Earrings Off! also features three instrumental tracks, but none of these feel like they add anything to the experience of the album, or its central themes.

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

They continue to write overwhelmingly catchy and energetic songs full of anthemic shout-along choruses that feel hopped up on one too many energy drinks, and though Kamikaze doesn't differ all that much from Blowout on the surface, the music here comes off a little more raw and crunchy, and also a lot more melodic.

There are glorious moments of reflection to be found throughout The Last Panthers too. Circuitous, sweeping pad interludes that, more often than not, come in the form of unusual and unsettling chord progressions to jolt the beauty that's frequently on offer.

The stripped down feeling of the record works to Islands favor on each of SIRHAS's ten tracks.

Diamonds and company hold on to flimsy synth arpeggios and pop contrivances like a child would an old toy.

Sonically and conceptually, the all-purpose artist isn't interested in coloring in between the lines, but focused instead on offering a vibrant option to things once defined as black and white.

It's an introspective, at times hesitant collection yet in the way most introverts allow themselves to relax within company, the more time you invest in The Colour In Anything the more readily you will discover its qualities.

Will is a triumph--it takes the kosmische regurgitations of Oneohtrix Point Never, the choral, almost religious feel of early Julia Holter and the relentless thirst for finding the new in the old of The Caretaker to make an entirely new statement.

They haven't changed their sound, more developed it. They've kept the rawness, the pop songwriting and uncompromising attitude but pushed it sonically further than many would have ever expected them to.

It shimmers with an enchanting beauty that this writer at least has yet to find in any other song this year.

Low just put out their best album in a decade, and For Good seems to be following the same path.

Skepta has learned to remain steadily himself in the face of hurdling success, while delivering one of the most vital albums in the history (and for the future) of globally accepted grime.

Tired Of Tomorrow is a bold, expressive grandiose album that proves capital-R Realists can make something just as beautiful as capital-R Romantics.

While there isn't anything all that distinct about their approach, none of it deters from the fact that Seratones are making some truly fun music.

Without question, Twin Peaks has nailed the mood they strove for with Down In Heaven. Sunken and Wild Onion were solid outings, but it feels as if the group has really hit their stride here with their third and best LP to date.

As we're thrown directly and unmercifully into 'Curtain Twitcher', we're already heavily bruised from the first half of the album, and will have to wait until 'Take It' to finally take a breath.

As If Apart will still add a few gems to your chilled out summer evening playlist, but it certainly leaves a little to be desired in regards to the evolution Cohen was clearly striving toward.

To the gustatory synesthete, listening to Kaytranada's music is probably the equivalent of sucking on a pack of Starburst where all the flavours are orange: refreshing at first, if not a bit sickly in the end.

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.

One cannot help but feel as though, if White Lung had let themselves get a little messier on Paradise, it might have yielded an even more compelling result.

Views, made up of twenty polyrhythmic and eclectically curated tracks, is Toronto's ethos and identity in sonic form, an inside joke between Aubrey Graham and the city he's championed since the start.

It's an astounding debut in which he demonstrates the discipline to shape his wildly creative visions into something not only thrilling and compelling, but also focused.

Although the production looks outward, the recording of these songs is up close and personal, playing up the physicality of Van Wissem's playing as much as the notes themselves. Each string slide and pluck is heard perfectly across much of the airy phrasing.

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

Subtlety is in short supply on Lost Themes II, with soaring guitar solos, industrial synthesisers and violent percussion throughout.

Pop culture's reigning diva appeared in raw form--a vulnerable mess and unapologetically enraged as she thematically confronted her husband and father's alleged infidelity publicly, through visceral imagery and emotionally loaded sonic offerings.

The Diary's strongest cuts come when Dilla is behind the board.