They produce pretty mutations; their first collaborative record throws up a mix of stuttering electro-rap and ethereal pop.

Hauschka’s bracing concept album.

Equal parts lo-fi sketch-like song structure and buffed-to-a-shine ’80s soft rock, these 12 songs are evidently personal and, at times, thematically obscure.

While Happy Families’ snappy sludge hints at a slight reprieve, the jingle-jangle whimsy of Larry Lizard is a tired reminder that there’s only one crime worse than being outright bad--and that’s being as mind-numbingly banal as this.

Ultimately, Glow will live or die on the strength of its singles. On this evidence, Tensnake seems to be missing that key part of his blueprint.

This contrarian impulse ultimately makes things more interesting, but Mount's decision to record at Toe Rag--the all-analogue Hackney studio made famous by The White Stripes and Billy Childish--imbues the songs with an archaic, lived-in feel that takes some getting used to, and you'd be forgiven for being underwhelmed by your first listen. Bear with it, however, and that feeling will turn to pleasant surprise.

It’s not an easy listen and moments, notably the faux-soul of ‘Shame’, can grate, but this is a fascinating and rich record.

This isn’t a bad or a lazy album, and Elbow are too good a band to ever be dismissed, yet one can’t help but feel they could push their envelope a bit further.

All we can say for sure is that here is a talent in bloom, the sound of ideas finding shape, winding out in all directions.

Each song is so powerful and crafted you can’t help but buy into whatever it is Ava Luna are trying to sell you.

In the main Dean Wareham is too dreary, too frequently.

Despite the presence of ex-Razorlight man Andy Burrows on drums and extra songwriting oomph, their latest offering feels like another exercise in anonymity.

A release packed with bangers and choppy breaks.

This is glossy Americana, mixing The Avett Brothers with Edward Sharpe And The Magnetic Zeros, its piano- and violin-led crescendos emulating old-timey grandeur.

It’s as nasty a little thing as it sounds, yet, for all the ugliness that spills out of Eagulls, they’re never anything less than vital; these are anthems for a doomed youth determined to kick against the pricks rather than mope forlornly and fruitlessly.

here’s no doubting that the beats on Mastermind, as you would expect from a production roster including Kanye West, Jake One, JUSTICE League and The Weeknd, are exceptional, lush and bombastic and full of zaftig soul samples. So, really, it’s all down to Rick and whether he shows up. And he does.

Brave and futuristic, by venturing into space, Mescudi finally steps out of Kanye’s shadow--with not just one small step, but one giant leap.

This is an album in possession of a rare innocence and charm.

Blood Red Shoes is probably the duo’s most satisfying effort to date--frustratingly short of the “quiet triumph” they sing about on closing track ‘Tightwire’, but an admirable racket nonetheless.

Sadly, the Norwegians promptly undo much of their good work by interspersing the bombastic rocking with acoustic cobblers like ‘Lovescared’ and the sort of excessive, pompous emoting that even Pearl Jam tend to avoid these days.

The only real lump-in-the-throat moment is ‘No One’s Gonna Love You’--although admittedly, said lump is gobstopper-sized for the duration.

There are a couple of duff tracks here, in the shape of ‘Fear Of The Knife’ and the horrible cod-reggae of ‘Bandbreaker’. More broadly, Skaters’ whole shtick can feel about as current as that Hot Hot Heat T-shirt lurking in your bottom drawer.

It couples a moody sort of glamour with a concrete feeling of loneliness, and it makes for some of the most affecting comedown folk you’re likely to hear all year.

For all Hemerlein’s prodigious talents, you can only have your heartstrings tugged for so long before it all gets a bit wearing.

This new music sounds fresh, vibrant and effortless.

Clark’s readiness to be freakish and alone has translated into her songwriting, which is bolder than ever, and out to connect.

A gently addictive and well-balanced offering.

Arthur Beatrice running their race slow and steady has resulted in an album full of sophisticated pop.

Luckily, no amount of squelchy beats, dubstep bass, trip-hop crackles and gabba breakdowns can suppress their effervescent sense of melody.

Sadly, Wave 1 is a more disjointed, disorienting listen.

The result is an LP that feels more in sync with contemporary music than ever before. There are notes here of Oneohtrix Point Never, Clams Casino, and Tim Hecker. Crucially, though, Present Tense roams a landscape which couldn’t have been charted by anyone else.

