Terrestrials sounds surprisingly cohesive considering the project’s improvised roots and slow development.

It grows immediately after every listen. Its effects have some kind of exponential growth in your head, where you can find yourself humming melodies that appear once or twice in one track. His songwriting is that infectious.

Comfort food is dubbed so for a reason, and Real Hair’s got my belly delightfully full.

Songs Cycles certainly doesn’t represent all that Van Dyke Parks has to say about the state of the modern world, but the album does manage to assuredly illuminate Parks’ singular artistic vision and his enduring impact on the music of our times.

Sure, it’s chorus-driven and a touch too slick, lacking the density and the ambition and the sheer bloody nihilism of NIN’s 90’s heyday, but Reznor’s not that guy anymore--that guy died with the heroin overdose. But there are more than enough moments here to suggest a maker not--whatever the protestations of one of its tracks--yet at peace.

Cut Worms, now Clarke’s third record under this moniker, arrives as handsomely as the tidal waves that ramble onto the shore: high-spirited yet uncompromising in their force.

Snapped Ankles make music to soundtrack the apocalypse, and you can’t help simply sitting and enjoying the ride.

It’s a rich tapestry of sounds that comes straight from the heart. That might be Marten’s secret ingredient: no matter how left-field the compositions are, whether warming or breaking, there’s always a lot of heart in the music.

It’s positively thrilling to witness a band perpetually committed to pushing boundaries and creating music unlike anything else released before it.

As the next chapter in an unimpeachably reliable catalog, Nicole Atkins couldn’t ask for anything more from Italian Ice, preserving her artistic hallmarks, deepening her emotional lyrical depth, while broadening her stylistic palette.

Young Enough is a pop album that just happens to rock.

You don’t have to be a fan of punk music or emo to be a fan of The Hotelier, you simply have to appreciate genuine, earnest emotion.

Fabiana Palladino is a near-effortless reinvention of retro pop, soul, funk, and R&B tracks with a glossy modern sheen, setting the stage for more grandiose statements in the future.

Ultimately, one of No No No’s greatest strengths is its lack of clarity.

The result is a record much darker in tone than previous outings, yet still harbours the sardonic wit that endeared us to them all those years ago

Strong as the songs are, it’s the rich musical settings that really hit hard.

Beatopia highlights an artist who has matured quickly, honing her initial work while impressively expanding her aesthetic scope.

Pinkshinyultrablast isn’t so much offering something new to or pushing shoegaze anywhere it hasn’t already been. They are flat out transcending it, offering a sound all their own that is frighteningly powerful and overwhelmingly beautiful.

As an elegy to Hayes, Era is a beautifully crafted tribute to their friend, but it’s also a statement of intent, which is to keep moving and create music that mixes the ups with the downs, euphoria with despondency, in a voice that is their own.

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.

Horse Lords fare even more impressively with the minimalism that sets in during the second half of the album.

Sticking to their core tenets, This Behavior is perhaps the record where ADULT. get the weirdest and the most lost, taking their aggressive electronic soundscapes to a plain more immersive and menacing than they’ve ever been before.

Kagoule have captured the energy, thrills, uncertainties and anxieties of being a teenager and bundled it all up in an exciting debut album that thrills from beginning to end. More importantly they've done it on their own terms.

Protomartyr save their best for the final half of the album beginning with the buzz saw, fuzz chug of “The Hermit”, moving into the splashy moroseness of “Clandestine Time” and recent single “Why Does It Shake?”. But it is on “Ellen” when The Agent Intellect truly peaks.

Bewitched is a marked step up in every way. And, because of it, she’s more than the promising young star she was in her early career – she has shown herself to be an established talent.

Mourn is a hearty, eye-popping reminder just how far we have swayed from rock music’s embryo nowadays and how awfully contrived the revivalist stabs have been.

Masking our flawed humanity with flawless electro, the South London trio fork over a delicious portion of pessimistic pop, drizzled in scrumptious synths and glorious electronic production, but bypassing a sugarcoating of over-hackneyed hedonism.

For its occasional low ebbs, Oxymoron is an impressive display of bleak wit.