Daft Punk
Random Access Memories
(Daft Life/Columbia)
Twenty years in, and Daft Punk are still creating quirky dance music for the masses, but perhaps reaching a new level of maturity, in essence reminding us that we owe everything to our predecessors (while, of course, the French duo’s signature vocoder and space-age synth remain). What results is a collection of carefully crafted tracks, bigger and more stadium-worthy than any of today’s EDM. While anyone can borrow from the past, Daft Punk make their album one-of-a-kind with a crate-digger’s dream of contributors: Electro Godfather Georgio Moroder describes his coming of age in German discotechs. Chic’s Nile Rodgers plays disco guitar. Paul Williams, the once infamous singer/songwriter (Carpenters, David Bowie), is resurrected on the epic “Touch.” It’s a shame we have to revive sounds from 40 years ago to boost soul content of today’s productions, but Daft Punk will do what it takes to “Give Life Back to Music.” (MC)

Dillinger Escape Plan
One of Us Is the Killer
(Sumerian)
Obvious as Mike Patton’s influence was, Greg Puciato shunned the impact of Irony is a Dead Scene early in his days with Dillinger Escape Plan. It made sense, given that Puciato was a new singer tasked with taking over a band after their lone, landmark LP and a transitional set of songs featuring one of the most iconic voices around. But on this, their fifth and maybe best album, Dillinger have embraced the old EP’s off-kilter approach to violence with a Patton-esque sense of melody that at times sounds more like Faith No More than anything. The result is an album that finds its footing with such certainty that it wastes no time sweeping the listener off theirs. If “Prancer” is the primer to the Dillinger Escape Plan sound, the next ten songs work to deconstruct it at every turn. Whether it’s the industrial destruction that grooves through the hooks in “One of Us Is the Killer” or “Paranoia Shields” or the mechanical dissonance shredding through “CH 375 268 277 ARS,” this album is wholly representative of a band not content with standing on already broken barriers, but on rebuilding the standard to keep the competition out. (TM)

The-Dream
IV Play
(Def Jam)
Although he’s best known for penning über-hits like Bey’s “Single Ladies” and Ri’s “Umbrella,” Terius “The-Dream” Nash has consistently and, when considering his status, inconspicuously, dropped four incredible albums under his own name. The only time his fifth release gets shaky is when useless guests (especially Jay-Z, who all of a sudden thinks he’s Gucci Mane on “High Art”) show up and interrupt the atmosphere Nash builds with his frank songwriting, silky layered vocals, and synthed-out backdrops. The-Dream’s previous albums succeeded with their short guestlists and here, the strength of the feature-light second half of IV Play proves that The-Dream doesn’t need the starpower that has eluded him to continue making his satisfying brand of camped-up R&B pop. (CJ)

French Montana
Excuse My French
(Bad Boy/MMG)
The chances of a rap album coming out on its initial release date are highly unlikely, but the ten-month delay French Montana’s blockbuster debut Excuse My French had was just bonkers, especially with lead single “Pop That” being as successful as it was. Sample and guest clearances could have partly caused the wait, along with having to please a pair of imposing executive producers (Rick Ross and Sean Combs, thanks to his Maybach Music/Bad Boy split-deal), but now that it’s here, it’s clear—this monster needed time to grow. True to its title, Excuse My French is an audacious affair, and makes its case for the most obnoxious rap album in history at every turn as the vile, promiscuous, misogynistic, drug-dealing and abusing, caricature of a modern day rapper that is French Montana and his like-minded guests slime their way across a set of well-chosen, tight productions. This is unabashed, unapologetic knucklehead rap at its best. (CJ)

Hooded Fang
Gravez
(Daps)
For a band beloved for their whimsy, Hooded Fang’s 2011 LP, Tosta Mista, was a surprisingly weighty record, balancing unfussy garage melodies with serious-minded doses of insecurity, heartbreak, and loneliness. It was a good look for this Toronto outfit, and, gladly, it’s an avenue they continue to explore with Gravez. Murky and blown-out as ever, Gravez is Hooded Fang strumming at their hardest: “Ode to Subterrania,” built on a Spaghetti-Western bassline, sounds like an Ennio Morricone score blasted through a junked tube amp; the full-moon surf of “Never Minding” is charming, until you realize it’s gruesomely suicidal; and lo-fi funk collides with obssessive self-loathing in “Genes.” The most consistent thing about Gravez is that Jekyll-Hyde binary: it’s lo-fi and high-concept, hummable yet genre-sweeping, sunny yet macabre, and it’s precisely why such a death-obsessed album won’t just make out summer playlist, but perhaps our year-end lists, too. (MT)

