In Hear This, The A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well. This week, we’re picking songs from 2016 that we discovered too late in the year to include on our year-end ballots.

With Rush’s 40-year touring career coming to an end, this documentary offers an especially lighthearted and uplifting look at the band’s legacy. Stocked with footage of Rush’s final tour and the band’s celebrity fans, it also contains one of the most involved looks at Geddy Lee’s, Alex Lifeson’s, and Neil Peart’s…

From the opening moments of Echolocation until its grim close, Gone Is Gone’s latest output is stronger than its debut EP. The sound evolved fast: While both releases combine post-hardcore and metal in a radio-friendly way, Echolocation reveals a band that’s fought hard to discover its own sound, even if that sound is…

“You’re getting used to me doing no wrong,” El-P says midway through Run The Jewels 3’s first single “Legend Has It,” and he’s not kidding. Over the course of two decades, El’s been a sort of gravitational force for good in hip-hop, his industrial production seemingly refusing to age and his verses getting sharper…

By design, Brian Eno’s latest collection of instrumental ambient music is a fluid entity. In addition to making the 54-minute, one-track Reflection available via the usual media (e.g., CD, vinyl, streaming platforms), the composer collaborated on iOS and Apple TV editions featuring an “endless and endlessly changing…

Every Friday, dozens of new records are released into the wild. Some make big splashes, and others sink almost immediately. For most music consumers, it’s almost too much information, and save for those precious few who spend their hours glued to review sites and release calendars, it’s hard to know what’s coming out…

The A.V. Club, as you might have guessed, is staffed with no shortage of music nerds, casually tossing off comments about our vinyl collections and that obscure indie show we caught last week. Before we were parents, we naturally assumed that our excellent musical taste was something hereditary that we would pass on…

Though Nine Inch Nails has always been a collaboration, it’s often seen as being all about Trent Reznor—though any deeper reading about The Fragile reveals a process involving several musicians creating ideas, not one man locked into a studio. But Not The Actual Events is the first time Nine Inch Nails is officially…

While The A.V. Club spends much of December praising the year’s best works, it’s also a time to reflect on the ones that left us scratching our heads. This isn’t necessarily the worst music of the year, but these albums left lingering questions about why they exist and who they are for. Dive in, friend: This is the…

Though the holidays are just a few days away, it’s time for another episode from our partnership with Pickathon, one of the Pacific Northwest’s most scenic and unique festivals. This time around, we’re presenting a video featuring the amazing Mac DeMarco, who performed at the fest earlier this year. In this video,…

For our final Holiday Undercover of the year, Lansing, Michigan’s Cheap Girls dropped by to play a song that’s a bit more downcast than our standard fare. Though “A Long December” isn’t a traditional holiday song, the cut from Counting Crows’ 1996 record, Recovering The Satellites, encapsulates the winter doldrums…

My World Of Flops is Nathan Rabin’s survey of books, television shows, musical releases, or other forms of entertainment that were financial flops, critical failures, or lack a substantial cult following.

At this point, the idea of an Odd Future member growing up isn’t necessarily newsworthy. Tyler, The Creator and Earl Sweatshirt—the two best-known members of the hip-hop collective outside of Frank Ocean—have both managed to build careers that move beyond the controversy of their earlier lyrics. That’s not to say…

We love it when bands don’t take the “holiday” part of Holiday Undercover too literally; while it’s nice to have some traditional songs—see last week’s Shonen Knife entry—it’s also nice to play with the idea a little bit. That’s exactly what the British band Wild Beasts did, bringing us this intense duo version of…

In addition to our best-of list, which chronicled 21 of the year’s best records, we took to A.V. Club Live to give the top three picks a little more space. Here A.V. Club Editor At Large John Teti and Music Editor David Anthony discuss David Bowie’s Blackstar, Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool, and Angel Olsen’s My Woman,…

There’s no easy way to summarize the year in music given how much of it took us by surprise. High-profile albums would be announced with little warning, arriving on streaming services in a flash, and dominate the cultural conversation until the next one came along. Similarly, some of the most innovative names in music…

Given that so many people contribute to our yearly best-of lists, it’s hard to get a glance at an individual’s favorites. But hey, that’s what ballots are for! After giving our top albums of 2016 a glance, dig into the individual lists our writers submitted. It includes their top 10 lists, honorable mentions, and…

Lucy Dacus’ debut album reminds me of so many things that I already love that its only downside might be a sense of overfamiliarity, even on first listen. But No Burden isn’t too much of a good thing; it’s a synthesis of disparate-but-similar favorites from Julie Doiron and Low to Cat Power and Sharon Van Etten.…

What you hear first is the pastiche: the easy nods to A Tribe Called Quest, the snap of sleepy OutKast drums, and the references to Southern stalwarts like Curren$y and Silkk Da Shocka. But something sticks about this record above the familiarity. Isaiah Rashad released The Sun’s Tirade after a multiyear morass in…

Bloc Party dropped its long-awaited fifth album, Hymns, way back in January of this year. The last 11 months should have given fans enough time to decide whether they could get on board with the band’s revised lineup—new members Justin Harris and Louise Bartle joined in 2015—as well as a new direction, which has taken…