Each track will commit to Whack’s usual first minute, but suspiciously lingers on, sometimes embellishing an idea and other times letting the same moment marinate on repeat. This often does little to diminish the power of each particular song, but on the macro-level, the record is still a collection of fleeting snapshots, albeit with high resolution and long-term fidelity.

Rips is that album; there’s nary an ounce of artiness or innovation here, and it sounds almost hopelessly out of time in 2014, yet you can’t help but grin and love it just the same.

This is a thrilling conclusion to an incredible, peerless career, and it just so happens to be one of the greatest posthumous albums of all time.

The past few years have seen Dev Hynes become one of the most prominent, important voices in pop. Negro Swan builds upon this legacy.

Mortal Primetime sees the rebirth of the New York trio; emerging from the shadows of winter to tilt their heads towards the brighter, more fruitful pastures of spring.

It’s always charming, but in its best moments, Don’t Forget Me is often phenomenally well-written, a solid show from an artist who’s likely to linger in your memory for a while.

Their tracks are short and sharp bursts for the most part, rarely cracking three minutes and crammed with ideas (sometimes to the point of disorientation) but it does mean nothing stagnates and keeping up with the stylistic shifts is an exhilarating task.

When it comes to Israel Nash's Silver Season, it's impossible to get tired of it. Try it--it won't let you down, either.

Charming, addictive and seemingly effortless, Cuz I Love You is Lizzo’s declaration of superstardom.

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

It’s one that will thrill fans of inventive, guitar-driven alternative rock.

SABLE, fABLE’s slog in the middle wouldn’t have been as hollow had that seeped into the central concept more. For now, the record shows signs that Bon Iver’s discography runs in duologies, much like Mitski’s.

Overall, this material is essential listening for hardcore fans of Bob Dylan, recommended listening for fans of Johnny Cash, and somewhat life-affirming for folks who have Nashville Skyline as their favourite ever album. But for everyone else, there is the sense that this material making up its own standalone set shows either a lack of foresight or a thirst for dollars.

MAYHEM is more like an inspired album rather than one that inspires, and where Gaga usually flips the game on its head, she’s stuck to the rules this time. LG7 feels like it’s come and gone, and where we’re usually saying ‘wow she’s amazing’, it’s more like a resounding ‘wasn’t that nice’ – not bad, not life changing, but a record I’ll be playing for a while I’m sure.

It's an emphatic 42 minutes of contentment, of genuine happiness that is so rare within music.

This is Parker's strongest bunch of songs yet.

What makes Pussycat an unqualified success is how Hatfield has constructed it with multiple dimensions and, no matter the mood or approach a given song takes, she continually scores with material among the finest of her career.

The result is a blisteringly progressive record - one that genuinely feels years ahead of its time.

Dawn is just the beginning for Yebba, and the sun is only rising on her promising future.

If these stories sound less compelling than those of her past work, rest assured that Mitchell’s talent as a songwriter has remained undimmed in the decade since Young Man in America.

Rebound doesn’t represent an entirely successful experiment--especially when, on ‘In Between Stars’, things begin to sound suspiciously like Texas--but when Friedberger gets it right, the record soars.

Preservation hits the hardest when there are zero or few added ingredients to divert attention from the voice, the melodies and the words.

Although PRE PLEASURE is stylistically leaps and bounds from debut album Don’t Let The Kids Win the tenderness and vulnerability of earlier Julia Jacklin albums isn’t lost.

Its power is found in the band’s ability to trap and pin you down to experience a place unholy – to transport you into their gnarled world that struggles to give way to its inevitable ruins.

Unwilling to finish on “14”’s vulnerability, Water From Your Eyes keep us at arm’s length, but eager to burrow deep and discover everything this album has to offer.

Williamson’s voice, writing, and sound have all evolved leaps from her previous albums, and Time Ain’t Accidental stands tall among masterful country-pop crossover records like Speak Now or Golden Hour that made their authors superstars.

