The Practice of Love reveals the sensitive humane core that was always behind Hval’s practice of enlightened dissent. The album develops an elegant approach to solving the existential problems of love, care and intimacy from the position of otherness.

Despite the fact that listening to one of their albums in full feels like a 40-minute bludgeoning, there’s something oddly heart-warming at play here. Unsane are not chameleons or shapeshifters but rather stoic veterans unashamed to continue honing a sound many would argue they perfected decades ago.

While it’s a short EP, it doesn’t disappoint. If anything, he presents himself as a soloist with an unexpected sound for his high-pitched countertenor voice and very far from those earlier ballads we have heard from him.

More than a mere souvenir or stopgap, Versions is a sumptuous release that affirms both the increasingly unique and essential nature of Zola Jesus' music and the enduring genius of JG Thirlwell.

We might have heard these tropes a thousand times before, but on Kykeon, Rhyton use them to make something richer and more nimble than the flabby freak-out-by-numbers psych that's currently clogging up rock's bandwidth.

An evocative sonic portrait that juxtaposes the human-made sounds of the railway and the surrounding landscape.

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.

It’s not just a mongrel mesh of genres. It’s stretching and cracking them into new shapes, creating something fresh, hyperactive, and utterly pop.

In moving beyond their avant-garde origins, the 'technopop' which comprises the latter half of this compilation has often been viewed as a descent into the lightweight, and a commercial sell-out. On the contrary, #7885 (Electropunk to Technopop 1978 - 1985) proves a mastery of superficially conflicting musical spaces.

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.

Larceny and sharp, immediate hooks permeate everything they do, and so it is with Right Thoughts, Right Words, Right Action.

The entire album is a feast for the senses, its production DIY yet lush, kitsch yet rich.

ATOMOS is certainly a sensitive and thoughtful piece of work on its own, but the ultimate success of the listening experience is in its ability to stir an emotional reaction, and impose a state of thoughtfulness on the listener--and presumably on the dancer too.

With 1989 she has succeeded in leveraging the most cordial and familiar of pop music outpourings to something that feels like a statement, a work of note and the sinew of some kind of emotional connective tissue–binding tastemakers, rock critics, guys I work with and my 12 year old cousin; irrevocably and unexpectedly.

In and of itself, EUSA is a beautiful piece of work that acts as an aural snapshot of one man’s vision of security and peace.

Flight b741 could have come off as overly kitsch or ironic, but King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard stick the landing.

This is Svenonius with just an electric guitar, a microphone, an analogue-sounding drum machine and a tape deck, creating the rawest and most stripped-back manifestation of his singular muse to date.

TVAM’s debut album looks both backwards and forwards, drifting in a somnambulant hinterland of psychic anxiety. It conveys a disgust for our regurgitated culture while pilfering with abandon; it’s a cerebral endeavour, and it’s also a peach to dance to.

In the early 1980s Swans and Einstürzende Neubauten broke new ground in their obsession with the body as a site of painful affliction, and traces of both can certainly be found in the grinding, reverberant noise that stalks Bestial Burden. Yet the album easily transcends its influences, forming a bleak, distressing narrative of a self on the brink of collapse.

Lament proves itself to be a remarkably effective listen because it is an utterly egoless record; a record that, in binding many stories from all sides, creates a feeling that is ultimately sans-patrie.

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.

While its episodic narrative veers off into realms of absurdity akin to standalone send-ups, it proves--especially after a repeated listen--a fun, texturally dense celebration of the possible, a showcase of real daring that has been the payoff of countless prog odysseys of yore, the perfectly bonkers lineage of which it so clearly stems.

Clocking in at 35 minutes it's a breezy listen, but one that stays with you. The musicianship is excellent, the production spot on and, despite its restless nature, the album hangs together nicely.

Certain passages evoke Popol Vuh or Cluster (for all the Brazilian flourishes, Simian Angel feels quite German) while others bring to mind avant-garde composers like Robert Ashley or Laurie Spiegel. All this is created seamlessly, the parts fusing into one another to create a vivid, if mysterious, tapestry.

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.

It’s as engaging a release as you could hope for. The melodic sheets adorning the surface offer enough solace for casual listeners whilst intrigued parties will locate heart-heavy layers if they lean in just a little. As you might expect from the steady hands at the tiller, this is a cortex-hugging drone record of beauty and depth. A soundtrack worthy of living your life to.

It may not be the Rapture many were expecting this year, but this triumphant return to form is pretty glorious nonetheless.

From its funereal ballads to its hook-infused jams, Innocents is uniformly satisfying and catchy as hell, suggesting a fascinating possibility--if this is the album that he has waited his entire life to make, then at the grizzled age of forty-seven, Moby is only now entering his prime.

There's something very satisfying about listening to a woman whose career has been marked by deeply ambivalent encounters with the machinery of the music industry--who was briefly being touted as the next Marianne Faithful under Loog Oldham, and whose work was later forced into a folk mould on Diamond Day--finally seize the means of music production and create an album on her own terms.

Crucially, this is an album lacks cynicism and one that bathes in a love of its antecedents so deep that the final results are as seductive and mesmerising as their live show.

