True, it’s also an often familiar-sounding form – that same chord progression at varying speeds, faster than Bad Religion, slower than NOFX – but they also sound like themselves again.

Bleak as all hell, then, yet somehow this uncompromising music seems so in tune with the times that Chat Pile could genuinely be on the cusp of a major breakthrough. Don’t miss out.

No Obligation documents the result of resilience and hard work, and makes for a listen that’s enjoyable regardless of musical preference or taste.

Sløtface’s third album leaves the feeling of a musical outfit undergoing a bit of a rebirth, but one that’s brimming with promise. Don’t bet against Haley making this new incarnation of Sløtface even better as they continue to find their sound.

The greatest achievement is how easy to swallow this all is. The shifts between chonky riffs and mellower, jazzy polyrhythms and gorgeous David Gilmour-ish guitar solos are so smooth as to be in some way unnoticeable as they happen.

It's a record as sweet as 20 pumpkin spice lattes, with Gravity ('She keeps pulling me like gravity, everywhere she goes') and Perfume ('I wanna make you my girl / I wanna make you my world') sticking out as notable offenders, while the equally syrupy Kiss Me Again is also a little boilerplate. That said, it’s all rather endearing, especially for those who relate enough to the sentiment to be swept up by it.

It’s not, in fact, an exaggeration to say that there are moments on this album that almost replicate the visceral intensity of vomiting. Partly that’s due to Michael’s guttural growls, a voice that rattles and chokes on itself as it exits his mouth. Around it, though, is a brutally cacophonous swirl of sound that, especially on the title-track, is harrowing and – oddly, paradoxically, confusingly – comforting.

The Essex star’s already demonstrated that she’s adept at crafting a banger that plays in your brain on loop for hours, but she’s somehow improved the recipe of whatever secret sauce goes in these songs.

At it’s core, it’s an endearing celebration of friendship and life’s small joys. Contrary to Dune Rats’ self-deprecating quip, this record doesn’t suck at all, but turn it up anyway.

A record that contains a number of inspiring moments, but, on the whole, Another Day doesn't quite assert itself in the context of their back catalogue.

This time out, there is greater maturity in every note. Bea’s trademark indie-folk stylings haven’t been left behind. If anything, they eclipse her grungier tendencies this time out. But on songs like the outstanding Ever Seen and Tie My Shoes there’s less lo-fi fragility and more a strident, sunbeaten warmth akin to peak Phoebe Bridgers or even latter-day Tay Tay herself.

Those who are only after heavy guitars in their music won’t be completely satisfied. .... But this stunning, expansive collection of songs delivers exactly what this torrid world needs: a simultaneous celebration and indictment that will stand the test of time for decades to come.

Confidently delivered and teeming with ideas, it flies by as much because of its urgency as its cohesion.

The template is similar to that of their youngest selves. The knockout rock and roll riffs of guitarist Billy Zoom almost shrug at the lyrical company they’re required to keep.

Irreverence and wilful expendability means quality control goes out the window. Denzel’s titular mischievousness and biting charisma can do a lot of heavy lifting, but with everyone from TiaCorine and A$AP Ferg (HOT ONE) to Ty Dolla $ign and Juicy J (COLE PIMP) piling in, it’s a turbulent flow. Fortunately, flashes of genius keep shining through.

Six years since their last full-length release, this is the sound of one of desert rock’s greatest bands digging deep – and delivering all the groovy brilliance we’ve come to expect.

Unquestionably the most proggy proposition on the album, this tune [L’Enfant De La Lune] shifts through different passages like a receptacle for all the musical touches Alcest have at their disposal. As such, it’s part of a listening experience which often feels like something of a journey, and if the specific destination is ambiguous, the direction is very much into the light.

The guitarist is so focused he has arguably delivered a stronger, more consistent collection than Slayer’s last two albums, for From Hell I Rise slays from start to finish.

Amid softer, acoustic-led material are jubilant anthems like Walls Of Jericho, the biggest-hearted, most openly singable Bon Jovi track for many years. We Made It Look Easy and My First Guitar salute the past in different ways, but both are fond and emotive rather than chest-beating, and Living In Paradise is another big chorus showpiece that grows in both momentum and feels.

This is simultaneously both the most pulverising and the most memorable release the band have put their name to in years.

Having created a monster, BMTH have proven themselves equal to matching the creative demands it’s placed on them. What a re-GeN-eration.

