Frusciante has given space for Maya to breathe, for the powerful breakbeats to push things forward to their full potential.

A Thing Called Divine Fits is a seemingly rare thing; a really good, life-affirming rock record that just works, and gets better and better the more time you spend with it.

Free Reign is an album finds Clinic pushing themselves in directions that wouldn't have been considered years ago and it's to their credit that they possess both the will and imagination to do so.

England is a Garden is a beautiful and well-worked project. The five years wait it induced is retrospectively more than worth it as it is one of the most thoughtful and listenable albums the band have unleashed for quite a stretch of time.

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.

It’s wonderful stuff, centred on Ayisoba’s signature instrument, a two-stringed lute-type contraption called a kologo. Obviously limited in its sonic scope, our dude provides rhythm and melody lines alike to hypnotic and strangely groovy effect.

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.

Footwork, however, appears to have no shortage of peculiar, adaptable, and idiosyncratic producers that resist any such outcome. I’ll Tell You What is slippery, contrary, devious--to listen is to be seduced and mangled.

[Fingers is] fifteen tricksy, itchy, endlessly inventive footwork belters, which do little more than uphold the finest tenets of the genre, and are perfectly laudable for that.

With Weird Sister, attentiveness pays off, and rewards with deeper comprehension of what this band are about.

Here, you'll find a more focused version of mournful doom, no less emotive for its precision. Happily, even in their later years Paradise Lost sound hoary and venerable rather than wizened or dilapidated.

All shot through with the psychedelic heft of Neil Young & Crazy Horse, this is not a flash in the pan, a fumble in the dark or an album which loses its way but a cosmic paean to perfectionism that creates order out of the most beautiful chaos.

Wonky is Orbital's most pop album; it's supremely, relentlessly, even ruthlessly melodic, and laden with irresistible momentum throughout.

Twigs still finds ferocious power in her music, her femininity, and her sexuality. But on MAGDALENE, she tampers that ferocity with a radical sensitivity and vulnerability that indicate a broader maturation in her artistic development.

For Plastic Bouquet they’ve come together to make an album that is as relevant to modern ears as it is those more attuned to the old ways.

Natur stands out in that it is less about the conflict between the two and more about their mutual evolution. Nature and technology are not dueling forces to place against each other, but a continuum that needs to be reckoned with.

[A] satisfying compilation with its lugubrious and luxurious electronic introspection created by an artist once again near the height of his powers.

Partly through technology, of course, but owing much to the composer’s own ingenuity, A Separation Of Being was made by just one person and an acoustic sideman, and makes densely assembled music sound feather-light and, yes, joyful.

This is a brave album about how to move on from grief. It’s challenging but totally compelling.

Remember Terry is deliriously memorable. Most albums of this ilk from the Australian underground will have a couple of standout tracks; this album is full of them.

It’s a brilliant, confounding piece of work, in other words, although good luck finding its niche in your well-ordered record collection.

If you encounter this in a club and can pontificate, or even stay still, then you’re made of sterner stuff than I.

That remarkable square for detail is pedantic verging on obnoxious (charmingly so), but makes this his most captivating effort yet.

It remains quite literally sublime--i.e. it creates a stirring sense of awe and fear in the listener, by creating an abstract representation of a facet of nature that we are right to be humbled by and terrified of: giant oceanic waves.

Sonically, Purple Mountains embraces and accentuates Berman’s taste for cushion-edged, almost AOR country-rock, with none of the powerchords or uptempo jigs that peppered late-period SJs LPs Tanglewood Numbers and Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea.

If their late 90s records were marked by the fallout of Britpop and the fallout of relationships, The Ballad Of Darren is marked by this existential contemplation — not quite a breakup or a crisis, but the weight of the changes through the years. It’s a statement of where Blur are now.

The songs feel bigger, better, more expansive and fresher, while their collective deportment has something of a swagger about it.

With features like BIA, Jorja Smith, Reykon, Tyler The Creator and Bootsy Collins, Uchis’ debut is clearly meant to make a big impact, and her romantic-tragic persona complements it beautifully.

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.

Kate NV has probably made her most confident and colourful statement with Room for The Moon. It’s an all-encompassing record, packed with plenty of reassuring elements to those already familiar with her work, but with acres of room for the listener to disappear into.

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.

That Cowboy Junkies are still making music this far down the line is to be applauded. That it ranks with the very best of their material deserves nothing less than an ovation.

It sits together as a cohesive body of work rather than a fragmented collection of club moments.

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

Every track on Grid Of Points is captivating.

Despite the surfeit of sounds and samples in Powers’ productions, he’s made an album that can still breathe with moments of serenity amongst the freneticism, one that provides moments where the antagonistic, alienating sounds of modern life can be reworked to make something pleasing, even joyful to the ear.

With Furfour the duo has altogether eschewed contemporary psychedelia’s hackneyed reliance on drones and heaviosity, and in doing so have made a powerful case for catchy tunes as a vehicle for mind-expanding music.

Whatever the aural equivalent of a spectacle might be, that's Mutant, which firmly establishes its creator as an auteur.