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.

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.

Despite that introductory flash, Newman and Spigel are equal partners in Immersion, and there's no way of telling where one's contributions begin and the other's end. The instruments themselves are also equal collaborators.

On first listen it might seem simple, almost naïve; but it becomes increasingly complex as the record progresses, and with every listen. It builds convincingly until its final track, by which point your head feels like an echo chamber for stray rhythms and juddering off-beats. Afrofunk is alive and kicking.

Third Law in fact sees him taking a wise look inwards, re-appraising and drawing upon his influences and past techniques, and adapting his music accordingly, resulting in an album that is far more detailed and interesting than its predecessor.

Where some calls for more variety amongst the virtuosity here aren’t entirely without merit, the finesse of Dutch Uncles uniquely emboldened pop craft is arguably without comparison at present.

Melt Yourself Down combine a pan-global cannon of jazz, afrobeat, and western pop to arrive at a truly thrilling kind of party music. Some parts may be garish, others recall the Klaxons a tad too potently, and some moments are more forgettable than others, but in essence 100% YES is the purest of escapist experiences. The most fun you can have without taking your daily exercise.

What this sense of apparent introversion leads to, however, is anything but a soft or slow record. On the contrary; Oh No often grooves harder and faster than Pull My Hair Back, with Lanza’s voice still invoking early Madonna and Cyndi Lauper.

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.

It’s ‘The Promise’, perhaps, that best shows how these elements have been streamlined for maximum impact: deliciously tricksy drum patterns and a bleach-guzzling melody are welded to a simplistic lump hammer thump to devastating feels-so-wrong-it-must-be-right effect.

After the insular mood of Quaranta, with its themes of addiction and depression, it’s refreshing to hear Brown having unabashed neon-lit fun.

The key success of Hurry Up is that his canvas has exponentially increased in size.

This is a powerful, balanced, personal and at times harrowing album that is deserving of your attention. Each listen seems to add further layers of depth and seriousness. Spend time with it.

Laid-back philosophies punctuate this album, which again suggests a kind of bemused contentedness with life. There's nothing too highfaluting or over-stretching, though musings are thought-provoking enough.

Hood and Mike Cooley, the only original members left, handle all of the songwriting for the first time since the band's 1998 debut, and it makes for a unity of vision that prevents the grief from sounding gratuitous, that makes the uncertainties resonate with our own.

Any fears that the band is skimping after such a delay between releases are soon allayed once the music starts, for what we have here is a high concentration of ideas that punch well above their supposed weight.

Whilst Bandana doesn’t have Piñata’s same effortless sense of an instant classic, it has considerably more urgency and contemporary punch, also reflected in the once-again immaculate choice of collaborators, Killer Mike and Pusha T in particular contributing a devastating sucker-punch to ‘Palmolive’.

Despite everything, CEL never feels sprawling. It’s not complete anarchy. The arrangements remain lean and starched, austere even, with clipped, unprocessed jazz drum breaks regimented underneath icy, hyperactive square wave arpeggios.

On the surface, Garson’s album (not least the directive that it was to be played to help plants grow) seemed typical of that drift. Beneath the heavy topsoil of kneejerk A&R, however, a deceptively nuanced and downright irresistible feat of pure electronic minimalism lay in wait.

These 12 tracks serve as a bombastic backdrop for Svenonius’ treatises on living the life of an anti-capitalist svengali; they're a guerrilla garage rock manifesto imbued with fever, fervour and soul.

With Homesick, Matrixxman has at last found a depth of exploration and expression that stands up to the ideas so visibly floating around the edges of his work.

As a work that gathers up so much of what’s going on in modern dance and electronic music in 2017 and finds ways to make them click together, Mnestic Pressure feels like a game-changer, or at the very least a defining moment. Time will tell.

While at first listen Everything Is Alive might seem plain and minimalist, its flavours can be savoured for a long time. A bit similar to a perennial flower regrowing every spring. Like wonders of life and death hiding beyond the seemingly impenetrable façade of routine and time, its sonic complexity lies beneath the surface.

These marvellous tracks aren't marked by much in the way of bustle--not much necessarily changes over their elegant stretches. But that isn't to say that not much happens.

Made Out of Sound might be one of the finest things either Corsano or Orcutt has done, which is no mean feat.

While some of the music drifts a little close to the milky reassurances of New Age music (‘Praying for Mother / Earth Part 1’ places seemingly random plinking notes over the top of rippling running water that challenges the listener to not run to the loo), other tracks, such as ‘Variation – III’ by Masashi Kitamura + Phonogenix, move gorgeous ambient chords around the sound of waves licking the shoreline, a peace punctured occasionally by a chū-daiko drum to wholly peaceful affect. Together, the twenty three tracks here promote a warmth that feels somewhere close to paradise.

Ba Power was recorded in short, raw sessions. It hits hard, yet ingrained in every track is the sense that Kouyaté is letting loose of his previous restraints. This, is surely Ngoni Ba as he always wanted them to sound.

JP3 is a rollicking delight, exactly the sort of album we need right on the crest of summertime. Its power, though, will last way beyond the summer.

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

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.

A ghostly and passionate debut.

