Voivod have a hardcore following and for most, this much anticipated album will be received with adoration. For the rest of us, it's to be hoped that with relatively new bandmate in Mongrain, this is a transient moment before they head off to fight new battles.

Far more than a collection of club tracks, it's an elegant, fully realised narrative.

Nobody could question the fact that these guys mean it with every fibre of their being, and Meir is music to make Norway proud; a new majestic fanfare to welcome hog-riding warriors into Valhalla.

This is some of the raddest music you’re likely to hear this year. Rad in its overall excellentness and radical as to its forward-thinking nature, sounding so even today, though recorded at the height of Ceausescu’s suppression and censorship.

This kaleidoscopic mix emphasises the Black Jazz catalogue's consistently searching brand of music, and both complements and abridges one of jazz's most undersung and thrilling musical footnotes.


With this album, Ministry Of Wolves have done both Anne Sexton and the Brothers Grimm proud; bringing their own gothic legacy to bear, and returning their work to the dark forests where they belong.

Infinity Machines is a painful modern masterpiece, and it's urging us to listen to the voices in our heads.

It's the great triumph of this collection, one that goes beyond whether it hangs together as a body of work. In bringing together artists from around the world Shirley Inspired should help to ensure that these tales are not forgotten.

Like Tyler and Brooks, Sheppard unveils his pleasure in what he sees around us gradually, his final destination ultimately unimportant so long as the quest is enriching. This is a trip that comes seriously recommended.

Heather Leigh has emerged from centuries of tradition and the improv world she is most closely associated with, to deliver a work of art that exists in a world all of its own.

Ghost Stations is designed to arouse thoughts of “abandonment, empty spaces and dereliction”. But that denies the album’s soothing, ultimately positive nature. It may offer a melancholy tour of desolate scenes, but they’re lent the nocturnal beauty of ancient structures bathed in subdued lighting, any sense of threat exchanged for a reassuring sense of security.

There is no doubt that Become Zero is a heavy record in every sense, an obliteration of the senses to leave one wrung out and euphoric, offering both epiphanies from Heaven and elegies from Hell.

Jim Jones And The Righteous Mind play it straight and with a total conviction from a lineage that includes The Bad Seeds, Tom Waits, The Stooges and all the way back to those primal urges that fuelled that first generation of rock & rollers as much as they did the seekers of hidden knowledge.

What makes Jane Weaver and Modern Kosmology such a joy is that it comes as sharp and welcome relief to so many of the serious and po-faced purveyors of cynically cosmic vibes. This is music that simultaneously celebrates and explores, that takes pop as its foundation and then builds a multi-layered space on it that welcomes one and all.

Belief is an album for repeated listening, offering consolation, delight and reward in generous portions.

Don’t Look Away is a supremely confident album from a songwriter who has found his place and knows his music. It completes a trilogy which is essential listening for anyone who wants to hear why the psychedelic lineage of the past 50 years is fresh and alive.

Deaths is particularly, brazenly haphazard: it was written and recorded briskly, around full-time jobs, and the results are thrillingly erratic without ever feeling rushed.

Polwart’s inventiveness is unfettered on Laws Of Motion, but the result is not only musically and instrumentally rich, but uncommonly focused. Music for our times.

Ideal Woman does one thing and it does it well; throbbing, furious guitars and unpretentious, fierce lyrics.

It is the kind of album you can listen to 1000 times, and on every single play a new intricacy will be revealed. The mark of genius is that despite this it never feels overburdened or complex. It is, put simply, an extremely ace pop record.

It’s not always effective – there are moments of meandering, repetition and filler, points at which the band seem to reach their textural limits, and the occasional re-hashing of an idea they’ve already explored – but what’s most striking about Guadalupe Plata is that even these missteps gel perfectly with the ritualistic atmosphere they’ve whipped up. This is a brisk record, but one that leaves a marvellously macabre impression.

Both a graceful tribute and a testament to these musicians’ questing vision.

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

An admirable and invigorating work, Scramblers casts its eyes to the future of machine music and does not flinch in its steely gaze.

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

The album manages to be wholly fulfilling. Each track takes on its own character, sometimes wispy and laid black, channelling the unbounded soulfulness of Erykah Badu’s New Amerykah albums like on She’s My Brand New Crush. At other times they’re pointed and deliberate, such as ‘Cut To The Chase’, which does away with sung lyrics entirely for statements spoken over tribalistic percussion and futuristic electronic harmonies.

