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.