Deciding to reflect on states of mind some of us could resonate to – especially this year – BE serves as a chronicle of what 2020 has been during lockdown: a year of uncertainty, anxiety, depression and frustration. But it also delivers hope for the future.

This is the beauty of My Krazy Life, which manages to break the homogenous mould of the majors by retaining an unshakeable sense of local identity.

This sprawling double LP’s sheer intensity doesn’t feel intended to alienate the listener, so much as accompany them in processing the mind frying enormity of everything.

Django Django are at their best when their sounds are at their gnarliest.

While most of the songs on Fuse have sharp electronic edges, a soulful ballad such as ‘Run A Red Light’ isn’t going to scare Radio 2. Nevertheless, as the album unfolds, it becomes clear this isn’t EBTG simply revisiting past glories, but cautiously experimenting, and perhaps hinting at where they might go if they make more albums.

Moving at a satisfyingly glacial pace, The Besnard Lakes Are The Last Of The Great Thunderstorm Warnings is an album that reveals its rewards over multiple listens.

Not only is Black Age Blues Goatsnake's best album, it is an instant classic of the stoner-doom hybrid and an earthy, electrifying endgame for rock & roll itself.

Farmer's Corner is a slow burner whose finer points emerge on repeat listens, but put it on while you do some chores, or during your daily commute, and it's bound to sneak up on you.

Overall i,i sounds expensive and yet – simultaneously – all too safe.

Their energy is utterly thrilling and secondly, Hollandaze hints at so much more and should ensure that Tzenos is not reduced to journalistic footnote of merely being a cuddly version of Big Black.

A crescendo of electronic drums and stirring strings draws Distant Satellites to a close, and leaves you with the impression that, while inconsistent and desperately overwrought on occasion, Anathema deserve to be heard out with the private members' club that is prog rock in 2014.

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

There was plenty of belligerence and protest on 2017’s World Eater, an album that quite literally bared its teeth, and a track like ‘Wings Of Hate’ delivers exactly what you expect it to. But there’s exasperation and frustration here too, and it’s not quite the maximalist, terrifying work one might expect given the subject matter at hand. Personal grief also informed the year Power spent working on Animated Violence Mild, so following a more reflective, emotionally resonant path makes sense.

Fans certainly won't be bowled over by the innovation on offer, but as a refinement of their sound it is the ne plus ultra Autechre album, honed and executed to perfection with only a few drifty moments that suggest it could have been cut down to a single LP.

It's quite fair to say that whatever is lost here in interesting experimental moments is made up for by enveloping production details which, when combined with his often unconventional musical choices, propel the record into an accomplishment that stands on its own.

Although there's not much here to blow you away, it does seem that the Lay Llamas have stumbled upon a useful synthesis of those fashionable psych touchstones--repetitious afro, spacey synth kraut and churning fuzz guitar--which earns a rightful place amongst the rest of the crop.

With Everybody Come To Church, Evil Blizzard have fused anger with commentary, psychedelia with post-punk influences and have created something that's wholly their own. The ceremony is about to begin and you'd do well to join this congregation.

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.

Laibach seize every opportunity on Also Sprach Zarathustra to bring out the grandiose psychodrama and tension inherent in a founding tract of modern philosophy, rendering what could have been merely bombastic and brutal as spectacular and even sublime. It might not be greatest present that has ever been made to humanity, but it is a resoundingly impressive feat.

Not everything is suddenly revelatory in a positive sense--indeed, often the selections confirm exactly what you might expect, and sometimes songs start to blend into one another, which is inevitable over the course of such an extensive set.

A Laughing Death In Meatspace is by no means easy listening: the playing is off-kilter, strange bursts of noise erupt from instruments, songs dissolve into a maelstrom of noises; the production, mixing and mastering bear traces of the album’s speedy composition and release; and the lyrics invite us to contemplate, without histrionics or self-deception, precisely how fucked we all are. It’s hot with anger and full of ugly truths about the ways we live our lives; and the effect is compelling.

There's no centerpiece and no massive reinvention. Much of the songs place on the drone-noise-ambient continuum. But the sheer scale of Chemical Flowers feels bigger than what came before. Recorded in solitude in the Essex countryside, Chemical Flowers is charmingly ambiguous, floating around in some galaxy between labelmates Lee Gamble and Yves Tumour.

