The result is a hugely compelling, powerfully inviting album that manages to be simultaneously and seamlessly equal parts intimate and epic, experimental and elementally down to earth – often simultaneously. A perfectly formed gem, in other words.

On Hold On Baby, we find King Princess both more coy and more confident than we’ve ever heard her, and she leaves us little doubt that both those sides of her feed one another.

The infectious results deserve to elevate McCombs beyond his durable cult hero status.

Overall, Trick is reminiscent of those rare enjoyable hangovers--contemplative, contented and tranquil. And like those hangovers, it is unusual and a delight.

On This Stupid World, Yo La Tengo proves they are still relevant arbiters of rock.

There is a broad crossover appeal, and there is so much to unpack. They have taken the sounds of their EPs and expanded into something more expansive, without losing what endeared them to audiences. This is a thrilling, evocative debut that lives up to the hype.

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.

It’s a classic KC album. His Scottish brogue, the bagpipes, accordion and harp all reappear for his now expected impish magic.

Pray For Rain sees Pure Bathing Culture taking a step towards an elevated form of the type of leftfield pop the band produced during their first outing, and in doing so, they’ve created an album wrought with subtle nuances and big ideas.

Dungen Live is first and foremost a team effort, a totem for the kind of intuitive and intoxicating musical family communion that is hard to come by.

Its power is found in the band’s ability to trap and pin you down to experience a place unholy – to transport you into their gnarled world that struggles to give way to its inevitable ruins.

Instead of signaling a demise (of a feline nature or otherwise), the album represents yet another sonic rebirth from a band who has been making a methodical career out of rising from the ashes of inactivity to surprise us all once again.

The album is a heavy 17 tracks that last over 70 minutes, meaning it’s a long and intense listen, but deliberately so--loneliness is a long and intense feeling.

On first impression, in|FLUX is almost alienating, an unsettling listen that does all but invite you back for more. But with determination, passion, and survival instinct – the very feelings explored at such length – it yields excellence.

There’s decidedly no fall from grace here for Grant Hart on The Argument, his most ambitious and accomplished album in years.

Shamir represents what it is to be an outsider, with each of Revelation’s nine tracks teaching us to face our insecurities and embrace our weirdness. Even in the darkest times, Shamir’s brilliance continues to shine through

It’s an overwhelmingly dark album.

Courting the Squall is a collection of songs from a musician unencumbered by expectation or industry pressure, just Guy Garvey recording a bunch of tunes with his friends and seeing where his muse leads them. That free spirit gives his poignant solo material a fresh buoyancy that still sounds intimate, due to his estimable songwriting gifts and the band’s ability to not overthink these compositions and just let the musical magic happen naturally.

Avalon Emerson is doing everything required on Written into Changes to tear up the dance-pop rule book.

Surprising, always engaging debut solo album.

Mythologies is the sound of a band who've realised their previous limitations, improved on the sounds they're most comfortable with and invited us to listen to them discovering their ability to splatter the canvas with all kinds of beautiful mess.

Sexistential is Robyn at her most lucid, practicing at liberation and assuredness now with this singular caveat of reinhabitation that doesn’t celebrate Robyn as a pop iconoclast with thirty years of consistent brilliance on the scoreboard – or doesn’t only; rather, she wields that in the creation of a self-mythology that also manages to sound brilliant on its own merit.

It’s music made by a human being, intended for human beings, about losing one’s humanity in order to transcend it. By nature, that makes it immensely incomprehensible, scary and challenging, even difficult to get through for the uninitiated. But if you meet Anhedönia's creation on her terms, ready to plunge into the depths and emerge semi-alive, Perverts will open up to you – at least, it did for me.

It’s haughtier, humbler, more powerful, more delicate; it’s like Anna Calvi was dipping a toe in the sea, and now that she knows that the world rather quite approves of her, she’s ripped the ripcord and is delivering the beast within.

Even if a few rougher edges wouldn’t go amiss, the results prove resonant, occasionally reminiscent of the similarly genre-blending mash-up of black music styles exemplified by Sault.

Mellow Waves is the sound of an artist reaching a conclusion, one that is content with its place in music history as it is hopeful of the future.

Cyclamen is immaculately crafted and the arrangements themselves would be worthy of praise regardless of whose name was attached to them, but it’s Graham’s razor-sharp lyricism and vivid vocal delivery that gives the music real heart and therefore makes the LP worthy of listeners time.

It scrambles the brain, leaves the heart feeling empty, but compels the body to move. Woof scratches that primal itch. It's the sound of a society unraveling, and Fat Dog has captured it.