William Basinski has created yet another outstanding work of art with A Shadow in Time, an audio sculpture of serenity and bliss to begin 2017 and put what was a saddening year for music to bed.

On 2017 – 2019 he again shows us why he is one of the most vital electronic acts of the 21st century.

This definitely isn't for everyone, and the production and mixing is particularly un-inviting this time around. ... But the sheer tunefulness in the songs beneath it all is actually incredibly heartwarming, and something that deserves as much attention from the adventurous indie listener as it currently gets from the rock and metal gatekeeping elite.

While the cosy acoustic folk of Sling is indebted to her influences — Joni Mitchell, Carole King, the Carpenters — Cottrill makes it wholly her own. ... While it’s a shift from the lovesick alt-pop of Immunity, it’s bound to be a transformative moment in her career. Whether she releases music for years or retires tomorrow, Cottrill can take solace in knowing she’s created something timeless.

Executed with palpable warmth and affection for the musical heritage that hovers behind these songs, what could have been an unconvincingly superficial genre exercise emerges as another winningly inviting Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy album.

It’s this invitation into her most confidential thoughts that makes the album equal parts sensual as it is unflinchingly confident, and it’s the ability to inhabit so many subtleties of the emotional turmoil of relationships that makes Take Me Apart such a memorable album.

Anakin often brings an urgency with his flow, each bar breaking with his voice, snapping like a bonfire night firework. It's an effortless relentlessness, ensuring you watch but keeps you cautious enough through fear of getting burned. Those personal touches are truly where Frank shines.

It’s a wonderfully strange, dense, and visceral album that finds solace in uncanny experimentalism.

Instrumentals is an album which is both easy to understate and overstate. ... By ingeniously pairing this music with the straightforward Songs, Lenker paints them as two pieces of a whole, two completely different recordings of the same state of mind.

While Suddenly’s highlight tracks buzz with upbeat glamour, Snaith is smart enough to tone a portion of the LP with their contrasts. Although short-lived, this is what made Swim so memorable.

Electric is a work of renewed purpose, whose short time-frame and scant tracklist (no PSB album has ever clocked in shy of ten songs) belie the gems that lie within.

A brutal yet glorious release that doubles up as an unbending overture to fervour and force.

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

There are a number of highlights on the record, but “supernatural” is the shining star. .... There’s also moments that don’t quite hit where they should, with “true story” and “i wish i hated you” being perfectly nice but lacklustre or simple in their writing.

There’s so much good stuff here that it can take several listens before the less overtly outgoing gems (also including the wounded hush of “Love Is For Love”) emerge from Twilight Override’s mass of music.

On The King, Anjimile crafts a masterstroke folk album that binds differences through time for unparalleled emotional clarity.

Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress’ is good enough, by post-rock standards. But it really falls short of the bar that GY!BE set themselves before they took a break from the game.

Sexistential is Robyn at her most lucid, practicing at liberation and assuredness now with this singular caveat of reinhabitation that doesn’t celebrate Robyn as a pop iconoclast with thirty years of consistent brilliance on the scoreboard – or doesn’t only; rather, she wields that in the creation of a self-mythology that also manages to sound brilliant on its own merit.

Musically, Dream River sticks calmly to understated Americana, generally managing to pull off Lambchop’s neat one-inch punch trick--seemingly effortless and gentle, only to echo with far more drama and beautifully powerful resonance.

The clarity heard on this album can be interpreted as a sharpened edge in Hval. She collapses the space of the album into a single sensory experience; she conveys something unsearchable but found.

The tracks feel as easy as they probably were to craft, and while they are pleasantly paced and succinct, the impact of their previous work is lost.

Three excellent albums in, Calvi has produced her most complex work to date.

It’s going to be hard for Albini, Weston and Trainer to ever top what we find on Dude Incredible. Worthy of filing alongside and above At Action Park and 1000 Hurts, it’s the sound of one of the great bands at the height of their powers.

Overall, this is an album that makes so much of the distant past and the present through intelligent working with and against classical music conventions. Recommended to anyone wanting to experience a beautiful and evocative soundscape created out of a highly original sensibility.

