While its predecessor certainly offered glimpses into her private life, nothing could prepare her most ardent fans for the completely unvarnished, beautiful, hot mess that is West End Girl.

Labyrinthitis is Bejar’s best work since Kaputt. At this point, Bejar has several classics under his belt, so there’s no desperation here to create another one, but he manages to do it with ease.

It is an unmistakably raw first album of ripe potential, and one of the more memorable releases of the early weeks of this year.

Possibly the most intelligent album about love this decade, Water Made Us gently and disarmingly humanizes Woods while maintaining a me-positive stance.

Despite running for over 2 hours, the album feels notably succinct, even concise.

Hopefully Slave Ambient will do for The War On Drugs what Smoke Ring For My Halo did for Kurt Vile and place Adam Granduciel as one of the musicians with serious talent and songwriting acumen in modern indie rock.

YTILAER finds Callahan at his most personally enigmatic, taking inspiration from his own life and filtering those experiences through a prism of modern folktales. He offers us all the most enticing details but manages to keep it wonderfully vague at the same time, a treasure trove of musical obscurantism.

It’s not an album that immediately reveals itself, but when it lets you in it’s hard to find your way out.

Digging further into the singer-songwriter aesthetics of Seven Swans and Carrie & Lowell, Stevens has crafted an element of rare beauty, meticulously extracted from a host of sorrows, affections, and other confounding sentiments.

With the triumvirate of googly-eyed rhythms, sinfully catchy melodies and a breeziness that seems only fitting, they’ve served up one of the most auspicious debuts of the year.

While her method of intermingling a vibrant array of synthesized sounds remains from previous records, there is more musical complexity, which yields a pure joyousness that comes bouncing out. She has energised her productions with greater depth, more interplay across the stereo field.

Ssss is absorbing techno to listen to and proof that well written music outscores clever production tricks any day of the week.

Modern Vampires of the City finds the band in both familiar and unfamiliar territory, and it’s pure pleasure hearing them navigate these waters.

Even without the context of her back catalog, these songs are strong in their own right.

Thirty tracks and seventy-five minutes, Fabric 69 is a work of incredibly sturdy sonic architecture; it’s hardly inert or monotonous, yet at the same time it takes techno’s notion of repetition to what might be considered a logical extreme.

Frank Ocean might have a gutsier pen game–and Usher more moves and Miguel more sex appeal--but 20/20 is easier to fall into a groove with than any of the best contemporary pop/R&B albums out right now.

By reaching every-damn-where he could, ASAP Rocky both sidesteps this pitfall and becomes one of the year's most exciting voices.

Seabed is a luscious album that implores you to dive into the gorgeous depths of its sound and atmosphere.

Here he has never sounded more confident and purposeful, building layered and incredibly rich compositions out of his blissful loops that more than justify the length they inhabit.

The album’s brevity only adds to the allure, as it is stripped of any excess, and devoid of a single misstep. It is a distinct departure, but ultimately unsurprising in its flawless execution.

Both in its challenging nature and its status as an emblem of everything that the Motion Sickness of Time Travel project has dealt in to date, it functions, without a doubt, as Evans most accomplished release of her career and one of the more accomplished ambient albums in recent memory.

The trance-like pace of II serves to reinforce the album rather than weaken it.

Over the course of the album, we seem to hear Fohr coming to terms with the vastness of mortality, and realising that it is in itself beautiful – it is what makes life precious. With the enormity of that acceptance gradually arriving, her soul emerges, no longer eclipsed by grief, shining brighter than ever.

One of the more vocal complaints about The Weeknd's second mixtape was its lack of immediacy, which Echoes of Silence certainly outgrows.

The result is the rawest and truest set of songs in his career to date.

Keepers of the Light is as much of a singular expression of the hardcore continuum as it is an exploration of it, but maybe the best way to soak in its two and half hours is as a richly constructed sound world unto itself.

