For now, let’s revel in the fact there’s a record that swings from sumptuous sprawls to ear-sizzling riffs.

Still is Thompson through and through.

In the classic sense this is yet another worthy piece from an undeniable master.

If Luminiferous has a flaw then it is its length.... On the whole, however, this is a difficult album to throw too many critiques at.

This is wonderful stuff.

It's an album heaving with ideas, but just coherent enough to stick together as one piece of work.

Son Lux veers away from the straight forward and chooses to make records as wonderfully complex as Bones.

The record is certainly the best distillation to date of a band whose careening fun places equal value on Radiohead at their most brow-furrowed and novelty chart hits without any trace of preening post-irony.

It doesn’t quite retain the piss and vinegar, lightning-in-a-bottle feel of its predecessor. But then of course it doesn’t: that album was turned out in a matter of days by much younger musicians, while this release spanned years and several recording sessions and it’s still absolutely exhilarating.

The slower songs can certainly be felt to add a rounded edge to what would otherwise be an unrelentingly pointy poptastic delivery.

This is not an easy album to listen to and digest. It is all the better for it.

Although Success is a very solid album, from a band that have already proved themselves consistently capable of churning out suitably bad-tempered and obtrusively loud material, it’s hard to feel it’s anything we haven’t heard before, which makes it far more underwhelming than its generally high quality content suggests it should be.

At its best Home Economics tries to find some kind of ascension from this harshness of life. At other moments what is being said, what is got at is lost, and easily passed by unnoticed.

It’s Gengahr's commitment to weirdness on A Dream Outside that puts them many streets ahead.

While moments of greatness emerge, there's a unfortunate limpness to proceedings that undermines otherwise outstanding songwriting.

Even as these pieces are tightly composed, improvisation, solos, a loss of control, are never far away. This can only be a good thing.

A little more clarity wouldn't have gone amiss here and there, but there's enough on offer to bring curious listeners back for repeated spins, which is just as well, as More Faithful is definitely a grower.

This is a remarkable, compelling record that hits the heights of the heavenly poetical but also dredges the deep dark of cruelty and meanness that flashes through us all at times (though through Kozelek more than most it would seem).

Accomplished yet instantly forgettable--a most fitting curtain call for such a confused endeavour.

The best love songs are the ones that make you want to dance and cry all at once; and Bad Love has them in spades.

While the instrumentals service Barnes well, when guest vocalists--once a hallmark of Leftfield’s work (John Lydon’s vocals on ‘Open Up’ still feel perfect)--the album broaches less solid ground.

Even if they wrap themselves in prettier packaging, they’re as sharp as ever.

You have to turn Girl up loud to hear the 'meshes of voice' that make this a more complex album than on first impression.

It does the job you need it to do. It succeeds entirely on its own, self-contained terms.

It may take some perseverance to get on board here with Gibson’s vision--but, if you achieve that, then you’ll be rewarded with a record that’s as beguiling as it is strange.

The Infinity Machines strain occurs in eight stages, each with varying intensities of drone.

I Don’t Want to Let You Down as a whole serve only to fuel, rather than dent, the anticipation that Are We There rightly stoked.

With their debut Mbongwana Star have made a really classic record for the ages, and what’s more, one that could shape a whole lot of music to come.

While the longstanding fan may indulge them the odd misstep, it’s a little bit jarring when they produce something which by their own high standards is, dare I say it, a bit underwhelming.

Grievances is yet another remarkable record from one of the UK’s most consistently remarkable underground bands.

She’s gone from making an album that felt in constant peril of collapsing under its own weight to one that carries her predilection for drama with genuine confidence--for now, at least, that’s redemption enough.

With Quarters King Gizzard they have produced an album which can be analysed to death if need be, but actually works better as something to be consumed as a whole.

There’s just so much going on, so much to wonder at.

Before the World Was Big is a record that will help you appreciate the 'good old days' whilst you're still in them; it's a record that will make you feel okay about the unsettling aspects of the future and it's a record that will make you wanna hug your pals and never let them go.

This is the sound of a band fired-up and focused, and the result is a Darkness album to be proud of.

