Let’s start things off with one of the most laid-back and easygoing records of the year. Muchacho is a remarkable thing, filled with twinkling piano, sunny synthesizers, and a rhythm section that always keeps things at a lazy-river pace. And that’s still only the surface layer. There’s so much exquisite instrumentation here that it must have taken considerable skill to make everything sound quite so relaxed. At the center of all this is Matthew Houck, whose cracked and charming voice, for all its wordplay, gave us one simple command in the first track that we were happy to obey: “Be easy.” –Miles [LISTEN]