Delivering their most ambitious and longest album since 2010’s opus Romance Is Boring – and doing so while maintaining all the hallmarks that have made them such a beloved force.

Nepenthe isn’t The Magic Place, but it certainly sounds like she’s found another special site of inspiration. Thankfully for us it’s just as prodigious and marvellous as anything else Barwick has put out before.

It is him following a path of lesser resistance through the landscape, writing actual choruses and melodic hooks, and finding that there is just as much natural brilliance and artistic merit to approaching his work in this manner.

Origin of the Alimonies is an astonishing piece of work that leaves the listener breathless and euphoric. It is haunting, stunning in its ambition and scope, and a rapturous piece of art. It is beautiful, brutal and bruising. It is challenging, pretentious and uncompromisingly complex. It’s ace.

We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace and Magic delivers on the promise of Foxygen's previous material in almost every way possible, offering up full and complete songs filled with bright instrumentation and enough surprising songwriting turns to get lost in, but there's also a strong personality at its core bursting with a vibrancy that carries these songs beyond their specific musical waypoints and influences into a uniquely modern setting.

The band’s most emotionally delicate and intricate record to date.

Toledo has always been a lovably jaded ringleader, and Making A Door Less Open continues to dwell on his self-criticism and feelings of redundancy. What makes it a continuously compelling listen is how each song manages to use different sonic approaches to extract a new shade of his despondency.

While James Blake felt aloof, even ahuman, Overgrown is packed with feeling, and releases it with the smallest of gestures.

All ten of the songs here are grandiose and muscular in the great tradition of Spiritualized songs.

This is a high point in his already illustrious career; a labyrinthine and ultramodern take on hip-hop that will likely age like a Cabernet.

Abandon is one of the most cathartic, brutalizing, and beautiful experimental releases this or any year.

Their tunesmithery is crystalline, their lyricism freewheeling yet precisely penned, and their voice as evocative yet relaxed as ever.

Parks has made her most undeniable statement yet, an album full of uplifting and mesmerizing neo-classics that will fit right in the hearts and minds of the thousands it will touch.

She reaches through your speakers and pulls you into her fold where you ride buoyantly through her musical world, just as Peter Vajkoczy became part of her life of movement and dance.

After the muddy emotional quicksand of her previous album, Fohr has found an intoxicating clarity that abandons orchestras for beats. Recorded mostly at night in a basement-studio, the album exudes the limitless, animalistic jungian energy Pan stands for.

The album’s strength is in its sheer breadth, its teleological scope, its grandeur without pretence.

Suck It And See is an almost seamless step forward, reaffirming the notion that the band's shelf life is probably much longer than initially estimated. More importantly, it proves they still have places to go.

This kind of remaster campaign is normally reserved for albums that have had decades to sink into the national consciousness as is, introducing a shock-of-the-new, hearing-it-again-for-the-first-time element, and while the oldest of the Trilogy material has only been around for a year and a half or so, the differences in the new mixes can still be jarring.

Nothing here is overtly thrilling but ultimately the record is a real joy to listen to.

The record is patient and delicate, but Chung remains a constant if not aggressive presence within every track, imbuing each with immaculate detail.

“Whiskey” comes to terms with what turns out to be an album-long treatise on love. The emotional and theoretical aspects out of the way, she assesses a flawed, drink-loving co-human and decides she can work with imperfection. The moment is captured in bright, awakening tones where dawn is first noticed by the ears. Dawn in New York, where she lives. Spectacularly, among us.

The whole thing sort of pops into existence, an idea and a testament, and instead of resolving, wistfully swoons into silence, all a dream. But maybe that's what Lennox was going for.

It appeals instantly with its impactful and unforgiving sonic palette, but feels much better when we delve in deeper and engage with the emotion of the words – and for that we must leave rationality at the door.

Iceage mine the clangorous middle ground between traditional punk structures and the often sterile world of Joy Division-indebted post-punk, but they transcend both of those genres, just by meaning what they say.

