The best CDs, mixtapes, and downloads of the year.

The Awakening makes a solid case for Goblin as one of the most important independent film-music forces of the late 20th century, alongside Ennio Morricone, Carpenter, and Popol Vuh.

Bish Bosch is a meticulous, intelligent, and generally stupefying addition to what has already been one of the most remarkable second acts in pop-music history

Ever since his earliest years, adding his spacey synth treatments to Roxy Music’s polarizing art rock, Eno’s been a musical provocateur, pushing listeners to question traditions and extend the boundaries of what constitutes pop music. But in 2012, Eno’s influence ...

On her third album as Bat for Lashes, The Haunted Man, Natasha Khan takes her Kate Bush obsession to new extremes with diminishing returns, channeling her fairy godmother’s brooding soundscapes and ’80s-style production but little of her sensual melodic catharsis.

The restless trumpeter, composer, and bandleader Dave Douglas does not make music for lazy listeners. Since 1993, Douglas has released around three dozen recordings under his own name, and has appeared on many more than that as a sideman. About ...

Animal Collective embraces messiness and abrasion on its ninth studio album: playing live instruments together in a room for the first time in nearly a decade, downplaying feathery loops and pillowy textures in favor raw muscle and eardrum-busting mayhem.

Can's new three-disc set, The Lost Tapes, includes previously unreleased material recorded between 1969 and 1978 and traces the band’s gradual development from eggheaded garage band to prog-reggae experimentalists and, finally, a proto-ambient ensemble.

What used to come off as a nearly unimaginable extremity—the sort of forbidding musical brutality that Dying Fetus has made its specialty—now can seem almost quaint.

In 2012, pop radio sounds like an airbrushed, Auto-Tuned wasteland, and nobody in their right mind knows what the hell “alt-rock” means anymore. But a number of Pitchfork-approved, taste-making experimentalists have emerged in the past decade—chief among them Brooklyn trio ...

Lydon was perhaps the greatest angry young man ever, twisting with cynicism and contempt, raging against the machine. But at 56, he’s long past his angry-young-man years, and repositions his shtick effectively as a babbling old man.

Both Exmilitary and The Money Store have offered reviewers a seemingly unlimited supply of influences and reference points to chart, analyze, and argue about: noise rock, Public Enemy, industrial dance, dubstep, Suicidal Tendencies, Gang Gang Dance, Def Jux, Dalek, even ...

On its sixth album, High on Fire further entrenches its position as the American version of Motörhead, not least because singer/guitarist Matt Pike sounds more than ever like Motörhead main man Lemmy Kilmister. (And also because the initial response to ...

On One Second of Love, her third full-length and first on Secretly Canadian, Ramona Gonzalez has finally secured an appropriately widescreen sound to match her biggest, funkiest, darkest, most eclectic ideas.

The old-age album is fast becoming a genre of its own, and it is fascinating to see how these icons who have shaped our culture confront old age.