This is the closest we’re likely to get to a new Sonic Youth album, and The Best Day is a great reminder of what made that band so special.

While the sheer breadth of Wait ‘Til Night can’t fail to impress, the album lacks certain cohesiveness. That said, there’s an honest creativity here that ripples through proceedings.

There’s little here to alienate his fanbase: these 10 tracks might sprawl in length but they’ve a familiar mesh of earnest words and slow builds, autumnal in hue but with a fireside warmth.

When we’re not soaring we’re wrapped in ambient solemnity, all the while fixated on Nika Danilova’s voice: theatrical, confessional and, perhaps for the first time, totally unafraid.

There are some surprising hooks amongst predominantly ugly arrangements, and its ambition is admirable, but Plowing… proves woefully lacking in coherency, and fails as its makers’ next evolution.

It’s by no means a bad record, but won’t be the trap pioneer’s most memorable either.

The ’80s sci-fi pastiche meets early-’00s girl power wears thin over 11 tracks, but there are still moments for the dancefloor.

Sweet, intimate and tender, Trick is a tempting treat.

Latin lamentations and oscillating interferences spin sinful tales of transgression and violation, with a flagellating undercurrent of austerity, to create an uneasy, intuitive, idiosyncratic masterpiece.

It’s immediately likeable, but loses distinctiveness later on.

DOOM, sparing on the mic, rustles up his usual funk finds with samples sprayed willy-nilly. Teenage sensation Bishop Nehru slots in; assuredly, naturally skilful, with the right amount of NYC, street cypher confidence putting up an all-rounder’s game.

Hozier is an authentic portrait of an artist--soulful, spiritual and seductive – and is a deeply impressive first step.

She imparts yearning with such controlled restraint and lightness of touch it’s sublime.

It doesn’t challenge expectation, but equally it does nothing, puts nary a single step wrong, to risk their reputation as a preeminent act of their kind, and of our times.

There’s nothing nostalgic here--it’s the sound of a band reborn, rather than one reformed. And yes, it’s well worth the wait.

The great just gets greater.

Marrying a bewildering array of influences, Shaker Notes presents a probing, unified voice on what could well be White’s finest album to date.

This is a slow-burning, deeply resonant collection with a stirring potency and the capacity to truly wow.

Our Love is a record that feels distinctly his own, accessible yet containing minute touches that you’ll need to listen to many times to appreciate.

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

This, his fifth album, is also an overt ode to limbo, the halfway house of consciousness and true death. And this is where all 19 tracks dwell, in between the failing light of traditional jazz and the bursts of neon emitted from his polyrhythmic, nocturnal electronica.

If this is post-rock, it’s in the purest sense of that prefix: it’s rock that goes beyond expectations for the genre, even while working within its confines, to somewhere that you sense its players aren’t quite accustomed to yet.

Largely though, this is the sound of Casablancas giving a middle-fingered salute to his past.

Green is never going to be a gritty rapper--but even taken as a straight-up pop-rap record, Growing Up In Public is disappointingly tame.

Restless, furiously inventive and resolutely original, Tricky shows no signs of thawing just yet.

Reticent yet resplendent, SBTRKT is a master craftsman, humanising the digital and effortlessly shifting the shape of sounds.

While the trap state of mind may be a bleak one, it makes for a stunning piece of music.

The bared teeth and balls that made PABH so loveable in the first place are still splattered all over Blood, but for the first time it sounds like they have a plan.