Dependent and Happy sounds like the hungriest dance music that Ricardo Villalobos has recorded in some time.

Islands might not have the far-reaching social insights of Routes, but it shows that Idehen's personal world is almost as gripping.

As a whole, the album succeeds at doing something tricky: pandering to fans of theory, minimalism and ambient music all in equal measure.

Stern's use of repetition is powerful and carefully considered, making space for deep thought and reflection. Pockets of silence strengthen this concentrative quality.

Where many similar hybrids are too cerebral or schizophrenic, his album is impressively tactile, and laced with a genuinely passionate pulse.

Inner Song's highs are very high. Beyond the bang-on production, the LP feels like as much of a journey for the listener as it does the protagonist.

Such interventions, like the coughing fit that concludes "Brutal," are vital in the fabric of The Redeemer, which feels part art installation, part cri de coeur, but all true--further reason to believe the Hype.

Remember... feels cohesive in a way that has eluded Fernow through the rest of his work as Vatican Shadow, and signals a new frontier for the producer that's as promising as it is grim.

They! Live is a lovely, highly listenable release, flowing effortlessly in a way that most house music albums can only hope for.

Here she pushes things in a more aggressive direction: on "Tiro," her vocals become increasingly scattered and dramatic, as the percussion warps into a mash of cracking whips, laser shots and grinding metal. On its back half, KICK ii dips into abstract territory, sounding more like a tangled web of overactive synapses than anything immediately recognizable as pop.

Their album together is a beautiful take on doom and gloom, but be warned: there's no promise of a happy ending.

Dis Fig transcends In Blue's origins in genre exercise into an otherworldly fever dream, an album of tectonic bass and thundering drums that somehow feels intimate and sensual. It's as much her triumph as it is his.

Anyone who's seen her DJ could tell you about the confrontational aggression she hasn't yet captured on an official album. KicK iii tries, pushing the choppy, freeform and unrelenting part of Arca to the fore and pulverizing the listener over its brief, 36-minute runtime.

Fear In A Handful Of Dust is a very approachable Amon Tobin record. It is highly unconventional, full of alien timbres and strange logic. But, as was the case with much of his music in the past couple decades, you don't need to be in a specific kind of mood to enjoy it.

Shades feels like a group effort. Khan's deadpan but catchy vocals are a huge part of the appeal, and the whole band sounds locked in, especially Calderwood and his wild soloing. ... It's the kind of quietly brilliant record that makes you fall in love with a band all over again, sharpening their approach—and songwriting—without losing the shambolic charm that made them so loveable in the first place.

Left bruised and raw from the previous entry, the soft pads and thick walls of synth noise on tracks like the Planningtorock-featuring "Queer" feel like weighted blankets. ... kick iiii plays like a surrealist diary of Ghersi's experiences as a queer person and transgender woman.

This album tells a deeper story that only grows more vibrant with every listen.

These songs are whittled down, a rare moment where the overwhelming density of Arca's music falls away, raw and stripped of any protective coating. ... There's a newfound and striking intimacy—the last gasps of the KiCK series before the explosive climax "Crown," where kiCK iiiii's softness is ripped apart by cathartic blasts of noise. It's one final, triumphant punch that leaves everything on the table.

Shygirl remains tough and unforgiving across ALIAS, and her voice as an artist has never been stronger. She's a full-blown pop star driven by her luscious fantasies.

Despite his mainstream flirtations, Cashmere Cat is more about delaying pleasure than instant gratification.

You may not always know what's going on or why, but that hardly matters when it's such a joyous whirl.

Black Jazz Records is a label worth knowing. As far as introductions go, you could do worse than a tribute mix by Theo Parrish.

Rapping with Paul White combines a series of moods and ideas and ties them together with quirky skits and a varied palate of samples, all with the charm we've grown to expect from White.

Machine is as visceral as anything he's ever put out, but the album's use of negative space—a cornerstone of what, in that Electronic Beats interview, he identified as dub's "alien unknown quality"—creates a sense of heightened focus you don't get from his vocal albums. These tracks are certainly "floor weapons," as Martin has billed them in liner notes. But they'll work just as well for those looking to quietly meditate on bassweight at home.

A large part of Death Peak--despite the morbid title--contains some of Clark's most accessible and melodic dance floor tracks.

If The Inheritors was the sound of the former trance artist undergoing a spiritual rebirth, The Animal Spirits is as close as he's come to transcendence.

The mix of familiar sounds and snippets of intimate conversation makes for dance music that can feel deeply affecting, even as its spastic rhythms keep the energy at a constant high.

Conatus is Zola Jesus' most gratifying offering so far.

Whatever's at the heart of these sonic fictions, it drove Crampton to reach for new audio possibilities, not for the sake of novelty but to keep pace with the futurity of her visions. It sets the album apart from other pieces of audio collage because it's not sound design for sound design's sake: it's what's required to bring the drama to life.

