Crunching rhythms, subtle brass, and tunes as intoxicating as a blood transfusion from Pete Doherty combine as he tells the tale of a disastrous year full of rat infestations, romantic strife and weight loss.

Her songs sound even more spaced out and unreal than ever.

This is a cut above your average US alt.art-rock, most notably on ‘Stranger’, which sounds like The Strokes doing The Shins.

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

Inside you’ll find very little deviation from the wistful, narrative-led pop they’ve made a career from.

The result is a set of remarkable electronic rituals with an endearing, mystical quality.

There are few smiles cracked on an album that’s shot through with the loneliness of the night bus home. But this is a record in the true sense of the word: a document of a certain time and place, an emotional account of a cruel, Krule world.

It’s an album that tries not to shout ‘old school Franz are back’, even though it unmistakably signals that old school Franz are back.

Ultimately, Aerotropolis is not just a statement of Ikonika’s personal growth and reinvigoration, but a measured statement of British electronic music’s broader lift-off.

It’s just a shame he can’t bring them together as a coherent whole.

While a couple of songs--most notably ‘Satisfaction’, a three-note guitar riff spun out for eight-and-a-half minutes--suffer from an acute case of stadium bloat, it’s all done in such a jubilant fashion that it hardly matters.

Mawkish and messy.

High up the Mumfords scale, checking the boxes for straining vocals, loud and quiet dynamics, thumping bass drums and American gothic lyrics about rivers and literature.

The results are remarkably plangent and romantic.

Perhaps its issue is that it’s quite hard to feel anything throughout its running time beyond a sense of general malaise.

It’s a difficult album and requires repeated listening for some of the subtler parts to sink in.

It all amounts to a rich, evocative expression of a mother’s optimism and anxieties.

This is wild music, a celestial cabaret that absorbs and unsettles.

As changes of pace go, it should be far more jarring than it actually is, but instead it shows a much softer side to a band who should own this summer with their brilliantly heavy two-man mania.

They lose points, however, for a descent into guitar squall and full-on ‘Baker Street’ sax (‘Perpetual Surrender’), which mar an otherwise intriguing debut.

An album of washed out, happy-sad, semi-psychedelic sounds that glower as much as they gleam, it’s perfect for those 3am mornings when you’re full of alcohol and regret.

Occasionally subtlety spills over into insipidness, but overall this is a masterclass in restrained beauty.

Permanent Signal finds beauty in loneliness.

Only four tracks, but enough firepower to blow up the dancefloor.

Stories Don’t End is smoother than a drive down to Malibu with the Eagles chilling in the back seat.

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.

Too often their over-earnest delivery is unbearable.

This is folk music transmitted from the far corner of the universe.