Soul Music feels a bit too modern to slot in perfectly with the music it's pining for, but that's part of what makes it a success.

Much like its musical parent, Without You effortlessly inhales and exhales strands of musical influence past, present and future.

Whatever the differences on Narkopop, the album is remarkably true to the project's past: this is music that takes inspiration from childhood memories, bygone eras and the natural world. The results can feel like another dimension, but the album is also intensely personal.

No Lube is an impressively literate expansion of Peaches' sonic universe and stands in stark contrast to the one-note tonality of their previous work.

They might be skeletal and drained of colour, but their tracks have an unpredictable, wandering spirit that makes them far more than listless jamming.

You're drawn in by a minimalist master at work.

Adorned with production that's as sympathetic to UK underground dance as it is to modern R&B and classic soul, Devotion is a classy affair that delights in its own refinement yet stays pinned to the earth, a talented singer and songwriter realizing her potential at just the right moment.

If Lopatin's recent albums wowed with their density, Tranquilizer highlights the preciousness of its constituent parts by making it sound like they might flit away at any second.

This is all delectable, sure, but what's memorable is how Davidson—who has the dexterity to crack a joke uniting Friedrich Engles and LNR on 2018's "Work It"—maintains her dark sense of humour.

Both introspective and marking the importance of community and friendship, I AM JORDAN is energising music that can only instill joy and catharsis.

With its unabashed focus on large, universal emotions softened by the weight of adult experience, softscars is a beautiful blast from the past, made brighter with its emotionally timeless themes and crunchy rock aesthetics.

For those of us undeterred by Halo's vocal approach, Quarantine is an often breathtaking piece of emotive reverie that stands sonically as one of the year's more consistently inviting ambient LPs.

This is imaginative and complex dance music, with a level of detail that in the hands of a different artist could become overwhelming. Luckily, as brainy as it gets at points, Second Language is always exhilarating.

A nicely well-rounded debut album from an artist who's only been releasing music for a couple of years.

Trying to follow these songs as they unfold is a bewildering experience. But if you take Hassell's advice, and "scan up and down the sonic spectrum," taking in the moments of beauty as they occur, the album's title makes a lot of sense.

While Shygirl clearly has a reverence for hip-hop's past, she never turns that admiration into staid nostalgia. Over early grime-type beats, we hear what might be otherwise well-worn clichés—sirens, flutes, drip drops and sped-up vocals—but under Shygirl's command, she manages to give them an international twist.

These tracks are rescued by gorgeous chords and melodies, which give otherwise grey arrangements rich shades of melancholy and optimism. Avery had a knack for a hook back in the days of Drone Logic, too. His attitude to the dance floor might have changed, but the important stuff hasn't.

It shows him settling into a state of deep contentment, evoking the same warm and fuzzy feeling you get from throwing on a record that you know inside and out.

That feeling of organic growth and decay is, definitively, what makes Blondes unique--everything is in its right place, but instead of processed-to-death perfection, it just feels natural.

It's a testament to his stature as a leading purveyor of experimental electronics that the results of those pursuits, as seen once again on Kilo, are reliably unpredictable.

Body Pill is thoroughly understated throughout. It's an odd little album that only shows us part of the Anthony Naples puzzle, which is probably appropriate for an artist whose work seems to come in small and unusual bursts of inspiration.

The result is some of the most intimate and grandiose music he's ever produced.

The songs reunited on The Singles should be celebrated by anyone fascinated by the UK's long tradition of tuneful eccentrics.

Listen on a good system and you'll be entrapped and immersed.

Asking for more of a good thing isn't something to baulk at. On Dying…, Aussel and Miniawy have created a brave, if not pertinent, record of experimental brain-benders, building on their previous work to make something altogether stranger—much like our fractured world.

Aas Good Time shows, his skills have caught up with his ambition.

For an artist who has traditionally experimented with recording methods, Quixotism is another landmark, thanks largely to how natural it sounds in spite of its ambitious approach.

While Demdike fans will have heard a lot of this stuff by now, Sean Canty and Miles Whittaker are still better than just about anybody else in the way that they thread found sound, field recordings, library music and generated sounds and beats... one hell of a package.

FM Sushi is straighter, painstaking in its own low-budget way and--bathed as it is in a potent fug of despairing melancholy--far more emotionally resonant.

Hendra is an always beautiful, sometimes stunning album, if one that bears no trace of its creator's knack for house music.

Hive Mind, follows in the vein of "Ital's Theme" by focusing on warm, softly throbbing textural slides over insistent 4/4 rhythms to forge a kind of day-drifted vagabond music akin to the work of acts like Blondes or The Miracles Club.

