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

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

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

Youth Code isn't a perfect album, but it is one hell of a first stab.

Psychic doesn't quite burn itself into your memory.

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

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

Trumpets, drums, vocals, violins, flutes, saxophones and cellos make for a much fuller, richer and more authentic sound than ever before.

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.

It's a wild, theatrical and, at times, bloated ride.

A well-considered and promising debut album, one that knows just when to stop and breathe before breaking another sweat.

It's this combination of shadowy unknowability and full-hearted melody that makes Pull My Hair Back such an intriguing listen, and certainly one of the year's best debuts.

For a jingle writer whose album is almost relentlessly upbeat, his music can cut surprisingly close to the bone.

Copeland is an accomplished collage artist adept at combining the highbrow and the trashy, but when the individual bits are laid out on their own they can seem a bit throwaway.

Loud City Song is her most broadly scoped and epic album to date.

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

What Barnes has done here is give us a full tour of a hidden place he only let us peek at before, a place that's even more breathtaking than Dagger Paths made it out to be.

Ikonika has delivered one of 2013's definitive summer albums. It's time to get happy.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Where Moderat sounded at times tentative and disjointed, II is in every regard a better and more well-rounded record. If there were no third Moderat album, this would stand as a definitive statement.

It's peaceful and distantly serene, but with flickers of dissonance rubbing away at the edges. Those contrasting textures are part of what makes The Inheritors perhaps the year's most revealing and intriguing album yet.

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

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

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.

His fans might find this fascinating. For anyone else, there are better entry points into Jonson's catalogue.

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

In many ways Ghost Systems Rave is as bumpy and nerve-jangling as a joyride in a stolen Ford Fiesta. Whether that's your idea of fun or not, no one could ever claim it's clean and healthy.

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.

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

Waverly is constant and consistent in its crossing between a less exotic Dead Can Dance and a more lo-fi Fever Ray, which is certainly a captivating enough blend for a debut album.

The end result sounds like a shameful karaoke. Nonetheless, fans of Miss Kittin should still give Calling From The Stars a go, as it remains her most accomplished solo release to date.

For an artist so intent on self-mythologizing--with his grand pronouncements, rare interviews and mask-wearing anonymity--With Love feels like a surprisingly comprehensive piece of work. But it's still a rambling outpouring of quick-fire songs.

As nice and welcoming as Getting Closer is, it'll never challenge you.

So while Cold Spring is in many ways a massive leap forward for Mount Kimbie, it's also the sort of transitional album you might expect from a group with a knockout debut.

Even the most careful listener will be left wondering what it all means. Luckily, Boards Of Canada have laid out a riddle we won't tire of teasing out, embedded in a timeless sound unlike any other.

There are many occasions on Modern Worship when the surging synths sweep you along with the force of a dopamine rush, but there are a few others when you're left with a nagging sense that Hyetal could take things that little bit further.

Though it's often lost in the overwrought emotions of Dva, her gift for sound remains even when she overshoots the mark.

Immunity is a journey to be savoured, revisited regularly in the knowledge that some new landmark will emerge each and every time.

A pop album brimming with imagination, vibrant melodies and, yes, a fair bit of formula.

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

once Random Access Memories unravels, it is, at its best, pretty magnificent.

Homogenous and slightly predictable, Panorama Bar 05 is not Steffi at her most adventurous.

Too much of the album feels restrained, unable to truly revel in the bliss of melody.

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

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

Though it's way too long to listen to in one sitting, Grime 2.0 is catnip for the grime fan, and good bait for those new to or curious about the genre.

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.

Gordian is a delightful listen, packed with plenty of rewarding oddities if you care to sit down and really take your time with it.

If you're a Sandwell District fan, fabric 69 isn't going to blow your head off. You've heard these guys mix these kind of tunes together before. But you've never heard them do a mix as careful or considered as this one.

Too often, Letherette is synthetic and manufactured, but in those slower, stranger moments it feels like the real deal.

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.

He might have translated his sound into electronics with Excavation, but here Krlic's music feels more wrenchingly human than it ever has been.

Considering the odds, it shows an animated and still vigorous trio worthy of its semi-legendary status.

They massage the album's plentiful organic charges into a sonic puzzle with an almost symphonic reach, one that's as challenging, bounteous, and ultimately unknowable as anything you'll hear this year.

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.

You Are Eternity is like a long and endless tunnel: for all its twists and turns, you're always in the same sensory deprivation chamber.

The result is bone-chillingly gorgeous, right down to the feverish burst of pop strings that accompanies the final choruses.

While it might be beautiful to gaze at momentarily, by the end of the record it's treading water.

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

It's infectious and almost a little too odd, yet it's totally at ease. In other words, it's DJ Koze doing what he's done for well over a decade.

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

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

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

As ever, there are great songs here, underpinned by sharp, imaginative production.... The problem is that Lidell doesn't go far enough.

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

The result is a record that's sensually stark, with not one extraneous moment marking its naked contours.

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.

For those of us in between, it's like that aforementioned jigsaw puzzle: confounding, occasionally satisfying, and forever keeping you guessing as to what image its shapes are trying to form.

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

Taken as a whole, Incubation is an album that lures you into dark places in your brain rather than moving your body on the dance floor.

Though far from the full-on dance album Yorke's DJ gigs and 50 Weapons single had presaged, Amok does feel like a collection of tracks, not songs.

It is a real gem.

While McIlwain is operating within more rigid structures, another hangover from his ambient productions is that he can sometimes sound a bit directionless.

House of Woo may be playful and irreverent, but that shouldn't disguise its status as a potent exploration of sound.

Mood-wise, the three tracks are more in line with his debut, Hazyville, than any of his more recent output via Honest Jon's, although the techno that pulsed and glimmered through his older material is largely absent here.

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

The appeal of this LP lies in the adroit splicing of this aesthetic with that of dance floor techno, a combination which has the potential to be horrifically stale, sterile, smug—but ends up being anything but.

Wraetlic has the lingering feeling of prematurity, offering snatches of brilliance too easily snuffed out by its own tendency to hide its features in the dark.

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.

It's unclear if Elements of Light represents an evolutionary mark for the producer or a one-off exercise inspired by a summer's day in Oslo, but as an effort at minimalism, it's a modest success at best.

Stones and Woods is a frustrating body of work, with good ideas poorly realised and arresting moments interrupted by annoying ones.

Rhythmically, Ben UFO is giddy, ebullient even. Which is why, even at his most corrosive, he is not just a very smart "crate-digger," but also a phenomenal party starter.

It's not often one comes across an album that is somehow both more evolved and primitive than its predecessor, yet it's a trick Container has pulled-off with LP.

Movement, then, is more a proof of concept than a fully fleshed-out thought, though Herndon brings enough passion to her sound to suggest one is coming.

While Orbits is a tighter record, its joints are still too weak to hold it all up.

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.

If there's one major criticism of this record it's that its excessive length--13 tracks totalling 58 minutes--means that standout tracks can be missed through sheer volume of material.

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

It's a more expansive, more ambitious and more accomplished Raime than we've heard before.

As you unspool slowly into Aimlessness, you can't help but wish for a more mediating human touch.

The truly ambient moments of Living With Ghosts are easily its most arresting, providing brief periods of respite amid the album's unrelenting greyscale grasp.

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.

There are no new tricks at hand here, no experimental forays into the goonier psych-prog ends of the space disco genre. And you know what? Thank f*** for that.