["Listen Out"] like so many songs on Last Evenings On Earth, has a fidgety, loosely controlled nature that sees it stray off into almost freeform sections before winding itself back in again, but it’s precisely this inclination to push boundaries that makes Melt Yourself Down so appealing.

This is a record that is highly sonically ambitious, and even the moments that don’t quite come together are carried by Beyoncé’s vocal talents and sheer star power.

Methyl Ethel have an innate knack for a tune, yet the darker ideas can feel unremittingly earnest.

It’s bold approach, from a group of musicians clearly focused on soaking in a wide range of influences and offering their own distillation of the Tuareg sound. The apprentices aren’t fully ready to surpass their masters just yet, but they are intent on writing their own story.

On The Ship he has managed once again to take listeners somewhere thrilling and new, while rising to the challenge of adding another dimension to a distinctive career filled with innovation and originality.

Total Time’s earthly escapism has stars in its eyes and dirt under its fingernails.

The recipe for their success is straightforward, but they do manage to indulge in some more experimental desires by pushing Geronimo’s voice to the margins of the mix on tracks like the psychedelic “Bird’s Eye.”

Always Strive and Prosper is arena rap in jet-set dance-pop drag, and while A$AP Ferg’s talent occasionally flickers when it’s directed in the wrong places, it shines brightest when he’s just being himself.

Niki & the Dove are making their own quiet contribution to politics on Everybody’s Heart is Broken Now and at the same time having a subtle evolution, rather than revolution, of their own. Same band, different tempo, slow riot.

There is a lot to appreciate here: Gnod have proven themselves adept in new areas, at carefully crafting tension and unease that hovers on the precipice of climax, in what's the heaviest record of the year so far.

It sounds like they’ve given kautrock an intense, life-threatening electric shock, while simultaneously floating through 41 minutes (or your entire lifetime, dare you interrupt the endless loop) with the elegance and unpredictability of a kite in the sky.

Dälek have stepped out just enough to create an album that sits comfortably within the band's discography, and deserves to be cherished.

It's a tumultious mixing pot of important issues, personal emotion, raw refrains, and cotagious hooks that makes their words hammer straight home.

While Bombino and his fellow Tuareg's music is now well settled in the same market, the rebellion which fuels their music is very real, and as such, Azel is a breath of fresh air.

For all the tragedy that’s to be found within Singing Saw, it is a warm, welcoming album, every second of it informed by a knowledge of the transience of all things.

What’s most impressive about the Blind Spot EP is not only how deftly Lush have mined the sound that made them a real treasure in the first place, but that they’ve matured without sounding tired, cash-in or merely nostalgic.

This is Suuns’ third album but their essence hasn’t changed, just honed.

By coalescing a number of everyday influences – from Television to John Cale--and adding her own distinctive formula, Crab Day doesn’t really sound like anything else out there.

What a solo album with all of his own bars over all of his own beats would have sounded like, we’ll never know; The Diary does more than enough to fire all of our imaginations, though.

Ultimately the potential legacy of BFF Hosted by DJ Escrow lies with the future artists it may inspire.

Where the band truly shines is when it strikes a balance between erudite musicianship and songwriting prowess.

Going the high fidelity route was definitely a risk this far into Woods’ existence, but the band never fully embraced the lo-fi label, and City Sun Eater proves that everything about them sounds just as strong with or without the fuzz.

This is not simply Koi No Yokan 2.0: if anything, its true parallel is White Pony, another moment in the band’s history that seemed to find them catching lightning in a bottle, condensing all of the elements that made their early sound so intriguing together with as-yet-unheard influences and producing a classic in the process.

By letting their political frustration run away with them, they’ve carved out their own identity and worn it on their sleeves; the results are engrossing.

We’re left with an album that hides behind the idea of specificity--the title and the lyrical content certainly want you to believe as such--but that ultimately provides a ferocious observation of our lopsided society. It’s also the best out-and-out rock record that Harvey’s made since Uh Huh Her.

