Life on the whole feels a little more erratic than usual for many of us and in under 45 minutes, Wu-Lu manages to skilfully capture this.

Her debut album The Spoils felt like a spell thrown into a mirror of static, and more than a decade later, her newest album trembles with a similar sense of rupturing enchantment.

Proof serves as a nostalgia trip for long-time fans of the septet and a summary introduction for the curious. With thirty old songs, three completely new tracks, and eleven new versions of well-loved classics, this album marks a satisfying closure to their first nine years as a group.

Despite the high quality of the arrangements, the orchestration and the recording as a whole, it is a bit too much at once. A case of less would have been more.

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

What you will find is an artist keen on experimenting with mood and form. Much of the music probably makes greater sense alongside the dance project, but as a standalone piece of work it offers welcome insight into another side of Hadreas’ artistic temperament.

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

Although the stylistic variations across the two LPs make it seem as though there is more music here than could reasonably be expected to be contained within eleven tracks, much of it is highly accessible, addictive even.

The resulting music is stunning, perhaps a little more difficult to get a handle on than Amaryllis, but offering an invigorating glimpse into new territory for Halvorson. Though more abstract than its companion volume, Belladonna’s instrumentation tugs at the heartstrings aplenty.

A wonderful balance of melody and ferocity, their tunes tap into a wide-eyed joy at the heart of their rage. Serrated guitar noise and complex vocal parts mix with an adrenaline-rush rhythm section in concentrated blasts. It goes straight to your head.

The dark alchemy of Waterslide – named after one of the art-pieces Margolin painted during lockdown – ultimately flows from the manner in which it slithers under the skin even as it engages with that part of your monkey brain that enjoys a zinging pop song. ... As with much else here, the moment is beautiful and ugly and extraordinary.

Ghosted is a record which depends on its cumulative effect. And in doing so, it reveals there’s the potential to find endless movement in even the most rigid structures.

Air feels like a swan song for a gorgeous world in peril.

It opens with a piano motif that could’ve come straight from Chris Martin’s candle-scented fingers. The matching vocals are so annoyingly whispered, they practically qualify as ASMR. Halfway through, the song changes tack and starts courting the modern market for anxiety pop. ... More specifically, it makes you think, “Does this sound like a needy Mercury Rev, a ham-fisted Grandaddy, or Wings without the easy-going self-awareness?

All the pieces constitute a splendid array of transnational collaboration, a brilliant collage of ideas.

When It Comes is a very balanced record that shows the artist standing on solid ground, in comfort with herself, and ready for a further creative take-off. A soothing and pleasant listen.

One of the purest, most ferocious, most generous albums I’ve heard. A simple offering, and an outright masterpiece of emptiness and full-to-bursting-ness at the same time.

This album is too much of a piece to be picking out favourites, yet it is also one whose subtleties really reveal themselves on subsequent listens. Go on, dive in. Soak up the heat, discover what’s hidden underneath the overgrown foliage. You know you want to.

Characteristically, she doesn’t offer up any concrete solutions on Everything Perfect is Already Here. Instead, by listening to her music, and how she weighs every element with equal care, we’re able to stop and begin to find gratitude for the moments we might have once ignored, however fleeting they may be.

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.

Funny, weird, irreverent, a bit messy in places, Wet Leg’s debut feels like a rollicking night out at your local indie disco compacted into thirty-six brisk and breezy minutes. Across a dozen by turns funny and fraught tracks, the highs and lows of twenty-something life are captured with zinging joie de vivre.

An important component to the Paraorchestra’s practice is melding analogue, digital, and assistive instruments. The results, as heard across these eight ambitious compositions, are completely spellbinding. ...

Despite this slightly bathetic penultimate track, however, Whatever The Weather is an excellent, and at times thrilling, exposition of a particular side of James’ music-making, a strange and alien concoction that reels you into its jellied depths.

There’s no clever foreshadowing here, and the real-time emotions make the death of the relationship so much more powerful. Both she and we got something terrific out of it.

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

The approach behind Two Ribbons is omnivorous, forming a vibrant kaleidoscope that fluidly twists between genres. ... Despite its more gentle touch, the album’s spirit remains restless, transmogrifying.

It is certainly a dizzyingly contagious collection of songs that benefit from main man Dan Bejar’s scattergun technique of song selection. Not for him, the smooth transition from song to song, building neatly to a gentle climax. It is in his blood to unhinge the casual listener and provide a shifting backdrop for his lively lyricism.

