This is a band living up to their reputation as exhilaratingly free-spirited, not so much proving they deserve all the accolades and fervent fanaticism bubbling around them but demanding it.

‘I Love You Jennifer B’ is the product of a voracious appetite to find the gaps in between the familiar, a record emblazoned with such pristine, disorienting, unsettling originality that at first, you don’t quite know what to do with it.

A truly unique gem. ... The band have said they want ‘Heart Under’ to feel like the experience of driving through a tunnel with the windows down. Through deliciously inventive musicianship they’ve created something even more thrilling.

Ultimately this record – her best yet – is about finding a different kind of love: the quiet self-examination after the dust of a break-up finally settles.

With ‘The Passionate Ones’, he has honed his intuitive songwriting and production for an experience that is warped, welcoming and deservedly self-assured.

‘For Those I Love’ is not only an immaculate debut, but a beautiful record that speaks to anyone who’s ever loved and lost, anyone who might be mourning or just processing the days of youthful abandon, or perhaps those who need reminding that you can’t have shadows without the light.

This new record not only keeps up that 100 per cent strike rate of golden tunes, but also gives us their best release to date. It’s an album that represents huge growth. Their vocals are more powerful and emotive than ever. ... Like true Gen Z artists, they pull from an extensive palette of genres, but manage to make each – be it angsty rock or a return to disco-pop – feel like it’s a sound they’ve been honing for ages.

Crawlers reaffirm their place as one of the young guiding lights in British guitar music.

In trying to write an album for herself, she’s made one that will resonate harder than anything she's done before.

Combines her strengths with her evergreen knack of embracing the moment into a collection that exudes maturity and class.

‘Service Station At The End Of The Universe’ isn’t the mark of an artist finding his sound, but a confident, authentic trailblazer who knows his craft inside out.

When Wretch said ‘Home?’ would be “soul food”, he wasn’t kidding. It goes beyond that, becoming a testament to the strength of roots that refuse to wither and a promise that – no matter where you are in the world – you can always find a piece of home in this record.

Fizzingly fun, this third mixtape sees Chance finessing but certainly not hampering, his freewheeling nature.

Whatever this is, it’s jaw-dropping.

The result is an album that pulses with energy, one that’s not a dancefloor record in the traditional sense – we can’t see Diplo dropping any of these tracks into his inevitable socially distanced Las Vegas comeback set at some point in late 2021 – but one with an insistent groove woven into its 10 delicately emotive songs, which deal with love in all its messy permutations.

On the evidence of Chris--a deft and bogglingly-intelligent record, which somehow sounds blissfully effortless too--she’s earned her own place in the pop icon history books.

These songs offer a more adult and grounded perspective than ones like ‘Lone Star Lake’ and ‘Evil Spawn’; they’re about the person who feels like home rather than the one who gets your blood pumping. It’s a nice counterweight that feels emblematic of ‘Tigers Blood’ — it’s a burning fire, and it’s a warm summer evening at once.

A tour-de-force of production chops that reaffirms Grey’s established position as a key auteur in the future of her genre. More Black Mirror than Twin Peaks, ‘U’ is an intimate hyperpop record portraying snowballing isolation, a digital-age pop star’s yearning under the limelight of the techno-infused Anthropocene.

Her music is smart, rich and thoughtful enough to pull it off.

It's thrillingly obvious that Junior Boys have made one of the year's best albums. [31 Jul 2004, p.41]

‘Pink Noise’ is steeped in liberation, not bitterness – it isn’t just a heartening comeback, but an absolutely sparkling pop album.

With soothing production, enveloped with numbing vocals, she leaves you in a state of utopia. This surprise album of 2019 was something we didn’t know we needed.

We Are Not Your Kind is an astonishing record, a roaring, horrifying delve into the guts of the band’s revulsion, a primal scream of endlessly inventive extreme metal and searing misanthropy.

The tension created by the lyrics and music is wonderful and uneasy, ensuring that The Idler is endlessly fascinating and unlike anything else you're likely to hear this year.

Merriweather..., their psych-pop pinnacle, shares the simultaneous relentless complexity and instant simplicity of the best Of Montreal albums, but where Kevin Barnes’ last effort got lost in its clever-clever weirdness, shifting rhythms and textures in a way that felt like standing onboard a bus going down a mountain, Animal Collective’s is an easy, good-natured beast.

Their world - sexual, drug-filled, and occasionally paranoid - has become progressively darker, and as such we find them nothing less than guardians of the rock flame.

‘On Bright Green Field’, in all of its weird, frantic and fantastic glory, they’ve gone above and beyond.

A rich and varied album that courses from atmospheric instrumentals (‘Interlude : Dawn’) to the smooth groove of ‘SDL’, on ‘D-DAY’ Agust D is an unstoppable, thought-provoking force, wrapping up his trilogy in peak form.

In ditching the artifice, Annie Clark has made her most generous and open statement yet.

It’s a shame that on The Mindsweep, Shikari's message is occasionally lost among the madness.

