There’s a huge amount of solace to be found in this album--one that, amidst the chaos, taps you gently on the shoulder, and takes you away somewhere nicer.

Experimental works like this aren’t typically held up for their broad appeal, but the waves of static peace and disorienting swells that wash back and forth over Cruel Optimism communicate on an open plane where specific meaning is obscured but state of mind is apparent to anyone.

It’s big, brash, and crystal clear, but open-hearted and often evocative, too. At its best, the blown-up production and direct performances produce real stardust.

On A La Sala, Khruangbin prove their talent for making intricate instrumental music that is capable of casting an evocative spell, whilst also hinting at the potential downfalls of becoming locked inside the band’s mid-tempo comfort zone: more of the steadily intensifying drama of gently soaring first single “A Love International” would be welcome.

What they couldn’t manage in the past is having enough discipline to put their disparate influences together and make a consistent album. However, on Movements, those days are over.

It's a thrilling, if occasionally nauseating, sojourn into the spontaneous world of freeform performance.

If the band are looking for a platform to build on, this could well be it.

Although it’s not as vital as his early work, it’s a fun and confident return from one of the kings of grime. Long may he reign.

It’s an album that will satisfy fans of Maine’s introspection, evocative storytelling and atmospheric production, but it may not reach the same heights as his most celebrated releases. Still, for those willing to dive into its depths, Shirt offers a homespun experience that further cements Aaron Maine’s place as one of the more singular voices in contemporary indie music.

Shamir settles into the familiarity of gleaming indie-pop arrangements and sweet starbursts of melody, all while hints of darkness bleed through the margins. While not a startling stylistic reinvention, the album does feel like a rewarding artistic waypoint from an exceedingly consistent singer and songwriter.

Without losing the sense of comfortable familiarity, and the nostalgia that comes along with it, Alexisonfire have signposted a new era for themselves as a band – and in doing so have let us know that they’re ready to roll with the times and the fast-evolving post-hardcore scene as it is right now.

Weird Faith toys with the emotional cohesion of Diaz’s best work, resulting in an album whose sum is only the value of its parts.

This certainly won’t be the most original album you’ll hear this year, but it will be one of the most charming, and the rate at which Jones is managing to churn out quality pop songs bodes well for the future, and means you can forgive him Sob Story‘s occasional misstep.

Minor refinements are enough for a group so fully formed from the start, and Dusk is Ultimate Painting’s fullest record yet.

FlyLo is the trickiest of acquired tastes, and some listeners just really won't have the patience to wait for this LP to unfurl. For those who do, a reward awaits. Flamagra, like the man who made it, is an island of its own: often beautiful, sometimes baffling, totally inimitable.

Mutual Benefit occasionally build to moments of wonderful melancholy, before coming back down and resetting their expectations. It’s a charming sense of reality, but ultimately the music drifts in the middle lane too much to be truly mesmerising.

Waverly is just that: a study of tension, mysticism and some natural elements thrown in for good measure.

Their self-titled debut is one that bubbles with retro rock fuelled passion.

Despite that blemish [changing a lyric in “Better Than Revenge”], Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) is a cathartic release of pent-up frustrations of things she never had the confidence to say at 19 that are now stated proudly at 33.

Not everything on Hope Downs impresses, as tracks such as "Sister’s Jeans’’ and "The Hammer’’ fail to recount the warmth and vivid storytelling found on the rest of the album. Regardless, Hope Downs is a record that sounds like it was made in the Australian bush, and it’s when this sense of local experience is presented most effectively that it really starts to shine.

Cocoon Crush is a portrait of an artist in transition. It’s rough around the edges, occasionally stunning, and always surprising.

Back to Land, then: business as usual, but the business remains good.

Closing track aside, this is a mostly compelling and wholly fun trip through modern pop with a charismatic protagonist, that hangs together way better than it should.

An unforgiving album about an often unforgiving city.

If she’s toed a contemporary line, it’s been mostly via sonic contexts and a swaggery bent. With Fidelity, she lets much of that go, embracing an old-school R&B MO. It’s a credit to her unflagging authenticity that despite her retro leanings, she’s still chic, modish, and frequently enchanting.

