A clear cut statement on what it feels like to be alive in these troubling times from an artist who is carefully cementing himself as one of the most compelling and earnest young talents.

It is a vital addition to an impressive catalogue from a group who deserve your attention.

Like the best pop stars moving far from their imperial phase, she remains uneven but always fascinating.

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.

Witch Fever end on their angriest, highest energy moment and it’s a triumphant, resounding closer to a knockout debut record, and the final echoes ring out like a promise.

I Walked With You A Ways almost certainly won’t go down as the most definitive work of either Crutchfield or Williamson’s career, yet it is unmistakably the work of two phenomenal musicians at their peak. Tasteful, affecting and melodic.

The Car flickers between solemn nostalgia but also having a blast – a journey which can be unsettling but fun and surprising in a way that you wouldn’t expect.

Overall, on their third record, The Big Moon stay true to their title and lay bare all that they have. They’ve shown us their rawest moments and the deepest parts of their psyche and said, simply, “Here is everything”.

Dirt Femme is sexy, smart, and most importantly; fun. It’s a step up for Tove Lo without losing any of her signature charm, and it might just be her best album yet.

The 'what if' factor looms large on CHAOS NOW*, but not to the detriment of enjoying the thrilling outsider pop music that Dawson provides both in his overarching messaging and unsteady sound.

Although the songs are largely solid, there’s a recurring sense of deja vu. ... Being Funny in a Foreign Language sees The 1975 lose touch with the reality they are usually so skilled at reflecting. Ever one to over-intellectualise, Healy is wrapped up in so many repeating layers of fame and meaning and memes and buzzwords that any real meaning is out of reach.

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.

Most Normal is mostly freeform pieces with no real beginning, midpoint or end. It's typically confrontational, throwing the listener face first into their wall of noise with some spectacular excursions into how to make naturally rhythmic instruments sound ugly, aggressive, unpleasant and ultimately cathartic.

Every listen yields new life oozing from each beat - above all, Anywhere But Here feels like an album that will weather excellently as Sorry go onwards.

An album that turns a sound into a physical being, CHARLIE is packed full of personality and heart.

Elegantly blurring the lines between post-rock, metal and post-classical once again, As The Moon Rests is a dramatic, urgent, poetic return to form for A.A. Williams.

Loose Future embraces uncertainty and jumps headfirst into big emotions, but with acute self-awareness.

A work of breathtaking beauty capable of connecting us more deeply to our truest selves and to the world around us.

Cool It Down is not only timely but a necessary album in evaluating the feelings of the present and looking ahead towards an uncertain future.

With The End, So Far, Slipknot haven’t reinvented themselves, but returned to their roots with an older, wiser and more concise outlook, resulting in a record that chews its listeners up almost instantly, and spits them out an hour later feeling beaten, battered and ultimately, cleansed.

Rounding off with the fitful “Wildfire”, Shygirl closes the curtain on a remarkable musical universe that shows she’s one of dance music’s emerging greats.

Souls may be sold separately on the trail for gold, but respect is earned, and Freddie Gibbs continues to rack up the points with another stellar entry in an almost-infallible collection of projects.

It’s a very buoyant creation - perhaps her most levitous release since Debut - that concerns itself with ancestry and legacy.

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.

Doggerel finds the American alternative mainstays reinstating bittersweet peaks and ironic edge, the interplay of Black Francis and Paz Lenchantin’s quasi-mystical vocal patter joining songwriting that captures the four-piece’s creeping, jack-o-lantern-leering spirit.

Despite only being seven tracks long, this album is substantial and will keep audiences invested.

The execution itself often falls frustratingly flat, lacking originality and a clear-cut focus. With its limited scope of musical conceptions, Born Pink, therefore, sounds strangely restricted, as if detained in a confined space wherein it longs to escape.

So sentimental and lyrical the whole thing is, and its content remains forthright and honest throughout. It is, indeed, a gratifying holistic experience.

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

Both parties benefit from the collaboration on Ali: Touré gets to paint the songs he loves with a wider palette without diluting the power of the source material, and Khruangbin’s add some welcome grit to their smooth and hazy signature sound.

Yes, the album could do with some variation in its sound and a few more wildcard tracks to switch things up a bit, but overall, MOSS is a gorgeous outing for Maya Hawke.

Though it feels glued together by the seams, God Save The Animals, like the best Alex G efforts, eventually reveals an almost impossible cohesiveness – a slightly off-kilter haze where a smouldering heart shines for others to lean into.

Tough Baby demands your attention; it's a dizzying array of vibrant innovation and determination to be counterintuitive.

This certainly isn’t one for Mumford & Sons fans. There’s no big, foot-stomping, sing-along moments here; instead, the song arrangements are sumptuously layered, built on many little, delicate, moving parts, masterfully put together by producer Blake Mills.

With its attention to detail and exceptional vocal delivery, The Hardest Part is a debut for the ages. An album that is both culturally relevant and sonically refined to the point of timelessness.

Taken as a whole, this is a perfectly enjoyable album if you want your music to be nostalgic, friendly and accessible. If you’re a jaded rock fan looking for a newish band and a reliable sound, Starcrawler are for you. For everybody else, proceed with caution.