Ersatz GB still trumps most records released this year as, one suspects, The Fall always will.

In the years to come we might turn to Plumb or Measure before Open Here to remind ourselves of the essential Field Music, yet this, their seventh record, is nevertheless a thing of immense songwriting charm and ideological strength, defined by its sardonic judgement of various seismic social shifts.

With Deep England, she drills into the marrow of a nation that in 2021 doesn’t really know itself and possibly doesn’t want to. The result is a fever dream splicing of Pan’s Labyrinth and a cider binge beneath an underpass that has got out of hand and turned unexpectedly nasty.

The Don Of Diamond Dreams feels imbued with a sense that alternative realities – different ways of telling stories, different mythologies to reflect our true nature – are always within our reach, if only we’re able to fully embrace our own imaginations.

Perhaps his most assured and confident album.

Singles [is] the first of their albums that really forces the repeat button; as good as In Evening Air and On The Water are, they're so emotionally draining that you don't exactly find yourself in a hurry to play them again right away.

These are still audio waters containing complex depths worth diving into, revisiting, pondering over, dwelling over, dwelling in.

Napalm Death continue to exist to push sonic boundaries and challenge dogmas, and it’s great to hear them have fun here while further broadening the vitriolic sound they’ve defined into a singular movement.

By embracing the rich heritage of Black, queer dance music and adding a splash of her own magic, she’s created a genuinely captivating record. It’s a seductive sound – even worth waiting six years for.

Until Silence is as brilliant a fusion of electronics and symphonics as those Bedroom Community projects, and yet it's also a far more user-friendly one.

Musically, Blood Bitch plays a lot with drone, feedback and white noise, while simultaneously handing huge portions of songs over to the most melodic and annoyingly catchy work Hval has ever made.

Where acts like Grouper or Lee Noble seem to be deconstructing song altogether, Barnes seems to be engaged in a more subtle exercise, assembling strands of song formats into elliptical constructions with absolute precision.

Kilo exchanges pure visceral impact for control and composition, but in doing so it focuses its own energy into a sharper edge.

Silver/Lead is an exhibition in restraint whose brilliant corners and burrowing phrases reward both the keen ear and repeated listen.

17 year-old Eilish has gone deeper into the weirdo-pop trench. Together with co-collaborator brother and producer Finneas O’Connell, she has drawn on trap and industrial pop to create a darkly humorous record about romance, rejection and addiction.

An album that is dense, involving and rewarding.

Numan's appropriation of Arabic musical patterns, textures and instruments can make for mildly uncomfortable listening at first, but on repeated plays these are the moments that really stand out. His decision to directly incorporate these less familiar (to the western ear) musical mores into his already alien-sounding style pays off.

This is a record with conflict, displacement, trauma, and tension woven into every seam, and all the more powerful for it.

What you will find is an artist keen on experimenting with mood and form. Much of the music probably makes greater sense alongside the dance project, but as a standalone piece of work it offers welcome insight into another side of Hadreas’ artistic temperament.

This a sensitively curated survey of Czukay’s many-splendoured oeuvre, and it makes a good case for Czukay as the OG granddaddy of modern German music.

These re-conceptualised variations still stick to her greatest strengths: pure musicality, melodic (re-)invention, and artistic lucidity.

Our Raw Heart is a crushing and stirring doom metal affair, a cathartic album created after guitarist and vocalist Mike Scheidt suffered a severe episode of diverticulitis early last year. It shines with a rare beauty. The music ebbs and flows from ballad-like meditations reminiscent of Earth to the caustic sludge of Yob’s early records.

For a fairly short 50-minute album it's definitely something you can digest in one sitting without feeling overwhelmed. Nevertheless, In Conflict improves with each listen, new pieces of the puzzle falling into place, details making the picture clearer and more fascinating with each spin.

Its story expands on the journey and transitional creative period their last release embarked on, in a way that both compliments their past while not being afraid to introduce a slightly weirder path.

Reloaded is the sound of the impressive talent behind 2010's Marcberg blossoming into greatness; one of the best written rap records of this young decade.

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.

To my ears, the songs here still feel like detailed, unfolding odysseys rather than studio happenstance but, no matter their method, the results catch lightening in a bottle, again.

With this album, Ministry Of Wolves have done both Anne Sexton and the Brothers Grimm proud; bringing their own gothic legacy to bear, and returning their work to the dark forests where they belong.

Iradelphic, which has evolved out of Clark's live shows, marks a change and may be a little surprising to longstanding fans of the man – it's less ethereal, more compact and cohesive than the electronic experiments of Clarence Park.

It is impossible to separate the synthetic from the organic here. ... At points I find myself asking if some of the sounds that I am hearing are even really there or if my brain is just filling in the gaps. Each time I listen through an alternative medium, different textures emerge.

The alchemy between the two musicians is palpable and electric. They couldn’t be further removed from the genres that made them famous – from pop’s gleaming, detached lights – and they fit in with confidence and raw honesty in this new environment. Finally, their long-desired quest for their true selves might have come to an end.