This album makes use of every single second of its runtime, jam-packed with choruses so huge and emotional, no one can quite replicate her unique sound and vision.

As a songwriter and a storyteller, she’s simply never recorded anything quite like it. After so long in the game, it’s miraculous to hear her take such a fresh approach to her sound.

CMAT succeeds in making each track individually compelling, while simultaneously excelling in exploring her more abstract side. Crazymad, For Me shows CMAT to be in a world of her own, one that’s way ahead of the pack.

Any Shape You Take attempts to connect the dots, unafraid of expressing the depths nor the heights of a life lived with supreme sensitivity.

This album is diverse, thoughtful and – most importantly – rewarding. It’s not the strongest work of Fucked Up’s career - but it may very well be the most thrilling.

For a group so often criticised for the coldness and the metronomic aloofness of their catalogue, this is a record that sounds warm, tactile, and is evidently the outcome of five musicians spending six years on the road together.

Gone are the peak-time weapons that peppered Drone Logic; instead Avery teases us with tension and texture, ebbing and flowing his way to something truly hypnotic.

Her eye for her own artistic point of view has never been sharper. The rest of the record is an equally thrilling ride.

Along with the help of his session-artist buddies, Ty Segall has rebirthed himself on an album of both biblical proportions and grand artistry. Segall’s voice has never sounded so necessary.

Kagoule have captured the energy, thrills, uncertainties and anxieties of being a teenager and bundled it all up in an exciting debut album that thrills from beginning to end. More importantly they've done it on their own terms.

Here is an album that embraces every fibre of your being; generous in its awe-inspiring and beautiful moments. It’ll keep you guessing every minute of its hour long run. It’s uniquely Pumarosa and there’s nothing else quite like it.

Despite the eclectic genre-hopping, all of Résistance ends up sounding unmistakably and thrillingly like Songhoy Blues.

If the album’s mind is fixed on a future world, it is an open-ended one. The tendency at this point might be to assume that all imagined futures are dystopian, but the spirit of Don’t Look Away and the sum of the pictures and story fragments Tucker has strung together in the record are reflected in its title: the good, the bad, the beauty, the fear...don’t look away from any of it.

The violence and sheer horror of Deaths is not only immensely enjoyable, but utterly necessary.

This is intelligent, knowingly silly music that should have no place in 2019. It’s anachronistic, beholden to its influences, and just a bit lightweight to be anything but a bit of a laugh. But, as this is 2019, and the real world is anything but a bit of a laugh, thank God for records like this. The world is in a dire condition, and International Teachers of Pop have given us a beautiful distraction.

Whether in Harare, Rotterdam or Peckham, Mushonga feels those most-human of emotions: heartache, isolation, pressure to conform, but refuses to be shackled by them. Instead, we are invited on her geographical and psychological journey, and encouraged to embrace the turbulence.

If you’re looking for an album with a coherent, tangible theme then perhaps this isn’t the one for you. Instead it’s a coagulation of the weird and the wonderful, and just a snapshot of the immense power of FEET. Complete madness, but so much fun.

Each featured artist brings their best game and does what they do best. And in return, K&K thrive, bouncing off the energy of their fellow artists.

This album is not a timeless classic, it is a du jour album that showcases a drummer and producer’s talent at capturing the sound of the times. It should be enjoyed as such: a testament to young musicians blending tradition and modernity in exciting new ways.

Deceptively simple, yet holding a world of complexity within it, Yeo-Neun is airy abandon in parts and heavy sensitivity in others. Remarkably honest and creatively challenging, the album projects into a constant companion, whether with its unflinchingly beautiful musicality or its daring noisiness.

This follow-up to 2018’s Might As Well With My Soul, in some sense, serves to highlight the band’s underrated ability to deviate from well-worn norms.

On Death Of The Party the four-piece adds a dash of Northern Soul to the mix, and it’s a perfect complement to their Beach Boys harmonies.