[A] sprawling, at times impenetrable, but most outstandingly, engaging ramble.

For six albums now the twosome have been tugging along their listeners, perhaps even trolling them in some degree, and Everyone’s Crushed may be their strongest box of tricks to date.

WIXIW is simply a Liars album that exceeds expectations and throws a sonic left curve that not only impresses, but reminds us how talented this band is.

The Great Bailout is as much a historical commentary as a work of art, a detailed chronicle of the way in which a flawed system was flawlessly crafted.

The result is a project that frequently sweeps the listener into a trance, ruptures that trance, and then reestablishes it.

Its stark contrasts and melancholy work better on each spin, revealing artists who are wrestling with existential situations.

Far In handles weighty themes outside of love, such as the apocalypse, but Lange’s gentility is what we take from it. His presence is always thoughtful, sincere, never forceful or selfish.

The 10-song, 34-minute project crescendos, Powers perfecting his multifaceted craft while forging one of 2023’s more hypnotic sequences.

Tunes are built slowly and satisfyingly, ebbing and flowing into oceans of ambient sound. Through these layers, though, shine frequent flashes of utter brilliance.

With Celestial Lineage Wolves in the Throne Room have managed to craft a seamless and moving record as well as exceed the potential they'd previously left unfulfilled.

It’s rare to find a lyricist so honest and a vocalist so earnest, and when put into song it seems to Houck as if every word is vital and cathartic and necessary.

Their latest LP, Christfucker, is a further and consummate refinement, resulting in a milestone of seamless eclecticism and uncompromising savagery.

Electronic Dream concludes like it was only meant to be heard once and then remembered in scraps like its namesake, but, thankfully, its starts over as readily as it ends.

The strongest album of their career thus far.

America is an album in two halves, once again separate but together, a side of individual tracks and a four-song suite that inform each other even as they generate tension by nature of their disparity.

A sound ultimately unique to Chalk, Crystalpunk is a sensationally realized work, laced with tastes of madness, both cultural and individual.

Yes, it is very hard to convey the sheer creative joy within these compositions Clark has come up with, but what’s more important is the bigger picture. And that is that St. Vincent can no longer be directly compared (or plagiarised).

It’s Been Awful boasts some of Rashad’s most immediately gripping and memorable hooks to date.

Immediately striking on Sepalcure is the grace and fluidity with which these songs are constructed. The album's fifty-one minutes fly the hell by at a breakneck downhill pace and while these songs are infinitely busy they never find themselves reaching or crowded.

While New Long Leg basked in a chic trendiness, Stumpwork more soberly conjures the spectrum of 21st century life: our endless search for identity, our egoic highs and crashes, the ineluctable tedium.

Though the album now comes with studio polish and masterful songwriting, W H O K I L L still feels like an underground tape, challenging the listeners with oddball melodic choices.

Without a dull moment in sight, Reep has succeeded in creating something of an ethereal masterpiece.

Instrumentally, Ignorance transcends the traditional folk that The Weather Station tirelessly perfected over the previous four albums. With an ever-expanding palette of sonics at her disposal, Lindeman weaves these tales of turmoil and regret through the usage of everything possible – horns, strings, several subtle non-acoustic guitars, and most prominently the piano. To reach the levels of awareness she sought required another level of sound, and it crackles throughout Ignorance.

The songs are so masterfully constructed and the mood throughout so consistent that the key complaint must be that it has to inevitably come to an end; a sure-fire sign that an album is doing something right.

She’s a painter of sound, of mood. And one feels after listening to this document of searching textures, yearning melodies, and newfound sonic intimacy, that she’s only getting started.

It is the inability to identify a precise sound, while all the while remaining consistent, that is W's greatest achievement, a notion as ambiguous and tempting as Rostron herself.

