Guerrilla's rough kuduro is an impressive leap for a mature style. But its most remarkable feature is the artist's unflinching embrace of a distressing legacy. As a memorial to his family's story and Angola's past, Guerrilla is more than a mark of respect. It's an act of love.

From start to finish, Nothing To Declare poses scintillating questions that have no answers, leaving genre tropes smoking on the electric chair. DJ Haram proves the perfect dance partner for Moor Mother.

Now, in 2014, Vessel has given us one of the year's best electronic music albums, and it's hardly electronic.

Given the ubiquity of some of this material, It's Album Time is a little tricky to assess on its own merit. But with tracks like "Delorean Dynamite," "Johnny And Mary," and "Old Joy," there are certainly plenty of grandiose stretches to keep us satisfied.

rje had another ace up his sleeve: It's the Arps, a glistening modern disco EP that, at the risk of splitting hairs, is probably his finest yet.

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

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.

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.

The album is quite possibly his most stirring and accomplished work to date.

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.

It's another triumph for Friends of Friends, and it's a breakthrough for a young producer finally emerging with an individual and inventive style previously only hinted at.

It's her strongest project to date, a thrilling fusion of classical and electronic music delivered in astounding clarity.

The real freaks can nerd out on the harmonic theory that will wash right over most ears on this divinely sequenced record. You don't need to be educated to enjoy Malone's music: it's emotive, world-building and all-encompassing. The beauty lies within that.

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.

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.

It's a fascinating mosaic in which every tiny detail lends colour and depth to a work of real, high-minded seriousness.

Huge credit is due to Audika: while Picture Of Bunny Rabbit is an archival compilation built from disparate sources, it feels like the kind of asymmetrical, twisty little solo album Russell would have made himself, not just a bonus disc.

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

R.I.P. is the most enveloping and fully developed of his cultivated soundworlds yet.

It feels like a miniaturized epic, and it sees Mendez touch on all the established hallmarks of his already renowned sound, embellishing it here and there with grandiose flourishes.

SickElixir channels his metal background into a masterpiece of slanted techno. These 14 molten tracks judder from industrial hip-hop to syncopated sludge, redefining what a techno album can be.

Like the phantom motion you feel laying in bed after long hours in transit, Themes for an Imaginary Film is bound to stick with you, drawing you in deeper with each turn of the ignition.

The image has no direct connection to the music (it was drawn in the '70s, before Halo was born) but it's intricate, strange and beautiful--much like the album itself.

Everything Squared is both a closed loop back to the fundamentals of the band's sound and a new tributary opening up, once again confusing any attempts to accurately place Seefeel anywhere but in their own time and space.

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.

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.

It's one of the most engaging and gripping techno albums of the year anyway.

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.