The Age of Immunology finds the group tightening some bolts and adding depth to their mythology, and it’s really quite a treat.

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.

Though falling short of revelatory, a few rotations of A Hero’s Death brings some good news. Outgrowing Joy Division and overblown inverted paddywhackery, it’s a largely nuanced and, most blessedly of all, believable affair.

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

A Pocket Of Wind Resistance combines powerful storytelling and songwriting to produce something special. Polwart and Murphy make Fala Flow seem unnervingly real, conjuring atmosphere through quiet incantation and simple but resonant instrumentation. They also deliver a strong political message in the best traditions of folk music, making health equality something to sing about.

The Old Fabled River is an exceptional record, a powerful example of a living folk music based on exchanging stories and remaking cultures in the process.

What you’ll know after listening to Vesper Sparrow, is an option for the album of the year.

At times a song can simultaneously be baroque and noise, harsh and beautiful, and the contradictions aren't evident because their voices are one--but there are also times when the record is triumphant, precisely because they're torn away from one another.

All [tracks] are grand, and strong-hearted.

Everything on the album is audible but nothing is settled. He has a skilled compositional hand and an ability to shape the shapeless.

LV are remarkably adroit tunesmiths, able to navigate the fine lines between minimalism and melodicism without ever descending into dry formalism or familiar clichés. Josh Idehen has a voice that is just as expressive and powerful.

It's fair to say with such as varied collection of sounds from disparate sources, µ20 doesn't make it easy on the listener. After spending two hours of being buffeted by a dizzying array of beats and sound textures, listening to the third CD, with its wilful experimentalism, was almost too much on the first listen.

The record ends brilliantly with the superb one-two of ‘Trankil’, a truly brilliant pop track, and the immensely sympathetic ‘Aminiata’. The brisk, crisp, ‘that’s your lot’ ending on each of these two tracks somehow makes listening in so much more enjoyable.

The Art of Losing has been in the can for a couple of years now, delayed by the pandemic. It’s been worth the wait: this is a special record. They don’t come along very often. Quotable, immersive, moving, imaginative, delicate, and dramatic. A stellar achievement.

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.

If their late 90s records were marked by the fallout of Britpop and the fallout of relationships, The Ballad Of Darren is marked by this existential contemplation — not quite a breakup or a crisis, but the weight of the changes through the years. It’s a statement of where Blur are now.

Like pretty much all of his previous work, C4C isn't really open for the casual listen. Music as densely layered and as assimilated as this tends to unwrap itself at different times in different situations and with varying results.

His finest work since the first two Suicide LPs.

It's not a perfect album by any means, but I don't think it wants to be. It just wants to, be. Musically it walks a proverbial tightrope and often loses balance. The beauty, however, is in the moments when it does fall. Because for every time Mazy Fly falls from the sky, there is always a safety net on standby briefly followed by the next enthusiastic trapeze flip in Chrystia Cabral's psychedelic circus of one.

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.

Ultimately, Midnight Rocker is a worthy, maybe even essential, addition to both Horace Andy and Adrian Sherwood’s massive catalogues. It’s not perfect, but there’s a strange vitality in its imperfection, and that energy, that vitality – whatever it is – is incredibly compelling.

With Archangel Hill, Collins continues to deliver on the title of that extraordinary record, Folk Roots, New Routes: finding old ways to look forward and new ways to look back.

It’s as engaging a release as you could hope for. The melodic sheets adorning the surface offer enough solace for casual listeners whilst intrigued parties will locate heart-heavy layers if they lean in just a little. As you might expect from the steady hands at the tiller, this is a cortex-hugging drone record of beauty and depth. A soundtrack worthy of living your life to.

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.

Black Metal 2 ends at an uncertain crossroads, while sonically the record is perhaps Blunt’s most easy to engage with.

This time with an added bite of something that is entirely their own. This is a remarkable album, and easily good enough to send them global.

While it’s a short EP, it doesn’t disappoint. If anything, he presents himself as a soloist with an unexpected sound for his high-pitched countertenor voice and very far from those earlier ballads we have heard from him.

The National have arguably never struck that balance [between tenderness, optimism, humour and melodrama] quite as sweetly or persuasively as they do on Trouble Will Find Me, a layered, resoundingly human work that extends their winning streak without so much as breaking a sweat.

The Practice of Love reveals the sensitive humane core that was always behind Hval’s practice of enlightened dissent. The album develops an elegant approach to solving the existential problems of love, care and intimacy from the position of otherness.

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.

At the moment, the diversity on display here feels like something to be treasured rather than wished into oblivion.

