Five years ago, Joanna Newsom and Sufjan Stevens both released career-defining albums that ended up battling it out for the top position on my year-end list. Stevens won that year, largely because The Age of Adz was the album that firmly turned me from a casual listener into a full-blown fan. Last year, unbelievably enough, it happened again, but 2015 is Joanna Newsom's for the taking. As much of an emotional juggernaut as Carrie & Lowell is, Divers prevails on ambition, inventiveness, and sheer, dizzying talent. Simply put, no one else is making music remotely like this right now. Granted, it's no triple album, and there's an utter dearth of songs over ten minutes long, but Newsom easily proves that she can fit just as many twists and turns into an album and songs of a more conventional length. Consequently, Divers contains her most mature, complex, and awe-inspiring songwriting yet.

As much as I adore Have One on Me, it's admittedly a bit sleepy and drawn-out on the whole, so I was happy to see that Divers would be a more streamlined affair. I was even happier to find out how sonically diverse it is, which makes it simultaneously more accessible and more challenging but certainly never boring. There are disparate influences all over the place: "Goose Eggs" has a certain Dolly Parton-esque twangy energy to it; "A Pin-Light Bent" calls to mind Aerial-era Kate Bush, while "You Will Not Take My Heart Alive" seems to borrow its theatrical quirkiness from Never for Ever; and Newsom's cover of "Same Old Man" in the style of Karen Dalton is a return to her Appalachian folk-inspired roots - she even manages to put a medieval twist on metal in "Leaving the City!" Even as these reference points are obvious, Newsom is talented enough to make them fully her own with the incorporation of her distinctly literary lyrics, idiosyncratic warble, and percussive harp melodies, along with a small army of instruments that rarely see use in contemporary music (bouzouki, baglama, recorder, trombone, celesta, marxophone, harpsichord to name a few).

This is the kind of album where an entire essay could easily be written about each song alone. "Anecdotes," the most Ys-like song here, is essentially an entire symphony in and of itself, cycling through half a dozen distinct movements within its six-and-a-half minutes, all of them returning in a satisfying rush at the song's urgent conclusion. Even seemingly straightforward - by Newsom's standards anyway - songs have enough going on to spend a lifetime obsessively picking apart. "Leaving the City," for example, is jaw-dropping in the unrivalled complexity it achieves in under four minutes, alternating gorgeously understated verses with jagged bursts of blaring mellotron and a breathlessly multisyllabic, ridiculously precise chorus: "I could barely breathe for seeing/All the splintered light that leaked her fissures/Fleeing, launched in flight/Unstaunched daylight, brightly bleeding/Bleached the night with dawn, deleting," etc.

As usual, Newsom's lyrics are what elevate most of these songs to untouchable levels, aided by the varying emotional shades of her vocal delivery, which has retained its fledgling charm while at the same time growing into a formidable instrument. "Waltz of the 101st Lightborne" is a piano-led, bluegrass-leaning love song to a soldier lost to an endless war between, naturally, warring dimensions in time: "Make it stop, my love!/We were wrong to try/Never saw what we could unravel/In traveling light/Or how the trip debrides/Like a stack of slides!/All we saw was that Time is taller than Space is wide." The title track is an atmospheric, expansive ballad told from the perspective of a woman in love with a diver. Over a bewitching, hypnotic backdrop of '70s-style keyboards, Newsom wails insistently, "A woman is alive!/You do not take her for a sign in nacre on a stone/Alone, unfaceted, and fine." She saves her best for last with the richly orchestral "Time, as a Symptom," a celebration of "the nullifying, defeating, negating, repeating joy of life" that ends amidst a flurry of ethereal harmonies on the exhilarating command, "White star, white ship - Nightjar, transmit: transcend!"

And that's only skimming the surface of all that Divers has to offer, honestly. As a collection, it's representative of everything that's come before, from the wide-eyed freak folk of The Milk-Eyed Mender to the unabashed grandeur of Ys to the subtle harmonic complexity of Have One on Me. At the same time, its instrumental experimentation and tonal variance hint toward fascinating new avenues. More than anything, it's the sound of a fearless and inimitable artist at the top of her game and an album that everyone should be listening to. Divers isn't available on streaming services, but believe me when I say that it's definitely worth paying for.

How to even begin talking about this album? In many ways, it defies description. Even if I had never experienced the death of someone close to me, the emotional devastation wreaked by Carrie & Lowell would still be immense and undeniable. Sufjan Stevens writes about grief and loss and loneliness in ways that are as universal as they are personal, drawing shared meanings from intensely private experiences. Moreover, he conveys these emotions with the musical intimacy they deserve, trading in all of the bells and whistles of his latest releases for an acoustic minimalism that hasn't been so fully on display since 2004's Seven Swans. Allowing his sorrowful lyrics and beautiful melodies to speak for themselves, Stevens proves with Carrie & Lowell that he's one of the most important songwriting voices of the generation, even stripped down to his barest self.

