While No Coast is more resurrection than reinvention, hearing new Braid now after 15 years without drums up the realization that nothing has sounded quite like it since.

The Price of Life’s relentless delivery of its agenda is a tiring but invigorating shot in the arm. Will time show this to be their best album? Maybe not, is this an album by an act quickly becoming one of the most important acts in the UK whose message demands to be heard? Absolutely.

Delivering on both slow-burn emotional complexity and quick-hit thrills, Sir is a welcome return for an underrated group whose influence on contemporary pop music is often overlooked.

Without appearing arcane, Earth-Sized Worlds snapshots the group in their element, continuing to breathe new life into the remnants of often overlooked sub-genres in a brain-frying madcap patchwork.

Heartache City has much more in common with the band’s first two albums, the freakiness of their folk here is undeniable, but the tracks all share a strong backbone of hip hop and afro-beat which elevates them above the streamlined pop melee.

Throughout the album, the duo’s sound stretches and bends like pliable dough, somewhat unmoored from any solid foundations, subject to abrupt and unexpected – yet still cohesive – contortions with little advance warning.

The impulsive outpouring of Noise & Romance is reminiscent of Deerhunter and their side projects back in their prolific Microcastle / Weird Era Cont. days; flooded with good ideas and inclined to put them all to use.

Learning the lessons of its predecessor, then, album number 5 is an intelligent distillation of everything that people cherish about British Sea Power and what makes them a truly Great British rock band.

Removed from the narrative of the series itself, every emotion is given the space to take its own form – and the result is as mysteriously powerful as the world that it hails from.

A soundtrack for life’s glorious heights and crumbling nadirs.

Real victory comes from delivering something cohesively independent such as MELT MY EYEZ. And as promised we do indeed see the future.

A record that belies its debut status, Unlearning bares the strength and complexity of a later career offering, with Walt Disco deftly updating their precursors’ flair from a twenty-first century vantage point, championing the illustrious Scottish post-punk tradition in the process.

Another Billy Childish record--freewheelin', unhinged, intellectual, intense, mustachioed. It was ever thus.

If these stories sound less compelling than those of her past work, rest assured that Mitchell’s talent as a songwriter has remained undimmed in the decade since Young Man in America.

The specificity of the lyrics and the boldness of the electronic orchestration should theoretically preclude this--but Grant lets the emotions that drive them show through enough that you can’t help but connect.

On her debut, Sleepless Dreamer, the folk-soaked, pedal steel tinged sound felt like a familiar friend knocking on your door. With Magic Mirror, that friend has returned, with some stories to tell while ready to dazzle with a sparkle.

As a soundtrack to a new era where we’re all through the looking glass, old certainties bonfired and every phone alert quickening the pulse, Rennen hits the right tone--its rhythms shivering and uneasy, its melodies veering from melancholy to euphoria in a single stride.

Delivered with a passion that feels like it could at any time escalate to a frenzy, Rosenstock laments the USA’s current situation in true punk style with his heart on his sleeve.

Ripe is much less coherently pieced together than a Field Music record--as much as one can be, finding something special in the loose construction around a common idea--but therein lies the magic.

On Death Of The Party the four-piece adds a dash of Northern Soul to the mix, and it’s a perfect complement to their Beach Boys harmonies.

Even though Frahm shines on Oddments of the Gamble though his exquisite use of the Rhodes, the real stars of this record come through the application of percussion, as performed by Gmeiner and Andrea Belfi.

Elytral is rarely a passive listen: Epworth’s maximalist approach means that every song throws up at least one surprising moment. Even the more pop-leaning tracks have uneasy elements.

A step toward the intimate clarity of Front Row Seat to Earth, it still didn’t foretell the use of more ambitious instrumentation on “Diary”, “Used to Be” and “Do You Need My Love”, embellished with brass, wire and ivory. Mering counterweights the classic touches with ambient drone here and electronic manipulation there.

Though the EP doesn’t quite feel like bold new territory for the band, it does find them equally blunt and blistering.

The album is inner thoughts given flesh, a voice of candour and comfort soaring towards the future. Where it's leading is anyone's guess, but that's not the point. The point is right here. The point is right now. The point is the almost-hour you spend listening to these songs. And it's nothing short of magnificent.

While a covers album can be a pedestrian thing, often about what the artist can do to make their mark on a song or set of songs, Bonnie Prince Billy’s homage to Haggard is so much more than that--it’s reaching out to a ghost, pulling the uninitiated to a plane where it’s possible for Haggard to be renewed and revitalised while all the time being revered and respected.

This is an album of bold, aggressive regeneration that does not fall short.

Miami Memory displays an increasing, albeit cautious, capacity to divert from a well-trodden trail; seeing Cameron’s confessional voice explored and defined to a degree previously unseen in his output.