Boarding House Reach's overall flow--conceptually and creatively--is at times unsure and brilliant at once. This is no album of the year contender, nor will it rank too highly on White's saggish discography. Instead, it's thirteen songs of creative madness.

The Skrillex moment aside, there are really no glaring missteps here.

While it’s a rich topic [unhealthy romantic relationships] to explore in song, a sense of repetitiveness does ultimately set in as Teitelbaum circles around the same themes of codependency and falling in love with questionable men against one’s own better judgement. .... When Teitelbaum looks elsewhere for subject matter, some of her strongest songwriting comes through.

"Born Cold" sounds like HIM, though with a slight pop-punk tinge to the chorus as Gould almost whines “do I look so good that you wanna treat me bad?” ‘Thorns of Love’ immediately feels like an old Gaslight Anthem track, and "Napalm Girls" – along with much of the record – has Alkaline Trio written all over it. This is no bad thing – Gould’s delivery of each line is fantastic, and the lyrics are lofty in multiple different ways. It’s exciting and feels fresh set against the current scene, but it feels just a little too all over the place.

Ultimately, with Guitar, DeMarco is working against the friction of his inescapable audience expectations to declare where he stands now: wiser and more intent, although still victim to tedium.

It's still early days, but this London-based quintet have delivered a debut with all the hallmarks of a band who will continue to refine their own distinctive niche.

The album shoots its shot repeatedly to great effect, sometimes it’s better at hitting the mark than at other times but always seeks to embrace the euphoric and it’s obvious why Nia Archives has become a need-to-know name in dance music in a relatively short space of time.

With her fourth studio record, Lola Young has created a tapestry of conflicting narratives delicately intertwined.

Death Valley Girls’ music is, for better or worse, calculatedly disposable, and the band make no real attempts to secure lasting hooks or forge undeniable melodies. What they do, they do well, and that’s more than enough reason to give Under the Spell of Joy a spin.

“Complicate it”, “heavy”, “heartbreak3r”, all standalone fine, but ultimately all bring the same contribution to the shape of on to better things without providing much else. Where he digresses though, he does so excellently, promising that maybe with the challenge of a feature or with the fire to push his sound a bit more, he could be great.

The addition of older tracks onto Home can constrain Spektor’s artistic growth more generally, like on “SugarMan” – which stretches food metaphors to their absolute limit and lacks the staying power of Spektor’s best tracks. However, at their best, the songs of Home feel akin to a warm hug on a cold day.

This isn’t a perfect album – far from it – but it is stylistically consistent, thematically coherent and beautifully composed.

It’s a short and snappy experience clocking in at under 30 minutes, but the rising tides of sin and crashing waves of liability make Back To The Water Below the most all-encompassing outing of Royal Blood’s career.

Odds are Future will drop another project or five between now and the end of the calendar year, so while EVOL is ultimately dispensable it’s still a pretty good time.

They didn’t quite manage to move past The Seldom Seen Kid on Build a Rocket Boys!, but with Take Off, they’ve both cemented their place as a British institution and hinted that their best might yet be to come.

Strange Pleasures can indeed take you anywhere if you let it, with a journey of discovery awaiting you anytime you cue it up.

For the most part Lysandre is a masterful exhibition of how to execute and relay truth and emotion.

The heartache-on-sleeve lyricism occasionally veers into the melodramatic (“Passed you on a side street / Brushed across your wrist like a razor blade”), but it’s forgiven because of the sheer honesty offered.

Their eponymous EP was pretty great--and are showing on Weird Little Birthday that that’s not all hot air.

This does feel like an album of transition--about the journey rather than the destination and its more sophisticated moments point towards the idea that The Wave Pictures are a band which are only going to get finer with age.

What’s left is a truly beautiful, if slightly dishevelled, gothic menagerie, amongst the last of an intact Broadcast’s recorded works, and a great inducement to see this movie so apparently rich in sound, terror, and beauty.

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.

There’s fewer moments of Bird producing fireworks with her vocals throughout Different Kinds Of Light, and while that may leave some early fans feeling somewhat unfulfilled, it’s as strong a sign as any that she’s matured and is operating with a newfound dynamism as a songwriter – there’s more to her than just that huge voice.

Their growth is obvious: the songwriting is more versatile and the dynamics more daring, the emotional range broader.

