A little less effects-led ebb and flow (and a touch more structure) might have made Square One more vibrant. The album's absorbing collection of mood pieces, though, are rewarding and evocative enough to make it worth your while.

Huxley's pop forays might not be for everyone, but there's plenty on Blurred to appeal to both his underground acolytes and, perhaps, a new crop of fans as well.

These abrupt transitions are clearly of central concern for Lopatin, and it's these rapid shifts that make R Plus Seven unlike anything he's produced to date.

Lyrically, 7 Days Of Funk offers little to muse on. Snoop's mainly concerned with discussing how funky he is and what a good time he's having. It's largely free of the misogyny and gangsterisms that have defined his past work.

Lazer Sword's somewhat gloomy sophomore album does still represent a largely enjoyable body of work that packs in plenty of well-executed ideas.

As expected, the Norwich-based producer's first full-length culls together another mass of genres, this time with the fresh additions of footwork and UK funky flavours.

With a couple of cuts hovering around ten minutes, the album requires patience but remains accessible.

Some of Orbiting still sounds a little sketchy, like a bunch of good ideas that have yet to coagulate into fully-rounded, purposeful bangers, but clearly Jeremy Guindo is a real maverick talent.

Though far from perfect, New Energy is one of Hebden's most intimate and personal albums, with all the idiosyncrasies that come with that.

So short and concentrated, the album feels like a style exercise rather than a major work, but it nonetheless finds Cutler refining his skills and presenting the best version of his 1992-via-2020 approach yet.

It takes a lot of talent to make crate-digging sound so seamless, and even if the cracks show every once in a while, Planet High School is some of the best patchwork around.

Instead of building on the momentum of her songwriting career, Still pulls her back into her comfort zone, with promising hints of something new waiting in the spaces between.

Like E+E's The Light That You Gave Me To See You, Egyptrixx's latest brings an element of the human and the mundane into his epic, depopulated landscapes. His harsher records were more impressive, but this one invites affection.

Miami still isn't their masterpiece, but it suggests they have one in them.

Brimming with standalones ... but it sometimes feel[s] more like a collection of songs than a singularly-minded and cohesive album.

Unrestrained emotion is ultimately III's defining attribute, and that richness can be too much to bear.

On Wenu Wenu, everything is present and correct, and that's part of the problem: it feels polished.

This is an experimental record culled from fully improvised sessions, so it follows that some zones feel more inspired than others. To these ears, some of the most inspired of Dissent's "Chapters" are more densely referential than previous MVOT music.

MHYSA gets most expressive with her vocal processing, sometimes rapping in hot bursts, sometimes creating soft and surreal textures, other times using abrasive distortion and noise. When beats do appear, they're patient and sparse, highlighting the artist's contentment with silence.

Ambitious and homespun all at once, Welcome to Mikrosector-50 is like diving into the overgrown imagination of a young child.

Ada's lengthy absence has allowed her the freedom to switch creative modes without any seemingly abrupt transitions. Meine Zarten Pfoten is bright and soft and tender, a kind of warm-bath comfort that should be perfect for those downy hours before you put the day behind you.

Walk Dance Talk Sing shows you can't have too much of a good thing.

Standing alongside DeGraw's contribution as an EP standout, Teengirl Fantasy offer an all too brief remix of "Monkey Riches" that takes in analogue house, indie thrash and dreamy Machinedrum-style juke.

The lyrics on Humanz might be Gorillaz's darkest, but the album has lots of bright music.

The set stumbles, though, when it's at its most raucous.... When Green trusts his own downbeat instincts, though, LateNightTales feels comforting in a way few mixes do.

Dear's latest, the four-track Headcage EP, finds the New Yorker continuing to explore what it might mean for him to be a pop star, even going so far as to bring in some outside help on the production end.

Butler's troupe have always been unique--a dance floor-friendly manifestation of the dissenting, politicised queer underground--but now they're making transcendent music again, too.

