They perfect the formula occasionally - penultimate track 'Swept Away' matches its name, a pillow-soft cascade of plummy bass notes and piano house, across which their voices whisper like wind - but for much of Coexist they sound halting, nervous, afraid to push beyond the boundaries they've created around their sound.

This refinement in Mogwai’s modus operandi suits them well. Where once their revolutionary sound startled, their evolutionary execution now beguiles--and keeps them several steps ahead of the pack.

Ultimately, Hoodies All Summer sounds like it’s been ‘fixed’ by a major label trying to improve Kano’s chances of radio play by throwing some poppy hooks and production into the mix and praying for the best. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, but in this case the result is simply banal.

Their seventh stellar album in a row. .... The Alchemist makes for an inconspicuous partner, creating eerie soundscapes upon which Woods and ELUCID make things a whole lot eerier. And make no mistake, there are some hair-raising cuts here. .... Armand Hammer are equally adept at turning the world suddenly inward, punctuating political madness with moments of real poignance.

Which is the thing all the way through DSU, the parts that you recognise, that feel familiar (or rather Alex G's creation of a comforting sense of familiarity) make everything else seem richer for happening around it.

Only a few acts have really transcended local industry mores and enlightened amateurism to make something of truly wider, lasting appeal. And maybe none more so than The Homesick with this record, which should surely sneak through the gates of classic pop heaven.

Start with the bangers – and there are plenty, mostly front-loaded. ... It’s a visceral and strange album, one that revels in its abstractions, but is direct in what it has to say.

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

Wahile Girls have returned brimming with confidence and enthusiasm, this record seems to overstretch them.

Change is musically daring but familiar – the austere yet affective electronic backdrops elicit Broadcast in their prime, or High Scores-era Boards of Canada.

Astronaut Meets Appleman might very well be King Creosote’s masterpiece. It is at once ethereal and contemplative, grounded and matter-of-fact.

It’s simultaneously unnerving and feel-good, witty and disconsolate. And though recorded two years ago, somehow it captures the essence of what it is to be a conscious entity negotiating the world in 2021.

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.

Their cover of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s ‘Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence’ feels superfluous and unnecessary. But that aside, this album sees Sherwood and Pinch take a big evolutionary step in their partnership in terms of keeping their inventiveness and the slabs of bass fresh while managing to ditching much of stodge.

Godfather 3 is more like a mixtape than an album. Many of the tracks are shorter than three minutes and the number of features gives it a collaborative, crew-project feel. But this is what Wiley does best.

It strikes a perfect balance between the emotional rack-drawing that's made them beloved to many an indie misanthrope and the warmth and hope that makes them better than mere scab-pickers, just as it offsets their talent for unashamed anthems with dark and gnarly little details. It's a beautifully layered construction.

For scope alone, Deathconsciousness feels important, but it also makes the band's new music sound contented and unfussy.

Two or three more long jams in a double harmonic scale would have worked just fine. But the lack of closure, like the lack of polish, is entirely characteristic of this release, which to be honest is less of an 'album' than a longish EP.

Rather than sounding phoned-in, Melvins make this louche lack of effort seem joyous and energetic, and though it can indeed feel uncomfortable, there is a sense that that’s what they want. They were making in-jokes for themselves, and the fun sludge bits were just by-products. Nonetheless, this record works, and those who vibe with the arrogance and the spikiness of Buzz and co. will warm to being joshed a little.

I AKA I is eclectic and forceful, but always at the service of melody, atmosphere and, if you listen hard enough, emotion.

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.

The combination of Diggs’s hyper-enunciated double-time flow, William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes’s twisted industrial production, and high-concept albums strikes me as original.

Restarter, the band's fourth full-length, sees a return to form for Torche that even in its unabashed nods to frontman Steve Brooks's other musical endeavors, retains the pop sensibilities that have continually been the point of distinction between the two.

Squandered its potential. Maruja emerge from the studio with raucous rap-rock and meandering jam music in tow, resulting in an album full of the same songs several times over. By the end, listeners may feel they have deja vu. Fans may feel they have dementia.