Listen to the beats and you'll find The Neptunes' best work in years. [27 Jan 2007, p.31]

If you want to know about the Glasgow scene which spawned Franz Ferdinand, 'Push Barman To Open Old Wounds' is pretty much essential. [21 May 2005, p.66]

‘Romance’ is the band’s most considered and intricately crafted release yet.

By breaking from what the world might expect from them and letting themselves do whatever the hell they want, they have produced a record that’s experimental, soothing and vulnerable; it’s a thing of great beauty.

‘Folklore’ feels fresh, forward-thinking and, most of all, honest. The glossy production she’s lent on for the past half-decade is cast aside for simpler, softer melodies and wistful instrumentation. It’s the sound of an artist who’s bored of calculated releases and wanted to try something different.

It’s an insane and challenging, ambitious and exceptional work of art.

Expertly curated, every single song in ‘Valentine’s relatively restrained 10-song tracklist feels like a fully-realised gem.

War Music is the best album Refused have ever made. It has more in common with the violent swing of a sledgehammer than any punk record we’ve heard this year.

It’s this delicate placing of guest vocals, personal anecdotes and on-the-street soundbites that make ‘Essex Honey’ the most organised sketchbook, one which perfectly encapsulates this particular moment in time.

Slightly less lo-fi than previous efforts--although as it blends together Slayer, Japanese noisecore and warp-speed prog intricacy, sound recording fidelity is a relative concept. [5 Nov 2005, p.45]

Across 10 air-tight tracks, meticulously crafted and elegantly delivered, it’s an absolute triumph.

The confidence in her voice gives you no reason to doubt her. All the way through this album, the pop star is in the driving seat, both behind the scenes and in the situations she describes in the lyrics. ... ‘Future Nostalgia’ is a bright, bold collection of pop majesty to dance away your anxieties to… if only for a little while.

Divers, her unusually tight fourth album, is full of lofty concepts (‘Waltz Of The 101st Lightborne’ sees time-travelling soldiers wage a futile war on their own ghosts) but her crafty tales, signposted by ornate folk arrangements, rarely outpace your imagination.

Though this is her most creative record to date, the lyrics stick to safer territory.

In the hands of someone less witty and schizoid, a near three-hour epic would be unforgivable, but Merritt at play is frequently magical.

The immediate reference point would be a Swedish Coral to the power of ten--but it's more mental, more hippy and psychedelic. [14 May 2005, p.67]

This is wild music, a celestial cabaret that absorbs and unsettles.

Bad As Me has to rank as a disappointment, since there are no surprises to match Real Gone's sepulchral funk or Orphans'... breathtaking sweep.

An album of eerie, elusive beauty.

Throughout, Gibbons and her collaborators maintain a needling sense of unease that, when punctured, allows for fabulous melodic blowouts.

In Masseduction we already have both Dorian and his portrait: the fox on the album’s cover, all rampant neons, stockinged legs, and taut flesh, and the inner ravaging--material just too good to keep in the attic.

When positioned against their previous releases, ‘Formula Of Love: O+T=˂3’ paints a picture of a masterful act, one who has learned to wield their talent and concept into one cohesive banger after another.

Dear Science cuts through genres like a laser through a music encyclopaedia, making strange connections, but always with pop clarity as the ultimate aim. As ever, Sitek’s production shines.

In some ways, ‘Brat And It’s Completely Different But Also Still Brat’ is a home run for its creator, letting her finish the game on her own terms. She has perfected the art of remixing, keeping the songs moving by giving them a brand new lease of life rather than letting them exist statically in their original form.

The production throughout is nothing short of exceptional. With the full backing of an orchestra, there is a richness to the sound overseen by seminal producer Inflo. Their chemistry is apparent throughout as the vocals and production coil around one another egging the other on to new heights. ... It’s not hyperbole to suggest that this canonises her work forever, elating her to be one of the greats.

What you have in ‘This Could Be Texas’ is everything you want from a debut; a truly original effort from start to finish, an adventure in sound and words, and a landmark statement.

Odd, addictive, unsettling and beautiful. [8 Jul 2006, p.41]

The record stands as an all-encompassing culmination of Tyler’s ever-varying sound, showing that growth isn’t always linear and that artists can be a multitude of things. On ‘Call Me…’, Tyler cements his place as a generational talent, one in fine form and continuing to push the boundaries of his vision and kaleidoscopic sound.

She might not want a pedestal, but there aren’t many songwriters who’d make better use of it.

There’s tonnes of fun to be had from absorbing the duo’s fury, and El-P’s sci-fi beats are as thrillingly big ‘n’ bad as ever.

PJ Harvey's best album since 1991's 'Dry', a return to the feral intensity of that remarkable debut.... The clarity of the electric guitars played by Harvey, Rob Ellis and Mick Harvey is enough to make you fall in love with elemental rock all over again.... You could quibble Harvey has absolved her responsibilities by making an album earthed in the New York sound of 20 or 30 years ago. But when rock is so invigorating, so joyous about love, sex and living, all arguments are null and void.

Bits of it rule.