Many of the songs feel like they're improvised by someone with an encyclopedic knowledge of vocal pop music.

Schofield often sounds downright uneasy, as if he's looking to cut the legs out from under his trademark style. When an artist slips into this mode, they rarely make perfect statements. What usually emerges instead are uneven collections full of experimental escape hatches that are engrossing for their very imperfections.

Overwhelming as Delphi's mood swings can be, they're worth putting up with. Douglas's production is full of elaborate ideas and strange tricks, even if it sometimes feels cheesy or overwrought.

Naturally, the good tracks are sublime... [yet] familiar overreaching, archness even, creeps in elsewhere.

Adult Contemporary might not break any new ground or present any radical ideas, but as the familiar saying goes, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."

It lacks the depth, intrigue and smirking beauty of the group's best work—a product, presumably, of Blunt and Copeland's peculiar chemistry—but doesn't replace it with anything fresh. For all that, it's not bad.

By most measures, Crush is an excellent record. But its aggression and obtuseness, for me at least, is relative—once the shock wears off, there remains a slight reserve, a sense that Shepherd's innermost rage has only fitfully overpowered competing aspects of his psyche.

It's quintessentially him, stuck in the little world he's created. And there are worse places to be than his realm of video games, rap music and pop so sweet it tickles the back of your throat.

Endgame excels when its structures are more orthodox.

Thirteen tracks of relatively barebones 808 funk can star to wear, and especially moving at such a (relatively) slow tempo Transistor feels a little bloated by its last third.

ey clearly understand the value of the direct appeal, but on Coracle, the duo has rounded out the pre-manufactured pleasantries of their debut into headier, more substantive approaches to IDM, Chicago house, and nu-kosmische.

It's a boisterously enjoyable and skilfully compressed journey, and a further evolution in an already promising mix series.

For a debut album from such a young artist, 99.9% is remarkably self-assured. It sets up Celestin as someone carving out his niche.

Volume Massimo embodies Cortini's deep connection with the Buchla. His commitment to melody, though it makes the album approachable, often detracts from the music's noisy (and more interesting) imperfections. Even if you follow Cortini's instructions to play the LP at "a very loud volume," the full heft of his sound fails to translate outside of its onstage setting.

Sure, it's still quite messy, but in separating the vast array of influences and ideas present in Ras G's deceptively complex music, Earth lays it all out in a much more digestible manner.

Psychic doesn't quite burn itself into your memory.

The best moments here are almost indistinguishable from Grouper's best work.

It's both humble and ambitious, wonderfully arranged in some places and slightly clumsy in others (the Popol Vuh-isms of "Start A New Life" kill the album's momentum just three tracks in, and I've yet to be convinced by Weber's humdrum vocals). But for an artist who has always been earnest and upfront about big melodies, Garden Gaia feels like the logical next step, freeing him from his techno past.

At its best, Black Star shows an artist amplifying Afrodiasporic club music with modern verve, unlocking a new wave of Black pop stardom all the while.

Death After Life is so seamless and consistent that it might grow tedious for less patient listeners.

This is a perfectly fine debut, but probably nothing compared to seeing them live.

Tightening up the chaos that blighted his sophomore record, The Rat Road doubles down on SBTRKT's multi-genre vision and pulls it off slightly better. His cocktail of pop and underground influences sounds more decisive and refined, though there are still moments that fizzle rather than ignite.

Most of these tracks feel like they would evaporate instantaneously if they tried to leave the house, let alone take their place in any public space. As a debut collection of electronic oddities, it works just fine, though.

Ultimately, in the cold light of day, it all begins to sound unrelentingly grey and one-paced.

While this scrappier, DIY vibe feels like a natural fit for HTRK, Venus In Leo lacks some of the depth and mystery that makes their music so powerful. ... Still, HTRK create something their fans will never tire of: a dark, sensual, poetic languor that's theirs alone. Venus In Leo delivers a welcome fresh take on that sound.

