The record activates a deeper form of listening and sonic perspective in a way that many field recordings do, without containing any direct or concrete sonic references. This is at the heart of what makes Even The Horizon one of English’s more compelling releases as of late.

‘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.

Whether this album’s your first insight into Prison, or you’re a die-hard fan, on Downstate, the band hooks listeners in with a unique compilation of progressive stoner rock songs.

A Shaw Deal is an aural patchwork stitched together with the technical ability and confidence of an established sonic manipulator, but above all that – it’s a beautiful ode to friendship and music’s healing power.

Across 24 tracks, he meditates on the journey that has got him to where he is now, but also succeeds in looking ahead to a hopeful future, pointing to various chapters of his creative development along the way.

If you’re welcoming another wired morning, indulging in orgiastic dance floor exploits, or simply want to lose your head, Decius have got you more than covered.

Excellent. .... The single guest vocal comes on the album’s only misfire ‘Childlike Things’, which bizarrely features vocals from North West, the eleven-year old daughter of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, who contributes a rap in English and Japanese. With its sing-song chorus, brattish chanting and self-consciously zany lyrics (“Like a chocolate teapot / Melt ‘em down and burn ‘em up”) it sticks out on an otherwise sophisticated album, and is just plain annoying.

A terrific follow-up Mogwai’s No.1 smash.

It’s an album that, as much as it looks inwards lyrically, is finally just as universal as Weather Station’s climate change-themed breakthrough album Ignorance, a remarkable achievement in itself.

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

Full Moon is a distinctive and exuberant snapshot of an exceptional journey. It offers yet more proof that Moonchild Sanelly is a singular artist whose colourful aesthetic is not only discernible via her trademark blue mop of braids but in the joyous, sexy and defiant nature of her sound.

It’s not bad, sometimes it’s even very good, but it ought to feel much more significant than this.

The good news is that BMB still tear it up. These recordings hit like the gut-troubling, sub-bass fists of a sonic pugilist.

Heavily drenched in the pursuit of nostalgia, Prismatics is hypnagogic pop at its most loyally rendered, the pixelated synthscapes encapsulating a temporal exploration of an envisioned utopia that has since been lost.

You’re Only Young Once But You Can Be Stupid Forever can be regarded as a lighthearted counterbalance, yearning for both innate and planetary peace while making no concessions concerning personal and artistic perspective.

This latest release, Mosaic, is Fennesz at his most cinematically emotional. The catharsis at times risks spilling into soundtrack-type material, but Fennesz’s trademark textural warmth keeps the music immersive and involving at all times.

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.

The result is a collection that, while it lacks the retrospective finality of the song-driven True North, a meditation on the passing of time that closed Chapman’s career as a singer-songwriter, nevertheless underscores the idea of Chapman as a guitar player who didn’t need words to express himself. And that’s no mean feat on Tuttle’s part, especially as, coming to Another Tide cold, you could easily believe it was the work of younger artists pushing into new territory.

While Stein’s arrangements are frequently simple, they are never sparse. Despite the minimalist approach to the songs, the production still sounds full, allowing distant echoing sounds to emphasise what’s there rather than imply what’s missing.

Nobody Loves You More is the sound of an all-timer breaking vast new ground while holding her head high.

Ballads Of Harry Houdini is more like a spiritual sequel to the rockier and cross-genre Highway Songs from 2016. It feels deceptively slimmer with just six songs, rather than nine. In fact, its total running time is ten minutes longer. Maybe more focused, then?

If the start of Too Cold To Hold is faintly predictable, the rest of the album opens up into something rather more unexpected. The band have always weaved elements of hip-hop and jazz into their messed-up punk-funk but here they’ve refined it and pushed it forward. The sounds seem richer and more ambitious.

It is a gorgeous, masterly and strangely addictive album.

The band’s twisted takes on dub, electronica and popular music find transcendence through the contributions of guests, like vocalists Chen and Ben Eberle, live strings, horns and piano, and the nuanced production of Seth Manchester.

Natur stands out in that it is less about the conflict between the two and more about their mutual evolution. Nature and technology are not dueling forces to place against each other, but a continuum that needs to be reckoned with.

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.

Rhetoric & Terror is a multi-textural album, constantly swinging in different directions, resulting in a less immersive time than Nonpareils’ debut. The album is constantly in flux, moving between different states like Hemphill’s mind.

