In Personal Record, Eleanor Friedberger has delivered on every promise she’s ever made with her music, and come up with an ever-unfolding, fully-realised gem.

Floaty angst in abundance, Gengahr have produced an all encompassing soundtrack to this year’s briefest romances and most curelly broken hearts.

It will take you places. Places that don’t feel like they exist in our dimension, on our plain. This all just feels so brilliantly different and new; a very special debut indeed.

In the end, The Space Between is a reminiscence of what was, what has been, and what will be, all at once. The outer space for her is vast yet intimate, daunting yet beautiful, and she beckons us, quite restlessly, to discover the miraculous beauty of it.

Johnson wordlessly serenades us as the band plays out over the final credits. A reminder that sometimes the personal hits harder and lasts longer than anything else.

Thematically the album's tight and the catchy hooks and danceable rhythms drip with just the right amount of psychedelic dance-pop sweetness. With infectious grooves, great musical phrases and smooth almost sultry vocals, it all makes for another Saint Etienne record that's extremely hard to dislike.

The album’s only real mishap is the lack of sonic cohesion between energizing jams and moments of quiet clarity, but each song is able to hold its own as a solid pop offering.

Whether it's the drifting of "Singalong Junk," the stripped down, jazz-cat prowling of "Mountain Moves," or the electro-tripping of "Sea Moves," Deerhoof have simply outdone themselves with Mountain Moves, an album that requires as much focus as it does imagination.

Life After Youth is proof that the best days needn't necessarily be the early ones, and marks a strong and exciting return for fans and band alike.

His languid delivery belies the very real anxieties that Dark Days + Canapés is scored through with, but the nervy sonic backing absolutely serves to accentuate them; what that leaves us with is an album that's more about personal politics than global ones, but that still feels scored through with the suffocating disquiet of life in 2017.

There’s the sense that the artist is using this record as a transitionary vehicle, a space where he can blend familiar themes with unfamiliar sounds, adopt different lyrical approaches and mix them with different styles of production and instrumentation. Such an effort is testament to Sweatshirt’s status as one of the foremost artists of the hip-hop avant-garde.

On Our Two Skins, Payten reckons with big decisions and big changes, claiming them as part of her life to beautiful effect.

On his third album, he continues crafting his inimitable blend of pop, R&B, and electronica, ferociously cementing his place amongst the very best at work today.

Taking their cues from alternative sub-genres of the last thirty to forty years, Girl Scout offer their own self-effacing contribution to infectiously febrile effect.

Not for a long time have I listened to something that so delights in its lack of abandon; their name might be uninspiring, but Cloud Nothings’ output is clearly anything but.

While she’ll have to work even harder to find an angle for record number two her debut delivers everything you could have hoped for from a pop star in 2013.

Dupuis’s credo on Slugger is so simply, yet still colorfully as expected, stated and essential that flash-drive copies of Slugger should accompany all high school freshman Health class textbooks.

On With Light and With Love, Woods once again prove that they can casually strike the perfect balance between imaginative pop confections and untethered psychedelic jams.

Constantly changing, Mothers is whatever you want to make of it. Presenting a sound that never settles, and will never tire, Swim Deep have at last demonstrated the strength they've always been capable of.

In the end this feels like a record made by people seeking hope and escape while – like many of their audience – secretly doubting everything. It's fertile inspiration for music that twists Metric’s signature sound into new shapes that seem a good fit for the psychic terrain of the supposed swinging 2020s.

One of Cerulean Salt’s great triumphs is that we believe in these people, the album’s intimacy heightens its sense of realism, its characters feel living.

Factory Floor’s music is distilled down into three elements. Rhythm. Synths. Vocals. That they make something so evocatively alienated, so compulsively unknowable and so bleakly irresistible from simply this is a sharp, uncompromising, emphatic victory.

This is a pleasant plateau he’s found himself on, and it’s a perfect launching platform for further, more avante-garde endeavours.

II is another step forward for a band who were once a side project, but now stand firmly alone and away from the shade cast by others.

Overall, there is something deeply satisfying about the majority of the album, anchored by Skepta’s unique vocal delivery and a sonic playfulness that he has long perfected. Skepta has proven himself a pioneer at several points of his career, now it’s just good to him hear at the top of his game.