The mixtape moves through a few different sections, starting off slow and dreamy, taking in woozy hip-hop and twinkling dance pop and ending up in UK club territory. There's a wistful vibe throughout.

Rinse Presents: Brackles is a cohesive, singular statement that finds his sound truly rising to the occasion.

Thanks to its quieter passages, Alternate/Endings breathes in and out gradually, never lingering or sprinting for too long.

With In A Dream, Maclean and Whang have crafted some of most expertly tuneful music of their career.

It's almost too easy to become completely enamoured with the very sounds it's employing, rather than the mood it's ostensibly trying to convey.

It might be dismissed as dinner party music by those with a hunger for more experimental fare, but The North Borders is charming, fascinating and a touch mysterious.

still slipping vol. 1 is an honest and humanizing document, giving us a deeper look into the musical styles and influence that drive Joy Orbison than anything else we've heard before.

It's his most mature and realised vision to date.

It's meant to be experienced in one fell swoop. Once the record works its magic on you, it'll be hard to pull out a single moment.

Surely Saginaw's most confident work yet, No Better Time Than Now shows a young artist maturing with the grace of a seasoned musician.

There is a kind of pure, cathartic rage in Virgins and it leaves moments of intense peace in its wake.

The record holds up alongside standout moments from Dear's discography, but adopts an unexpectedly rugged disposition.

Less is more has never been a part of Kaytranada's creative ethos, and while there are many ear-catching tidbits on Timeless, the LP also has its fair share of moments that get lost in the shuffle. .... But even with these misses, the album never fully slides into outright dullness—there's always a big idea or complex breakdown right around the corner.

There's no doubt you'll hear a lot of records in 2012 that sound like Whispers in the Dark, but you'll rarely hear it done this well.

Rare, Forever has all the hallmarks of a big, crossover dance music record, but no one's doing it quite like this.

Working Class Woman is special because it looks beyond the personal highs and lows of touring to the cracks in the foundation of a lucrative club culture that requires constant, exhausting effort to achieve some semblance of stability.

All Melody is remarkably well-rounded. It's not a techno album, it's not a classical album and it's not an ambient album, but it at times resembles all three.

The mixtape jumps from acid basslines to Daft Punk-style chops in the time it takes to draw a breath. Just take "Stateside," which layers a goody bag of textures (scratchy percussion loops, vinyl scratches, stratospheric leads, and no fewer than three different bass tones) that whirl away from a breathless hook like petals. With her third full-length project, PinkPantheress refurbishes the refurbishers for yet another new generation

Visa finds Ripatti attuned to a very specific, focused energy, and the result is some of his best work.

While Active Agents And House Boys slows the aerodynamic rush of the duo's live sets, it reveals a new dimension to their work: something you could almost call songwriting.

What I Breathe feels like both a jumping-off point for dance music newbies and a feast of great ideas for those who have been around the block a few times. It's all held together by great pacing, frankly amazing production and a lack of cynicism that feels refreshing, open-hearted to the very last moment.

It always felt like the UK dance community was collectively cheering for Katy B's success, and Little Red shows how much she deserves it.

A surprisingly coherent record full of vignettes that feel alternately archival, ethnographic and as usual, flickering and ephemeral-glimpses of musicality that flutter away just when you get comfortable.

It still sounds like music from the furthest reaches of the galaxy, but after three decades of getting to know Sean Booth and Rob Brown, the feelings wrought in their work have never been clearer or more heart-rending than on SIGN.

Gamble successfully deploys his robotic collaborators as tools in his sonic worldbuilding rather than as ends in themselves.

Phoenix fully establishes a distinct Eartheater style, building mountains underground and finding worlds of meaning in deep introspection.

Pinned down somewhere between pared-down jazz and emotive R&B, Duval Timothy continues to find insightful ways to tell stories by way of repetition. When ideas are this robust, the extra stuff becomes less important.

Throughout the album's darkest passages we're struck by a sense of possibility: that everything Richard has endured, fought for and overcome has merely allowed space for beautiful new beginnings.

On Loom, she takes her interest in found sound to a gloomy, thought-provoking new depth.

For fans of Ø, or anyone keen on abstract, contemplative electronic music, this is a fine release with more than a few fantastic moments.

Overload is suffused with love: love for self, love for community, and especially love for Muldrow's longtime creative and romantic partner, the rapper Dudley Perkins.

Like Reed, Tarelle and Inyang are involved in gritty, street-level investigative poetics. ... This is detective work, through which they hope to discover their own place—figuratively and literally—a sense of purpose, of honest labour.

Pleasant is the word. But not simple. Quiet has just as many corners worth peeking down.

Whatever Loop The Loop's flaws, Jenkins has definitely found his C, and he's justifiably pleased about it.

t's a work of clever, classy and timeless R&B that builds on some of the most enduring and ubiquitous music of the last 30 years.

[A] formidable, baffling, often delightful behemoth of an album.

