Sun Structures is a bold, muscular record.

It comes across as a record not made with a grand statement or goal, but rather a meticulous creation from a collective with nothing to hide or show off. Just raw talent and a willingness not to be too precious with their creations.

Always Inside Your Head is a dizzying blend of the old, balanced artfully with the achingly new.

Home Counties have firmly asserted themselves as some of today’s brightest musical minds.

[Terminal matches] the sweaty intensity and unstoppable forward-momentum of Circle's inimitable live shows. The material is extremely potent, too.

s Adams raises her voice and coats her guitar in discordant fuzz, it hints at potentially thornier and more abrasive (yet still intimately majestic) future directions that could address the one and only possible flaw with Metal Bird, the album’s uniformly first-gear pace.

Present Tense stands as another stage in Yumi Zouma’s development in this sense, lapsing at times into dream-wrapped comfort zone while throwing enough curveballs to differentiate from preceding outings.

It’s a wonderfully strange, dense, and visceral album that finds solace in uncanny experimentalism.

Rare Birds is practically bulging with strong material. It’s telling that the album’s strongest moment--the desolately soaring closer “Mulholland Queen”--is also its least densely ornamented: on this form, Wilson’s songs require no extra polish or decorations to compel. Despite its flaws, Rare Birds is a rare find.

Death From Above might have pulled their brand of wreckage rock even further towards the dance floor with this, yet it still manages to further the rawness and execution they’ve become so mythical for. Most of all they feel like a band without any limits here.

Far from showing signs of slowing down, Nadler sounds more focussed here than ever, continuing to challenge herself and evolve, with her eyes fixed firmly on the horizon.

Belong would still be getting outright praise along with their slightly more subdued self-titled debut. Previous work aside, this is still an intricate, technically awe-inspiring LP with many narrow pathways to explore.

With Qualm, Hauff has further enhanced her reputation as a vital voice in contemporary dance music.

It’s incredibly immersive, and at times it can be emotionally overwhelming.

Electric Wizard are arguably the most revered band of the doom metal genre since Black Sabbath themselves, and on Time To Die, they remind us why.

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.

The powerful, FIFA-ready indie rock is good and often great, but these spare, vulnerable songs are the record’s most powerful. Bakar is becoming one of the most distinct personalities in UK pop, and the more of him he shows us, the better he becomes.

While Bombino and his fellow Tuareg's music is now well settled in the same market, the rebellion which fuels their music is very real, and as such, Azel is a breath of fresh air.

Give A Glimpse Of What Yer Not is more than just a routine 8/10 Dinosaur Jr album, it’s their most satisfying and realized post-reunion album yet.

This is a well thought-out record and is clearly something that has taken several years to coalesce and construct. Though the political edge can sometimes distract from the beauty of the instrumentation, articulation and overall composition, it never gets boring, with little twists and turns that get better upon every listen.

Room for the Moon appears to have it all, whilst remaining cohesive — it’s an eccentric entity in itself, but also the work of one.

By the time the record reaches it’s 12-minute close “Angel”, it feels like a great release. You’ve been put through the ringer with the abrasive “Cook A Coffee” (with plenty of shots at a certain, now former, Politics Live pundit) and “Be My Guest” and made it out the other side. Sweatier and ready to take on the world.

Not only is King of Cowards Pigs’ best release, the promise of their previous work fulfilled; in a year of hip hop and R&B dominating charts and critics’ minds alike, it’s probably also the best time you’re likely to have with a rock album in 2018.

Concrete Desert is not intended to fade away and become background music or some meaningless soundscape. Rather, it's a captivating effort that leaves the listener exhausted, but ready to spiral again.

The narrative is unsettling, but the music leaps and soars with a boundless energy that could only be made by two people with the utmost faith in each other. It helps that the album’s production sounds rough and homespun.

Although not a million miles away from what we’ve heard of Johns before, with Adams’ help this release has captured a moment in time between the two artists that speaks volumes.

There are a few moments that miss their mark--recent single “Someone” has a forced keychange that belies its soaring effortlessness--but for the most part, Lovers is a slick, listenable debut with a strong sense of direction and poise.

The Imperial is far from a standard rulebook-revising nostalgia turn. Both the stark realism of the romance-averse blue-collar settings (here, the narrators are too busy hustling for a living to croon sugar-coated rhymes about romantic ideals) and potent musical left-turns (such as the stripped-bare minimalism of the weary-beyond-words "Roll Back My Life") make The Imperial sound thoroughly authentic, as opposed to a trip through someone else's back pages.