All things considered, there are far more winners than losers here, and that's nothing if not a pleasant surprise.

Of course The Most Lamentable Tragedy is ridiculous. It's also dumb, intelligent, heartbreaking and life-affirming.

Hoorn’s sultry vocals; swirling, gossamer textures; and grand orchestral arrangements tirelessly interact with the record’s musculature to develop and bring to life the exquisite and anthemic anatomy of Spiritual Songs For Lovers To Sing.

A vibrant and digestible yet existential and thought-provoking treat.

With only the most faithful replications of the original performances falling in any way flat, the contributors' ability to balance reverential respect with an ethos of printing their own identity on these indelible songs is what makes I'll Be Your Mirror succeed where so many similar tributes nosedive into dull irrelevance.

Death Valley Girls have collectively crafted a record worthy of their dusty Californian roots, an album which is a step up from any previous works featuring some of their most infectious jaunts.

One never gets the impression that she's battling against or drowning within her riptides; instead the vocals and guitars assume a kind of subservient relationship, the voice somehow calling, from out of the void, the raging whorl.

GOD isn’t about sensory pleasure. It’s about sensory gluttony, auditory overload, and revelling in the difficulty of its pacing.

Gojira have turned their grief into triumph. It will ensure they don’t remain on the fringes of metal’s elite for much longer.

Whilst the album on a whole is routed in vulnerability – Williams the chanteuse, cathartically pouring whatever remains of herself into her most precious form of expression, “Just A Lover” signifies a shift; a marker of unfinished means, as the pieces she’s surrounded by begin to coagulate into an entirely new feeling.

While there are moments of significant note here, Glowing In The Dark as a whole doesn’t feel, or more importantly sound, like the album that will finally solidify the band in delivering what is their true potential.

The Beths have managed to create another overwhelmingly thrilling record. One in stunning communion with their debut but also distinctly its own creature.

Could It Be Different? carries on exactly where they left off. In their songwriting, The Spook School have always merged transformational politics with an anthemic quality, and the LP's opener is no exception.

If a whole album could sum up my juvenile years of prepubescent chanting along to anthems in the kitchen at house parties, it would be this.

It’s intended to breathe life into everyday objects we take for granted. You made need a dash of imagination to bring those items into consciousness, but Silver helps the process along.

“Grecian Summer” seems like a Hanging Gardens off-cut, all bouncy beats and twinkling synths, whilst “Faraway Reach” is a blissed-out, breezy tune with just the right amount of funk. These moments are, however, disappointingly few and far between.

As a crucial companion piece to her LPs proper, Phases achieves the rare distinction of must-have odds-and-ends album.

The scale of Van Etten’s ambition--musical and otherwise--is now such that we’re never likely to see her make a wholesale return to this kind of territory; as a document of her songwriting origins, though, (It Was) Because I Was in Love is fascinating.

The album just takes you to the place in your brain where everything is just fine.

Guy Walks into a Bar… is an album built on disco-dreams and broken hearts and is guaranteed to show you a good time.

He is a true, wonderful artist that seems – on this evidence – to be on a one-man mission to take country out farther into the wilderness that its ever been. Make sure you’re along for the ride.

Complete with dreamy guitar bends, gorgeous harmonies, and a candid lyricism that Phoebe Bridgers would be proud of, If I Never Know You Like This Again has undoubtedly delivered a hat-trick for the Derry-born artist.

On their seventh LP, Joyce Manor find a fine middle ground, and the result is their best record since 2012’s Of All Things I Will Soon Grow Tired.

Marking their rangiest and most integrated foray, Not Here Not Gone is a doom, 'gaze, and stoner speedball. There’s an existential space here we all know.

The specificity of the lyrics and the boldness of the electronic orchestration should theoretically preclude this--but Grant lets the emotions that drive them show through enough that you can’t help but connect.

Where Culture of Volume excels it is a progression and refinement of prior work. But for all its ambition, it’s a showreel of promise and potential rather than a cohesive whole.

Let’s Eat Grandma have made one of the most intoxicating, inventive and original records of the year.

