There’s nothing particularly new here, nothing cutting edge, but there is beautiful, considered, genuine songwriting, and to greet such art with any kind of disdain would be nothing short of a travesty.

Fast Food isn’t as labyrinthine as her debut--exits are neon-lit fire escapes rather than barricaded doors--but it is just as powerful.

Through the intelligent, measured expansion of the artistic characteristics for which he has been so respected since his departure from The Coral, Bill Ryder-Jones has confirmed his place among this country’s most vital contemporary songwriters.

As with every Neon Indian album, VEGA INTL Night School can feel chaotic, effusive, even overwhelming at times. But, much like the proverbial “bright lights” of the city which provide the inspiration for this LP, it's dazzling, too.

There’s a confidence, an appealing weirdness to Twin Heavy which looks keen to stretch the limits of the genres it might be categorised under. Completely unrestrained in his approach, and with a noticeably slick evolution since 2017’s People and Their Dogs, Willie J Healey seems set to continue in his upward trajectory of…wherever it is he feels like going next.

While the two records share an airy, ethereal DNA, The Practice of Love is a far more palatable, more replayable affair – it just doesn’t seem to hit as hard as its sister, but very few albums do.

These are songs written for the sheer joy found in creating and sharing that still hold within them a much deeper core. ... Beautifully constructed, candid, and hopeful vignettes.

GOD isn’t about sensory pleasure. It’s about sensory gluttony, auditory overload, and revelling in the difficulty of its pacing.

The Concrete Knives will be a nice addition to the Bella Union family as they fit right in by not fitting in, instead, carving their own path while instructing us to do the same: Be Your Own King.

Since bursting on to scene with “Young Blood” all those years ago, The Naked and Famous have proven themselves to be more than well-deserved mainstays in the indie bop world.

Desire Lines is another gorgeously-crafted pop record from a band that make them look easy; melody, harmony and sophistication are all present in abundance.

While touching briefly on new ground, The Long Walk is generally what you’d expect it to be, but with minor variations alongside the engrossing quality that make Uniform so distinct to begin with. It’s nothing too far off from Uniform’s standard layout, but right now it shows them precisely where they should be as a young band.

A reflection on the band's past achievements and the clearing of the rarities cupboards: cut out a handful of one-laugh oddities tossed aside with punky abandon, and Alpha Mike Foxtrot beats most bands official catalogue.

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

Agree with them, or write them off as abstracted lunatics, The Shadow of Heaven is an incredible persuasive push for thoughtful guitar music, in an often vacuous mainstream.

Although by no means an instant classic, Nobody Wants to Be Here and Nobody Wants to Leave shows an integrity to The Twilight Sad which cements their position as one of the more creatively important bands operating today.

The studio cuts from this era on What's Your 20? provide a reminder of the huge contribution that the late multi-instrumentalist (and Tweedy's occasional co-writer) Jay Bennett made to Wilco's gradual shift from sour-breathed earthiness to more experimental, sophisticated and unsettled sounds.

The record works perfectly as a coda to what sounded like an unusually comfortable period in Spencer’s life. It’s not quite as unadorned, not quite as intimate, as Julia--opener “The Fog” has its title represented by jarring clouds of synths which break through the eight note motif that underpins the entire song--but you can still tell that all fifteen of Piano Man Spencer’s songs came from the same place.

Liberated from certain commercial expectations of their primary bands, MIEN have made an album that experiments freely without sacrificing broader appeal.

Whether in Harare, Rotterdam or Peckham, Mushonga feels those most-human of emotions: heartache, isolation, pressure to conform, but refuses to be shackled by them. Instead, we are invited on her geographical and psychological journey, and encouraged to embrace the turbulence.

Wallop is so confident in its ecclecticism, but it really impresses when the more simplistic, unpretentious urge to move hips and raise hands takes the fore. As always, an absolute pleasure to spend some time locked in with these brilliant oddballs.

There is no chance of someone walking away from Eat, Pray, Thug similarly un-enlightened; the political suite, as mentioned above, is far too direct for that. What makes it unique, however, and uniquely Hima; to be specific, it's that it manages to be both obstinate and intelligent, outspoken but sly; one could not imagine anything but that rubber-and-sandpaper voice being as such.

The London four-piece mix and match ingredients to create sounds that, whilst respectful of what has gone before, are unmistakably rooted in the here and now. The results are frequently mesmerising.

The sonic architecture crafted by Chance is both spirited and steely in its gravity.

Queen includes 19 tracks, which some might consider to be too long for an album. But Minaj avoids boring her listeners by changing up her flow and the atomosphere of each track.

Y Dydd Olaf is a marvellously magical mixture of elation, anger and sorrow and is very lovely indeed.

Keeping the ratting trap beats across most of the tracks keeps the record bang up to date, but adding in flourishes of experimental instrumentation sees Ariana going so much further.

He found himself in a rut, did what many of us would be too scared to do, and spent time with just his thoughts, for weeks on end. He waded through them, and came out the other side with his best batch of songs in years.