Complex, original and even sincere, it’s a brilliant new departure.

Shrines is a euphoric treat in its own right, made all the more thrilling by its heady potential.

'Take Them On, On Your Own' is a masterpiece. You should get hold of it as soon as possible.

This is cold-blooded revenge pop that strikes like a shard of shattered plate to the heart.

A joyous surge of drums, guitars, wild brass and potent Spanish-English vocals from powerhouse frontwoman Victoria Ruiz.

The doomed relationship cycle in eternal motion or the sound of a heart that won’t stay mended, Honeyblood is visceral pop music giving its prettiest snarl.

The Go! Team's eclectic soundclash makes us feel deliriously dizzy. [11 Sep 2004, p.53]

Lyrically lucid and sonically exciting. [11 Jun 2005, p.67]

The spontaneous sounding arrangements--topped by Watson's uniquely mercurial voice--are at turns ornate, grand and subtle, but never less than totally bewitching.

The good--no, the astonishing--news is that this constantly engrossing record repays a decade and a half's faith and patience. D'Angelo has scuttled down the digital chimney with an early Christmas gift with long-lasting rewards: not just one of the best records of 2014, but one that will stay with you throughout next year, too.

Glasser's glowing debut offers more melodic and emotional consummation than almost any of her peers can muster, poised in a genuinely transcendent golden balance between the stern, the spacious and the gaudily sparkling. A very precious Ring indeed.

Written around the time Tillman got hitched to this girlfriend, it's a hugely ambitious, caustically funny album about the redemptive possibilities of love, and being heartily sick of your own bullshit.

The Great Pretenders is an emotional, emboldened triumph.

It's like the best bits of every extreme metal subgenre: a deathly crossover of sludgy, blackened thrash that will put hairs on your chest.

King Night is sick. Not just in the sense that it's outstandingly good but in the fact that it seems extremely unwell.

This isn’t so much a progression as a rebirth.

It’s lyrically dark and has the musical aggression to back it up.

Burke delivers as pure and proper a record as you'll hear all year. If you've ever laughed or cried, you need to hear this.

Recovering emos Brand New have taken doing things their own way to the point of invisibility, but their journey into the widescreen ether continues with yet another breathtakingly accomplished record.

Closer ‘Sea Of Trees’ is as impressive, its restrained riff suddenly smothered by an almighty dirge. It’s a fitting climax to a record that unsettles from start to finish.

It’s that sense of twisting bleakness into something that sounds thrilling is what makes the album so effective. Lip Critic take the horror of Kaser’s very personal trauma into something strangely communal and alive.

It's the best thing he's done since his game-changing debut, and heartening evidence to suggest the self-professed Louis Vuitton don is in a good place right now.

[Has] the unmistakable feel of an instant classic. [28 Jan 2006, p.34]

Nielson strides away from the woozy Beefheart-indebted psychedelia of ‘II’ and its self-titled 2011 predecessor, and vividly expands every single aspect of the UMO sound.

The most doubter-defying second album since 'Modern Life Is Rubbish'.

They have returned hungry and wired to shake us out of our digital comas.

It’s a sleeping giant of a dancefloor creeper that will be everyone’s favourite new electro album in approximately six months’ time.

A record with the bleak-yet-redemptive spirit of REM's 'Automatic For The People' and the musical magnificence of a 'Deserter's Songs'. But also a record that - as much as 'London Calling' or 'What's Going On' - holds a deep, dark, truthful Black Mirror up to our turbulent times.

His outfit have returned with an album that skirts close to perfection in its 35 minutes of glorious madness and transcendent, George Harrison-like guitar solos.

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

Smother is deeply sad and lonely, but still a barbed invitation to intimacy; like Coleridge's albatross, an extraordinarily elegant, stunning, (near)-perfect portrait of how terribly bad decisions can turn out.

Gratuitous filth, basically. It’s funny, but also a pity, because Yeezus is so tight, so bold, that with a few tweaks Kanye could’ve made his rock for the ages. As it is, he’ll have to settle for one of the best records of the year.