There's a lot to like here. "Bucky, Boris and Dent" aren't long for this world, but their memory lives on thanks to the song's chipper melody. It's just that a good chunk of the tracklist unfolds along a steady procession of waltzes. They're all gorgeous, too, smooth and shiny as a commemorative dinner plate. The spacey interludes will keep you on your toes, but anyone who's looking for a hoedown might get bored in a hurry.

Agree with them, or write them off as abstracted lunatics, The Shadow of Heaven is an incredible persuasive push for thoughtful guitar music, in an often vacuous mainstream.

Forgetting The Present is the latest and most perfect union of Remember Remember’s distinctive blend of styles. Expect that record to stand for as long as it takes for their next album to appear.

Interestingly the relationship described in Tenderness is between Standell and a new lover, which you would expect to be a difficult topic for Blue Hawaii to collaborate on, but they are alarmingly mature in the way they support each other on this musical project.

Some listeners may miss the rawer sounds and leanings of her debut and the instrumental adventurousness of her second album, as Lahey wends her way through a less incendiary and more restrained sequence. Still, she employs volume dynamics skillfully, her melodies are consistently enrolling, and her lyrics, at once colourful patter, empathetic pep-talk, and a vehicle for catharsis, are aptly accessible.

Love You To Death is a really, really good pop record.

This message of positivity, strength and optimism is one that is weaved throughout each track on their new album Ash.

For its occasional low ebbs, Oxymoron is an impressive display of bleak wit.

Ultimately, Rock n Roll Consciousness is a collection of songs that would sit as comfortably in and amongst Sonic Youth’s back catalogue as they do within Moore’s own solo work. And that's no bad thing at all.

Enter Shikari are as invigorating as ever, and perhaps at their most invigorated too.

MartyrLoserKing may not just be one of Saul Williams' best, but it could also find itself among the most important albums of this year.

Marigolden is a quiet exclamatory statement hearkening toward what’s gone missing from America’s roots.

Ricocheting through the wandering quips and rustic palette of Watch My Moves, Vile resists any temptation to curtail his free-roaming private wilderness, doubling down on the ambling strand of songwriting sure to sate seasoned listeners.

Their second album continues the work of the first, a yardstick for the heavy guitar sound, and is in its own way as hard hitting, visceral and effortlessly brilliant.

Arc Iris is traditional music thrillingly positioned at the nexus of the old and new.

Broken Twin may eventually necessitate more gusto and variation in tempo and dynamics should Romme want to further forge her plow forward. However, she intended for May to be a return to basics; with it, she has produced a compelling and painstakingly beautiful triumph of understatement.

So yes, it's a cracking release from DTP, but it's not without fault. You certainly get your money's worth though and only a fool would hesitate before recommending it.

It may take some time for casual fans to fully embrace the record’s shifting sound, but anybody who has ever dealt with loss can get something out of Away.

Ultimately, United States of Horror is more than just a collection of songs. It’s exactly what Ho99o9 intended it to be: a blistering manifesto for a disenfranchised America.

This project DJ Kicks is the most successful as it is marked by a spirit of rebirth of its author.

Gas Lit’s intent is so immediate, it communicates its significance regardless. Its statement is not just one you can hear or read about. More importantly, it’s one you can feel.

While there are undoubtedly highlights on Sympathy For Life, it seems like fans will have to keep waiting to see the band fully commit to their dancefloor ambitions.

The Things We Do sounds like the product of an alternate reality in which Bruce Springsteen was a teenager in the 2000’s who spent all his time crafting the perfect instant messenger away notifications instead of ruminating on small town America. But Alex and his bandmates pull it off with sheer conviction and force of will.

It’s a tense work, a deeply troubling piece--it evokes, at least in terms of mood, noise-terrorists like Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire. It’s also a thrilling record, one that stands up to multiple listens, and with each listen it becomes easier to digest.

At the end of the day, Gibbs is too talented of a rapper to put out a lackluster album, so while Shadow of a Doubt might not go down as one of his classics, it features more than enough quotables and street-smart truisms to be worth a few spins.

It’s a pretty relentlessly upbeat, pacey affair that could do with stripping things back (as it does a little, to great success, on ‘East Side Glory’) a tad more often--but not many.