Mount Kimbie
Cold Spring Fault Less Youth
(Warp)
On Cold Spring Fault Less Youth, British beatmakers Mount Kimbie move on from bedroom producing to try their hand in a real studio for the follow-up to their critically acclaimed debut. The duo continues in the vein of what hasn’t yet been given a better name than post-dubstep, where there’s no drops or wubs, but instead ambient sounds, choppy textures, and overall electronic subtlety. Cold Spring Fault Less Youth is warm, crackling, and clicky, and the organic percussion gives the album a budding, fresh feel. Also fresh is a sound you won’t find in anything produced in North America—the young, deep, red-headed talk-singer called King Krule, who no doubt we’ll be hearing more of in the future. (MC)

The National
Trouble Will Find Me
(4AD)
The National are a band who have built their career on musical tension and anxiety, so the fact that their fifth album, Trouble Will Find Me, sounds almost at ease is itself a bit uneasy. But the National have never appealed to listeners looking for instant gratification, and a closer listen here reveals not only Matt Berninger’s typically self-deprecating wryness or challenging percussion and guitar timing and tones from brothers Devendorf and Dessner, respectively, but a confidence that allows the band to dig deeper into perfecting sounds most handily found on 2010’s excellent High Violet. “Don’t Swallow the Cap” is both brooding and bouncy, proving once again how subtle and masterful the National’s hooks really are (see also: “Sea of Love”). It’s may be the sound of a band comfortable with what and where they are, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re forever content with it. (NV)

Neighborhood Brats
No Sun No Tan
(Deranged)
After releasing a handful of singles and a self-titled LP, No Sun No Tan is the sound of Bay Area punk act Neighbourhood Brats hitting their stride: Singer Jenny Angellillo’s spit-sung vocals are as ambiguous ever—at turns, overflowing with seething rage, beach-bum antipathy, and nihilism—while guitarist George Rager’s buzzsaw melodies make the Brats’ skate ‘n’ surf-inspired fretting sound positively ferocious. Blend it together, and the result is wonderfully vicious, whether the band delivers frothing-at-the-mouth anthems (“Ocean Beach Party”), ’80s NoCal hardcore jams (“Shark Beach”), or violent song-threats (“White Girl,” in which Angellino seethes, “I’m not a martyr”). It’s a glorious chemical imbalance: It’s a summer album for those who hate the heat, a party album for antisocial misanthropes, and a call-to-action for the apathetic. Fuck the beach. (MT) (Note: We erroneously wrote this was the band’s final release. It is not.)

Pistol Annies
Annie Up
(RCA Nashville)
After releasing their debut album Hell On Heels in 2011, country supergroup Pistol Annies have emerged as a solid, booze-soaked guild, fully equipped with twelve more songs of heartbreak, substance abuse, and the complexity of modern womanhood. On Annie Up, Miranda Lambert, Ashley Monroe, and Angaleena Presley handle all songwriting duties again, but this time around they elevate their approach to three-part harmony and Grand Ole Opry-suitable country music with razor sharp lyrical jabs at the dirtbag men in their narratives, and plenty of lush, layered instrumentation orchestrated by some of the finest players Nashville has to offer. Annie Up is an honest, an often dark approach to modern bluegrass that has each member earning respect for their equally important individual contributions to the sisterhood of Pistol Annies.

Vampire Weekend
Modern Vampires of the City
(XL)
Modern Vampires of the City is a record nobody might ever have expected Vampire Weekend to make. Laced with the usual myriad cultural influences and upright quirk the band has made a name on, it also delves into personal, analytical, and straight-up weird new places to deliver treats like jarring surf-rock jams (“Diane Young”) and head-scratching, vocoder-chorused ballads (“Ya Hey”) about love and death (and New York City, natch). Vampire Weekend have always been sold a bit short (though admittedly understandably) as stuffy Ivy-League indie-rock brats (or, simply, “goofy shit,” as a friend puts it), but truthfully, their dedication here to being thoughtful, optimistic students is enough to overlook all the easy jokes and dig in. (NV)