Musically, it radiates personality. There’s an intimate quality to Clancy that feels like you’re not only right there with Tyler, witnessing him spill his guts, but also in the studio with the frontman and drummer Josh Dun as they giddily experiment and let it all out. They’ve long been one of alternative music’s most unique bands, but on Clancy there’s a confidence in showcasing absolutely everything they’re capable of.

What is surprising, however, is how deep into gloom Dark Superstition dives, and the subtlety with which its cocktail of abyssal heaviness and velvety melody works its way under the skin.

This one is a masterclass in delivering musical precision with an undercarriage of scuzz and tension. The likes of Tattoos and Days Are Dogs retain the minimalist vision that has coursed through Shellac since their earliest releases.

Knocked Loose are at the head of the pack. Throw all the hype and viral Coachella moments around you want, it’s the music that matters, and this isn’t just their best record yet, it’s one of the best albums of the year. And somehow, it feels like they’re only just getting started.

SELF HELL, is their most fearless. The 12-track collection mediates its electronic curveballs with the melodic metalcore mash-up that Sleeps have pioneered over their career, blended to masterful effect.

If this is, indeed, the end, it’s a wonderful and profound way with which to say goodbye. It would, however, be a great shame if this was the last we ever hear from Aaron West, because this is more than an album. It’s an actual life.

Dark Matter is many things. It’s thrilling. It’s moving. It’s surprising. It’s a band still operating at the peaks of their powers.

ABOMINATION is frequently a colourful, outlandish listen, bold in scope and teeming with ingenious lines.

Their rebellious spirit is intertwined with a sense of total, inspiring self-love and in creating that feeling of empowerment, Humble As The Sun feels revolutionary in a fresh new way.

There will be doubters and there will be haters, but Heaven :x: Hell is Sum 41 at their zenith and is, without any shadow of a doubt, the album of their career.

Nonetheless, even if the follow-up to 2022’s Garageband Superstar isn’t wildly innovative, there’s a smorgasbord of catchy tunes fizzing with sugary energy.

The Mandrake Project is a colossal idea carried out by an artist who revels in snowballing ideas and having to work hard to cram it all in. It’s the most Bruce Dickinson of all Bruce Dickinson’s solo works. It's also the best.

Ultimately, though, this is a record with the kind of undeniable quality that will captivate fresh-faced newcomers just as much as weathered veterans.

This is punk at its most multifaceted and emotional, overflowing with desire and angst.

Despite only clocking in at 42 minutes it feels like it drags on for ages. And the copious use of samples to remind you it’s an industrial record gets tiring.

At the point where most bands start to slow down, Pissed Jeans have hit the accelerator.

The Liverpudlian quartet have every reason to be overloaded with strident self-belief, but the striking vibrancy and surging energy with which they translate it to these 12 tracks is utterly remarkable.

It’s evocative stuff, but what makes it more compelling is that it’s delivered by a 43-year-old woman whose tastes can’t be contained by low ceilings, so these observations don’t necessarily arrive with the musical backing you might expect.

Musically, TANGK finds IDLES’ style rejuvenated, with drum patterns drawing from soul, techno and hip hop. The sparse beats and ominous background hums of POP POP POP are reminiscent of Radiohead’s Kid A.

Ultimately, this album is a promise that as brilliantly beguiling as Chelsea Wolfe has always been, her big picture is still coming into focus.

Unlike the rest of us willpower-lacking lightweights, he manages to succeed; crafting an album that nods to the Rattlesnakes’ past but strikes out boldly for a bright new future.

Ignore the anodyne song-titles like Versions Of You, Bad Time and Scars. Sonically, we’re right back into the gravel of early-2000s classic From Here To Infirmary and Good Mourning. Guitars slice, grate and gouge like murder weapons. Matt and Dan Andriano’s vocals are loaded with more wry, world-weary bittersweetness than they have been in years.

Exhilaratingly expansive music balanced by a sense of darkness and foreboding, travelling simultaneously into outer space and inner turmoil. SLIFT’s expansive energy and transcendental creativity provide a uniquely rewarding thrill.

It’s a return to rock with a capital 'R'. In fact, make that three capital 'R's.

As they get older and wiser, when they focus their songwriting skills like they do on Saviors, they are as sharp, bright and essential as they’ve ever been. And they still know who they, and you, are.

In their own distinct ways, they both sound like the end of the world, and this jointly-created album sees them gleefully pulling preconceptions out of shape.