Overall 2R0I2P0 works incredibly well and shows that the partnership between these two titans still has plenty of gas left in the tank.

Dying Is The Internet is a different breed, boasting fully-fleshed, albeit unorthodox songs that impress with their serpentine arrangements.

The more cultivated recording process allowed textures such as strings, Tacular's accordion and Moore's sonorous and charismatic vocals to assume a richness that has not been heard before.

This is a record which deserves your time and effort; it is not an easy listen and nor should it be. It is a dense and weighty work of art which examines the areas between life and death in which we shall all find ourselves. Kevin Richard Martin is making music about subject matters almost wilfully unconsidered by many due to the sheer terrors represented within their everyday realities. If you're human, then Sirens will resonate with you.

Nature provides a home for Welcome Strangers. It offers shelter, and sheds vital warmth--and light--in times of uncertainty. It’s the bedrock of this heady compendium of haunted disco lullabies for foggy urban woodland raves and psychotropic campfire sing-alongs.

With clicks, thumps and such acoustic subtleties, Vienna Blue unfolds like a rapid sequence of silver-screen freeze-frames: each too brief to comprehend fully, but collectively long enough to spark whole worlds of fantastic imaginations.

On the surface, My New Band Believe is a fully-acoustic singer-songwriter record, but whole strange worlds exist in every groove.

Movement is one of those lovely surprises that makes you think, "Of course that's how music should sound right now".

Dirty Projectors is not quite that good [Primal Scream’s Screamadelica]--few records are--but it certainly drives a stake into the ground as to what guitar bands could deliver in 2017 if they would only open their ears and minds up a little.

With Redemption, Jay Rock elevates the level of his artistry while creating resonating tunes.

Eyes on the Lines sounds alive: the ivy growing out of that sphere, adding color and oxygen to the weathered, though still captivating, form underneath.

Ultimately Moonbuilding 2703 BC is an immersive, imaginative journey into the unknown that, unfortunately, won't end up being the space travel concept album of the year. Public Service Broadcasting have already locked that down. Top marks for effort though.

The majority of the tracks on the album are put together in such a way as to make you want to dance as well as take you on a journey, and by the third listen in you really begin to find yourself immersed.

Sangare sounds energised by the new production context: the new sound becomes her, and as one would expect it is her power, verve and versatility that truly carry the album. [Jun 2017, p.70]

Moor Mother’s voice is an essential anchor on Open the Gates, but the album is more exciting taken as a group work than just the next in a long line of collaborative efforts.

This album, more than any punk tune, is the sound of the suburbs; rather than being from the suburbs, it sounds like the suburbs. If you think that’s no recommendation, just hear it. There is beauty here, and sadness, and peril, and deep, deep soul.

While made from individually minimal, looping rhythms and uncomplicated textures, Drift Multiply is rendered into a harmonically luxurious and sonically dense whole.

While there are many masterful qualities to what Tamara Lindeman has created with this record, more of the introspective numbers such as ‘Trust’ and ‘Robber’ would have made for a more sonically rewarding body of work. Otherwise, this is a vivid and vibrant return.

Simply, we are left with more evidence of a true American original, who was also as important in his own way as Harry Smith or Alan Lomax and other such college-educated curatorial spirits.

Avec Le Soleil Sortant De Sa Bouche have produced a record which is at once ambitiously progressive, admirably methodical and unassumingly joyous.

It offers astonishingly rich pickings--its pillowy-soft surfaces might have all the edges filed away, but there's a stunning amount of detail packed into each of its eight tracks.

The core remains. It is a worthless task to try and work out exactly what exactly it is Sundfør practices, beyond an extreme form of uncompromising pop.

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.

Demen's debut album is worth listening to in its own right, regardless of any nostalgia for the 4AD sound. She takes a studied-sounding array of influences from contemporary ambient and drone, infusing them with a more operatic, vocalised melancholy.

None of this feels glib, not in the circumstances, and not when the music steers clear of mush to come out gorgeous, taut and streamlined.

There is a playful freedom on display from start to finish. By increasing the importance of the bass and keyboards (a move possibly inspired by fellow Swedish prog compatriots Anekdoten) and simultaneously writing with string arrangements in mind, the innate grandeur at the heart of this band’s music has never been as audible as it is now.

As the title states, the tones and timbres of the album are blue. But it’s not the crushing, overwhelming darkness that you might expect. By the time you reach the final track, the sombre ‘End In Blue’, in which all beats have been stripped away to leave only Chen’s voice echoing against a background of drones, you get the sense that a hard and relentless journey is almost over and that just ahead, at the end of a tunnel that has sometimes felt like it would never end, there’s a glimmer of light.

R Plus Seven is music that's more programmed than performed. But behind that programming is a very human kind of agency, pushing the right buttons. Amidst an excess of prosumers, Lopatin proves here to be an actual pro.

Soaring and swooping in all the right places, there's no denying the gorgeous ethereal shimmer and dizzying demonstrative pull of these songs.