God’s Country is a truly wonderful, twisted record. About halfway through you start thinking it’s maybe the best debut album of the year, and by the end of the first play you start thinking it’s possibly the album of the year. It’s intimate, expansive, political and deeply personal, unsettling, upsetting and life affirming.

A subtle shift toward curated production and raw lyrical revelation. Which isn’t to say that her earlier records didn’t have those things, but they feel far more present and deliberate here. Running once more in complete sync with inflo, these songs are some of Simz’s most personal and most vitriolic, masked in measured rhythms and encased in the wrath of someone who’s too tired to give a fuck.

Let us hope this isn't a flash-in-the-pan success and that subsequent releases are just as good.

By the time Once Twice Melody reaches its closing moments, it sounds like the band are taking a well-earned victory lap in a career full of wins.

Del Rey’s longest album to date by some distance – and not without the occasionally questionable choice. But the best moments, which abound, solidify Del Rey as one of the all-time greats.

Beyoncé has given us her most excessive body of work to date. It is unfocused, it swerves and changes directions, yet delivers quality in so many different ways no part of it can be called inessential. While one could choose a cynical route and think their way into not appreciating the full product, the truth is history will be kind to Cowboy Carter as yet another classic album from Queen Bey.

These twelve tracks are full, they're self-aware, they're straight up funny, and it's these traits that immediately separate Father John Misty's folk-rock from what Fleet Foxes do.

Cut the World is compelling enough to change the way we appreciate the world and its sad beauty. There's simply nothing that sounds quite like this.

The Italian duo have put together a timeless and beautiful dance record that slides easily to the top of 2012′s best.

Changes is a meticulously crafted album that brims with hooks, deceptively complex vocals, and timely ambivalence; oh, add a sprinkle of hard-won morale – perfect for spring 2026.

Headlights solidifies Alex G’s gift for tapping into the familiarity across our individual experiences. His melodies are oftentimes warm and inviting while also imbued with quirky flourishes that evoke a potent nostalgia. His lyrics bring to life scenes that are specific, relatable, and very often painful.

Ultimately, it might not be a more serious album than anything previous, but Shangri-La captures the spirit of uncertainty and restlessness that 21st century modernity has created.

On Ultimate Success Today, Protomartyr have made essential jams for a genre that’s been passed around dozens of times over. It’s nice to know that, five albums deep, the band haven’t lost any ferocity, and that they continue to be a mouthpiece for so many feelings we all share.

Whether her words come from personal experience or not, Yanya’s able to swell with empathy in ways few current songwriters can convey. It’s audible how she places herself within the circumstances of a song, maybe to feel herself, but in doing so she connects with her audience on a different level.

Where there was honesty in the lyricism of "Losing My Edge" in 2002, there is now sonic honesty in the vivacious rock and roll that is the London Sessions.

Hard to categorise, and impossible to assess immediately, like all of Slowdive, everything is alive will ever blossom with time.

With His Happiness Shall Come First Even Though We Are Suffering, Mutinta completes her heroic triptych. Processing her own fury and the fury stashed in the world’s memory. ... Leaving us stunned, devastated, ecstatic.

With New Threats, Davis, flanked by the talented Roadhouse Band, makes his mark, perhaps indelibly, joining a select group of artists who are deepening, broadening, and revamping the Americana genre.

Hannah is a culmination of everything Read has done up to this point and she delivers bittersweet missives through tender songwriting and a deft application of her strengths as a musician.

If you give the album the chance it deserves you will be rewarded by one of the strongest LPs you are likely to hear this year.

It’s an album that holds power found rarely these days – up there with Joy Division’s Closer in terms of transgressing the boundary between the macabre and ethereal, uniting music to dance to with spiritual experience, marking the twilight divide of utopia and dystopia.

On Lifetime, de Casier not only manages to create a truly hypnagogic aura, but captured this elusive quality of oneiric purity and grace. It’s the sound of an existence beyond our own, prismatic and startlingly beautiful.