While all of Carrie & Lowell is painted in the same sonic palette - largely voice and acoustic guitar, with smatterings of piano/keyboard and electronic ambiance - the songs do a remarkably good job of distinguishing themselves from one another, which is a testament to Stevens' melodic talents. They are helped, too, by the charmingly lo-fi production and Stevens' whisper-soft vocals, which lend an ethereal lightness to the album's atmosphere, even in its most starkly mournful moments. Combined, these elements prevent the album from becoming overwhelmingly dirge-like. For as often as it sounds like it physically pains Stevens to excise his emotional demons, there's also a quality of hopefulness in his catharsis that comes through in fleeting glimpses of brightness, like the subtly jubilant ending of "Should Have Known Better" or the nostalgic humor of "Eugene" ("He called me Subaru") or the sober serenity of "Blue Bucket of Gold." In this sense, the goal of Carrie & Lowell is not to indulge self-pity but to find a way out of the darkness, a gift to himself as much as the listener.

With such a consistent musical backdrop, the major focus becomes the lyrics, which are simultaneously among Stevens' simplest and his best. They are also, by a long shot, his most personal; although often obscured by metaphor and myth, they seem to offer the truest portrait of Stevens as a person yet, and the effect is often heartbreaking. Two constant narrative threads dominate the album, the first being the death of Stevens' estranged mother, Carrie, and his conflicted feelings toward her. Although he recognizes her abandonment ("When I was three/Three, maybe four/She left us at that video store"), he also desires to make amends now that it is no longer possible ("I forgive you, Mother/I can hear you/And I long to be near you/But every road leads to an end"). By "Fourth of July," his grief has become so vast that he imagines her comforting him in death like she never could in life: "Did you get enough love, my little dove?/Why do you cry?/And I'm sorry I left, but it was for the best/Though it never felt right/My little Versailles."

Simultaneously, the album seems to deal with the impact of a physically abusive and emotionally draining romantic relationship. "All of Me Wants All of You" plays out as a desperate plea to a detached lover ("You checked your texts while I masturbated/Manelich, I feel so used"), and "Drawn to the Blood" details a chilling physical encounter and the narrator's subsequent self-doubt: "The strength of his arm/My lover caught me off-guard . . . For my prayer has always been love/What did I do to deserve this?" Both of these events combined result in a crisis of identity and a downward spiral of harmful behavior, from suicidal thoughts ("The only thing that keeps me from driving this car - half-light, jack-knife - into the canyon at night") to substance abuse and sexual promiscuity ("Like a champion, get drunk to get laid/I take one more hit when you depart"). As always with Stevens, it's impossible to tell how much is metaphor and how much is reality, but the sentiments, at least, are brutally honest.

After a certain point, one gets the sense that Stevens has made peace with his sadness. In "The Only Thing," he asks in a quavering falsetto, "Should I tear my eyes out now?/Everything I see returns to you somehow/Should I tear my heart out now?/Everything I feel returns to you somehow." The questions come across as both sarcastic and sincere, a reminder to himself that the only way through is to keep living, as tempting as ending it all may be. It's a brave statement, just like the album as a whole. While listening may at times border on voyeuristic, it's also comforting to know that Stevens was willing to share his personal journey in the hopes of helping someone else along on theirs.

Julia Holter is a baroque songwriter for the twenty-first century. Her previous albums, though beautiful and ambitious, have always been slightly too impenetrable for me to fully love. Have You in My Wilderness is far more accessible, fusing Holter's chamber music influences and precise, classical compositions with more pop-leaning structures and big, exuberant choruses. However, Holter's ingenuity is not watered down or simplified in the slightest. In fact, her songwriting has never been better, squeezing all the cinematic expanse of her earlier work into perfectly compact pop songs. Each of the album's ten tracks is like a mini-symphony, full to the brim with romantic lyricism, intricate instrumental arrangements, melodic turns that will leave you breathless, and, of course, presiding confidently over it all, Holter's warm, resonant soprano.

Pre-release singles "Feel You" and "Sea Calls Me Home" are as catchy and addictive as you would expect any good pop song to be. The playful lilt of Holter's voice, which has previously been embedded more deeply in the instrumentation, is at the forefront, accompanied equally by traditional instrumentation (keyboards, drums, bass) and more unconventional choices that speak to her baroque inspiration (strings, harpsichord, saxophone). The songs' dreamy syncopation and sweeping arrangements are complemented by their lyrics, which are as clever ("The time change worked well/I had a good excuse for being late") as they are enigmatic ("I can't swim/It's lucidity/So clear!").

The end of "Feel You" offers the first of many delightfully surprising moments on the album: through a tangle of strings and handclaps, Holter delivers a charming monologue about perfumes in parking lots and people playing saxophones. The final minute of "Silhouette" is equally unexpected, the breezy lightness of its verses blurring into a vibrant, overlapping chaos of violin and voice. Other tracks burn fiercely but slowly, like the smokily seductive "How Long?" and the shuddering, plaintive "Night Song," full of sensual poeticism: "I throw a boxful of oranges/Syrup seeping out/Searching for a season smell." The closing title track fits into this group as well, with its romantic pronouncements ("Lady of gold, you would fit beautiful in my wilderness/Oh, in your waters I've dropped anchor") and rich, atmospheric musical accompaniment.

