Tonight We Dance

Recorded last summer in Los Angeles, their debut 10-track album effortlessly showcases both Oberst’s and Bridgers’s strengths as songwriters who are unafraid of literate vulnerability as they explore subjects like loneliness, privilege and estranged family.

As both a quintessential entry into his catalog and a striking entry into mainstream popular culture, Colors once again cements Beck as a clever, ever-dynamic and enduring artist.

“Spin” stacks up with just about anything in the Tigers Jaw canon, with melodic and memorable highlights with detailed flow and cohesion that invitingly solicits frequents listens.

Recorded last summer in Los Angeles, their debut 10-track album effortlessly showcases both Oberst’s and Bridgers’s strengths as songwriters who are unafraid of literate vulnerability as they explore subjects like loneliness, privilege and estranged family.

The artists for whom Clark now carries the torch were never satisfied with their past accomplishments and were always pushing forward. Masseduction cements her in this camp.

Semper Femina matches Laura Marling’s personal quest to unlock facets of her identity echoing with the wider struggle to clear a space for the feminine voice within society itself. With a triumphant new album it seems that this songwriter has found a room of her own.

Emerging from the murk and into the new-found quiet of middle age, Feist’s Pleasure is a document of stark beauty that’s entirely and unequivocally her own.

The result is probably the best work of the singer’s career, a wide-ranging survey of contemporary shortcomings in which the frequent bursts of offhand spite and bitterness are perfectly balanced by the warmth of the folk-rock arrangements.

Courtney Barnett and Kurt Vile are brave to make something so gentle, natural and unguarded. They’ve managed to strive for an ideal informed by a real sense of pragmatism, and in the process, they’ve made one of the warmest, good-hearted records of the year.

What elevates “Turn Out The Lights” is that it’s sensory as well as earnest, personally destabilising while artfully assured; it oscillates in the spilling synaesthesia of panic attacks, the dizzying clarity of epiphany, the paralysing futility of depressive episodes, the unfathomable locus of being okay.