Speeed finds transcendence in loudness and distortion, making noise not so much to express frustration as to heal.

In the unhurried calm of Whatever The Weather, it's easy to envision the slow-moving shifts of the season. ... However one chooses to sit with the sounds in the album, personally, as an American, Celsius has never sounded so dreamy.

Culled and then cultivated from her live set, these tracks have the dance floor in their sights, but with a skewed focus.

Providence marks a muscular new path for Fake, but he sounds as singular as always.

These songs are fast, coming at you from all angles, with little time to think twice. If anything, the record is a large, flashing stop light for anyone who dares to try her again.

Actress is still working at something like the peak of his powers, and there's never a wrong step on Statik—never an idea that falls flat, never a moment where Cunningham feels like he's compromising his sound rather than simply choosing to work in a smoother style on his latest whim.

Slow Focus is more often than not an Olympic-standard piece of work.

Quite possibly represents Edgar's most full-blooded work yet.

Drone lives and dies by its inviolability and rigidity, but Lopatin throws that away in favor of something madder, weirder and altogether more enticing.

World Eater is Power's most eclectic record to date. Dumb Flesh, his second album as Blanck Mass, moved away from the wall of sound of his self-titled debut.

Pop Ambient 2014 is the fluffiest, most cushioned set of zone-outs in the series' recent history.

The result is a set of tracks that, compared to the prickly, experimental music of Shaking The Habitual, are purposeful, propulsive and emotionally direct.

Visions is marked by a number of characteristics that make up a broad swathe of forgettable, barely-there music-it sounds distant, cheaply produced, with songs that seem to flutter in and out of earshot rather than command attention-but it's executed with such personality, earnestness, and feeling that it feels so much louder and present than it really is.

Voigt's mix of art music, techno and classical, of fairy tales and field recordings, feels singular and timeless 25 years on. It's not Voigt's most beautiful or immersive record as GAS, but it remains a forest we can all get lost in.

Not everything on Isles is a win—"Rever" and "Fir" dial the neon palette up a notch too high—but overall the album nails the tricky balance artists face when following a successful debut: similar enough to charm the old fans yet fresh enough to entice the new.

Eternal Home is by no means an easy listen, especially for people who aren't used to extreme metal vocals. But it's well worth the effort—the LP features some of the most beautiful music I've heard all year.

Shade is another beautiful and often devastating entry in the Grouper catalog.

It's not long before Punk Authority ceases to feel abrasive and is instead perceived as soothing, continuous streams of sound.

They race through their earliest, long-abandoned digicore work with newfound dexterity and a fiercer sense of self.

Although Spirit Exit, both more expansive and more restrained, doesn't oscillate as wildly as her previous expeditions, the heart strings remain plucked in gorgeous loops and motifs that spiral out into infinity.

An album that finds Cantu-Ledesma orchestrating perhaps the most gorgeous ambience of his career so far.

Metal, techno and noise fans will all find solace here, as the band juggle sounds from all three to make something that sounds new, and almost natural.

Blizzards highlights everything Fake is good at: the way his drums tend to dance in between established genres, melodies that sound like a warped Boards Of Canada record, the constant push-and-pull of dark and light. It's more of a reset than a reinvention, a return to the earnest simplicity that made him a wunderkind all those years ago.

As with Exai, no major new ground is broken here, but when the landscape is this vast, fascinating and intractably alien, there's no need.

It is a real gem.

Blue Gardens is another milestone in a banner year for one of the UK's most consistently exciting labels.

For a techno mix, Fabriclive.73 is a surprisingly breezy affair.

His music appears to be the stuff of mid-morning TV interludes and inconsequential memories, yet it ends up plumbing great depths.

Cellophane Memories ranks among Lynch's best: slippery, bewitching and almost overwhelmingly Lynchian.

LISm is a sprawl, a circuitous meander, but one in which every second counts.

Elysia Crampton isn't always an easy listen. In fact, it's a little bit ugly at times. That intentional clash is exactly what makes her sound so compelling. She cultivates a juicy, electric tension by combining pieces that aren't made to fit evenly together.

A work with a fighting spirit so potent that tipping the world over begins to feel like a genuine possibility.

Amidst all the flying debris and heart-stopping drama you have the most cohesive and powerful single statement from Terror Danjah yet.

Age Of is the sound of an internet addict sifting through the digital ruins, part of a culture jamming legacy for future generations, should they exist.