Peel back the façade, and you’ll find two white dudes parroting phrases and stealing time-tested tricks to sustain the rebel mirage, to cover for the fact that they have no clue what they’re even talking about.

If There is No Enemy was a pretty concise record of dreamy guitar pop, then Untethered Moon sees the band get back to a gnarlier sound, with roughhewn, grungy production and two songs that yawn far over the six-minute mark, erupting into hackingly primitive Crazy Horse-style jams.

It’s a good record, it honestly is. But good grief, it’s a hard one to be excited by.

In Colour stands tall as a bold and renewably-exciting triumph.

What Multi-Love lacks in immediacy it mostly makes up for in aesthetic.

Thankfully there’s enough genuinely high quality Fall material here to ensure that any newcomers to the band are fairly sure to move directly from ‘Quit iPhone’ to ‘Frightened’, ‘The Classical’, ‘New Big Prinz’ or another classic Fall album opener.

Non-Believers may disarm at first, but after a couple of listens this will quickly hook into the ears and heart as every Mac McCaughan venture does. This is his dusk album.

A richly ambient affair, it makes for a particularly strong listen via headphones, dread-soaked mist and hopeful shimmers given heightened impact.

Emotional, great and exhausting.

Fortunately, the role of curator suits Cunningham's talents, and despite the choppy mixing and non-continuous programming, DJ-Kicks never feels as alienating and outright strange as some of his past mixes.

The current trend of Nineties-leaning music shows little signs of abating, and Heydays is yet another gloriously messy, scratchy string to its bow.

It’s a beautifully composed record, where songs gently bloom and the pace constantly ebbs and flows.

Sprinter manages to be defiant at its most minimal: she may not have made a fully realized masterpiece yet, but she’s staking-out the place between noise and silence where a masterpiece will be built.

There aren’t many musicians in the country as creative and as interesting as her at this point in time, and Welcome Back To Milk represents another triumph in her weird and wonderful saga.

At once Herndon’s most accessible and most adventurous record, this is digital age avant-garde sound art put through a pop prism, and it’s all the more exciting as a result.

Not only is there too much going on in each song to think of them as simple pop numbers, but Why Make Sense? touches upon a huge range of styles.

Love Songs For Robots is ambitious without being overblown, intimate without falling to sentimentality and subtly, delicately lovely.

With Peanut Butter, Joanna Gruesome have raised the bar.

Like their last record, Album of the Year, Sol Invictus is more concerned with playfully nudging at the boundaries of hard rock conventions rather than attempting a dizzy genre-spanning explosion to rival 1995’s King for a Day... Fool for a Lifetime.

A bottle of red wine and a full listen of the album is when you’re really going to uncover the caveats and subtleties of the record. Anything else and you’re just wasting a wonderfully dark and seething record.

Wilder Mind is incredibly one-track, so much so that even on your first listen-through, you’ll likely already feel like you’ve heard closer ‘Hot Gates’ five or six times in the past hour.

It’s not enough to make an album that blends inoffensively into the background. Psychedelia is supposed to be mind-bending, not just some minor flavouring to add to your very average indie-pop songs.

For the most part, Bush is another re-hashed and tweaked Snoop album. It is expanding into new territory, but delivering the same result.

This is beautiful, disgusting, danceable, and nightmarish music. It allures and repels in equal measure, bursting with thoughtful concepts and successful experiments in sculpting electronic noises into something danceable, melodic and meaningful.

There's nothing wrong with making demands of the listener, but there's little to no reward to be found across these eight increasingly alienating compositions.

There may be less outsider allure now that he’s opened his heart, but his fourth consistently good LP in a row casts his authenticity in emotional honesty for the first time while expanding his musical palette beyond all expectations.

It's a pleasant enough experience on the whole, but could've been so much more--and that is what's so frustrating with Rituals.

Born Under Saturn sounds like what it probably is: a bunch of smart musicians having a great time.

The album only features nine tracks, but somehow still contrives to feel over-long and lack cohesion.

The version of the band audible on their second album is one that's on a sugar high and fuelled by a desire to create loud and fast music that doesn't skimp on the hooks.