This time round, the humour is more subtle but the observations on life, and increasingly death, are no less keen.

The debut album from half-Scottish, half-Swedish songwriter Nina Nesbitt is pop so sugary it’ll rot your teeth.

Anglocentrically and have eternally teenage garage production values. In other words, a GBV record that sounds like everything GBV fans love about GBV.

Burn is her first album recorded with a full band, though the resultant fuzzily glam swagger doesn’t forsake her wise style, instead coming off like Bill Callahan covering T Rex.

Their latest album You is very much an acquired taste, a wonky clatter that eight fellas with wayward Warren Ellis beards and DIY instrument workshops in their sheds will surely jizz themselves silly over.

Yes, they write pretty and moving songs, but it’s reasonable to expect more from a band with a history of writing such sophisticated pop.

It’s at its best when it mixes Badu-style soul vocals and booming apocalypse bass ('The Road', 'At Night'), but there’s evidence of a lighter side in the sort of jazzy tribal stompers that Gilles Peterson would approve of (‘Ra_Light’, ‘Near The End’).

It’s a brave record, but also a frustrating one. While you’re persuaded by the clarity of Rostron’s vision, it’s hard not to also suspect a shortage of ideas.

There's so much beauty on Let's Go Extinct that it could hardly be anything other than a delight.

Its mixtape nature means it isn’t yet the concise album Keel Her might one day produce, but the breezy likes of ‘Go’, ‘Riot Girl’ and ‘Don’t Look At Me’ are tuneful pop pastiches in the vein of Dum Dum Girls and Ariel Pink.

July is a career high.

It’s their finest collection of songs to date.

here are patches of sonic soup--‘Kenworth’ suffers from a particularly acute case of moaning flange--but overall, Cheatahs is a triumph of content over style: a gleaming pop wrecking ball taken to the sonic cathedral.

Bagshaw’s tendency to spout arcane guff about the Odyssey, desert rituals, buried crystals and dancing on the stones is pure hippy mimicry. Sonically, though, this is a fresh and energised ’60s homage.

Real Hair works like a oujia board: dangerous, addictive fun with the potential for unwelcome answers.

It's functional, but dispensable.

His taste for sonic jumble can be overwhelming.

Oklahoma’s Samantha Crain does weird so very well. The only trouble is, she just doesn’t do it nearly enough.

As a self-conscious play for stadium-rock ascension, it may prove successful. As a successor to one of the most honest and affecting debuts of recent years, however, it feels a little empty.

Angel Guts: Red Classroom is his third album in under a year, and superficially it resembles many of Xiu Xiu’s others by draping wracked and fragile vocals over obtuse electronics and analogue atonality.

Somehow they’ve retained their pop nous, making for an album that’s unique, but maddeningly all over the place.

This fifth album resolutely refuses to tread water, instead coming on like a literary pop version of The Maccabees’ recent explorations in jittery psychedelia.

After years of chopping and changing, Bombay Bicycle Club have finally found an iteration worth sticking with.

Although his mission proves futile, he approaches it with a curiosity of spirit that makes ‘Along The Way’ a captivating and nourishing listen, less noodly than his early solo releases and more in the vein of the composerly streak exhibited on 2011’s ‘Get Lost’.

It's a timely refresh of rosy-cheeked indie-pop mores.

What diminishes War Room Stories is the songs themselves, which can feel a little ordinary. Rappak’s vocal is a bit sub-Yannis Philippakis, a monotone half-mumble that doesn’t make the most of his intriguing lyrics.

Former DFA man Tim Goldsworthy has helped them find more sonic sparkle in the production of their second album Dunes, but they nonetheless remain a confused proposition.

36 minutes and three tracks of rich, enveloping, meditative heaviness.

Shamelessly self-indulgent, you imagine their aim is to jam themselves into a sonic trance as much as the listener.

An adventurous and fun record.

Quilt really shine when Anna Fox Rochinski, Shane Butler and John Andrews harmonise impeccably over the spooky melodies of 'Saturday Bride' and 'Secondary Swan'.

Here Brian Fallon’s voice is as beaten and battered as the perfect leather jacket, and all the more beguiling for it.

Whether listening to them or foolhardily attempting to describe them, there’s little about Marijuana Deathsquads that’s easy, but that doesn’t make their third LP any less rewarding.

For the most part, though, After The Disco unfolds at a fertile equidistance from each man’s comfort zone (inasmuch as a polymath like Burton can be said to have one) and the results are a marked improvement.