A record that anyone who’s ever demanded anything interesting from rock music should hear.

One of the most exciting hip-hop releases not only of this year, but in recent memory. [27 Nov 2004, p.61]

A clearly adult, unfashionably sensitive document, all grace and understatement, experimental through what it leaves out, and the effects it plants in the background.

It’s heavenly, in its own troubled way.

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

Less has always been more with Smith, and the success of In Colour lies in his gift for melding together very few elements to create songs that are original, surprising and highly effective.

This Is My Hand should see her join him, her other collaborators and St Vincent in the US experimental pop pantheon.

This is an album that leaves you in absolutely no doubt that, at the very least, Pascal Arbez-Nicolas is the best thing to come out of France since Daft Punk. [30 Apr 2005, p.63]

It’s wrought with haunting, high-stakes emotions, but the strength of Scott’s voice means it never feels melodramatic or plainly vulnerable.

Thank you very much, Mr Rubin--The Man In Black is still with us. [1 Jul 2006, p.36]

It's an album of outstanding natural beauty, an organic, wholesome work.

Uniformly excellent.... Few, if any, British bands are making music quite like this right now.

A joyous, celestial celebration of sound.

A diverse but wholly coherent set of songs, this spaced-out odyssey is well worth the trip.

ATDI's latest album has its amps cranked to the hilt from start to finish. Far from being another in a long line of sanitised American punk rock albums, 'Relationship Of Command' sounds REAL.

Their best yet.

Nobody is making music quite like Harding, she is a special, singular artist. Just be sure to take the same approach to interpreting her lyrics as you would to any great work of surrealism; the joy is in the wondering, not the knowing.

It'd be hard not to draw parallels between Calvi and [...] PJ Harvey. Yet while both women ooze an elemental kind of passion, Calvi is unashamedly slicker, especially when compared to Harvey's earlier, grungier work.

What 'Drukqs' never is, of course, is boring. It's also beautifully paced. No track sounds like the one before, even though Aphex rarely strays far from the musical palate that's served him so well in the past.

The TNGHT EP packs five explosive instrumental hip-hop tracks, every one dripping with each producer's trademark sonic flourishes.

One of the most assured debut albums of the last five years.

They’ve made an absolutely magical record--the jagged edges of their past have been smoothed by the sea, making Teen Dream a soft shore gem in the crown of the great chronicles of youth.

My Maudlin Career is the kind of record that exists to reward those both mad, and sad, in love.

Let's Get Ready', Mystikal's fourth LP and his first Billboard chart-topper, is one wholesale fighting muthaf**ker, a full theatre of opportunities to offer the world outside. Women? Mystikal will take you down for one. Or, preferably, two. Reputation? Come see about him. Neighbourhood? You don't wanna go there... Mystikal is the fightingest bastard and his grin's never wider than when he's putting the hurt on.

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

They’re a shaggy-haired, surf’s up pop band and painfully vulnerable all at the same time.

The album's more subdued moments--like the disarmingly sweet navel-gaze of 'Simple As This', or the folksy arm-around-the-shoulder reassurance of 'Note To Self'--are its most remarkable ones, where Bugg's voice, usually accompanied by little more than an acoustic guitar, takes on a preternatural wisdom.

The album is beautifully structured, leading from spare and shimmery beginnings into harder, weirder and more varied territories, all those snippets and elements and personalities crafted into a shifting, subtle whole that quietly captures your attention from start to end.

That it’s Portishead’s best album yet is little short of miraculous.

There's going to be a hearty scrap between this lot, Muse and the Monkeys when album of the year time comes round.

Low have always sought to make music that can both swell the heart like a gospel tune and capture the amplified absence of a funeral parlour. It's difficult to imagine a more perfect expression of their vision than this.

Much like the title of his debut, Indiana’s curious ringmaster Stith is a contradiction in terms. Don’t be put off--he’s a contradiction worth losing yourself to.

It still defiantly goes against the grain, but also explodes with immediate, attention-grabbing riffs.