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.

It would take a hell of a reinvention to pull back Primal Scream from this stinking brink. Come Ahead is a record that fails, fatally, to recognise that Bobby Gillespie was always Primal Scream’s least compelling element.

With Chromakopia, Tyler, The Creator crafts an album that is as much an exploration of identity as it is a sonic masterpiece. .... Collaborators – Childish Gambino, Willow, Doechii, GloRilla, Lil Wayne, Sexyy Red, Solange, and Teezo Touchdown – each adding distinct textures and perspectives that enhance the album’s emotional complexity.

Their eleventh album proves there’s plenty of life in the old dog boys yet.

The songs on Rong Weicknes are also longer than the rapid-fire tracks of their previous two albums. Giving the songs space allows for tricks like the kaleidoscopic way instruments morph into each other. Without a frenetic pace to keep up with, singer Ma Clément also has more of a showcase for her vocals.

The haunting nature of these stripped-down demo versions is reinforced by the spectral presence of the singer, whose persona has inevitably undergone mythologisation akin to other prematurely deceased artists.

Machine is an album of military rhythms, deep sub pressure, rasping bass synths heavy enough to take chunks out of the earth, and massive, driving, low-end drones that occasionally sound like weeping hairdryers. Yet, through all of that, there are glimpses of a melodic melancholia.

One of their most rewardingly mysterious and perplexing releases in quite some time.

The spirit of ‘Pussy Power’ percolates in OneDa’s searing lyricism and rapid-fire flow all the way through Formula OneDa, underlining exactly why she represents an exciting and inspired future for the Mancunian hip-hop scene and beyond.

For all the proggy flights of fancy here, Absolute Elsewhere still resolutely retains what made the band’s unique take on death metal so fascinating in the first place. Once the novelty of hearing them bust out Rick Wakeman-esque synth flourishes amidst churning blastbeats has worn off, repeated listens reveal the band’s songwriting skills feeling more finely honed than ever, with a consistent (if entirely surreal) logic underpinning the structure of both these side-long movements.

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.

A shining, distorted, expertly constructed, open-ended record, that might be Xiu Xiu’s best.

While it’s so clearly a record about loss, it’s not one that reverberates with grief. In fact there’s a joy in the bold, restless exploration – messing with the machines until something human came out. And there’s also a joy in treasuring Parker’s memory.

Thematic and tonal dexterity accounted for, The New Sound is undeniably an entertaining body of work which highlights Greep’s strengths as a singular songwriter and performer. However, there are instances (the bizarre final minute of ‘Walk Up’) where Greep throws too many ideas at one song, resulting in misaligned structures.

Looser and more personal, fragile but still pissed off, City Lights – next to the band’s self-titled debut – portrays the classic tale of a creative harmony that blooms over time, no longer tempered by the tentativeness that comes with getting to know one another.

This feels, in many ways, more like a compilation than a coherent album: a selection of tracks created in tribute to the late artist, rather than a cogent piece of art crafted by her exacting hand. It isn’t so much that this tries and fails to replicate what SOPHIE did best – or, more accurately, what only SOPHIE did – but more that it steers too far away from that, likely (and with good reason) to avoid criticism on that front.

The whole record feels hauled from a dream space where you’re laid on your back letting the sky sink down to you. It’s ‘Shadow of a Doubt’ the album.

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.

As a whole, Viewfinder is Eisenberg’s most ambitious statement yet, and a testament to their range as an artist.

Cascade is a unified and more straightforward album from Floating Points, made for those looking for dancefloor elation.

Migratory is a beautiful listening experience that should hopefully bring some succour to you, wherever you might be.

Rack is what fans have waited a long time for. .... It’s partly completing unfinished business, returning to the high-water mark of those Touch and Go days. And it’s partly because, together, they make an unholy racket that makes them feel good.

Wild God is exactly what you’d expect a Bad Seeds record made by church-going Nick Cave at the age of 66 to sound like – vocally, that wobble and rasp now is what you’re going to get from decades spent smoking snouts and everything else besides. Musically, it is a slow and elegantly-arranged record, which also seems fitting for where Cave is in life.

WOOF charms mainly by the dint of its barefaced cheek: a record like this has been long overdue, especially since the pandemic.

