Over time, I found the album to be stickier than its first impression. The pensiveness of its approach is, after all, an effective rendering of the sense of crippling stillness which awaits in grief; periods of deep paralysis stirred only by sudden anguish or unexpected joy. Essex Honey isn’t about England, it’s about the mourning Hynes experienced there.

The tracks are skeletal, repetitive and fuzzed-out to the point of abrasion; it could be an easy mistake to think they’re disjointed sketches. In truth, they cohere like a shattered mosaic of memory, pieced together into a triumphant chronicle of growth.

When a partnership between such bold artists can endure for decades in spite of individual prerogatives, you can be assured it’s deep and real, and as Mazurek and Taylor each continue to expand their own practices, Chicago Underground Duo only gets richer.

You can’t fault the album for its lofty ambitions, though at times it feels overly wedded to a sense of gravitas, like the pianos on ‘The Slipstream’, which have all the solemn sentimentality of a Lloyds Bank advert. Closer ‘Safety’ is a much more arresting cut.

Private Music Deftones sounds just like Deftones, but with something off about them: even compared to their most ethereal numbers, Private Music is blown all the way out. Everything echoes or is covered in fuzz. It sounds like the slowed-and-reverbed version of themselves. In a word, a memory.

The album sounds rich, even if the people Brown sings about (and for) are not. The songs themselves are brain-swirls of half-remembered fragments, dreams, bits of song, ephemera that repeats in your mind against the everyday wash of thought. You’re captured in its sticky, squelchy synth web from start to finish.

It’s A Beautiful Place is an amalgamation of directions, culminating in a product that is lyrically existential, sonically experimental and eerily extraterrestrial.

‘Bloom Baby Bloom’ had so much going for it. Why couldn’t Wolf Alice apply that level of vision, skill, invention and audaciousness to the rest of The Clearing? As radio friendly as Fleetwood Mac usually were, they didn’t win the world’s respect by holding back timidly for 80 per cent of each album, or being content to let only the vocals do the talking.

At times, it feels as if Marcloid has somehow found a way to give her DAW a nervous system. This, combined with White-Gluz’ organic melodic impulses, makes for a pop album that is both strikingly deft and consciously playful.

Lower one’s expectations from its rescuing of the planet and Babymetal’s latest, Metal Forth, is a full-on hoot. .... Polished and compressed to the maximum, the metallic elements do their primal job of instigating the headbanging and devil’s horns. Each successive pop chorus is catchier than Saint Peter’s fishing net. The electronic details add to the endorphin-triggering lushness.

Willoughby Tucker is the most complete, emotional and addictive Ethel Cain record to date.

I’ve not yet had the chance to hear this music in its natural setting, but perhaps more than any funk full length, Radio Libertadora! gives a real indication of what that might be like.

Even when the songs falter – the clunky ‘Dove Cameron’, or the over-filtered ‘Dream Scenario’ – they fail interestingly. This isn’t a pristine album. It mutates, glitches, repeats itself.

The proverbial mask might be off but The Armed still have us in a headlock, forcing us to look at the atrocities we’d rather turn away from or scroll past.

Blue Veil has a cinematic sense of tension that keeps the music from retreating into passive background music, but never feels overbearing. As much of a deviation as Blue Veil is from her previous work, Railton has lost none of the sense of control that sets her apart as a composer.

DJ Haram has delivered a debut worthy of an artist intent on tearing through the clichés that cling to both sound and identity – confronting the systems that colonise, both outwardly and within.

In keeping with its title, Trouble arrives as a more explosive record than its predecessor, Birch’s first solo album, I Play My Bass Loud. .... The smooth and cohesive production (with the help of Youth from Killing Joke and Michael Rendall) makes Trouble an appealing listen.

You could spend days mapping the landscape of My First Album, which is woven with enough references to flummox and delight any pop nerd. The trouble with this approach – artist as nostalgic fangirl – is that it leaves you wondering who Jessica Winter is, and what her sound might have to say other than “I really love the music of my youth”.

A fearlessness in operating in obscurity is Black Noise, demonstrated in its abstract nature. ‘Art of Survival’ brings forth a mass of overwhelming sounds before dulling into inaudible speech that is both numbing and ominous, in amongst defiant lyricism. ‘Black Orpheus’ bares mystical unease, dominated by streaky violin chords intriguingly met with rhythmic drum patterns that create fanatical theatre.

The earlier EP was impressive but they’ve noticeably pushed themselves further here, achieving something sharper, more their own.

Opener ‘London’ carries the ethereal quality of a psychedelic haze, beckoning listeners into Gwenno’s world of underground campfires and whispered wizardry. ‘Dancing on Volcanoes’, the delightfully playful lead single.

This Material Moment, is her most accomplished and inventive yet.

