This is an unusually difficult album to love, because its true beauty is obscured, deliberately so, by clouds of uninviting sonic textures, but hidden in the depths are incredible moments of clarity and intent. ... Probably Thom Yorke’s most beautiful work to date.

The truth is that they are both thoughtful, sometimes sentimental musicians, with voices that can sing of love and hurt just as much as eating croissants (“Continental Breakfast”) or friendly girls who insist on touching your face (“Untogether”)--and this is delightful.

Alongside a natural tendency to sustain tensions and avoid convenient certainties – what the poet Keats called negative capability – is a sophisticated pop flair. With I Get Into Trouble, Zietsch emerges as one of the more eloquent singer-songwriters of her generation.

A slab of seventeen tracks, the bands ninth album has managed to pack enough dynamic twists and turns to make it feel like a joy ride rather than a struggling amble. Given the weight that One More Time... holds, it's an impressive feat and one that feels significant no matter which way you look at it.

Combat Sports reaffirms The Vaccines as one of the most exciting British bands around--and one absolutely still worth pestering friends about.

Whether it’s dark and driving or elegant and echoing, Vultures is at all points capable of igniting a spark in your gut that’ll burn until there’s nothing left.

V isn’t a huge reinvention, more a subtle reboot, and a move which has worked out perfectly. The Horrors are hardly new to making brilliant albums--they did that with their previous three--but V is better than them all.

An album that is truly magical, Man Made is a stand-out debut. After giving everyone a bite of the fruit with previous releases “Downers” and “Hu Man”, this is the full showcase of her impeccable talent.

On their tenth record, they’re back once again to thwack their guitars really hard while also putting together some of the lushest soundscapes and most rousing choruses you’ll hear all year. The band’s greatest strength is an ability to cover multiple bases while always sounding unmistakably Deftones.

Here she is not just a musician, but a generational talent capable of creating transfixing otherworlds and, with The Gods We Can Touch, an ethereal masterpiece.

For The First Time is ferocious and endlessly intelligent, highly considered and wildly improvised, eked out with bristling tension and set alight with a burning intensity and a knowing smile.

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.

It really is a stunning record, a completely unexpected treat and an album of the year contender, no doubt.

Laufey colours both inside and outside her established lines to create a joyful tension on A Matter of Time. It makes for the boldest chapter in her artistic story yet.

Very few albums are worth such a long wait, though, but blackSUMMERS’night is one of them--it’s an album that should live forever, purely because it sounds so detached from time.

It’s beautifully crafted, and you’ve really not heard anything like it before.

She forges a mighty hammer and her album has a thunderous resonance for our times.

A concept album this is not, but the with the veins running deep with recurring themes, as a second album, Davies has managed to construct a weighty signifier of impassable change. ... Packing a punch musically; twisting and turning; immersing with piano interludes branching elegantly from the albums introductory roots (“All Shall Be Well”), the softest nature is held for later cut “5am” which feels as vulnerable as it does honest.

Wondrous Bughouse is a delicious collage: provocative, allusive and consistently engaging.

On the whole, Freedom represents a watershed moment for Damon McMahon.

The Cleansing’s bounteous treasure trove delivers his most ambitious and potentially most rewarding collection of songs.

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.

Unsurprisingly, there’s an overarching sense of melancholy, but the more you listen, the more you realise that she’s deftly poetic with her words in a way that’s clearly inspired by some of the great writers of the 20th Century.

Jones places a premium on tonal variance and equilibrium throughout Visions; it’s a wise chess move, ensuring an absorbing listen with every spin.

It can range from snarky and contemptuous to comforting and reassured, but every time you listen to The Overload you notice and feel something new.

Lovingly co-produced with Paul (Mansun) Draper, Davies is on startling form throughout, layering spellbinding vocal harmonies and turning her hand to a long list of instruments with names few will even recognise.

She’s delivered an album full of unrepentant honesty, decadent instrumental highs, and an unguarded emotional core. Few other artists can so perfectly capture the dizzying life-or-death stakes of those who love too young and too hard.

With clever twists of post-production, Makaya chops and resamples not only his own band but also choice words and phrases of each stanza, making the poetry a percussive element and drawing out emphasis. A decade after his death, Gil Scot-Heron’s final oeuvre has finally settled into something great.