Tunes 2011 To 2019 frames the artistic development of someone whose older music sounds more inspired but is still capable of greatness. ... 12 years since his last album, we at least get a large chunk of his often incredible catalogue in one place.

"I think about it all the time" is among the most surprising moments on the record, as Aitchison sings about the possibilities and paranoias of motherhood so openly and casually like she quickly scribbled on the back of a napkin—that it comes between heaving dance floor tracks only underlines how Aitchison is harnessing her chaotic energy to the fullest, but also how real it is. .... BRAT finds the sweet spot most leftfield pop stars only dream of: keep it experimental and referential, but enjoy the party while it lasts.

A Carrollian multiverse of shapes, sounds and ideas that only becomes richer the longer you spend there. It might take some time, but it's endlessly rewarding.

Gas is the sound of a man freeing his mind and allowing it to wander. To listen to Box is to seize that same opportunity.

Biokinetics has aged so well that it could easily pass for a new album. The production level is exceptional by today's standards, and it has more teeth than much of the music it inspired, especially contemporary dub techno, most of which sounds vanilla by comparison.

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

Beyoncé is clearly itching to experiment with her sound. This latest album may not be her most cohesive release, but it does come with a handful of well-executed surprises. ... The album falls flat when it tries too hard to immerse itself in a culture that does not belong to Beyoncé.

aya has created one of those rare sequels that manages to both outstrip and enhance the ideas behind her first album. Following up an incredible debut with something more ambitious and immediate is hard. Most sequels buckle under the weight of expectation. On hexed!, aya doesn't so much rise to it as tear right through it.

There's an intimacy here that compliments Broadcast's already close, cosy sound. Even the shorter songs bear fruit. .... It's hard not to imagine what these songs could have been: would Broadcast have kept them as-is and dove more into psychedelic folk, or would they have embellished more, and added more synths and electronics? Either way, it's a fascinating glimmer of what they might have done next.

The arresting thing about Robertson, and what makes her latest so effective, is her aversion to absolutes.

These very much sound like live performances, and they're all the better for it. Short of seeing him in concert, Spaces is as close as you'll get to hearing Frahm at his best.

Throughout Honey, the pure, raw emotion that has always defined Robyn's music is still there. Now, she's just dancing to a different beat.

Black Origami can be intimidating: it's dark, relentless, and makes substantial demands on the listener. But it's also powerful and distinctive. In the world of rhythmic electronic music, nobody else is doing it quite like this.

The Passionate Ones, ponders late-stage capitalism, loneliness and love over an impeccable blend of breezy indie pop and grainy electro-funk. Brown's deadpan baritone is loose and relaxed, and he croons like he's drawling in bed. He delivers stunning poetic refrains with heart and the kind of vulnerable confidence only developed after climbing out of rock bottom.

On Natural Brown Prom Queen, she proves she belongs to no mood, genre or period of time. Over a placeless mix of sounds and endlessly dynamic beats she comes of age, shaping Black histories into exciting futures, all while making it clear that her idea of home is wherever she decides it is at any given moment.

Listening back now, it still pumps. But it's a palatable pump, with enough hooks and vocals to work as well over pasta as in a field at 4 AM. Funnily enough, the tracks that have aged best are the ones that pump least. ... Though other remixes in the middle section update the production techniques, they don't really advance on the festival-pleasing 4/4 or big beat predictability of the originals.

On his Warp Records debut, Safe In The Hands Of Love, Yves Tumor joins the ranks of Arca and SOPHIE at the millennial generation's pop vanguard, a group whose fluid approach to music and imagery is eradicating the gap between underground and mainstream.

Whatever you want and could ever require from the progressive soul textbook is up in here. Darts, slaps, bops and most definitely thumpers. ... Renders a greater reward than we could ever envision. Voice Notes gives us just that.

Magnificently re-mastered... an exemplary introduction to the duo.

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

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

Following shaky albums from both Yorke and Radiohead, A Moon Shaped Pool suggests that they were right to keep the faith.

Lives Outgrown is a quiet folk album, but there are elements of the carnivalesque and the sublime.

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.

While GREY Area was a collection of great songs, Sometimes I Might Be Introvert feels like a therapeutic breakthrough. ... A body of work so rich with innovation, so broad in its influences and so powerful in its storytelling that we'll still be finding new things to love until the next one comes along.