Most importantly, as the band builds momentum on track after track, they never miss an opportunity to draw unexpected emotion from their grooves. Time and time again, they excel at finding and seizing every opportunity to fully capitalise on the underlying beauty of these compositions. Likewise, they never undervalue or underestimate the sheer power of gentleness.

With Wrecked, ZONAL and Moor Mother have made a joyously feel bad album whose grinding negativity and tidal heaviness provides a necessary form of catharsis, that sloughs or burns off the stench of ego and know-betterisms. It demands a form of humility from the listener both of their place in the world, and of the experience and position of others.

The album sounds like the process of ripping away at one’s own humanity in search of some kind of core; the music is colossal, destructive and all-consuming. ... Extraordinary, turbulent album.

While Murray's lyrics are consciously evoking images of old timey Americana – desolate arcades, voodoo rites, thunder in the mountains – your mileage will vary on whether you find it charming or cheesy. Regardless, The Last Exit is a road trip worth taking. Murray’s sultry croon is effortlessly affecting.

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.

Throughout, Tobias balances the baroque, saturating instincts of chamber pop with urgent, to-the-point rock segments, the romantic swells of plucked and bowed strings on ‘Political Solution’ or ‘The Scam’ tempered by the almost post-punk gestures of ‘I Feel Hated’ that hug Tobias’s soulful cadence with hard-driven indietronica à la Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

Requiem is unlikely to be an album that creates a new legion of converts, but for devotees of this true innovator it’s an incredibly rewarding one.

Still Trippin’ doesn’t have the crossover punch of DJ Rashad’s Double Cup, which definitely influenced it, but the potential is there just the same.

The Take Off And Landing Of Everything is the sound of a band prising an encouraging aesthetic edge from the sheer enjoyment of ageing. It bodes well for the future.

It's not the spartan techno of the early SCB records by any means, but the never-quite-convincing progressive window dressing has mostly been thankfully thrown out said window in favour of an approach that maintains big room impact without pandering to its more simplistic tropes.

Night Thoughts is a record that deals poetically and bravely with the shadows that start to grow as we age and life's responsibilities weigh heavier on our shoulders. Brett Anderson seems as comfortable writing about the aging process as he did chemical smiles in the backs of Volvos and bored suburban housewives done in on sleeping pills etc, something that bodes well indeed for the future.

Very programmatic, AAI allows Mouse on Mars to fully flesh out their ever implicit techno-humanist sonic philosophy, a certain anarcho-progressivism with a tech-utopian bent. The record serves as a magnifying glass to their career-long preoccupations.

Over repeating ground bass figures, Barbieri builds and varies an increasingly complex architecture of melodies and harmonies in vaporous synth tones. Created using the Orthogonal 101 modular synthesizer, the means may possess degrees of randomness, but everything sounds precisely placed.

The poetry of Gruff’s lyricism is second to none. His ability to flit from language to language between projects, expressing himself with elegance and eloquence in either, is not only an enviable talent but a unique one.

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.

Dinosaur Jr. have succeeded in creating the ultimate gateway album, a perfect synthesis of all the ingredients that have made them one of the most intriguing and long-lasting guitar bands in recent history.

{Awayland} is a treasure trove of an album, brimming with ideas, most of which work and all of which, at the very least, prove that O'Brien is not simply another little-boy-lost lamenting the fact his parents wouldn't pass him the salt, but a songwriter of real note.

The result is a beautifully eerie song cycle whose pulsing analogue heart is even darker than the penumbral territories the band usually inhabit.

The Men's highly enjoyable chaos.

As ever with William Basinski, Cascade is deeply melancholic and subdued, music to embrace in the deep of a sleepless night. But it also unfurls to reveal layers of brightness that went undetected on 92982, as the increased pace of the loops blurs and breaks apart the piece's monotonous (in the best sense of the word) repetition to reveal the deep humanity at the work's core.

The world has changed, and, though bruised and broken, the sincere, generation-galvanising Sleater-Kinney have changed for the better.

Personal, moving, poetic, humorous, and engaging.

Musically, this is Anderson at her most assured: she has synthesised her various musical interests and influences--noise music, metal, grunge, folk and country--into an entirely idiosyncratic musical lexicon.

This is a new incarnation of The Julie Ruin, and it's still raising the goosebumps on my arms.

