Centralia is by far the most satisfying release to date by the Brooklyn-based minimalist post-rock duo Mountains.

It’s as though she’s thrown a jumble of ideas up in the air without thinking too much about where they land. At times, this means her sixth record feels refreshingly free and at others a little too sketchy. But it’ll still make her fans think, sigh, shrug and smirk.

His barnacled baritone steers a steady course through Moog-soaked covers of favourite songs, with sombre lines about dark oceans, soulless days, and skirting a skeleton coast.

Todd Snider has the kind of audience rapport that comes only through years of one-night stands and the confidence that builds in one's character – even if that character is of an inveterate ne'er-do-well peacenik, wryly proud of his inability to grow old gracefully.

A bitterly beautiful album.

All told, it’s a magnificent, career-defining set, full of hard-won wisdom, assertive independence--and compassion in abundance.

This 30th-anniversary performance of the album at Glasgow’s Barrowlands doesn’t convey quite the sense of risk that accompanied their early shows, but the cocktail of noise and melody has largely retained its potency.

For all its glimmering synths and the robotic pathos of Taylor’s idiosyncratic vocals, this is a record with both heart and soul.

Unlike I Love You, Honeybear and Pure Comedy, which were rooted in performativity, God’s Favorite Customer is sincere, raw and melancholy.

It just feels tedious and predictable. Portentous twangs of guitar? Tick. Shivery percussion? Tick. Screeches of feedback? Tick. A frontman who delivers lyrics (rambling prose) in a croaky, squawking gasp that recalls Mark E Smith? Tick.

It's a dub reimagining that takes the material further out, into a soundscape whose fractured dubstep tones, sped-up samples and drum'n'bass beats only occasionally work in its favour.

It’s wonderful to find so many moreish layers in music that was, apparently, composed so quickly. Grab yourself a bean bag and settle in for the long haul with this one.

Given how far out Scott Walker had stepped with 2012’s complex and challenging, allusive and abusive Bish Bosch, the five tracks which comprise Soused seem almost mainstream by comparison.

As with all of The 1975’s escapades, it ought to be a disaster. Instead, the showpiece triumphs as an unlikely paragon of social media-era pop. In a glass bottle, tamed and ridiculed, the inferno is strangely beautiful.

Spare Ribs certainly reflects the personal and political overload of 2021, but half an hour in you’d be forgiven for scanning the horizon for your stop.

Tracks such as the blistering “Temple of the Sun” take no prisoners, taking little time before exploding into the kind of full-frontal assault we’ve come to expect from the heavier side of metal. Elsewhere “The Luminous Sky” takes a more frenetic approach though feels no less uncompromising, while “The Sacred Soil” closes out a record that not only shows exactly where Skeletonwitch are in 2018, but also where contemporary metal is at as well.

Even by Wilco’s adventurous standards, Star Wars is possibly the most unusual, exploratory work of the band’s existence.

Two Ribbons is another milestone for the duo. Their third record finds the inseparable pair separated. Written mostly individually, it explores the small fissures beginning to show in their friendship as they’ve grown up and grown apart. The result is remarkable.

There’s a confidence and flexibility to his disparate themes.

This new collection finds Horan moving towards the lusher production sound of his former bandmate Harry Styles. Laurel Canyon references mingle easily with Eighties synth-pop and Noughties guitar rock. It’s beautifully cohesive.

The charm – and perhaps a flaw – of Collapsed in Sunbeams is how easy it is to drift in and out of it. At times, Parks’s prism colours and ideas can leap out, scatter and startle you. At others, the myriad references to fruit and fashion alongside mental health catchphrases can feel like flipping through a magazine. But then, that’s how the light works. And I’m so glad Parks is here to brighten this dark year.

A master at cramming elaborate lines into verses far too small for them, Bradfield could have made Even in Exile a wordy tangle of exotic oppressions. Instead, to draw parallels with the “acceptable” brutalising of today’s socialist figures, he takes a more impressionistic approach.

Themes of lust, power politics and rebellion are smuggled in via unusual locutions, de-synchronous beats and treated sample-loops – interesting stuff, though occasionally one yearns for a decent tune.

Despite the limited instrumental palette, there’s a broad variety of approaches.

Hive Mind feels much more collaborative, put together in studios and homes the band rented around the world. It’s undoubtedly one of their best works: the band have a synergy that draws the listener in, allowing you to revel in their irresistible confidence, and hope they might invite you to join the party.

It’s alienation couched in the most genial manner; and along the way, he gets to muse over such matters as speech and silence, mysticism and medicine, relationships and reality, in a beautifully meandering song-cycle.

The lyrics sound like they’re being negotiated, rather than expressed, while the music, for all its pleasing West Coast and Brit-psych affinities, lacks the risk and edge that made Sixties psychedelia such a thrill-ride.

If it's not quite the landmark that was Wilco (the album), it's not far behind, as absorbing as any you'll hear this year.