Wherein a part time beatsmith links up with Soulja Boy and the almighty BasedGod on Myspace to lace their stoned earnestness with thick cumulus cover. In peeling away the singularly outré vocals from a dozen of Clams Casino’s finest weird rap nuggets, Instrumental Mixtape fully exposes the playground of textural oddities swirling underfoot—human voices splayed like chewing gum, birdcalls, and acres of white noise. It’s a wonder as much for sound as for sheer improbability, too, an ace beat tape from a producer without a working knowledge of the form, an ambient shoegaze watershed from a full-time physical therapy student who’d never heard of the stuff. —Craig Jenkins

Clams Casino: "Numb"

Jai Paul is a ghost in the machine, haunting the Internet with unanswered questions. Who is this guy making this polyglot space-funk that sounds like it’s being beamed in from another star? Why has he only officially released two songs in four years (the muffled miniature masterpieces “BTSTU” and “Jasmine”)? What’s the real story behind this allegedly leaked collection of alleged demos? Why the hell did he sample “Gossip Girl” and cover Jennifer Paige’s “Crush”? As of this writing, 16 months have passed since these tracks mysteriously appeared on Bandcamp . Sixteen months of complete silence from Jai Paul, only adding to his legend. If he never releases another note of new music, it would actually be kind of perfect. —Amy Phillips

Jai Paul: “BTSTU (Edit)” (via SoundCloud )

It's hard to remember, but there was a brief moment when Odd Future felt refreshingly small. Before the blog hype, the Los Angeles rap collective existed in a vacuum of carefully lo-fi Tumblr-distributed zip files. It was teenage lightning in a bottle and it never got more potent than Earl , the eponymous debut of a 16-year-old rap prodigy bred on the syllabic havoc of Eminem and backed by the crumpled Neptunes plod of producer/guru Tyler, the Creator. The young Sweatshirt was a shock rapper, to be certain, but he shocked in the service of a greater vulnerability. For all its bluster, Earl is an oddly introverted record, one that would almost certainly sink to the bottom of today's rap internet. That's the sad irony of OF's rise: we thought we were witnessing the future of music—a creative ecosystem where children could be left to build their own universes unfettered—when we were actually enjoying the last gasp of this past. —Andrew Nosnitsky

Earl Sweatshirt: "Earl"

Cramming a fleet of synth sounds into a series of quick, bright blips of pop music, Glasgow's Russell Whyte did not know when to stop when it came to Glass Swords , his debut album. His willfully overzealous style, which Simon Reynolds called “digital maximalism,” conjures thoughts of The Legend of Zelda: MDMA Edition , or a computer that throws up double rainbows every minute of every day, or maybe robots popping and locking in an underwater club years after humans have been mercifully extinguished. In other words, it sounds like the future: overloaded, swift, and perhaps a bit anxious. The producer drove his point home even further on a two-hour Essential Mix from 2012, which seamlessly mixed mainstream rap and R&B with his own tracks, sounding like Top 40 radio beaming in from a hyperworld a few galaxies away. —Ryan Dombal

Rustie: "All Nite" (via SoundCloud )

Neither toxicologist nor translator can interpret Young Thug. His vocabulary is a creole of Atlanta trap slang, Hopelandic , and the language of thought—the yeows, yelps, and coos used by babies to communicate. His bloodstream is equal parts Strawberry Jolly Ranchers, promethazine, tropical Fanta, marijuana, molly, and alien drugs beamed in from the plug on Betelgeuse . 

It is possible to explain him in terms of conventional lineage. There’s the croaking syllable plasticity of Lil Wayne circa the lunar peaks of his Martian phase. But Thugga hails from one planet further out, an inhospitable and volcanic sphere of choppy rock where the strip clubs only accept hundreds. He shouts out Fabo and OJ the Juiceman. Gucci Mane is his spiritual advisor. But when he looks in the mirror, 22-year old Jeffrey Williams only sees a meal ticket and occasionally Princess Leia buns. 

The eccentricity makes him compelling, but it doesn’t make him great. His hooks are sticky as resin. His craggy voice sounds ancient and energetic at the same time. You might question the lifestyle decisions, but few make self-destruction sound so gleeful. He spells out “l-e-a-n-i-n-g” on “ 2 Cups Stuffed ” like Styrofoam and codeine were presents under the Christmas tree. 

