Few records have stayed with me in the way that S.C.U.M’s first and only LP, Again Into Eyes, has. Dark, odd, trendy, and fizzing with an almost naive creativity, it was a record that found me at a perfect time; it aligned with my budding interest in synthesizers and motorik rhythms and directed me towards many of my favorite records ever, while itself remaining a prized part of my record collection.

There’s a sort of giddy anticipation of a collaborative project of artists whose work you like individually for different reasons and whose intersecting creative paths were a complete mystery. Eluding fanfare, singer Antony Hegarty, now taking the nameANOHNI and commonly known from her music made as Antony & The Johnsons, united with two of the more ambitious electronic producers out there to fashion the music for HOPELESSNESS, her first studio album in four years.

An abrasive hardcore band progressing from pummeling noise to nuanced songwriting is hardly novel in 2016. It’s almost perfunctory, part of the Internet’s cred-to-buzz-to-respectability-to-longevity arc.

Julianna Barwick has occupied a unique space in music since her breakthrough, 2011’s The Magic Place. She makes music that isn’t quite electronic, because it’s too organic; isn’t quite instrumental, since it features voice; and isn’t quite ambient, since her music isn’t all drones and tones.

Brian Eno‘s intentions will never cease to be helplessly rooted in discovery. Strikingly modest for a man with such colossal cultural impact and a production résumé boasting John Cage, David Bowie, and John Cale to name a few, Eno is unrivaled in his influence on the dynamics of modern electronic music.

On Chris Cohen‘s second solo LP, As If Apart, the singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist seems to be wandering through the gullies and gulfs of his own interior world, intermittently stopping to examine strewn fossils of ‘60s baroque pop, vintage AM gold, and the most placid strains of psychedelia.

After a three decade long career featuring stints as the original singing voice of Jem in the ‘80s cartoon Jem and the Holograms followed by Belltower; Ultrababyfat; the recently reunited Luna; and Dean & Britta, her ongoing band with husband Dean Wareham, Britta Phillips has finally and remarkably released her debut solo album.

Three years after 2013’s sparser, more tentative Nightingale Floors, Rogue Wave come roaring back with an album that reasserts them as major, albeit under-recognized, players in the world of 21st century indie rock.

2016 has been a bit of an oddity to date. How many other years can you think of where, even only at the quarter-year mark, so many of the best albums have been released by artists over 60? David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and John Cale are now joined by Wire.