The album's undeniable centerpiece, though, is the six-minute "Betsy on the Roof," a haunting ballad stripped down to the basics of piano and voice, its sparseness highlighting Holter's natural ear for melody and the nuance and dynamism of her voice, capable of imbuing multiple meanings into a single line. At the midway point, it segues into an intensely yearning arrangement of piano, strings, and percussion that slowly unravels into dark, mangled dissonance as Holter's wordless desperation is alternated with the impassioned demand, "I'm standing here on the ground, Betsy/My arms stretched out/Looking up/Won't you please tell me the answer?/You know the answer, Betsy." It feels like everything in Holter's catalogue has been building to this moment, and the release is immense. The fact that it's surrounded by nine tracks that very nearly match its quality is merely icing on the cake.

"Heather, I'm sorry that your mother/Diseased in the brain/Cannot recall your name/Heather, I dreamt that I forgave/But that only comes in waves/I hate you all the same." It's hard not to be immediately intrigued by such a brutally cold introduction, delivered with a quiet sneer over a sparse, brooding guitar line. Where Torres' debut coasted on a similarly subdued energy throughout, Sprinter wastes no time accelerating into aggressive rock, howling and distorted. By the end of opener "Strange Hellos," Mackenzie Scott is practically screaming, her voice raw and unhinged as she spits accusingly, "What's mine isn't really yours/But I hope you find what you're looking for." It's representative of an album that rages as much as it reflects and is as darkly humorous as it is subtly devastating. Sprinter is extroverted introversion - an intensely personal song cycle blasted through a loudspeaker - and a startlingly confident musical statement.

Much of Sprinter is certainly as hard-edged and blistering as its opening track. The best song in this vein is probably "New Skin," an unflinchingly honest exploration of the conflict between burgeoning self-identity and religious upbringing. Scott's weary rasp battles hard to maintain dominance, pushing steadfastly through a thick wall of feedback-heavy guitars to proclaim, "I am a tired woman/In January, I will just be twenty-three/In Kansas City, I was/Undressed and bested by an air-tight floor/Then it said, 'By the power in me vested'/And wrapped me in this new skin I'm dying for." However, there is also a fair share of experimentation: "Son, You Are No Island" builds suspensefully from a trembly, ominous beginning into a cataclysmic ending in which Scott threatens, her vocals cycling in on themselves, "Son, you're not a man yet/You fucked with a woman who would know." There's also the simmering, seductive "A Proper Polish Welcome," which I've already written at length about, so I'll just say that it's one of the best songs I heard in 2015, period.

However, lately, I've found myself most drawn to the album's more expansive and tender moments, "Ferris Wheel" and "The Exchange," both seven-minute ballads that feel like they simultaneously expand indefinitely and pass by in a flash. "Ferris Wheel" is a warbly ode to romantic missteps that's as self-deprecatingly hilarious ("You don't like me/You just like my ride") as it is achingly lonely ("There's nothing in this world I wouldn't do/To show you that I've got the sadness, too"). Comparatively, "The Exchange" is even more minimal, only an acoustic guitar, voice, and the faint murmur of chirping birds. It revolves around the experiences of Scott and her mother, both adopted, as they wrestle with the identity crises created by the unknowability of their origins. In the first verse, Scott's mother finds out that her adoption papers have been destroyed in a flood, "an entire family tree, an eternal privacy, underwater." Later, Scott herself grapples with her fear of the future - "I am afraid to see my heroes age/I am afraid of disintegration" - before breaking down into the wounded admission, "Mother, father/I'm underwater/And I don't think you can pull me out of this."

On a purely emotional level, there's probably only one other album on this list (and it has not appeared yet, for what it's worth) that feels like as much of a sucker punch as Sprinter does. From a technical standpoint, it may not be particularly impressive or innovative, but I can't imagine any other musical style fitting Scott's bluntly confrontational lyrics so well: the occasional messiness of it, all of those tiny imperfections, are what make it so affecting. It's hard to stand out in the singer-songwriter game these days, but Scott's willingness to expose the unfiltered, often ugly truth, even about herself, easily puts her at the front of the pack.

This is the last band I would have expected to be in my top five at the beginning of the year. Not that I have anything against them, just that their sound isn't my usual thing, and while bands of a similar style have won me over before, it's an admittedly rare occurrence. But Harmlessness is kind of undeniable. It's a long and ambitious album with a little bit of something for everybody, from folky acoustic songs to energetic pop-punk to expansive post-rock to cathartic, heart-on-sleeve emo. The band pulls all of these off with equal ease, resulting in a vast, intense, and unpredictable melting pot of influences that ultimately defies labeling as a specific genre. Harmlessness is a passionate tribute to the recklessness and uncertainty that accompanies youth, enthralling to its final seconds.

There's so much here to love, but I have to start with "January 10th, 2014," which was released as the album's first single. I listened to it because I'd seen a lot of people speaking positively about it; five minutes later, I still had chills down my spine from its staggering, anthemic beauty. Its lyrics ingeniously pair the mythological figure of Diana/Artemis with the contemporary true story of Diana, Hunter of Bus Drivers, a Mexican woman who sought revenge against bus drivers who had been sexually violating female passengers. This interweaving of dichotomies - fact/fiction, present/past - is taken a step further in the dual male/female vocal delivery. During a suspenseful lull in the song's middle, David Bello asks tentatively, "Are you Diana, the hunter?" to which Katie Shanholtzer-Dvorak returns confidently, "Are you afraid of me now?" By the time the aggressive instrumentation kicks back into gear, her transformation from woman to goddess is complete: "Don't you quiver/I am an instrument/I am revenge/I am several women." It's a moment so chilling and powerful that I even ended up writing a poem with those lines as its basis of inspiration.

