Confidently frail and hesitant, LP1 is a refreshing reaction to, and a calm assault upon, the unfathomably fast-paced total noise of the current age.

It’s what Bright Eyes coulda done if he put the songs off I’m Wide Awake onto the canvas of Digital Ash.

Stripping away all of the surrounding noise, it allows Krauss to bring her dizzyingly sweet voice to the fore, showing that Sleigh Bells are not just a one trick pony and that these songs work on more than just the basis that they are great at shaking windows.

Ritual Spirit tantalises with the promise of a staggering force should the next LP surface soon.

Joy As An Act Of Resistance is everything anyone could have wanted or expected it to be: Idles have released the most relevant and at times gut wrenching album of the year.

Me Moan is a remarkable record that takes a genre rooted in formulae and clichés--country--and spins it into something fresh, compelling and edgy. A stunning follow up.

What makes Coachwhips bigger than the rock n'roll n'amphetamines and extreme petting that inevitably gets etched on them is sheer, dirty, bone-corroding, untamed noise.

It’s the sound of a gifted songwriter comfortable with his craft and in his own skin, offering glinting new facets to earlier sounds and the songs present on Ruminations, and it makes for a subtle, yet striking departure from everything that came before.

We’ve been the Hold Steady, and You’ve been the Hold Steady, he says predictably... but for once, on a live-recording, you didn’t have to be there.

These 17 vignettes glow with Cold War paranoia, picking up where Threads, the most scarring piece of TV ever made, left off. It might also be the duo’s most accomplished album yet--and that’s coming from someone unable to remove the Hi Scores LP from his stereo.

For an album with no discernible weak links--we'll deduct a mark simply because half these songs were previously available--the final quarter is where Veronica Falls finds itself elevated alongside 2011's best.

Steeped in the postpunk aesthetic, a well-established rock style that nonetheless remains richer and deeper than any other in formal possibilities, this is a deceptively complex record that conflates doubt and optimism while at surface remaining aggressively articulate.

We can speculate as to how their ethos and focus was developed from time spent in the company of other imaginative musicians – it could well be essential to their consistent evolution – but the evidence on Peepers leaves no doubt as to how successful this union of education and expression is.

One of the highlights of their career.

It is an astonishing album, cohesive but wide ranging, sometimes presenting Low as they were, more often seeing the trio forge on until guitars dissolve, words dissolve, flesh dissolves and everything becomes pure light.

Really, the only fault of this record is that its most arrestingly beautiful minute is its final one: everything that comes before, however brilliant it is at the time, pales once that choir swells, just for a few too-fleeting seconds.

R.I.P. suggesting a fitting final ceremony, where Ghettoville evokes Actress driven over the abyss, As an obituary, however, it’s a fittingly emotional, opaque and confounding conclusion for a project that has been an outlier amongst a scene of outliers from its inception.

A Bureaucratic Desire For Extra-Capsular Extraction is yet more proof that Earth were, and indeed still are, vitally different to so much of what's come before them, after them and even surrounded them.

What's really satisfying about Go is the way the soaring architecture of symphonic hipster du jour Nico Muhly's compositional work looms just as large on the more effervescent numbers as it does in these quieter spots - it really drawing everything together into a wonderfully coherent whole, despite the record's ever-shifting tides and Birgisson's violently affecting knack for distilling every emotion known to humanity into a single echoing chord change.

Slave Vows is--easily the finest guitar album The Icarus Line have produced since Aaron North precariously sprinted across a row of trembling amps to crash out the window and join Nine Inch Nails in 2005.

Everything about Jessica Rabbit is visceral--full-force drum slams, the slick claps, Miller’s steely slabs of guitar, lyrics replete with bombs, knives, and natural disasters.

Far from falling under the weight of either expectation or ambition, {awayland} is a far more magnificent progression from Jackal than any of us could have hoped for.

Breaking Kayfabe is a record that demands and deserves undivided attention, its creator fashioning a brain-searing patchwork of ragged rap, electronic flourishes and truncated rhythms.

Everything sounds fresh, new and different, but every song is still recognisably Wilco; it just sounds like Wilco at their best.

You would have to search far and wide to find a transformation in an already great band that works as well as this. The key to it all is the vulnerability that MJ is now willing to put on display, giving the newfound musical incisiveness the emotional fuel it needs to really fly. If this isn’t one of the albums of the year then we must be in for something special.

The emotional universality of the debut has certainly carried through to Blisters in the Pit of My Heart.

It's the best representation yet of the sheer force of the band live, a perfect half hour snapshot of the energy and aggression they've never properly captured on tape.

Whilst Wolfgang Amadeus... is clunker-free, with high points from start to finish, allow me to abandon my critical faculties and gush about 'Love Like a Sunset Part 1', as this instrumental is by far the most incredible moment of the album and also quite possibly the best thing they've ever done.

Do yourself a favour and eschew fashion for something with real substance: Outside Closer is an album of the year, fact.

