Everyday Robots is a graceful and beguiling album from an artist that continues to explore, mature and surprise us with each release. Not bad for a debut album.

The trio are playing together better than ever, even capturing some of the power of economy that their earliest music commanded with grit and grace and thunder and lightning.

Hardly Electronic is a mature and polished album from a band confident enough to let their influences guide their sound without overshadowing it. Longtime fans will obviously snap this up, but anyone with an interest in classically-minded pop arrangements and great songs will find much to like on this unexpected gem from the Essex Green.

While IV is extraordinary for delivering fresh music that elaborates on their past work, it feels particularly exceptional because of its forward momentum.

The Moritz Von Oswald Trio deliver their most impressive and spatially alluring album to date with Fetch.

Artists that push themselves with every release are rare, and rarer still are the artists where each new frontier is a successful one. Objekt is one of those, and Cocoon Crush demands to be listened to intently and completely. The arrangements themselves are never predictable, twisting and turning with opportunistic glee, marrying the fluidity of his role as a sonic architect.

It is big, bold and absolutely electrifying.

Jay II is a mysterious, endlessly enjoyable collection of songs that reveal more and more with subsequent listens.

Picking up where their 2002 self-titled album left off, Oblation is a triumph of doom metal and stoner rock.

Not one second on the album goes to waste. It's an efficient half-hour endeavour where every song, (save for the rousing intro), sounds like the grand finale of an epic live production.

Music can be therapeutic, and Hildebrand's music is a perfect example of this.

It's when producer the Alchemist trims and arranges that Bronson becomes a salable bouquet.

The LP is both amusing and poignant, full of strange imagery and punch lines that are characteristic of Mountain Goats.

If the self-titled debut was the unobtrusive introduction, Avalanche represents the showy breakthrough the duo have been angling for.

Tasteful inclusions of every kind, powerful melodies and dense, wry lyrics make Tim Melina Theo Bobby an unmissable conclusion for fans of Midwest emo, electronic rock, and strong songwriting.

While the Body are experts at playing with aural textures and layers, the decadent variety of sounds on Christs, Redeemers is next level, even for them.

Perfectly written, recorded and performed, Along The Shadow is less an emo revival than a full-on reconstitution.

Still walking the high wire, with Something More Than Free, Jason Isbell continues his streak of genre-defining masterworks.

Joe Strummer 001 is bursting with endearing, heartbreakingly excellent stories and songs about and by a guy with an endless passion to create and affect change. Here's hoping this series continues.

You don't just feel unburdened of "progress" dysphoria, you feel like you've emerged from the paradigm equipped with a new language to help you navigate the next one.

Replaying Under The Same Sky enough times reveals balanced interplay between heavy warehouse techno and increasingly noticeable individual craft.

On Is Survived By, they've outdone themselves.

Here, every riff is full of life, the chemistry popping out in the open spaces, Ozzy's melancholy once again finally, and fittingly, overtop the soundtrack of metallic joy and madness, the whole thing combining to create a perfect metal sound the way only the masters can.

It owes something to the great songwriters and studio tones of the 1970s, but it's also strikingly timeless and authentic rock music, helmed by an underground Renaissance man.

Mother finds Xylouris White quietly questioning musical structure and expectations. They remain trailblazing outliers with a supernatural power to express themselves as one and, with a warmth and welcoming generosity of spirit, invite listeners to step up and out of their comfort zones.

It is as brilliant. What Faith in Strangers does do is confirm Stott's position as one of the most stirring and explorative producers going.

It's the sound of all of pop history cast into the void of space and sent careening back, transmuted by some unknown force. The ghosts of lost icons hurtle through these songs — passing by in molecular form are the sparkling ethers of Prince and Bowie, the curdled spectre of Genesis P-orridge.

Roberts' characteristic style is Scottish without cliché, and his marriage of old and new stands out in an oversaturated, strummy-guitar field of singer-songwriters as a gorgeous album from beginning to end.