American Standard is, paradoxically, perhaps the band’s most straight-up listenable record while also their hardest to process thematically. .... It focuses in large part on a life lived with bulimia nervosa. Like the band’s four previous albums and sundry collaborations, these experiences are examined under a harsh, bright, unforgiving light in a manner that’s deeply unflattering but also cuttingly incisive.

Thirty years later, Seefeel still know how to push our buttons.

Despite the inevitable ending, Amelia is an unexpectedly soothing record. This is largely down to Anderson having a calm, meditative quality to her voice that holds steady whether the arrangement is minimalist or intense. But much of the relaxing quality of the album is also related to Anderson’s ability to look at a figure frequently only cast in tragedy and mystery as a whole person.

A project with little boundaries, 3+5 stands on its own two feet as a concoction of hyperactive releases weaving in disco, electronica, cyberpunk, metal and more.

A Firmer Hand is such a thrilling listen because it eschews the platitudes of empowerment for something far more gritty, tough, self-critical – yet also unafraid to dish it out.

Ndola emphasises the need to acknowledge and learn origin stories to gain a deeper understanding of how music works both locally and globally in the present. Far from just another spectacularly re-playable adventure from Kampire, this is the most convincing evidence to date that she’s an excellent musicologist and historian, not just an exceptional DJ.

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

Musically, >>>> is as strong throughout as the vocals are characteristically for the birds. .... >>>> arrives out of nowhere and it’s a fine addition to the canon, made all the more amenable by the cleverly engineered surprise of it all.

Cellophane Memories is harder to get a grip on. Chrystabell’s vocals, previously the unambiguous focus of every song, are here layered, cut-up, and reversed, often to the point where they become indecipherable. That’s in part due to the nature of its creation.

Its story expands on the journey and transitional creative period their last release embarked on, in a way that both compliments their past while not being afraid to introduce a slightly weirder path.

Shackleton’s deep bass rumble and Six Organs’ ritual folk both echo through Jinxed By Being where together they conjure something strange and absorbing.

The greatest achievement across Charm remains Cottrill’s execution of another large-scale reimagining of her desired sound.

The music rewards multiple listens, with different emotional subtleties emerging in each one.

An album that takes us through the gamut of human experience. As I say, Um never feels like the tentative steps of a debutante.

It’s all so assured, yet Fratti never returns to the same thought for long. It’s impressive for a musician who’s comfortable with her voice and instrument.

It’s so bloody infectiously JOYOUS that I can’t help but get swept along by the dazzling melodic hooks, rampaging beats, thirty-year throwbacks, and glitched out breathy vox.

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.

Dense snapshot lyrics put us in their head state, somewhere between reflection and rumination. As always with grief, there aren’t easy answers. But that act of picking at the cadaver leads to Iceboy Violet’s most focused and affecting set of songs, one that honours the humanity of its subject through bare writing.

The album is a gorgeous stew of musical openness and stylistic shape-shifting, without once abandoning the heritage that has birthed it.

Brat is a great, great record. There isn’t a duff jam on here. In the end, what you get at this all-nighter is the glorious, swaggering gonzo nihilism of Charli XCX, versus the lovelorn, self-examining humanity of Charlotte Aitchison, and the winner is us. I hope the cost isn’t too high.

These are deep, emotional, sometimes bruising songs, though the insinuation of total darkness belies the exquisiteness of its spiritually rigorous forty-eight minutes.

There Is A Garden is a highly accomplished album which captures Beings’ live playing so well it sounds as though they’re recording it right now, inside your head.

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.

Darning Woman is quaint and pleasingly unusual in its execution, with songs like ‘Sounds Of A Giddy Woman’ and ‘Women’s Role In The War’ seemingly plucked straight from the 1940s thanks to Coope’s uncanny antenna to the spirit realm.

I don’t think anyone in modern mainstream music — certainly nobody on the same scale of global fame — analyses and unpicks the breadth of their trauma, in so piercing and revealing a way as Billie Eilish does here. .... I’ve found Hit Me Hard And Soft to be a focused, self-contained, sometimes stunning piece of work. If there’s a flaw, to mix metaphors, it may be that having grown in ambition and sanded down some rough edges, the music is easier to swallow, which risks one missing some of the richness (and edginess) of flavour.