While it remains probably the best song on the album, this distinction is more a testament to its enormity than a slight to the tracks surrounding it, which are utterly spectacular. The opener, "You Can't Live There Forever" is surprisingly vulnerable and lo-fi before opening up into a lush swirl of strings and stacked harmonies, while the sorrowful, banjo-accented "Mental Health" is an intensely personal reflection on sanity. Meanwhile, songs like "The Word Lisa" and "Wendover" are quick bursts of pop-punk vitality, full of springy synths, infectious hooks, and irreverent, tongue-in-cheek lyrics ("Freaking out again at the supermarket/Putting out-of-order signs on things that work"). "We Need More Skulls" is a dark post-rock dirge featuring a single lyrical couplet that fades in and out of hearing ("We set out to make up all the mistakes of our parents and their friends/We set up a safety net but it was above our heads"), and "I Can Be Afraid of Anything" and "Mount Hum" are glimmering, ominous epics.

I somehow managed to listen to this album once earlier in the year without recalling a single note of what it sounded like. I'm not sure what excuse I have for that, maybe distraction or hasty judgment. Luckily, when a chance encounter with an earlier Braids song led me to give the album a second chance, I loved every note of it. Braids started out as an exuberantly experimental art rock band whose music, for better or worse, was a little all over the place. On Deep in the Iris, their third full-length release, the band refines their sound to its most crystalline form, losing some of their more abrasive qualities for an expansive and hazy dream pop style. However, they retain personality in spades, thanks to Raphaelle Standell-Preston's idiosyncratic vocals and unapologetically confrontational lyrics. A surface-level loveliness masks a dark, politically-charged undercurrent - there's far more to unravel and dissect in this album than it may initially seem.

The light, buoyant atmosphere of Deep in the Iris easily draws you in and lulls you into a dreamy calm. The abundance of hooks is heightened by a smoothly flowing and bubbling electronic backdrop, enriched by vibrant piano, spacey guitar, and driving percussion. Although pop at their core, these songs are far from conventional or straightforward. Some tracks explode from minimalistic beginnings to a complexly textured constellation of sounds that seems galactic in its reach ("Happy When," "Warm Like Summer"). Others shake up the traditional verse-chorus structure by segueing unexpectedly into extended instrumental breaks or new vocal melodies ("Letting Go"), while others eschew such formulaic trappings altogether, preferring a more organic and loose approach ("Miniskirt"). Throughout them all, Standell-Preston's voice alternates between an ethereal croon and a passionate, full-bodied belt. It bends and twists - both digitally and naturally - right alongside the music, seamlessly integrating itself into the intricate weave.

As beautiful and soothing as the album sounds, the lyrics, once noticed, are surprisingly smart and assertive. Standell-Preston is confident in her voice and uses it to bring light to important issues that affect not only her but all women. In songs like "Happy When" and "Getting Tired," she sings candidly about struggles with depression ("It is winter now, I must prepare for all I cannot bear/Myself, my mind"), and "Sore Eyes" raises questions about the false and unattainable expectations created by watching pornography ("The girls with balloons and the men with batons, shoving it hard"). She also presents honest portrayals of sexual abuse, both at the hands of a manipulative lover (in "Taste," "Take me by the throat/And will you push me up against this wall/And spit all your hurt on me/So I can feel my reach?") and a pedophilic predator (in "Blondie," "Touch me so young, make it seem fun, take everything, you don't care").

The most important and emphatic message comes in "Miniskirt," which is split into two separate but related narratives. The first is told from the point of view of a young woman who has been objectified, sexualized, and antagonized for both her choice of attire ("It's like I'm wearing red, and if I am/You feel you've the right to touch me/Because I asked for it") and her sexual desire ("In my position/I'm the slut/I'm the bitch/I'm the whore/The one you hate"). Sadly relatable, Standell-Preston's no-holds-barred commentary and her snarling delivery tell the listener exactly what she thinks of such double standards. In the second half of the song, she relates a more personal story about a sexually-abusive stepfather and the impact of his actions on the family: "My mother's soul he devours with a grin/And when she finds out/The child he has taken/Confronts him and stakes him and breaks him/All our boxes on the lawn/Woman shelter for nine months/Cross the street to the church/Pray confusedly about what hurts." It's as brutal to listen to as it is to see on the page, without any of the trappings of prettiness that disguise the other songs. But it's also a revelatory, necessary moment on an album that isn't afraid to go deep.

It's unlikely that Vulnicura would be the album to finally make me a Björk fan, but that's exactly what happened. Although arguably her least accessible release, being somehow both dense and subtle at once, there's an emotional immediacy in its unfiltered expressions of pain and grief that I've never gotten from her music previously. Of course, now, having spent 2015 acquainting myself with the bulk of her discography, I find it hard to believe that I could ever dismiss her music as emotionally cold. Still, the depth of openness, honesty, and rawness on display in Vulnicura is singular. Yes, it can be a difficult listen - it's not an album I can ever see myself pulling out for casual listening - but it's simultaneously a stunning departure and a welcome return to form for an artist who many assumed was past her musical prime.

