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.