Good Riddance verges on greatness, an incredibly honest portrayal of guilt, doubt, and heartbreak.

While Finally Free has a handful of songs that are excellent and some that are simply okay, the vexing dilemma points back to Romano himself. It’s as though he isn’t quite sure the direction to take and that hesitance alone is off putting.

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.

There are some exciting ideas here, but the sophisticated and mature singles like “Spinnin” and “Home To Another One” act as red herrings for an album bogged down by an odd reframing of the past.

SUCKERPUNCH sees Moriondo in dialogue with all sorts of characters and musical methods, hitting peak creative heights, but sometimes lacks dialogue between its component parts. Moriondo’s vision, when it’s clear, is brilliant and radiates throughout the record, but sometimes in the jumps between moods can get a little hazy.

Meet Me @ The Altar know what they are going for, and they do it well - showing off an undeniable songwriting talent in the process.

Crybaby is ironically more memorably catchy than some of their more obvious tilts at commerciality. Conversely that strength is also its slight flaw: the energy is so high on certain tracks that any slow to mid-tempo songs can naturally feel like lulls when actually they provide necessary variation.

The result here is a compelling record that is as confident in its shiny, polished singles as in its crepuscular oddities.

None of the tracks surpass the original (except probably Coldplay), but it doesn’t feel like the intention to ‘one-up’ other bands here. It’s an intimate, nostalgic affair for a small minority. For others, it’ll be less vital.

His third outing feels more introspective, without losing any of that gargantuan shine or him feeling like a stranger.

It’s a tried and tested formula, but no one really does it in a manner as unfailingly, beautifully hilarious as The Vaselines.

Even when 6LACK is on cruise control, the emotional hour drives by, hiding thoughtful romanticisms and nuanced musical flashes that are a delight to discover.

There are a number of beatless mood pieces ("Crush", "Keep Driving") which showcase a more restrained, cinematic style, but ultimately bring little to the table, especially when the non-committal, monosyllabic vocal ice of Jae Matthews is such a focal point. Overall, though, this record leaves quite the impression; if uneasy listening is your thing, Boy Harsher’s murky interpretation of dead disco will envelop you in its dark delights.

You Still Here, Ho? offers a snapshot circa 2022, reminding us that, at least when it comes to the competitive side of human nature and the fallouts of capitalism, the 2020s may not be that different from the 2010s, 2000s, 1990s, and so on. Different trappings, same dynamic.

Underpinned by sharper melodies and, shock horror, notions of hope, they sit comfortably as among the best songs Metz have written so far. If they’re a nod to how the band intend on developing their sound further, we may well soon end up with a record that truly feels like serious change has occurred.

Several of the tracks are too short, as if in an eagerness for the songs to sit within a four minute pop structure, instead of discarding some of their ideas, they cram them all in and cut down the song length.

On this accomplished fourth album, Little Dragon’s enthusiasm is palpable and their world well worth exploring.

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.

Whilst no-one wishes further misfortune on NOTHING, Tired of Tomorrow proves they've learnt how to make the most of it and turn it into something dark, but beautiful. Its title suggests despondency, but its content should certainly leave them hopeful.

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.

It’s a record with a few winners, a few losers and some fillers. However, it is by no means a poor record. There’s plenty here that most modern electro artists would die to produce, but it’s a shame that there’s just so much here that falls far short of the work Dear has done in the past.

Summer of ’13 is an album that takes itself with a pinch of salt, experimenting with good humor and having a lot of fun in the process.

With his sophomore album, Lacy has established a few things. He’s talented, driven, and able to connect and resonate with his listeners. He hasn’t harnessed the full power of his ability yet, but as he continues to pave a path in front of him, his Gemini star will shine brightly when he does.

Adult Contemporary is a whole lot of fun, and furthers Chromeo’s mission to take the seriousness out of modern day music. Chromeo’s trajectory remains in tact with this release, and shows that funk truly never goes out of style.

There are some excellent discoveries waiting to be heard across a surprisingly wide array of artists and (sub-)genres. The collection features everything from safe recreations (White Reaper’s “Sad But True”) to left-field rejiggering (J Balvin’s rap reimagining of “Wherever I May Roam”).

