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.