Insomnia is generally solid, with more peaks than troughs. All things considered, it probably isn’t groundbreaking, and doesn’t feel as vital or captivating as Dave’s Psychodrama or Headie One’s Music X Road. But it’s a welcome addition to the artists’ respective back catalogues.

The bending of time and place and sights and sounds across this record leaves the listener with plenty to digest and a lot to be excited for with what’s to come from Squid.

It’s purposely chaotic and skeletal in places, but when the disjointed pieces are viewed as one, you get an album that is a fascinating and hypnotic listen.

The six impressive soundscapes are often desolate and overwhelming, with brief flashes of hope. What grounds Disconnect is Joseph Kamaru’s spoken vocal, delivered like warnings through static.

The music rewards multiple listens, with different emotional subtleties emerging in each one.

The greatest achievement across Charm remains Cottrill’s execution of another large-scale reimagining of her desired sound.

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.

17 year-old Eilish has gone deeper into the weirdo-pop trench. Together with co-collaborator brother and producer Finneas O’Connell, she has drawn on trap and industrial pop to create a darkly humorous record about romance, rejection and addiction.

Utopia is not just an album about intimacy, it also expresses a degree of intimacy that goes beyond words--especially in the sense that her voice sounds so detailed here, and in the ways she works with Arca.

New History Warfare 2 is superfine, breathtaking, at once unnervingly exploratory and highly accessible, a record which leaves you grasping in vain for adequate reference points and peer comparisons.

It may be too early for most to declare it a classic, but only a few hours after its launch, it seems fair to describe Gang Signs & Prayer as a towering triumph.

One of the best dance LPs of recent times from one of the moment’s most valuable artists.

Occasionally there are pedestrian moments, as on the drifting 'Pill Hill Serenade', where the vitality dims and the sombre tone can feel wearing, so taking it all in is best staggered over several listens.

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.

While not life-altering, how i’m feeling now is fun, fast and thoroughly listenable. It’s absorbing as a document from a strange period, and its diaristic, vloggy aspects provide an intriguing peek into artistry under pressure.

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.

This is isn't album to fall in love with at first sight or listen; indeed, this requires a form of courtship between listener and album as the former, over time, opens up its many dense layers to first entice and then slowly seduce the latter into a lasting and meaningful relationship.

For a fairly short 50-minute album it's definitely something you can digest in one sitting without feeling overwhelmed. Nevertheless, In Conflict improves with each listen, new pieces of the puzzle falling into place, details making the picture clearer and more fascinating with each spin.

Singles [is] the first of their albums that really forces the repeat button; as good as In Evening Air and On The Water are, they're so emotionally draining that you don't exactly find yourself in a hurry to play them again right away.

Ebbing and flowing between order and chaos, A Universe that Roasts Blossoms for a Horse feels like a long ride in an entropic machine, programmed to descend into mire and din. As such, it’s never dull, it’s just you sometimes wish it had a couple more places to go.

Miss Grit’s debut full-length dials down the dimmer switch for a more intimate entry into their songs. ... It is Miss Grit’s lovely voice that captivates – simultaneously strong and breathy, the way she effortlessly jumps between the notes of these interesting melodies really standing out.

For all the scrapes and judders, it’s these elements that elevate Osmium’s work beyond the merely curious and propel it into the downright compelling: the ability to corral these strange mechanical sounds and wring from them something primally, achingly human.

It shouldn’t work. But it does.

Tonally and generically, the album is not so much a continent as a small country. But it's a beautiful country, warm and vibrant.

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

As a whole, Shackles' Gift is more obviously tuneful and considered than its predecessor and, as established, thematically watertight. The most interesting thing about it, though, is that it works outside of this context.

Nothing Great About Britain, a measured yet viciously ribald meditation on the contradictions at the heart of Britishness in 2019.

It’s a relief to state that their new album Polymer is very much Plaid’s best album this decade, and at least their best since 2008’s Heaven’s Door.

I found hooks I hadn't noticed while playing it worming through my head days later, and there's no better testimonial to Rustie's managed moreness than that.

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.

It's the band's most mature work to date and perhaps the only one that feels like a true album.

By showing so much of themselves in all their imperfect glory they clearly don't give two hoots what anyone else thinks. Love and monsters is all well and good, but self-indulgence and punk spirit is the true and unlikely dichotomy at the ever breaking heart of Half Japanese.

While many of the songs are gloomy as ever they are not cynical or nihilistic in their view of love or other subjects. Nor are they especially sentimental.

The challenge of making something so immediate and inviting is obviously one everyone involved has taken to with gusto, and as both a musical work and their most daring experiment to date, the record is a resounding success.