With less decay and bleed coming from the guitars, Sonancy benefits from a greater degree of separation in its instrumentation. Consequently, every track gets to breath. There’s little stifling claustrophobia at play here and much like the psychedelic experience, the music reaches and stretches out for a greater truth and space.

What we're witnessing here isn’t radical reinvention (which is hugely overrated anyhow), but the continued refinement and mastery of a specific milieu, and the judicious introduction of new elements and a new collaborator in Arve Henriksen.

The highs here hedonistically bounce around big beats, and the ease in which Rosalía can rap coolly about her status and influence is just as easy as you get wrapped up in it. ... Sadly, Rosalía does not find a way to organise her many ideas well. The tracklist’s brisk changes in energy and awkward hard endings deny any chance of momentum-building.

Although occasionally straying a bit too close to generic Afro-rock, the group still manage to keep it all on the right side of the classic sungura sound before mixing it up a bit on the final track.

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.

[Jenny Hval's] most straightforward record to the date, full of colourful and warm sounds – as well as one of her finest pop tunes.

A good album, but one better suited to a former time.

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.

The songs have all benefitted from these unexpected levels of time and space to add additional material and occasional re-writing. Pulling from the twin pressures of studio time and commercial schedule combined to give the songs a sense of gentle completeness.

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.

Pretty much the whole way through, without pausing for breath, Pray For Me I Don’t Fit In sounds like a carnival band decided to make a covers album of 90s industrial rock classics. I don’t reckon this is an influence they’re especially punting for. However, happily or not, it’s where they land. This is a thrilling mosh, though it can get annoying.

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.

There is a presence conjured up by Trupa Trupa’s music. And it seems to have made itself more manifest on B Flat A.

The intensity is stunning and continued across the remaining nine cuts, but shaped into divergent designs.

It conjures up a wistfulness for times you don't even necessarily want to revisit. Beneath all the complex layering of instruments, the whirlwind of sounds and styles, it’s these simple and powerful feelings that cut through.

The overall mood then is distinctly chill and pleasingly psychedelic. There’s enough space echo going on here to tranquillise a horse. Like cLOUDDEAD or Donuts, Few Good Things is one of the great bedroom hip hop records.

Yeule sits in a coterie of future thinkers making eclectic pop music, and since the scene has become a cultural firecracker in the last few years, many artists are seeing praise for work that rests on its recent success. Glitch Princess moves the goalposts once again.

If you’re new to her, this is an ideal introduction to Hausswolff’s dense but sinuous music. But for true believers, it’s a blessed sacrament for the overwhelming of the ordinary world.

In Free Fall often feels like floating, but it never really makes the crash-landing you’d expect from gravity’s pull. Rather, it stays in the atmosphere, lingering on the feeling of uncertainty of a jump, right before your feet touch the ground.

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.

With Archive Material, Silverbacks bring so much fun, personality, and excellent musicianship across their songs. It’s a record that, once again, confirms a bright future ahead.

CAPRISONGS is light on its feet and more accessible than her tricksier electronic work but, whether she's delivering dancehall, hip-house, afrobeat or drill, almost all of these are songs which could only have twigs' name on them – take the glitchy, snatched vocals on 'ride the dragon' or the elegiac harp at the end of 'lightbeamers', mixed among the sub-bass and the hi-hats. CAPRISONGS is a testament to twigs' voice.

There’s so much passion under the surface that Blumberg presents that some form of purging is not only needed, it’s inevitable.

Shout Out! To Freedom.... is a joy to listen to, packed as it is with warm tones, a boat-load of guest-stars, and an eclectic sound which dips between dub, rap, and house.

It’s a beautiful and inspiring suite of music, by turns both lyrical and aggressive, evocative of the elements in their many different forms. ... Great artistry which is significantly more than the sum of its parts.

Each track is a varying assemblage of satisfying discordance. The layering of sounds one atop the other creates a latter-day Latourian compost heap of experience. ... The quiet confidence of Jenkins’ brevity and his refreshing lightness of touch makes for a sharp, welcome intervention that balances the broad and gestural with close attention to the fine print.

Every moment on the album feels open, inviting every spontaneous sound that enters the fold. Much of the album occupies an unsettled, unpredictable trajectory that’s coloured by a sense of poignancy.

