In Warpaint, they've mastered the mid-tempo come-on, being to indie rock what Aaliyah was to R&B.

A mélange of harum scarum garage-psych, unabashed homage and carefully-crafted pop reprieve, it finds Black Lips at their most daring, exploratory and downright vital.

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.

With three of the nine songs clocking in at over seven minutes-long, every note is earned and necessarily. Extended instrumental breaks and outros never feel gratuitous, if anything they allow the listener to fall deeper into the song, to lose track of time.

Nothing Great About Britain, a measured yet viciously ribald meditation on the contradictions at the heart of Britishness in 2019.

While the higher purpose behind Voices is obviously beyond reproach, the surprise is just how much joy it contains.

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.

Acid Rap is by no means without its kinks--'Favourite Song' and 'NaNa' make for a definite lull to these ears--but the heady Chicago cocktail served up on the tape's other 11 songs paints a splat of vivid colour over the city's newspaper headlines.

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.

Luxury Problems plays like a logical continuation of this chapter of Stott's music--the sweet spot between fear, obstruction and the warm embrace of total sound immersion.

The Men's highly enjoyable chaos.

II tweaks the Metz formula just enough to stand as an improvement over the band's excellent 2012 self-titled debut.

Simple Songs is the most emotionally direct of O'Rourke's pop-oriented releases for Drag City, and the least likely to distance the listener with a cruel joke or winking musical allusion.

The songs not only feel like they exist in a vacuum, but that they demand the listener create one too. It’s an important and serious album because it forces you to experience it as one, it asserts itself as the only thing you can concentrate on.

There was always a worry that Gamel might be too self-consciously studious and challenging for its own arty sake, but as it transpires, it's an unnecessary and unfounded thought.

Idle No More is evidence that this band is serious (sometimes) and it's in it for the long haul.

RPG casts a powerful spell but finds magic in the power of imagination rather than the supernatural. It is a celebration of the essentially human playfulness of gaming, storytelling and songs.

Ypres is an eloquent meditation on such complacency, on valour and its misuse, as well as a memorial to the battles, and war, that was meant to end them all.

By deconstructing their identity, Saint Etienne have created a coherent sequence of remarkable songs which sound like everything else they have done and nothing else, at the same time. It is a very impressive achievement.

As well as command of the overall mood, Lipstate always demonstrates a steely command of her influences. But these mini homages don't swamp her sound--quite the reverse.

John Glacier sits firmly at the helm, shifting the mood around her with each note and nuance, yielding a quiet magnetism throughout.

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.

Revelations very much sets the benchmark by which their subsequent work will be judged.

A New Nature does retain elements of the brooding intelligent gothic pop of their earlier work but this time around, Esben And The Witch's predilection for post and progressive rock is thrust to the fore.

His third album may not perform the economic miracles of the second, but it’s a powerful addition to Stromae’s canon and a beautiful gift to the world.

Sic Alps, a taut and absorbing listen, appears to have a mission to take conventional beauty and make it something more interesting by fraying its corners and smearing it with a little dirt. There is nothing Sic Alps could have done to create a better, more delicious sweet and sour record.

Under the Sun is well crafted, interrogating the listener and experimental where it needs to be, gifting you with something to gain throughout.

Divide And Exit is a record that demands you sit up and pay attention, unable to do anything else while it's on, a ticker-tape of frustration and smart tension blocking out peripheral vision.

Haiku Salut could be a curious fit for this – certainly, anyone looking for an evocation of the honky tonk contemporary to that era of silent film will be disappointed. Instead, Haiku Salut have delivered one of their strongest works to date.

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.

While many of the songs are gloomy as ever they are not cynical or nihilistic in their view of love or other subjects. Nor are they especially sentimental.

Sandwell District still seem eager to assault the biggest speakers in the darkest rooms and they eloquently marry the primal physicality of techno’s propulsion with its forward-facing techniques. It might not have the initial groundbreaking impact of its predecessor, but End Beginnings pushes the techno continuum on, inch by inch, bleep by alien bleep, beat by rib-crushing beat.

Temples then. A bit retro--check. Noel Gallagher and Johnny Marr likes them--check. Singer has amazing hair--check. A debut album chock full of references to their sources, but elegantly reformed and futureproofed--check.

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.

Recorded on an eight-track in her flat, Colt steadily emerges as a feature-length celebration of what solitude can yield when approached with creative ablution in mind and the right amount of inspiration at one’s disposal. Woods sounds at home in her seclusion and strikes a chimeric midpoint between electronic and acoustic worlds.

Willoughby Tucker is the most complete, emotional and addictive Ethel Cain record to date.

Miles away from the poppy happy clappy smiley lovey dovey vibes of Twenty One or epic choruses of Serotonin, Radlands displays a new direction and confidence.

The six impressive soundscapes are often desolate and overwhelming, with brief flashes of hope. What grounds Disconnect is Joseph Kamaru’s spoken vocal, delivered like warnings through static.

