This new collaboration is a wonderful demonstration and crystallization of the best aspects of [Burger and Voigt's] combined canons.

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

Sleaford Mods' eleventh album is a remarkable leap on from 2017's English Tapas, a record of consolidation that addressed the strange situation that the duo found themselves in--going from a niche concern more accustomed to playing alongside noise artists suddenly given column inches and selling out massive venues. This progress has come hand in hand with a keener knack for more fully developed tunes to bolster Williamson's hectoring. It is also, frequently, a hilarious record.

Previously, Brian Leeds made music that you could dance to. Now he makes music to lose yourself in.

What’s heartening about the first part of Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost is that this formula has not become tired. Rather, the band are adding to it incrementally and progressing into ever more interesting territory.

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

Herein lies Róisín Machine’s beauty at its most uncomplicated: every single one of its songs implores you to dance, and in doing so implores you also to forget the human fragility of which you are so incessantly reminded. Vicariously through Róisín Murphy – be she god, machine, person, or something floating between them – we can forget our fragile bodies, losing ourselves in a blissful utopia, even if only for an hour.

From first note to last, The Fiery Margin is a recording that exudes complete confidence.

Mantras build and collapse on themselves, choruses rise and fall, and enveloping you with a rich seam of guitar pop.

The voices are huskier, the music juicer, the innocence of yore starting to chip away as Paradise sees them explore the dark side of vice and life. They're are all the better for it.

Where Have You In My Wilderness faithfully stuck to pop structures and verse-chorus-verse dynamics, Aviary appears through-composed, as though its songs were written purely according to whatever felt like the right thing to do next, and not dictated by any of Holter’s more traditionalist habits. This doesn’t make it a difficult listen, though--this is an album steeped in beauty, a celebration of sound.

There’s plenty of intricacy in the intimacy of this record. In the end, though, The Age Of Pleasure is an easier ride. Less densely packed with ideas but it’s no bother.

Restless Idylls doesn't transcend, or greatly advance the template set out by Tropic of Cancer's past work, but it refines that template to its purest and most evocative expression to date.

The Scientists never really broke through to a wider audience. But what they did do is leave behind a body of work that was picked up by subsequent generations and cited as highly influential. There’s certainly much to enjoy here but there’s also plenty to re-affirm their cult status in the greater scheme of things.

What makes The Moths Are Real such a well, lovely listen is just how unforced this all is--not out of twee naivety, but by a brilliant sense that these songs are their own worlds, telling their own stories, with a bit of a twist.

An album that's otherwise remarkably deft at uniting the many aspects of Kevin Martin's musical output to date.

Those who had their hearts set on another batch of coy, cloudy electro-pop from the Swedish singer/songwriter might consider the song [Gunshot!] a bummer, but for the rest of us, it and the other eight tracks that comprise I Never Learn make for a stirring, pristinely rendered expression of heartache.

These very personal surges of sound swell in the ether, seeking out like-minded listeners. His “Audio Virus” – a collection of electronic hardware items that range from the esoteric to the obsolete – purrs like a living being. The hums and crackles it emits, a constant feature as one track slides into the next. Whilst that sounds cold and machine-like, the lunges of notes often reach heart-wrenching heights.

Pain: the quintessential Deaf Wish family album.

That documentary ["All Junglists: A London Somet’ing Dis"] was the first thing I thought of when listening to this compilation, because while the medium is different, that fresh underground attitude is defiantly the same on this record as it is on that film.

Although it feels they've truly thrown the kitchen sink and their full repertoire of synth syncopation at it this time, it's truly a thrilling and spine chilling ride, one that leaves your bones shaken to the core.

Mediation Of Ecstatic Energy is undoubtedly Wong's most fully realised, varied and intriguing set of compositions to date.

Their energy is utterly thrilling and secondly, Hollandaze hints at so much more and should ensure that Tzenos is not reduced to journalistic footnote of merely being a cuddly version of Big Black.

Richly textural and delicately performed, Setting exude a lingering warmth, their edges softened as if left out in the sun. It’s lethargic in all the right ways, untroubled by the need to shock or surprise its audience – and yet surprise it does.

It's Real is a beefier, buffed-up expansion of the debut's rough-hewn sound, but the added polish doesn't nerf Ex Hex's powers as much as it re-energises them.

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.

St. Vincent's real genius is the way it manages to project an aura of perfection while simultaneously showing us its guts; it suggests that while the polished surface may not be a lie, exactly, it's based on a series of elisions that we're all uncomfortably complicit in.

It’s A Beautiful Place is an amalgamation of directions, culminating in a product that is lyrically existential, sonically experimental and eerily extraterrestrial.

The result is a beautifully eerie song cycle whose pulsing analogue heart is even darker than the penumbral territories the band usually inhabit.

William Doyle’s Great Spans Of Muddy Time fuses the emotional honesty of 1960s girl groups with muscular electronica to create an atmosphere of absolute sincerity and uncertainty soaked in pop yearning. It is an album that truly sinks in.

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.

Funeral Songs is neither the first nor last gloriously raw album to be laid down in such a state.

