As we fully move into the new music releases of 2015, it’s hard not to look back at some of the greatest albums that shaped the industry in 2014. Here is one final recap of the top albums of 2014. While Cadenza continues to consider and eagerly await 2015’s full-length releases, we can only hope that they match the quality of the 2014 offerings.

1. D’Angelo and the Vanguard

“Black Messiah”

Fourteen years of silence erased in four days. It didn’t feel real. It still doesn’t. But here we are, with a new D’Angelo album.

The question wasn’t whether it would be any good—a brief but masterful body of work quashed fears of an outright disaster. No, the question was whether D’Angelo could reproduce the otherworldly grooves that fueled “Voodoo”’s black magic.

He did, but that’s only part of the story. “Black Messiah” is forged from the fires of D’Angelo’s heroes—Prince, Marvin, Sly Stone—and synthesized into something at once familiar and alien, but it moves beyond “Voodoo”’s bedroom-centric fixations.

Where “Voodoo” built its loose-hipped jams around Questlove’s slack-drum patterns, “Black Messiah”’s virtues are primarily melodic. This being D’Angelo, he takes the evolution one step further, warping traditional verse-chorus structures into shapes that fit the contours of his singular musical language. The album’s pleasures are subtle; finding beauty in the offhand phrases that would pad the arrangements for, well, just about anyone else.

But D’Angelo isn’t anyone else. He finds and produces resonances you wouldn’t think to look for, refuses to give his voice top billing, resists instant gratification. His songs seep into your aural cavities upon repeated listens, but never lose their mystifying otherness. They create spinning color wheels of mood and texture, dazzling with each rotation. We don’t get songwriters like D’Angelo often, but when we do, we’re reminded of just how good music can be.

Each year brings with it a new set of festering wounds, and last year’s cut deep as any. Albums like “Black Messiah,” in their quivering beauty, make those wounds hurt a little less.

Welcome back D’Angelo, we’ve missed you.

2. The Hotelier

“Home, Like Noplace is There”

The stakes are what separate good emo records from the great ones. Plenty of bands can whine their way to a Warped Tour slot, but the best make suburban ennui sound like the apocalypse. The Hotelier does just that on “Home, Like Noplace is There,” turning small-scale angst into nuclear warfare.

The trick is that it does it without striving toward the operatic pyrotechnics of a My Chemical Romance (not that there’s anything wrong with that). It’s the feelings that are big, not the stagecraft.

But the set design is almost beside the point when you have a lead performance as electric as vocalist Christian Holden’s. His brand of melodrama may scan as shrill to some, but his gravitational pull can’t be denied. It takes a special set of vocal chords to tear with this kind of heart-searing abandon.

But The Hotelier’s no one-man-show. As a unit, the band locates that same swirl of ambition and immediacy that pushed Titus Andronicus into the creative unknown on “The Monitor,” its revelatory 2010 punk opus. The Hotelier isn’t thinking that big yet, but when it does, watch out. Headphones can’t transmit frequencies that tsunamic.

“Home”’s modesty keeps its transcendent vulnerability under wraps for a few listens, but it’s the kind of record that sews itself into your emotional hardware if given enough time. Spend some with The Hotelier this year.

3. Swans

“To Be Kind”

Words really can’t describe the scale Swans are working on these days. Colossal, maybe. Titanic. You can take a glance at the often 10-plus-minute (34 in the case of album centerpiece “Bring the Sun/Toussaint L’Ouverture”) song lengths, or the vast assemblage of instruments listed in the album credits, but it’s impossible to comprehend the scope of Swans’ achievement until you come face-to-face with it. Reckon with its gothic, ear-splitting beauty. You need to be crushed and swallowed by the great pulsating vortex that is “To Be Kind,” the band’s third release since reuniting in 2010.

That vortex has no peer in modern rock, pushing the genre’s skeletal framework to symphonic heights with its bubbling reserves of menace. Likewise, major chords are all but nonexistent; this is an exploration of the punishing potential of guitar, drum and voice. At its zenith, this is brutal stuff, but if you’re able to survive the sonic onslaught, there’s serenity to be found in the darkness.

But the album’s study in extremes swings both ways, finding ample time for quiet—an unsettling, ominous quiet, but quiet nonetheless. Sometimes the quiet functions as a vehicle for tension, other times a respite. Michael Gira, the band’s primary creative force, has learned a thing or two about dynamics in the 35 years since he founded Swans, and here he explores the chasm that separates loud and soft in terrifying detail.

Though there’s often calm before Swans’ storms, make no mistake, they want to destroy you. This is end-of-the-world, meet-your-maker stuff. Buckle up.

4. Cloud Nothings

“Here and Nowhere Else”

Once a purveyor of cutesy bedroom punk, now an architect of tuneful vitriol wrapped in barbed wire, Cloud Nothings brainchild Dylan Baldi proved his staying power with “Here and Nowhere Else.” Following 2012’s “Attack On Memory,” his stylistic turning point and creative breakthrough, Baldi sharpened his hooks and coarsened his riffs to cathartic effect on his second go-round with Cloud Nothings 2.0.

