The Glasgow trio bring an almighty ruckus on second album Youth Culture Forever, building on the ear-splitting success of 2012 debut ‘Cokefloat!’ while discovering enough new shades of grey to give EL James a run for her money.

Expansive, immersive indiepop; how these Pains have grown.

Sound Mirror’s mix of jazz rhythms and psychedelic funk cuts a distinctive, if unfashionable, path.

Far lighter than their grungey 2013 debut, 'Antipodes', it's pitched between the blissed-out guitar of Splashh and the idiosyncratic pop approach of fellow Kiwi, Unknown Mortal Orchestra.

Movements is full of urgency; songs struggling to keep up with everything thrown at them.

Government Plates is a challenging listen, but as one of the most transgressive records of the year.

Round the back nine (‘Golden Fire’, ‘Kilmore’s End’, ‘Overnight’), the attention to detail slips, and they end up with a load of meat patties of twee that just come across as Owl City in fashionable shoes, a whiny inner-child deserving of a smacked botty-bot.

They feel like they could have been made at any time since 1951, yet they sound completely, compellingly new.

Breakfast, for all its modest attractions, never quite transcends its talented-journeyman origins.

'Mythnomer’'s nightmarish pitch-shifted vocal and claustrophobic beats are a misjudged move, but on the whole Breathing Statues is a world that's ripe for sinking into.

As a whole, Meteorites fails to set the sky on fire.

By the time closing waltz 'Bring Me Down' ends, intimacy levels are so high that you feel like a contented voyeur.

Consciously retro, sure, but more convincingly so than Disclosure and similar young bucks.

Van Etten tackles heartache with refreshing sharpness, distilling complex sentiments into something beautifully simple.

Compulsive and conflicted.

Jacko xscaped in a faulty pod, but now at least we’ve a worthy tribute.

Like ‘The Girl And The Robot’ from Röyksopp’s 2009 ‘Junior’ album, and it begins with a stunner--‘Monument’, a winding and mystical 10-minute epic containing startlingly self-confident lyrics.

Too often, though, the rage is vague.

Its portraits of downtown legends like Lou Reed and Alan Vega are far more affectionate than much of his scabrous output, with music that flits between dreamy Velvets simplicity and the synthetic throb of Suicide.

Besides ‘It Is Only You’ and ‘Here Comes The Storm’, the mountain-shouting bravado of old tracks like ‘Borders’ and ‘Put You In Your Place’ has been dampened, but TSU is an intriguing new sunrise.

For her less conventional-sounding follow-up, she and producer Prince Fatty have beefed up the basslines, giving her tropical pop songs a dubby atmosphere.

Overall, Pure X’s immersive charm remains intact. Only ‘Rain’ betrays the heady sonics of old.

The formula wears pretty thin towards the end--bee-stung emoting in the verses, splashy catharsis in the chorus--but Glorious is no failure.

Too often, Thumpers fall flat.

In defiance of a criminal lack of universal adulation, they just get better, harder, faster, stronger, and you boggle at just how formidable they might be in their dotage.

Everybody Down brings to life a plotline that’ll be more fully explored in Tempest’s debut novel, published by Bloomsbury later this year. It’s hard to imagine it being more gripping than this, though.

It all harks back to the word-in-your-ear confessionals of ‘Fevers And Mirrors’. Were it not for the whimsical, country-tropical jangle of ‘Hundreds Of Ways’, Upside Down Mountain would very nearly be its equal.

Tiersen never loses touch with his innate sense of melody, but the lack of edge means that Infinity's charms are, in fact, finite.