For a long time, Chelsea Wolfe has been one of those musicians I felt I should, in theory, love but never quite managed to click with, despite the fact that I couldn't find anything to particularly dislike about her either. In cases like these, it's usually a new album coming around at the perfect moment and making everything else fall into place that finally changes my mind. This is exactly what happened with Abyss. While it doesn't tread much new ground, instead continuing down the same darkly menacing path as Wolfe's last several releases, it does find her perfecting her gothic blend of folk, industrial, metal, and grunge, resulting in a consistently strong end product. Though not exactly easy listening, Abyss also never grows tedious or grating, even at nearly an hour long.

I think one of the main problems I've had with getting into Wolfe is that her powerful vocals and beautiful melodies have in the past been a little too obscured by layers of noise and distortion. As a result, they often took patience to dig out, a daunting proposition if you're not already a fan. Abyss is probably Wolfe's cleanest-sounding album yet, which makes it more accessible and immediate. But it also achieves this without sacrificing an ounce of her music's ominous mystique. Songs like "Carrion Flowers," "Dragged Out," and "Color of Blood" go all out in this regard, rich with overblown synths, groaning strings, eerily manipulated samples, and heart-pounding climaxes that arrive in a cinematic swoop. At the center of these intense vortexes of sound, Wolfe's palpably pained vocals, swimming in reverb, maintain a commanding presence.

However, the album's greatest power lies in its more nakedly vulnerable moments. One of these is "Iron Moon," which alternates its muted verses, Wolfe murmuring poetically over sparse accompaniment, with grungy walls of guitar anchored to her distorted wail, "My heart is a tomb/My heart is an empty room." Other tracks like "Maw" and "Crazy Love" are less dramatic in their rendering of emotion, but no less compelling. The former leans in a more shoegaze-inspired direction, with gauzy instrumentation and vocals and a subtle build-up that emphasizes beauty over terror and culminates in a surprisingly soaring chorus. The latter takes a turn toward the acoustic and is almost sweetly romantic as Wolfe proclaims ethereally over an orchestral crescendo, "I don't want to live without you."

This is a style of music that could easily become dreary or overbearing or, worst of all, comically melodramatic, but Wolfe is a master of balance, tempering the most oppressively dark moments with songs that reach, even briefly, toward the light. While not an album to be played casually, Abyss is still more versatile than one might expect. It may appear on the surface that Chelsea Wolfe is painting with a very limited palette of shades, but the tonal and emotional variety she manages to coax from them proves that she's no one-trick pony.

There are a lot of things about Natural Born Losers that shouldn't work: the uncomfortably confrontational cover, the death and violence-obsessed lyrics, the vocals so sweetly innocent they're practically cavity-inducing, the dark industrial soundscapes that threaten to destroy everything in their path. None of it would work if it were done solely for shock appeal, but I don't think that's Nicole Dollanganger's aim. She seems genuinely uncalculated in her approach to such material, especially considering she's been quietly releasing music that blurs the lines between naivety and depravity for some time now. Whether borne from an honest fascination with the macabre or a compulsion to expose humanity's dark side or both, Natural Born Losers is the gorgeous, unsettling culmination of Dollanganger's efforts to draw strength from the ugly by reclaiming it as beautiful.

The album catches the listener's attention immediately, for better or worse, as Dollanganger opens "Poacher's Pride" with the wide-eyed and shockingly vivid declaration, "I shot an angel with my father's rifle/I should have set it free/But I let it bleed/Made it into taxidermy/Hung it on my wall." Backed only by sparse electric guitar and subtle atmospherics, the contradictory sweetness of her voice lulls listeners into a false sense of security in the moment before the full force of the lyrics hits them, which turns lines that might otherwise seem cliched or melodramatic incredibly chilling. It's the sense of incongruity, of the wrongness of that voice singing about those things. A line like "I like it when it hurts like hell/There's nothing you could do to me I wouldn't do to myself" from "Mean" isn't shocking in and of itself but becomes so when paired with its gently cooed but startlingly earnest delivery.

From this track onward, the songs become more complex and textured instrumentally, usually building up from minimalistic keyboard or guitar beginnings into chill-inducing emotional maelstroms of unearthly vocal harmonies, sludgy guitar riffs, darkly droning synths, and thunderclap bursts of percussion. This is a far cry from the necessarily stripped-back DIY aesthetics of Dollanganger's previous releases, but it makes a huge difference, creating drama and dynamics where otherwise the songs might begin to sound too similar. Her voice has also grown to fit its new surroundings: while inarguably dainty, it never gets lost or muddled and often pushes beyond its limits into raw, unrestrained passion. "Angels of Porn (II)," a re-recording of an older track, illustrates the benefit of these changes well. The higher production values and intense build-up during key lines ("My hair is falling out again/And I don't really care") turn it from a sorrowful but slight acoustic ballad into a full-scale cathartic release.