The bleak landscape around Dungeness can provoke contrasting responses, and both the sense of malevolence (it’s the site of a nuclear power station) and stark beauty are well reflected on this masterly recording.

What A Boost is Rozi’s best, most interesting and experimental album to date. It’s what happens when her introversions gather the worldliness and confidence to let others in. There’s all the same tenderness, all the same familiarity, but it’s never sounded this good before.

Overall, TYRON is not quite the same intense powerhouse as Nothing Great About Britain. The strength of the first half gives way to half-hearted examinations of one’s place in the world. But Slowthai still delivers a compelling record which seeks to discover and establish a self-portrait that’s a little messy but worth praising for its efforts at rough-around-the-edges ingenuity.

Once the tempos settle and some semblance of rational order is retained, Eye of I proves a less gnarly companion.

Con Todo el Mundo feels like a record to be enjoyed in transit, towards somewhere sunny, optimistic, exciting.

When all’s said and done Chills On Glass is an exhilarating record with a variety of shades, but its biggest achievement is its ability to create such weird and wonderful sounds whilst maintaining the potential to appeal to more than a small minority.

Apple is barely a whisper in the breeze by comparison at ten tracks long, and in the way that 7G meticulously unpicked Cook’s innards so fans could see the master’s mind at work, Apple weighs out the specifics and pours them into the meting pot.

There’ll be plenty of albums this year that grab you by the throat more vigorously than Atlas does, but very few of them will be quite as lovingly nuanced--and none will make the guitar sound anything like as appealing.

The glue holding Martyn’s third LP together is his immaculately-produced tone rather than succinct emotional movement through the album. The individual tracks don’t suffer from it, but it makes sitting down and listening all the way through The Air Between Words a less attractive prospect than doing the same for Immunity. That being said, there’s plenty to take away from Martyn’s third LP.

Despite the occasional lack of captivating subject matter, it signifies a grown woman embracing new beginnings. The grim clouds are already clearing towards the finale – a million little stars bursting, fluttering, ready for more grandeur.

As Brun has demonstrated over these last two records, whether experimenting or sticking closer to home, she remains essential listening.

It’s the imagery that Williams draws from in her lyrics that places you there. ... Despite the sense of movement, one doesn’t get the feeling that Williams is driving, running or swimming towards nor away from anything in particular. Rather, that she’s on the journey because it means something in itself to sit alone in a dark and silent car and see everything become clearer.

It’s a very brave record where Deradoorian eschews the traditional language of pop music to create her own pictures and conversations and turn them into brilliantly beautiful songs.

Allie X's debut, 2017's CollXtion II, was a fun, if simplistic outing, but Cape God is an album undeniably made by a woman truly forging her own path however she sees fit. Not to mention championing the wickedly bright future of avant-garde, ascendant music.

YOU’LL HAVE TO LOSE SOMETHING is by far the band’s most straightforward record. This isn’t to say however they have lost what makes them one of the most progressive bands around; sonic textures still overlay collages of obscure samples, whilst the method of individual members writing separate streams of consciousness verses before coming together to record still creates enviable levels of lyrical surrealism.

It’s difficult not to wish that the entire album was full of the same ingenuity as its first half, because there's so much potential and talent evident in those first tracks. It’s still early days, though, and the huge themes and inspirations Georgia plays with in Seeking Thrills showcase a true rising star of British pop.

Things Are Great is certainly a return to their best form, and it shows signs of the band entering a new golden era with the next one. Just hope it’s not another six years in the making.

Uplifting, powerful and sincere, Pip Blom deliver a rich, ocean-inspired debut that is instantly captivating. This is the opening chapter to something very exciting.

Vile had the opportunity, with the success of his previous solo album, to make something completely polished and aim for the stars to just see where he landed. Rather than dialling back the finesse, he could have aimed for his Rumours, his Full Moon Fever. Instead, his eyes seemly firmly fixed on the road, then at the beach and then at the gutter. And it’s a thrill to join him everywhere he goes.

A clear and consistent exercise in true class from a band who clearly haven’t lost a step, they just took a few stray ones.