Belle and Sebastian exercise their songwriting powers by crossing the boundary between sophisticated indie-pop and straightforward happy-clappy numbers with mainstream radio hit potential (‘I Don’t Know What You See in Me’).

Skelethon is a wildly energetic, funny, poignant, nostalgic and sad record; the result of huge personal investment on Aesop's behalf.

In general, the album's tracks take more risks, and surprise in a way that we've not quite heard from Hebden before.

With Half Free, Remy has made a brilliant, accessible, edgy pop record without compromising her ideals one iota--and hopefully has surreptitiously brought her into a wider light.

While there might be a pleasing inevitability to their sonic tryst--and even to its shagging-and-dying trajectory--there is nothing predictable about Here Lies The Body.

Despite the undercurrent of anger and frustration in some songs, the album is rich with the triumph of black womanhood. The overall result feels positive.

Dark Matter/Dark Energy is the sound of a band that's acutely self-aware of its own legacy and where it fits in on the cultural landscape. Crucially, it doesn't attempt to be something that it's not and the honesty contained within is one of the album's greatest strengths.

Wanderer, although not explicitly confrontational, subtly undermines this longstanding and limited perception of What Cat Power Is. Marshall herself sits in the producer’s seat, and gone is the gloss of 2012’s Sun; these 11 songs are stripped back to the sparse bones of piano, guitar and that distinctive, smoky, Southern States voice.

Ignoring the pair of low-key, forgettable tracks that close the album, Howlin is a cracking summer album.... but whether the album has a shelf life beyond that remains to be seen.

The Something Rain is the sound of a band entirely reinvigorated, like a new band even, bursting with dreamy, soulful, intelligent songs, though you won't be surprised to learn everything is executed in the most understated way.

It's sad to report then, that Psychedelic Pill is nothing less than a crushing disappointment as it gives way to Young's most meandering and directionless tendencies.

From the rock & roll of 'Freaks and Geeks' to the ska-indebted 'I'll Reach Out My Hand', this is unadulterated glee.

A prayer of a record, despair turned into poetry.

Tenology itself, to recap, is not perfect, or even close. But half of it is a lucky-dip of madcap ingenuity and variation from one of the few pop bands to render cleverness a virtue rather than an irritation.

It isn't quite as lovely as 2012's Hotel Shampoo and it isn't as otherworldly as his 2005 solo debut, Yr Atal Genhedlaeth, but it does manage to push his freewheeling spirit to the fore throughout and there truly is a sense that journeys long and important are being taken within and alongside the music

Wild Pendulum soars with the sounds of a band comfortable in their own skin, free of past pressures and ready to celebrate the present in magnificent style.

It’s different, daring, and, fortunately for the trio’s fans, effective.

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

DNA Feelings is a beautiful follow-up to Of Matter And Spirit. Investigating what it is to be human, and how transcendency might happen today, Devi winds ideas together and crafts her own sonic spirituality.

This is music for interplanetary airports and as much as it soothes, it sonically unsettles. But that said--when the project is taken holistically--the listener also risks being unsettled by the contexts that lie in its peripheries.

For those that need a bit of background music The Slow Rush is a competent record, but it’s impossible to actively listen to it for a prolonged period of time without despairing. At least now that this is out, there probably won’t be another one for a few years.

A bold introduction and dynamic arrangement sticks to the formula while constantly evolving and developing. The sharp production allows each instrument the space and sonic textures to open up expansive new worlds of unfolding sounds and wider influences.

Bougaïeff’s record is toying with the same aesthetics as Nine Inch Nails, but with the dancefloor’s (and hindsight’s perspective) rather than a powerlifting miseryguts’ – and the result carries much more positivity, lifting us up and through the darkness and into the (strobe) light. ... This album is ideal for anyone who likes moving their body and counting at the same time.

Side one exemplifies 2020 in that it’s not entirely successful. While there are great ideas bursting to get out, it also lurches mechanically and is difficult to love. It often feels laboured, like Kirk is giving himself a migraine trying to reinvent something because you suspect he feels that’s his job. Flip the record over and the outlook changes. Once he submits to the pulsating rhythms and allows himself to be free then there’s a gold rush.

