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.

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.

The album is incredibly rich from beginning to end, and totally unpredictable.

Like most of his records, his self-titled LP shows a talent that stretches well beyond house music, weaving together funk, soul, hip-hop, jazz and R&B into a rich and unpredictable bricolage.

The most fully formed and wholly unique record in his discography.

With KOCH, Gamble has found a canvas that's just the right size to fit everything on, to hold the whole beautiful thing up at once.

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.

trip9love...??? is easily one of the greatest accomplishments in the small but impressive Tirzah catalogue.

The album is not only one that fans will cherish for years to come, but it will surely be the record that draws a whole new generation of fans into her deeply personal, and always captivating, world.

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.

Patience for Take Me Apart validates her audience who saw her as the future from the start. You won't soon break free of it.

Vynehall's entry into the long-running series doesn't have quite the same crowd-pleasing quality, but like the Moodymann mix it's brilliantly executed.

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.

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

One of the album's key qualities is how Vynehall uses these musicians to enrich a sound that feels authentically his own. There are almost no dance beats on the record, but again, this feels like Vynehall moving farther down a path he'd already explored.

When Bruner's social conscience speaks up, the insights--spiced with slacker humour, free of sanctimony--are persuasive, even moreso when accompanied by an embrace of his flaws.

The LP hops between ideas and experiments in the tradition of the rock music double-album, and even within individual songs things are rarely straightforward.

Halo's records have always posed tricky questions, and Dust features her most complex and engrossing yet.

Martin and Robinson cycle through stages of grief, derision, self-hatred and abject loneliness with an honesty that could make you flinch.

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.

Holter has always taken pop and presented her own masterful version of it. But her desire to break through the distressing clatter of the present is what makes Aviary her most captivating album yet.

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.

This new LP is understated by comparison, with fewer jarring moments and more shifting grooves.

Piñeyro taps into the rarefied air of so many early IDM records, a mix of beauty, nostalgia and melancholy.

At a little under 40 minutes, Screen Memories is a concise LP with few faults. Its sequencing brings out the variety on offer.

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.

Colleen's most immediate and affecting LP to date.