It’s not polished, but it's chromatic, jagged, yet it jangles. It’s the sort of record that skates across a pond, leaving no marks, but the ice collapses moments after it graces it.

The Afterparty is messy, amusing at times and intentionally touching on uncomfortable moods, that honesty is appreciated, and the songs themselves feel fine, if underwhelming when they’re describing such potentially big emotions.

It’s brief, and perhaps maybe pushed its sound too far to bring in many new listeners, but for those that enjoyed their previous records it’s certainly a great time.

Remember The Humans only hints at past glories, but it's a welcome reminder of why Broken Social Scene endeared themselves to us in the first place.

Location Lost is what I imagine floating endlessly through space feels like, rotating as the natural force of casting yourself away with the intention of relinquishing all grounding takes hold as reverb disappears into the unknown horizon. The buffering and battering of space debris through the majesty, akin to the twists and turns each track takes, add to the momentum.

Theft World spotlights them trusting themselves and their process – that whatever they’re doing will land as it’s supposed to land and reach the people it’s supposed to reach.

The staggering amount of feelings spent and tales fabricated draws the listener into the story as much as it may pull them out of it.

The shockingly personal look at every contour of this lofty title FENIAN – all the happiness, empowerment, community, successes, sacrifices, disenchantment, confliction, grief – makes for a far more interesting, humanising record. Kneecap’s fire understandably dimmed, but it never sizzled out.

An endearing, lo-fi filtered record not limited in what it has to say.

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.

This is a snapshot of a band that has conquered mountains and achieved grand things while proving you can still find those edges at the peak that go a little higher.

With how much groundwork they’ve already laid, Friko can afford to conduct themselves more lightly this time, but there are promises from their introduction that we’re still waiting for.

The beats prove slick with how they are able to further express his feelings, the lyrics are solid with bits of metaphors sprinkled for impact, and the production itself enlivens the whole experience. It wouldn’t be out of place for Joseph to come back in the next few years with a bigger masterpiece.

Singing shines brightest when Margaret's voices are in harmony.

Come Closer is a hostage to 90s Euro-Club-isms and torn in half by the lesser devices of two highly talented individuals, a near-first in music where a collab brings out the worst in each participant.

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.

Throughout the album, the duo’s sound stretches and bends like pliable dough, somewhat unmoored from any solid foundations, subject to abrupt and unexpected – yet still cohesive – contortions with little advance warning.

It's a no-frills sound, but dynamically expressive enough to make a potent virtue of the live feel ethos that characterises Total Dive.

Judging by the often mesmerising, genuinely timeless and deeply resonant Evergreen In Your Mind (which ultimately adds up to far more than the sum of its highly commendable parts, especially if ingested in one uninterrupted, focused sitting), Habel’s own steps are inching ever closer to a comprehensive mastery of the folk song format.

You’re left shrugging, like, okay, whatever. As recalibrations, or simply maturing, goes Cruel World is as mixed and contradictory as her debut.

Hurts Like Hell may feel unremarkable to some, but for those who are constantly contemplative of where one used to be, its subtle yet deeply personal storytelling will be much more touching than expected.

These songs remain uncharacteristically conventional in structure and instrumentation as a disappointing result.

As a project, Strictly 4 The Scythe is overcommitted and faintly ridiculous. Its collective chemistry is intermittent, owing something to its indiscriminately-into-the-crowd exuberance and occasionally tipping into something cynically curatorial. .... These failures are failures of abundance, though. Curry remains an earnest underground champion.

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.

FREE SPIRITS brilliantly represents the pairs growth into themselves and into the reality around them. It’s as playful as you’d expect – the features all doing their part to add to the dizzying hold on to actuality – but beneath the smirk lies something more deliberate.

Perhaps what’s most striking about Birding is how cohesive it is for a debut, every swell is intentional and carefully placed without ever feeling clinical. There’s warmth and space while including all the finely crafted minutia needed to give songs genuine depth and the band have resisted the urge to overcomplicate things.