‘Future Times’ is a comforting record, delivered by a highly-skilled musician taking on the epically harsh world of the 2020s, and facing off against the dark forces with the pure power of mind-melting music. That kind of optimism is in short supply and we need more of what Plankton Wat has to offer us: mind expansion, inner calm, and irresistible fuzz.

Crystal Vision does indeed seek to provide a kind of crystal vision, resulting in a more direct love-letter to the ties that bind, and in doing so Fake weaves a sense of body, community and connectedness.

Like everything else they’ve done, it doesn’t sound limiting or calculated or agonised over – it just sounds vibrant and magical.

Cannell’s music thrives most when she takes the airy, washed-out sound of her bass recorder and mixes it with the twinkling, prickly textures and harmonies of a twelve-string harp to make mysterious palettes. .... Much of the music on The Rituals starts to feel monotonous. Most of Cannell’s melodies slope upward, made of ascending slurs that recede into a pillowy bed, yielding little variation. But with closer ‘A Lost Nightingale’, her ideas coalesce into a sombre yet optimistic meditation.

Miss Anthropocene is a Kanye West of a listening experience. Strengthened by listening less hard and chilling out. Weakened by due diligence and the artist’s cerebral disconnect between what she's great at making and who she believes she is.

This is an utterly spellbinding record that shows with maturity that the band only grows and improves. If this is their last, it is an exit at their peak, proving their relevance and importance more than ever.

In Pale Bloom, Davachi reconnects to the piano on a spiritual level, releasing whispers and wishes of delicacy and delight into the ether.

All The Way is particularly strong, however, for both the production of Galás' piano and its melodies--there is an added, foreboding subtlety which comes through with more clarity here.

Melody's Echo Chamber is a glorious album. Its success lies in the balance between Prochet's ability to break out of the (supposed) shackles of her structured classical composition education, while still delivering a suite of songs that are coherent, eminently listenable and blend lightness with dark foreboding.

Sounding freer and better than she ever has before.

Some might feel that at 55 minutes and 17 tracks and with so much going on, Shook is perhaps a little long. Yet to these ears it never feels bloated and it’s hard to see what might be pruned without losing some of the record’s impact.

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.

The band, led by its creative core Douglas Dulgarian, have managed to fuse the noisiness of reverse-reverb effects and jungle breaks with the dark, heavy textures of contemporary shoegaze. And Lotto, their most recent outburst, might well be their greatest.

By the album’s end, they seem to be stuck in a cul-de-sac. The next album, one hopes, will come along soon and help them out.

It doesn't have the polish of 2015’s La Vie Est Belle, but is more daring in its exploration of its diasporic soundscapes.

Half Divorced is packed full of pep. They’ve stomped on the gas and it burns along like a raging forest fire.

Compassion is slightly less impenetrable and esoteric than Barnes' other albums, its emotions slightly more telegraphed. But it loses none of his power to enthral, disturb and enthuse.

Eyeroll is organic and expansive, woven around the bouncy sounds of struck, scratched, and stretched rototoms, mutated voices, squiggly trumpet noises, and the ambient sounds of Ziúr’s flat in Berlin. The resulting music is restlessly rhythmic and capable of growing into a multitude of textural and structural directions.

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.

What Tunng have shown with Presents…Dead Club is that addressing grief and death doesn’t have to be devastating. It can be thought-provoking. It can also be simply pleasurable.

Spike Field isn’t particularly immediate, but is the kind of album that sits in your mind: you come back to it and it surprises you in a new way.

There's a sense that Pink is somehow serious, utilitarian, workmanlike, that while the tracks brought together here may work in isolation and on dancefloors, they're not as suited to indulgently solipsistic listening as previous Four Tet records.

Across spheres of contemporary art, experimental music, noise and techno, Pan’s twisting trajectory as an artist is rousing to witness; Lack惊蛰 serves as yet another reminder of her thrill.

The best part about it is the Oh Sees manages to make this shift while still sounding like themselves, holding true with some killer bursts of distorted guitar and psychedelic reverb throughout.

