Senior Cadenza Editor Mark Matousek shares his picks for the best albums of 2015. Read 6-10 here.

5. Jason Isbell – “Something More Than Free”

When picking the best music from a given year, the temptation is to reward the grand, sweeping gestures—the home run swing, the musical thesis, the artist or album that embodies the latest cultural narrative.

This tendency is not new, but it persists, and it comes at the expense of artists whose excellence doesn’t easily reduce to slogans. Jason Isbell is such an artist. His great talents are economy and vocal shading—not exactly the sexiest skill set.

On his fifth solo album, “Something More Than Free,” he sings of rock bottoms and redemptions with humility and grace, no doubt aided by his history of personal turmoil. Since 2002, he broke a marriage, was kicked out a band (Drive-By Truckers) and struggled with drug addiction. He’s made a welcome comeback in recent years, remarrying, watching his solo career flourish and getting sober.

With this experience has come a gentle wisdom that he uses to depict characters in various states of disrepair. He distills conflict and desire—the two cornerstones of storytelling—to their simplest forms, suggesting whole personal histories with no more than a few details, picked sparingly and with purpose. (On “Speed Trap Town,” the narrator, after realizing “There’s no one left to ask if I’m alright,” wonders “If there’s anything that can’t be left behind.”)

Isbell’s pained tenor communicates tremendous empathy, bridging the gap between personal history and fiction. His songs demand a certain ambivalence, an ability to express conflicting feelings simultaneously. If you need proof that great singing comes not from range or perfect pitch but emotional precision, consider “Flagship,” which has Isbell floating between fear, despair, romance and resolution.

Isbell is an unselfish singer, always putting the needs of his character before his as a performer. The generosity pays dividends all over “Something More Than Free,” one character, one telling detail at a time.

4. Vince Staples – “Summertime ‘06”

There comes a moment in one’s life when internal and external awareness meet, each shedding light on the other. This often happens in one’s late teens or early twenties, but for Long Beach rapper Vince Staples, it occurred during the summer of 2006, at the age of 13. “Summer of 2006, the beginning of the end of everything I though (sic) I knew. Youth was stolen from my city that Summer and Im (sic) left alone to tell that story,” he wrote in an Instagram post revealing the release date and artwork for his debut album, “Summertime ’06.”

The album is stark and unsparing in its depiction of Long Beach and the tensions that pull young men and women towards violence. Staples is not one for decoration. He hits hard at images that hit back. “What’s the price on a life in this dark world?” he asks on “Surf.” “Couple hundred where I come from.”

In doing so, Staples draws out a dark web of causes and effects: drug abuse, institutional indifference and abuse, murder, rigid gender codes, prison sentences, broken homes and the crushing pressures they’ve exerted on him. A cutting and unsentimental narrator, Staples struggles to reconcile the fame that brought him release with the fates of his friends and family who remain trapped.

His perspective, rooted in a specific sense of place and vernacular, finds a fitting sonic partner in No I.D.’s sunken and hollow production. (He received a credit on 14 of 20 tracks.) One of 2015’s unsung heroes, I.D. turns up the bass frequencies until they consume the space around them. Even when they bounce, there’s something sinister underneath, something dark waiting just around the corner.

In an interview with Exclaim last year, Staples questioned the utility of a universal morality, “What does wrong really mean?” he asked, “It’s all based on the window you’re looking out of.”

On “Summertime ’06,” Staples’ window looks outward and reflects inward, wise enough to diagnose how home and self relate and to note that the two are inseparable.

3. Drake – “If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late”

Is there a pop star with as much nerve as Drake? The guy sells records like no one not named Taylor or Adele, turns SoundCloud B-sides into top 10 hits and is fawned over by the media—critics and tabloids alike—yet he had the gall to open the year with a 68-minute record about how hard it is to be as awesome as him.

But that nerve’s the whole point, isn’t it? We love Drake, in part, because he makes himself so easy to hate. He builds his musical persona out of the pettiness and narcissism we often hide, but we know it’s there, and so does he. He knows we identify with villains as much as heroes, so he makes himself a hero on the outside and a villain on the inside. It’s a brilliant marketing strategy that’s probably more intentional than he lets on. Or maybe it’s not. You never know what’s real and what’s fake and what’s a little bit of both. On “If You’re Reading This…” he leans into that gray area more than ever.