Far from monotonous, the band’s seemingly relentless pummelling rewards a patient listener with plenty of hypnotic texture and enriching detail that is far easier to simply feel and become immersed in than do justice to with words.

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.

Surprising, always engaging debut solo album.

Ö is a raw, natural celebration of that trust. It doesn’t take itself too seriously, and it’s exactly what’s needed heading into summer.

Of The Earth is ultimately easier to admire as an audacious gamble than to love as a fully successful statement: sections of the album feels still under construction, an impression amplified by a handful of fully realised gems, like the hypnotic and haunting highlight “Light The Way”.

Her songs look straight into the abyss and still reach out for colour. That choice, made again and again across the album, gives it a quiet power, one as a listener you have to be willing to absorb to feel fully.

Even if it doesn’t feel like a groundbreaking return, many tracks here align with his ingenious artistic consistency.

Avalon Emerson is doing everything required on Written into Changes to tear up the dance-pop rule book.

On U, she finds a clearly-defined, rounded-out identity in her music for the first time, and she delivers the most immediate and the most robust work of her career.

Play Me is at its most interesting when removed from an easy genre.

With her new album, Saputjiji, Tagaq continues to mine hardcore proclivities, stepping fully into the role of devoted subversive and guerilla artiste.

A comeback, then, that proves the case for Peaches herself while underselling her music.

The result is a collection of futile, brooding songs that tries to encapsulate bigger-than-life emotions but ends up being too afraid to truly delve into them. He could just need a little love from someone, anyone, to get that refined taste back.

Something We All Got is the third album from the Toronto group and the recipe of buzzing, breathless quite often vulnerable sound has been matured and given new life.

Flashes of quality make the album all the more frustrating. If the lyrics came anywhere near his halcyon days, the shortcomings might matter less.

If the odd long term listener might suggest Nothing's About To Happen To Me is a touch risk averse, the majority of Mitski fans will be more than satisfied with another serving of seriously good stuff.

Callahan is particularly unsentimental. His lyrics often bring to mind lab or field notes. His signature deadpan delivery is consistently elusive. The instrumentation sounds unscripted, largely improvised. In this way, 58 captures Callahan at his most unguarded and unrehearsed.

The result is the most substantial and satisfying Gorillaz album since the widescreen 2005 art-pop masterpiece Demon Days and its almost as impressive successor, 2010’s sprawling Plastic Beach.

There are a few tracks that are decent rather than great, and the 36-minute runtime leaves it feeling a little too brief. That being said, it’s always a good thing to leave your audience wanting more, and Baby Keem certainly does that.

Cerulean, while technically masterful, is just a fine, pleasant dream to pass the time.

If you’re ever walking by rundown buildings of the same stature, listen to Shaking Hand and let the colour in the mundanity reveal itself to you.

The slight disappointment of Disc 39 is that Cole’s comfort in his recent life leaves less to be explored than you might hope. That said, there are certainly high-points throughout and the reflection of "Quik Stop" and "and the whole world is the Ville" illustrate Cole’s growth and position now as an elder statesman.

The film’s problematic dryness and refusal to shed light on the all-around complexities of this toxic love are relayed here. Intentional or not, the 34-minute length is one of the project’s two saviours; any longer and tedium would be inevitable.

As it stands, the apple tree under the sea acts as an affirming step that Hemlocke Springs is taking. An adventurous blend of pop across various decades, with a journey that only unleashes courageous swerves rather than shrinking down.

Despite its many strengths, the rest of the album can’t help but feel like a gradual comedown from such a monumental start, but the sincerity and warmth of Glenn-Copeland’s deceptively simple songs is never in doubt.

All the shifts lend the album an odd pop sensibility, the tracks flowing like a bizarre dance amongst the scraps of modernity. Despite these developments, singer Valentine Caufield remains as incensed, vicious, and powerful as ever.

Although the results skitter unpredictably over genre barriers, often within a single song, the results make total, positively charged, resistance-battering sense.

