This album is a good example of how to revive twenty-year-old sample relics and construct new, wildly dilapidated material from them like they were so much reclaimed timber.

Thundercat sprung The Beyond / Where The Giants Roam on us unexpectedly, but in its surprise and brevity is the awakening of his voice.

Whilst My Name Is My Name has one of the best selections of beats on a major label rap album in years, and Pusha’s enunciations are still as sonically potent as a decade ago, his singularity largely comes across as a stubborn resistance to change in the face of how ambitious the LP (and so much new rap, frankly) sounds, and suffers from a tracklist too concerned with features to allow this singularity to reign supreme anyway.

If Dagger Paths was a revelation, Engravings is a refinement, long to arrive but worth the wait.

If anything, they illuminate an increasingly formulaic approach that, in its attempt to express extremes of human emotion, ends up saying not very much at all.

While the lyrical content can be a little prescriptive in places, all of Womack's contributions are frank, honest and humble

With this record Laurel Halo has created a strong work that, while being notable and challenging for its unusual, compact combination of pop, ambience and musique concrète, is also immersive and enjoyable for this exact reason.

Rather than limiting this EP's scope, restricting it to the use of only one synthesizer allows Terje's innate quirkiness and sense of humour even more room to maneuver.

I Shall Die Here is a bracing listen, certainly no easier than The Body’s conventional albums, and in its application of intense studio treatment, at times perhaps even more intense. But it is also a whole lot better than The Body’s 2013 album for Thrill Jockey, Christ, Redeemers.

Rich and disorientating, KOCH accesses a different pace of life--or rather several, bewilderingly, all at once.

Despite its patchier moments, fIN's effective command of light and shade make for an involving listen, and it's a sound that's pretty much Talabot's own.

Future’s lyrical sensitivity wouldn’t work without the album’s pitch-perfect production.

Kill For Love matures with each listen, and there's enough craftsmanship at work to more than compensate for the more listless moments.

Though the songs on Swisher are occasionally a little too long--even the shortest is more than five minutes, and ‘Andrew’ nearly 10--they’re mostly dynamic and varied enough that boredom never really has the chance to set in.

While it may take until the next album for these darker elements to be as rewardingly complex as Wilner can be, it’s still an immersive trip.

This timid spike ['Afterlife'] in urgency is short-lived, swallowed whole by closer ‘Supersymmetry’ and its 11 genteel minutes of caressing synth-loops and mental nothingness, completing perfectly what is an utterly tangential statement.

Bestial Burden, remarkably, achieves exactly what it sets out to do: to turn the gory inner mechanics of the body outward, and lay bare its unpredictable capacity for self-destruction.

While My Krazy Life is YG’s debut, it feels more like an album-length celebration of Mustard’s ratchet revolution, a sound distilled from LA G-Funk, Atlanta snap and Bay Area hyphy.

DS2 is a relentless, dud-free hour that adds in most of his recent highlights to complete the story of his last year.

Booth and Brown are old hands these days, their territory firmly staked out. It’s gratifying to see, if only briefly, that they haven’t lost the element of surprise.

Aquarius is quite a complicated and accomplished album in that it’s amplified the potential of the mixtapes, making Tinashe into an unquestionable contender for real popstar status, without sacrificing the weirdo introspective soul that made them so special.

Ruins is one of her finest works, full to the brim with emotion in spite of the aching space at its heart.

When it works, it makes for gloriously contradictory pop--it's just a shame that the formula isn't a little more consistent.

Swing Lo Magellan features some of the Dirty Projectors' most straightforward pop songs to date.

Rather than a portrait of Fuck Buttons’ time in the studio, Slow Focus is a hovering meditation on a distant, eerie landscape; a panorama with a sustained, totalising gaze that figures an expanse in perpetual decay and dis-ease.

Like much of the best music of recent times, Colonial Patterns sits outside of chronology, peering fascinatedly in.

Even at its most oppressive (in particular the songs from Thursday), every haunted note of Trilogy seems blissful.

For a record that wears its retro influences so openly, Psychic is surprisingly forward-thinking.

It’s huge fun and sounds just as big.

It’s Album Time is an impressively balanced and varied record.

House Of Woo is one of the sparkier dance albums of the year so far, and a gem amidst all the buncombe.

Silver Cloud may be unfocused at times, but itʼs also a terrific feat of conflicting textures and moods, marrying crackly scuzziness and poetic timbres with ease.