The condo is an aspirational ideal, a metaphor for highness, a place to store his imaginary Grammys, and to fuck nannies. That is, if he’s not in Jamaica or Siberia smoking weed from Nigeria. It also sounds like he’s taking a trip to Alberia, a country from Howl’s Moving Castle , which actually makes more sense. He belongs in an animated world of mad hatters, sorcerers, witch’s curses, and carpet-bombing. Or at the very least, Pokémon, as an evil Pikachu where he can level up, blind you with diamonds and use his lightning rod at will. 

Since last February’s release of 1017 Thug , Thug has ascended to the throne as Atlanta’s next star. His singles “Stoner”, “Danny Glover”, and “Lifestyle” earned him airplay across the South, but this mixtape is when he announced his arrival. It’s unclear where he came from or where he’s going next, but none of the minor logistics matter. When you enter a different world, you don’t expect to speak the same language. —Jeff Weiss

Young Thug: "Picacho" [ft. Maceo] (via SoundCloud )

Jaar’s debut is the kind of loose, subliminal music that suggests a beautiful place just out of reach, like the sound of the ocean playing from inside a conch shell. It fogs together, it falls apart, it builds up only to dissolve into giggles and splashing. Foreplay, basically, and though Jaar uses samples and occasionally defers to the backbone of a 4/4 beat, that doesn’t make him techno, nor do his jazz inflections and French-film dialogue make him smarmy. He’s a thinker and a sensualist—someone who just wants to slide in close enough to see what you dream. —Mike Powell

Nicolas Jaar: "Keep Me There"

Tom Krell used his first two   albums to fuse noise and traditional song structures, creating devices to obscure his own nakedly emotional pleas. On “What Is This Heart?” , his third and most striking album, he emerges from the darkness, facing himself and the world around him with disorienting clarity. You only need to glance at the quotes surrounding the album title to guess that Krell is a Ph.D. student, but “What Is This Heart?” ’s intense, soul-searching honesty transcends any pretense of academia, steamrolling through rubbery R&B, swelling drone, and plaintive acoustic balladry. The elliptical question posed in the album’s title is never answered, and that’s OK; the album's raw power comes from following Krell’s journey into the center of himself, even as he holds up a mirror to our own uncertainties. —Larry Fitzmaurice

How to Dress Well: "Repeat Pleasure" (via SoundCloud )

Tim Hecker has always been more of a synthesist than a bellwether—someone who pulls together disparate styles from forbidding worlds into music that might make sense to an outsider. Based around recordings of a day playing pipe organ in an Icelandic church, Ravedeath sounds less like music than the remnants of it—a haunted, hollowed-out record that reflects Hecker’s fascination with what he calls “digital garbage.”

Part of what makes the album appealing is that it’s middleweight: Sturdy without being oppressive, ethereal without feeling limp. And given how high-minded and abstract rhetoric surrounding electronic music can get, Hecker has an eerie talent of reminding you that behind all the gauze and processing is a human, stumbling around with his hands. —Mike Powell

Tim Hecker: "The Piano Drop"

Natasha Khan's breakout album as Bat for Lashes, 2009's Two Suns , exulted in high drama and mythic sweep, but its secret weapon was a synth-pop crush anthem named after The Karate Kid . Follow-up The Haunted Man ups the ante conceptually while also aiming all the more keenly at the emotions. It starts with a prayer and ends with "a new religion being born," taking excursions into both druidic revelry and ghostly military choirs, but the electronically starry "Marilyn" and heartbreak-pinpricked "All Your Gold" are direct hits to rival any Ralph Macchio ode. The most refreshing departure is pared-down piano ballad "Laura", about someone who is "more than a superstar." If The Haunted Man 's balance between pastoral grandeur and a boldly contemporary voice fit nicely into the digital-era folk music of 2014 albums by How to Dress Well or Hundred Waters, Khan herself has left albums behind the past couple of years, when her collaborators have included Beck, Jon Hopkins, and Damon Albarn. More than superstars, all. —Marc Hogan

Bat for Lashes: "Laura" (via SoundCloud )