Its resistance to structure creates in the listener a heightened awareness of each individual sound, and the resulting friction or harmony when pressed against another.

Ironically it improves with age, so pop it on little and often--most tracks are around 90 seconds anyway--and let it grow on you.

As a whole Brilliant Sanity is as fresh as it is reminiscent, as catchy as it is challenging and thoughtful--a welcome nod to what has been, with a firm eye on the horizon.

This is pop music as it should be: simple, unvarnished, young but world-weary, and ultimately timeless.

It’s an album that coheres more effectively than did the first, and it’s one that shows an adventurousness while staying within sight of the elemental spirit of its inspiration.

What the other releases do so well is that they either hit the spot hard or deliberately miss for effect, but this time round the result seems to be somewhere in between.

Super is a grower--a brave rejection of pipe and slippers, embracing the mythical dance floor with admirably vacuous experimentation, even if it mines the mid-nineties, when dance music grew least interesting.

Bleached don’t really break away from the tried-and-true pop-rock template here. When it’s done quite this energetically, though, it’s hard to care--especially when the sense of catharsis is so palpable.

Pennied Days is an album anyone who has ever been in love with rock music should listen to, and it has the kind of universal appeal that should mean big things for Night Moves down the road.

It’s a very strong release, energetic and intense, and promises a high-octane finale.

A combination of new life experiences, that allow Hutchison to weave more vivid tales of mourning, nostalgia and, ultimately, triumph, and the shot in the arm that is Aaron Dessner giving the band that little bit more has helped to create an album that could rival Midnight Organ Fight.

Once Gonzalez has had his fun and begins to settle in to the ways of the old M83, but with a bit of a pop sheen to it, is when Junk works best. It’s just a shame you have to flick through the channels to find the gold.

Instead of signaling a demise (of a feline nature or otherwise), the album represents yet another sonic rebirth from a band who has been making a methodical career out of rising from the ashes of inactivity to surprise us all once again.

The album in it’s conventional format may be too limiting for Nisennenmondai here and therefore, this is not their greatest advert.

Silent Earthling is clearly an experiment in how to expand on a sound that is already protean and expansive by nature. It’s a difficult job, and that’s clear from listening to the record, but such is the breathtaking nature of Three Trapped Tigers that it is highly doubtful many will mind.

This isn’t one of the standout tapes in Thug’s ever-expanding discography. But, as always, it signifies development, progression--most of it accessible on "Drippin’".

Ultimately the Screaming Eagle of Soul continues to soar, and despite all of the changes, the reasons to fall for Charles Bradley remain constant.

Considering that The Last Shadow Puppets is just a casual commitment and a bit on the side for Turner, Everything We’ve Come to Expect is champagne-coated, arena-sized pop-rock album that’s slick and accessibly smart.

They are definitely a marketable band (it’s no wonder Katy Perry ripped them off) and Lost Time is Tacocat’s biggest accomplishment to date--27 minutes of bubblegum pop that doesn’t lose its taste.

Atomic doesn’t quite hit the heights of their greatest soundtrack successes, but as a further document of a restlessly inventive band constantly tweaking their sound, it’s well worth approaching with open ears.

Minor setbacks aside, it’s another beautiful, consumable collection of music from Bibio that no other artist could make sound so inherently theirs, and one that leaves Wilkinson's future musical trajectory as wide open as it’s ever been.

Even if you’ve hated Bird for the past twenty years, Are You Serious is the kind of record that is so breathtakingly alive and enjoyable that you should take the time to listen and consider rethinking your stance on him as an artist.

The album is thrillingly foreign yet familiar in its finest moments.

With the aid of deft production and mild restraint, Amen & Goodbye is well within therapeutic range. Its hybrid of analogue and digital techniques have allowed Yeasayer to create their most enthralling and satisfying record to date.

We can certainly add this gorgeous new album to the list of things that we take warmly to our hearts during these trouble times to help us make some brief sense out of it all.

