Since Mikal Cronin has been playing fresh rock music—whether writing songs solo or in a backing band with friends—for 10 years, I’ve got a nickname for him: Cronin the Conquistador.

Cigarettes After Sex (aka Greg Gonzalez) brought the sensuality back to indie rock with his 2017 self-titled debut, an album that, across swaying dreams like “K” and the unmatchable “Apocalypse,” brought an unexpected edge of sexiness, open-heartedness and musical transportation to a rather staid scene.

The latest in an ongoing series of ballets scored by everyone’s favorite angel, Sufjan Stevens, was Justin Peck’s The Decalogue in 2017.

Sparking into fire with 2018’s Distant Star EP, a supercharged power-pop record, strapping together equal parts Superchunk and Teenage Fanclub with a drizzle of post-rock, Norway’s Spielbergs have since debuted their LP This Is Not the End with an expansion along the same lines.

Following the perceived flop of the now-lauded Village Green Preservation Society in 1968, Ray Davies, never a band leader to follow the path of least resistance, chose to follow it up with another ambitious working class concept album: Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire.

I could write elegant sentence after elegant sentence praising to the skies the transcendent wonder of this album, at times taut, at times beautiful, at times spacious, and at times so tightly-wound as to be almost physically uncomfortable.

St. Vincent’s Annie Clark has been riding the MASSEDUCTION wave nonstop since its initial 2017 release. Last year, she released the barebones MassEducation which returns the songs to a raw piano and vocal delivery, stripped of the maximalist electronica and highlighting Clark’s thoughtful songwriting.

In the fall of 1994, after the shock and grief among fans, fellow artists, and the music media over the death of Kurt Cobain had settled, news about plans for the first posthumous Nirvana release started to trickle out.

After a career-defining performance at Glastonbury this summer, British grime artist Stormzy is now confronting his place on the throne-a place often as lonely and dangerous as it is rewarding.