Like many of us, it’s safe to say 2016 will not go down as Chris Baio’s favorite year on the planet. Opening with the death of his favorite artist David Bowie, the Vampire Weekend bassist’s annus horribillis was compounded by the Brexit shitstorm hitting the fan in his adopted homeland of England in June.

Great albums originate from fortuitous circumstances. Bedouine‘s Azniv Korkejian, the Aleppo-born Armenian singer/songwriter by way of Boston, Houston, and eventually Los Angeles, went to Gus Seyffert’s studio in hopes of purchasing a reel-to-reel tape machine.

It’s usually a bad sign when the best song on your new EP is a cover tune. And it’s even worse if that song is the opening track. But Amber Arcades’ version of Nick Drake’s “Which Will” fits so well within their archetypical dream twee sound that there is no drop off with the four tracks that follow.

The third studio album from New York dreamy rockers Beach Fossils stops to a near-standstill half-way through its fifth track, “Rise,” where Memphis rapper Cities Aviv leads a saxophone-induced slow dance.

With Dust, Laurel Halo lays stakes in a perfect middle ground between the bent art-pop, thumping house, and maximalist musique-concrete-as-IDM of her prior work, but achieves this by allowing fractures to show, letting components sit side by side without ever forcing them to fit together sensibly.

Here’s a quick recap: since 2012, Australian psych-punk gang King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard have released nine albums. One was a spoken-word Western concept album. One featured four long tracks of deliberately equal length.

Now this is a lovely thing. Jeff Tweedy revisits his past catalogue, recording acoustic renditions of songs from Wilco, Loose Fur, and Golden Smog. The record begins with a slightly faster paced “Via Chicago” from Wilco’s Summerteeth, the tempo suiting the song very well.

Throughout In a Mood, Simon Okely (Slow Dancer) untangles a relationship—he mourns and celebrates it. What’s fascinating about this deconstruction, however, is that he does not separate his feelings in a way that makes one song distinctly happy and another sad.

Algiers’ self-titled debut revealed a politically conscious band not afraid to use music to deliver a message.