Beautifully brutal weirdo punk.

As the record progresses, however, it’s hard not to feel that the band are using the same tricks over and over again. This not only makes the second half of the record intrinsically less vibrant on first listen than the first but also undermines earlier tracks on repeat listens.

Away from the lyrics, there’s a nagging feeling that, like The Only Place, California Nights isn’t going to blow too many people away with its mostly familiar-feeling content.

The boisterous, almost-live feel of the production, and a leaning towards big, striding choruses and unashamedly anthemic moments means that things never get too ponderous.

Although there’s a vogue for the vintage production techniques and comfortable imperfect noisiness that pervades the record, it doesn’t always do American Wrestlers justice.

It can be a slightly heavy listen but when you’re as good at it as he is, it is fine to embrace it.

Musique de Film Imaginé isn’t quite the most moving album you’ll ever here, but, more than most, it works.

This is an important--a very important--piece of work that will stand the test of time. It’s also an utter blast to listen to and live with.

Overall then, a triumph for instrumental music that’s more than genre-hopping: it’s genre-reviving.

In lesser hands, it would simply be an unfocused scrappy mess, but Braids have taken all this and managed to create one of the finest records of the year so far.

Disquiet, the group’s fourteenth album, is their most direct and to the point release in some time.

If you like Mew, you’ll like this. If you don’t like Mew, this is as good a place as any to begin, or to rekindle, your love affair with a wonderful band.

It is an almost endlessly intriguing record, full of mad ideas, strange microhooks and an air of rich elegy that just works.

You may not get on board with it as quickly as Gossamer, but it possesses greater replay value. Angelakos has made an album celebrating stability, and it'll be interesting to see what happens next.

Constant Bop has an air of effortless accomplishment and fresh brilliance, which can only come from hard work and a fastidious attention to detail.

With its genre manipulation and intensely poetic, socially aware lyrics, Foil Deer is a stronger, more assertive record with more to say for itself.

Escape from Evil might not change the world (unless you live for slightly off-kilter Eighties-style pop records, in which case, you should be thanking Lower Dens immensely), but it is all the more impressive because of its unexpected accessibility.

Marriages know what they're about, and have crafted an album for all seasons that still possesses a distinctly autumnal sound--an accomplished record that will provide the ideal soundtrack once summer's over.

No Pier Pressure shows just what too many cooks can do to a Beach Boy's broth.

At its best Sound & Color is very strong indeed.... Elsewhere it can be a little business-as-usual.

Royal Albert Hall is bursting at the seams with superb reinterpretations of some real classics.

The Southern gothic touches strewn throughout the album help make this their best set of angry anthems to date.

Beautiful, if rather impenetrable at times, Sonnet succeeds when holding back - teasing soft, sometimes brittle melodies through reverbed layers of atmospherics, giving just enough away to engage and envelop.

This is a loud, confident album, best enjoyed at high volume.

At times it feels distinctively as they are seeking to make as much noise as it’s possible for two people to make together at any one time rather than anything more subtle or nuanced as that, but there are moments, more than a few of them on Walks for Motorists where the alchemy is programmed just perfectly and something happens.

As second albums go, though, this is exactly what we want to see--a clear a development, a sharpening of powers and a defining of sound. What happens next could be truly spectacular.

Too much of Not Real is nondescript and dull.

The comparative simplicity of these songs makes this a more of a compelling curiosity piece, rather than the explosively satisfying--potentially classic--albums that both of these bands have in them as separate artists.

With the pop landscape becoming increasingly homogeneous, more artists need to experiment, and the variety displayed across Froot's 12 tracks is impressive.

A fun, but deeply human, record.

There’s less freewheeling improvisational spirit than perhaps you’d expect, instead there’s a real desire to cast a mood, one of optimism and warmth, The whole experience feels nourishing.

Ripe is one of the most unabashedly joyous and invigorating albums to have appeared in years. It’s a creative tour de force which marks the arrival of a new pop maverick.

It’s more immediate, more instantly gratifying and more technically proficient, but there are also dark, difficult corners which hint at hidden terror.