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...

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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...

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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...

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"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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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O.K. is as comforting as a bowl of chicken noodle soup or an afghan knitted by your grandmother or a steaming bubble bath. On the opening track, "Folly," a gentle acoustic ballad about the uncertainty of early love that blossoms into subtle electronics, Gabrielle Smith sings, "In my dreams, you're a bathtub running/You are warm and tender and bubbling," and there's really no...

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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...

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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....

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If I were to present an award to the album I had the most fun listening to in 2015, Peanut Butter would have to be it. You know, I used to want albums and songs I liked to last as long as possible, but these days, I'm learning to appreciate the beauty of releases that pack a major punch in forty minutes or...

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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....

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It took me until the hype had significantly died down before I got what made Visions so compelling, but I eventually grew to love it from top to bottom. So when it became obvious that its follow-up would sound very different, I was skeptical and spent my first couple run-throughs of Art Angels trying to decide if it was even good at all....

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I have to admit that I'm not the biggest fan of instrumental music. It's not necessarily that I don't enjoy it; it's just that I find it far easier to connect to vocals or lyrics, which makes it difficult for me to engage with instrumental music as anything more than pleasant background noise. For that reason, I was surprised to be so immediately...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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Lianne La Havas' debut, Is Your Love Big Enough, is a grower in the truest sense of the word; apart from a couple more immediate and extroverted tracks, it's an understated, quietly reflective affair that so slowly creeps under your skin that you barely notice. While this makes for pleasant listening, the lack of "big" moments also feels slightly underwhelming, especially because you...

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It wasn't long after I became a Sleater-Kinney fan that the band went on hiatus, and I didn't really expect that they would ever reunite, especially as Carrie Brownstein found more success as a comedian/actress and Corin Tucker and Janet Weiss seemed happy pursuing other musical ventures. And I definitely didn't expect, if they were to reunite, that they would be capable of...

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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...

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