There is no being taken on a conceptual journey, or losing yourself in these tracks. They overwhelm and punish your ears and synapses, disappearing before you get a chance to acclimatise yourself. Asymmetric guerrilla dancefloor bangers in effect.

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.

As illustrated by Kunk, the band is a breath of originality in the often-hackneyed worlds of punk and hardcore. Play this album the next time you want your dance party to devolve into a cannibalistic orgy.

It might be less daring than some of the other hankerings, but there’s no room for emotional snobbery on Plunge, no victory that’s not worth celebrating: those seized, stolen intimacies she’s grubbed around for, the flashes of desire and flushes of pleasure, are things to be savoured.

[A] challenging but beautiful album.

Chapter 3… is a record that has their trademark sense of restless grandeur and tough tunefulness.

This album marks a continued evolution in a subtly different new direction for this most idiosyncratic of American alternative bands, one of the few "allowed" to deliver this most unsettled of musics in a quasi-mainstream setting. After repeated listens, I've come to the conclusion that it and No Answer: Lower Floors represent a welcome refinement of something Wolf Eyes have been articulating since their humble beginnings way back in 2000.

By the end of MIKE’S POMPEII, the rapper has shown a range of styles, flows and cadences that perhaps doubters wouldn’t have thought he was capable of on SURF GANG productions. Sweatshirt’s UTILITY, whilst treading new production ground, still feels quintessentially him.

Mayhem is both a satisfying return to form and also an unabashed revisiting of stylistic and thematic roots, even linguistic tropes and tics.

Butler shows that there is strength in numbers and in being able to amplify the skills of fellow collaborators.

It's a work of music that seismically shifts in front of your ears. Melodies form crystalline shapes that grow, morph and solidify under a haze of generative ambience. Some of those ideas laid down on Get Lost have taken shape as an LP, designed to play through from start to finish.

If Mason’s last album Boys Outside was a window on his struggles with mental ill-health, Monkey Minds moves from micro to macro as he harnesses his strong sense of social justice, while continuing to hone the crisp electronics that so perfectly soundtrack his ghostly, exhortatory vocals.

A bleakly beautiful collection of compelling brevity, and while it exercises several demons across its ten tracks, it remains very much possessed by a singular spirit: that of an artist continuing to rise, even if he has to dig down uncommonly deep before springing past his peers.

With their fifth album, Artificial Sweeteners, Fujiya & Miyagi once again mine opposite ends of the lyrical spectrum whilst delivering their most musically satisfying collection to date.

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.

As the album comes to a close with reflective ballad 'A Long Time Ago', it becomes apparent that Stay Gold isn't much of a departure from their previous outings. It is however, more consistent and ambitious--both thematically and sonically--than The Lion's Roar, allowing First Aid Kit to gather a well-deserved period of buoyant momentum, flourishing beyond an element of pastiche.

To the wider rock world, Yellow/Green deserves to be regarded as a left of field classic, whilst to the metalheads who were perfectly content with the Baroness sound as it was, the record may seem something of a disappointment, its straightforward and melodic approach to songwriting the antithesis of the labyrinthine complexities and huge riffs of old.

As Flock Of Dimes, Wasner refuses to waste a second. Most tracks are pop hits waiting to happen in some daring universe, with verses as charming as the shimmering choruses, each a perfectly formed little jewel, Wasner's voice lush and warm.

Goat has distilled what could have so very easily become an overblown meandering jam fest into a punchy, forceful and infectious masterpiece of cosmic rock & roll – the will is palpable, nigh a trace of fat on these bleached bones.

To say this is a 'fans only' set is something of an understatement, but if you do have an interest and indeed if you can actually afford it, this is a lovingly put together and ridiculously detailed exploration of a record that has aged very well. For those whose interest is more casual the two-disc edition is well worth revisiting.

Atomic is a conceptual artwork that is overshadowed and at times overburdened by its subject matter. Yet taken in this context it holds a brutalist, otherworldly thrall all its own.

This is a record that reveals something new on each listen, a record that will secure Errors' place in the pack--part of a greater fraternity but with a formula distinctly their own.

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.

Harris deploys silence and sound artfully and masterfully throughout Ruins. And the closer you listen, the more intimate it becomes.

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

By fulfilling their dear friend's wishes, on Desertshore Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti have paid him a glorious, beautiful tribute that, like Nico's original album, celebrates the glowing eddies of sex and life and death.

It’s an album that is hard to categorise but its methodical beats, otherworldly production, intriguingly chaotic clashes of melody and hazy vocals all inexplicably mesh together, with Liv.e leaning further and further towards that vital point of breakthrough.

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.

Clocking in at over 75 minutes, The Inheritors is an exhausting, complex and disorientating listen, but one that will stay with you.

It may just be Anthrax's most consistent material since Among The Living in 1987.

Her latest creative effort, Tommy on Hyperdub Records, is the darker, more mature, older sibling to Lagata, and another firm exposition of her unique and extensive vocal ability and her creative, DIY production style.

A Wonder Working Stone is the work of a songwriter at the top of his game; inspired by tradition but equally inspired to break from it, fired by collaboration and freed to follow his muse wherever it may soar, like the ptarmigans that spread their wings through several of these songs.