Shell~Wave reaches intense highs. But, at times, it falls victim to the imperfect nature of spontaneity due to the pronounced use of delay. .... Shell~Wave bottles the veteran's personal experience with his machines and delivers it to listeners with the improvisation of a free jazz musician.

It's a record more about sound design and structure, an abstract deconstruction of Night Slugs' sleek chrome aesthetic.

Chromeo still aren't the most serious guys in the world, but White Women is a smart pop album rendered in vivid, 3-D detail.

The inclusion of dynamic percussion, as well as Darkside's openness, beckons music that is more kinetic, haphazard and melodic than anything the group has made before. .... Although it's hard not to miss the eerie glitchiness and endless meandering that made Psychic so explorable and viscerally unsettling, Nothing can be unnerving in its own way.

Jakobsson's DJ-Kicks is a smooth and enjoyable hour, and a reminder that, whatever name he's releasing under, he's worth taking seriously.

If only Tension lived up to the promise that she might be given something different. As it is, though, it's another entry in a rock-solid catalogue of dependable, uplifting club pop.

Kompakt's recent box set for Voigt's Gas project is arguably the ne plus ultra of emotionally resonant ambient music from the past two decades. Its influence looms over Pop Ambient 2017, but this music can nonetheless be its own soundtrack for daydreaming. On that level, the series continues to be worthwhile, but if its reach was just a little wider, it could be even more.

And while there's no percussion in any conventional sense, the likes of "Uptown Psychedelia" jerk manically to their own spasmodic rhythms. Yet where those tracks are marked by an almost feverish nervous tension, from "Racist Drone" onwards Hecker and Lopatin seem to drift into an almost tranquilised state-one which strays closer to ambient clichés.

As strong as Dillon's songs are, the idea that there are some missed opportunities here can't help but nag at even its strongest moments.

Even when Clark is firing sounds at bewildering speeds, it's never a chore--in other words, it's a lot more fun than Clark's reputation might suggest.

The album stays reasonably well-balanced throughout, straddling that fine line between understatement and being sledgehammer-esque obvious.

Midway through RR7349, "Wardenclyffe" cuts back and forth from cheeky synth pop to stratospheric synth vistas, revealing how much better S U R V I V E are with the latter approach. They finally concede to their strengths in the album's second half.

Fascinating and vibrant, Texture Like Sun finds Deenmamode less concerned with his own life and times, focusing instead on the world around him.

This is a minor work, but a minor work from a master of his art.

These might not be Martin's most envelope-pushing beats, but it's hard to think about that when the walls are violently shaking.

It's an interesting diversion for Romans, and might just be the most admirable part of Valere Aude.

Pretty Ugly takes the ugliest tropes of UK dance music and flips them inside out without losing what makes them so physically powerful in the first place.

As expected, Hyperdub's output retains a pretty sophisticated tone even when it's dealing in pop hooks and party tracks.

The final result is up there, but as it jumps frantically from idea to idea, it dulls the impact of its best ideas in favour of others that might have been best left in a folder along with hundreds of other loops on his laptop.

With slightly more judicious editing, Let's Turn It Into Sound could have been a grand crossover statement, combining admittedly trendy synth experiments with freak-folk charisma. But that's not what Smith is going for here. Instead, the LP feels like listening to someone try out a new talent, learning as they go along, substituting practiced polish with a hunger for new ideas and self-expression.

The Shakes is worth hearing for the sonic detail alone. The best tracks have an inclusive, sweeping abandon that rivals the high points of Scale.

[The album's] obfuscating mires of navel-gazing perhaps precludes it from attaining Ninja Tune classic status, but those of a darker disposition will likely be of the opinion this challenging opus collates Ortega's strongest work to date.

Colonial Patterns is not a flawless record, but it does open up a whole new world of possibilities for Leeds as a producer, and places him decisively outside any box people might wish to put him in.