That lack of wildness makes Modern Vampires of The City, while always thoughtful and often beautiful, the least captivating of their three albums.

The LP steps away from their usual repertoire, offering a softer, more stripped-back approach to their musings, teetering on the edge of almost folk-rock.

Whilst at times DISCO::4 Part II might feel morbid, its urgent, vital sounds provide a much needed antidote to the anxieties of the world we currently live in. It’s also further proof that HEALTH’s talent and appetite for collaboration is as potent as ever.

Choruses could feel more anthemic; the rhythm section could punch you in the gut a little harder. But that doesn’t take much away from a solid record that should come into its own with a live crowd connection.

Some will see it as cathartic and welcome, whereas others may just be disconnected by the process. This seemingly brutal separation of the wheat from the chaff won't necessarily sit comfortably with all listeners, but I guess that’s exactly the point.

His creatively unrestrained approach results in a record that is hotch-potch but also one that contains several stirring, noteworthy songs.

His further point of recognizing singing as his strength and songwriting as his weakness is the most self-aware and perceptive comment either Gallagher has ever made professionally, and Why Me? Why Not clearly benefits as a result.

The Other Side of Make Believe is an Interpol ready for the new age. It’s proved they can move onto album seven – even when the world was forcing everyone apart – and amidst side projects and other endeavours, the trio are a staple the world would do better to relish in since they deliver a high quality every time without sacrificing any of that brooding integrity we all so know and love.

The production team--Ben Turner and Part Chimp’s Tim Cedar--have done too good a job of capturing the excellent beats and riffs upon which the record is built, and this throws the shortcomings of the vocals into sharper relief. However, when the record works, it works, simultaneously in the senses of cohesion, physical graft and mechanistic industry.

Earth finds Neil Young in his element expressing the collective concerns of the modern age, a fitting coda for an artist whose name has become a byword for transition and re-invention.

Ultimately, while her opus may lie elsewhere in her discography, Blue Banisters achieves precisely what it set out to - free from distractions, it’s a welcome insight into some of her most warm and introspective moments.

Goat Girl push the boat out while maintaining, for the most part, a considered and deliberate mood across the 48 minute run time, and the few pitfalls are due to ideas that didn’t quite coalesce more than anything. The finest tracks can feel familiar only to grab you and hold you in entirely surprising ways.

The result is music that feels dreamlike and at times, feverishly nightmarish, occupying multiple emotional and sonic spaces at once. Xiu Motha Fuckin’ Xiu: Vol. 1 is uncompromising and unsparing, driven by a kind of manic clarity that refuses prediction.

There’s rarely a moment over the past 25 years where Dean Wareham’s failed to deliver an album that’s at least three-quarters brilliant, and Emancipated Hearts doesn’t change that record.

Remy’s new tracks are more slickly produced, built around retro and upbeat sounds.

These new songs build on Sohn’s mechanical, rigid guitar-driven synthpop with stomping techno and bittersweet electronics, inducing a dreamy haze as the cyborg operates on a depleted charge.

With Tired Of Liberty, The Lounge Society have mastered the art of making music that conveys a message, and done so with incredible prowess.

The result is not a focused or sharp record--but it doesn’t need to be. The allure of Noonday Dream comes in its willingness to swell and expand, before Howard sits up and starts kicking, slowly but precisely, to steer the track in a new direction.

All the component parts seem present, but they don’t quite add up to a greater whole.

Alternate/Endings is never a relaxing listen; when the breakneck pace drops, it’s only replaced by an unsettling calm, and one that doesn’t last very long.

Modern Nature likely won’t ripple the upper reaches of the album charts or critic lists, nor will it rouse any new fans, but it’s an undeniable a pleasure to those who already are and proof The Charlatans tank is plenty full.

It’s the moments of clumsy transitions, erratic woodwind inclusions and underwhelming choruses however that throw some doubt on that suggestion, but there's still much to love on Girl.

On Flower of Devotion, production is sharper, lyrics cut deeper, and the palette is more diverse, making for a much more rewarding listen than last year’s Water and their 2016 debut.

It’s emotional, it’s hooky and it’s loveable, and as a straight-up folk record for those who’ve never heard Hoop’s sounds before, it ticks a great many boxes. But, alas, as dazzling as the album regularly is, it is a fan’s record.