Each of Darren Cunningham's songs contains a universe. They might be lo-fi on the surface, but listen closely and there are layers upon layers of sound going into infinity. That quality made Splazsh  a landmark record, taking the electro and techno influences of Cunningham's debut Hazyville and imploding them into less familiar shapes. He ended up with the stilted house on "Hubble", rusty and disjointed funk on "Get Ohn", and, most memorably, a fantastically jagged Prince edit in "Purple Splazsh". On his second album, Cunningham found a way to make deeply repetitive dance music sound more interdimensional and otherworldly than it ever has, and Splazsh is still a trip like no other. —Andrew Ryce

There are plenty of aspiring musicians who recite diary entries atop simple guitar strumming, but most don’t write dispatches that bring PostSecret realness the way Katie Crutchfield does. On her second album as Waxahatchee, Crutchfield smoothed out the lo-fi production, making her emotions even more explicit. Cerulean Salt recalls the stripped-down end of ‘90s alt-rock and Saddle Creek sad-boys, but Crutchfield’s highly specific, overwhelming exhaustion of having to Figure It All Out resembles a young Jenny Lewis, too. If the coping mechanism for her terrible twenties is hooky songs about self-conscious pillow talk, marital regret before anyone’s even put a ring on it, and swan-diving to one’s own graceful death, here’s hoping she doesn't grow up too fast. —Jillian Mapes

Waxahatchee: "Coast to Coast" (via SoundCloud )

During their seven-year lifespan, synth-heavy trio Emeralds put out dozens of headspace-expanding releases. But the Ohio-based trio’s proper albums always stood out above its flood of cassettes and CD-Rs, none more so than the group’s fourth full-length. Because  Does It Look Like I’m Here?  is heavy with analog synths and arpeggios, it’s easy to draw comparisons to any number of gurgling krautrock LPs from time beyond memory, but it was very much a record of its moment, an excellent synthesis of the previous decades’ best, weirdest ideas—from the grit of the then-thriving U.S. noise scene to the digital scuzz of Austrian electronic musicians like Fennesz and Pita, whose label, Editions Mego, released the album. More than any of that, it’s a dense, beautiful, and uplifting work that found the trio embracing melody and grounding its atmospheric improvisations with incessant sequenced rhythms. —Aaron Leitko

To read this sentence is to immerse yourself in the very universe that Arcade Fire fears: a world in which we are not present, but plugged in, craning our necks to peer at brightly-lit screens. Courageous and reckless in all the right ways, Reflektor 's "here-goes" mentality was realized via producer James Murphy's spinning disco ball, leading to death-defying highlights like "We Exist" and "Afterlife". From the throngs of nocturnally-crazed street folk populating "Here Comes the Night Time", refusing to go back inside, to Orpheus and Eurydice and their dimension-defying love (and loss), to "Joan of Arc" herself, Reflektor  is populated by characters who actively seek to escape systems of control, but the path to the exit leads through the dance floor. —Zoe Camp

“Sex music” is tricky to nail: it can come off as too on-the-nose and premeditated, and if it deviates too far off topic, it becomes a distraction. On her searing full-length debut , FKA twigs already has the sub-genre figured out. Everything’s way sexier when sex itself is circled hungrily like an exceptionally prurient vulture, but never quite reached, and here it’s represented in long-distant memories (“Numbers”) and almost-tangible hallucinations (“Two Weeks”). In FKA twigs’ bedroom, there is no consummation, only coveting—which is fitting for an album imbued with such an alien take on piety, such as “Closer”’s canticle-like shape, beamed in from some frostbitten lunar cloister. Don’t get it twisted, though, as desire and desperation are not the same, as LP1 closes with a self-satisfied (ahem) trill: “When I’m alone, I don’t need you.” —Meaghan Garvey

Real Estate have always been a band aware of their own strengths, and many of their best qualities—subtlety, melodic precision, graceful interplay of voice and guitar—have sharpened over time.  Atlas  is Real Estate’s most mature album to date—virtually every track on the album makes some reference to the passage of time, measured either in hours or miles spent behind the wheel. Any listener of a certain age will recognize a familiar ache when Martin Courtney sings “I’m just trying to make some sense of this/ Before I lose another year,” on “The Bend”. Yet there’s also a befuddled sense of gratitude that courses through such grown-up love songs as “Horizon” or “Had to Hear”, suggesting that Real Estate have already realized that time is on their side. —Matthew Murphy

