They have plenty to make them stand out from the crowd. The legacy of Seattle grunge is alive and well and being extended in the hands of Strange Wilds.

Marks to Prove It is the most cohesive offering from the Maccabees to date.

It's as personal an album as he's ever written--more than just an amalgamation of the band's previous work, it is perhaps the purest distillation yet of everything that makes them who and what they are: rewarding, confusing, joyous, heartbreaking, immediate and profound, all in one.

Sleaford Mods have managed to express perfectly and effortlessly, what it feels like to live in 21st century Britain and from here, they can only get bigger.

On balance it's still a more than worthy addition to the New Jersey outfit's growing collection.

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.

As a primer, it's pretty effective and the performances are occasionally absorbing, but it's hard to imagine anyone other than the most ardent completist getting excited about it.

This record isn't really comparable to any of Monkeytown's output, but it still stands up alongside it--and not just as a novelty.

The Chemical Brothers continue to buck any notions of a creative burn-out with their strongest release in a decade.

It's not completely unfair to say that Déjà Vu won't be joining the pantheon of great albums any time soon.

It's too early to say if Currents will be the masterpiece that Kevin Parker is remembered for, but not too early to state that this is his best LP yet, a near-perfect album in a body of already remarkably impressive works.

Well worth imbibing.

It can be a little too sterile in places but for the most part, Working Girl shows that Little Boots is a canny operator who, now that she's been given the opportunity to do things on her own terms, has finally shown us what all the fuss was about in the first place.

We really want to like Lantern for its originality; its bravery and its attempt to grasp a genuine uninhibited euphoria that isn't easy pull off. Sadly it just misses the mark way too often and leaves you with fleeting glimpses of what could have been a very exciting album.

A gorgeous, triumphant return.

The focus from all concerned makes the convincingly grisly fiction a lot of fun.

The LP is consistently engaging: a solid rock 'n' roll album crafted by a bunch of talented musicians finding their feet--and sounding like they're having a damn good time in the process.

It can arrest large scale arenas, and Matrixxman's Swiss Army Knife game is indisputable, though it's often used as a plot twist that's not necessarily relatable to the original story.

Without getting too deep and meaningful and forgetting that Distractions is simply an album of indelible punk jams, it's also the sound of a disillusioned and discontented generation, and their collective vitriol speaks volumes for the rest of us.

It's dramatic, emotive, a little cheesy, but magnificently good fun.

It might not cut as hard and sharp as Van Etten, but her careful lullabies ooze with enough steady sadness that when the light finally does break through, typically via bubbling layers of instrumentation doused in near shoegaze-ready echo, the result really is akin to soaring above the pines.

The plethora of guest vocalists (J'Danna, BIXBY, Okmalumkoolkat, Heavy D. & the Boyz) means things stay relatively fresh, but more often than not, it's not enough.

The jury's out on whether Miguel's offerings as a whole are indeed superior to Ocean's, for now he should be content that they share a space at the pinnacle of genre-defining pop music.

Each track possesses its own surge of mind movement propelled by the depth of eclectic sonics, psyche and contemporary wording.

An enlightening journey through the mind of an outsider, but an entirely relatable one.

They've birthed a catchy and danceable summer record which shows plenty of promise but falls short of something great.

These 10 tracks continually buckle under the weight of Flowers' torrid lyrics, mind-numbing cliches, and woefully derivative song structures.

The sound is typically dense but never overwrought with a wide sweep of styles and textures, The Orb being past masters at moulding a huge pool of raw material into a cohesive, listenable whole.