Just as on her recent EP of ’80s cover songs, ‘Aisles’, Olsen approached the decade’s tropes with care, and at no point does ‘Big Time’ descend into parody. Though it uses them in the same way those aforementioned greats did, to access the deep and real emotion at a song’s core and open it up to her listener as something irresistible.

This is a smooth, sleek band with their eyes on a bigger prize and they undeniably lose something in the process.

Prince: Originals is at its best when Prince lets loose and embraces his cheekier side. ... Although the camp synths and indulgent guitar solos present on a lot of these tracks are clear by-products of the decade that gave us cone bras, Super Mario and The Goonies, this music also sounds prescient.

Elegant and elemental, quietly confident and masterfully understated, Designer feels like a breath of fresh air in a time dense with noise and algorithmic hiss.

By its close, FKA twigs is an unstoppable force of nature.

A powerful synthesis of past and present, ‘Letter To You’ shows us the strength that can be found in sorrow. The result is Springsteen’s finest album since 2002’s ‘The Rising’.

While this is clearly not the record Smith intended to make, it's still an immensely gripping and cohesive piece of work. [23 Oct 2004, p.47]

By its close, 'The Blueprint' has eloquently mapped out life's foundations: laughter, tears, joy and pain, and has marked the Jigga as the complete rapper.

Even when things get musically darker on the shimmering alt-pop of ‘Posing In Bondage’, there remains a prioritisation of pop melody; the fat is trimmed from all 10 songs on the record, leaving perfectly formed three-and-a-half-minute pop songs that want – and deserve – to be blasting out of your radio.

Once again, SAULT demonstrate the power of words and just how impactful music can be. It’s impossible not to feel affected by the stories being told. But, despite ‘Nine’s sadness, SAULT channel optimism and hope for a brighter future into their songs.

It may be titled From Kinshasa, but this record could easily be from the future.

‘Manning Fireworks’ is an album that aches for its cast of freaks and losers, and its success in walking that line is a sign of MJ Lenderman’s richly developing voice.

Sonically, it was staggering.

Undoubtedly the one Sleater-Kinney album that everyone should have. [21 May 2005, p.66]

‘Euro-Country’ has the courage and the consistency to land high on the fast-approaching end-of-year lists, and to make CMAT the icon she’s been giving all this time.

Lyrically, then, it’s a record characterised by its pessimism, yet musically it’s among their most joyful.

Everything from psych-jazz, electro-funk, soulful house and the occasional rocker gets a look in here. In lesser hands it’s a right old mess, but not in Howard’s.

[A] brilliant album.

With ‘King’s Disease III’, the New York rapper has put the seal on a strong album trilogy that proves that, three decades in, he’s still a force to be reckoned with.

Rock records don’t come much better than this.

Despite having elite lyricists such as Pusha-T, Killer Mike, Yesin Bey and Black Thought among the guests, Gibbs never sounds second-best. Bandana should mark the moment the Indiana emcee starts to truly be considered as an elite rapper.

It’s a well-crafted debut from a worthy new artist, but it’s competent rather than compelling.

By trading nonsensical time signatures and atonal bursts for fluidity and stadium rock, they've subtracted from their former wretchedness.

Through her boundless ‘Orquídeas’ albums, Uchis blossoms into a fearless pop ambassador at the forefront of breaking down the divide between music in English and Spanish.

Everything about Joy As An Act Of Resistance is just so perfectly realised.

By embracing the pop orthodoxy, you might argue that Boucher has sacrificed some of what made her seem so alien when 4AD debut 'Visions' emerged from the ether back in 2012, but rest assured: she's still laughing and not being normal, only this time, it's all the way to the bank.

Dawn FM feels like the first steps on a journey for The Weeknd to find peace with himself; perhaps next time we hear from him, he’ll be fully embracing the light of day.

This is murderously good stuff. [25 Sep 2004, p.64]

Guaranteed to leave you speechless, one way or another. [12 Mar 2005, p.58]

Those in search of a tightly cohesive album knitted around a single concept have probably come to the wrong place entirely – but for a sprawling answer to the band’s two huge 2019 breakthrough records ‘Two Hands’ and ‘U.F.F.O’, then look no further.

A harmonious hardcore Dispute.

There is a fatal flaw with 'Arular' which means it never makes the step up from 'solid debut' to all-time classic. MIA clears her throat, grabs your attention: and then has nothing to say. [16 Apr 2005, p.49]

You’re Dead is a madly inventive record, one that takes hip-hop and jazz as starting points, beats them both to death and then brings them back to life in an almost unrecognisable form.

'Remedy' is probably as good a dance album as anyone from these Isles has produced this decade.

Seven have never been released before, including heartfelt opener ‘Separate Ways’. Over Levon Helm’s solid but minimal drum line comes a chorus up there with Young’s best, as melodic as it is thoughtful, as pensive as it is powerful. ... The freewheeling ‘Vacancy’ is the last ‘new’ song here, an instant classic (if you can call 46 years trapped in the vaults ‘instant’).

He leads the listener on an amazing journey, making use of cosmic, symbolic, mythological and religious images in perfect conjunction with his explorations of blunt everyday reality.