While infested by hooks, yet Life Without Sound bears itself with moral clarity and resolve while rocking damn hard.

Shackles' Gift was born in Maritius, yet constructed in London, it's as indebted to the past as it is to the present and it's to the band's credit that they understand that completely.

Every element that made Neon Indian such a joy through the first two albums has been polished and improved upon to make a record that truly must be heard.

It’s evident that Pusha T is at his most confident on DAYTONA; his rhymes carry confidence and clarity paired with a high head and a release that was well worth the three-year waiting period.

Jenny Hval has never come closer to a universal truth. If she’s often felt to have been speaking from on high, Hval has never been more purely human than on The Practice of Love.

Rather than betting the farm on a couple showstoppers while keeping everything else relatively muted and inconspicuous, Frost pushes himself further and further and creates an incredible experience.

This feels like a band overflowing with ideas in a productive way.

Inspirational work, yet again.

It’s the best National album since Boxer; and for argument’s sake, Devendorf’s drumming hasn’t been this vital for ten years.

Unlike countless hip hop albums that feel slapped together to fit in the artist's favorites alongside the label's, flow unconsidered, each moment of Big Baby feels earned.

Although it seems reductionist to place the album so closely with Ellery's other work, it does seem fitting. He writes in a certain style, produces in a certain style and sings in a certain style. LUH keeps everything that made his previous projects captivating and channels them into areas where they shouldn't really work. But that's why this album works.

Whether they're delivering something rocking, glistening or simply breathtaking, almost every song on this 12 track effort is a gem (only the strange sound collage that is 'Go In' falls flat).

Their vocal frustrations make perfect fodder for their post-punk blasts, and in combination they add up to some of the most invigorating music currently being created, making Wide Awake! a valuable and vital call to arms.

The album is a thrill from start to finish and is perhaps surprisingly accessible, particularly if you are aware of their previous work.

Devour is the first Pharmakon album which was recorded live in the studio, and there is a sense of organic creation to it which is pivotal to the ideas layered within. The warmth of the production separates this album from her previous three, perhaps even suggesting a sense of hope for humanity in the face of overwhelming odds which are stacked against us.

Gira, with the help of many talents, has concocted Swans’ most beautiful yet most bleak sounding record of its 30-plus years existence.

Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper is not the private masterpiece that Person Pitch turned out to be, but it might be the final triumphant salute to an unforgettable chapter in Lennox's career.

Everything’s for Sale will find an audience. Its gilded despair only leaves a greater impression with each listen. If there’s an album for the sad Instagrammer, posing in a beam of perfect light, copyrighted smile, only to heave a sigh, this is it.

Jessica Rabbit is a fucking great feminist-punk record, one of the pop highlights of the year, and the best thing they’ve ever done.

Beware of the Dogs is a wonderful debut album from a luminous young talent.

For anyone willing to stick around long enough to listen, they are richly and endlessly rewarding.

Nilüfer Yanya has managed to produce an album which flits from one template to the next, yet at no time is there a tendency to feel that this is contrived and neither does it suggest an artist scrabbling around for an identity and an audience which then comes with it. These shifts in style always feel controlled, as though the song demands them.

He's created an album that stands as one of his most evocative and ambitious so far.

Ultimately, Abyss is like a nightmare. It consumes you, shows you a darkness you'd tried to keep away from, but in the cold of night, wide awake and heart-pumping you can't deny you enjoy the thrill of it.

The Undivided Five is slow, meandering and intelligent. ... A Winged Victory for the Sullen produce breath-taking works of sumptuous beauty which will no doubt bore the shit out of those who are not equipped with the patience, cultural competence and time to delve into the work properly. That sounds wildly elitist but so be it.

This is still dense music, yes, but crucially it never alienates over its epic 68 minutes: you can drop in on this record at any point and still find a good time. As such, I Was Real feels like the band’s most thorough examination of itself yet--and is all the more satisfying as a result.

Riot Boi is an immensely listenable, often thrilling record, and on the first few spins you're more likely to be seduced by the beats, before digging into the lyrical content.

Diet Cig’s debut album Swear I’m Good At This is a reclamation of female sexual agency, a physical mandate for equality, a gauntlet-throwing promise for world domination, and the most fun I’ve had with a punk album this year.

DeMarco has shifted his musical style in a way that does not feel forced or as though he lost anything in the process. In fact, he feels though he is more refined than ever, offering beautiful and heartbreaking sentiments with a remarkable economy of language, all the while delivering another sonic masterpiece that will undoubtedly soundtrack all too many summer soirees this year.

Sonically the album is engaging and intriguing, but that's only the first layer. The lyrics are poetry, each word there on purpose, just like each note and beat.

With more than enough flagrant energy to satiate the average punk, The Murder Capital—still—is most affecting through its delicate and understatedly sad musings on life and death. In fact, the rest of the record sees the band tap into poetic introversion that is both broad enough to latch onto, yet intimate enough to impress your own experiences and fears.

With Life Metal ... they have minimized those aspects of their sound which were perhaps becoming too comfortable for them, and too familiar for the audience. The result is a work rich in texture, depth and tenderness.