Moor Mother’s voice is an essential anchor on Open the Gates, but the album is more exciting taken as a group work than just the next in a long line of collaborative efforts.

What is impressive about absent origin is that the sprawling album does have a focus. There are repeated themes — feminist and internationalist snippets as well as musical motifs. And the albums winds down in a logical way as the soothing string arrangements and bird song of ‘an infinite thrum (archipelago)’ give way to the piano and more operatic singing of album closer ‘the abandoned colony collapsed my world.’

Dilloway, Gordon, and Nace stick in a precarious balancing act, a taut zone between form and formlessness. Like Mac Low, it doesn’t seem about recklessly pulling something asunder, but poking at the glue that holds the parts together. Delving into errs and stumbles and finding the poignancy that resides within.

All in all, though, a sort of affectlessness emerges here as one songs blend all too smoothly since, not unlike an automated playlist, the whole becomes less than the sum of its parts.

There are nods throughout to progressive soul superstars like Isaac Hayes, and the slide guitar outro on ‘Never Know’ suggests George is in fact Sam’s favourite Beatle – though the album always strikes the right balance between vintage and cutting edge, never unduly nostalgic or pastiche-y, with sax breaks, searing synth solos and simulated Stax horns that never feel indulgent or showy.

The group has made their name by blurring the lines between genres, letting multiple ideas meld into one airy texture, and this album follows suit. But it’s in the spurts of tension, the swelling melancholy, the subtle melodies, that Monument feels its most compelling.

Shade reviews different ways Grouper has approached her work over the years, but is also a unique look at the style that has emerged as a result, even if some of the stops along the way are less polished. If Grouper is normally minimalist in her recordings and performances, Shade is like having Harris perform in your living room: it isn’t always flawless, but it is absolutely special.

This is a gauzy and sometimes deceptively accessible album about falling all the way to the bottom and wondering if there’s any way back.

Water often reminds me of Soused, the excellent Sunn O))) and Scott Walker collaboration. They are both albums where there seems to be so much unavoidable emotional distress on first listen but eventually it can sound exultant. The initial atonality is replaced by the surrender to a different way of treating harmony.

It takes a couple of plays for the songs to individually stand out. Simon le Bon’s still remarkably youthful voice remains the most recognisable element but John Taylor’s bass and Nick Rhodes’s ear for keyboard shade come into their own, while Roger Taylor retains his steady presence on drums.

Lily We Need to Talk Now is an unexpected piece of artwork that manages to reflect the liberating now of boundaryless music. With influences from decades of genres and artists – from 70s to 90s to 00s and from The Sugarcubes to Pixies to beabadoobee – this album pieces together the excitement of discovering fresh music, making for a rollercoaster of a listening session.

This is a brave album about how to move on from grief. It’s challenging but totally compelling.

Hushed and Grim is not only Mastodon’s longest, but also their most personal album to date. An impressive and brutal addition to the canon, even if making it to the other side can sometimes feel like a more unassailable task than traversing Blood Mountain itself.

It’s simultaneously unnerving and feel-good, witty and disconsolate. And though recorded two years ago, somehow it captures the essence of what it is to be a conscious entity negotiating the world in 2021.

Actually, You Can might tumble headfirst into doomsday, but Deerhoof’s day of reckoning sounds just as botanical and prismatic and baroque as they proclaim.

Though the album very occasionally loses its way, getting mired in space-age jazz stylings, it is undoubtedly a superb album that greatly expands on the classic Vanishing Twin sound and mixes it with a sense of experimentation that only occasionally fumbles.

This sprawling double LP’s sheer intensity doesn’t feel intended to alienate the listener, so much as accompany them in processing the mind frying enormity of everything.

Taylor is also creating epic pop from this mess, and the soundworld she has built with her producer, Johan Kalberg, is her lyrical support system. ... The uneasy stuff is louder this time around – beefier, darker – but Taylor has twisted it to become a solid component of her strength.

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.

Much like her previous work, the imperfections, leftfield leanings, and laidback nuances of the lo-fi aesthetic on Colourgrade demonstrate that modern love songs can hit places you never thought they had the integrity to ever reach.

As these final notes trail off, Leaving None But Small Birds instills a trembling sigh, which resonates long after the last notes die.