An evocative sonic portrait that juxtaposes the human-made sounds of the railway and the surrounding landscape.

Raime are past masters of sombre carnage, and this here is their moment.

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.

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.

Rack is what fans have waited a long time for. .... It’s partly completing unfinished business, returning to the high-water mark of those Touch and Go days. And it’s partly because, together, they make an unholy racket that makes them feel good.

Whilst there have been several releases so far worthy of consideration as amongst the best the year has to offer, none have felt quite so necessary and potentially healing as this one. ... It attains a transcendent, mantric like force through repetition of multi-tracked vocals and the resonating squall of guitar that it emits cloud-like from the deceptively simple core of its construction.

NOT TiGHT is a solid showcase of the pair’s considerable chemistry.

A dash of extra variety, and an increasing ability to transform clever layers of sound into well-structured songs, make this his best contribution to date.

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.

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.

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

Oneida prove once again that they can change course anytime they want, and the journey will remain exciting.

‘v2’ is narrower in its oscillations, but all the more incisive, with zither-like textures and guitar screams that morph into sharp pulses and tinnitus-evoking tones. ‘v3’ radiates with a sense of melancholy and loss, and makes for a fitting final manifestation of what is another triumph for Kali Malone.

The steadiness in their performance is captivating and a pleasure to immerse yourself in. There are great rewards to I Don’t Know, in this regard.

What this sense of apparent introversion leads to, however, is anything but a soft or slow record. On the contrary; Oh No often grooves harder and faster than Pull My Hair Back, with Lanza’s voice still invoking early Madonna and Cyndi Lauper.

This isn't a record you dismiss on one spin and parts require some work from the listener, but given proper attention Theatre Is Evil unfolds into something multilayered and quite lovely.

Up to this point, Hopkins is best known for the work he does with others, as an arranger for Coldplay, an in-demand producer and a talented collaborator, but Immunity is the record that defines him. You'll be blessed if you hear a better album of electronic music this year.

The project is stunning and displays a wonderfully acute understanding of what it should do. Duterte knows exactly where this album should stand within her own discography and that of the wider world. Its song-writing is calculated without betraying itself to rigidity and its honesty is telling without falling into a trap of timidity. Anak Ko owes a lot to Duterte’s awareness of how simplicity can breed beauty. Its greatest trick is the delicate fittings of nuance amongst deceptively uncomplicated compositions.

Compared to the preceding Plunge, this new album is more adventurous, perhaps, attempting to summon diverse and emotionally challenging experiences of a relationship. Depending on a listener’s experience and expectations, Radical Romantics can be found as uncomfortable as it is accommodating. The album tackles its subject with an attitude that exudes boldness and acceptance.

Wide Awake still sounds like Parquet Courts, but it’s a far more colourful, warmer and bolder version of the band.

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

Anxiety's Kiss will be the record that will garner this humble band the respect they so justly deserve.

This is a great album, and it's incredible to see Fernow again broadening the scope of the noise genre.

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.

Our Raw Heart is a crushing and stirring doom metal affair, a cathartic album created after guitarist and vocalist Mike Scheidt suffered a severe episode of diverticulitis early last year. It shines with a rare beauty. The music ebbs and flows from ballad-like meditations reminiscent of Earth to the caustic sludge of Yob’s early records.

A rich, complex album that, similarly, rewards both the grand overview and close attention, and offers up fresh details, insights and emotions with each listen.

There's something very satisfying about listening to a woman whose career has been marked by deeply ambivalent encounters with the machinery of the music industry--who was briefly being touted as the next Marianne Faithful under Loog Oldham, and whose work was later forced into a folk mould on Diamond Day--finally seize the means of music production and create an album on her own terms.

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.

Saint Etienne want you to remember them this way with not just the pop album of the year but with the pop album of all our lives.

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.

This is a record which deserves your time and effort; it is not an easy listen and nor should it be. It is a dense and weighty work of art which examines the areas between life and death in which we shall all find ourselves. Kevin Richard Martin is making music about subject matters almost wilfully unconsidered by many due to the sheer terrors represented within their everyday realities. If you're human, then Sirens will resonate with you.

This is a record with conflict, displacement, trauma, and tension woven into every seam, and all the more powerful for it.

Mclusky are here with us now and guess what? They’ve grown up. Don’t panic: they’re as daft and irreverent as ever but there’s a newfound inventiveness to their songwriting that’s clearly the result of experience. With Falco and drummer Jack Egglestone perennially busy with projects like Future of the Left and Christian Fitness, the past twenty years haven’t been spent idly, and it shows.