It’s an album that abounds with details but feels perfectly homogenous, and one can only wonder where Laurel Halo goes from here. It could be very interesting indeed.

Every expansion is followed by certain randomisation of energy; some may object that album's sound is overcrowded, bringing together seemingly incompatible stylistic patterns. Too many new ideas that need to be quickly processed are restlessly thrown, but never scattered, in raw fluxus.

The sound design is absolutely phenomenal, rich in detail. New components, from the clanging of chimes to the rattling or chains, enter from moment to moment. It’s every bit the album Engravings was: a vast world of sound unfolding on a battlefield which exists between the ears.

Hell on Heels is one beautiful amble.

Perhaps his most assured and confident album.

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.

MITH is an insightful record, one that gives its listener pause and feels like a valuable artefact of our time.

Dolphine’s songs are mystical, yes--but by no means are they not also tough, topical and profound.

Kate NV has probably made her most confident and colourful statement with Room for The Moon. It’s an all-encompassing record, packed with plenty of reassuring elements to those already familiar with her work, but with acres of room for the listener to disappear into.

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.

Musically, Blood Bitch plays a lot with drone, feedback and white noise, while simultaneously handing huge portions of songs over to the most melodic and annoyingly catchy work Hval has ever made.

There are clear signs of the heights he’d soon reach on A Love Supreme five months later. Observing such incremental shifts is both fascinating and valuable, and while the performances are all deeply satisfying it remains a tad disappointing that archival projects like this one tend to blot out contemporary work that proves that jazz continues to push forward in the present.

Fortunately, It Is What It Is takes the listener’s needs into consideration by counteracting giddy one-liners heightened by energetic accompaniments with introspective ruminations coupled woven into sultry arrangements. In adjusting to the shifting sonic plains, the listener is presented with a gloriously rewarding stretch of tonal stability in the record’s third act.

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.

Simple orchestral riffs and warm west coast production are thickly glooped onto a collection of songs that otherwise may have been too mellow for his rock canon, yet too nice for a stripped-down solo Bruce record.

The last time West used the name Jerome in a rhyme (MBDTF’s 'Gorgeous'), it was a reference to racially disproportionate sentencing practices in drug cases. It’s that sort of doublespeak that makes Yeezus the zenith of West’s entire career.

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

Quiet Signs, as sparse and subtle as its name suggests, shares its secrets only with those willing to give their complete and undivided attention in exchange.

As vital as the air that you breathe, you need this album in your life.

Despite the surfeit of sounds and samples in Powers’ productions, he’s made an album that can still breathe with moments of serenity amongst the freneticism, one that provides moments where the antagonistic, alienating sounds of modern life can be reworked to make something pleasing, even joyful to the ear.

Even in its most unsettling moments, such as the silent gaps that punctuate the synth notes on closer ‘Bow of Perception’, Ecstatic Computation retains a sense of expanding horizons and joyful experiments.

Elder have crafted a lush and carefully-orchestrated record, approaching from a different angle than their peers, or indeed their previous attempts.

Progression is a great thing to hear in any artist's work, and there's plenty of that to the largely excellent Burn Your Fire. Yet its louder moments at the minute seem mostly in place to provide contrast, with Olsen remaining at her most engaging when speaking to you in whispers.

Her delivery style at best gives delicious mile-a-minute tongue-twisters, enhanced by that distinctive New Yawhk-Latinx accent. The brash vitality of the way Cardi B spits is genuinely thrilling and potent.

What makes Busy Guy extraordinary is its scorched-earth intimacy. Fretwell’s voice rarely rises above a whisper; his guitar playing consists largely of skeletal fugues so minimalistic it’s as if they are barely there at all. Yet oceans of pain and lifetimes of regret are packed into an LP that hooks a cable to the listener’s soul and cranks the voltage all the way up.

Excellently crafted beats emerge throughout the album in tracks like ‘Neon Pattern Drum’, ‘Emerald Rush’--also released as a single--and most notably in the hefty ‘Everything Connected’, which Hopkins describes as a “massive techno bastard”.

Bangs & Works Vol. 2 straddles a fine line between function and dysfunction, innocence and dissonance--and not once in its 26 track run does it ever get boring.

Sleep are telling us they have been experimenting in the laboratory-studio on their rare strain of heavy music, turning the art of thundering stoner rock into a science. And with that fusion of the two cultures, this album delivers the monument to their craft they have long promised.

The ground covered on Black to the Future is immense. The visceral passages really slash deep, the moments of unbridled energy are exhilarating, and the meditative moments reach crescendos of total beauty.