From the disturbingly lullaby-esque "In the Land" (which tackles the degradation of women in an unflinchingly brutal manner) to the tongue-in-cheek, undeniably catchy love song to a bad boy "You're So Cool" (I guarantee at some point you'll catch yourself singing along to, "When I'm good, I'm very good/But when I'm bad, I'm better"), each track is a grittily cinematic journey into the dark heart of the American midwest. It may surprise some that Dollanganger, as a relative newcomer, has managed to cultivate such a singular vision, but the seeds of growth are clearly planted in her self-released back catalogue (which I keep linking because it's free, y'all). In Natural Born Losers, she has created an album that's as revolting as it is inviting: you know you probably shouldn't listen again, but, ultimately, you just can't help it.

I don't think Laura Marling is capable of making a bad record. Since releasing her debut album as a teenager in 2008, she's consistently shown remarkable maturity and nuance in her songwriting. While 2010's I Speak Because I Can will always be closest to my heart, it's hard to find much fault in any of her releases, really. Short Movie is no exception. While it contains both the lush '70s singer-songwriter-styled folk-pop and the atmospheric, slow-burning ballads that have long characterized her music, Short Movie also presents Marling at her most aggressive. It has teeth - sharp, gleaming, and fierce - that her previous work has only hinted at, making it a refreshing change of pace and another worthy addition to her impressive oeuvre.

Long-time fans will find a familiar warmth in the smooth acoustics, honeyed vocals, and sun-warmed atmosphere of tracks like "Divine" and "How Can I," and the dark interplay of richly-strummed guitar with foreboding layers of reverb and white noise places "Warrior" and "Howl" firmly alongside Marling's strongest simmering ballads. With every release, her delivery becomes ever more throaty and world-weary, and her soul-searching lyrics match their intensity perfectly: "I'm just a horse with no name/Somewhere there's other beasts who think the same." As flawlessly as Marling executes these styles, an entire album's worth of such subtlety runs the risk of becoming predictable and bland. On "Divine," she sings insistently, "I'm taking more risks now/I'm stepping out of line/I put up my fists now/Until I get what's mine," and this isn't just sentiment or metaphor: it's a statement of intent that the rest of the album aims to prove.

Early standouts "False Hope" and "I Feel Your Love" introduce the turn toward more driving and aggressive rock that emphasizes electric instrumentation, occasionally supplemented by soaring string arrangements. The relentless pace demands versatility from Marling's voice and it delivers, swinging effortlessly from a ringing soprano to a gritty snarl as she throws out accusatory one-liners ("An electric fence/A silent defense/It's who you are"). To avoid being too one-dimensional, Marling's rock influences are all over the map, from the bluesy "Don't Let Me Bring You Down" ("Do I look like I'm fucking around?" she asks bitterly in the chorus before announcing sarcastically, "I'm a woman now, can you believe?") to the '90s alt-rock jangle of the shouty, breathless "Gurdjieff's Daughter." It all boils over on the title track where, over a noisy wall of groaning violin, robust cello and percussive guitar, Marling snarls, "It's a short fucking movie, man/I know/I will try and take it slow."

More than anything, Short Movie is all about finding one's voice and then finding the strength to use it and speak up for oneself. Where her lyrics have often seemed centered around mythological or otherwise fictional characters in the past, this feels like Marling's most personal album yet, a first-person account of confidence and power gained, against all odds. It also speaks of limitless potential, which is particularly exciting for an artist five albums deep into her career.

In 2014, I fell in love with Ought's brilliant debut, More Than Any Other Day, in the midst of finalizing my year-end list and ended up wedging it in at #11. That was as high as I felt comfortable placing such a new discovery at the time, but I've only fallen more in love with it since. Barely a year later, the band capitalized on the adrenaline rush of their unexpected success by releasing Sun Coming Down. Despite its swift creation, the album is highly complex, showcasing a marked growth in the band's skills as both songwriters and performers. What it lacks in spontaneity, it makes up for in precision and laser-sharp focus. Besides, it's still injected with plenty of rambunctious energy, even if there's nothing quite as charmingly uninhibited as "Today, More Than Any Other Day" or as emotionally raw as "Habit."

In any case, it's probably wise of the band not to attempt to duplicate exactly the sloppy, unhinged urgency of their debut because it's an approach that could easily fall flat if forced. Instead, they focus on refining their sound into one that is more calculated but also more sustainable in the long run. Tim Darcy's lyrical rambling is more pointed and his vocal delivery more deliberate. The band's instrumental accompaniment is tighter and cleaner, and while their tendency toward unexpected shifts in melody and time signature remains intact, such curveballs come across as more thoroughly planned, which also means that they're pulled off with greater ease.

While More Than Any Other Day in some ways celebrated the beauty to be found in the mundane ("I am prepared to make the decision between 2% and whole milk!"), Sun Coming Down takes a more critical view, exploring the ways in which social conformity dulls our capacity to live fully. This theme is most fully encapsulated in the eight-minute centerpiece, "Beautiful Blue Sky," which exposes the meaninglessness of small talk by stretching it to its most absurd limits. Over a barely changing musical backdrop, Darcy repeats ad nauseum in his detached nasal drawl, "How's the family? How's your health been? Fancy seeing you here. Beautiful weather today. How's the church? How's the job?" As these phrases grow more insufferable with every repetition, it becomes easy to see how they might obscure us from truly appreciating "the big beautiful blue sky." This realization resolves in a sort of optimistic nihilism, renouncing structure for spontaneity: "I am no longer afraid to dance tonight/Because that is all that I have left/Yes!" The change in Darcy's delivery of this single final syllable, shifting from a robotic monotone to a passionate yelp, speaks volumes.