Neither spectacular or deflating, Coexist is simply the sound of the xx, more or less just as we left it: minimalist, intuitive, romantic and enchanting. Consequently it's a good album, for exactly the same qualities that made their debut likewise.

Yes, it’s possible to read Soul Music as some kind of commentary on, or deconstruction of, jungle. More people will probably interpret it as a collection of straightforward, canon-savvy bangers. That’s fine, of course, but it’s difficult to shake the sense that Special Request could have been something more.

There’s certainly nothing on Beautiful Rewind with a hook as memorable as ‘Locked’, from last year’s Pink. When Four Tet hits that sweet spot between fragile beauty and gritty pirate radio music (as on the aforementioned ‘Aerial’ and ‘Buchla’, for instance) however, you really feel as if he’s onto something.

Punk Authority confirms Swanson as no longer just a man with potential, but an institution in his own right.

Whilst Nostalchic is Lapalux’s most full-bodied work to date, it’s also one of the finer examples of how the recent house-meets-r’n'b explosion can be executed with subtlety and finesse.

While certainly not the most sincere album around, nevertheless there is ingrained in its tireless activity a genuine passion to fight the loneliness of intelligence, of neurotic shyness--to fight an inability to connect with people, that condition exacerbated in the era of social media.

Rinse Presents: Royal-T takes his biggest anthems to date--the abrasive, ferocious 'Orangeade' and the gloriously untethered 'Cool Down'--and builds on them in every direction.

Alternate/Endings is as bleak as it is imaginative, a drum ‘n’ bass opus from a producer who hasn’t quite turned his back on hip-hop.

It all comes across as fairly overwrought, working very hard to sound effortless and losing its sense of self in the process.

Even if his chops as a producer aren’t in question, the writing on Xen is too patchy to fully realise Ghersi’s ambitions. Still, it’s hardly lacking in ideas.

This is the best footwork album released by Planet Mu to date, and sits comfortably in the upper echelons of their discography. Traxman has set the bar incredibly high.

Aside from anything, the album’s glut of southern coke-rap cuts are plain mundane; partly because trap is so horribly over-exposed right now, and partly because footwork sounds unordinary next to any genre you could name.

Ominousness is woven into the fabric of Until Silence, where beauty and bleakness coexist synergistically, as though it’s impossible to have one without the other.

In Our Heads seems acutely lacking in personality, meaning or the ability to evoke, in your head, anything other than a vague urge to dance.

Nepenthe is more ambitious than its predecessors, more varied in style and execution and sonically richer.

The album wants to be eccentric, but it severely lacks personality.

Considering the trio are relative newcomers to dance music, the programming throughout Factory Floor is acutely deft. Elegant, in fact; so much so that the sound can comfortably be described as chic.

Considering that Ferreira is a twenty-one-year-old major label pop artist exploring indie rock on a highly-anticipated debut, songs born of manifold frustration and uncertainty, Night Time, My Time is a defiant and assured listen.

Black Metal is an exceptional record. It is a stronger, more complete statement even than that seen on The Redeemer, primarily because it lays bare its own contradictions.

It makes for an excellent debut in whatever style you want to call it.

This is a Chinese whispers record, one that has been passed through enough cultural and aesthetic filters as to make it utterly meaningless.

While Oxymoron is never dull, thanks to Q’s indisputable skills as a rapper and beat selector, by its conclusion you’ll wish he’d given less of its runtime over to his gangsta persona and more to exploring his own identity.

This perpetual cycling through of ideas can be fascinating but also fatiguing, and it ultimately marks the record's most debilitating flaw.

For the most part this is a composed, nourishing pop album.

Though Younge’s production may be the star here, Twelve Reasons To Die is the work of a rap game veteran who in the autumn of his career still has plenty to offer.

At the moment, it feels like he's clinging tenaciously to the edge of disco's seamy grandeur: held there by a certain stiffness, seriousness even.

It’s all genre-splicing and too little genre-defining, and I can’t help but think that Martyn, with both his musical knowledge and his production chops, is capable of something better.

There’s often a disconnect between the production and what’s going on vocally, the two elements at times even working at cross purposes.

No Better Time Than Now is both musically rich and emotionally open, and it’ll be interesting to see where Shigeto takes his sound next.

The theme of pining which was thread throughout her debut mixtape Cut 4 Me is still present here, but more pointed and poetic this time around. Each song beams with growth.

The Block Brochure is a daunting proposition and quite simply a difficult amount of music to process. This is unfortunate, though, given the sheer number and variety of gems strewn throughout.