An album that is stacked full of mind-transporting moments, rendered by carefully selected, produced and deployed analogue elements. It’s a lot to pack into 40 minutes, but it ensures that Theory Of Colours is not only a noteworthy debut album, but a statement of beautiful, fascinating intent from Dauwd.

It's rare to come across an album that allows you only the faintest impression of its workings while simultaneously impacting you in a profound way.

If Astroworld suffers from any sin, it’s a nearly endless ambition.

This is perhaps the most simply alive Baths has yet sounded on record, retaining enough of his emotional heft, while allowing for an entirely new collage of flashy, elated songcraft. This is Baths triumphant.

Musically, Mannequin Pussy show off a new-found nuance and detailed understanding that backs up this intricate situation perfectly, spinning the threads of guitar so beautifully that you can mistake the song for romantic, before you’re knocked back to earth by the painful reality of the situation.

Throughout you can’t help but feel the constant swing of life’s moods, channeling through Elias Bender Rønnenfelt to become a drug that’s uplifting, unifying and ultimately deeply entertaining.

This is a slick, polished rock album with a clear lineage from bands such as L7, Sleater-Kinney and Celebrity Skin-era Hole to more contemporary acts such as Du Blonde, Dream Wife and Pip Blom.

They’ve experimented with vocals, concentrated their musical chemistry, further polished their production, and tweaked their songwriting so that the transitions between movements in their songs are less sheer cliff-faces of fury and more lithe passages. All this, combined with some of the best songs they’ve ever written, makes Ordinary Corrupt Human Love the band’s most irrefutable credential as a leader in modern Rock.

Qualm is her inauguration. Its agitated kineticism and flagrant oddness, blossoming from Hauff’s intrinsic charisma and craft, is exhilarating. It is techno gorgeously streamlined; straddling the fucking weird and the primally gratifying, as present in the grimiest tunnel raves as in soundtracking the imminent robot revolution.

The Age of Immunology honors a potentially fading ideal. Should it all come crashing down, it's hard to think of a more fitting, colorful, and ambitious tribute than the one Vanishing Twin have given us here.

It’s an album crammed full of massive singles; the musical equivalent of a table full of gaudy, delicious cupcakes. You know too much of it is probably bad for you, but you can’t help but diving in and sampling each and every one with relish.

Here, Cardi’s explosive personality translates flawlessly into confidence-saturated rhymes about hardships, love and success.

While Kazuashita might not be a completely perfect album, it is as close as you can get to perfect when it comes to fulfilling the potential of the album as an artistic concept. Every piece fits together, it has a message without pontificating, and it’s absolutely crucial to experience it all at once.

While Power conjures up one of the most hectic, impenetrable, and eclectic listening experiences of the year, it’s above all, a true rags to riches story, one that complexingly captures a struggling artist on the verge of fulfilling immense potential.

Queen of Golden Dogs is a bold and original statement that collides together emotions, textures and beats to gloriously dissonant effect. It’s also Vessel's best album to date.

Joseph’s songwriting is descriptive and its simplicity is one of the most fascinating aspects of her artistry. She does not only sing her dark hues, but she also wants us to listen as if we were reading pages of her diary.

Schlagenheim may possess some semblance of the aforementioned genres, alongside others like kraut and yes, even jazz, but pining for some rigid label is futile, because Schlagenheim is one of the most unique rock records released this year and maybe of the past five years.

Even when the album isn't serving up infectious bass riffs and glistening guitar chords, Grey Tickles, Black Pressure offers beautifully constructed songs that, even in the darkest moments, offer a glimmer of hope.

The extra-textual background isn’t as impressive as her music is enjoyable.

Silberman’s compositions are packed with poignancy and are captivating.

Angel is unprepared to commit to anything in the long term, but is always fully committed to now, and this has allowed her to make her boldest and most purposeful step yet.

Glover has delivered an inter-generational, retro-futuristic 11-track history lesson on the healing and inspiring qualities of funk.

Negative Capability is sure to stand the test of time, much like its creator. Marianne Faithfull has delivered a searing late career masterstroke, as vital as any in her storied career.

It's better paced than Arc, which had great songs but grew tiresome. It's the insular nature of these songs that makes the album better than their previous efforts, a purity emerges from their new found restraint, there is depth to be found in its breathing room.

No Home Record is impossible to listen to without making reference to her former band, yet it stands alone as the finest work of a magnificent, imposing talent.

It's accessible, creative, and honest- everything art wishes it could be.

There’s simply no encountering something as powerful, as primal, as Senyawa without scarring. This is their turf, and only they know the rules. Sujud is an experience. Be safe, everyone.

This is what it sounds like when an artist matures, discovers a confidence they perhaps never knew they had, and return, revitalised.

On the Strange Weather EP, she takes this signature style and applies it to the songs of other artists who share the same particular penchant for music that finds inspiration in the dark recesses of our minds. This proves stunningly successful, no doubt responsible in part for the help Calvi recruited in the form of producer Thomas Bartlett (The National, Antony and the Johnsons) and one Mr David Byrne.

