St Germain conjures up rich and atmospheric landscapes equal to Navarre's earlier work. They're different from where we last left him, but they still seem to find him right at home.

The spirit of the concept is dazzlingly portrayed at times, but the LP also conveys the emptiness of these things, the true idea of a "new pleasure"—everything we want, though not always enough of what we need. But it's great while it lasts.

Salton Sea feels engineered for eminent listenability.

It's something more functional, familiar and safe.

Brute's most interesting flourishes are all surface-level. Take them away and you're left with Al Qadiri reusing the same musical ideas.

Ultimately, Tears In The Club could have been a nearly flawless six-track EP--though the filler doesn't detract from the more noteworthy tunes on here, it doesn't really contribute either.

Without its academic trappings, Projections starts to grate, with its middle-of-the-road niceness and mood of tepid celebration. With them, it's borderline offensive.

"Napoletana" got the Project Pablo ear for melody and signature sweet mood, but the sonics are pristine, every lead flourish and bassline wiggle perfectly placed. Elsewhere the mood deepens, and Project Pablo flavours his melodic groovers with rich atmosphere.

Live manipulation gives In Situ its textures, as Halo hardly lets a few bars go by without tweaking rhythmic elements, introducing new sonics or briefly leaning on an effect. The movements are unpredictable but never distracting or overwhelming.

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

Providence marks a muscular new path for Fake, but he sounds as singular as always.

With a relatively small number of building blocks, Acre has built an album that feels varied, showcases a range of emotion and, most importantly, feels whole.

The State Between Us does, at times, attain a depth of its own, particularly when it's dealing in the sadness of separation Brexit engenders in roughly half of the population. But at other points it just seems to be saying, "Ooh, aren't we quirky?!"

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.

Bridging that pop-underground divide has always been what makes Gou an interesting artist, but on I Hear You, she can't seem to veer from the middle of the road.

No Lube is an impressively literate expansion of Peaches' sonic universe and stands in stark contrast to the one-note tonality of their previous work.

If you come to Foals from an exclusively indie rock perspective, this may blow your tiny mind. But if this is Foals' attempt to infiltrate clubland proper, it falls short.

Their lush synth textures are a few tints darker and their songwriting is a whole lot tighter.

The twists and turns can be compelling, but they make The Catastrophist feel somewhat lopsided, with scattered ideas too disparate to congeal as a cohesive listen.

Most of The Triad lacks darkness or tension, which results in a lack of depth and contrast.

Days Gone By focuses on the band's smoky, bedroom-ready style. It's only half the story, but it's still a pretty good one.

It's a rare example of him writing and singing lyrics, and it's endearingly youthful.

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.

Love Letters is more mature, doleful and disconnected from club trends.

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.

Where Ufabulum felt like a garish souvenir from the performance built around it, Damogen Furies is more substantial and self-contained.

Clarke sounds reinvigorated here. It's clear he feels he has nothing to prove to anyone but himself.

The tracks that feel like direct tributes to older, better tunes tend to fare better than the majority of the album, which is hugely sentimental but never sufficiently sharpens its edges to counteract all that mush.