Re-working black histories through both a personal lens and the structure of modern technologies, Moor Mother has created an album as a mythos of possibilities, a cartography of hope.

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.

Words And Music By Saint Etienne is an album that reaffirms all that is glorious and brilliant about pop music.

Solid and dependable, Fade is another album in a long line of impressive works that, whilst never setting a cultural agenda, is always returned to for satisfying rewards

Through Obel’s breathtaking vocals and ethereal piano and cello compositions, Citizens of Glass succeeds in creating a welcome musical space to escape the observations of ourselves and others.

It’s an album made for obsessives to dissect, component by component. But independent from the technical obsession, Ishibashi creates a clear narrative through the album.

Certain passages evoke Popol Vuh or Cluster (for all the Brazilian flourishes, Simian Angel feels quite German) while others bring to mind avant-garde composers like Robert Ashley or Laurie Spiegel. All this is created seamlessly, the parts fusing into one another to create a vivid, if mysterious, tapestry.

England is a Garden is a beautiful and well-worked project. The five years wait it induced is retrospectively more than worth it as it is one of the most thoughtful and listenable albums the band have unleashed for quite a stretch of time.

A case can be made for the transitional albums, like 2011’s at ease with itself Suck It And See. The Car, however – in which a songwriter matures and finds an unexpected emotional range – is sure ultimately to be ranked in the band’s very top tier.

Confession presents dal Forno’s music at its most lush and sensual, evoking 90s dream pop as much as 80s post-punk. It still has the chilly sensibilities of her previous work, but there’s a shimmering lightness there as well, like sunlight reflecting off the ice.

It’s a brilliant, confounding piece of work, in other words, although good luck finding its niche in your well-ordered record collection.

Track-for-track the birth of a new legend? Absolutely.

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

While at first listen Everything Is Alive might seem plain and minimalist, its flavours can be savoured for a long time. A bit similar to a perennial flower regrowing every spring. Like wonders of life and death hiding beyond the seemingly impenetrable façade of routine and time, its sonic complexity lies beneath the surface.

It's to Earl's credit that he's managed to make the music he wants to, even if it's more of a rapper's rap record than one of any major crossover appeal.

It would be a stretch to say that this album is easy going, but it’s probably the most accessible of his records. It’s exciting to find such an artist trying out more populist forms.

Across the album, lyrics leap suddenly out like car lights in a dark tunnel, illuminating unpalatable truths with the sarcasm on full beam.

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

Small wonders are waiting to be uncovered here, though they take considerable searching. While there’s limited novelty these days in live performances, given their ubiquity online, there are a few stunning examples scattered in the tapes. ... Reviewing these recordings may be superfluous. The songs were not designed to be heard but to be worked through and altered so it’s akin to reviewing storyboards or rushes.

For Plastic Bouquet they’ve come together to make an album that is as relevant to modern ears as it is those more attuned to the old ways.

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

No More Like This is intelligent but not chin-stroke music. It’s for the dance floor – and the after-party.

Kammerkonzert is cemented in the fundamentals of music creation, using orchestral music as its base camp. But of course, Jenkinson wouldn’t let you get away that easy, and as the music builds he washes his wonderful, abstract pigments all over those traditionalist forms – whilst maybe just hacking off a few musical purists along the way.

These four songs are the antithesis of the gluttony of the “gifting” economy and they’re all the better for it.

Odds Against Tomorrow is contemplative and, at times, undeniably beautiful. If earlier albums like A New Way to Pay Old Debts desublimated blues and roots music, Odds Against Tomorrow resublimates it. On this set of tracks, Orcutt mourns the loss of expressivity in music and conjures the fantastical spirit of the blues.

John Grant's songs can be characterised by extreme restlessness and the state of suffering mental and physical discomfort within one's being. The irony and often confronting honesty he brings to these problems ensure Pale Green Ghosts is extremely engaging and often engrossing. But Queen of Denmark it is not.

Lodestar sees Shirley Collins creating a boundary-pushing, exhilarating work by doing nothing other than what she does best: reanimating the folk songs of Britain with all the respect and veneration she feels for them.

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

Something political and socially aware, but rather than aid it stands adrift, documenting the prostrate torment that tears through most bereft of power and consumes by the traumatic fallout, all delivered in a sensory wave, something that absorbs and immerses, envelops, is inescapable, yet never lectures.

The diversity of drums and percussion instruments and players also lends a different quality to the sound, bringing in a slapped, clacking flatness. It’s a perfect match to the frequently staccato energy of the saxophone.

A 2015 update of Model 500 with a dark, industrial overcoat would be as unbearable as similarly ill-considered evolutions from other artists, and in sticking to his ground Atkins resolutely retains his strengths.