Heaven To A Tortured Mind isn't necessarily the most dynamic release by the artist, but in its best moments, it's a heaping dose of musical ingenuity.

It is the kind of music you could imagine spending the rest of your life listening to.

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.

This more mature approach to storytelling is what makes MAGDALENE a raw and outstanding album about love. The lyrics have more depth than LP1, bearing a universality that perhaps one can only write after an especially honest heartbreak.

Art Angels wipes the fog from her lens and lays out her vision, clear and uncompromising.

It's invigorating, vulnerable and, at times, uncomfortably raw.

It's almost certainly the producer's most ambitious and most vital work since Untrue.

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 whole album bleeds into one magnificent mess, thanks in part to some incredibly short track times, but also to the nature of the music itself.

It never feels like Dreijer is playing catch-up. Plunge is the natural next step, a realization of impulses that have long lain dormant, or at least unrecognized.

Even if Have You In My Wilderness is Holter's most accessible record to date, it's riddled with enough puzzles, lyrical twists and delicate refinement to remain intriguing listen after listen.

Fetch picks up right where Horizontal Structures left off: von Oswald allowing the group's myriad tones and timbres to bleed out and coagulate.

There's so much blood and soul poured into Music for the Quiet Hour that it almost feels effortless. Along with the fascinatingly fragmented Drawbar Organ EPs, the box set presents what's either a closing chapter or a new beginning in the career of one of electronic music's most luminous illuminati.

The strength of In These Times is in its considered arrangements. The melodies take center stage rather than solely the kinetic rhythmic attack McCraven can unleash whenever he pleases. And when he pleases, his percussion charts can hit with a ferocity that shudders like drum licks plucked from a lengthy Fela-meets James-Brown after-hours live session.

Affection is everything one would want from a pop album—the way it shimmies along with catchy beats, whistle-along melodies and hooks that easily live rent-free in the long-term memory banks. The Jenkins touch here is an unmistakable charm that could very well nudge Affection into "cult album" territory.

For all its mind-melting attention to detail, Hertz's music has rarely sounded so evocative.

When a record is so dazzlingly abstract (or abstractly dazzling), it seems harder to interpret in emotional terms, too. But like LeWitt and his primary-coloured paint brushes, or Dan Flavin and his store cupboard of strip lights, Dillon isn't offering us a feeling so much as giving us a space in which to feel.

On ORCORARA 2010, Crampton fleshes out a unique sound world that's desolate but lush, harsh yet hopeful. It feels like one of her greatest, most permanent works.

The result is one of the most punchy, lyrically explorative UK rap albums of the year.

Arca's most accomplished work to date.

Some tracks, like "Mouth Mantra," simply feel overcrowded. The Haxan Cloak, who mixed the album, struggles to find clarity in busier moments. But the story, visceral and tragic, transcends these imperfections in the telling.

There's a palpable lust for life throughout the 20 tracks, but Edna is at its most arresting when Headie details his journey from custodial sentences to commercial success with unflinching candor.

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

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

serpentwithfeet is not a project that deals in restraint, but it's the mix of melodrama and newfound control that makes soil a great record.

What we're left with is an uneven album that's rarely as profound or as meaningful as it tries to be.

With nothing more at their disposal than techno's characteristically sparing palette, Dozzy and Neel have built something so rich that it has the feeling of a feature presentation.

Reform Club is full of conventional beauty; protracted strings and pads which soar, pulse, float or shimmer on a dub-tinged substrate.

The LP boils down a generation's worth of London music into a restlessly creative mix of dance music, infused with emotions both celebratory and mournful.

In anchoring her songwriting in the canon of '90s dance music, twigs shines with a quality we haven't really seen before. Eusexua is remarkably slippery, allowing songs to go anywhere and do anything, but propelled by the prowess of a songwriter in peak form.

Rema remains steadfast on his path to brilliance. HEIS is a capstone of an artist who's left an indelible mark on Afrobeats, but also Rema's realisation of his own singularity—not just in the great Benin Kingdom before him but the world.

Cheek's vocals are versatile, often soaring into her upper register, then trickling into lower notes. Much of the lyrics across the album are a challenge to make out, but it's a delight to pull scattered meaning out of the obscurity.