Balancing an instinct for dancefloor-crushing industrial with gloomily lush soundscapes, Rat Wars suggests that even when HEALTH are at their most meticulously state-of-the-art, a fervent need to express honest emotion finds humanity overriding tech to emerge as the dominant element in their work.

Polished production courses through veins of Zig, with each track elevated above its component parts, as the genre-muddling star incorporates elements of industrial, metal and jungle amongst the record’s heavier junctures, with piano and cello bolstering the album’s more delicate passages.

A satisfying, feisty record made for blasting loud enough to annoy the neighbours, and for partying the existential dread away. This band’s not cooling down anytime soon.

As ever, SAVED! is a genuinely haunting record from an artist whose emotional articulacy is unlike any other. Creatively, it is an inspired idea, carried off by a unique talent.

This is an excellent album in its own right, but ONE MORE TIME… also points to an even more exciting future for blink-182.

It’s all written with smartness, a rough, street poetry, and a huge dollop of Americana populated by burned-out restaurants and big cars and rock’n’roll dreamers and John Hughes suburbia.

Sanguivore may well be Creeper in their ultimate form, and by embracing their biggest, most bombastic sound ever, they’ve created black magic.

The main business is killing, of course, and business is very good. It’s one of the reasons why Tomb Mold are among the most respected names in the new school of old school. But by allowing their own ideas to run wild atop it all, they’re also comfortably one of its most creative.

It’s in the staggering breadth of what Code Orange dare to do here that’s as striking as how much they want you to break your neck from turning your head every time they dart around a corner.

Taken individually, both NULL and VOID are brilliant albums from a collective who understand music’s role as a vessel for emotional articulacy. Put them together, and they are creatively anything but their combined title, while also somehow perfectly expressing a feeling of being both.

EndEx doesn’t win many points for going where no band has gone before. The album, and its creators, do deserve credit for continuing the Fear Factory tradition, as an industrial metal band preoccupied with questions of how technological advancements adversely affect our lives. If you fear the future, this is the soundtrack for you.

Very occasionally, such as during the first half of the otherwise excellent Crashed Out Wasted, that compulsion to pour honey in our ears can lead to a little too much saccharine. But on the whole, Race The Night is a journey worth taking, deftly hitting all of the touchpoints that make Ash such a special band.

If life is still depicted largely as a struggle against despair, these songs nevertheless suggest that small moments of happiness can be found amongst the darkness. If the message of No Joy is ultimately one of perseverance, it’s fitting that this is an album which seems set to grant its creators a new lease of life.

Those still pining for the slick, sparkly, arena-sized rock bombast of the masterful This Is War will be left wanting, but such is how things go on Mars, and it’s a hearteningly better album than the awkward, confused America. The guitars are back.

As obvious as it is to say, Baroness are completely singular in what they do.

There is a very good rock record waiting for you here – and certainly one that deserves to be appreciated by many more than nine people.

It’s testament to how thrilling Rivers Of Heresy is that by the time you reach at closing track The Looming, released, somewhat boldly, as the first single from the album, that its impact hasn’t been lessened.

Like the very youth it seems to be chronicling, Learning How To Live And Let Go flies by in a blur, blindsiding with the contemplative poignancy of arms-round-shoulders closer It Ain’t Easy.

With a nod to the classic rock that inspired them, Greta Van Fleet continue to contort those great influences in challenging and evocative new directions.

There might be a heavy dose of sarcasm in the seams of its shell-suited soul, but Super Snõõper is never arch or cynical. Rather, it’s an exhilarating endorphin rush you’ll want to return to again and again.

As usual, PVRIS demonstrates the value of existing in the spaces between genres, and that moments of combination and contrast are often the most exciting.

It comes across like the soundtrack to a great lost ’90s teen movie and, best of all, with its irresistible energy and eminently quotable lyrical couplets ('I have to say you look like Hell / Oh well'), the whole thing’s an absolute blast.

Yet while this album rails against the world our plutocratic/oligarchic overlords have created for the rest of us, it also displays a vulnerability that’s rare in hardcore and post-hardcore.

A trip worth taking, over and over again.

As a QOTSA album, In Times New Roman… is dark and disorientating; for Joshua Homme, it feels like a wholly necessary outpouring of creative catharsis.

Sixteen albums in, that they continue to surprise and create as much as they do is to be celebrated on its own. That it represents their best work in a decade is the triumph of a genuinely magnificent band.

