It has been worth the wait. It’s not as if music’s timeline moves in anything but circles today, so the delay doesn’t present an issue. This is the music of yesternow.

The instrumentation is often so clean and clinical it can almost feel like stock sounds, but coupled with the eerie atonal textures it feels very odd. Like a Bosch painting, where the lines are smooth, colours are clean and saturated, and even figures in darkness shine in the gleam of some unseen light, the arrangements feel alarmingly smooth and uncomfortably well-rendered.

Nothing is a stark record, and I imagine not one that will be ringing out of club PAs on a regular basis. Instead, it joins the impressively swelling ranks of dance/techno/electro/house albums that reflect the inner workings of the individuals creating them.

More Light stands as one of Primal Scream's finest, most honest records, even if the ravens remain soundly roosting within the Tower's walls.

Why Love Now may be their second album on Sub Pop, but there has been no cleaning up or pulling punches. Pissed Jeans are as soiled, sordid and scintillating as ever.

Despite the wallowing, there is a fundamental Hot Chippyness to the music that, though appropriately reflective of the record’s moribund themes, is still, in its own sometimes quiet, sometimes propulsive way, utterly gorgeous.

It’s been widely noted that Levi is the first woman in twenty years to be nominated for Best Score, but that she should win has nothing to do with gender, and everything to do with the off-modern freshness of her approach in a field dogged by generic bombast and minimalism-by-numbers.

Rave Tapes may not be their definitive album, and even if that never comes, it adds another clutch of undeniably brilliant songs to their arsenal. The hawk is very much still howling.

It's a brilliantly focused, glittering and energetic classy pop album that you'd never have expected from the authors of the disparate, overly quirky 'Does You Inspire You'.

A softer collection of songs, harnessing more sincerity than his last two general-release LPs (as opposed to Orion, which was online-only), Easy Tiger and Cardinology.

From a purely musical perspective, however, it executes that very most rare form of retroism--the type that makes the tired, forgotten and domesticated once again radical.

I Know What Love Isn't turns out to be a graceful break-up album, one that eschews ugliness and rage.

With Sallows, Mayberry and Psutka have crafted something deeply human and eerily, beautifully contradictory, like meeting someone you already know for the very first time.

Unfortunately, most of it sounds like Jason Williamson jogged into a pillar box. The guest musicians include David Yow and Jamie Cullum, a VIP list that draws attention to IDLES' own inadequacy. IDLES' by-numbers rock plod has none of the sensitive jazz swing of The Jesus Lizard nor can it match the unhinged ferocity of Cullum at his most feral. ... Three albums in and the hype has died down. The ideas are drying up. The lack of substance is wholly exposed.

Fans of Nick's previous work should feel right at home; it's livelier and more overtly catchy than anything in his catalogue, but at its core, much of Anchor is a refinement of the things he's done well in the past.

A gradual unfolding of creative consciousness in real-time, long evolving in a psychotropic loop of self-invention, her journey culminates on The Tunnel and the Clearing in hard-earned clarity.

Seasons of Your Day is a no-frills, no-fuss album from a band cocooned in their own impenetrable dreamworld, untouched by the passage of time.

This record is both symphony for sufferers of that condition and a treasure map to the Orkney Islands, whether walking their beaches, or stopped in a traffic jam on the M25.

At her brightest and her best.

Granular Tales is not without its flaws, but perfection isn't necessarily what makes a good album.

With Heavy Love Garwood has created not so much an album as a sonic dream. While you're in it, it's visceral and poignant, but once you're awake it's hard to recall the details, the lyrics, or one song from another (except perhaps the title track).

In The Same Room gives us more intimately friendly insight into the beguiling world of Julia Holter, seen here as thoughtfully poised and careful not to intimidate the listener, making this breezy recording a good entry point for novices in Holter's catalogue.

A taut, at times challenging, but engrossing collection of sounds.

A superhuman album celebratory to a soul very sad to have lost.

It’s a boundary-pushing work that, depending on the listener, could be considered either powerfully engrossing or deeply alienating.

On Confess his tired, joyless music and moribund, hackneyed and hankey lyricism suggests a man whose concept of romanticism would go nicely with a Nairn cracker and dab of quince jelly.

You won’t hear a better pop album this year. I doubt you’ll hear a better rap album this year.

Herd Runners is another excellent record by a disastrously underrated songwriter who doesn't believe in love, but doesn't get enough of it either. There's only so long he can wait.

Peering out from the shadow cast by their Band on the Wall contemporaries Joy Division and The Fall, their thirteenth album It All Comes Down To This is their strongest since 1982’s Sextet.

Have Some Faith in Magic is very pretty and very meaningless.

What has emerged is Broken Social Scene’s best album.

WHY?’s brand of excess ought to be not abandoned, but embraced.

It's Venetian Snares going back to the root of his influences by means of a longer-established medium. An admirable idea well executed, but as a listener I'm just not ready for a drill & bass revival and as such this album beggars few repeat plays.