Bell’s mastery of subversion and convention enables the record to function as an exploration of dance and community; a reminder of how it feels to be alone, a stranger in a crowd.

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

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.

There is a presence conjured up by Trupa Trupa’s music. And it seems to have made itself more manifest on B Flat A.

Days Are Gone, their long-in-the-baking debut album, is properly great, sounding effortless and breezy in a way that only something worked over like a jewel can.

This time Numan struggled with depression in the past few years (which nearly broke up his marriage). This all comes through in the lyrics, which are mostly good (one particularly haunting line: "I don't believe in the goodness of people like me"), even if they lay it on a little thick sometimes.

This ego-stripped project may not be to the liking of some of his original grime fans. But at this stage, Stormzy is aiming to break boundaries both materially and spiritually. He achieves both on this new album.

While it’s a release that might disengage fans of her more sub-rosa earlier material of yore, Zola Jesus has evolved into an artist where pop--born from a need to mend from trauma or otherwise--is no longer a recurrent secondary descriptor, but a primary one. Danilova has loosened the shackles that have made this remarkable metamorphosis possible.

Not interested in following in anyone's footsteps, Arca borrows back the skeletal remains he made to West and creates new albeit strange life. Gorgeous and ghastly, Xen is no clone, but it may too resonate through generations.

Da Mind Of Traxman, rarely overly solemn and ever-playful, is still far from a middlebrow defanging.

The covers portion is entirely without merit, Turner having managed to extract every last atom of enjoyment from every single one of the songs he's chosen.

Open is magical, calming, intriguing, beautiful. It makes me smile to listen to it.

Emerging as an outgrowth of Chicago house music, the principle formula is one that combines bubbling 808s and low end with angular snare patterns and looped snatches of vocal samples. It can often prove a jarring prospect in the first instance, but DJ Rashad’s Double Cup is a coherent and appealing starting point for the curious.

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.

It’s a big, sonorous, unearthly offering, and it’s difficult to imagine it being created separately by two men, with cut and paste and some incredibly deft stitching. How they’ve managed to bring this Frankenstein’s monster together as a coherent work is testament to a modern friendship by two brilliant musicians using up-to-date technology.

Another great Pere Ubu record, one imbued with a more upbeat emotional sensibility than its predecessor, with some memorable songs and some wild sonic experiments. It’s a snapshot of where the band are right now, as well las a hint of where they might still go in future.

A pleasing anachronism landing on a very different planet. Even though the band had reformed for some dates a decade ago, it’s a return that feels as unexpected as a reappearance from the ghost of Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra.

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.

Lord Steppington is arguably his finest since Domo Genesis' No Fools mixtape, certainly an album on which his production is more freewheeling than it has been in a while, noisier, angrier, determined.

In its moodier moments, the music can be as gorgeous and inherently moving as Rafael Toral’s explorations of sustained harmony on Traveling Light. Yet, a sense of disquiet follows like a shadow, haunting the melodies, ready to break the enchantment. .... When they finally culminate in the overpowering, elatedly bright ‘A New Morning Breaks’, Dorji’s music begins to feel truly necessary, a transmutation of current anxieties into a determination to move forward.

It may not be as immediately sonically challenging as her earlier, more austere work, but it is no less valiant and genre-defying. In fact, it probably pushes the envelope quite a bit further.

It is in this emergent, slightly surreal space between music and politics that Jaar’s syncretic talent shines through.

Conatus seldom reaches the same level of experimentation as Danilova's collaborations with the likes of LA Vampires. But what she proffers instead is far tastier: a deft fine-tuning of the slick and stylish formula of Stridilum II, with the slightly schlockier moments of melodrama eschewed for something more sophisticated.

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.

This is yet another chillwave album. An album so typical of the genre that it even has the audacity to use the word "polaroid" in a lyric. What rescues it from mediocrity, however, is the flawlessly melodic melancholy of Edwards' voice.

Algiers isn't incitement to revolution, it's a call to self-interrogation, to consider your reality and the reality of those around you.