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.

All the material contained within is new, and very good. The bands are in fine form, building on their former forms.

On The House, Maine is vulnerable, honest and strong--he soars on this, his best album yet.

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.

The church's natural reverb provides a chilling reverse-incubation to her trembling vibrato, and at times, her breath too itself is transformed into a fluttering instrument, frantically encompassing all angles of the space.

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.

The album unfolds at its own unhurried pace. Initially, it can feel almost vaporous, but its textural richness rewards patience; with each listen, new layers emerge, like light shifting through water at different times of day.

Highly Deadly Black Tarantula has a strange unease to it, an air of what's almost unfinished-ness. Which is not to say that it doesn't function, successfully, as a complete whole; but much like movies made with incredibly strong first and final reels, it rather loses its direction around the midway point, necessitating commitment on the part of the listener to see the experience through.

With Play What They Like Colpitts and Man Forever have crafted something truly unique: a spiritual jazz album for agnostics.

This is Shah finding her rhythm, enjoying herself doing tongue-in-cheek domestic subversion. It's the kind of album she has long wanted to make, when not urged towards a large scale social statement, like on her Mercury-nominated Holiday Destination.

Though they are very different albums, one way that Love carries on where Through Donkey Jaw left off is that it is deeply hypnotic.

Neurosis have not reinvented extreme metal on Fires Within Fires, and at this point it seems unlikely they’ll ever again record anything as gamechanging as Enemy... or 1996’s Through Silver In Blood. These albums and others give them ample credit in the bank to merely – merely! – bust out a new record every few years, tweak their various formulae, play by their own rules and timescales, and keep on delivering the goods in punishing, end-time-preacher fashion.

The central two of the six tracks are a bit of a cruise by comparison. .. Machine-fed streaks of looping refrains and rippling electronics make for a pleasing melange, no doubt, but it’s the surrounding four tracks which really vindicate the horizon-opening technocultural paradigm which apparently informed the album’s concept.

With John Wizards, Nzaramba and Withers have arrived.

This is Svenonius with just an electric guitar, a microphone, an analogue-sounding drum machine and a tape deck, creating the rawest and most stripped-back manifestation of his singular muse to date.

The production credits read like a fever dream: The Alchemist, Kenny Segal, EL-P, Conductor Williams, Preservation, Messiah Musik, Sadhugold, Ant, Shabaka Hutchings, Steel Tipped Dove, DJ Haram, Willie Green, Jeff Markey, Saint Abdullah, and Human Error Club. And yet, the sound holds together. Disorienting, yes. But deliberate. Woods is the constant: his voice measured, ghostly, sometimes smirking.

Lustmord's music takes its time, but it's hard not to get absorbed into its shadowy netherworld, even if all meaning and sense in there stay resolutely out of focus.

Lux is a surprisingly rich experience that's difficult to fault. It's not the most startling record Eno's ever made, but it probably is his most successful ambient work.

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.

Instead of trying to recapture the magic of their formative years, Hatori and Honda have written and produced a meta-comeback record about the impulses that inspire artists to reunite.

The 24-piece choir which accompanies most of the pieces here are a lightwave beam keeping the listener afloat, yet it's Coltrane's own vocals which resonate the most deeply.

Eleven great tracks out of twelves is a handsome return though, and the listener must surely delight in the fact that Harvey isn’t done with Gainsbourg just yet.

Ultra is, at first, quite hard to get your head around. There’s a lot to take in over its 50+ minutes, not so much in the With Love sense of sheer musical volume but more in the new ideas and stylistic left turns that find their home on the album. Leave it to sink in, though, and Ultra works fantastically as an album experience, with sequencing that sees the level of intensity wax and wane as emotions freeze and thaw.

Wilds feels like a homecoming for a band that was doing the 60s-influenced, boot-fair futurist thing long before it was cool. What a treat to have them back.

Tinariwen's Tassili may not have the distorted guitars of previous records, but the acoustic recordings suit the contemplative mood and makes for a powerful return to their roots, as the musicians' circumstances, like getting lost in the desert, go in circles.

She may be six albums in, but having taken the time to pause and recalibrate, Scott is proving that she still has much to say and a voice that is worth listening to.

As with all Callahan’s work, his immaculate comic timing, pathos and heart are intertwined – the strongly held centre of the maelstrom.

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.

Wyatt has sustained and continues to sustain himself with quality, idiosyncrasy, and integrity over so long a time, as these eight sides so amply demonstrate.

More richly-nuanced than Mastermind and far trippier than 4-Way Diablo, Last Patrol sees the elder statesmen of stoner rock back at the very top of their game.

The raw and at times, ferocious navigation of the album soars in its earnest delivery and marks a career-defining release for (Sandy) Alex G.

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.

The trio’s music here is still that much more dynamic and to the point, especially as Ambarchi’s ghostly riffs start waving through the groove’s valleys and mountains, evoking the intricate loops of his solo albums.

The Childhood of a Leader opens up further notions on the increasing use of mise en scene within Scott's music as well as positioning himself as a modern composer utilising cinematic techniques within narrative frameworks. It is an unexpectedly urgent addition to a master's late period canon.