Not a moment is wasted in watery balladry or avant-garde ego-tripping. Baldi dedicates each note to the expression of his endless reserves of angst, lending “Here and Nowhere Else” a furious momentum.

Baldi’s distaste for detours, when combined with an ear for anthemic, scream-along choruses, achieves the monumental task of making the internal social. He may come across as a misfit, but he can navigate the tensions between pop’s inclusivity and punk’s insularity with the best of them.

As the album format fights for relevance amidst shuffle-happy streaming services, Baldi’s sonic argument for the long-player—brevity and force—may stave off its demise. May the odds ever be in his favor.

5. Jessie Ware

“Tough Love”

Winner of last year’s “unfairly maligned sophomore album” award, “Tough Love”’s chilly reception defies common sense, good taste and any reasonable barometer of justice. Maybe critics were in the mood for fussy demonstrations of textural virtuosity (*cough* FKA Twigs *cough*), or perhaps Ware’s instinct-driven songwriting didn’t announce itself with enough ceremony. No matter the cause, Jessie Ware was robbed of a much-deserved commercial and critical coronation.

It’s a shame, because what she’s after here is that stomach-churning tingle that accompanies love, both gained and lost. The kind feeling you can’t construct, that flees from meticulous personas and grand statements. On “Tough Love,” she reports straight from the gut, tapping into the rhythms of a heart beaten but never broken.

In doing so, she achieves the rare trick of ascribing life-and-death stakes to romance without overshooting her mark. “Tough Love” is the rare album that feels, rather than describes, reminding us why we put ourselves at risk for heartbreak time and again. “I want to feel burning flames when you say my name,” she croons on “Say You Love Me.” Don’t we all?

For the rest of Mark’s extensive album selections from 2014, check out the Cadenza section on studlife.com

6. Lana Del Rey

“Ultraviolence”

A nightmare dressed as a daydream. That’s what Lana Del Rey—self-styled femme fatale, media punching bag, supposed fraud—has wrought with her second full-length. Quite simply, “Ultraviolence” sounded like nothing else in 2014’s pop universe, but neither did “Born to Die,” her overstuffed, airless debut. So what’s different this time around?

Cohesion, for one. Cutting “Born to Die”’s endless roster of producers to a select few (The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach chief among them), she creates a sonic world that’s damn-near novelistic in detail: guitars plucked and strummed with suggestive nonchalance, hair-raising theremins, vocals shrouded in mist. Riding Auerbach’s expansive licks deep into the rotten heart of postwar noir, Del Rey pollutes golden-age nostalgia with her impossibly lush brand of fatalism.

The lyrics are still disposable, but the sounds she and Auerbach conjure are not. Pulling from Tin Pan Alley pop, mid 20th-century showtunes and Phil Spector-era girl groups—with dashes of spaghetti-Western swagger and Lynchian surrealism for good measure—they create a universe unto itself, where muscle cars and chiaroscuro lighting and cigarette smoke congeal into the makings of Raymond Carver’s dreams.

You’d think it would be nasty, gritty stuff, but Del Rey and Auerbach’s great trick is capturing the allure in the live-fast-leave-a-beautiful-corpse ethos. You know exactly what Del Rey’s doomed characters are in for—they probably do as well—but you cheer them to their tragic fates, if only for another dose of “Ultraviolence”’s bourbon-soaked hellscape.

7. Ty Dolla $ign

“Sign Language”

I understand if you can’t get past Ty Dolla $ign’s rampant, repulsive misogyny. In a hip-hop and rhythm-and-blues scene overrun with disparaging attitudes toward women, Ty takes the cake in his dogged insistence on depicting them as sexual objects, not to be trusted or valued as anything other than conquests.

But I’ll be damned if he doesn’t make his tattered moral fiber sound irresistible. Beamed from alien planets where the water’s laced with Molly and strobe lights flash day and night, Ty paints strip clubs in blurred lines and kaleidoscopic swirls of color. Composing with a reverence for classical songcraft and a surrealist’s touch with atmosphere, Ty’s assembled a slew of alternate-universe chart-toppers (“My Cabana,” “Paranoid,” “Or Nah”) in the two years since the debut of his “Beach House” mixtape series. But Ty came into his own on “Sign Language,” which dropped with little fanfare last August.

Constructed with a purposeful fluidity, “Sign Language” defies mixtape convention. This is no 18-track brain dump, comprised of equal parts gem and dud. Each of “Sign Language’s” 11 tracks serves as an argument for Ty’s innate understanding of melodic language. Halfway between songs and sketches, they can meditate on particularly striking phrases before abruptly turning towards all-too-brief song-ending interludes. “Sign Language” is breezy and loose, but in all the right ways, bearing the imprint of a songwriter with a peculiar sense of structure.