Due to Snaith’s decision to make music in situ, FabricLive 93 tends to veer and swerve all over the place in terms of a 'narrative'. ... You can hear that Snaith is clearly having fun letting his instincts take him where he feels the music needs to go. This rubs off on the mix--you do find yourself propelled by the energy, despite the missteps made on the way.

Regardless of whether you share the Manic's collective outlook on life, and if you're not forty plus you might not, you can only take Rewind The Film for exactly what it is: a band who know where they want to be and are comfortable with that. And, interestingly enough, this is maybe the closest we'll ever get to really knowing them.

A flame my love, a frequency is a modest, introspective album. It focuses on the small, the minute, turning inwards in the face of questions too large to grasp.

If Mason’s last album Boys Outside was a window on his struggles with mental ill-health, Monkey Minds moves from micro to macro as he harnesses his strong sense of social justice, while continuing to hone the crisp electronics that so perfectly soundtrack his ghostly, exhortatory vocals.

Water often reminds me of Soused, the excellent Sunn O))) and Scott Walker collaboration. They are both albums where there seems to be so much unavoidable emotional distress on first listen but eventually it can sound exultant. The initial atonality is replaced by the surrender to a different way of treating harmony.

Harris deploys silence and sound artfully and masterfully throughout Ruins. And the closer you listen, the more intimate it becomes.

While Lazaretto occasionally hints at some of the excesses of the producer/songwriter genre, what's undeniable is the talent on display.

Visions is a more focused album than the spaced-out Halfaxa or the disparate Geidi Primes but one of the key charms of Grimes' sound is its unforcedness.

She turns experience into art with a painter’s eye and a warrior’s heart, and Music For People In Trouble is a profoundly humanist work: her finest by some distance.

Bright Sunny South is Amidon's sixth solo effort and like previous releases, the key to the album's potency lies in how the Brattleboro, Vermont, native creates emotional dichotomies and then bridges the expansive gulfs in between.

On the Water is a 'love album', but much more than that--seldom has a long player narrated so fluidly, consummately and lucidly, a journey of self-realization.

This is an album that seems to spring from an indoor world of cerebral textures and bedroom experiments, a headphone odyssey for an era in which the rock gig has become a corporate-sponsored burlesque.

You might expect that pulling one part away from the whole would leave you with something solitary, but Weitz’s departure from his proverbial and literal ‘collective’ does not reduce him to a singularity. Instead, he emerges as a complex sum of parts all of his own.

The takeaway sensation of their epic and sprawling second record is quite simply one of pleasure. They embrace the ridiculous and the sublime in equal measure.

Where 2012's Pansophical Cataract was a bit of a meditative blur, Ryonen is more like an adrenaline hit, pumped with rushing rhythms that get the heart hammering against the ribcage.

Atkinson is a masterful, creative collector of such sounds, and she deploys them judiciously to great effect in her work. The Flower And The Vessel is no exception.

The issue for both Femi and Made’s records, is that they feel too conscious of both their modern international audience, and their own political weight. It feels like there is too much scaffolding and careful consideration around the tracks, and as a result, the spontaneity and freeform funkiness of afrobeat gets diluted.

It's a record that doesn't undermine their body of work, but nor does it stand out as a career-defining highlight.

As percussive as her previous offerings, A Man Alive is jaunty but perhaps less folky than normal, endowed significantly with the spirit of Tune-Yards' Merill Garbus, the queen of both loop and uke.... That's not to deny that this album is a step forward, however.

There is definitely room for some trimming. A third could easily be trimmed without damaging the listening experience too much. At the core of Face Stabber is a fun album that gets better with each listen but when it drags, and in places it does, it feels like a laborious chore to get to the good stuff again. The album lives up to its name. From the moment it starts it is an unrelenting, and visceral, album.

Slow Focus is the album Fuck Buttons were born to make.

This might be their most enjoyable release since 1991's Lived To Tell.

A direct response to the band’s dreamlike debut, Wicked City is a venomous inversion of the very world the group strived to create; where there was once playfulness, there is now fiendishness. It’s a frenetic and lively record, for not once does it stay too long in one place.

The group offers a dose of nostalgia for an era that never quite existed in this form previously in any case. Either way, this is medicine that you can imagine lighting up the most varied of settings. Yol is a transportive listen, offering portals to environments few could have ever envisaged.