For all the scrapes and judders, it’s these elements that elevate Osmium’s work beyond the merely curious and propel it into the downright compelling: the ability to corral these strange mechanical sounds and wring from them something primally, achingly human.

While the variety of styles and approaches on display is mesmerising if not dizzying, the cuts on Yowzers feel as if they truly belong together, connected by an intangible thread – a sensibility which eclipses pure aesthetics and bridges concepts, worlds, and compositions across boundaries.

While Metallic Life Review is both intricate and sentimental, it also sparks, bounces and refracts as all that is metallic melts into cascading rays of sound.

This thinly veiled sequel, 2t2, continues in much the same fertile vein as her post-Throbbing Gristle output. At the same time, it also appears a little more guarded, as if the candid moments in her early days have left her more cautious.

Her deliberate, fully present process resulted in the sort of opulent, heady music that you’d actually expect mushrooms to make. From the very first notes of opener ‘Rewild’, the music betrays an intoxicatingly organic aura.

‘Time Ring Rattles’ was added last year. Shorter and more frantic than the rest it bursts in the middle of the album, a spray of staccato dots and vivid daubs achieving a swarming mania. Calming down again ‘Sparkles, Crystals, Miracles’ is a warm and dreamy beauty, its mood gently ascending into a widescreen outro.

The album is a masterclass in orchestration and pacing. .... The result is deeply compelling and will have listeners coming back time and again to uncover more in these thrilling pieces.

Remix collections tend to be a mixed bag. Mixes Of A Lost World is no different.

Goddess doesn’t stick to one style, and though there are echoes of Gibbons, Del Rey and Sade, the album’s coherence comes from its themes and overall mood and not by remaining within a single niche.

Much as Wolf himself has moved on from his string of tragedies to create something beautiful, what fuels this record is the belief that this is possible on a grander scale.

The outcome of this pairing is an uneven affair, with deep troughs and high peaks.

On Death Mask, Fearless lifts the lid on what lies beneath and exposes his true self in ways that he’s always been reluctant to entertain. Fearless honesty suits him.

There’s a universality to More which benefits from Cocker’s inimitable, offbeat perspective.

Everything on the album is audible but nothing is settled. He has a skilled compositional hand and an ability to shape the shapeless.

The album captures a specific kind of contemporary attention span: fractured, fleeting, slightly numb. It’s sparse, suggestive, and pointedly uninterested in conventional structure.

There is an intimacy inherent in the way that caroline let the stitches, scraps and seams show across this record, and masterful playing and songwriting matches the presentation perfectly.

At 34 minutes, The Foel Tower is a relatively brief window into the romantic and naturalistic world of Quade, but every second is made to count on this gorgeous record.

Another masterpiece from this most singular of groups, Crooked Wing deserves to soar.

The band’s indefinite hiatus has not been in vain, as they have clearly been spending this time carefully piecing together what feels like their strongest album in years. Instant Holograms on Metal Film also feels particularly emotionally resonant.

The production credits read like a fever dream: The Alchemist, Kenny Segal, EL-P, Conductor Williams, Preservation, Messiah Musik, Sadhugold, Ant, Shabaka Hutchings, Steel Tipped Dove, DJ Haram, Willie Green, Jeff Markey, Saint Abdullah, and Human Error Club. And yet, the sound holds together. Disorienting, yes. But deliberate. Woods is the constant: his voice measured, ghostly, sometimes smirking.

He’s come up with ten numbers that linger plenty enough for earwormery to set in.

Mclusky are here with us now and guess what? They’ve grown up. Don’t panic: they’re as daft and irreverent as ever but there’s a newfound inventiveness to their songwriting that’s clearly the result of experience. With Falco and drummer Jack Egglestone perennially busy with projects like Future of the Left and Christian Fitness, the past twenty years haven’t been spent idly, and it shows.

Abyss doesn’t chase innovation for its own sake – it chooses clarity over chaos, presence over posture. In doing so, Anika crafts a document that’s less about sound as spectacle and more about the quiet horror of being awake in the wreckage.

It’s one that may feel familiar to fans of his hard, unfussy, crisp-but-rugged production style but this vision of techno is deceptively idiosyncratic and contains within it a number of important clues to uncovering Child’s true relationship to the music that’s been his bread and butter for the last three decades.

Concise and ambitious, delivering its poisonous punch with characteristic sweetness, the track and the album it concludes are inarguable proof of Deerhoof’s unerring genius.

Even the more overtly psych-rock tracks spill into new territory or shake you out of your reverie. ‘Counterbalance’ surrenders to punk fuzz. Three and a half minutes into the mesmeric drip of ‘How Could You Run’, Rishi Dhir’s sitar obliterates all hope of stupor. ‘Slipping Away’ sounds precisely the opposite – urgent and present – and ‘Empty Sun’ is equally formidably paced.