Roisin Machine captures the singer at her most triumphant, finally comfortable in her role as an alt-pop icon—there's something casual and more assured about this Roisin Murphy.

As the realised aspirations of Myson's inner-teen, Hollowed is startlingly articulate and mature.

Oil Of Every Pearl's Un-Insides, SOPHIE's first proper album, presents her artistic vision in a purer form than anything she's done before. It is at times unapologetically poppy, beginning with the opening power ballad, "It's Okay To Cry." But it's also utterly, defiantly weird, flouting conventions of rhythm, composition and, perhaps most of all, taste.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

A standout record in an already peerless discography.

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.

On its own terms, the Midsommar score is a sometimes brilliant but limited affair that showcases both Krlic's genius and how that genius suffers under the constraints of a film.

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

The album nostalgically embraces all corners of rock music past with post-punk, heavy metal glossy shoegaze and more, while still pushing the boundaries a good distance forward. ... If The Asymptotical World was the sunset preceding the meteor, then Praise A Lord is the big hunk of rock itself. The resulting explosion—in all of its chaotic, god-defying beauty—leaves a fully formed rock superstar emerging from its ashes.

Afternooners is deceptively complex for soundtrack music.

What is on display here is the potential of unbound artistic striving. I dare say this may not only be Shepherd's magnum opus, but one of Sanders' greatest works as well.

Jlin has plenty to say, and she has a remarkably strong and distinctive voice with which to say it.

Though he's had plenty of strong releases in the past, this one has the inspired feeling of an artist truly finding his footing--a breakthrough, in other words.

Through throat singing, traditionally performed as a dialogue between two women, Tagaq tells ancient stories of the lives of her people from a modern perspective, preserving tradition while helping it evolve.

Raven's underwater mood is all-consuming and meditative, so much so that it takes several listens to fully comprehend all the infinitesimal details that contribute to its brilliance—the sound of water bubbling, a flourishing synth or Kelela's pristine, whispered harmonies.

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.

In the end, LP1 is probably the most singular pop album of the year. It's testament to how emotionally affecting one person's realised vision can be.

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

It traces Yaeji's emotional development, coming to terms with anger and resentment she had suppressed as a child—a period that she channels into her charged and surprisingly bracing new LP.

Pete Swanson isn't "going" anywhere but his own scorched-earth path. If you can withstand the heat, it's probably worth following him for a bit.

Rochelle Jordan is staking her own claim to the dance floor without losing sight of her intimate, sometimes vulnerable songwriting.

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.

Taking touchstones from familiar genres and refiguring them into something completely new, it's like a microcosm of the label as a whole.

LCD Soundsystem have made a better album than they've ever done.

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.

Science Fiction Dancehall Classics is a treasure trove for newcomers as well as On-U completists (there's a generous number of previously unreleased tracks), and a fascinating piece of dance music genealogy.

Modern Jester is one of the most accomplished noise albums of the last several years. Excellent are the chances that it will go down as one of his very finest works.

For all its appeal, DJ-Kicks isn't necessarily Halo's most striking mix. Her 2017 Boiler Room, which incorporated UK funky, grime-adjacent tracks, Príncipe anthems and Whitney Houston, felt slightly fresher, more expressive. But DJ-Kicks is still a success, a standout club mix that reflects the individual streak that runs through Halo's work.

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

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 probably wasn't hard for Koze to look beyond house, because it never completely won him over. Knock Knock makes a case for others to do it as well.

In some ways it's arguably dubstep's first concept album, an expansive and visionary "what if," a dreamscape of a post-globalization, collapsed multicultural society where cultures collide uncontrollably.

Sakamoto has made a workaday logbook into something transcendent, partly because of its intimacy. Whether it's one of his major works is a question for future historians, but coming amidst an ongoing struggle with cancer, its bravery is defiant and splendid, the sound of an artist's soul laid bare.

There's an intense and cautious feeling to Sakamoto and Nicolai's approach, keeping everything at a constant volume and introducing changes only gradually. Glass is good for close listening, trading narrative for pure texture and mood.

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.

Sinephro's spaces not only feel full of life, they're built with the very sounds of it, too, reminding us not to take it for granted.