The results are beautiful, an upside to all this desolation, a lengthy excursion among the snippets. Perhaps there could have been a couple more of these at the expense of some of the shorter, less obviously complete pieces, but as a fascinating clear-up exercise, Lamentations makes a virtue of its small sorrows.

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.

It’s a wonderfully dexterous and developed body of work that gives more of itself with each listen.

The whole experience is charmingly woah-dude in a way that never feels caricatured or insincere. Great pleasure is taken in employing the familiar apparatus and codes of psychedelia and, well, making them psychedelic again.

[Endless and Blond(e)] are great--but they require time and, realistically, a step-back from the extraordinary (and sometimes ludicrous) hype that necessitates Ocean’s new works be either masterpieces or a complete let-down.

Ultimately, this is an astonishingly consistent album, particularly given Segall's work rate.

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.

Each of the eighteen tracks gathered on Livity Sound absolutely wrecks on a big rig, ripping ragged from the speakers, turning small basement rooms into packed, humming resonance chambers and settling teeth and viscera rattling.

It turns out that Transangelic Exodus is a fitting title, then, for an artist emerging from his early career and crafting a new project that’s satisfying and unique.

This is a great album, and it's incredible to see Fernow again broadening the scope of the noise genre.

[Endless and Blond(e)] are great--but they require time and, realistically, a step-back from the extraordinary (and sometimes ludicrous) hype that necessitates Ocean’s new works be either masterpieces or a complete let-down.

Musique de France isn’t an indiscriminate smash and grab of appropriation, it’s a wonderfully organic and experimental and occasionally psychedelic record that will take you to interesting places if you’ll let it.

From Kobza’s “trad walz inflected” ‘Bunny’, released in 1971, to Ihor Tsymbrovsky’s wonderfully melodramatic chanson, ‘Beatrice’, from 1996. Along the way we get gems like The Hostilnia’s marvellously doleful rap, ‘Sick Song’, from 1992 and work by the remarkable Svitlana Okhrimenko from Sugar White Death.

This album isn’t a call-to-arms or doom merchantry, but rather a poetic statement of fact--short stories of and for the anthropocene, the product of a resignation to our inevitable demise.

‘Alreet?’ feels as raw and as singular as any record Lewis has previously made. And it might be one of his best too, which I appreciate is a bold claim.

Jones's second album with current outfit The Righteous Mind is driving, high-energy, distorted guitar music designed to shake 2019 out of its apathetic gloom and get it up and dancing, alive and ready to take on the world.

The best Hey Colossus album to date. But to fully enjoy Black And Gold's many delights, it should be understood that this is a journey with a beginning, middle and end, and one to be taken in a single sitting.

There are some astonishing moments on At Least For Now. Clementine's voice is a force to be reckoned with--throaty, powerful, and theatrical to the point of histrionic – and his piano-playing bears all the hallmarks of unorthodoxy you would expect from a successful autodidact.

Age of sees Daniel Lopatin, like the AIs of his album, escape his digital restraints and make his most human record to date.

While track-sequencing can edge towards clunky territory at times, How You Been is a colourful murmuration of percussive, glacial synths and exploratory jazz interplay. Exciting, expansive and entrancing, SML are evidence of the supergroup’s enduring power.

This experience of overcoming grave adversity and living to tell the tale exists at the thumping heart of Purple, and accordingly in the accomplished, passionate and fully mended band who has gifted it to us.

This album is an excellent opening entry into what will hopefully be a new series of releases from Kaukolampi, one which rewards returning visits to the places beyond the restrictions of both gravity and mundanity.

More harmonically rich than earlier releases where bass and kick reigned, this album places vintage organ motifs at its linguistic centre. These recurring textures make the record distinctive, not only within Moss’s discography but within contemporary dance music at large.

They've arrived at a romantic, odd, ambitious pop record that eschews musical theatricality for punchy, 40-something's take on the complexity of love from the view--and this is why it works--of one who is still, at heart, an incurable and incorrigible teenage romantic

The tracks are skeletal, repetitive and fuzzed-out to the point of abrasion; it could be an easy mistake to think they’re disjointed sketches. In truth, they cohere like a shattered mosaic of memory, pieced together into a triumphant chronicle of growth.

For the listener, its rawness can feel akin to ambulance chasing or scrolling the sidebar of shame. But in the fishbowl of fame that Allen has existed in since ‘Smile’ came out in 2006, it’s also a massive eff you to the prurient media class. .... Here it is in all its hypnotic, looking-at-a-car-crash glory: vomiting up beautiful couplets of utter emotional desolation and romantic hopelessness.

Usually such an album would never be the place to start for a newcomer to the act in question, yet so comprehensively does this explore McCombs' multiple directions, there is a case to be made that A Folk Set Apart could be a suitable primer.

The collaboration works wonders for both artists, as the textural beauty of Poliça is expanded with the added depth that s t a r g a z e bring.