This is an extremely strong, varied follow-up from an artist who is yet to fulfil his potential.

If to stir is to mix and combine, or to transform something that was one thing into something else, this shows what Kleijn and MacKay can do so remarkably when set to that task.

On Your Wilderness Revisited, Doyle sheds himself of the bad habits he developed as an emergent successful recording artist in East India Youth and takes on the role of the Proustian artist. He takes pleasure in and extrapolates beauty from the suburbs that raised him, and takes pains to share that beauty with us.

Compassion is such an easy listen. The melodies are so cheerful, so simple and memorable, they require absolutely no effort to enjoy.

In rock, rehashing the past more often than not results in music that sounds anachronistic, but Unfidelity is proof that in electronic music, a disregard for technological progression can still result in a forward-looking album.

Trupa Trupa’s ongoing refusal to engage with anyone but themselves is certainly addictive to listen to.

Blade of Love is a piece that takes the ideas and challenges of their debut even further without losing any of their focus or animal thump.

While space rock might never be considered high art, when it begets nine tracks as riveting and white-hot as those on Shape Shift there's little you can do but submit.

Despite the strong influence that can detected in the band’s style – Smile via Penguin Café Orchestra, The High Llamas and contemporary classical ensemble North Sea Radio Orchestra perhaps – few others are so committed to making music that sounds like this. After decades building up to it, The Clientele have produced what is probably their finest, most enjoyable record.

This Is What I Do leaves you spoiled for choice. Ruined, in fact.

There is humour--albeit dark--throughout this precious, timeless album.

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.

One of Strut's best compilations to date.

Thrillingly, LP1 gives any record you might find us covering elsewhere on The Quietus a run for its money in terms of oddness.

The artists on C-ORE complement one another in that they share a certain darkness and an interest in digital experimentation, but their voices and methods are distinct, ensuring the album is defiantly unpredictable.

The tropes of romantic art are self-consciously manipulated, but the artifice is made plain, and the finished work feels more real as a result.

Funny, weird, irreverent, a bit messy in places, Wet Leg’s debut feels like a rollicking night out at your local indie disco compacted into thirty-six brisk and breezy minutes. Across a dozen by turns funny and fraught tracks, the highs and lows of twenty-something life are captured with zinging joie de vivre.

Probably the last recording of Reid playing live, before his death in April 2010, it is a fittingly energetic and exuberant performance.

The collaborations are abundant throughout Reflection too and mark some of James’ most assured offerings: her skills as a producer (particularly on drill tracks) are especially impressive. Through working with other creatives from afar, James starts to arrive at something that resembles peace.

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.

With a discipline perhaps learnt from his extensive soundtrack work, Harvey has trimmed away the fat, so that every rhythmic or melodic touch serves a purpose.

Wizard Bloody Wizard still rocks hard enough to justify the occasional rebellious upward glance from the existential trudge down the long spiral into nothingness that they evoke so bleakly, and so well.

The pop hooks in contrast to their previous two albums are more subliminal. The melodies don’t always go in places you expect, but this music is best left to stew in the background before the magic manifests.

Clearly, this is the sound of an artist having fun, but one who avoids the trappings of self-indulgence.

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

Tthe album plays out like a mood swing of rage, despair, and an ennui that threatens to consume. It’s in that ebb and flow that Sightless Pit as a trio have found their balance. There is space for softness and melancholy. The organic is allowed to creep amongst the distorted or the electronic. Noise is only meant as a temporary shock to the system, not as a punishment to be endured.

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.

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.

Confession presents dal Forno’s music at its most lush and sensual, evoking 90s dream pop as much as 80s post-punk. It still has the chilly sensibilities of her previous work, but there’s a shimmering lightness there as well, like sunlight reflecting off the ice.

As it stands, Wake In Fright is a misanthropic social/personal/political blank cheque as bleak in outlook as it is righteously harrowing in sound. It’s 2017, and life’s a chasm. Uniform are staring right in.

Her debut album The Spoils felt like a spell thrown into a mirror of static, and more than a decade later, her newest album trembles with a similar sense of rupturing enchantment.

It is a record at once dark and joyous, fun and foreboding, gleeful and eerily apocalyptic. Curiously, it may also be the group’s most ‘organic’ record to date, an album whose every beat and every blip seems to question our sense of the real and the fake, the human and the alien.

SIGN is a welcome detour, a diversion, and in these difficult and complicated times, a salve of sorts. It’s as close to chill-out music as the duo are ever likely to get, making it the perfect Autechre album for 2020.

Lyrically The House That Jack Built is a masterpiece.

For open ears the recordings on Pakistan Is For The Peaceful offer immersive ever-spiralling tracks that reach ecstatic heights as they open up endless waves of spiritual harmonies, beyond the drone and into the unknown.

Throughout its ten years as a label, Hyperdub has managed to establish and uphold a reputation for consistently on-point and challenging releases that has seen it become one of the most vital UK independent labels, and the range of sounds present on 10.2 is testament to that.

Despite its overall lighthearted, ebullient mood, E.m.m.a's music is almost unsettlingly weird at times, and laugh-out-loud bizarre at others.