A couple of tracks have endings so abrupt they feel artificial. They definitely have me wishing for longer codas and wig-outs. Does she ever let it go on longer? Is this instinct, or discipline? A plan, or just how songs came out? But crucially, where Limbs felt like someone still developing their sense of direction, The Hollow sounds like someone nearing absolute mastery.

Time is Glass is both a pretty great Six Organs of Admittance album and a pretty great album full stop. Though its more committed embrace of British folk music is a double-edged sword – risking a smattering of beautiful but forgettable instrumental parts – the overall effect is mesmerizing, an album that allows its composer’s voice to shine through in new and often more elaborate ways.

Their fifteenth album Nonetheless doesn’t measure up to the friskier mid-’10 releases Electric and Super – the melodies are often wan and Neil Tennant’s delivery is uncharacteristically stilted – but the Boys are old friends. They amuse and move us. Their foibles are familiar.

There’s just enough time to get lost in thought before you’re jolted back to the beginning again. Only ‘Long Assemblage’ has any ambitions to break out from the sketches, a five-minute exposition that dares to create anything like a narrative arc, carried along by some intrepid hi-hats. Otherwise it’s soft and languorous and thoughtful, and occasionally a little bit sinister.

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.

This makes for what might be the most polished album in the Neubauten canon, though one band’s polish is another’s poison. There are still interjections of metal perc here (played by N U Unruh) or electric drill (played by Rudolph Moser) there, and if it’s a less dangerous record than some of its predecessors, that’s mainly in the health and safety sense.

Using mournful drones, haunting vocal arrangements and the judicious inclusion of foley-type sound effects, Cotton communicates not simply the details of the story but the emotional journey of its characters.

Here, the trio integrate skeletal post-rock with soul and jazz, deconstructed by a presiding impulse to blur lines between terms or genres, allowing it all to collapse and collide. It’s harmony clashing with disharmony, the musicality of concrete sound.

While this particular take lacks the almost chaotic energy and sense of transcendence of the Coltrane/Ali version, it still overflows with riotous lyricism. The additional instruments expand the textural and rhythmical dimensions of the piece, before topping them with a rumbling drum solo. A fitting end for an equally inspirited, crucial live recording.

Jlin has always reached across musical genres to create her music, and with Akoma, she reminds us again that genre is a malleable idea meant to be redefined and reshaped.

Its [Daydream Repeat’s] arrival as fourth track brings a welcome levity to proceedings and you sort of wish there was more of it. Nevertheless, if Three is predictable in its lack of surprises, in Hebden’s case, that can only mean what’s on offer is sturdy and assured.

The Great Bailout is a hauntingly edifying experience born out of intergenerational trauma, political rage and suffering. Echoey vocals and experimental composition hold this album up as a house of mirrors – a forceful confrontation with an ugly past with no way out. Its counterpoint is a feeling of strength.

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

An antidote to the corporate pop that forces us to be joyful, Rooting For Love offers a genuine alternative without being militant or hideously self aware.

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

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.

The power of these long form works is the room afforded to imprint your own interpretations, feelings, and notions upon them like Rorschach tests or perceiving shapes in clouds. Will these drones imprint the same emotions and thoughts a thousand years from now? Only time will tell.

An oscillation between control and disorientation continues throughout (the album’s title refers to a numerical vector for oscillation in physics and engineering). Hewing closer to the former is when Phasor is at its strongest, exploring the world of a character seeking connection but far from reach.

What Do We Now is a record of beautifully put-together songs played on an acoustic guitar then beefed up by a band (mostly Mascis himself on overdubs, plus a little piano from The B52s’ Ken Mauri and some slide guitar played by Toronto musician Matthew “Doc” Dunn).

Upbeat, curious, and inquisitive, Cloudward makes for a great city walking album. It strikes the perfect balance between being jazz that’s not too impenetrable, while also being full of interesting surprises (primarily in terms of the language of Halvorson’s own playing).

Her distinct 2018 style isn’t lost at all. The dreamy synths, the soft vocal harmonies and the unhurried compositions are still there in several tracks on this record. Thanks to that, Orquideas is the perfect tracklist to introduce any newcomers into a more niche latin sound.

Bertucci might not have the reach of Taylor Swift but, in creating such affecting work, she’s generating a legacy that will hopefully last for as long as there are still humans pacing these receding coast lines.