The album attacks other social institutions in similarly satirical ways, from masculinity in "Men for Miles" ("There were men for miles/Doesn't it just bring a tear to your eye?") to corporate devotion in "Celebration" ("Suit and tie/Fits okay/Don't take much to make my day"), all backed by angular guitars, propulsive bass, and frenetic drums. Yet social deviance comes with its own brand of alienation, an outcome which Darcy grapples with in "Passionate Turn," the most nakedly emotional track on an album that largely makes its point through seeming emotionlessness. At first, Darcy puts on an impassive front, insisting lazily, almost brattily, over equally dispassionate instrumentation, "I have given up love . . . I am digging the silence . . . Goodbye to everyone I know." But this denial breaks open over the course of the song, slowly revealing the cracks in such a philosophy, until Darcy finally admits weakness: "I'm a distance from grace/And I'm losing my face . . . It's too much all for you/It's too much all alone." As a whole, Sun Coming Down can be viewed as the more jaded older sibling of More Than Any Other Day. However, the sincerity and nuance with which the band approaches its cynicism keeps it from falling into any cliched traps, and, in the words of "On the Line," "halle-fucking-lujah" for that.

Mew has been on a roll of really good albums with really (endearingly) bad covers since 2003's Frengers. While it's true that the Danish band has been taking more and more time between each release (And the Glass Handed Kites came only two years after Frengers, but No More Stories... was five years in the making and + - six), this is only because each time they've had to fine-tune their elaborate and detail-oriented approach to fusing prog- and post-rock, baroque pop, and electronica in a way that both tracks with the rest of their catalogue and stands out as something more than a mere retread of past ideas. So far, they've succeeded brilliantly. Although + - hews closer to its predecessor than previous releases have, it also brings enough innovation to the table to stand up on its own.

I have to admit that I was slightly disappointed in + - in the first few months of my acquaintance with it. Initially, I felt like all of the best songs had been released as singles and though I largely enjoyed the sound of everything else, it also seemed a little too one-note and expected. For these reasons, I put the album away for a while and was pleasantly surprised when I revisited it later in the year to find that it was more interesting and complex than I remembered. While it's true that it lacks a lot of the unbridled experimentation found in Mew's past work, the album reveals an impressive maturity and precision in songwriting and production that is the culmination of nearly two decades' work.

The album's singles are definitely its most immediate tracks and provide a good representation of Mew's style for the uninitiated. "Satellites" is an expansive, sunny pop song that builds up layers of synths, guitars, drums, and Jonas Bjerre's eternally youthful vocals into a stadium-sized chorus then blasts off into robust prog-rock instrumentation through which Bjerre's ethereal harmonies effortlessly glide. Half as long but just as packed with musical twists and turns, "Witness" skips the build-up, arriving breathlessly and never once letting up; Bjerre shows off his vocal range even more impressively, delivering low, dark verses before leaping back into his transcendental upper range. While these tracks skillfully illustrate Mew's more maximal side, the emotional "Water Slides" is subtler. Abandoning his usually cryptic lyrics for directness, Bjerre's romantic desperation is palpable: "For such a long time, I didn't know if I'd find you/Say something/I'm lying on the bathroom floor."

While the rest of the album takes more time to sink in, it is equally rewarding. Turning the "big chorus" formula of the singles on its head, "Clinging to a Bad Dream" is hypnotic and spacey, teasing the listener with a dynamic pre-chorus before moving in the opposite direction toward a dreamlike collage of polyphonic melodies that's more shoegaze than pop. The penultimate track, "Rows," is an unexpected nod to Frengers' "Comforting Sounds," a ten-minute epic that evolves into a galactic instrumental jam, punctuated by swaths of piano and soaring falsetto. By the time it ends, you're sure that it can't possibly be outdone, but then along comes "Cross the River on Your Own" to prove you wrong. Instrumentally, it's one of the most sparse and straightforward tracks here, which makes its beauty all the more staggering. In the final moments, Bjerre sings, almost as an afterthought, "My life was okay/I was counting my steps," summarizing in a handful of words the regret that permeates the entire track. At nearly an hour long, + - can be an overwhelming listen, but it is also an album of endless discoveries - which is a good thing, considering, at their current rate, it might be several years before we hear from Mew again.

U.S. Girls is Megan Remy, who assembles pop songs that sound like they've been scattered in pieces, picked up, and reassembled again into bizarre patchwork versions of themselves, making them the monsters to her Frankenstein, equal parts fascinating and frightening. In fact, the majority of Half Free wouldn't sound out of place soundtracking some sort of contemporary pastiche of the stilted black-and-white monster movies of old. One of the songs here is even titled "New Age Thriller," and there's really no better description of the musical atmosphere that Remy cultivates. Half Free is dark and weird and gritty and, most important of all, adventurous, combining its influences in a way that leaves it sounding like nothing you've ever heard before.

