There’s moments where creeping doubt, and a little bit of self-awareness, begin to set in--mainly on Franz’s part--but those aside, this is going to challenge Ezra Furman’s Perpetual Motion People for the title of the year’s finest pop oddball.

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

Their second album is ultimately the sound of the band exploring the myriad influences that make up their sonics, in doing so realising who they are and focusing bloody-mindedly on driving the point home.

Jaga Jazzist's music has never been shy on the intellectual front, and for those willing to take the plunge, Starfire's innate intricacies leave as much to be discovered as the skies themselves.

Put simply, Alternative Light Source manages to sound both fresh and exciting, and like old Leftfield all at once.

Jem is an auspicious debut, a worthy volley from a city whose popular music reputation has been built on genre splicing and boundary pushing that’s sat a bit quiet as of late.

Faulty Superheroes, simply put, is faultless.

By the time it’s over, you’re wondering how a record so precise, so considered, can sound so gloriously laid-back, and quite how they’ve managed to convey so many different ideas so efficiently.

This is an album that sits somewhere between Lynch and Lucifer, ethereal in its softer moments and utterly savage at its loudest.

All Your Favorite Bands is plenty polished, but scratch the surface and there’s close to zero going on beneath it; it’s the kind of record that you’re in danger of forgetting before it’s even finished playing.

How Big How Blue How Beautiful is a cathartic, devastatingly honest personal diary set to music.

The moments when the singers get braver with stamping their own personality on the material prove much more memorable.

It’s tempting to see it being one day considered an “essential listen”: compiling and collating the first half of the decade’s tastes, trends, aesthetics and politics into a cohesive and inoffensive whole.

The lyrics are tighter, more poetic and speak volumes of a band that have something quite specific to express.

There simply is no contemporary songwriter that speaks so plainly, yet so devastatingly, to the darker matters of the heart as Sharon Van Etten. Her intimacy is so palpable that the silence in the room once the record stops is jarring.

The Shakes is a record with raw energy.

The emotional gravity carried by its brevity and simplicity, a quantum leap from last year's self-titled EP, is nothing less than astounding.

This isn’t dewy eyed nostalgia all weighed down with rose tinted reverence, though: he makes a respectful nod to the past by rifling through jungle and garage and so on, but each track feels like a poignant and yet propulsive reflection of Jamie’s personality and experiences.

Before We Forgot How To Dream is subtly uplifting, astute and speaks in the diction of a youth that may be tired of being talked at, rather than to.

Sometimes weighty and serious, sometimes dissolute and light, Grimes’ interaction with the piano on The Clearing is the sound of a musician who knows how to extract every emotion and feeling from what they are playing.

English Graffiti is a record full of ideas that has much to commend it, neither a triumphant or disastrous third album, just not a great one.

Nielson and Unknown Mortal Orchestra have created a genuinely psychedelic pop gem in the sense that it has virtually zero on in common with what psych-pop is supposed to sound like. What's more, the results are easily infectious enough for us to join them without hesitation on this richly rewarding ride into the unknown.

Throwing in references to various Farrow and Ball paint colours, Asos, estate agents, and thoroughly unsavoury characters such as Heroin Stan (stabbed his mam), this is middle-aged angst set to music. Both World of Twist and Earl Brutus have a classic album to their name, and now, so do The Pre New.

In terms of coherence, it’s quite possibly their best LP since Imperial Wax Solvent.

Much like Black Messiah, a slightly more heralded return of another long-absent polymath, it rewards repeated listens, even if they’ll barely bring you closer to actually understanding it.

Shamir is unquestionably the star, but the interplay between artist and producer is palpable; it’s a musical match made in heaven (or, perhaps, hell: Sylvester has likened his role to the relationship between the poet Virgil and his protagonist Dante), and the finest moments here have Sylvester providing the trampoline for Shamir to bounce on.

A short album of promise and potential stretched too thin by its stifled delivery.

From Kinshasa is a distorted transmission of a sound of a city, but it's not the neatly paved, orderly and predominantly functioning type of town most of us are used to.