Ratboys have been a perennially underrated indie act for the best part of a decade, a steadily excellent band on the verge of proverbial explosion. With the hooks, heart, and heaviness packed into Singin’ To An Empty Chair’s 50 mins, their time could well be now.

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.

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.

Though Can I Get a Pack of Camel Lights? is a magpie-mix of familiar genres and influences, from Indian-raga-inspired psychedelia to tripped-out electronica, it is also clearly the product of someone freely expanding their sound in multiple directions, and that sense of exploration and fun is infectious.

He’s at his best when tracks uncoil like little vignettes, leaving small clues that pile up towards the end.

In experimenting with various sonic tapestries paired with a conceptual thematic essence, she ends up hitting effective compositions in some moments and awkwardly stumbling on others. It’s a dream that might gradually fade in and out of the mind, but when it does clear out the misty blur, some moments end up potent.

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.

World’s Gone Wrong manages to turn the Tennessee-based songwriter’s urgent dismay and anger at the socio-political chaos that is tearing America apart into genuinely impactful and affecting art that is likely to endure long after the final splinters of the current mess have been swept away.

Too much of Quicksand Heart feels rushed, or perhaps consciously unambitious, eschewing bold creative strokes in favour of the kind of inoffensive consistency you might put on at a cheese and wine night to set the mood. Its best songs are worth a relisten; taken as a whole, though, it’s something of a disappointment.

Shaw’s untreated voice speaks directly into your ear, and Tom Dowse’s layered guitars are bright and upfront, doing so much melodic and textural work that they seem to wrap around and fill the space in every song.

It’s simultaneously consistent and assorted, richly individuated without any overwrought attempts to appear authentic.

In breaking the tides of what was once familiar, Anna Von Hausswolff revels in the abundance that she fully embraces.

Bang is a great album, but more crucially, it’s an important one.

The fuzz caked like dust onto Ellis’ demo mixtape has been cleaned off on Blizzard thanks to its proper mix and production job, allowing his extraordinary flirtations with folk music to shine.

An elephant in the room – the overproduction of his tracks. While they do not completely ruin the album, it neuters the vulnerability that is expressed. Otherwise, fans will be pleased to find that Keaton Henson reigns well as a solid singer-songwriter in today’s climate.

The sonic palette wanders into romantic and mythical laments and as a result the actual relationship loss is portrayed as cosmic. This could be seen as melodramatic or overblown at times but given the notion of the all encompassing love at its heart is also, perhaps unavoidable. .... Vocally, she continues to be a force.

There is a broad crossover appeal, and there is so much to unpack. They have taken the sounds of their EPs and expanded into something more expansive, without losing what endeared them to audiences. This is a thrilling, evocative debut that lives up to the hype.

Ehrlich’s resplendent falsetto is still at the centre of everything, but there’s a serious depth here in the writing that elevates the material above the group’s previous two albums.

Yes, it’s an unashamedly ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ record – but who really cares when the results are so enjoyably convincing?

It’s so unrestrained that it sometimes loses its grip, condensing several albums worth of ideas into a single project that isn’t quite as compelling as the sum of its parts, the sum of its collaborators, or the sum of its energy.

Mercy shows woods and Elucid delving more deeply into surrealism, their lyrical flows, brimming with uninhibited leaps, often bordering on stream-of-consciousness. The Alchemist’s approach is lighter, his treatments perhaps more precisely wielded than on Haram. With Mercy, Armand Hammer continue to radicalize and aestheticize rap, pushing language beyond the conventional – all while reflecting the savage world we live in.

Sorry remain excitingly unfileable with their third and likely best album to date. Simultaneously, though, they’re fast becoming one of the most reliably exciting pop-indie-rock-whatever bands in the UK today.

It's a bravura performance from all concerned; for all the album's unquestionable strengths, you may wish for a drop more of the same raw sawdust-kicking passion and bite during some of the more restrained proceedings that follow.

Her introspection has not only led to her most vulnerable and earnest record but also a display of everything she has worked towards over her career.