The closest comparison point I have to this album is Avey Tare's Slasher Flicks (just listen to "Little Fang," and I think you'll get what I mean). Both albums are similarly cinematic and horror-inspired, but where Enter the Slasher House largely comes across, at least to me, as messy and overly complicated, Half Free is more straightforward and less cluttered in its approach. Remy's voice is exceptionally well-suited for carrying such unconventional material, a bold and quirky drawl that is as hypnotizing as it is unsettling, especially when combined with her deceptively sing-songy melodies, spooky musical backdrops, and abstractedly sinister lyrics. Take opener "Sororal Feelings," which sets the tone for the rest of the album immediately, fading in on muffled basement synths and culminating in a creepily playful chorus that is punctuated by disturbing sound effects and ends on the repeated lyric, "Now I'm going to hang myself from my family tree."

The following three tracks - "Damn That Valley," "Window Shades," and "New Age Thriller" - take the musical textures and motifs introduced in "Sororal Feelings" to their extreme, layering competing demented vocal lines over top of one another and supplementing them with distorted synths, crunchy guitars, and ghostly strings and piano. These songs borrow as much from genres like disco, new wave, and 1960s-style girl pop as they do from more industrial and gothic-leaning styles. As a result, they'll make you want to dance at the same time as they make you glance anxiously over your shoulder.

Things come to a head in the closing track, "Woman's Work," which (despite the initial disappointment that it is not a cover of Kate Bush's "This Woman's Work") is an absolutely stunning musical achievement. At seven minutes, it takes its time unfolding, opening with burbling synths that spiral (think Iamamiwhoami at their most ominous) over the faint refrain, "That woman's work is never done." Then Remy breaks into verses as intensely as if she's dragging them straight from the pits of hell, culminating in the threatening chorus, where, backed by creepy robotic harmonies, she sings, "You arrived in your mother's arms/But you will leave wrapped in a black limousine." Breathless until the very end, it encapsulates an album that surprises at every turn.

Johanna Warren has the voice of an angel: it'll stop you in your tracks at how pure and clear and sincere it is. But it's not enough just to call it "pretty" on an aesthetic level because it also possesses a level of intensity and emotional immediacy that is awe-inspiring, especially for how naturally it seems to come. Luckily, she also has the songwriting chops to back it up. Nūmūn is fairly straightforward, no-frills folk-pop music; in such an oversaturated genre, it can be difficult to stand out, so the fact that nearly every song on the album is as good as or better than the next is an impressive accomplishment, revealing not only Warren's raw talent but her ability to wrangle and mold that talent into something wholly controlled and meaningful.

It's mind-boggling that Nūmūn can sound so rich, full, and warm when it was solely produced and performed by Warren and her collaborator, Bella Blasko. Often, it sounds like there must be an entire ensemble of performers involved. While many of the songs draw solely on gentle acoustic guitar and sparse piano accompaniment, others contain woodwinds, percussion, and what sound like strings or synths. The atmosphere is also well-done, drawing on minor chords, countless layers of haunting harmonies, and bits of well-placed ambient noise and effects to create a sense of foreboding and mystery. Ultimately, though, all of this, no matter how effective, is just window-dressing to Warren's gorgeously-crafted melodies. Her compositions are very precise, clean, and simple, giving them an almost classical quality. The album has a timelessness running throughout it that makes it sound as much of the 1960s or 1970s as of the twenty-first century, which bodes well for its longevity.

Upon repeated listens, having gotten past the spectacle of Warren's voice and musicianship, it's the lyrics that have most fully captured my attention. I don't think Nūmūn is intended to be a concept album, but recurring themes and experiences crop up across many of the songs. Most intriguingly, there is an elusive and persistent "she" whose presence looms as large in the narrator's life as a mythological figure. "Follow" is the story of their meeting, detailing how immediately this mysterious woman wins the narrator's intense devotion: "She burned as bright and as unattainably as some distant star/And from within her fragile flesh, where I lay my head to rest/I could feel her heart hammering in her chest/Then and there I swore, by the blue light of her celestial glow/I would follow her where no one else dares to go." The seduction progresses in "True Colors" as the two become increasingly intimate with one another: "We spoke/I posed/She painted my reflection." However, things take a dark turn as the woman's power over the narrator grows, culminating in the threatening reminder that "God has his plans, but I've got mine" ("Noise"), a possessiveness that results in emotional abuse: "She kept the key to my dark room/She left and warped the weft of my loom" ("Pin Oaks"). The album concludes with a reclamation of agency as the narrator asks herself, "How much more are you willing to take?/Do you think you'll bend, or will you break?"

The fact that such clear connecting concepts appear, regardless of Warren's authorial intent, is a testament to the depth and complexity of her songwriting as a whole. Beyond pointing out specific lyrics, I've chosen not to focus on individual songs because literally any one of the album's eleven tracks (except, perhaps, the instrumental interlude, "Apogee") would serve as a brilliant introduction. This is also another example of an album that is ultimately so much greater than the sum of its parts. I already find myself wishing I had placed it about five positions higher on this list.