Djo yet again proves an adaptable vehicle for such madcap energy and chameleonic shifts in style, an earnest and well-finished delve into another sphere of Keery’s artistic voice.

Asphalt Meadows acquits itself well. It’s there within the measured tread and stark atmospherics of "Peppers", or the twinkling sun goes down gorgeousness of “Fragments from the Decade” where loose limbed almost jazzy drums shuffle off into the distance, of course your mileage may vary according to your own particular emotional pressure points.

Whitney have updated their sound, but they do it with such subtlety and finesse that it feels incredibly natural and organic.

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.

Hideous is able to straddle the line between a celebration of sexuality, whilst going beyond themes purely of self-love and physical exaltation that have come to dominate feel-good pop music in recent years.

With Expert in a Dying Field The Beths have created a bundle of sheer sonic joy that confronts, but doesn’t succumb to, all those neuroses most of us know too well.

Opening themselves up to new concepts and sounds, but retaining their trademark ability to captivate and obliterate in equal measure, listening to Holy Fawn’s Dimensional Bleed inspires a deep, unfading admiration for a truly genre-defying band.

Sampa The Great's latest offering ensures that she will remain a beacon in her home continent of Africa and beyond.

How Do You Burn? ups the ante on its two predecessors going deeper in a richly assured display of Dulli and the band’s abilities.

Over Natural Brown Prom Queen’s 53 minutes and 18 tracks, the Cincinnati-born Parks displays her compositional skills, penchant for winning melodies, and versatility as a performer. Most strikingly, the set documents Parks as she integrates myriad approaches, balancing discipline and the hedonistic impulse.

It’s positively thrilling to witness a band perpetually committed to pushing boundaries and creating music unlike anything else released before it.

With Älskar, Nina Nesbitt has profoundly demonstrated her knack at penning emotive, and sonically layered numbers that range from classic-pop to piano-ballad cuts.

The result is a seamless psychedelic synthesis of pop noir, ghostly '60s girl group sounds, Lynchian-style atmospherics, ambient washes and dance floor undertones, there’s nearly always a subliminal sense of unspecified menace or is it simply the deep disorientation that love and desire brings? Surrender and immersion are the only sensible responses.

Though impressive and vaguely explorative, the record falls slightly short of the mark for an outfit aiming to reinvent themselves.

Souvenirs is the creation of a band who have to make music and like all great debuts it’s both a culmination of their beginnings as well as a pointer to the wide open road ahead.

It does feel harsh to pick holes in a record that’s already so visibly bruised by criticism; where credit’s due, the home stretch is much, much stronger.

Flood is a superb album, by an artist who hasn’t even given us a glimpse of her potential. It’s charming and enjoyable and engaging and attractive and all of the adjectives you could ever want out of an indie-pop record - and not only does it hold up to multiple listens, it actually seems to expand and grow in stature with each run-through.

An album as intimate as it is cinematic. Rose-tinted melodies wrap around delicate harmonies and show off Jónsdóttir’s disarming vocals as she chronicles her experiences of falling in and out of love in the digital age, and 12 tracks feel not quite long enough to experience the ethereal beauty of Laufey’s sonic universe.

On Sound Of The Morning, Pearson proves she has much to show us, and should be recognised as a folk singer of real promise and singular talent.

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.

It is easy to imagine there are a number of extra levels to reach, and the glimpses he has provided on this album should only serve to increase excitement about what he could do in the near future.

The infectious results deserve to elevate McCombs beyond his durable cult hero status.

As well as succeeding in being both a culturally appropriate expression of catharsis, Care also pushes the band further in their musical development.

Bigger. Messier. does drag a little towards the end – particularly when Elfman’s collaborators show too much respect for the original tracks. (Stu Brooks’ remix of “True” is an example of this: the bassist played with Danny Elfman at Coachella, and you get a sense that he’s a little too close to this music as a result.) But then the album closes out with an absolutely bonkers remix of “Happy” by Little Snake, who somehow manages both to deconstruct the track into smithereens and to enhance its gothic, trippy essence.

All Of Us Flames reveals a perhaps more humble and equanimous Furman, an empathetic artist still committed to truth-telling, still railing against the injustices of the world.

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.

Chopper doesn’t reinvent the wheel, nor does it steer into anything surprising or off kilter, but it definitely shows how nicely the wheel continues to spin.

The LP offers one of the most compelling and honest explorations of addiction in recent musical memory - it’s filled with grizzly, visceral declarations that underscore the stakes at hand.

Filled with high-octane rock-infused instrumentation, demanding lyrics and strong vocal performances, Garageband Superstar is a truly impressive debut from the Isle of Wight's own brightly burgeoning scuzz-pop superstar.

Green’s debut foray into a full-length project highlights and accentuates her brilliant ability of penning narratives and churning out infectious alt-pop cuts.

Freakout/Release features many moments of quintessential Hot Chip fun, but explores other exciting avenues as well. What’s clearly still at the centre though is the heart and love for creativity that this band still have, and it’s a testament to their talent that through all the music they create between them they can still turn out interesting hits in new ways.