The title track and the genuinely brilliant ‘MetaGoth’ Stripped to the bone and not so much sung as intoned by Josephine Wiggs, this is one of the creepiest yet compelling compositions The Breeders have ever put their name to. From there on in, the album goes through a variety of fits and starts before descending into anticlimax.

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.

In its fullness and emptiness, all at once, Limbs is an album that dares the listener not to fall for it. Keeley Forsyth is a world builder and Limbs is an outstanding record.

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 is an album totally devoid of filler and maxed out with instantly memorable hooks, melodies and riffs that will move into your head and take up residence for quite some time to come.

While I can’t help missing the volatile momentum of previous records, Listening to Pictures still animates its sonic space with the kind of detail few musicians have the vision or audacity to achieve.

A transcendental eloquence comes out in this unique artefact. What we have is a series of sketches, providing a fitting closing statement to his legacy as a series of ideas strewn together, much like his life beginning as a poet. ... Thanks For The Dance stands out as an emblem of the artist’s life work. Dancing between satire, melancholy and tenderness, his final words stand out as the mark of a worldview drawn from a life lived in the shadow of his own genius.

Negro Swan feels like a collection of personal and cultural traumatic memories, and it also feels like an embrace--a call for young queer people of colour to have hope, feel beautiful, and be filled all the way up.

Fearless and witty--an incredible album from start to finish, perfect for long days and ever longer nights.

The multiple styles and masses of guest appearances on Discombobulated could have produced a scrambled blob, but instead the community around the core band members adds clarity and strength.

For an album so grounded in electronics, it sounds remarkably organic. Perhaps it’s the lyrical intent, or the fact that Kember’s been cultivating its growth over some time, but the record’s connection to the earth is unmistakable. In making his grand statement, Pete Kember has succeeded in creating his magnum opus and an album for the ages.

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

Our Love isn't an explosion of delight so much as it is an affirmation of the moment, in many different forms.

It is sparkling and wistful, and it's quite lovely.

By far the most approachable Liars record in years. While there's a lyrical focus on looking inward and notions of personal development, inspired in part by Andrew's recent exploration of microdosing psylocybin, it's less insular and abstract than the previous record.

It feels almost too intimate for the world to hear.

It is a gorgeous, masterly and strangely addictive album.

Made Out of Sound might be one of the finest things either Corsano or Orcutt has done, which is no mean feat.

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.

The beauty of Sling is immediately apparent, but it is so much more than ‘pretty’, Clairo is letting us in to her safe space and reminding us to nurture one another. She is creating songs that throw an arm (or paw) around you and share the weight of your experiences.

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.

There’s no obvious world-building or self-contained story to give Frank the pomp and circumstance you might expect from a major breakthrough rap record in 2022, but he doesn’t need one. The subtlety and detail of his songwriting does that on its own. The world is his for the taking.

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.

The narrative and sonic stylings of these songs have the aesthetic qualities of intimate music, but Snaith’s anonymous intonations, sometimes bathed in layers of muddy distortion, hold the listener at a frustrating distance. Like the album’s artwork it advertises transparency, but delivers only more obscurity.

They show us what pop music can do.

Modern Vampires quite often touches brilliance, and does so without audibly straining for 'maturity' or pushing hard to be some po-faced Great American Album.

A beautiful resurrection for Zamrock, Zango is one of those rare records that, after living with it for a few months, still makes me feel something very profound. A triumphant return indeed.

This is a powerful, balanced, personal and at times harrowing album that is deserving of your attention. Each listen seems to add further layers of depth and seriousness. Spend time with it.

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.

The occasional soppiness of post-rock, which ultimately rendered it a dirty word in certain circles, has all but disappeared from the work of its godparents. Godspeed You! Black Emperor are now truly playing the music they were destined to play, and in its purest, weightiest possible form.

With just nine tightly constructed and sonically consistent songs, the record is a fleeting rush, but what keeps it from being slight is all the rich perspective and detail.

It's magical, from start to finish.

The result is something stranger and more off-kilter than either of its predecessors, but equally distinctive.

Hunter is a tempestuous album full of haunting, unsettling vocals; it resonates with evocative power.

Fans of the band will find a lot to applaud on Dude Incredible and it's one of their more efficient, immediate LPs.

Sarah Davachi is delving deep into the intervals between these states, to the place where emotion dwells, and is holding us down there until we can feel it roaring through our lungs. Just don’t forget to breathe.

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.

The band’s indefinite hiatus has not been in vain, as they have clearly been spending this time carefully piecing together what feels like their strongest album in years. Instant Holograms on Metal Film also feels particularly emotionally resonant.