What can at times sound facile in its un-coded repugnance deepens, on repeated listens, into both sophisticated political statement and haunting music.
Lemonade is an entire album of emotional discord and marital meltdown, from the world's most famous celebrity; it's also a major personal statement from the most respected and creative artist in the pop game.
Raitt is as bold and sharp on Dig In Deep, made with her longtime road band.
Eno is always looking for that new fantasy, a look into the shadow world that's fascinated him for so long. The Ship is just his latest interpretation of his vision, his constantly changing illusion, and it's also one of his most accessible albums in recent years.
Reaching back to the very beginning of black music in America, Chance recontextualizes one of the most enduring African-American art forms for 2016's most urgent one.
This album represents Bowie's most fulfilling spin away from glam-legend pop charm since 1977's Low. Blackstar is that strange, and that good.
For all the different genres it consumes and spits back, it sounds like no other band on earth.
The strange new demon inside them has driven the band to roughen up some of their mirrored surfaces and make a darker, more uncomfortable record than their last two.
Emily's D+Evolution is a far more ambitious and thornier affair. The lyrics, flowing in disjunctive clusters, are about deleted narratives, glass ceilings and dreams deferred – ultimately a complex, funky prog-rock concept opera about love and identity.
The second Fifth Harmony LP isn't a massive step forward, but with a constant bombardment of hooks, high energy and incredible harmony there's not much time to catch your breath to compare.
That restless versatility is all over the LP, generating the emotional crests and sensory overload a festival crowd demands, but with a nuance that'll make it work even if you aren't shirtless in the desert.
Next Thing shows that as the group continues to grow up, Kline's clear-eyed observation and youthful disaffection only feel more vital.
On his awesomely gnarled 17th solo album, he plays the low-rent elder statesman, a spectacularly scuzzball Leonard Cohen still snarling, still hoping to get his rocks off.
It's a labored-over opus that wishes it were a mixtape, trying hard to curate the vibe of a sprawling mess, and that's because it's made by an artist who feels like a mess and doesn't care to hide it.
There's brilliance in even Lamar's cast-offs, and an intimacy here that makes this more than just a gift for his ravenous fans --it's an illuminating look at a red-hot rapper's craft.
Midwest Farmer's Daughter is the first full-on country release on Third Man, the Nashville based label run by suspect carpetbagger Jack White, and dude was smart to wait ‘til he had an act this undeniable.
As bawdy and unpredictable as anyone is in their first puberty, Puberty 2 shows Miyawaki indulging her whims with a devil-may-care attitude – the result is an incendiary self-portrait.
Human Performance is the first album you could describe as your typical Parquet Courts record – it gathers their best tricks in one place, along with new ones you wouldn't see coming.
One of her most challenging albums, and one of her most urgent.
If Radiohead have made the dehumanizing effects of technology their great theme, A Moon Shaped Pool is the first record in which, musically, they kick their way out of the machine, or at least make their cyborg soul more vestigial.
Their music is driven by emotions that are almost unprecedented in the genre that gave us Joy Division and Public Image Limited.
Sailor's Guide is classic album length – nine songs, 39 minutes – and best heard in one sitting; this is Nashville craft less as pop science than as expansive headphone storytelling.
Human Ceremony is a very impressive record for a band that's only been putting out music for about a year.
The album's rambling, vaguely emo title is a giveaway: Despite opening big, bright and airtight, I Like It When You Sleep ... gets boring-melty during dream-gaze reveries like "Please Be Naked" and "Lostmyhead."
The Monkees' first album in nearly 20 years is also their best since the Sixties – to be precise, since the Head soundtrack in 1968.