Melding Motown melodies and pop chords for heartbreak and house party listeners alike, Hive Mind is a triumph.

The fourth album from Caribou is the sound of the summer we're only just getting round to enjoying.

An album of gloomy, almost gothic techno splendour. Beneath its typically sleek, urbane deep house grooves, it beats nervously with foreboding, fear and loathing for humanity as a whole.

Weirdness far from gallops across the dozen songs that make up the pick'n'mix bag of The Whole Love though, as the straight up alt.pop of 'I Might' testifies, coming across something like a breezy Weezer packing PhDs and lime-topped Coronas.

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.

The perfect entwining of brain and brawn. [9 Sep 2006, p.37]

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

It’s a satisfying ride. This smooth and consistent journey through nostalgia and the energy of new ideas means that ‘Profound Mysteries’ parts one and two stand up as latter-day career triumphs for Röyksopp.

By going back to the music that producer Don Was calls the “fountainhead of everything they do”, however, they sound younger than they have in decades. Blue & Lonesome is proof that old dogs don’t always have need of new tricks.

It [‘In Twos’], much like the rest of ‘Phonetics On And On’, works because of its lack of pretensions and its back-to-basics spirit. Second time around, Horsegirl are still recasting past greats in their own vision but finding more of themselves as they go.

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.

When it works its magic, as on the opening suite of tracks, you will happily sit mesmerised for seven or eight minutes of glimmering sonic twilight and translucently tingling ambi-organic pearly-dewdrops droppery. But when the spell is broken, as on two or three later tunes, when more traditional instrumentation turns up late and dishevelled for a half-hearted cosmic-rock supernova, the effect is rather like gatecrashing some purgatorial soundcheck by a Pink Floyd covers band in, say, 1968. Or possibly Spiritualized.

Every tangled note of Option Paralysis drips with honesty and endeavour, and it shines like a beacon of integrity in a world that's been focus-grouped into the dirt.

There really ain't anyone bringing the world party quite like LV.

Nine Types...will make those who over-contextualise TVOTR finally quit their chin-stroking and live a little.

I’m A Dreamer is another stellar effort.

Even if you've been fortunate enough to live with these tracks over the last year or so, they still sound more vital, more likely to make you form your own band than anything else out there.

She’s combined the joy of Chairlift, the atmospheric mastery of Ramona Lisa and the experimentalism of CEP. The result is a Caroline Polachek record in its most distilled and fully realised form.

The result is a thoroughly modern pop album that will best appeal to ageing clubbers.

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

Godspeed’s new album articulates dark times, but it also presents the countermovement with breathtaking power.

Metz deliver the same righteous anger that informed much of their favourite music in the early '90s.

Like the works of other great swooners from Cole Porter to The Divine Comedy, 'Poses' is held together by its maker's maniacal attention to detail and conceptual strength.

The album has a coherency that was absent first time around, and there is also a rattling freshness to the sound that Timbaland has rustled up.

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

This real-life fairytale is made up of myriad difficult home truths but Marling's hejira, her flight to freedom, makes for absolutely compelling listening. Oh, and there's a happy, redemptive ending to boot.

A more diverse and calculated album than a usual Hey Colossus offering, and all the better for it.

Overall, though, despite a couple of subpar verses, ‘Insomnia’ is one for the books. The UK rap world has never seen three of the scene’s most in-demand rappers surprisingly team up for an album. Here the best of north and south London have come together and paved the way for others to follow suit.