Three good tracks [songs, "Motion Sickness," "Ends of the Earth," and "Flutes,"] do not an album make - and, unfortunately, this is the sum of the worthwhile moments on In Our Heads. Elsewhere the album is pure drudgery, remarkable only in its dullness.

In taking her sorrow, turning it on its head and finding inspiration in another magical place, she has produced something powerfully, uniquely transcendent: something vast and expansive, intimate and affecting all at once.

You Know What It’s Like is a grower, and one that demands repeated listening.

There is joy here, beyond the pleasure of wallowing so elegantly and tunefully in ennui.

A musically diverse affair yet still coherently Saint Etienne.

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.

Lover is a fabulous record, full of super-fun standout pop hits that make your heart burst. It oozes with Swift’s much more palatable upbeat sass. She’s in love and also thinking about different kinds of love.

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.

While Here And Nowhere Else is a noisy onslaught that rattles along at a cracking pace, there's a real sense of fun and catchy melodies that Billie Joe Armstrong would be proud of.

These are sad songs, sure; desperately sad, sometimes. But while the connections they depict may be long-severed, that they once existed at all is enough to grace this assured, affecting collection some hope, and an unlikely warmth that seeps in around its blunt, hard edges.

Theirs is a physically and mentally overwhelming (and exhausting) form of full body sonic experience that's equally akin to the psychedelic techno battery of Jeff Mills and the blissed-out sensations of swimming through MBV's arcs of feedback. With its airless surrounds and restrained feel, however, Factory Floor clearly doesn't sound quite like they do onstage.

Sequentially, Some Say I makes its six-of-11 central meditation on separation perfectly telegraphed.

If Konnichiwa was Skepta’s coming of age, then Ignorance is Bliss is a comfortable consolidation, one that hints at the changes in the artist’s life without ever delving deep in. Nonetheless, the project comfortably asserts his place in the current moment as a unique figurehead of UK culture, possessing artistic ability in bags and a persona that suggests far more to come.

Healing is a Miracle is easily Barwick's most intimate – and intentioned – foray in years.

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.

Metal is a cradle-to-grave church of the outsider; birth occurring when you first heard Black Sabbath, Slayer or Metallica. On Abyss, however, Los Angeles' Chelsea Wolfe dabbles in it, owns it, then walks away.

At times things get messy and sound a lot like Ferreria and her various producers totally forgot what was going on ('Omanko' & 'Kristine') but these moments do a great job of hammering home the fact that the record clearly wasn't signed off by someone with a seasoned commercial agenda.

Ratcheting up the glimpses of honesty found on The Redeemer, it is his most transparent collection to date.

Bermuda Drain is, from the off, a massive step forward for Prurient.

Fans of the characteristic Kylesa stomp will find enough of it remaining in the cracks to keep them entertained, but the originality and kinetic force of their vision has become a splutter.

This is an album that sounds massive, pompous, threatening, druggy, psychically hollow, a mirror turned against the daily noise... and is all the better for it.

There is something unsettling but ultimately compulsive about this record. From the opening moments of ‘Deep Six Textbook’, you feel compelled to listen attentively and follow the whole oddball affair to its conclusion.

Texturally, Forgetting The Present is gorgeous, a deep field of beautiful orchestration to explore.

Nothing feels hashed out in haste or haze; every beat, clatter and hiss is perfectly orchestrated. The recordings sound cavernous--this album envelops you, and everything is in its right place. The beauty of Sequence is how deftly Rattle guide you into a narrow slipstream that somehow ripples out into an infinity.

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.

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

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”.

Crisp, rich tones leave space for the imagination to flood in, and take us to a location that exists only in the mind. Sidings is Craven Faults’ best, most irresistible work to date.

It’s good to hear that 40 years in the game hasn’t jaded their urge for silliness. .... It’s all entertaining enough without breaking too much of a sweat.

Using just guitars, a 70s analog synth for bass, and drums (Ambarchi's first instrument), he has forged an exquisitely balanced and powerful sound whose apparent simplicity belies a multi-layered exercise in displacement and resolution.

Ultimately, nothing hangs together long enough to enable a consistent or enjoyable listening experience.

Coracle is a perfect soundtrack to the hazy, misty-morninged Indian summer we're enjoying. Long may it continue.

This is a record that leaves you wishing for one thing more, though--some of these beats seem too good to be used on an instrumental, and could stand up handsomely against a powerful wordsmith.

By tackling the mediocrity of a chart-topping genre head-on and infusing every track with genuine polemical anger, Miss Red and The Bug have created a record that is as thrilling as it is timely.

It's a pleasure to hear the trio working in this way, especially given the sonic common ground they share with Fennesz, and it's also the most energised I've heard the latter sound for a while. Nonetheless, the lack of friction between their respective musical aesthetics can't help but make me wonder how King Midas would sound in collaboration with another, less likely, fellow traveller.

Return to Archive is a funny and unsettling trip through the past, to a time before we felt like we’d heard everything. But its greatest power is in forcing us to question what we should archive, given that any noise can capture the world it came from.

