The truth is, it is both cultured Tibetan Singing Bowls and DIY damp finger on wine glass and all the richer for it.

This is a fine record and if it doesn’t match up to the high standards alluded to above, that’s because Field Music really only sound like Field Music.

The distant rumble of the crashing sea and the odd squelch of moog provide a thrilling climax to a superb album.

Richly nuanced and always intelligent, fifteen years have passed since the last album, and much like Bazan prior to the record’s conception, its release feels like a homecoming.

Ma, to an extent, substitutes freeform elements with a more bankable linear path, orienting between breezy accessibility and flashes of lateral sprawl; a pattern that serves to engage adequate interest. Honeyed highlights compensate for less tight moments, paralleled with a ponderous, but temperate pace; translating into an elegant offering from Banhart, despite gratifying a teasing fondness for excess.

Nepenthe is a very special album, one which doesn’t sound like anything else around but which also sounds like music you have unwittingly known your whole life; the quiet hum of life itself, re-appropriated and expertly sculpted into a shape where all of it’s complexity and simplicity feels a just that little bit sweeter.

Age Of Anxiety sees Hannah Rodgers set a course for her career with a stunningly assured debut brimming with ideas and practically flawless in execution.

At just 30 minutes long, it never outstays its welcome and, often times, you’ll find yourself hitting ‘repeat’ just to get another hit.

Whilst being worlds away from debut Sometimes I Sit And Think, Sometimes I Just Sit, Barnett’s latest sonic venture marks a new era for the Aussie musician, and one we’re all the better for.

A work of great craft, multifaceted charm, and, yes, an alluring marriage of the visceral to the gentle, this album feels like the opening chapter of a thrilling career.

In Personal Record, Eleanor Friedberger has delivered on every promise she’s ever made with her music, and come up with an ever-unfolding, fully-realised gem.

Floaty angst in abundance, Gengahr have produced an all encompassing soundtrack to this year’s briefest romances and most curelly broken hearts.

It will take you places. Places that don’t feel like they exist in our dimension, on our plain. This all just feels so brilliantly different and new; a very special debut indeed.

In the end, The Space Between is a reminiscence of what was, what has been, and what will be, all at once. The outer space for her is vast yet intimate, daunting yet beautiful, and she beckons us, quite restlessly, to discover the miraculous beauty of it.

Johnson wordlessly serenades us as the band plays out over the final credits. A reminder that sometimes the personal hits harder and lasts longer than anything else.

Thematically the album's tight and the catchy hooks and danceable rhythms drip with just the right amount of psychedelic dance-pop sweetness. With infectious grooves, great musical phrases and smooth almost sultry vocals, it all makes for another Saint Etienne record that's extremely hard to dislike.

The album’s only real mishap is the lack of sonic cohesion between energizing jams and moments of quiet clarity, but each song is able to hold its own as a solid pop offering.

Whether it's the drifting of "Singalong Junk," the stripped down, jazz-cat prowling of "Mountain Moves," or the electro-tripping of "Sea Moves," Deerhoof have simply outdone themselves with Mountain Moves, an album that requires as much focus as it does imagination.

Life After Youth is proof that the best days needn't necessarily be the early ones, and marks a strong and exciting return for fans and band alike.

His languid delivery belies the very real anxieties that Dark Days + Canapés is scored through with, but the nervy sonic backing absolutely serves to accentuate them; what that leaves us with is an album that's more about personal politics than global ones, but that still feels scored through with the suffocating disquiet of life in 2017.

There’s the sense that the artist is using this record as a transitionary vehicle, a space where he can blend familiar themes with unfamiliar sounds, adopt different lyrical approaches and mix them with different styles of production and instrumentation. Such an effort is testament to Sweatshirt’s status as one of the foremost artists of the hip-hop avant-garde.

On Our Two Skins, Payten reckons with big decisions and big changes, claiming them as part of her life to beautiful effect.

On his third album, he continues crafting his inimitable blend of pop, R&B, and electronica, ferociously cementing his place amongst the very best at work today.

Taking their cues from alternative sub-genres of the last thirty to forty years, Girl Scout offer their own self-effacing contribution to infectiously febrile effect.

Not for a long time have I listened to something that so delights in its lack of abandon; their name might be uninspiring, but Cloud Nothings’ output is clearly anything but.

While she’ll have to work even harder to find an angle for record number two her debut delivers everything you could have hoped for from a pop star in 2013.

Dupuis’s credo on Slugger is so simply, yet still colorfully as expected, stated and essential that flash-drive copies of Slugger should accompany all high school freshman Health class textbooks.

On With Light and With Love, Woods once again prove that they can casually strike the perfect balance between imaginative pop confections and untethered psychedelic jams.