Slater is adept at wrenching every available feeling from a short stint of words, a talent that's gestated wonderfully as the band have found their feet.

Throughout Hopelessness, Anohni reveals multiple layers to the stories within her songs, and that the deeper you dig beyond the headlines and easily digestible sound bites, the more pain and deception you are likely to find.

The fact that the duo have chosen to deploy a stripped back approach to the album, and the fragile beauty this evokes, leaves little doubt that the pair are more than capable of weaving some seriously ethereal magic, even when they're miles apart.

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.

It's simply stunning.

In short, the world can never have enough albums like this. Not only have Public Access TV added to the run of great New Wave-tinged pop records of the past few year or so--from Phoenix’ Ti Amo to Spoon’s Hot Thoughts, what they’ve also done is make an album that sounds like the more metropolitan end of New Wave, encompassing disco, punk and 80s pop.

Imagination is what makes this record. There’s something about each one of these tracks that lulls out a scenario from the recesses of your brain, with each different sonic motif working around the others to complete a narrative, which fades out of your mind immediately as the song melts into itself at the end, like the disintegrating dawn reverie we all experience on attempting to remember a dream.

Their ingenuity and introspection often serves as an antidote to brash, factory-made pop, making them crucial figures within the wider pop landscape. On A Bath Full of Ecstasy, Hot Chip remain as vital as ever.

Coope’s feminine and domestic aesthetic is cunningly invoked and then subverted across the tracklist – in parts charming, in parts unnerving, in parts invigorating – producing a record that’s genuinely unexpected and delightful.

Everything Squared succeeds both on its own terms and as a reminder of how original the band was from the outset. Looking forwards and backward with equal acuity, it is a fine achievement.

God’s Favorite Customer isn’t afforded the opportunity to shine with Tillman’s usual charming spirit--that’s not because the turmoil of heartache is too mundane a subject for the philosophically-minded Tillman to master, but because in order to master it, he needs to do more to whip up his usual reckless innovation.

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.

This album, as different as it is from the band’s other output, is simultaneously the most distinct Black Country, New Road has ever been.

Nikki Nack frantically succeeds on so many levels. Garbus ticks every box with aplomb and swagger, making a record that’s confrontational, boundary-bending, enigmatic, topical and sheer fun outside the usual channels.

Whip smart, furious and, most importantly, fun, Songs of Praise is the first essential album of 2018. And what an album it is.

This is Sunn O))) at their most playful, and Scott at his most enjoyable.

Heaven is a brief, yet indulgent series of funk jams and sultry, lo-fi ballads, fit to make leaves age into Autumn based on atmosphere alone.

With this raw collection of songs, Royal Headache have bared themselves to the world, and it's enthralling.

The tracks’ detailed arrangements are almost symphonic at places, but no matter how elaborate and eccentric they get, listeners are consistently guided by catchy ornamental melodies with which the album is replete. It’s this powerful juxtaposition that makes Age Of so compelling as an album.

By interrogating the strategies we employ to keep on living in an impossible world, this astonishing album has become one.

While the big-tent ambitions of Farm To Table make for some of Strange’s most exciting fare, they also narrow his range sightly, making the record feel in some ways more creatively restrained than his debut.

What’s makes PUP an engrossing listen, though, is also what takes it beyond a typical hardcore record: there’s sunlight that refuses to be shut out from the overcast skies.

Although this is hardly an essential release--few live albums ever are--it’s no victory lap or self-indulgent unit shifter. Its true value lies in its function as a worthy addition to the latter-day Cohen canon, as a reminder that he is still an active, relevant artist and performer, rather than a self-aggrandising nostalgia act.

In ten aptly small songs Adrianne evokes our ability to vanish at the feet of nature, creating a black hole all of her own that’s both comforting and suffocating.

With sonics so extraordinarily ornate and a soul-stirring sentiment to match, three men and their producer have successfully taken the listening world to church, and left it there waiting for its next sermon.

Rather than coming across as naïve, Shura has created something hopeful and delightfully light in this record, setting it apart from much of pop’s current offerings. It is the perfect soundtrack to the end of summer, and all the months after spent remembering it.

With Loom, Fear of Men have proven to be just as brilliantly complex as that natural wonder they so often invoke--deep, refreshing, mysterious, life-affirming.

The result is that rarest of things: an improvised album that sounds so perfect, you’d think it was all planned.