It's a confidently self-referential record that goes with her own flow, settling into a sensual downtempo sound as effortless as it is studied.

For many, it was going to be hard for Tellier to surpass Sexuality's sensuous odyssey. Thankfully, My God Is Blue does at least equal it.

Like all good pop, News From Nowhere is brief, never falling victim to the temptation to get lost in soundscaping. Instead, it builds those immersive realms in just a few minutes with each track.

The results are unmistakably Mount Kimbie, showcasing their love for pop, R&B, electronica and Krautrock, while also forging a new identity for themselves within indie rock.

For the most part, though, their method bears fruit, yielding an irresistibly catchy pop record that holds true to its humble Welsh roots.

Platform is full of beautifully corrupted, synthesised signals.

Mod Prog Sic is the latest stop on this journey, taking the band to an evolved new place for a deeply satisfying blend of primal expression and visceral pleasure.

Because Of A Flower pieces together a similar set of songs to ~~~, but with a more open and assured mindset.

The complexities of No Highs are masked by its minimalism. Hecker pairs expansive and bright songs with more repetitive compositions, capturing the beauty in uneasiness and vice versa, and keeping the album from blurring into an ambient haze.

Modern pop remix albums have had a lazy streak—tacked-on features, small-minded production and recycled vocals. But Charli comes to the club with new verses, exciting collaborators and a fresh eye for her past work.

A much more concise statement than last year's Welcome To The Chi, Double Cup is an exciting portrait of a maverick artist with complete creative freedom, and the skills to hold it all together.

Though it finds Smith at her most reserved, The Mosaic Of Transformation feels like a breakthrough, melting the pop-savvy hooks of her past records into one gorgeous, rarefied sound, as invigorating and smooth as electricity flowing through circuits.

Ecstatic Computation is marked by sudden breaks from predictability. Stylistic influences and sonic textures are varied, yet they're cohesive. The result is an album that's both provocative and blissful.

The combination of these two forces is both inspired and insane.

It's another entry of his sublime wanderer's music as Torn Hawk, and includes some of his most arresting and sonically numbing creations to date.

The Killer seems to reveal a pattern on Pawlowitz's part, yet it somehow remains every bit as viscerally captivating as his best material, a formula still as cryptic as it ever was.

Re-Engineering is very much an album designed to be played as a seamless whole. It's warm, fun, curious and deeply entertaining.

Crash Recoil relishes in the same spontaneity offered by Child's live performances, composed of songs that feel more structured like cinematic scenes than traditional techno tracks.

The result is an ingeniously crafted album that, under the right conditions, heightens the senses and inspires heartfelt reflection.

It's a career-defining work that lives, shapeshifts, and, crucially, grieves.

Part of the reason why LXXXVIII is so enjoyable is all these callbacks—it's catnip to a diehard Actress fan. There's a few new wrinkles on there, sure—the jazzy chord changes, the piano, the almost formless ambient sections—but mostly it's what he does best.

Like any such grand project, it's daring and indulgent, occasionally weighed down by its own pretence, and the result is several songs on the album that seem to unspool in no direction in particular. But that unwinding is usually gripping, and like the other two albums Björk's recent renaissance—Utopia and Vulnicura—Fossora stuns more often than it doesn't.

It's a boisterous, life-affirming record that successfully blends essential elements of dancefloor house music with some of the more convivial markers of Peruvian and Latin American music and culture at large.

Essex Honey, with its cool, crisp textures and elliptical rhythms, is expansive and beguiling, an inviting place to rest in a chaotic year.

On the self-produced Will, there's an extraordinary confidence behind Barwick's voice and arrangements.

Even in the depths of despair she still managed to turn out something that feels lush and enticing. DREAMER is one of those albums people revisit for all kinds of reasons, whether they're sitting drinking wine with friends or out on a walk in need of a good cry.

It's her most capital-A ambient album, without the sometimes harsh interference of her favored found sounds and field recordings. Yet at the same time, it's so quiet that it slips into the edges of comprehension just when you've determined you're going to get to the bottom of it. All the better to listen to it again to see what you missed—and then again, and again and again.

Tranklements recalls Robert Hood's Motor: Nighttime World 3: both exhibit a confidence and composure perhaps unique to veteran producers.

Without succumbing to simplicity, Klein's latest release delivers an intimate vision of the mayhem, loss and detachment that can ensue from a whirling cycle of panic and redemption.

Key to the Kuffs certainly finds one of underground music's true antiheros in irresistibly infectious form.

It's another sharp turn in the road on the winding journey of a creative nomad.

Sharp and fiery, Isoviha lacks any restraint, capturing the paradoxical multiplicity and singularity that makes all of Ripatti’s output so memorable.

If Outrun was a fast-paced drive that made the city look like an endless stream of light-trails, Reborn is a beautiful retro pastiche that intentionally slows down to let you take in just how far you've come.