The result, for its few flaws and its exhilarations, at the very least, sounds fantastic, production-wise; Grace finds the band melding tooth-ground guitar assaults; '80s throwback candy pop; fluttery house templates; dusty, almost Stax-worthy soul getaways and sample-laced electro throbs into an album willing to sacrifice sonic exactitude for a mélange of sounds, tempos and genre exercises that still feels very much of a singular-albeit kaleidoscopic-piece.

Absorbing a Squarepusher LP in one sitting has always been for more adventurous or diligent listeners, but the dank final section means that, outside of more hardcore fans, Be Up A Hello will probably need to be navigated in exactly the right sort of mood.

Stately though Dedication was, its serious mien and careful composition made it an introduction to Zomby that made his work seem less appealingly messy than it oftentimes is. This seven-song, 23-minute EP remedies that.

Sadly, tracks like "Years Ago, Days Pass" or "Wired"--even with their intricate array of digital ornaments--remain badly in need of a proper tune; album closer "Nights," on the other hand, simply comes across as an anemic piano-led ballad: clocking in at seven minutes, it easily outstays its welcome and ends the album on a lukewarm note.

For Years feels like the natural conclusion to the quest he quietly started back in 2010.

With arena-size atmospherics and every sound endowed with a fathoms-deep dub delirium, Eight is an album as focused on its meticulous sound design as it is on the musicality.

Emerson's decision to duck out of dance music and resurface as an indie-electronica artist for her long-awaited debut album feels like a risk, but in its well-worn and world-weary approach to songwriting, it's also deeply familiar, almost comforting.

The album as a whole is accomplished, but it still hasn't entirely caught up with the precision of his visual multiverse. Still, I am glad that Labyrinth offers another glimpse of Kanda's alternate realities.

The Road To Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions, just slightly overcorrects with its mainstream-seeking direction, opting for more James Blake-esque electronic pop and reeling in the eccentricities.

At 16 songs and with impressive guest features, it's a sprawling portrait of James, one with mostly dark and subdued tones.

Instead of trying something new, he focuses on what he's good at, which makes Claustrophobia a lateral move rather than a step forward. It seems Rose is trying to recapture the brilliance of his peak-period work. In Claustrophobia's best moments, he does.


Scattered brilliance makes Shelly's On Zenn-La a compelling listen. At its best, the LP showcases a composer with an uncompromising will to experiment, even if it yields mixed results.

The impact of Written in Changes on its own terms may feel a little elusive, yet it's admirable to hear someone as musically omnivorous as Emerson continue to allow herself to change.

Coles has a way of making her tracks sound massive and intimate at the same time, using reverb in a way that evokes both the expanse of an arena and the introspection of a bedroom.... Comfort has enough of these moments to remind us of her casual brilliance, but not enough to make it the complete knockout it could be.

On "Drop Down," Lunice's bass stabs align nicely with Le1f's vocal stabs. With a few more tracks like these, the LP would have made for an even more dramatic return to the spotlight.

Melding the jerkiness of dancehall with deconstructed house, it's raw to the point of bloodiness.

At times Weird Drift's afternoon daze softens into formlessness.

Amid all this diversity, Abaporu is a remarkably steady work, with Boratto's consistent sound palette and knack for melody running strong throughout.

Dreams isn't flawless--the alt-folk ballad "United," for one, meanders a bit too much--but WhoMadeWho's best tracks are incredible.

Xen remains as singular--and often as brilliant--as the rest of the Arca catalogue.

Early Riser recalls '70s LPs by the likes of Herbie Hancock--with whom McFerrin Sr. collaborated--and actually evokes the process of remembering, insomuch as it's full of teasing hints and hazy feelings that ebb and flow throughout.

It's an album of unapologetic bangers, boasting some of the most enjoyable music Shepherd's ever released. But it also sacrifices some of what makes his best work so singular.