There remains a re-assurance in these grooves that here is a band that knows what is does best and is perfectly happy to play to its strengths.

Drenge is giddily goofy.

1000 Days is even more assured, and it often veers into being overproduced and losing that essential 1970s DIY role-playing game spirit.

Ultimately, Beast is smart and cohesive but still joyous and daft.

The live recordings feel raw and vibrant, capturing the energy of the performance, the power of the music, and the subtlety of emotion.

Musically, Smith’s electronic extravaganza finds kinship with such auteurs as Fever Ray and Estonian producer Maria Minerva. From shimmering hypnagogic pop on ‘Both’ to playful 8-bit ‘What’s Between Us’, Gush is inventive and unpredictable.

Nisennenmondai will fill your head with strange, billowing thoughts as their compositions sprint towards infinity. Approached in the correct spirit--principally an understanding that this is music that will ask questions rather than provide answers--their conjurings are irresistible.

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.

Lower one’s expectations from its rescuing of the planet and Babymetal’s latest, Metal Forth, is a full-on hoot. .... Polished and compressed to the maximum, the metallic elements do their primal job of instigating the headbanging and devil’s horns. Each successive pop chorus is catchier than Saint Peter’s fishing net. The electronic details add to the endorphin-triggering lushness.

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.

Traditional airs 'Women Of Ireland', 'Carrickfergus' and 'Curragh Of Kildare' are evocative, stately and impassioned, respectively and alternately, and Rowland's bolshy old yelp has softened to a croon. He brings the kind of authority he didn't always have 30 years ago, along with a hard-won wisdom that gives him the character to handle this stuff sincerely.

If we were picking holes here, you might gently suggest Tied To A Star is not altogether captivating, but for serious fans of J Mascis' acoustic incline--it does deliver. His lack of clear narrative, comically dull song titles like 'And Then', 'Drifter', 'Heal The Star' and 'Come Down', still leaves J Mascis as something of a stranger to us.

Mission Of Burma are excellent, their new album is equally excellent, and an easy contender for best rock album of the year.

This a welcome shot of vitamin D in the cruellest month of the year where summer seems to be an eternity away while the filling of tax return forms only adds to the harshness of January.

A fantastic set of songs approached with a reverence that is never stifling, and one in which fans of either act will find plenty to love.

For every instance on III set to give the listener an aural acid bath, there are nearly as many that might induce a snooze on the bus, and a dribble on your neighbouring passenger's shoulder.

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

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

This is pop music, pure and simple: smarter, stranger than your average fare, no doubt, but don't confuse its oddness for inscrutable obtuseness.

M:FANS perhaps loses some of those dissonant, euphoric yet deeply melancholic moments that Music For A New Society has to give us; tracks where it seems a self-consuming feat for Cale to bring himself to sing. But the two work in a partnership rather than against each other.

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

It’s refreshing then that their music comes without a prescribed meaning being spoon-fed to listeners. This allows the listener to come to their own conclusions.

Gorillaz helped re-unite both indie and pop with that most Paul Morley's jowl-wobbling of things: the abstract.

Of course such is the collage gonzoid splatter-gun style of the Blues Explosion and their huge canon of songs its almost inevitable that they might inadvertently chance on something shiny from their own back catalogue and contort it.

There are moments when Clarietta breaks from being the wallflower at the indie disco, and lets fly with a few carefree windmills.

There are highlights, sure (twigs is too preternaturally talented to avoid those completely), like the gleeful ‘Sushi’ or gorgeous closer ‘Stereo Boy’, but even the more compelling tracks like ‘Cheap Hotel’ – a satisfyingly eerie piece of slow-garage – would rank towards the bottom of EUSEXUA’s track-list. What’s odd is that we know twigs can do this style justice – she has an album from early this same year to prove it – so its bewildering to hear her deliver one unrewarding song after another.

Akin to scrolling down a Tumblr dashboard, A.L.L.A as a whole lacks coherence but features some impressive displays of aestheticism.

Pinkunoizu take synth pop, psych folk, surf rock, krautrock and other marginal forms of pop and rock from the last 50 years, and use them for the basis of extremely enjoyable excursions in deep listening.

Through electro beats, samples and soaring choruses, Lynch's voice is consistent, strong and always beautiful.

Aforger has a mysterious, almost uncanny quality to it beyond the more obvious emotional exorcism.

This album is a career highpoint for Sweden’s Skull Defekts.

Only ‘It Will Never Be Simple’ (at 2:32) feels a little like padding. Overall though, this is the pinnacle so far of the current GBV reformation, reaching in parts the high calibre of classic era albums like Alien Lanes and Under The Bushes Under The Stars.

Like a young monster venturing out into the world on its own, Volume Massimo, despite its pretences towards a pop sensibility, is still a beast at its core, but it’s an album that showcases just how much Cortini‘s aesthetic has developed since his early days.