A Brief Inquiry is a record of substance that manages to both poke fun at and be a product of its time. The 1975 might be white-boys with guitars, but they're so much more than that.

They continue to plough the same furrow as on their previous albums, yet with a little more urgency, consistency and richness that some of their earlier work lacked. There is a simplicity here, both in terms of lyrical content and musicality.

These 16 minutes from Thundercat will likely prove to be one of the year's thought provoking and most rewarding listens of the year.

It makes for an exhausting and engrossing listen, and ultimately can’t be anything but a life-affirming statement.

Similar to the likes of Animal Collective, it weeds out the ordinary pop listener to reward the fan devoted to deciphering its layers.

An already impressive album that both solidifies their reputation as one of the more compelling bands to come out of the 90s alternative landscape, and cements their reunion as one of the few necessary ones that are currently happening.

On The Echoing Green is an experiential album, but not in the way of something like The Wall. This is an album that seduces you to come and spend some time with it; sit in the shade with it, stroll in the hot summer sun with it, take a dip in the lake with it.

A supremely assured, instantly addicting debut, it walks the precarious balance beam between earworm and confessional.

The year’s first R&B masterpiece.

Over repeated listens, the former evolves into a touching meditation on love’s complexity and erraticism, where introspection intercedes the Big Important Questions.

The title couldn't be more appropriate--it's an album about the healing power of music, a testament from someone who made it through, a shout to keep going.

As her music shows, Kelly Lee Owens is honest, fluid and meaningful. Her rise to success is owed to her own creative mind and assuring that taking time to create a solid product can be a virtue.

A true musical blessing, extraordinary stuff.

Sun Coming Down already feels like a cult classic and an institution that embraces a thousand sides of the punk rock coin while retaining a steadfast originality.

The music found on Safe in the Hands of Love thrives. It's just as boundary pushing but at the same time, it offers easier access points to the complex and often messy but brilliant world of Yves Tumor.

This is R&B and dense pop bent to its creators will, rather than anything the other way around. This is Beyoncé for a panic attack. This is, only more and more so with time spent in its valleys and peaks, essential listening.

Heartleap works superbly as a collection of songs, and can only serve to extend and preserve her legacy.

It’s an as surprising and unpredictable, yet unquestionably enjoyable 40 minutes of music.

The sound palette of If Anything has been refined and expanded without compromising the band's explosive might.

No Cities To Love finds the trio facing inwards, rocking out in a tight space, writing short and punchy punk songs and just generally enjoying bouncing off each other once more.

Deerhoof show that pushing boundaries can yield fantastic results.

His music is meant to be both nakedly honest and cathartic at once, and this is where Skip a Sinking Stone succeeds the most.

What Hansen and company have accomplished with Epoch (and their previous albums) can only be described as tapping into the sublime.

Barnett's emotional candour on Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit shows us that sometimes she brushes off her mistakes and sometimes she dwells on them--just like the rest of us.

An ambitious, varied and ardently rewarding listen, Titanic Rising is pop music for ages and worlds far beyond our own, and an emphatic show of prowess from one who is sure to be one of indie’s new radiant lights.

It’s her most complete-feeling album to date, and never seems like Halo is trying to please anyone but herself. Yet, she also manages to create emotional bridges through the sincerity of her compositions.

Although sonically ominous, Relfection of Youth possesses a sophisticated breed of optimism which embodies itself through realism.

Need To Feel Your Love is more than just a terrific debut, it also happens to be of the best damn rock records released this year. What makes it work so well has to do with the sincerity of the band themselves.

Georgia is not only an x-ray of Barnes' emotional core but also a snapshot of the divergent ways in which music in London (not exclusively, but more commonly) is embracing lots of genres and sounds and throwing them together with complete abandon.

Through their highly freeform but affectionate collaboration, the trio consistently accentuates the potency of the passion in the songs.

Mystère is a long, cohesive, and magnificent work of art, full of vivid soundscapes and synesthetic tableaux.

It's the conflict between tension and resolve, the contrast between beauty and ugliness, and the overall uncertainty that makes this such an interesting and enthralling experience, and also one of Porter's most startling and accomplished releases yet.

The results are unmistakable. Over V's 31 minutes, a listener could theoretically skip to any track and find themselves carelessly dancing into the void with the joyous, raucous tracks that Wavves has meticulously created.

The joyous moments continue to come thick and fast as you work your way through The Voyager.

To combine filmic orchestral scores with the punch of hip-hop, the fun of indie-dance, flavours of funk, nocturnal London sounds, glistening electronica, with such natural fluidity makes War Room Stories a genuine pleasure to listen through; and makes it not just an interesting but an important step forward in highlighting the versatility of "the band", as well as in prolonging its perceived shelf-life.

Strangers is an astounding combination of styles that takes music that is fairly usual, and turns it into something completely unique that strikes slowly but deeply, and irrevocably.

The Bride might not be as accessible as its predecessors, yet after time invested it will have you curiously considering ceremony, matrimony, and individuality.