In short, a solid enough second effort with some promise for a more expansive third.

There is a sense of nostalgia throughout, with tracks such as ‘Angels Pharmacy’ and ‘Remembrance’ featuring female vocalist Zsela giving off hazy club vibes. The turn to voice, Actress’s first time, has formed a deeper sense of worldliness, the invasion of corporal sensation into his production style.

Though their sound is undoubtedly unique, their music has become formulaic.

Khan has truly emerged as one of modern pop's most thrilling voices. Steeped in references? Perhaps, but Khan's own spirit of invention and emotional wisdom are through lines which make The Haunted Man a singular journey.

Evidence is an impressive addition to their existing body of work.

Though Phillips' lyrics are often chilly, abounding with images of freezing water and fallow fields, there's a genuine warmth here remarkably absent of pretense or the weepy e-bow heroics that post-rock has grown so fond of.

Malamore is an album full of standouts, and a step in the direction of greatness.

While Memorial Waterslides (the title itself a perfect juxtaposition of the bleak and the playful) is shot through with a sense of longing and an awareness of the passing of time, it’s also a joyful celebration of creativity, and of a band who appear to have ideas in abundance.

Changes In Air is subtle, almost ornate, but Coverdale whittles minute variations and intricate textures to discretely demand our attention. Encouraging us to actively notice rather than passively absorb.

A powerful, impressively unconventional, predominantly instrumental suite, linking sludge and doom metal with a desolate reading of jazz.

Mother finds the band tremendous on all fronts, but the rabid, manic excitement of ‘Only Love’ overshadows everything else. There are no other moments on the record like it, nothing as intensely unhinged or exciting. However lovely and affecting the rest of the record is, as it drifts further and further into more serene climes, the spectre of this extraordinary early blast grows in the back of your mind, and you're willing them to let go of their beautiful refinement just one more time.

Musically speaking, radical reinvention isn't Oozing Wound's raison d'etre, so don't expect a new version of the wheel. Instead, there’s willful progression, incremental growth, and renewed focus. After the sprawling Whatever Forever, High Anxiety's comparatively concise seven-track, thirty-four-minute runtime feels super concentrated and highly potent, calling to mind the band's previous high-water mark, Earth Suck. But High Anxiety is no rehash.

More vibrant and engaged with the world than they've sounded at any time since Whatever You Love, You Are.

Aside from sonics, the almost obsessive way in which the lyrical themes are fleshed out is another way in which this album is delightfully skewed.

With Rakka, Vladislav Delay has created an arresting album of sheer punishing density that encapsulates the ecological pressures of a land that is brutal and unforgiving at the best of times, but occasionally encompass moments of estranged beauty.

TYRON feels like a necessary release for the controversial rapper. Even though he’s placed himself as the centre of attention this time around, there is still plenty of societal commentary to be gleaned from his autobiographical missives – and it’s no less urgent or energising.

Medicine is, in other words, a straight up psychedelic rock affair – for better and for worse. .... Overall, it is an amazingly fun record for spooky psychonauts.

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.

Chills On Glass has been sequenced, so that there are gaps between the songs big enough to drive a huge tour bus through, but each nugget is such an alien blast that you need a break to re-evaluate what just lubed past your lobes

On Undertow there’s less of the upfront ferocity of previous years but it’s not as if they’re toning anything down, just prolonging the hallucinatory qualities and the twisted, anomalous ardency of their vision.

Playing like a combination of its two predecessors that vividly incorporates the production expertise Martyn has accumulated over his decade-long career, The Air Between Words may be short on surprises, but it is rich in finesse and detail.

It is a crystallised definition of "record collection rock".

Cala is a record that, at its strongest, reaches astounding levels of beauty and emotional fragility, but at its weakest, is just a fading shadow of its most powerful moments.

Even if some of the album's humanism cloys slightly ... it's reassuring to hear the argument against corporate greed advanced with such forthrightness.

Although Seeking Thrills has many brilliant tracks, ‘About Work The Dancefloor’ is still Georgia’s signature song – and a neat summation of her mind set. It seems that while thinking about and working tirelessly on her songs, she can slip into dreams of their impact in a packed venue. Fortunately, Seeking Thrills is often good enough to take listeners to that delirious high with her.

One of Haines' best efforts, Nine And A Half Psychedelic Meditations On British Wrestling Of The 1970s And Early 80s is an album that does much to encourage the here and now as it does to paint an impression of a time long gone.

Given the rigid stylistic direction of Meliora overall, Ghost seem to be writing for the expectations of the general metal community with songs like the stock metallic chugging of 'Absolution' and the AC/DC-baiting 'Majesty'. Such safe playing prevents Meliora from being something truly special.

A stirring evocation of childhood, community and the nature of memory, The Silver Gymnasium suits being pored over as much as it does driving on a sunny day--and it suits both very well indeed.

Sun is the light at the end of one hell of a tunnel, a record brimming with an assurance and playfulness that, if a little dorky in places, is about as cathartic as pop gets.

[A] wonderful record.