So euphoric are the multiple highlights here that one can overlook the occasional dalliance with silliness.

Where YFIIP meticulously arranged the collective of instrumentation for precision, like a ballet, this self-titled album throws everything into a blender, almost completely overwhelming the pretty melodies underneath - but not quite.

12 immaculately crafted slabs of grandiose sound.

The guitars and brass survive, but everything else is fresh.

Possibly a little early to be wheeling out 'album of the year'-type assertions, but with The English Riviera Mount has set the bar nice and high.

An adrenaline-fueled head-rush of precision-perfect pop tunes about modern life.

One of the great indie-rock releases of the year. ... The new songs are what really impress, glowing with a sparky freshness few saw coming.

Whatever the plan was, Both Directions at Once isn’t just a treat for the hardcore, either in terms of Coltrane or jazz more broadly.

An easy grandeur is present throughout, as is a sense they are following an increasingly individual, carefully textured path. It is a wild, vivid romance that The National make their own, and on High Violet it sounds just as striking, just as wild, just as vivid as ever.

It’s the sound of forbidden affairs, illicit sex with strangers in bars, drunken confessions, of real life. And it feels fantastic.

Whatever the case, 50 Words...demands to be listened to as a whole.

Here there can be no snobbish derision and calls of 'selling out' or playing to the average man; in creating an album showcasing the very best of the band’s talents they have created one so perfectly fit for, as Scott so vividly puts, “the soft, soft static” of popular radio.

Whilst it would be easy to say that the 136 tracks across five CDs make this boxset a purchase for completists and enthusiasts only, to do so would be reductive.

M. Ward turns in a star-studded set that feels at once a logical progression from 2006’s "Post-War" and a step closer to that all-out classic his preceding suggests; an assimilation and appropriation of American blues, gospel, country and folk as lovingly, winningly relayed as we’ve come to expect from the Portland-based troubadour.

Confident Music For Confident People is exactly what it says on the tin. It's also the most unashamedly addictive record you'll hear all year.

A great starting place if you don’t know anything about library music as the album is chocked full of bangers. Wall-to-wall bangers! It gives you a launch pad to go and geek out over musicians and labels, each being a rabbit hole well worth going down. The abundance of heavy hitters is remarkable.

Far more accessible than anything the act have produced in recent years, Liars shifts perceptions in the way most have come to expect, but with the dense conceptual themes and boundaries limited it is as if they have met most listeners halfway only to lure them back into their own sordid comfort zone, littered with the contents of a fifteen-year-old's bedroom.

Intuit is, unfortunately, probably not a high profile enough release to be mentioned in the end-of-year lists nearly as frequently as any of the aforementioned albums. But it’s easily the equal of any of those releases, in terms of its breadth of vision and depth of emotion, and it really establishing Knopf as a supremely talented and truly heartfelt songwriter.

A brilliant and riveting album.

It has the same majesty and ethereal wonder contained in the best works of the Flaming Lips, Boo Radleys, My Bloody Valentine, Jesus and Mary Chain and Mercury Rev.

1992 Deluxe is much more than just a cheap re-release of her breakout 2016 mixtape, it’s a complete reimagining. The record features 8 brand new songs that help to cement Princess Nokia as one of the key voices in modern hip hop.

While the first offering holds a quite tangible anger and general gloom within, 'The Lyre of Orpheus is a much more mellow affair, contemplating existentialism and the like.

This is music that lingers in the mind and seeps into the bones. And while you can view it as melancholic, Scally and Legrand never dwell on sentimentality or allow anything to sink into despondency.

This is an album that can (and I think will) transcend musical taste and age range... 'Lifeblood' may well live forever as one of the best commercial albums of the bands career.

Their adventurous spirit is in such clear abundance on Open Here, that you could almost forget that this is a band with a stronger grasp of the basics than most.

There is so much to go back to, beyond cheap thrills and catchy, yet dimensionless, hooks. An album for the ages.

What Xiu Xiu demonstrate throughout Always, is the way in which they can lay down so starkly how terrible life can be and how fucked up one can feel and create something amazing, angry, political, fierce and defiant out of all of it.

You’ve [Lana Del Rey] found your own style and run with it. It’s amazing to see someone so free and in control.

The fact that Smith rarely untangles The Fall from the cryptic absurdist approach that has become his stock-in-trade, to head toward this type of profoundly personal material, only makes it that more affecting when he actually does deviate from his path most traveled.

How to Stop Your Brain in an Accident is arguably the band's finest hour.

It's more than a return to form for SSLYBY--it's potentially their finest hour.

Everything sings here, no matter how dark the matter at hand.

Scott Litt's crisp, clean production always had a plangent directness that suited Out of Time perfectly, and any remastering tweaks are pretty imperceptible. Disc two here is entirely comprised of demos, many of them instrumental, and certainly not something to repeatedly listen to in a single sitting.