Glimmer has enough to rope back in jilted Treny fans, but is steady-footed enough to find acolytes in drone and ambient communities as well.

They make some mistakes, sure--the vocal spots from JODY and Yen Tech are fumbles--but they're more adept than ever at stewing their idiosyncratic set of sounds into one deliciously strange brew.

There's a weightiness to Polar's songwriting that both complements and contrasts the crystalline production touches.

Hyperdrama is more impactful than Woman, but not quite as ostentatiously in-your-face as Audio, Video, Disco. The duo sound better for it.

Reflection bangs, sounds enormous cranked up loud, but it's also dreamlike and soothing. There is plenty of pain and uncertainty in these tracks. But altogether, the album is a salve for the listener, and maybe for James herself.

For all its referential qualities, this is a record that is confident in its own distinct character.

At times, it seems like his most interestingly textured and complicated release to date.

The history of misogyny that followed Journey In Satchidananda complicates the serenity and innovation within it.

Not only is Looping State of Mind Willner's most diverse and satisfying statement to date, it's an album that establishes him as one of electronic music's more subtly lateral thinkers.

Hunt's debut isn't just a representation of her compelling Emotional Junglist sound, but a firm push against the boundaries of modern, nostalgic jungle, underlining how much even the toughest dance music can benefit from a little vulnerability.

Sound Ancestors is an ideal entry into the world of Madlib.

New Path's final moments are fleetingly hopeful, conveyed through faintly chirping birdsong. But once that warmth fades, the album's unsettling mood is what lingers. It's one of Essaie Pas' finest efforts yet.

On his latest, the palpable, sometimes uneven spontaneity that defined the first few years of DJ Seinfeld is gone. In its place is the sound of a producer who's found a confident, definitive voice.

It's a much less linear journey than we would expect from Owens, but it's also a welcome shift, an intriguing pivot from the very human themes of Inner Song. This time around, she invites the listener to wade through the fascinating depths of her imagination. It's hard not to close your eyes and surrender to the figure-eight flow.

Some of these tracks are simply mind-melting.

This celebratory nihilism defines an album that's sometimes dark and moody, sometimes manic and fun. There are familiar moments of quirky guitar pop ("Delete Forever," "You'll Miss Me When I'm Not Around"). More exciting is when Grimes goes big on reverb and club-sized beats.

Like his last album, Leaning Over Backwards, A Series of Shocks is rich and spatially ambitious.

Serious and focused but also enormously fun, it represents the late flowering of a distinctive, accomplished talent.

Gonzalez outdoes himself on Hurry Up, We're Dreaming: a double album in tribute to the hefty documents of pre-digital, pre-iTunes yesteryear.

See Birds, was a promising debut, but Wander / Wonder is the kind of record that can pull you into its emotional undertow from the minute those helium angels start singing.

Lone hasn't fully reinvented the narrative thread he started with "Pineapple Crush," but he's enriched it with a deeper exploration of his music's other referents, finding new dimensions to a sound that was beginning to feel awfully one-dimensional.

The sound of Pangaea doing his thang, then? Yep. Ahead of the game? On this evidence, most certainly.

On You Said You'd Hold My Hand Through The Fire, they lay bare their heartbreak through squalls of sound, managing softness even in the album's more hardened sonic environments.

Playing Robots Into Heaven pitches itself right in the middle, swallowing up Blake's wounded reveries in a tide of dance floor-friendly inspiration. It's the most vital he's sounded in years.

While Self's experimental productions showcase the versatility of the voice, his poppier songs luxuriate in its timbre.

In some ways, Euphoria Bound is the most Shackleton-sounding Shackleton record in some time, but there are still new references and sonic detours on display.

For the most part, Vibert's approach to drum & bass still sounds unique, although there are some signs that this was produced in the '90s if you're looking for them.

Lyrically, this may be the work of a 49 year-old woman, with its ruminations on family, married life and paying the bills, but, in terms of its energy and sheer lust for life, it could not sound fresher.

What really marks Machinedrum's growth are the moments that subtly push Stewart's sound into small stylistic corners only hinted at before.

It's the most relaxed, comfortable album he's ever made, and it's a delight to drift along with him.

His latest LP isn't nostalgic. If anything, Voids proves Deijkers is as comfortable in the here and now as he's ever been.

It's like listening to the sea, before the strings slip in and out of tune like crashing waves. The beauty that emerges throughout the record requires patience to be appreciated in full and—to Frahm's credit—when it arrives, it's worth the wait.

The spirit of those dance floors lives on through this second volume of the Legacy series.