Despite the occasional tendency to soar above when her songs could benefit from some earthiness, in the main Ware's sheer, confident boldness carries the day.

The result, unexpectedly, is his most ambitious record yet.

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.

[Ciara sounds] blissfully triumphant and uncomplicated on a record from start to finish.

Love Letters proves to have all the pop addictivenss that Riviera did.

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.

Acousmatic Sorcery's imperfections are unapologetic and unconcerned, largely stamping all over any chances of bringing the overall experience down.

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

Too Bright creates a captive audience in its effusive refusal to let you look away.

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.

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

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.

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

It's very difficult not to like these songs--for their clarity and craftmanship, but also the strength of their ideas.

More sweeping and grand than any of their previous records, the trio’s fourth LP is by far their most cinematic.

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

This may be Carla Bozulich’s take on pop music, but Boy is rarely anything short of cathartic.

It's Kemp's uncompromising beat patterns and bouncing, funk-infused basslines that ultimately deserve the spotlight here.

Ghettoville might chronicle a dark patch for Actress, but once it hits its stride it’s as good, and as full of life, as anything he has produced.

Say Yes To Love feels like a purging, 20-odd minutes of urgent expulsion that leaves you feeling exhausted, elated and renewed.

While indebted to the music that came before it, No World is very much of the here and now.

By and large, though, Moiré counters spontaneity with poise.

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

In Visa, Ripatti has constructed an album evocative of one extremely specific place--and it’s a place which couldn’t have been accessed by anybody but him.

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

Unselfconscious and joyfully untrammelled, most importantly Never is charmingly weird--that quality so coveted by indie chancers everywhere.

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.

Remember Your Black Day is about that feeling of grim portent, the cold fear that leaks in through your TV screen, the dread that hunts you down, even as you sprawl on a sun lounger and sip your cocktail and stare out at the sea.