For those of us who still believe in music's power to redeem, 'Funeral' feels like detox, the most cathartic album of the year. [5 Mar 2005, p.49]

It marks the dawning of an era of British music that isn’t just for the casual petrol shop consumer, but stuff so important that you can give yourself to it completely. This is the album that’s going kick open the door for all the great British bands that’ll sweep through in their wake.

Blazing, brilliant second album.

Josh Homme and his all-star pals prove the virtue of taking your sweet time on a record that’s as self-assured as it is damn sexy.

Daft Punk have pulled off a brilliant wheeze by re-inventing the mid-'80s as the coolest pop era ever. And not even the officially approved retro-kitsch cool of Madonna's lukewarm excursions into post-Daft terrain but all the bubble-permed, sports-jacket-and-jeans excesses they can muster.... Mostly, though, 'Discovery' is simply fantastic pop...

'Capture/Release' is fresh, unique, original even; its oh-so-contemporary reference points are revisited with such punk-rock vivacity and hell-for-charity-shop-leather vigour that they might be the first band you’d actually believe when they roll out the old "no, honestly, we were doing this long before we’d even heard of Bloc Party".

Time will tell how Primary Colours stands up to the likes of "Loveless" or "Psychocandy," but right now, this feels like the British art-rock album we’ve all been waiting for.

This album is an onslaught of brutal drumming and bowel-loosening riffs, occasionally leavened by surprisingly delicate vocal interplay.

One of the reasons Major Arcana works so well is because it’s addictive and fun, which could explain how these characters got into such a mess in the first place.

There's no possible way of having this much fun without getting the chorus of Handel's 'Messiah' drunk on peach schnapps. [4 Feb 2006, p.29]

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.

Holy Fire brings new words to mind. Sharp. Emotive. Massive.

DIIV need you, and you sure as hell need DIIV.

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

A stunning LP that, in a just world, would do for Roky what the "American Recordings" series did for Johnny Cash.

An astonishing debut of cosmic country noir. [28 Aug 2004, p.57]

Confident, bold, ambitious, bunged with singles and impossible to contain, ‘X&Y’ doesn’t reinvent the wheel but it does reinforce Coldplay as the band of their time.

In an age where even Britpop corpse-botherers Brother trumpet their desire to collaborate with Odd Future, the Monkeys have made a record heavily indebted to late-'80s indie and a small group of white, male '70s singer-songwriters: Lou Reed, David Bowie, and Leonard Cohen.

'Icky Thump' is brilliant, there's no way around that.

The nerve of it all is breathtaking. Turbo-beats poke up a gospel-jazz revivalist meeting, a mariachi band wanders into the hazy disco sashay of 'Broken Dreams', a Gary Numan sample gets bludgeoned to credibility in the Van Helden-esque pogo of 'Where's Your Head At?'.

Syro is amazing: bug-eyed, banging rave that sounds quintessentially Aphex while not quite sounding like anything he’s done before.

It has the reckless spirit of a record that hasn't been over-analysed, but with an intense flurry of ideas from someone in the absolute prime of their creativity.

Wild Beasts have undergone a sea change, and this beautiful album is a treasure that deserves plundering.

The ultimate rare treasure. [24 Sep 2005, p.47]

Muse have made a ridiculous, overblown, ambitious and utterly brilliant album, with more thrills than their previous three put together.

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.

An outstanding (dare I say ‘perfect’) debut.

The Seldom Seen Kid is a stunning record, a career-best from a band whose consistency has seldom been matched by any British indie band this decade.

Like Justin Vernon before him, with Lost In The Dream Adam Granduciel seems to be heading for things far bigger than anyone could ever have expected. This is one War On Drugs that might just succeed.

The lyrics, meanwhile, continue to move FOTL up two or three rungs of excellence.

This is an album to fall in love to, to break up to, to drown sorrows to, or to bounce around to. One-hit wonders? Well, the wonders part is right.

So contagious is their enthusiasm, you could start thinking that black-clad nihilism has kept music to itself for way too long.

An understated classic: a triumph of delicacy over decibels. [19 Jun 2004, p.56]