In short: this is a techno mix--a really good one.

His solo work tends to be more delicate--with Audience Of One capturing him at his most porcelain.

Blue Gardens something a bit more sonically vivid is touched upon in ‘At Sea’, when acoustic percussion samples and a less stable synth harmonium shiver and waver in a manner that subtly detaches the track from everything that preceded it.

It’s a creditable enough compilation as a whole, although a couple of relative oldies, Burial’s ‘Shell Of Light’ (from 2007’s Untrue) and DJ Rashad’s ‘Only One’ (from last year’s Double Cup) rather make me question the aims of the exercise.

It’s Too Late is a woozy, scattershot thing--Late Night Drake, if you will.

Though a marginally lesser album than predecessor MAYA, Matangi is nevertheless dynamite.

Chance of Rain hinges on uncertainty and fluctuating pressure, not outpouring. It’s impersonal, then, but never inhuman.

There are runs of tunes that are almost entirely textural, which might be part of the reason it’s so easy to drift into, but are not really ones you’d chuck on a playlist.

Many of its strongest tracks are those that see Q take his foot off the gas, playing to more traditional communicative strengths in hip-hop.

An unobtrusively profound statement, cradled in soft-focus melancholy, it's a willowy but towering expression of disassociation, and deeply moving.

Having been born of time around Hot Chip's main activities, however, New Build's debut is not without the limitations that are likely of such an endeavour.

Honeymoon is by far Del Rey’s most beautifully made and cohesive album.

Seabed is the worst of all worlds, all fluff without substance and repetition without meaning.

4Eva and a Day is--modestly, but definitely--a triumph.

Even if How to destroy angels_ are simply tweaking a long-established formula, rather than clearing the chalkboard, An Omen_ still presents a band that has mastered the task at hand.

The problem is that the vocals sound generic.

Plenty of new producers are doing interesting things on the outer fringes of the style--Filter Dread is probably Runge’s closest contemporary--but nobody sounds quite like this.

The sounds that Dall brings to bear here are often gorgeous, a sun-dappled, analogue-soft electronica of rippling synths and glinting percussion that recalls--and sometimes strongly--the atmospheric IDM of the mid-90s.

It’s fair to say that Modern Worship is the fullest yet realisation of its creator’s distinctive vision, and it’s a rewarding album--but not quite a stunning one.

Order Of Noise [is] a meaty, satisfying listen.

Production-wise, the album sounds as if it could have easily slipped from any number of top tier rap labels, yet with Gates at the helm, the journey is deeper, darker and far more invigorating than anything from the last couple of years with a Rozay, Em or Hov co-sign.

Galaxy Garden is ambitious, which is to be lauded, and Cutler also has a reassuringly realistic outlook when saying that he is still "chipping away at a big idea".

Unfortunately, dependable lounge ambience this ain’t; as the album progresses, any sense of cohesion or purpose is quickly lost to the sheer density and variety of ideas.

Even given the sheer wealth of variety and detail Fhloston Paradigm crams in, it’s never lofty or inaccessible; instead, it both upholds an electronic music convention even as it carves its own singular niche.

In both musical and studio accomplishment Holy Other has come into his own as strong, individual, musical voice; Held is a strong display of this and is going to make a lot of people very happy indeed.

By the end, you only want more: you find yourself wishing that Neneh Cherry and The Thing would just go ahead and cover every song in the world in this inimitable manner.

Hesitation Marks follows the musical lineage that began with The Fragile, but it surpasses recent NIN albums thanks to a deeply personal thematic core and a willingness to push the songwriting into territory that is often dancier and poppier than listeners have come to expect from the band.

Mantasy is a noticeably self-contained work: it unfolds gradually and deliberately, full of wholly beguiling details.

There's stacks to enjoy, but, for the most part, Release bares its bones and hides its heart.

There is some meat here, but it’s difficult to suck it off the bone. Perhaps in his efforts to prevent his music being “reified,” Warwick has fallen short of saying anything much at all.

The journey bounds from emotional high to low and back again: ecstasy and agony can both cause tearful eyes and heart palpitations.

Will Happiness Find Me? is a fitful, thought-provoking listen.

Legacy’s most obviously rewarding moments, then, are when Space pushes this alien thrill to its limit.

Total Loss is a largely dud-free album.

Fernow takes a more sprawling, less finely textured approach, so that Through the Window strikes a fine balance between morbid gloom and its faintly cheesy reference points.