Working with producer Randall Dunn again at the famed Avast! Studio in Seattle (fortifying that West Coast pedigree), Black Mountain have become more capable than ever of transmuting their kaleidoscopic visions into a volcanic unison.

It’s hard to single out a standalone track from this impressive debut and this, in itself, is testament to the LP on the whole.

She might have talked about breaking the rules on Sucker, but here you can feel her doing it, and it turns out to be a thrilling ride.

The White Album is, hands down, the best Weezer album since... well, since it became so hard to agree on what the last great Weezer album was.

Where You’re Meant To Be conveys the coziness of the room without any tricks or much polish, just a balance among the performers and enough proximity to the audience to capture bits of individual voices here and there.

Sure, there's no new ground broken, and no definitive answers given, but We Disappear isn't meant to be that. Instead, the album is a soundtrack of reassurance.

The group still manages to fluidly blend southern-fried garage rock, soul, psychedelia, and funk on their sixth studio effort, showing no ill effects from the recent shakeup to their tight-knit core.

Its narrative arc and Hinton’s own emotional investment into the project elevates Potential over some of the more high profile electronic releases of the past few years.

With Grapefruit he’s has shown an ability to take the fabric of rock n roll to other dimensions, to surprise, to confound. At times this means it’s pretty heavy going but it’s never boring. It’s wildly ambitious, challenging and wonderful.

It’s the contrast of sparkling melodic effervescence and Mould’s obsidian soul that drives the tracks on Patch The Sky. Here, Mould has turned up the contrast between anger and melody, and found some sense of enlightenment.

Fleeting is, in sum, an art in the sweet and wholesome worship of nature, it's comforting highs and dark, confusing depths encompassing all the brief human relationships it gives birth to and provides a stage for.

There aren’t any outright failures on Full Circle--Bernardout and her bandmates Dom Goldsmith and Arthur Delaney are too talented to turn out a subpar project--but there are moments that simply lack staying power.

Sometimes you have to look back to move forward, and by doing that, Underworld have made their best album in almost twenty years.

As a whole, Compassion is very impressive. It’s a largely fat-free collection of club-ready Danish synth-pop.

Chaosmosis has its moments, but it sure is patchy.

Post Pop Depression doesn't really sound like anything Pop's done before, yet it sounds unmistakably, naturally like an Iggy Pop album, a very good and, at its frequent best, impressively alive one, proving that what Pop really needs is a collaborator who understands how best to frame his unique talents.

It’s a record that’s weird in all the right ways, and signals the emergence of an exciting new experimental force.

2013 is as much an adventure story, autobiography, romantic poem and a classical opus as it is a pop record. But what makes it so convincing comes down to Jones’s passion. Every note of the record convinces you that the Welshman believes 100% that he’s on the right path.

It’s unassuming and introverted, an odd mix of murk and clarity which proves to be ever more intriguing with each listen.

The real moments of surprise come when the band strip things back and sound heavier than ever.

Yes, notes and chords are fun and all, but these songs are precisely-controlled messes, and beautifully so. Simply put, Heron Oblivion is a guitar-centric record for those who thought Marquee Moon was too linear.

His perfectionism has done him proud, as Telluric is a masterful glimpse into the mind of a man who has much to say, and who says it beautifully.

[The] big pop moments are the most thrilling, moreish moments on All My Demons but there are quieter moments where AURORA also excels.

Despite her enormous talent, Know-It-All can feel a little rushed. Fair play to want to capitalise on momentum, but artistically it would have been interesting to hear what could have been achieved with a little more time spent finding Cara's own sound, rather than mixing so many in to ten tracks.

While there are some moments of genuinely engaging songwriting early on, halfway through the mix of styles and genres becomes confusing and incoherent, making it feel incomplete.

In another step away from her new-folk singer-songwriter roots, Emmy The Great has delivered with a well-considered venture into a wider, colder, dystopian world.

