Rather than sounding phoned-in, Melvins make this louche lack of effort seem joyous and energetic, and though it can indeed feel uncomfortable, there is a sense that that’s what they want. They were making in-jokes for themselves, and the fun sludge bits were just by-products. Nonetheless, this record works, and those who vibe with the arrogance and the spikiness of Buzz and co. will warm to being joshed a little.

Setting banjos and bonfires aside, the folk roots are now replaced by a rich baroque pop accompanying a dark ride inside Huebert's mind.

The tracklist, and the fleet-footed manner in which Halo mixes these selections, provides an excellent snapshot of 2019 dance music, one that is being propelled by a unrelenting tide of weirdness. It never quite reaches superlative highs or lows but it ticks along tirelessly, getting better with repeated listens.

Mitski’s devotion to music has resulted in a tremendously earnest and endearing record.

There’s an ancient sense of purity to this music which seems a cut above any similar projects.

Carpenter, Cody and Davies have united to form an extremely tight, polished and powerful piece of thematic music with the third volume of Lost Themes. With much less to focus on then a full-length feature Carpenter really elevates and draws the most out of the fewer ingredients he works with and in doing so, truly distils the essence of his craft.

Seeds is the most streamlined, most polished, most sharp-edged album of their career. And yet it manages to retain their trademark schizophrenia.

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

It is a record that inverts and internalises its inspirations rather than externalising and projecting them. It's delicious. Try it.

If Autofiction was the first entry in a new triptych, considering the same themes at a more mature stage of life, then Antidepressants is a fine middle panel: a warp of the formula that is considered and progressive, if not as immediately thrilling. .... What a blessing that they’re using this renewed energy to keep complicating and interrogating their own artistry.

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.

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

The constant sense of apnoea and claustrophobia saturating all his previous work is gone, leaving space for a rediscovered breathing. Sprouting, springing, beaming, the lyrics follow the course of the seasons, paralleling the introspective thoughts of a man’s healing and the ever-beguiling cycle of nature. There is a light that filters through the notes, irradiating the sonic landscape like sun rays at dawn.

Rarely have a band so perfectly captured the nonchalant thrill of being beautifully stuck in their groove.

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

Big Wows is a risky, but remarkable move for the trio--even the weaker songs in the lineup offer a buzzy dance break, densely layering up the punchy synths and calculated, sharp percussion.

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

Some of Collins' finest work can be found here.

Lower one’s expectations from its rescuing of the planet and Babymetal’s latest, Metal Forth, is a full-on hoot. .... Polished and compressed to the maximum, the metallic elements do their primal job of instigating the headbanging and devil’s horns. Each successive pop chorus is catchier than Saint Peter’s fishing net. The electronic details add to the endorphin-triggering lushness.

Like the curveball they are, Shake Chain zig just when you expect them to zag, proving that there is such a thing as a jaggy snake.

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.

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.

It is a proper bass album representing all aspects of the current dance music scene through a noble kind of austerity.

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

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

A Short History Of Decay is raw, honest and painful: listening to its 10 songs feels like intruding on someone’s personal grief.

His finest work since the first two Suicide LPs.

Their most rowdy and rambunctious album yet.

Oczy Mlody re-presents Flaming Lips as a band to be taken seriously once again, despite how much fun they’re clearly having doing it.

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.

Put simply, this is one of the most exciting live albums to be released in many, many years.

Their musical vision is one that's so obviously well-honed that they know exactly when to kick the music into overdrive before lulling the listener back into a state of sonic paralysis.

While Sleep can be regarded as eight plus hours of ambient drift, it also grows into a piece of considerable emotional weight.

Each of the tracks on The Loud Silence pointedly, yet effortlessly, foregrounds the folk-y marranzano within the otherwise calm, techno-centric sonic context that Dozzy has outlined notably on Plays Bee Mask and with his group Voices From The Lake.

While challenging intellectually, Fountain is also nothing less than a pleasing listen, like a delicate wine that opens over time.

After The Disco is an exceptionally successful record filled with the type of uplifting melody we've come to expect from the pair, as well as more direct, clearer lyrics and an overall sharper edge.

Unrepentant Geraldines has an irresistible lightness of touch about it: its charms initially seem modest next to the towers of ambition Amos has previously created, but the generosity of melody and sheer prettiness of the sound wins through in the end.

This is an album that resists being the Other, but also resists even entering into a discourse that would consider that the only position. It is music innately of itself, and a privilege to hear, even at a considerable distance.

