Opener “Between the Fingers the Drops of Tomorrow’s Dawn” foreshadows what is to come: rites of passage, intense spells of grief and acceptance, and stretches of mystical visions that seem so familiar yet so strange. It is during these epic tracks where the sounds from instruments you have never heard all combine to create something that feels perennial, enormous, and truly unique.

Raekwon knows what he does best, and while this may not be as grand as his last, he does just that here, to the fullest.

What makes this record work isn’t just its ambition — it’s how cohesive it is. Every image returns. Every metaphor resounds.

Brun has such control of her craft, and that is made brightly plain across these two albums [After The Great Storm & How Beauty Holds The Hand Of Sorrow]. Which one you prefer will likely depend on which genre or style you have deeper inclination for, but taken together, they’re both excellent representations of an artist honing her tested and true style while also venturing out into new waters, easily proving just how capable she is along the way.

This is the return that so many of us have been waiting for, and his ability to come through on nearly all levels establishes Bolted as one of the very best albums of this year, electronic or otherwise.

This album is not served to us on a platter as a radio-ready hit record, and it is not made ‘for us’, but it gives us something better — the feeling of being a part of this music and not a mere recipient.

It's a spatial and musical theme across the whole of Impossible Spaces and it's perhaps the record's most deserving triumph.

Always grandiose and intimate at the same time, The Lemon Twigs have managed to perfect not only an uncanny reprise of FM rock (duly aided by producer and multi-instrumentalist extraordinaire Jonathan Rado), but also the type of excitement it provoked.

Aghori Mhori Mei is Billy Corgan’s return to his true passion, a fully formed and cohesive work that sounds like an actual Smashing Pumpkins album without resorting to self-references.

Featuring generous heaps of falsetto and sparse, jagged guitar licks, Fruit Bats' Tripper plays as a spectral highway romp that pairs jaunty folk-pop ditties with effervescent pop.

Katy B shows she's a vital voice to the smaller UK bass scene and her pop imbued form of garage has enough substance and personality to back her play for something bigger.

Mark Lanegan has accomplished something truly magnificent with Blues Funeral.

In the end, Sun And Shade proves far more complex than the label of psych-folk would indicate, to the point that its small flaws are easily forgivable.

We Stay Together is Andy Stott's second LP of 2011 and it's easily the heavier, more defined, and arguably better of the two.

It is the soundtrack to rousay’s year of insularity, isolation, and adaptation, and harmonises beautifully with anyone who’s undergone similar feelings of repression and growth during this period.

Much closer to Z than Evil Urges, My Morning Jacket proves that a leap back can sometimes be a step in the right direction, even if we end up "right back in the same place that we started out."

It's an album that continues to unpack itself after half a dozen listens--as beautiful as it is detailed.

With Scratch It, it’s hard to image a finer U.S. Girls album.

Gas Lit is an important record from an important band. It doesn’t attempt to make things palatable for you, and nor should it. The record is a provocation to a difficult conversation, one that in all honesty shouldn’t really still have to take place in 2021.

It's a lovely, weightless set of songs from an artist whom we can now reasonably assume is capable of producing consistently great music.

It’s a tender, chaotic, and messy experience that feels all the more natural because of Open Mike Eagle’s transparency with his audience. This is Eagle at his most directionless, and for the time being that’s exactly what we needed to hear from him, because that’s how many of us are feeling too.

With Forever Blue, she has created an album for those who like to close their curtains when the sun is out; it’s a debut of richness, depth and genuinely shattering emotional engagement – pure melancholic majesty to lose yourself in.

All Of Us, Together isn't an attempt to disown his early work and roots. Jamison just made the record he felt like making, and that's why it so easily matches his best material.

On Reflection, we truly see the breadth of her resourcefulness as an artist: both as translator and purveyor of gut feeling. The elemental building blocks are all you need to shape something completely new.

The band have taken their influences with their own abilities and made an album that is as accessible as it is excitable, and seems set to capture the hearts and imaginations of young lovers everywhere.

Crystal Stilts find a way to make you care, though, and that goes along way with music this raw and rapturous.

Neighborhood Gods is a potent, enticing, and, yes, elusive project.

awE naturalE is at least a great, deep listen, and all that THEESatisfaction has done to challenge the listener warrants serious admiration.