Though it may have lost some of the urgency of their debut, Before a Million Universes has allowed the band to develop a level of genuine introspection rarely seen in the hardcore of today.

Even the songs with more conventional structure feature an attention to detail and craftsmanship that is clearly rare.

It’s a record as much about falling apart as it is putting yourself back together and undoubtedly one of the debuts of the year so far.

MITM is an album with depth, and will please both hardcore grime-heads and casual fans. You’d have to be mad in the manor not to love it.

Ultimately, untitled unmastered isn’t TPAB, and anyone expecting something of similar cultural impact is only depriving themselves of one of the year’s early musical gems.

Convenanza naturally operates best when Weatherall stays away from the mic.

Long Way Home is a vindication of all that time spent slowly learning her craft and doing almost everything herself. As a result, she has finally delivered what all those early tracks promised; a bedroom record conceived in the club that drags confessional pop music further into the future.

The misfires on iii are few, and this is a record that deserves spins not only from Miike Snow diehards, but also those who believe the group may not be their cup of tea.

Her conceptual sounds don’t offer blatant, fist pumping anthems for movements like Occupy and Black Lives Matter, instead they seem to capture the still, quiet tension that echoes around that space between the battle lines and point to the psychological fear on both sides.

It could easily have fallen apart under the weight of the assembled egos, its car crash of dramatic themes or even just been doomed by the epic centrepiece of the album--the10-minute "Faustus"--but it doesn’t. The album works. And I daresay, it’s a damn sight more successful take on life, war, death and re-birth than Einsturzende Neubauten’s First World War-inspired album Lament.

On his eighth solo studio album, More Rain, Ward once again taps into the familiar echoes of musical history, crafting a breezy, uptempo collection of tracks that show off his songwriting talents as well as his wide array of influences.

It all makes for a pretty giant leap forward, with the weighty, emotional subject punctured by a Willy Wonka factory of discombobulated guitar pop that has the tUnE-yArDs’ finger print all over it.

It would be wrong to compare this with something like the ineffable Slates, given the group’s perennially shifting trajectory, but that EP has an enduring, remarkable consistency that’s all-too-often missed.

Through a well suited use of room mics, live tracking and the odd vocal take from Gano’s demos making the cut, Jeff Hamilton and the band have successfully fuelled We Can Do Anything with the scruffy-but-vibrant spontaneity that made all their earlier records the much loved works they are.

Music For Listening To Music To is a record that sounds simultaneously old-fashioned and modern, a delightful reminder of ‘that’s how it used to be done’ but ultimately a modern country album charged with electric guitars, a love of jangle and a showcase of Goodman’s glorious singing. But most importantly, it’s a gorgeous collection of timeless songs.

It's simply stunning.

This is not a record for quick thrills, or for sombre introspection; it is an album that creates a rich, layered sonic space, in which it invites its audience to lose themselves awhile.

If this really is the end, You Can’t Go Back... is more than a worthy addition to the story of a band who leave behind one of the--if not the--richest catalogues in sunny-side-down American songwriting; only a few slightly stale rehashes of familiar templates towards the end keep this from achieving the lofty standards of, say, 2009's We Used To Think The Freeway Sounded Like The River.

Distance Inbetween may not be the renaissance one would have hoped for and is a much more straightforward record than expected but there’s enough here to suggest their next record will be worth listening to.

This record blurs the lines between religion and atheism--it's a vital challenge to the inflexible labels that we are often asked to identify ourselves by. Alongside this, musical traits indicative of Glasgow greats see them nestle nicely into a thriving scene.

This album is a far cry from the 90’s American college-radio rock of their Blumberg-indebted debut, but, for a seemingly make or break record, Stranger Things just doesn’t really take enough risks.

The Ridge continuously strikes a fine balance between the heady grandeur of classical music and the restless creative exploration of the current indie scene, striking a similar resonant chord with music fans who either came across the album due to their interest in Arcade Fire or Mozart.