Mint Chip is full of misdirection but never feels contrived. ... Their songs are tightly composed, danceable streams of consciousness.

As the title of the soporific, sunbleached skank that is 'LO HI' suggests, 'Lucifer' is more a subdued warm bath of than a plunge into the psyche.

Under the rule of Worden's powerful vocal these sophisticated compositions provide a gripping, melodramatic exploration of a mindset both childlike and brooding.

Throughout, Strangers is quite simply an understated tour de force by a now experienced composer and performer, able to convey a feeling and lead the way within it in equal measure.

This is a timid stand for a band who've made a career out of courageously embracing their fears.

Largely an enjoyable and ambitious LP.

It takes a while for these disparate facets to show themselves fully, but the resultant experience is a trawl into an underworld totally removed from collective consciousness views of tradition, fate and religiosity. It’s a dark path, but one well worth taking, provided you have something to ease the headache when you come back.

Until In Excess, Imperceptible UFO has lofty ambitions of space on one hand, and a great deal of heart and soul to keep it simultaneously grounded on the other.

The Men may not be here to change rock history but at the very least they deserve serious recognition for the fact that they keep doing exactly what they want, and that it continues to be as honest and as shamelessly exhilarating as the best rock music always should be.

Instead of a coherent collection of songs, Animal Joy feels like a series of very clever blueprints that, while admirable in form, are often (despite that title), rather bloodless.

A record that may occasionally get on one's nerves, yet undoubtedly overflows with vitality.

Wand's resultant mixture of the frenetic and the smooth is intoxicating.

Boys And Girls is a somewhat predictable trawl through the back catalogues of Creedence Clearwater Revival, Stax Records, Janis Joplin and the recorded output of Muscle Shoals Sound Studios amongst others, but with none of the grit, passion or emotion.

Unfortunately, Girls In Peacetime Want To Dance is the net effect of an effort that goes nowhere at all; and this deviation appears furtive, as if they're trying to hide their beloved quirks from an expanded audience.

It's the first great guitar album of the year--stimulating, idiosyncratic, occasionally challenging, but most importantly, jam-packed full of proper tunes.

While Beauty & Ruin contains some of the most vital music of Mould's solo career, it'd be great to see him properly stretched again as an artist and player. And maybe that requires an even bigger rapprochement with the past.

It sometimes feels as if Sleaford Mods retreat a little too far on The Demise of Planet X – diagnosing collapse with sharp wit but leaving little in direction or galvanising force. In a Britain that could use art to provoke unity as much as amusement, that distance feels not just like an easy route, but a missed opportunity, no matter how enjoyable the chaos remains.

He's in playful mood and the tunes certainly don't suffer as a result.

Despite the apparent lack of new ideas here, the undeniable success of this work lies in Goat's deepening and development of the musical and spiritual themes presented on in World Music.

All in all, Instrumentals 2015 is an admirable piece of work from a man who seems to take direction from few others.

Lady From Shanghai is another excellent addition to the Pere Ubu discography, the sound of a band using comparatively limited means to explore a deceptively broad spectrum of sound, confusing the boundaries between pop and the avant-garde.

Music For Drifters is another fine showcase for the prodigious talents of this Sunderland twosome.

Exploded View is the type of album that seeps into your soul. Consciously designed or not, it exposes various unpalatable truths about the way we live now and turns them into frightening, spellbinding music.

Its huge, cocaine-pricked melodies remain present and correct throughout, but the tracks themselves are among his best so far.

It’s simultaneously a gratifying and frustrating listen. A lot of the homespun charm of ‘Pretty Girl’ has been jettisoned. The synths have clearly been given an upgrade. The drums sound expensive. There are musicians here who can play, and are probably on union pay scale. But no amount of major label gloss or ill-advised interposing guitar licks can disguise Clairo’s irresistible melodic gift, and strangely haunting/haunted voice.

Ghost On Ghost might not be definitive--Beam gives off the impression that a genuine modern classic is not yet beyond him, something a tightening of focus might help him achieve--but this is big, beautiful music all the same. That he makes it sound so effortless is all the more impressive.

Hidden Fields presents a binary world of pure noise set against the briefest interludes of silence between the tracks. It's only during the quiet moments that you can comprehend just how vast this album is.

Wand are a special band, and the new emotional range suits them.

In an age of hyper-optionality these tracks are never festooned with excessive detail where a few stark gestures would do, and the results boil over with primitive playfulness.

Sticky Wickets dispels any thoughts or concerns that this is merely a novelty act and while not as instant as their debut, repeated listens definitely provide equal rewards.

Carter Tutti has never seemed crippled into one genre, and now there's an authenticity tied to a gravitas that sounds instantly advanced.

Mudflowers sees him reincarnating and embodying his city's passion for a soulful Americana that flourished half a century ago.