Real Estate: "Crime" (via SoundCloud )

When Michael Gira announced in early 2010 that, after more than a decade without Swans, he’d be leading a new version on the road and in the studio, he made his intentions of advancement clear: “It’s not some dumb-ass nostalgia act. It is not repeating the past.” His hopes to press Swans ahead have been manifest since that year’s My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky and, even more so, on 2012’s massive The Seer . But To Be Kind , the third and most demanding album since the return of Swans, is too commanding, unyielding, and impatient to make room for relics. The band contorts primal rhythms and brutalizes basic melodies, turns gentle moments into death-trap bait and hits each crescendo with ecstatic malice. In an era of noncommittal cash-grab resurrections, Swans have become one of the few act to use their legacy as a stepstool for what’s to come—a commitment that helped push To Be Kind into the  Billboard  200 and the band that made it into the position of irrefutable authority. —Grayson Haver Currin

Swans: "A Little God in My Hands"

Everyone’s always trying to bring New York back, but early in the decade, there were few artists attempting to move the city’s sound forward. Outer-borough crews aped boom-bap, pining for the days when the local product ruled hip-hop. But Rakim Mayers, named after Gotham’s original god MC, went a different way, repping Harlem by way of sounds from Houston and Cleveland.  Rocky took cloud-rap and imbued it with charisma and hustle. He did what New York has always done: synthesized and repackaged the most popular sounds of the moment, put a pretty face on the cover, and watched it take the fuck off. —Jonah Bromwich

A$AP Rocky: "Peso" (via SoundCloud )

There’s something hard to deny about a band that can make a convincing song that sounds like John Lennon trapped in an amber of dive-bombing synth and phaser-coated guitar. Tame Impala did it 12 times on their debut , wrenching a classic wooly psych sound into the 21st century, imbuing it with a heavy groove and a distinctly modern iridescence. It takes sharp songwriting to cut through this much atmosphere, and the band shows skill and range running from the insistent throb of “Solitude Is Bliss” to the breathless take-off and non-stop ascent of “Runway, Houses, City Clouds”. —Joe Tangari

Tame Impala: "Solitude Is Bliss" (via SoundCloud )

The most uncharacteristically candid moment of Finally Rich is an interview snippet that opens album cut “Ballin'”, on which 17-year old Keith Cozart reflects, “They thought I was gonna be some motherfucking screw-up or something. They thought I was gonna be, like, bad all my life.” The sentiment applies just as easily to post- Back From the Dead critical response as it does any other swath of naysayers; as his post- Finally Rich output has grown increasingly, and pointedly, obtuse, it isn’t totally out of the question to suspect that Cozart crafted one of rap’s best major label debuts in recent memory purely to spite us all. But if Finally Rich remains the only artifact of Cozart as a legitimate pop force, you’d be hard-pressed to ask for more singular proof. Though the hallmark of its biggest tracks is the slurry, adaptive nihilism that’s come to define Chicago street rap, its most transcendent moments (“Kay Kay”, “Citgo”) reveal a tenderness that shines through the cracks in Cozart’s armor. —Meaghan Garvey

Chief Keef: "I Don't Like" [ft. Lil Reese] (via SoundCloud )

You’d think Ariel Pink would have felt some pressure when following up Before Today ; his cleaned-up 2010 breakthrough found a lot more fans than just the scores of lo-fi artists he had influenced in the previous decade. But if you’ve spent any time down the wacky rabbit-hole of Pink’s persona, the idea of him worrying about pleasing anyone other than himself seems a bit ridiculous. So Mature Themes finds Pink exploring continuations of Before Today ’s sound (the pure pop of the title track), retreats to early obscurity (the muffled “Schnitzel Boogie”), imaginary crowd-pleasers (swingers like “Live It Up” and “Baby”), and goofy novelties (the gem “Kinski Assassin”). Throughout all its satisfactions and puzzlements, every note sounds like Ariel Pink, and considering how often artists that face a new spotlight tend to overthink their own personalities, Pink’s ability to thoroughly be himself was a mature feat. —Marc Masters

Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti: "Only in My Dreams"