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

Nun is easily the most focussed and incisive record Teengirl have released to date.

That’s the achievement of Spaces: not simply to replicate the music of Frahm’s concerts, divine though it is, but to evoke the events’ communal intimacy.

Stealth Of Days is sonic candyfloss, delectable on the taste buds but fleeting too. Added to which, as with candyfloss, you might find yourself tiring of the flavour before long.

This is two albums in a row now that were basically a bit boring, and she needs to sort it out soonish please.

As anyone who’s spent a night lurking by the subwoofers knows, these tracks have the power to rearrange internal organs. Uncomfortable though that may sound, it’s a pleasure to experience.

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.

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.

Cupid Deluxe starts strongly with ‘Chamakay’, ‘You’re Not Good Enough’, and ‘Uncle ACE’, but sadly loses focus.

Spun out over a sometimes painful hour, NYC, Hell 3:00AM is a mess of an album that, despite a questionable concept, still has plenty of genuine highs.

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.

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

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

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.

It’s huge fun and sounds just as big.

Only ‘The Seasons Won’t Change (And Neither Will You)’ feels slightly extraneous. Otherwise, Restless Idylls is all we might have hoped for in a Tropic Of Cancer LP.

From the evocative title on down, there is nothing about Cut 4 Me that doesn’t challenge the listener’s expectations of what R&B can be in 2013 and beyond.

Silver may believe in the changeless beauty of his art, but he doesn’t quite succeed in convincing the rest of us.

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.

Kwes is a resourceful, competent producer and songwriter who’s not short on ideas; if anything, he’s overwhelmed by his own creativity.

As a pop-object, Interiors is far more convincing than its predecessor; as a musical experience it is still, regrettably, thin.

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

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.

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

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.

The record is at its weakest when it’s more hoedown than hoes down.... Generally though, Cyrus’s fourth album is more--ahem--bangers than clangers.

It’s an album that feels measured and well timed and yet avoids sounding over-polished or awkwardly stage-managed.

Though it sounds like it couldn’t be by anybody else, it’s more sonically diverse and less dense than previous Jesu albums.