It’s a forward-thinking, innovative distillation of the zeitgeist that pushes things forward. Indeed, while he’s had a co-sign from Drake, in the Scorpion-era Octavian’s new mixtape Spaceman is the kind of vibe Aubrey wishes he could make.

Aforger has a mysterious, almost uncanny quality to it beyond the more obvious emotional exorcism.

Medieval Femme plays to its strengths, with only a couple of disjointed cuts amongst an excellent collection, and even those keeping a tight ship on runtime.

It retains energy, but has enough twists and turns to still provide a consistently interesting landscape. They have made a beautiful confectionary, but one made with rigour, skill, and care. A joyful album, leaving me aching for a live performance.

Once you allow it to sink in, WIXIW becomes a hushed collection of voices.

Musically, it's painfully simple; sonically, it's painfully complex.

Everything you want from Richard Thompson is right here, right now, on Still. You wont notice Jeff Tweedy all that much, which is as big a compliment as one can make of any producer.

It sounds ominously worth, but on listening the level of fun is obvious too. Layer upon layer, spoken word singing weaves around carefully crafted atmospheric drum patterns and rudimentary grooves, sounding unpremeditated--spontaneously surreal.

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

Scar Sighted is still focused on conveying the noir duality found when the ugliness of atonality tries to devour moments of beautiful ill-quiet and creepy melody. This sonic ideology is perfectly produced and engineered by Billy Anderson (Pallbearer, Swans) who, along with Whitehead, captures the chaos in all of its multi-dimensional forms.

Who is William Onyeabor? is a surprising--yet camp--African reinterpretation of funk and disco, meant for our bodies and souls.

For all this fitful odysseying around, Hukkelberg is never more than three paces from home.

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

Algiers will always be big, bold and unapologetically earnest and while you’d stop short of saying something like they’re a vital band for our times, it’s good to have someone around who cares for them as much as they do.

Threace possesses a wholly immersive sense of itself, and a free floating kinetic energy that is out of step with most contemporary riff-based music. Its command of sonic hypnosis is all the more impressive considering its brevity.

It is a huge pleasure and a relief that this comeback is so good, so strong.

Emerging as an outgrowth of Chicago house music, the principle formula is one that combines bubbling 808s and low end with angular snare patterns and looped snatches of vocal samples. It can often prove a jarring prospect in the first instance, but DJ Rashad’s Double Cup is a coherent and appealing starting point for the curious.

The blend of soul and rootsy grit may not be startlingly original, but here, at least, it's Van Etten's and nobody else's that truly shines.

Two sounds like Owls really ought to in 2014--as melancholic and complex as they've always been whilst expanding their sound as a second album should.

An extremely accessible record for a broad-range of new listeners and one that’s easy to return to.

There’s an endearing earnestness permeating Tuttle’s amble through the various landmarks of his beloved Alexandra Hills. Along the way, his arrangements, in a stream-of-conscious flow, create a childlike wonderment depicted in Miyazaki’s films, providing a restorative portal of escapism.

Howl is certainly at the more pop-oriented end of Foxx releases, and that is its strength.

While it’s a release that might disengage fans of her more sub-rosa earlier material of yore, Zola Jesus has evolved into an artist where pop--born from a need to mend from trauma or otherwise--is no longer a recurrent secondary descriptor, but a primary one. Danilova has loosened the shackles that have made this remarkable metamorphosis possible.

Each member’s lyrical proclivity, musical preference and sonic muscularity are given equal measure, a pagan triumvirate of penetrating, pointed liberation.

a softer focus feels like a breakthrough: simultaneously freer and more composed, closer and more abstract, sweeter and more caustic.

It's a brilliantly focused, glittering and energetic classy pop album that you'd never have expected from the authors of the disparate, overly quirky 'Does You Inspire You'.

When we hear that scratch of pick on acoustic, we're trained to expect some diary-entry-type emoting. Pratt plays against that expectation beautifully, leaving us just enough breadcrumbs to get us lost.

Short Movie stretches its cohesive motifs through all thirteen tracks, without sticking to a plot or forced narrative structure. Instead, the themes of self-reflection and search for belonging and identity move you wantonly through the album.

Without sacrificing any of the solidity, astringency or brutality akin to their previous blood-lettings, Zu spit out their most astral of recordings.

At times, it feels as if Marcloid has somehow found a way to give her DAW a nervous system. This, combined with White-Gluz’ organic melodic impulses, makes for a pop album that is both strikingly deft and consciously playful.