It joins the annals of desolate and broken works, like Skeleton Tree and Purple Mountains. It’s also an album whose rewards have to be worked for, and that makes it a challenging listen.

What Saint Etienne articulate across I’ve Been Trying To Tell You is that thirty-one years into their career, their propensity to completely envelop their audience is as palpable as ever. Without hesitation, their latest offering is amongst their finest work. One that will certainly sound and feel as resonant and elevating over the next three decades and beyond.

Change is musically daring but familiar – the austere yet affective electronic backdrops elicit Broadcast in their prime, or High Scores-era Boards of Canada.

They leave a lot of room for the listener to complete the work. A choose your own adventure where we stay safely this side of the page, sipping our coffee. ... Your mileage may vary but for me the second half of the album contains the better music.

Every track on this album has its moment in time, its place in life and its meaning in itself.

Moot!’s frill-free tautness makes it anathema for casual listening, while repaying your commanded attention not with the spectacular structures of build-up, breakdown, or resolution, but with a sustained, flattening tension which would be dissatisfying were it not so completely gripping.

While Queendom isn't the most impactful musical project of the year, it is definitely enjoyable - a light song sequence that follows the classical traits of the 90s and 00s western pop, when celebrating yourself and talking about mellow love through R&B-pop compositions (like 'Hello, Sunset') were part of the playbook. And it is full of simple, catchy and relatable lyrics with well-thought-out hooks.

It's menacing, calming, earthy and completely otherworldly. And an appropriately unnerving conclusion to a project that, for all its bruises and emotional scarring, find a way to be flawless. And which confirms Lorde as continuing to inhabit a space-time continuum entirely of her own devising.

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.

While perhaps not as original or unpredictable as their previous monoliths, Infinite Granite is undoubtedly another epic, engrossing and engulfing piece.

This album sneaks up on you. It swiftly moves from easy-listening to music to obsess over. If you listen to it through cheap earphones on a crowded train, the intricacy of the production behind this album could be missed. It’s only when you invest attention, time (and good speakers) that you truly begin to revel in its wonders. To be able to relate with the messiness of Gartland’s emotional journey is to feel at one with a talented artist.

Still Slipping Vol. 1 bounces effortlessly from one style to another, from the intricate 2-step of 'swag' to the melancholic house of 'better'. There's a nod to '80s post-punk on 'playground', and gloriously throaty verses from James Messiah and Goya Gumbani on 'swag' and 'playground' respectively. Rather than a bold new direction, the mixtape feels like a peek behind the curtain, turning the dancefloor monolith into somebody we can all relate to, with Mum calling up to be sweet about something she doesn't quite understand.

For longstanding Mega Bog fans, Life, and Another immediately stands out as one of Birgy’s finest records from start to finish. There’s a maturation to the stylistic choices and general trajectory of the instrumentation.

The majority of Sinner Get Ready unfolds in beautiful, regal form that belies the sheer horror of the words. ... Hayter saves the most accessible moments for last, almost like a reward for those who have trekked through the excruciating stories that have preceded.

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.

Happier Than Ever is a record of many layers and nuances. It is primarily a deep dive into the dark side of overnight celebrity and the internet’s industrial-scale objectification of young stars. But the project is also is a study in loneliness and a baroque, at times almost gothic, picking apart of adolescent melancholia. It’s Lindsay Anderson directing an episode of HBO’s Euphoria. Or Edward Gorey illustrating Judy Blume.

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.

Some of their most accelerating work across their career path thus far. ‘Forest of Your Problems (Outro)’ offers a friendly, until next time. A great third studio album.

To my ears, the songs here still feel like detailed, unfolding odysseys rather than studio happenstance but, no matter their method, the results catch lightening in a bottle, again.

Mirror II sounds so much more sophisticated, self-assured and, dare I say, grown up.

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.

This album is a demonstration of how BigHit Music’s in-house producers and TXT members' composing skills blend smoothly to experiment with sound in clever but relatable narratives. ... The Chaos Chapter: Freeze is a surreal album in which a mix of sounds, music genres, and metaphorical lyrics seem out of shape – until you step to the right distance to appreciate the whole painting.

The Get Up Sequences Part One has its moments of unrestrained incandescence, it is true. However, a tremendous melancholy comes gusting through too. ... And it confirms that, for those who wish to splice up their life, The Go! Team are still masters of cut ‘n paste heartache.