Young Heart is consistent from start to finish. While it won’t necessarily ruffle many feathers, it’s a coherent addition to an already charming catalogue from Birdy.

It’s a rich tapestry of sounds that comes straight from the heart. That might be Marten’s secret ingredient: no matter how left-field the compositions are, whether warming or breaking, there’s always a lot of heart in the music.

The subtleties written into the album's DNA make all the difference (with the mention of the album's title in so many of the lyrics acting as unifying sentiment), almost to a faultless degree.

You Signed Up For This is candidly aware of the simple fact that you just don’t have everything right just yet. Combining this with Peters' constantly evolving and sharp song writing, and a braver, more mature sound, the singer-songwriter proves she’s one tough act to follow.

Lovesick, woozy, and somewhat optimistic, Are U Down? demonstrates an inherent musicality and dextrous ability that is likely to become magical in due course.

Modern Fiction rarely devolves into out-and-out dourness, but it has a consistent, latent sense of melancholy, something Ducks Ltd. manage with impressive expertise, and which adds a welcome and affecting weight to their sound.

The more deeply you dig in, the more compelling depths Fleuves De l’Ame reveals.

A record that belies its debut status, Unlearning bares the strength and complexity of a later career offering, with Walt Disco deftly updating their precursors’ flair from a twenty-first century vantage point, championing the illustrious Scottish post-punk tradition in the process.

The Regrettes already seem pretty at home in their new soundscape, roaming between stripped-back guitars and fully-fledged pop.

Short though this may be, it’s nothing if not meticulous.

Alpha Zulu confronts reality with a dreamy neon-lit elegance pulsing with playful vitality, it runs on its nerves but has its feet on the dance floor.

While her vocals ground her in a country vein, her sonic contexts borrow from and integrate blues-rock, classic-rock, and pop sounds. The result is her most freewheeling sequence to date.

It is a record that embraces recovery and revels in the joy of reclaiming what you love and wanting to go further with it. Gregory’s debut is an album that tells a painful story, with a renewed sense of optimism.

Last Man Dancing is a party to escape to when life gets a little bit too much, and it delivers on its mission statement with abundance.

Essentially, HELLMODE all but confirms the sincerity electrifying the voice of our charming punk hero. With little hope to hold onto, he's still angry, urgent, and prescient as ever.

All told, Accompany provides compelling testimonial for the case that Michael Nau is one of the most underrated singer-songwriters currently in circulation: an album you’re guaranteed to want to, er, accompany you for months to come.

This album not only heralds the return of a singular talent in contemporary popular music, it’s the demonstration of art actioning change in real-time.

TYLA is turned up to 11 – there is little emotional or energetic dynamism on the album, but every song is club-ready, danceable and infectious.

It's this juxtaposition between strong experimental instincts and ability to weld them seamlessly to a keen interest in (and talent for) engaging and accessible songwriting that makes Love In Constant Spectacle (and Weaver’s previous run of solo albums) such an unmissable treat.

The album’s nine uniformly strong tracks reflect the major life events that have led to an extensive break from the heavy lifting involved in writing and recording as a solo artist.

Happily, this new start feels fresh. HEAVY JELLY could be the ravishing debut from some doe-eyed newcomers with the visceral energy they’re touting this time around, except therein lies a hardened exterior.

Ultimately, Real Deal sees Honeyglaze steadily accessing parts outside their comfort zone, their range expanding with the new territory they gain.

This is everything you could want in a debut record, a distillation of a confident and coherent sound with plenty of room to develop, and plenty of time in which to do so.

Without appearing arcane, Earth-Sized Worlds snapshots the group in their element, continuing to breathe new life into the remnants of often overlooked sub-genres in a brain-frying madcap patchwork.

Albeit diverging in duration from its predecessors at a mere eight-tracks, Lust for Life remains sufficient in scale to carry such a taste for semi-encrypted post-punk wisecracks.

There is considerable range here, yet there is also so much nuance on what is a challenging and simultaneously rewarding record.