This follow-up to 2018’s Might As Well With My Soul, in some sense, serves to highlight the band’s underrated ability to deviate from well-worn norms.

Pure Luxury’s strengths issue from the way it commits wholeheartedly to a brash sonic blueprint, the unremittingly sleek surface polish sharpening its underlying social commentary - Lovett’s songwriting at its most multi-layered.

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

Overall, Modern Dread is an insightful, authentic record delivered with understated panache, and Denai Moore’s captivates despite minor imperfections.

A. A. Williams has allowed her listeners to exorcise difficult emotions on this record. She provides an aural tonic through her idiosyncratic, beautifully executed sounds.

There are one or two slightly lacklustre moments, such as "Hold On Me", which doesn’t feel like it belongs, but they are far outnumbered and outshined by the groove of songs like "Old Flame" and the smart, questioning lyrics of "Validation". It’s a record that challenges complacency

Their execution is highly impressive, Bedroom may be retro in its thinking, but on this debut bdrmm have proved to be forward thinking in execution. An assured and brilliant debut.

On Sunset could be viewed as an album reinstating Weller as the keeper of mod musical tradition, but it’s also an album that sees him taking a rare glance into the rear-view mirror as he speeds into the '20s.

Self-produced and mixed, A Portrait of an Ugly Man feels all at once familiar and fresh.

This shift further into sounds of the dancefloor obviously comes with no hands in the air hedonism, they stick firmly to their monochrome formula but by adding flourishes of colour to their sound they've made their best album yet.

This is a warming, rewarding album that grows with each listen, blossoming and unfurling in front of you. If you can get past the intensity, and see through to the glowing heart at the centre of this record, it’ll keep you coming back again and again.

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

The record makes constant reference to dreams, with the theme appearing in seven of its eight songs. At times it symbolises a joyful disbelief, at other times a moment away from a heavy reality, and at others still a world shared between two lovers. More than anything, the recurring idea of dreams softens the edges of the earth-shaking changes to Bonnetta’s life, letting him drift gently between real life and the inside of his head in search of a view of it all that makes sense.

The group sit deeper than ever in their grooves on their third outing, and the moments of tranquillity are even more zen. Mordechai offers a rich, meditative escape from the world, something more welcomed than ever in the current climate.

KiCk I is a consistently enjoyable, so the fact it still feels like something of an anti-climax is testament only to Arca’s history of braveness and originality.

Though the album was written before the effects of a global pandemic bedded in, its motifs of isolation and distance speak clearly to our current moment – mourning for places to gather hit hard by the actual and symbolic sterilisation of public space.

[An] excellent record: the guitars throughout the album are aggressive and sharp-edged, the bass is consistently robust and roaring, and rhythms are serpentine and oppressive - barely a moment goes by that you aren’t feeling Shah’s own claustrophobia, the weight of her own aging bearing down on your shoulders.

Bobby’s Motel is a big, bold slap in the face right from the start. Manic Bobby greets you at the door, takes you by the hand, and leads you straight to the dancefloor.

At a time of uncharted fear and oppression that finds the world holding its breath as to what happens next, Mia Gargaret sounds like a vital exhalation. It may be There's Always Glimmer’s quiet sibling, but it still has plenty to say.

Gum Country’s fun is earned. They take a face-value look at life, and conclude that even when it’s hard, it doesn’t need to be heavy.

WIMPIII culminates in a kind of languidness which shows that sometimes you have to let the songs lead you, rather than coercing them into something they shouldn’t be. There’s a coherence that exudes from the sparsity in the songs, and they’re never left feeling empty.

Though the lyricism and imagery present across The Avalanche might be some of Kinsella’s bleakest, and a stark contrast to the soft subtleties of its instrumentation, it’s also some of his strongest and most transparent.

By taking dubstep’s ideas and expanding them, one of the icons of that half-beloved, half-derided era has made a kind of a time capsule; granting longevity to an era of music which had liberation at its heart.

Punisher triumphs in the joy and pathos that’s to be found in returning to its stories, where like Donna Tartt’s A Secret History, there’s always new depths, clues and answers that make you want to dive right back in.

Rough and Rowdy Ways is long, intricately woven and illuminating as a medieval tapestry, and just as precious. It’ll make you cry, it’ll make you tear your hair out, it’ll make you gasp with awe.

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.

A luscious, intricate body of work, Shadow Offering recounts pain, heartbreak, anger, and everything else that nestles in the heart of humanity before lifting the trodden towards the light of hope.

Acting as both sultry invitation and empowered self-confession, the song is a clarion call for all those who deign to diminish the duo’s talents – talents that blaze through on Ungodly Hour with a full and unrelenting force.