As a confident debut, What I Breathe encapsulates exactly what Mall Grab wants us to feel. Weaving multiple genres together through dance and electronic, he shows us what he lives for and what’s pushing him forward.

Unwanted has genuine highlights even if it grows boring and repetitive as an album.

Whilst the orange glow of sunsets and Aperol Spritz’ are in full swing, it’s a record made exclusively for these moments.

Intoxicating soundscapes and irresistible hooks have long catapulted Leff to the top of the pop sphere. All 4 Nothing not only reaffirms this notion, it’s perfect proof that there is so much more to come; a glimpse into the depths of Lauv’s psyche and unlimited creative potential.

Panorama proves that Kiyoko isn’t limited to any 2018 zeitgeist. There are nods to her older sound, sure, but the matured production and continued experiments show that she’s not out to recreate Expectations – she’s growing from it.

The palette is wider and richer this time around due to prominent contributions of guests from different parts of the world. Even as electronics, strings and horns enter the frame alongside the ever-present banjo and different types of guitars, the music retains its spacious, uncluttered freshness.

Las Ruinas spotlights Rico navigating a broader emotional and stylistic range than she did on her debut, while also displaying finer attunement to the details of songcraft, production, and performance. And yet, one has the sense that Rico is still seeking to codify her brand, to claim a fertile balance between horror and pop, posture and vulnerability.

From the descending, soulful lines on “Backwards” with its urgent pulse to the glassy textures of “Vera (Judah Speaks)" with a club energy always moments away from being revisited, refreshingly, Yesterday Is Heavy never lets you veer too far from the present tense.

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.

Their ability to drop a pop banger has been proven already – they can do it – but they just find reimagining what Cybotron would sound like as a future-punk band, and that exploration in sound proves to be a gripping listen here.

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.

Ultimately, World Wide Pop works best in small doses. Still, Superorganism’s displays of creativity and personality are admirable and will get them farther than most in modern indie pop.

Treays has outdone himself by biding his time and doing what he always does – injecting his music with a slightly abstract but absolutely authentic sense of himself.

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.

Renaissance is one of Beyoncé’s best albums to date: it doesn’t walk in the footsteps of its predecessors but instead makes its own path, going to places we didn’t think Beyoncé would go. The six years since her last effort have well and truly been worth the wait.

On Hold On Baby, we find King Princess both more coy and more confident than we’ve ever heard her, and she leaves us little doubt that both those sides of her feed one another.

Whether its hiding tragedy behind comedy for his own purpose, or simply making it easier for us to digest what Purdy preaches when he gets to the truth, either way, ISTHISFORREAL? is a special balance.

Whether the music on Jack in the Box suits your taste or not, it’s hard to dismiss this album as an artistic statement rather than just chapter 1/7 of BTS proving they can also make money in ways beyond official group releases.

It’s full of genuinely bracing moments that deftly thread punk grit with austere humour and unabashed sincerity. It’s just a shame that what they’re best at seems to have been done so well so recently by other bands.

While further proving that Rogers has yet to find a wholly satisfying balance between understated folk and maximalist electropop, it also shows her to be a multifaceted performer with a dynamism lacking amongst many of her peers.

Nastasia has turned her harrowing experiences into genuinely beautiful songs. At first, the bluntly matter-of-fact tone of the writing and simple melodies seem almost artless and first-draft rough. Over consecutive listens, the cumulative hypnotic pull and elemental, harsh beauty of the songs and especially their lyrics becomes evident.

These are songs with the glossiest pop sheen steamrolled over them, erasing any wrinkles or mishaps – the exact thing that made her so endearing to begin with.

While many of the right components are present, About Last Night... feels like a plate of empty calories; struggling to reach a sense of genuine empowerment on account of its overstuffed production and lyrics that are vague to the point of meaninglessness.

Beatopia highlights an artist who has matured quickly, honing her initial work while impressively expanding her aesthetic scope.

Though many of the band's distinct hallmarks show face – heavier than ever, even – somehow their latest record sounds miraculously and hideously new, proving their aversion to any mindless repetition.

Retaining a societal consciousness, Down Tools is not so much a party record but one that surveys the damage after a storm, picking up the pieces with an increasing dose of humour as well as world weariness.

The prevailing feeling throughout LOGGERHEAD is one of punk, through its take-no-prisoners sound, and its desire to bring kindred spirits together as a community. “I think I’m just going through an exfoliation of my thoughts and experiences,” Romans-Hopcraft said last year, about his then still-in-the-making debut. Never has that sounded more urgent, more wholly unique, and more fiercely individual.

The band are excellent throughout, adjusting to Murphy’s performances and giving him room to fully explore his most eccentric tendencies.

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.

Although unfailingly accessible (“Anima” in particular is impossible to shake off once heard), this is a refreshingly strange combination of psych-rock dynamics, pop-savvy hooks, homespun electronica and ancient-sounding melodies.

Adding to the growing list of albums with a deeply personal approach released this year, this might be the most heartfelt and longing. The matured viewpoint of a growing artist is worth the due diligence alone.