An overwhelming addition to a back catalogue not lacking in transcendental power, Purge finds Justin channelling distress and disgust into music that hits both body and soul, creating something wonderful out of horror and pain. This really is a perfectly-titled album.

Tomorrow Never Comes is more of a delight than really it has any right to be. Certainly, it’s a good deal more compelling than any of its authors’ more recent albums.

It prises beauty from unimaginable suffering. Make no mistake, Foo Fighters have delivered a masterpiece – one they never would have wanted to have to record, but a masterpiece nonetheless.

For those who like their rock and metal to hit with swift immediacy, Take Me Back To Eden’s hour-plus runtime might prove a bit of a slog, but if you allow yourself to be fully immersed in Sleep Token’s world, the sonic rewards are plentiful.

True, not all these 10 songs are gonna be fan-favourites, but this return at least partly captures the sense of catharsis brought so brilliantly to that stage in South Wales.

There is an explosive exuberance at the heart of Enter Shikari’s superb seventh album.

Attention to detail makes …So Unknown an involving listen, but emphatically doesn’t detract from the band’s primary intention of rearranging your skeletal structure through elastic, chugging riffs and neck-snapping beats.

At an hour-and-a-quarter, like its predecessor, 72 Seasons is a lot to cram in in one go, a marathon. But it slaps consistently, and hard.

Alas, as with other City and Colour albums, this one suffers from moments of terminal blandness.

So Much (For) Stardust does have a foot in a past FOB, but where they're taking you is somewhere you weren't expecting, and it's equally welcome. Just as importantly, they sound like Fall Out Boy again.

It’s hard not to have fun when every track here feels suitably like its own adventure, and impressively still, BABYMETAL sound like they’ve been steering the ship through these parallel universes not for the first time, but for years.

This is extreme music heavy in both sound and content. But this is also part of the strength of the album. It is unflinching in its subject matter and depth of its darkness, just as it is unafraid to be exactly what it is. And that's something quite unlike anything else you'll hear in 2022.

Tantalisingly, this record also feels like the next building-block in a potentially genre-defining body of work. As much as we can’t wait for 100,000 gecs, however, there’s a mountain of fun to be had before we get there.

Dying Of Everything does not match or beat its predecessor, but that is not to say that it is lacking in any department, for it is a crushing slab of the dark’n’hard stuff executed with merciless precision and delivered with a killer mix.

Past //Present // Future dismantles every box the band have found themselves pigeonholed in, and sets them on their own path of integrity and triumph.

They’re making bigger leaps than ever. Even their more familiar-sounding songs show signs of metamorphosis.

Truth Decay is an album that sees You Me At Six grabbing elements from 2014’s Cavalier Youth and 2010’s Hold Me Down. Then it wraps them up into a time capsule of what it means to be a young adult in the ever-difficult 2020s.

Truly emphasising how far they’ve come since emo’s heyday, these songs have as much (or more) in common with alt.pop icons like HAIM, Alanis Morissette or Fiona Apple as even they do with even Paramore’s poppiest ‘rock’ contemporaries like Fall Out Boy and Panic! At The Disco.

One Day is a fearless from a band who punched the clock out cold.

When Måneskin tap into the youthful exuberance and fiery eccentricity that got them here in the first place, though, they’re still utterly unstoppable.

Every Loser is superb. But more importantly it encapsulates Iggy’s essence, not by reframing for a modern audience or pandering to trends, but drawing out the timeless qualities of its author: his anger, his sense of wonder and romance, and his downright strangeness.

The bad news for Disturbed fans, and unsurprising news for their detractors, is that Divisive is an average record. Hearing the first three tracks – opening single Hey You, the leaden Bad Man, and the forgettable title-track – one hopes they’re mere aberrations and that the quality high-octane arena fodder will arrive imminently. Alas, it never does.

This is a great rock album, built on its creators' own terms, and delivered with musical flash, songwriting panache and, at times, immense force.

It feels refreshing, and like a bunch of really good mates have got together to share their experiences with the world. L.S. Dunes could well change the tide on all things post-hardcore.

Cave World is an album brimming not just with colour and life, but also with a sense of striking unease that is pitched somewhere between the deeply sexual and the profoundly sinister. ... That all of this strangeness is carried aloft on a smorgasbord of varying musical styles makes Cave World all the more alluring.