Since Drake is, essentially, a human think piece, the music itself often gets short shrift. Which is a shame, because “If You’re Reading This…” may be his most musically accomplished album. The hooks are everywhere, even in places you wouldn’t expect to find them. But that’s not new for a Drake album. What is new is how he pairs those hooks with sounds that ring and move in strange ways.

Bells, squeaks, chimes, harps, voices muffled and pitch-shifted—the album’s production team (headlined by Boi-1da, 40, PARTYNEXTDOOR) pushes Drake even further beyond recognizable hip-hop and rhythm and blues tropes, creating a special brand of minor key ennui that makes an album about the challenge of being king resonate beyond the one percent.

Kendrick Lamar got the most ink about making an album that’s relevant to its time, but Drake may have made the most 2015 record of all, one that mediates between the public and private selves in complex ways, that mirrors social media in its blend of aspiration, impulse, self-branding and myopia. As with each Drake release, we know him a little more and a little less. Because that’s the fun of being a Drake fan, isn’t it?

2. Girl Band – “The Early Years,” “Holding Hands with Jamie”

If you give a monkey enough time with a typewriter, it’ll write Shakespeare, the saying goes. The hypothetical is meant to illustrate that, if life were infinite, anyone could produce anything.

But we don’t have unlimited time, so urgency takes hold. You could whittle away at that book, script or song forever, but you’ll be dead long before then, so close it up and ship it out; it may be the reason your name pops up in someone’s Google glasses a century from now.

I suppose Girl Band is more aware of that fact than most. How else could you create such a tense and unholy racket?

Last year, the Irish quartet put out an album (“Holding Hands With Jamie”) and LP (“The Early Years”) that were as primal and barbaric and thrillingly alive as any piece of recorded music I’ve heard. You could call the units of organized sound they produce “songs”; I prefer “panic attacks.” Composed from jumbled neurons and tightened stomachs, these things live in the itches you can’t scratch—bleating and ranting and raving, but never finding peace.

Many bands who make loud and abrasive music use a build and release structure. Girl Band opts for the build and build, stretching as tight as possible, then stretching some more. It has no use for pretense or misdirection, just finding new ways for guitars and drums and voices to scrape against each other.

If you gave four apes an electric guitar, bass guitar, drum kit and microphone, you’d eventually get Girl Band. What a blessing that we get to know what that sounds like.

1. Kendrick Lamar – “To Pimp a Butterfly”

History will remember Kendrick Lamar’s third studio album, “To Pimp a Butterfly,” as a “classic” and ‘“important” album, and as it often does, history will make it appear to be an inevitability. Of course this unusually perceptive artist would make an album that captured a cultural and personal moment fraught with unresolved tensions—in Lamar’s case, a self-perceived moral decay brought on by celebrity—in society’s systemic intolerance. It will creep upwards on “greatest album all time” lists and, in doing so, will become an artifact. Conversations about its merit will reduce to crusty assertions of influence and social relevance. The living, breathing quality of the music itself and the immense pressure Lamar faced before its release will become overpowered by the sheer force of its canonized glory.

Before this happens, let us recognize what an improbable achievement “Butterfly” is. It is dense and sweeping in ambition, but also precise and rooted in granular detail. It not only meets but exceeds the impossible expectations set by Lamar’s 2012 release “Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City,” which was also subject to breathless acclaim. Through spoken word poetry and jazz, it gestures to the kind of high culture snobs who see merit only in complexity and confrontation, but possesses an emotional clarity more characteristic of popular art.

By all measures, it should be insufferable, a mess at the least. But by some great miracle of inspiration, timing and persistence, the proportions are just right. It evokes feelings of anxiety and mania as vivid as those described by Lamar in his lyrics. It makes your head spin and throbs with a million different sounds and ideas at each moment.

“Butterfly” is a rare thing, the kind of consensus building beast that comes around only a few times per decade. We will not soon forget it. But we will likely come to take the sheer improbability of its excellence for granted. For now, take it in, all at once. Cherish your awe. You won’t feel anything like it for a while.