At many points the overall effect is hypnotizing with the way musical phrases interlock; the sounds are unpredictably stimulating, and the storytelling is relatable without coming off cheesy. Hive Mind, as the name suggests, presents The Internet as the tightest they’ve ever been.

From the unidentifiable and minimalist object on the cover to the track titles referencing interior design and architecture, via the very makeup of each track, Body Complex feels like a journey through a space both public and internalised.

The exquisite nature of this slices of dappled pop genius is a joy to behold.

One of the great successes of If All I Was is that it has the same levity as the anthems of the civil rights era.

Companion Rises is the sound of rattling shackles and tension not resolved but placated. The narrator rooted on earth by their surroundings still has a poetic awareness of the ethereal and the far-flung. Companion Rises is Ben Chasny’s valiant attempt to cast himself skyward.

Both Iyer and Smith perform exquisitely throughout (and yes, Manfred Eicher's clear production captures them perfectly), but also apply their notes, chords, solo flourishes and textures with intellectual aplomb and emotional potency. This is music from the heart performed by the brain.

All in all, there is freshness and intrigue for those that need it--and for those that don't, a reliable consistency with their 90s incarnation.

No era sólida travels to cavernous spaces, occupying an ethereal landscape that is deep inside an unknowable earth. Its final title track crystallises with Dalt singing in Spanish, moving out of her made-up language, the dissolution finally coming into sharp focus.

You'd think that a tried and tested method of the same old thing would have a shelf life that its novelty would wear off. But when the buzzsaw, ear-piercing keyboards and thumps of the drum machine hit your eardrums, all rationale is rendered futile.

Changes In Air is subtle, almost ornate, but Coverdale whittles minute variations and intricate textures to discretely demand our attention. Encouraging us to actively notice rather than passively absorb.

The past, present and future collide in a sublime celebration of technology, history and humanity, in all its flawed and triumphant glory, filtered through one man's attempts to understand and explain his small but significant place in the interconnected, universal whole.

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

The Switch confirms Body/Head as the best post-Sonic Youth project by a country mile, but to merely classify them as an afterthought of that group does them a great disservice.

Raymond tells timeless tales through her free-spirited performances. If, sometimes, it feels as if seventeen separate melodies are somehow being flung from six strings and two sets of five fingers at once, then know that all of nature, its blooming flowers, its swooping birds, appear in our ears because of her innate command of an explosive musical articulation.

Too strident to be remotely ambient, and too thoroughly liquid to be pure post punk, Sleepless is the kind of album you simply fall for, in a way that you embrace something that sounds familiar but almost aggressively fresh and vibrant; and like seductive but unnerving classics by Pink Floyd, PiL, Roedelius, Riley or Eno, it wraps you in fur but never quite allows you to relax.

This is pop music, pure and simple: smarter, stranger than your average fare, no doubt, but don't confuse its oddness for inscrutable obtuseness.

Moving at a satisfyingly glacial pace, The Besnard Lakes Are The Last Of The Great Thunderstorm Warnings is an album that reveals its rewards over multiple listens.

This record is both symphony for sufferers of that condition and a treasure map to the Orkney Islands, whether walking their beaches, or stopped in a traffic jam on the M25.

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.

These are cranky, abstracted journeys through texture, noise and rhythm with howling, gibbering singer Dara Kiely as our unreliable spirit guide. At their best, Girl Band manage to locate a sweet spot between chaos and precision, poise and frenzy, hysteria and logic.

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

A mature record, in the best possible sense, Machineries of Joy reins in the whimsicality and tendency towards wackiness, while still retaining a smart sense of humour alongside the philosophical pondering and strident rock shapes.

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.

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.

Wuthering Heights the album is an independent work of art. .... With a voiceover from Cale that sounds a bit like a corny narrative piped out in a theme park ride or immersive experience, the song ["House"] builds into a majestic, doomy dirge. But the rest of Wuthering Heights is a pop album, if a gothic one. ‘Dying For You’ and ‘My Reminder’ are immediate hits, while ‘Always Everywhere’ and ‘Chains of Love’ carry the swooping melodrama of a 1980s power ballad.

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.

What's changed here is that the Weavers are now more than just writers of music; they are now enablers of specific atmospheres, able to handhold a listener through incredibly dense forest in very low light.

Under and alongside the invective, Key Markets has some newly complex and skilful beats.

Rub is an album of well-sheened extremes.

This LP's strength is as a document of change rather than a retrospective.