Two years of steady improvement have Ty’s impending studio debut, “Free TC,” among my most anticipated 2015 releases. If he can avoid the major-label sandpaper that sometimes accompanies the transition from mixtapes to commercial albums, Ty’s mainstream breakthrough may be imminent. Trust me when I say pop will be better for it.

8. YG

“My Krazy Life”

DJ Mustard staged a coup in 2014, smothering commercial radio with his arpeggiated minimalism. His crowning achievement was YG’s “My Krazy Life,” the year’s most visceral hip-hop record. Careening from lewd recollections of YG’s sexual conquests to sober reflections on the toll of ceaseless violence, “My Krazy Life” creates a frank, multi-dimensional portrait of its narrator, connecting the dots between hip-hop’s recent reflective streak and past glorifications of gang culture.

It’s a delicate balance, but YG pulls it off because he doesn’t overthink it. As a vocalist, he’s rough around the edges, but “My Krazy Life” is all the better for it. His plainspoken dispatches on the agony and ecstasy of life in Compton wouldn’t hit with the same force if he labored over his cadences and rhyme schemes.

And don’t forget the hooks, which come early and often, courtesy of Mustard’s less-is-more Fisher Price melodies. Occasionally derided as a monochrome opportunist, he proves beyond a doubt the merits of his aural signatures here. He may not have Kanye’s range or Madlib’s avant-garde flair, but he constructs earworms with a scientific precision. It’s an aesthetic philosophy that produced nine top-25 hits on the Billboard R&B/Hip-Hop charts last year, and made “My Krazy Life” one of 2014’s most compulsively listenable records.

In a year bereft of sweeping hip-hop epics, “My Krazy Life” argued for the virtues of concision. Clocking in at a svelte (at least by hip-hop standards) 46 minutes, it replaced filler with whirlwind tonal deviations and built-to-last bangers. Let’s hope the competition takes notice.

9. Azealia Banks

“Broke with Expensive Taste”

Between an endless series of Twitter feuds and a perpetually delayed debut album, Azealia Banks seemed destined for the scrap heap of once-promising flameouts. But when she finally dropped “Broke with Expensive Taste” in early November, it was met with mild amounts of surprise—that it finally arrived, that it wasn’t a complete mess.

But “Broke” is more than a pleasant surprise; it’s a minor miracle, as fierce and volatile as its creator. Energized by a blatant disregard for sonic boundaries, “Broke” blurs genres with giddy bravado. No wonder Interscope couldn’t figure out how to handle it. The thing runs at a million miles per minute, adopting and discarding ideas in 140-character bursts.

For her part, Banks weaves through BPMs with all the cocksure swagger one would expect from one of hip-hop’s premier firebrands. It’s one thing to be a verbal acrobat; it’s another to make it seem effortless. Banks fires off syllables like bullets, flaunting rare vocal strength and flexibility.

Free from the shackles of a label that couldn’t handle her explosive brand of caffeine-addled dance-hop, Ms. Banks’ narrative is set for an improbable turnaround. If her music continues to burn this bright, her year in music-biz purgatory will become but the origin story for a budding star.

10. Drake

Non-Album Singles and Guest Verses

What’s that, you say? I’m cheating? Overlooking The War on Drugs or something? WELL DID THE WAR ON DRUGS SING A BRIDGE SPANISH, THEN RAP ABOUT HOW THEY CAN’T SPEAK SPANISH THIS YEAR? The answer is no, they did not. That would be Drake, reigning people’s champion and unparalleled hit machine. He did so on Romeo Santos’ “Odio,” a middling slice of Latin pop that doesn’t deserve a Drake verse but got one because Drake works in mysterious ways.

Drizzy spent the entire year elevating other artists’ songs, whether making a narratively incongruent appearance on YG’s “Who Do You Love?” that would’ve flopped were it not for Drake’s unyielding belief in his excellence or breaking iLoveMakonnen’s “Tuesday” just because he can. Even without an official single or album in sight, Drake owned 2014, because Drake is a winner, and that’s what winners do.

You know how big Drake is? He released “0 to 100/The Catch Up” on SoundCloud with no advance warning or promotion and scored both a Grammy nomination and the 35th spot on the Billboard Hot 100. Nobody does that. Except Drake, because Drake’s a winner and that’s what winners do.

With a knack for folding outlandish boasts into the logic of his enviable reality, Drake’s made an art of using his cultural cachet to illustrate, in great, often fantastical detail, how wonderful it is to be him. Whether insisting his New Year’s resolution is reminding us that he’s made it, or invoking his Sprite sponsorship, Drake further fleshed out his persona last year, as comically petty and arrogant as it is endlessly fascinating.

With a mixtape and full-length album supposedly on the way, Drake may test the limits of his improbable winning streak in 2015. Don’t be surprised if he demolishes them. Because Drake is a winner, and that’s what winners do.