This record is fun with a capital ‘F’, but there are moments of gravitas too. Not easy to do, that.

It’s easy to hear his plaintive songs, full of heartbreak, mountains and fjords, and picture Ásgeir recording in Bon Iver-style isolation.

‘Ways To Phrase A Rejection’ proves the four-piece do a good enough job of recreating the kitchen-sink narratives of the era, but where they really excel is when they slip back into the 21st century.

O’Neill’s sixth sounds both settled and intensely familiar, with the sense little time has passed since 2009’s ‘A Ways Away’.

Only the appearance of Barbadian teen rap prodigy Haleek Maul, annotating the grimy 'ISIS' with a murky charisma saves Supreme Cuts from slipping completely between the cracks.

Peggy Sue’s fourth LP impresses throughout, a record of soulful depths and heady, emotional highs.

Overall Trouble bristles with the freedom of early Breeders or Throwing Muses.

By drinking deep from the coolest records and the hippest poets, Penny succeeds in beginning a new chapter for her band.

Mostly Ghettoville is an exciting new landscape to get lost in and explore, even if it does spell the end for Actress.

While their true believers might not mind the record’s overall lack of variety, for anyone new to the band there’s little on None The Wiser to separate them from the indie-rock chaff.

Lee’s lyrics are sometimes sentimental to the point of potentially seeming trite, but they’re logical for a situation where love and pain have become so overwhelming that simple statements seem the most trustworthy.

A collection of astounding anthems for a new tomorrow, made by the disaffected youth of today.

This is a deeply personal record, unequivocally sensual.

It’s Grace’s own personal journey with gender dysphoria in ‘True Trans Soul Rebel’, ‘Paralytic States’ and ‘Drinking With The Jocks’ that has the most impact, though, the latter being the sort of raging polemic that proves the hardcore spirit of Black Flag is still alive and kicking.

Rave Tapes doesn’t stray far from the Mogwai comfort zone, but nor is it the sound of a band clapped out. Nineteen years in, there are still crescendos left to climb.

It’s a moving record. The only catch is, when they turn down the intensity on ‘What We Loved Was Not Enough’ they sound like Arcade Fire at their most mawkish.

Brothers And Sisters Of The Eternal Son bills itself as a concept album, a road movie with no end, but the songs are tight, the meaning incidental and any big ideas play second fiddle to bewitching tunes and delicate harmonies.

Mournful, moving and minor key, Age suggests The Hidden Cameras’ defiant sexual politics are still vital.

Waking Lines is a success.

A dusky delight.

Band moniker-related developments of recent years (see also: Ducktails, Peak Twins) mean this now implies gormless nostalgia, smarmy irony and, in a nutshell, chillwave. Happily, Lowtalker--five songs, 14 minutes--is a bit smarter, and better, than that.

Only a smidgeon less euphoric than ‘EP-1’, EP-2 is another brief broadside that further justifies Pixies’ drip-drip release plan, keeping their ten-year-tour on the road and the intrigue of their new material relentlessly fresh.

Her 2011 debut 'Hearts' had the drift and shimmer of shoegaze, but Chiaroscuro is sharper, even flirting with techno on the densely layered 'Faith' and handclapping electro on 'Denial' as Lindén tries out all the electronic styles of the 1980s.

It’s well executed, quite odd, highly original and full of promise--exactly what you want from a debut album.

Rarely has reliability been this funky.

Still The Boss.

Caoimhe Derwin and Jessie Ward’s guitars have perfected that Jesus And Mary Chain kettle-whistle sound, lending a haunted air to otherwise energetic stomps like ‘Heartbeats’ and ‘Talking.

Here he tightens the screws a bit to make 12 purposeful, concise tracks.

Climax polishes Beastmilk’s iron-curtained grandiosity slightly (‘Ghosts Out Of Focus’ is eerily like Suede), while maintaining the Cold War-era paranoia in their lyrics.

The nine tracks here turn to the old-school and the classic, making the carols you sung at school into something better suited to a night doing shots of eggnog in Fat Mike’s shed.

Burial’s success has brought with it imitators, but with this EP he’s outwitted them all by introducing a gloriously widened palate to his music that is both instantly familiar and shockingly unlikely.

If Skinner is coasting on production duties, then Harvey is overcompensating on the vocals.

It’s all nicely polished, but there’s nothing underneath.