Eagle’s skill is in being relatable to the listener, approaching issues that could otherwise be interpreted as controversial with a soft-spoken and melodic flow that never comes off as preachy or aggressive.

It’s studied, sure--these guys are superbly technically proficient--but never is the fun obscured by fretwork pyrotechnics.

It’s a fine collection of intimate, slow-burning, understated songs.

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

This album might satiate the seasoned Kasabian fan, but for anyone else it just comes across as the dated output of false prophets.

This third LP’s motley magic merits the coveted breakthrough that these Celtic chancers deserve.

Martyn manages to strip through countless layers, to absorb numberless ideas without losing sight of his own identity. A fine return.

This is power pop at its purest--not doing anything new, granted, but packed full of melodies so thrilling and uplifting that it’s difficult to even begin to give a damn.

This is an album that can make you weepy in the hazy blur of the wee small hours, and euphoric in the fuzzy afternoon sun.

Ultraviolence marks real progression: never has Del Rey sounded so compellingly crystalline on a set of recordings. Thematically, though, tracks can appear content to splash in the shallows.

The result of two years of head-down studio time, the Brighton-based producer has laced this debut with heart-racing drums that trip over each other and dark-hued synth rollers.

Refining rather than challenging their boundaries, Fucked Up reconnect with the sounds that first set their pulses racing. Glass Boys is a gloriously savage return.

Any aspect of their music that might have felt lightweight before, at least off the stage, has been eradicated.

Between the caustic riffs and searing lyrics there’s some damned beauty in Parquet Courts.

There’s a lack of precision, with a flabby middle section finding ‘Begin To Begin’, for example, looping aimlessly. Yet when it hits home, Reality Testing more than justifies Lone’s tag as one of the most flexible, dextrous producers in the game.

It’s enlivening, inspiring, frustrating and maddening in equal measure--and you always wonder what’s coming next.

While it aims to push boundaries, CLPPNG does so in a way that demonstrates a love for the music and culture that forms its source material.

Apart from perhaps three exceptions, most of these tracks get lost in their own elegant, introspective and lovelorn swirl of tedious easy listening.

With lyrics dripping with casual poetic nuance and bold, full arrangements, Stay Gold is at once an arresting set of classic country reference points as well as a towering body of stirring, beguilingly original songs.

Although the material demonstrates Vek’s undoubted talent, Luck can’t quite match our hopes--or, indeed, the quality of its predecessors.

On the whole this is clever, electronically-infused rock that showcases Ounsworth’s songwriting chops.

With Glorious Foxes has made a pop album that, despite occasionally drifting into melodrama, serves as an enjoyable listen stuffed with genuine pop-gems, sun-baked choruses and enough bite to warrant repeated listens.

Coming two years after his debut ‘Blunderbuss’, a vitriol-filled purge that dropped in the wake of White’s divorce, Lazaretto does sound like a transitional step.

Hardly essential, then, but Unplugged is a fans-pleasing release that serves as a reminder that songs with great longevity needn’t always be played loudly.

Towards is smart pop that keeps its charm.

With an energy and ambience that ebbs and flows in waves rather than exploding in peaks and crescendos, this is edgy, kaleidoscopic lounge music for the Digital Age.

The woozy title track seems deliberately designed to unsettle the listener at the halfway point of an album that is in turns both richly emotive and beguilingly, bewitchingly uneasy.

For now, these gossamer modernists have created something understated and endearingly elegant.