More harmonically rich than earlier releases where bass and kick reigned, this album places vintage organ motifs at its linguistic centre. These recurring textures make the record distinctive, not only within Moss’s discography but within contemporary dance music at large.

In an era of genre-less music, it’s nice to hear an album that does one thing and does it well, capturing a landscape so old it never really gets old.

Heydarian’s approach in his second album is quite respectable. He makes no bold statements; and avoids falling into the trap of pseudo mysticism and over technicality. His music is subtle, mature, humble, and simple, yet worth exploring.

Just as it’s often repeated that serious science fiction is written about the present rather than the future; this cinematic soundtrack seems reflective of contemporary reality much more than an invented narrative.

That anyone could craft work so head-spinningly euphoric, so joyous and life-affirming, as a deliberate response to the unmooring felt following the death of their partner and amid an ongoing war with their own mental health, is a kind of miracle. But that’s just the start of what’s marvellous about this magnificent record.

There Is No Space For Us is certainly more straightforward than its predecessors, though it’s no less creative for the exercise of reining in some of their more indulgent moments.

Listening to Antigone, one can hear everything Ishibashi has achieved in these fruitful past few years coming to a head. It’s a risk-taking, ambitious album-length statement that further cements Ishibashi’s place in a rare pantheon of artists – one including O’Rourke, Scott Walker and Autechre – making some of their best work thirty-plus years into their career.

Trappes has a strong sense of dichotomy, that every aural high has a low, the smooth always has the rough, the light is brought down by the heavy. It is an embodiment of grief, which subdues us with shock and makes us lash out with anger. .... And like grief, even though Trappes’ songs don’t feel linear, there is still a progression in them. There isn’t a definite resolution to the album, but it’s cathartic all the same.

Constant Noise redirects attention to the urgent task of repairing the fractured connections within our society. At times, the message may feel on the nose, but to articulate an appropriate emotional response, such directness may be warranted in an era where division reigns.

Dan’s Boogie, Destroyer’s fourteenth album played by a decades-established seven-strong band, sounds magnificent from the outset, a tribute more than anything to doing this job for so long.

This remains a rock album that won’t sound out of place in the daytime schedule on 6Music.

hexed! is both a difficult and rewarding listen because it’s such a true portrait of the way trauma sticks to us, even if it’s sometimes dormant.

Bringing together the Def Jux man’s icy pen and instantly recognisable flow with a riff that bassist John-Michael Hedley had been playing with for a couple of years has resulted in arguably the most overtly political statement of Pigs’ career. It’s a hulking beast of chugged rhythms and swirling guitars.

Sandwell District still seem eager to assault the biggest speakers in the darkest rooms and they eloquently marry the primal physicality of techno’s propulsion with its forward-facing techniques. It might not have the initial groundbreaking impact of its predecessor, but End Beginnings pushes the techno continuum on, inch by inch, bleep by alien bleep, beat by rib-crushing beat.

An album that has not only been well worth the wait but also, a clear indicator of the benefits of having an incubation period and what happens when artists are intentional in slowing down the process in order to get the best results.

The overall mood is reflective but such things are relative, this is still intense and emotionally heavy stuff.

If you’re so inclined, you can certainly make a better and more concentrated version of MUSIC simply by firing up the streaming platform of your choice and playlisting all of its standout cuts. There sure are enough on offer to make it worth your while, and you can also sidestep the ungainly sequencing that disrupts the record’s progression in the process.

The album as a whole feels like a dream that’s always at risk of being interrupted by reality, where pure bliss is just out of reach. But there’s more power in the in-between anyway.

Dead Channel Sky doesn’t introduce any radical new ideas and rather stays with the source material. However, in times when Gibson’s futures have already aged and some of his villains shape politics, Clipping revoke cyberpunk’s countercultural charge with extraordinary energy.

The study of Fohr’s internal world is cosmic in scope. That could make for an imposing listen, so it’s impressive that the record also stands as her most instantly loveable collection of songs.

Nothing is another manifestation of Jaar and Harrington’s efforts to preserve a harmonious fusion of rock and electronics, without compromising either side.

Mayhem is both a satisfying return to form and also an unabashed revisiting of stylistic and thematic roots, even linguistic tropes and tics.

DePlume composed, arranged and recorded each of the songs on A Blade. The result of a departure from his usual method of siphoning off the best parts of long improvised sessions, is a meticulous, focused record.

With tracks that demonstrate Bell’s versatility by encompassing spirit-of-Madchester-infused workouts, lush electronica and krautrock. Impressively, the album does this while maintaining coherence, never seeming less than the sum of its parts.