On Physicalist, Forma, mind-bogglingly skilled with their synthesizers, push themselves further and further into new territory--almost literally--as they pare back, slow down, spread out, dig into the (American) soil beneath their feet.

The sound of Psychic is meticulous and luscious.

While Sleep can be regarded as eight plus hours of ambient drift, it also grows into a piece of considerable emotional weight.

City Lake is a stunning, humble record built on traditions we all understand, yet, somehow feels dizzyingly new.

In this transition from experimental noise that revels in randomness and discomfort, the album layers sound into intense, hypnotic rhythms that reveal compositional prowess.

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.

It’s a bold claim to suggest No Geography with its reasonably brief (for them) 46 minutes is up there with the controlled chaos and warped psychedelia of their earlier work, but it is. With its unifying themes of freedom, unity and attack, channelled via the medium of boom and sirens, it really is. After the best part of 30 years, there’s still no one else like them. Amazing.

For a band whose titling and artwork is so important for the images they conjure, reverting to a tighter focus works for them. Carlson's guitars, clearly the focus, get to step back from the angular and the lugubrious. Instead, red-lipped riffs flutter over careful and precise percussion, evoking crimson dresses striding down gold corridors. And underneath it all--the star player--Adrienne Davis’s steady, world-eating thud has never sounded better.

The menace and late-night melancholy is subbed for outright tragedy and romance here, and this is certainly their best realised set released in the decade since Black Earth's high watermark, bringing together all that makes this music both beautiful and ugly, while tentatively exploring new sonic territory.

When we hear that scratch of pick on acoustic, we're trained to expect some diary-entry-type emoting. Pratt plays against that expectation beautifully, leaving us just enough breadcrumbs to get us lost.

An album of scope and unbridled invention, drawing from the past (in both music and aesthetics) to create a universe of sounds and textures that are quite unlike anything around at the moment.

It's certainly Omar Souleyman's most user-friendly listening experience. Hebden's democratic production style and mixing board economy, valuing every instrument equally, makes it less relentless than its ancestors.

Not a bad album at all. In fact, at points it's really rather wonderful; it's just not quite the wall-to-wall fruity bangers one probably expected, but by no means as skip-heavy as the likes of Random Access Memories.

Dissed And Dismissed is basically all gold, as long as you're not so jaded by years of inane indie chirruping that any combo of upbeat guitar melody and sad-lad lyrics induces a visceral reaction.

What Long Island captures is the warm sound of the room in full flow--it's a live album, really, recorded in a studio but improvised on the spot.

There's a huge lack of definition, and even with the volume cranked high, the dynamic surge previous albums from the group have led us to expect is absent.

An intriguing listen. Just when you think you have it worked out, Souleyman changes the script, and tempo, and you’re back to square one.

Compared to 2013's Innocence Is Kinky, Apocalypse, Girl is less noisy and more thematically united.

Fifteen songs is probably a few too many, but it’s hard to imagine consensus among listeners on what to excise, and plausibly the band ran into the same problem. If so, they’ve earned the right to moderate self-indulgence at this point.

Nothing’s Real is proof that Shura has carved out a name for herself in a distinctly oversaturated market. Here is a pop star that has undoubtedly arrived.

When Brood Ma gets all his dice in a row, he comes close to nailing it. But more often than not, his attempts fall short because of their sheer hyperactivity.

Nothing here is complex or highbrow, but instead filled with the joy and clarity of understanding and connecting.

With Grievances Rolo Tomassi truly have mastered the creation of such a hybrid, heightening their melodies and anthemic qualities whilst retaining their brutality and technical prowess within the contours of a finely honed album sequence.

Blizzards is a beautiful and fun and affecting record that never fully succumbs to the easy allure of nostalgia over its expansive sixty-four minute runtime.

Make no mistake, this is gloriously hypnotic stuff, a fall into a rhythmic vortex that unscrews your head so it can pop your brain in the fridge. And, as the album progresses – most notably on the seductive ‘One Two’ – the realisation creeps in that what was originally considered abrasive has become a soothing form of chaos. An odd mix, for sure, but one that comes as sharp relief to the trying tedium of lockdown life.

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.

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

It's an album which succeeds by virtue of elegance, and which knows a hell of a lot without ever seeming overly knowing.