I arrived late to the hammock-hangout hums of Hovvdy. But Austin natives Charlie Martin and Will Taylor, whose fourth full-length True Love glows with dusty middle Americana, won me over from the tender “doo-doos” of opener “Sometimes.”

R.E.M.’s tenth overall album and their fourth in a succession of ’90s masterworks beginning with Out of Time, 1996’s New Adventures in Hi-Fi incorporated the best of the group’s previous releases into a single moody exploration of the modern West in its imperial twilight.

Organized by Brooklyn-based independent soul and funk label Daptone, and recorded over the course of three luminous nights at Harlem’s legendary Apollo Theater in December 2014, The Daptone Super Soul Revue featured performances from its distinguished artists.

It may have taken 18 months longer than first scheduled, but Humanist’s first live show in Sheffield was well worth the wait.

One of the year’s most intriguing releases, Jackson+Sellers’ Breaking Point is exactly the radical shakeup needed within the Americana movement for quite some time.

Two decades after the fact, Sugarcult’s oft-overlooked classic Start Static still pulsates with the same defiantly youthful energy that earned “Stuck in America” and “Bouncing Off the Walls” slots on the American Wedding and American Pie Presents The Naked Mile soundtracks, respectively.

Wet Leg prove once again why they’re the most exciting new band in Britain.

Parquet Courts have been a band on the cutting edge of the rock scene for a while now. Between Light Up Gold, Human Performance, and, most recently, Wide Awake!, these country-boys-turned-punks have amassed one of the most consistently good discographies of the past decade in a genre oft-called dead.

The release of Chicago’s first live album was an audacious move. The first rock band to play a week’s worth of shows at Carnegie Hall had issued three double albums between 1969 and 1971, and Chicago at Carnegie Hall hit the marketplace in October of ’71 as a four-record set.