Their world might be lined by wrack and ruin, but it's a world that fits them like a studded glove.

It retains energy, but has enough twists and turns to still provide a consistently interesting landscape. They have made a beautiful confectionary, but one made with rigour, skill, and care. A joyful album, leaving me aching for a live performance.

A physical and spiritual journey unravels in the 37 minutes of the record.

Rub is an album of well-sheened extremes.

Ultimately, though, as a collection that welcomes the near misses and the questionable latter-era caricaturing, The Singles is real and admirable testament to the full Can story.

These are cranky, abstracted journeys through texture, noise and rhythm with howling, gibbering singer Dara Kiely as our unreliable spirit guide. At their best, Girl Band manage to locate a sweet spot between chaos and precision, poise and frenzy, hysteria and logic.

Title track ‘Love Invention’ continues to push this colourful pop juggernaut with its exploration of “wellness” culture, and there are a few songs in this louder kind of vein – painted with the broader brushstrokes of disco and house, with varying degrees of success. ... In truth it is Goldfrapp’s vocal that anchors this record, and things take a more interesting turn when the melancholy sets in (as is so often the way).

Their most rowdy and rambunctious album yet.

Nothing Important is a remarkable record--at times deeply, painfully intimate, but also witty, bawdy, surreal, disquieting, nostalgic, brash and fearlessly individual.

BENEE may not necessarily be an album artist, but listeners will find that most bases are covered within Hey u x’s 13 tracks. ... There’s a song here for every playlist, even if consuming all 13 in a row becomes a bit of a drag.

The conceit of Bishop's new album, Tangier Sessions, is some serious guitar-dork lore that would make any bedroom noodler salivate.

Despite their EDM club appeal and pop sensibility, seven strikingly dynamic and expansive maximalist compositions are still locked in a very private headspace, a kind of solitude that contains multitudes.

It is, by some distance, Krug's best work as Moonface. It's riveted with some glorious, soaring moments and the taut motorik rhythm is a compulsive mesh for the album.

Despite the songs' far-off beginnings, Change Becomes Us is like an aggressive, steroid-pumped continuation of the band's excellent 2011 album Red Barked Tree, a testament to the band's consistent faithfulness to the key signatures of ice-sheet psychedelia and jackhammer punk.

The folk guitar rhythms and stray words are easy to catch, and that surface level listen is pleasant enough. But the immediate impression of gentleness is something of a bait and switch. Maria BC calls for you to be on your toes so that you are not caught off guard when the message finally breaks through.

Building Something Beautiful For Me is a gentler listen by comparison [to 2019's For You and I], with some anger still there – just distilled into something more gleaming and triumphant.

Pangaea's Fabriclive is the much needed and triumphant reboot the format's needed, istilling something of club music's ongoing renaissance into a seamless, pounding missive. Every act is one to watch and discover, but at this point none deserve to be followed as closely as Pangaea himself.

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.

This is a solid pop album and Nayeon’s charms shine. Her voice, visuals, and sweet attitude deliver a feel-good tracklist full of fluffiness and catchy hooks, but it’s also clear that her own colour still waits to be found.

While the first disc replicates the original album, the real meat is to be found on the remaining discs.

Polygondwanaland is one of their strongest excursions yet, not just of this year but of any.

Still Slipping Vol. 1 bounces effortlessly from one style to another, from the intricate 2-step of 'swag' to the melancholic house of 'better'. There's a nod to '80s post-punk on 'playground', and gloriously throaty verses from James Messiah and Goya Gumbani on 'swag' and 'playground' respectively. Rather than a bold new direction, the mixtape feels like a peek behind the curtain, turning the dancefloor monolith into somebody we can all relate to, with Mum calling up to be sweet about something she doesn't quite understand.

When the album stops playing the temptation to categorize Family and Friends as a literate Streets project or Buck 65 with a flair for topic sentences is irresistible. Only one song exceeds the five-minute mark, though, and most are just over two minutes, so boredom isn't a problem.

Old Fears is, then, a notably moodier, less accessible work than Field Music's last album Plumb.

Seasonal Hire offers no grand statements and reveals no great mysteries. Ultimately, this is not a particularly ambitious record; no musician is stretched wildly beyond his or her limits. And yet, largely because of its off-hand quality and ease of execution, Seasonal Hire offers moments of intoxicating strangeness and beauty.

It's difficult to say Humor Risk is better than WIT'S END, but it is certainly its perfect counterpart.

They haven't quite carved out new territory here, but if the best moments of Nocturnal Koreans are anything to go by, the wheels have started turning.

Guzo is a strange album--it feels like the record label (or management) are calling too many shots, unable to decide whether Yirga should play the Ethio-jazz which we've come accustomed to through the Ethiopiques series, the cool Western jazz of Oscar Peterson and Bill Evans, or a fusion in-between that also includes soul and Caribbean flavours.

There is much to savour in Caminiti's enthusiastic and emotional attempts to expand on his own musical lexicon.

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.

For anyone who has enjoyed the great guitar music coming out of Mali in recent years Albala is essential listening.

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.