Fletcher and Parkin have released an album that doesn’t fit into the confines of what an ‘alternative’ album should be in 2018. Instead they’ve crafted 11 songs that show off their love of retro sounds, an infectious joy for life, a good melody and a catchy chorus.

Love Frequency sounds like a blended milkshake of ‘Experience’-era Prodigy and The Rapture, spiked with your upper of choice.

Catchy riffs and partying aside, this new FIDLAR record actually gets pretty deep.

Listened to while watching Georges Méliès suitably trippy sci-fi spectacle, it makes for a brief, but enchanting, experience.

Literate and honest, it doesn’t always connect, yet with 90 minutes of music to explore it’s a project that demands time and patience to truly absorb.

At times it’s sketchy and frail, at others decidedly defiant.

It's as much math rock as it is noise rock, delightfully unpredictable in places ('Weasel Bastard', 'Power Ballad'; and yes, the latter is the furthest thing from a power ballad you could possibly imagine), precise and purposeful in others.

Held together by a singular sense of purpose, ‘The Feminine Divine’ is at times daring, at others anthemic. Both puzzling and entrancing, it refuses to be hemmed in by past success, reaching out instead for new challenges.

The fact that I’m listening to this album on a gloriously balmy afternoon and am getting in the festive mood is testament to Legend’s conviction and the arrangements. However after 14 tracks, it does start to lose its way a bit.

Bar a couple of underwhelming or wholly unoriginal takes, 'The Metallica Blacklist' is a surprisingly solid listen considering its breadth. While the snobbier rock connoisseur out there might still view Metallica’s king-making album as when they ‘sold-out,’ this set just shows how malleable, how influential, and just how damn fun these songs still are.

After sinking your claws into this offering from PAWS one thing will become certain, their ramshackle approach to delivering scuzzy punk rock drenched in delicious distortion is enough to make anyone short of breath.

With one eye on America's rich musical history and one on the future of dance, if his formula needs to be tweaked, it is only by a little.

This is a splendid debut.

Having made the record about themselves, surviving under external and internal pressure and marathoning against the grain, Maria BC has spoken for all of us.

Perhaps less instantly gratifying than the shimmering ‘Zonoscope’, Free Your Mind is nevertheless a great time that provides additional rewards for those willing to disentangle its layered arrangements.

A fluorescent, gently psychedelic record with a fat vein of Eighties pop running through it.

Overall 'Self-Surgery' bristles with promise rather than complete realisation. As a raw one-off release it’s a breathless listen; the hope is, though, that the duo may return and build on this project in the future.

A reinvigorated set, it’s the sound of a band resurgent.

‘Describe’ offers a peek into life as a twenty-something, untangling the thorns of maintaining connections.

Catchy melodies abound in an eclectic, engaging effort.

Nutini reins in the melodrama, and Caustic Love is testament to that restraint.

Beth’s voice might be confronting at first, but over the course of the album the frustration becomes contagious, proving that anger is not something to be frightened by.

Some songs do pack a bigger punch than others, but at a brisk 33 minutes, the album never once outstays its welcome and even throws in a few surprises along the way.

Balance aside, ‘Get Up Sequences Part One’ sees the band doing what they do best, wading into an often cynical world filled with apathy and melodrama and detonating a glitter bomb - and you’ve always gotta love them for that.

As an album, it must be said, Gargoyle never truly coalesces. The distance between the bright, ethereal shoegaze sound and Lanegan’s dirty, earthbound voice is just too great to be reconciled (although 'Nocturne' does come incredibly close). But just because two compounds don’t mix doesn't mean they can't form something beautiful together.

Musically, the pop-punk sound has been largely abandoned (save for, perhaps, recent single 'I Don't Like Who I Was Then') in favour of something more forceful and nuanced.

Overall, ‘Ego Trip’ is proof that Papa Roach still have their finger on the beating pulse of heavy music.

Sleater-Kinney permit themselves a few self-satisfied experimentations – not everything comes off, such as the slightly wayward ‘Method’, for example. At its peak, however, ‘Path Of Wellness’ is a riot, one that underlines Sleater-Kinney’s hallowed status while providing a continual challenge to the idea of them as a ‘legacy’ artist.