As the title states, the tones and timbres of the album are blue. But it’s not the crushing, overwhelming darkness that you might expect. By the time you reach the final track, the sombre ‘End In Blue’, in which all beats have been stripped away to leave only Chen’s voice echoing against a background of drones, you get the sense that a hard and relentless journey is almost over and that just ahead, at the end of a tunnel that has sometimes felt like it would never end, there’s a glimmer of light.

In Outlaw R&B, Night Beats staple their genre-binding sound across eleven great tunes.

The result is a suite of textured deep space drones haunted by existential anxieties.

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

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.

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.

It presents a suitably enchanting (and at just thirty-three minutes, bracingly concise) expansion of the musical paths that Weaver has followed over the last twelve years, ever since The Fallen By Watch Bird reinvented her as a sonic explorer as well as a folk singer.

Once again, the results are even richer and more rewarding than on their last outing. There are subtle evolutions and tweaks to their tried-and-true formula, sure, but it’s hard to say what makes one Acid Arab record better than the one before it (and, to be sure, this one is their best so far.)

Crash Recoil is as taut and sinewy as anything he’s done, yet there’s a certain looseness here too, a contemporary, accessible feel that suggests that by trying new things to break out of a creative rut, Surgeon is once again pushing the genre forward.

All in all, Potter Payper lives up to the title of his debut album, officially putting the real rappers back in style.

Creep Show’s second album Yawning Abyss reaches further into your soul, and once there, it really gets to work, rummaging furtively and stealthily metastasising. The more spins, the more you submit to its charms.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The trio’s real triumph is found by looking at the bigger picture, discerning the elegant way in which they connect the ends of these disparate threads, shaping a close-knit, immensely enjoyable whole.

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.

Heydarian’s approach in his second album is quite respectable. He makes no bold statements; and avoids falling into the trap of pseudo mysticism and over technicality. His music is subtle, mature, humble, and simple, yet worth exploring.

Even the more overtly psych-rock tracks spill into new territory or shake you out of your reverie. ‘Counterbalance’ surrenders to punk fuzz. Three and a half minutes into the mesmeric drip of ‘How Could You Run’, Rishi Dhir’s sitar obliterates all hope of stupor. ‘Slipping Away’ sounds precisely the opposite – urgent and present – and ‘Empty Sun’ is equally formidably paced.

At 34 minutes, The Foel Tower is a relatively brief window into the romantic and naturalistic world of Quade, but every second is made to count on this gorgeous record.

The album is a masterclass in orchestration and pacing. .... The result is deeply compelling and will have listeners coming back time and again to uncover more in these thrilling pieces.

‘Time Ring Rattles’ was added last year. Shorter and more frantic than the rest it bursts in the middle of the album, a spray of staccato dots and vivid daubs achieving a swarming mania. Calming down again ‘Sparkles, Crystals, Miracles’ is a warm and dreamy beauty, its mood gently ascending into a widescreen outro.

DJ Haram has delivered a debut worthy of an artist intent on tearing through the clichés that cling to both sound and identity – confronting the systems that colonise, both outwardly and within.

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.

Although some darkness is present, A Man For All Seasons delivers a sense of hope. The album’s charm is in its vulnerability.

The instrumentation fits perfectly with the otherworldly, thoroughly non-jazz sounds of Toral’s guitar pedal wizardry, and the absence of an expected dissonance between the two feels strangely hypnotic.

A glorious return from the off, III begins amidst a shocking cloud of fuzz with everything a little broken up around the edges.

Sama’a is the sound of a band at the peak of their powers, their spontaneous interplay, invention and commitment undimmed. In the music of Ahmed Abdul-Malik they’ve found an infinite universe.

There is an eerie majesty threaded through this record that trickles through, burrows under the skin and then keeps going.

It sounds, somehow, like a record from the 1960s that nobody made. Not because it sounds retro, but because it has the self-evidence of something that should always have existed.

HEAL sounds as gorgeous as a vulnerable folk rock record, but as defiant and powerful as arena rock.

As an album that can trace its lineage to tripped out rock & roll of The Cramps' classic Psychedelic Jungle, this is a record that will delight the type of antisocial delinquent given to dabbing, dropping and freaking out.

Japanese Breakfast is turning into an artist with much to adore, unabashedly authentic but creating music that we can still all see a little bit of ourselves in.

