The Swede’s debut album picks up on this Mumford & Synths sound for a set of folk, soul and addictive house beats.
Bangerz is the sound of Hannah Montana gone Miami Vice.
It’s the density of wit, ideas, and verbal invention that makes this one of the year’s defining hip-hop releases.
With The Diving Board, Elton has regained his sense of musical possibility and taken a brave, graceful jump.
MM LP 2 fits in well in the year of Yeezus and Magna Carta . . . Holy Grail, records by aging geniuses trying to figure out what the hell to do with their dad-ass selves.
Despite the skull-crushing power, MBV is music that rewards close listening, music that takes its time to give up its secrets.
Reznor’s first NIN album in five years, it is one of his best, combining the textural exploration on the 1999 double CD The Fragile, and the tighter fury of his 1994 master blast, The Downward Spiral.
The warmest, grooviest album Yorke has ever made – nine songs where next-level laptop science collides with wild, funky improvisation.
A more accurate title for this album might have been Everything Was Pretty Much the Same: It’s a brilliant summation of all the things you already love about Drake – unless you find him totally annoying, in which case it probably won’t change your mind.
The Monkeys keep on evolving ... their fifth LP is this quintessentially English retro-rock band's most American-sounding record, especially rhythmically.
On much of Trouble Will Find Me as well, the terse phrases and single-tone exclamations of guitarists Bryce and Aaron Dessner hang around Berninger's baritone gravity like clouded starlight.
Make no mistakes, though: . . . Like Clockwork still runs on Homme's grizzled-dude-against-the-world intensity
Reflektor is closer to turning-point classics such as U2's Achtung Baby and Radiohead's Kid A – a thrilling act of risk and renewal by a band with established commercial appeal and a greater fear of the average, of merely being liked.
This is Daft Punk conjuring the musical era that first inspired them, when disco conquered the world with handcrafted grooves and prog-rock excess magnified emotions in black-lit bedrooms.
Yeezus is the darkest, most extreme music Kanye has ever cooked up, an extravagantly abrasive album full of grinding electro, pummeling minimalist hip-hop, drone-y wooz and industrial gear-grind.
Vampire Weekend have gotten better at just about everything they do.