Never have Patterson Hood’s five-piece sounded quite so cranky and furiously righteous as they do on this terrific, ear-splitting sprawl of shit-kicking country boogie.

For all its fast-paced absurdness, Love Is Magic carves out quiet moments, too. These tiny, rare diamonds stud a world that can so often feel completely evil. It’s a balancing act that Grant ultimately pulls off.

Rather than settling on a unified feel, second album Culture Of Volume also delights in genre-hopping, but it’s less abstract and more coherent than its predecessor.

Exploration of I, Gemini reveals its quirks are knitted together with extreme smoothness.

A disquieting atmosphere is conjured by both the constant shifts in tempo and Niblett’s emotionally naked lyrics, while ’s naturalistic production deepens the album’s near-menacing intimacy.

When it works it’s potent enough to rival his 2003 breakbeat opus ‘We Want Your Soul’. When it doesn’t, such as on opener ‘Do You!’ and the turgid ‘Best Fish Tacos In Ensenada’ (every bit as lame as its title suggests), it sounds like the kind of crap that gets played early on at Reflex on student night.

This debut carries you on pillowy reverb and ribboned guitar to places only a handful of bands since Simple Minds have visited.

Remember Remember are more about awe than aggression, and resolutely their own thing: this is music to lose yourself in, rather than to.

If it’s less direct than the trio’s 2018 debut, ‘Stranger Today’, it makes up for it with a quietly adventurous textural approach. This album wears its nuances confidently while executing incremental shifts in tone and pacing with precision and care.

‘My First Album’ is an impassioned and idiosyncratic patchwork, one which paints a portrait of anxious and wistful personhood that is, on the contrary, definitive and assured.

An album packed with shimmering highlights.

Merging aquatic Americana that casts its net over the gang mentality of Arcade Fire, The Polyphonic Spree and Broken Social Scene – and that most über-overexposed of F-words, folk – it’s clear why Johnny Marr is touting the Californian throng as his new favourite band.

Liz Wendelbo and Sean McBride have the Human League/Thomas Dolby textures down to a tee but, crucially, they haven't skimped on the songwriting

There's depth, sincerity and beauty in abundance here.

It's sonically peculiar, coolly melodic, relentlessly detailed and, frequently, exhilarating.

Considering Take Care is an affecting masterpiece easily on par with his debut, there could be no greater accolade for the genius of this man.

Sounds like his band are having too much fun.

A record whose luminous soundscapes are at once alien yet familiar, adding hazy heartbeat rhythms to their seductive take on ambient masters past and present such as Brian Eno, Harmonia and Tim Hecker.

Here, on their seventh album and two decades down the line, Enter Shikari sound perhaps the most joyful they’ve ever been, and even when they become characteristically philosophical, it still comes from a place of positivity.

This fifth album of Afro-Latin rhythms, tropical chanting and brass from the former TV On The Radio (on 'Return To Cookie Mountain' and 'Dear Science') and Foals ('Antidotes') collaborators will do nicely.

Overall though, A Star is Born is one of the best Hollywood soundtracks of recent years. Far from being Oscar bait, these are songs that could feasibly shine on their own--and ones that feel entirely believable.

This record shows that Vile isn’t about to abandon the formula that’s served him so well since he left The War On Drugs over a decade ago. It packs that wholesome, easy charm he’s always held, almost as if the songs fell out of his brain while he was strumming away on his back porch.

In this slim volume of three-chord thrashing there's proof that while punk may reside in middle age, in some quarters its vital signs have never shown more strongly.

When The Bees hit the target, as on domestic-violence lament 'Angryman; and the glacial funk of 'Sweet Like A Champion' the ghosts of everyone from JJ Cale to Hall & Oates to the Stone Roses enter the room.

Packs melodic punches with its killer Wilson-esque tunes. [18 Dec 2004, p.51]

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

This surprise is an entirely pleasant one. [27 May 2006, p.33]

No-wave krunch meets mutant disco shuffle meets snippets of global radness and, yeah, it's better than Animal Collective's new one.