John Glacier sits firmly at the helm, shifting the mood around her with each note and nuance, yielding a quiet magnetism throughout.

The woozy charm that oozes through the shaded vocals and the lulling chug of the record mean that some of its delightful intricacies can be missed without leaning in closely.

His most stripped back to date, featuring mostly Dawson’s voice, guitar and percussion, so that when a saxophone appears it drops like a bomb. It is also his most direct and haunting work, and a confident, sophisticated achievement that is surely his best work so far. .... With End of the Middle, Rich has given us the album we didn’t know we needed.

To the uncynical, the occasional lyrical stinker doesn’t distract from what is broadly a thoroughly enjoyable collection of songs. Critical Thinking is still very much a barnstorming Manics album, a state-of-the-nation address that will have many tuning in and nodding along.

Whilst some may pine for the intense and explosive krautrock of their debut, the adventurous spirit with which they tackle post-rock, fusion and a universe of soundscapes ensures that this is the most exciting and volatile the group has ever sounded.

The trio’s real triumph is found by looking at the bigger picture, discerning the elegant way in which they connect the ends of these disparate threads, shaping a close-knit, immensely enjoyable whole.

There’s an intrigue which lies in the way these are threaded together and you can hear the many musical influences at work which create a distinctive and well-crafted album.

The record activates a deeper form of listening and sonic perspective in a way that many field recordings do, without containing any direct or concrete sonic references. This is at the heart of what makes Even The Horizon one of English’s more compelling releases as of late.

‘Alreet?’ feels as raw and as singular as any record Lewis has previously made. And it might be one of his best too, which I appreciate is a bold claim.

Whether this album’s your first insight into Prison, or you’re a die-hard fan, on Downstate, the band hooks listeners in with a unique compilation of progressive stoner rock songs.

A Shaw Deal is an aural patchwork stitched together with the technical ability and confidence of an established sonic manipulator, but above all that – it’s a beautiful ode to friendship and music’s healing power.

Across 24 tracks, he meditates on the journey that has got him to where he is now, but also succeeds in looking ahead to a hopeful future, pointing to various chapters of his creative development along the way.

If you’re welcoming another wired morning, indulging in orgiastic dance floor exploits, or simply want to lose your head, Decius have got you more than covered.

Excellent. .... The single guest vocal comes on the album’s only misfire ‘Childlike Things’, which bizarrely features vocals from North West, the eleven-year old daughter of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, who contributes a rap in English and Japanese. With its sing-song chorus, brattish chanting and self-consciously zany lyrics (“Like a chocolate teapot / Melt ‘em down and burn ‘em up”) it sticks out on an otherwise sophisticated album, and is just plain annoying.

A terrific follow-up Mogwai’s No.1 smash.

It’s an album that, as much as it looks inwards lyrically, is finally just as universal as Weather Station’s climate change-themed breakthrough album Ignorance, a remarkable achievement in itself.

It’s a boundary-pushing work that, depending on the listener, could be considered either powerfully engrossing or deeply alienating.

Full Moon is a distinctive and exuberant snapshot of an exceptional journey. It offers yet more proof that Moonchild Sanelly is a singular artist whose colourful aesthetic is not only discernible via her trademark blue mop of braids but in the joyous, sexy and defiant nature of her sound.

It’s not bad, sometimes it’s even very good, but it ought to feel much more significant than this.

The good news is that BMB still tear it up. These recordings hit like the gut-troubling, sub-bass fists of a sonic pugilist.

Heavily drenched in the pursuit of nostalgia, Prismatics is hypnagogic pop at its most loyally rendered, the pixelated synthscapes encapsulating a temporal exploration of an envisioned utopia that has since been lost.

You’re Only Young Once But You Can Be Stupid Forever can be regarded as a lighthearted counterbalance, yearning for both innate and planetary peace while making no concessions concerning personal and artistic perspective.

This latest release, Mosaic, is Fennesz at his most cinematically emotional. The catharsis at times risks spilling into soundtrack-type material, but Fennesz’s trademark textural warmth keeps the music immersive and involving at all times.

By deconstructing their identity, Saint Etienne have created a coherent sequence of remarkable songs which sound like everything else they have done and nothing else, at the same time. It is a very impressive achievement.

The result is a collection that, while it lacks the retrospective finality of the song-driven True North, a meditation on the passing of time that closed Chapman’s career as a singer-songwriter, nevertheless underscores the idea of Chapman as a guitar player who didn’t need words to express himself. And that’s no mean feat on Tuttle’s part, especially as, coming to Another Tide cold, you could easily believe it was the work of younger artists pushing into new territory.

While Stein’s arrangements are frequently simple, they are never sparse. Despite the minimalist approach to the songs, the production still sounds full, allowing distant echoing sounds to emphasise what’s there rather than imply what’s missing.