Magus is fairly free of wild excess or brain-flaying drama. It is Thou’s most traditionally and accessible metal album so far, with a series of rewarding riffs scattered across the record.

A powerfully confessional record steeped in mystery.

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.

JP3 is a rollicking delight, exactly the sort of album we need right on the crest of summertime. Its power, though, will last way beyond the summer.

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.

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.

Time To Die is not perfect, but it's a nastier, hungrier album that stands with their best work.

Ekstasis is ecstatically good.

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

Celebration Rock encapsulates the kind of affirmative, collective experiences that define an entire adolescence.

It’s with By The Fire that Thurston Moore goes properly into orbit. Make no mistake; this is an album that stands shoulder to shoulder with the very best of his alma mater.

But where her EPs stubbornly wrapped tracks of jarring, syncopated beats around those massive tracks, Athena leans more towards R&B, and Parks takes advantage of the space of an LP to smooth out any previous idiosyncrasies.

They’re not just a crack musical unit--Kyle Seely and Matt Palmer, especially, have developed into a guitar duo to rival prime Thin Lizzy--the quintet feel like a great band-as-gang for our times. Morally upstanding without being dour or didactic, in control of their own image and destiny and capable of tuning to the key of life.

Harmonicraft often strays into pastiche when they attempt to cling on to their past, but comes into its own when it strides confidently into new realms.

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

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.

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.

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.

It's good to know that, like you and me, he's swimming hard against the ever increasing tide of shit and still, in the main, coming up smelling of roses and refusing to back down.

The bucolic folk-fingering on display gives the sense that he was gazing out upon the same grand vistas as Pan American.

Clark is an album of unsettling beauty and exceptional skill.

Hinterland is playful--a vibrant and urgent combination of genealogy and vision--and it is this that truly makes it a masterpiece. Not only does Campbell have the creative chops to create such richly evocative music, but she does it with a wink and a smile.

This is an immersive listen, full of eerie familiarity and suspended body horror; a quasi-mystical sense of oneness gives Anticlines cohesion and a sense of spiritual comfort, and somehow reminds of of the vast indifferent universe as we descend into environmental disaster.

The Pleasure Is Yours absolutely delivers on its title: it will surely make any room its in a sweeter place for playing it. But its proof, too, that sometimes you can have too much of a good thing.

Far from being self-proclaimed slack mothers their work ethic and life ethos is to be admired, if not from afar, but from the front row of a sweaty mosh pit as if your own existence depended on it.

This is not a live album, but an alive album, one of the most visceral, beautiful records you'll hear this year.

[Stott's] sound is so much more finely honed, well defined, better executed, yet left frayed around all the right edges.

Revisiting these deep-cuts from their catalogue and presenting them to audiences in an official capacity some twenty years later reaffirms an appreciation for Stereolab’s inimitable innovation. ... In many ways, delving into Electrically Possessed is akin to experiencing The Wizard of Oz for the first time. Initially, the aural stimulation is overwhelming, much like the shock of yellow bricks set to guide the audience through the fantastical world.

Comradely Objects is, in Horse Lords’ telling, a more studio-assembled record than late-2020 predecessor The Common Task, but the result is less ‘digital’ in sound. ... Horse Lords’ interest in “rural American guitar and banjo styles” is a matter of record, but this deployment of them is a fine new horizon.

It's flawed, but unlike the vast majority of Ellison's current contemporaries, its flaws and contradictions remain as intriguing as its positive points, and lend themselves to repeat listens.

Footworks remains the axis around which Jlin’s productions revolve, though her music transcends contemporary club trends, flirting with modern composition and theatre music.

Open Your Heart is the most thrilling and exciting album of the year thus far and one that demands your immediate attention.

The album also succeeds in capturing a spirit and essence of youth... the spunk, snarl and energy that comes with being one is integral to this record, even if isn't always fully realised.

Dan’s Boogie, Destroyer’s fourteenth album played by a decades-established seven-strong band, sounds magnificent from the outset, a tribute more than anything to doing this job for so long.

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.

Värähtelijä is most definitely descended from trope-riddled black metal, but no other band is anywhere near taking the music in a more interesting and open-ended direction while retaining its brutal core.

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.

The tracks are constantly in restless conversation, playfully sparring, casting light on new angles every listen. .... Implosion conjures a dystopian Ballardian skyline, but at times is able to point beyond it, offering a glimpse of how much more the genre has left to explore.

Another masterpiece from this most singular of groups, Crooked Wing deserves to soar.