State Of Run doesn’t reinvent the wheel: it touches on the arch grandeur of Varg, the trap-leaning stutter of Planet Mu labelmates Sinjin Hawke and Zora Jones, and the deconstructive spirit of 2013/14-era Goon Club Allstars. But the trio’s attention to detail shines through, and the full-length format gives them space and time to execute their rich visions.

Track-for-track the birth of a new legend? Absolutely.

Gliss Riffer is a magnifying glass held to that opening in one hand and an opium pill twirling between his index and ring fingers in the other, egging on the impending lucid dream that's been in the works for years. He's only now offering an audacious embrace.

A 2015 update of Model 500 with a dark, industrial overcoat would be as unbearable as similarly ill-considered evolutions from other artists, and in sticking to his ground Atkins resolutely retains his strengths.

Shah’s control of the narrative makes her songs sound more confidential than confessional. She exercises the same incisive observational skills that she applied to songs about social unease and toxic relationships when she turns the lens on herself, as willing to be cutting, critical and humorous when she is her own subject.

It is these three songs [MMMOOOAAAAAYAYA, Pool Hopping and Threatening Each Other re: Capitalism] that, in their hugeness, tend to overshadow the rest of the record on initial listens. Though the remaining tracks should not be missed or dismissed because of that.

Perhaps the main strength of 41 Longfield Street Late ‘80s is that these songs rarely turn out to be what you thought they might be, which is a fairly on the nose metaphor for life itself – especially viewed 35 years later through the distorted prism of the 2020s.

The engagement with dance music and half-improvised feel lends it an irresistible forward momentum, something that picks up pace throughout the album to exhilarating effect; the album's second half in particular creates a disconcerting sensation of constant acceleration, until it finally collapses into its closing throes and falls away.

Where Hubbert goes musically from here he may not even know himself, but with Breaks & Bone he's managed to pull himself from the quicksand of grief and cement his latest work amongst the top Scottish albums of 2013.

The music is cryptic, otherworldly, and uncanny. The dislocation of Smith’s voice from The Fall is jarring and thrilling at times.

C Joynes and the Furlong Bray have produced music that is finely considered and full of energy, amply repaying multiple listens.

Its monomaniacal refinement might sometimes challenge you to commit to its worldview, but it's an album that both demands and rewards deep listening.

The album Cistern is thoughtful and meticulous, agile and artful.

The really interesting stuff here is from those groups that barely scraped out an album before disappearing into obscurity or never even got to release a record at the time, many of them victims of being outside of what was still largely a London-centric scene.

It's not that the depth isn't there, it's just that the experience is multidimensional enough to bring forth a flatness; a sense of unity which discards dimensions.

The Arctic Monkeys have comprehensively slaked off their PG-13 pretensions and gone full-on X-rated.

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.

Park Jiha has composed, performed and produced an album that treats clarity with the utmost respect, in that it realises that with lucidity comes an understanding of calamity and disorder. The world she has created succeeds because of that understanding. So much music that tries to fuse the traditional with the contemporary fails because of an idolisation of its parts; Communion idolises nothing, and is all the more tangible and engaging for that.

Tundra is a techno album as contemplation, not in in the sense that it is soft or gentle (it most certainly isn't), but in the way that it allows you to plug in with your surroundings, letting the earth and sky open up around you.

This is an album significantly more than what it seems to be, at first, on the surface. To some, it will sound like just another melodic punk album with a predilection for pop--an angry retort at the grievances of being in your twenties--but it’s the kind of record that will stir and inspire you during moments of existential crisis.

The Frenchman leaves enough space for everything to live harmoniously together. Melodies and countermelodies run free, but nothing ever feels overblown or unnecessary.

Much more the clenched fist than Gish, their second effort saw an increase in intensity, ballast, grit, ambition and sheer scale.

This is the pop we need; considered, vital, comforting, spiritual.

Mind Trap is a triumph of feelings over ideas, of making sounds bigger and more mobile than the spaces (or heads) that contain them.

A musical punch-up from start to finish, Goldblade choose their targets well as one blow is delivered after another. You might want to roll up your sleeves and get stuck in.

From The Sea To The Land Beyond (whether encountered with or without the moving image) is a potent and poetic exploration of our own human mortality in contrast with the unyielding permanence of nature and the sea.

Man, It Feels Like Space Again is grandiose in the delivery, quixotic in the extreme, but, most of all, it's a helluva lot of fun to listen to.

Listening to Antigone, one can hear everything Ishibashi has achieved in these fruitful past few years coming to a head. It’s a risk-taking, ambitious album-length statement that further cements Ishibashi’s place in a rare pantheon of artists – one including O’Rourke, Scott Walker and Autechre – making some of their best work thirty-plus years into their career.

Perhaps the finest distillation to date of the various elements that comprise the group's distinctive sound.

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.

It's a work that, while being their most accessible to date, is still dense enough to reward patience and repeated listens.

In sharing her experience of doing this, James’ most exploratory album also proves to be her most open-hearted.