One of Cerulean Salt’s great triumphs is that we believe in these people, the album’s intimacy heightens its sense of realism, its characters feel living.

Factory Floor’s music is distilled down into three elements. Rhythm. Synths. Vocals. That they make something so evocatively alienated, so compulsively unknowable and so bleakly irresistible from simply this is a sharp, uncompromising, emphatic victory.

This is a pleasant plateau he’s found himself on, and it’s a perfect launching platform for further, more avante-garde endeavours.

II is another step forward for a band who were once a side project, but now stand firmly alone and away from the shade cast by others.

Overall, there is something deeply satisfying about the majority of the album, anchored by Skepta’s unique vocal delivery and a sonic playfulness that he has long perfected. Skepta has proven himself a pioneer at several points of his career, now it’s just good to him hear at the top of his game.

All things considered, there are far more winners than losers here, and that's nothing if not a pleasant surprise.

Of course The Most Lamentable Tragedy is ridiculous. It's also dumb, intelligent, heartbreaking and life-affirming.

Hoorn’s sultry vocals; swirling, gossamer textures; and grand orchestral arrangements tirelessly interact with the record’s musculature to develop and bring to life the exquisite and anthemic anatomy of Spiritual Songs For Lovers To Sing.

A vibrant and digestible yet existential and thought-provoking treat.

With only the most faithful replications of the original performances falling in any way flat, the contributors' ability to balance reverential respect with an ethos of printing their own identity on these indelible songs is what makes I'll Be Your Mirror succeed where so many similar tributes nosedive into dull irrelevance.

Death Valley Girls have collectively crafted a record worthy of their dusty Californian roots, an album which is a step up from any previous works featuring some of their most infectious jaunts.

One never gets the impression that she's battling against or drowning within her riptides; instead the vocals and guitars assume a kind of subservient relationship, the voice somehow calling, from out of the void, the raging whorl.

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

Gojira have turned their grief into triumph. It will ensure they don’t remain on the fringes of metal’s elite for much longer.

Whilst the album on a whole is routed in vulnerability – Williams the chanteuse, cathartically pouring whatever remains of herself into her most precious form of expression, “Just A Lover” signifies a shift; a marker of unfinished means, as the pieces she’s surrounded by begin to coagulate into an entirely new feeling.

While there are moments of significant note here, Glowing In The Dark as a whole doesn’t feel, or more importantly sound, like the album that will finally solidify the band in delivering what is their true potential.

The Beths have managed to create another overwhelmingly thrilling record. One in stunning communion with their debut but also distinctly its own creature.

Could It Be Different? carries on exactly where they left off. In their songwriting, The Spook School have always merged transformational politics with an anthemic quality, and the LP's opener is no exception.

If a whole album could sum up my juvenile years of prepubescent chanting along to anthems in the kitchen at house parties, it would be this.

It’s intended to breathe life into everyday objects we take for granted. You made need a dash of imagination to bring those items into consciousness, but Silver helps the process along.

“Grecian Summer” seems like a Hanging Gardens off-cut, all bouncy beats and twinkling synths, whilst “Faraway Reach” is a blissed-out, breezy tune with just the right amount of funk. These moments are, however, disappointingly few and far between.

As a crucial companion piece to her LPs proper, Phases achieves the rare distinction of must-have odds-and-ends album.

The scale of Van Etten’s ambition--musical and otherwise--is now such that we’re never likely to see her make a wholesale return to this kind of territory; as a document of her songwriting origins, though, (It Was) Because I Was in Love is fascinating.

The album just takes you to the place in your brain where everything is just fine.

Guy Walks into a Bar… is an album built on disco-dreams and broken hearts and is guaranteed to show you a good time.

He is a true, wonderful artist that seems – on this evidence – to be on a one-man mission to take country out farther into the wilderness that its ever been. Make sure you’re along for the ride.

Complete with dreamy guitar bends, gorgeous harmonies, and a candid lyricism that Phoebe Bridgers would be proud of, If I Never Know You Like This Again has undoubtedly delivered a hat-trick for the Derry-born artist.

On their seventh LP, Joyce Manor find a fine middle ground, and the result is their best record since 2012’s Of All Things I Will Soon Grow Tired.