful, much-publicized recent incident: A group of women had pelted her, with words and then trash, as she stood to dance at a Kraftwerk concert in New Orleans. She recalled her resolve to stay positive for the sake of her young son and his friend, also in attendance, and remembered assuming that she must have been imagining their violation: “Certainly a stranger would not have the audacity.” But that charity proved misplaced, and disappointingly familiar: As a woman of color, she had been dismissed, scrutinized, and harassed by strangers in predominantly white spaces before. She knew well the emotional labor of turning the other cheek.

When A Seat at the Table dropped three weeks later, it became clear that the essay’s title pulled from the lyrics of “Weary.” It’s a wistful ballad that explores how, when you’re constantly fighting for the base amount of respect, graciousness can be downright exhausting: “Be leery ’bout your place in the world/You’re feeling like you’re chasing the world/You’re leaving not a trace in the world/But you’re facing the world.” A Seat at the Table is full of similar admissions, delivered with a rare and beautiful empathy. In it, Solange often speaks to the universal experiences of youth (new love, confusion, heartbreak), but does not shy away from her own journey; the specificities of black life are proudly inextricable from her accounts. On “Mad,” she offers a poised reply to a damaging stereotype commonly affixed to black women, flipping accusations that they’re always angry into an uplifting rebuttal: “You got the light, count it all joy!” Floating over Raphael Saadiq’s lush soul arrangements, she travels “70 states” to escape such pressures, turning to sex, alcohol, isolation and material pursuits on the haunting ballad “Cranes in the Sky”—but the journey leads her back to where she began, looking inward for strength.

A Seat at the Table has a gorgeous sense of flow; ideas of identity commingle easily with social commentary as lithe R&B melts into spoken interludes. The latter happens with a cinematic ease; the interludes sew the album together like plot points of a larger narrative. Solange’s mother, Tina Lawson, makes an impassioned appearance, saying: “It’s such beauty in black people, and it really saddens me when we’re not allowed to express that pride in being black, and that if you do, then it's considered anti-white. No! You’re just pro-black. And that’s okay.” This segues beautifully into the standout track “Don’t Touch My Hair,” a measured stance against the misguided act of reaching for a black person’s crown. Much like the know-how required to care for this hair, which is often passed down by a maternal figure, Lawson’s words offer a glimpse of the love for her heritage that she instilled in her daughter. Other monologues feature Solange’s father recalling the trauma of school integration (“We lived in the threat of death every day”) and an introspective Master P, who crystallizes one of the album’s salient themes: “If you don’t understand my record, you don’t understand me—so this is not for you.”

On her third album, Solange has reclaimed every part of her narrative and has done something undeniably inspiring. In 2016, when it still seems like a radical act to release a record that catalogues the nuances of black womanhood, she has done so with stunning candor. A Seat at the Table is a contemporary take on the protest records of yesteryear, steeped in the tradition of vanguard singers who critiqued society’s ills from the female perspective. It is an offer of solace for anyone working towards their own glory, and for those whose right to dignity is long overdue. –Vanessa Okoth-Obbo

Listen: Solange: “Cranes in the Sky”