Off the Record is a magnificent treasure chest built for deep dives and repeat visits.

Those who aren’t invested in live performances may find Everybody Scream less compelling. The deeper the record goes, the more dependent it is on Welch and co’s theatricality that can sometimes only be appreciated by seeing it seep into their stage presence before your eyes. .... Luckily, there are just enough tracks on the album that emanate with such radiant energy even on stream, beckoning you to lose yourself in the restorative and ever-expanding coven.

Ending the album with a couple of more easily accessible songs – closer “Price of a Man”, despite being groovier and addressing toxic masculinity, is also quite conventional by their standards – may be the band’s attempt to attract a wider audience. And they do deserve a wider audience. It’s just that you hope they can get it without having to lose the spark and spirit that makes Again such a thrilling ride.

There’s a pleasant sea-change at the mid-way point on “Togetherness Is All I’m After”, with the dropping tempo allowing some finer feeling and vocal range to return, but tracks like “Cell Phone Blues”, “Love Chant”, and “Marauders”, feel forced and lumpen.

It's clear that these compositions are infused by strong emotions and the inescapable weight of memories, but it's not always easy to interpret the hidden meaning.

Much of the record takes the well-traveled Just Mustard path of slamming guitar pedals together until a mind-melding guitar sound summersaults out the other end. This process may as well be the Ted Lasso Way for shoegaze, but few others can boast the ear for melody and a measured control of the chaos like Lovecraftian, tortured Blondie.

The album details not just a break-up, but a shift in how relationships and human connection work in modern times.

It delivers successfully on its objective to keep things light and easy while dancing the night away. It’s not that deep, but it might just be Lovato’s best effort yet.

The now-classic title track to Born In The USA features twice on the uncommonly strong extras included on this five-disc deluxe reissue of Nebraska. ....The set of Springsteen's solo demos from the Nebraska sessions is startlingly strong, especially the four previously unreleased songs. .... Then there's the original album. Brought into sharper focus via remastering without losing any of its essential murkiness, Nebraska remains the gold standard for modern solo troubadour records.

Circle is a compelling, often mesmerizing listen, but you might have trouble finding a foothold.

The album ends suddenly and uncertainly. We’re left with plenty to mull over but, equally importantly, a great desire to hear those ginormous hooks all over again.

By maneuvering their psychedelia to one side, the band has crafted their most clearly defined record to date. For those in love with bar italia for their uncanny qualities, there’s still something here, but the verdict on intention is up.

While Prelude might feature thicker arrangements and traffic more in classic pathos, with Pyre, TLDP are as sublime and theatrical as ever.

Even if the album largely sets aside the impeccable hook-craft of previous work, the sequence is indeed sonically and thematically compelling.

Her flow can often be propulsive and deadly, and every so often, she strikes gold (“All Mine” and “AAAHH MEN!”). Even something like “Jealous Type”, one of Vie’s least cohesive mash of rap and pop, gets the job done.

These ten tracks are an arrestingly assured summary of who they are now, while fully embracing their former selves.

Snooper’s vision of egg punk is more hygienic; the full experience is still reserved for the stage. They’ve fantastically magnified a glimpse of that for larger crowds, but in the studio, Snooper aren’t as wild as we thought they were.

There’s plenty to admire of Swift – her voice, her curiosity, her ability to mine emotional nuance – but that’s been true of every Swift era. What’s missing here is the glue. Similar to Red, some tracks just don’t mesh.

The remastering work across the whole album is more subtle than might have been feared in that it does not draw attention to itself, but simply and effectively brings out more clearly than before the (positive) group dynamics and the sonic range. .... The three records are in an attractive tri-fold sleeve, though it would have been good, for such a lavish and correspondingly expensive product, to have the paper inner sleeves for both the studio album and the live one poly-lined.

The sleek and luxurious Through The Wall, doubles down and delivers the purest distillation of her vision so far, and on top of that, it’s one of the best pop albums of the year.

It’s in the album’s quietest moment that Dean delivers her most compelling performance yet.