Ultimately, Cheatahs haven't just upped the ante with Mythologies, they've created one of this year's most definitive albums and probably increased their own burden of expectation tenfold.

The Hunter is a pitch for the mainstream--but it doesn't compromise on Mastodon's core ambition.

Under all its punk ferocity, however, lies a grander message of mindfulness and mental strength. That’s an immeasurably powerful theme from two musicians both known for bringing vulnerable accounts of severe anxiety and depression to hip hop.

Bright Like Neon Love feels like the record The Human League could have made if they’d remade Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours in 1985. It’s like the soundtrack to the best party you’ve never been too, but always wish you had.

There’s nothing else like this out there that’s as perfectly realised as this, and to draw upon previous, albeit indirect precedents, that leaves only one outcome from this unruly verbiage.

Loss in its many forms shades Ruminations, and the matter-of-fact nature of its acceptance makes the record all the more devastating.

For Skelethon is the kind of record an artist only makes once in their career; the culmination of long-gestation, departing loved ones and having to innovate out of your comfort zone.

While there is still plenty of those addictive sonic downpours, The Colour in Anything is arguably Blake’s most create cloudburst to date.

Hands down, ‘Pawn Shoppe Heart’ is the record to blow their contemporaries out of the water.

Sleep Of Reason is darker, deeper and more daring than either Coexist or Overgrown and more emotional and soulful than The xx or James Blake. Ninja Tune won't release a better record this year.

Whatever happens next, she can rest assured safe in the knowledge that together with her beau they've conjured up one of 2012's--or any other year in recent memory--finest debuts.

It’s not what you might have expected or even--on one or two initial listens--have been hoping for from Kendrick Lamar. But this is an artist in his absolute prime: artistically, lyrically and musically.

Travels... is a 33 minute monster without a slither of excess fat, and the best thing Andy Falkous has ever put his name to.

It’s disarming, actually, how an album this heavy can be so kinetic, so compulsive, so--the word seems wrong, but funky.

Black Dice still belong in the DIY basement space but with Load Blown they’ve made their most accessible album yet.

Ultimately, this is the best thing Dulli has put his name to since Blackberry Belle.

Luminous marks another fitting addition to The Horrors' increasingly untouchable catalogue.

It’s all masterful.

Twenty One revels in fun found in the cobwebbed corners of Alkan’s mix and the nightlifing minds of its lyricists.

Funk-by-numbers has not yet had an update worth of Sly Stone; but in Head Over Heels, Chromeo have cracked it. They never miss a beat in updating it for 2018.

There are moments of ‘saneness and plainness’ on the album, but these are only short, giddy moments. The great bulk of material on it plays under the assertion that one conclusion, or one reading of a situation is impossible. Great works contain multitudes, and that is exactly what you’ll get here.

Excerpts is a work of forgetful minimalism; it is powerfully repetitious--perhaps, in waves, completely random.

It is heartening and not a little bittersweet to be reminded how Weezer once made sad, twisted, broken-sounding songs like these, and they made them work, and they made our CD player work, and they weren't a bit shit, and we loved them.

In itself, this serves as testament to Hecker’s ever more potent ability to make music that feels alive, that is successful on both a physical and mental level.

Tarot Sport doesn’t pause to bang or whimper. Tarot Sport accelerates.

It takes some talent to blend elements of metal, prog rock, classic electronica (Brian Eno has been an acknowledged influence, and Rogerson will be releasing a collaboration with him in the near future), techno and hip hop into an album, but Three Trapped Tigers have pulled it off so convincingly here that it makes some of their previous material look unfairly clunky in comparison.

This is their best yet and possibly the best of the year.

Even now, Fuzzy Logic hasn't dated and certainly doesn't sound as though it was made 20 years ago.

Action Time Vision... covers a seminal time when anything seemed possible and a special kind of never to be repeated excitement hung in the air. For those reasons alone this box set is worth anyone's time and money.

Longing for The Blood Brothers (or even, of course, Pretty Girls Make Graves) is as futile as rating a current girlfriend against an ex: while both may have inspired your love, all that truly matters is the here and now. And Jaguar Love are very much of today. There is no turning back.

In Ctrl, SZA draws on her personal experience and explores women’s sexuality in a direct and honest way which was so far mostly reserved to male R&B and pop artists.

Erykah might have mellowed out, but the lessons from last time round have been learnt, rethought and reapplied. This is a record that confidently stands alone as brilliant, yet remains an equally perfect companion to a modern classic.

Tommy sounds like it has been carefully scored, but chances are Dosh created all this in his head. There are so many perfect moments.

With no warning whatsoever, this is an incredibly thoughtful, articulate modern rock record that stands toe-to-toe with anything released this year.

Reflection is quintessentially Eno. A beautiful, thought provoking and introspective body of work that is composed in a way that is still as unique and as radical as the man himself.

Stark but lush, these are pop songs for moonlit lakes, soft throbs to bob in while no one else is looking.