Sebenza sounds like nothing else out there and yet LV's knack for genre-mincing produces an album that sounds both timeless and completely of its time, crossing musical and political borders with confident finesse.

Not so serious, just damn fun. Davis is taking big swings, purposely stomping through giant puddles like a kid again, eager to see how stain patterns form. So even when he misses, he still hits.

The album's wordless songs are almost as riveting as their counterparts.

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.

Hye Jin refines her sound, pulling from trap and boom-bap, not to mention dubstep and techno, to turn out a coming of age hip-house album. Before I Die is the clearest artistic vision we've heard from Hye Jin.

Together, Dom Maker and Kai Campos are something truly special. Apart, they still sound pretty damn talented, which makes this diversion a welcome one as the group work towards their next grand statement.

On Giant Swan, the duo display a fearsome mastery of techno dynamics, but it's their detachment from that world that makes their music so compelling.

JIAOLONG is one of the year's most consistently compelling LPs, whether as home listening evening fuel or out and about in the sweaty rooms for which it was designed.

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.

In the hands of artists as confident and unflinching as these three, the scope for discovery and growth becomes infinite. The darkest of gems.

They'll be fully outted soon--with an album this good, the backstory can't help but see the light of day--but even without the anonymity, Tiger & Woods will be plenty spicy.

Nazar's deadpan delivery bleeds into Demilitarize's rough parchment of kuduro, blotting out Guerilla's sharper-edged scroll, sometimes more heavily than it needs to. It's a slight blemish on a record that otherwise sees Nazar further reshape kuduro into a singular style that speaks to the shut-ins as much as it does the dancers.

The extended runtimes on Perpetual Now provide each of these pensive sound pieces enough room to tell their own meandering stories, with a dynamism that takes you out of time, placing you firmly within each boundless, everchanging meditation. At this music's core is an insight into the machinations of rRoxymore's mind.

As gripping as the album is all the way through-it seems to chart an on/off relationship even more directly than their eponymous album did-its best moment is actually its first. Opener "Angels" is one of the meekest xx tracks, but it's easily among their most powerful.

Shepherd's flawless Eglo catalogue had the power to coax his followers off the dance floor with him, and Elaenia's sophisticated sense of musical accomplishment ought to keep them there.

The progression in Atobe's work is incremental. Beyond the title-track, Yes mostly does away with the classy, tech house-style snap prevalent on 2018's Heat. For an artist that emerged as a model of consistency, Atobe takes a surprising amount of left turns.

The band's mix of disco, funk, new wave, dancehall and West African music would in most hands sound muddled or derivative. What happens instead is music filled with life and imagination of the kind described by Stuart Evans, the cofounder of the Green Door Studio, who once likened Golden Teacher to seeing "a robot dancing with a leopard."

It's in this border between a club setting and the divine that Fountain comes alive. Using her voice as a modular system, Pramuk suggests a ritual that's both folkloric and futuristic.

Halo tackles these chunky themes and textual cacophony with a score that never sits still, folding synthetic sounds into acoustic recordings and darting across time and space with the efficiency of a jump cut.

A diverse, compelling tapestry of 2-step, house and broken beats.

We Stay Together isn't a retread of Passed Me By, it's a continuation--but there are signs of life this time.

On It Is What It Is, Bruner—unlike Pastorious—finds a way out, channeling his pain into great, uplifting art.

The result is one of the most emotionally powerful synth albums in a time where they seem absolutely dime a dozen.

It's a powerful formula, and Dall and Ander have basically perfected it here.

Bring Me the Head Of... will not win Dunn an army of new fans, you are either on his wavelength or you're not. It is, however, among his finest work to date and shows an ever-growing refinement and understanding of his chosen medium.

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

Keszler has been able to turn the overwhelming nature of urban life into something beautiful, and it's one of his best records as a result.

The album bops and bangs as he explores throbbing Detroit techno and bouncy Kraftwerkian synth pop, overlaying those genres with recordings of his time in Hong Kong to create a deeply spiritual album that fuses traditions, lineages and memories.