The Something Rain is the sound of a band entirely reinvigorated, like a new band even, bursting with dreamy, soulful, intelligent songs, though you won't be surprised to learn everything is executed in the most understated way.

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.

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

A Little Death showcases Rousay’s ability to convey complex feelings of nostalgia, bringing to mind the themes of films such as Aftersun or Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind in their wistful approach to the portrayal of memories.

Although a bit more polished sounding than past endeavours, Le Bon is blessed enough with both sound melodic sense and a strain of Welsh peculiarity that lends Mug Museum a singular sound.

Birthmarks is a deft exploration of selfhood and becoming, and a marked step-up from an artist whose trajectory has promised a release that could stop you in your tracks.

This is an album that sounds massive, pompous, threatening, druggy, psychically hollow, a mirror turned against the daily noise... and is all the better for it.

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.

Throughout Fain--the band's second album--folk melodies meet visceral fuzz-rock, never sounding quite like anyone else specifically, but a unique blend that never coalesced at the time.

Like all Zedek's music it leaves you reeling with questions, the perfect balance between the dead-ends of despair and the realisation that this turbid onward drift, eternally unresolved and unrequited, is perhaps our only option.

The Agent Intellect probably isn't a record to be throwing on every evening after (or indeed without) work. Distilling the sheer fallibility of the human condition across twelve insistent tracks, each full listen feels like an investment in the slow-burning revelation of some bigger picture, delivered with the ardent persuasion of a band fully able to defend wasting no time in capturing the magic.

His background on the harder edge of modern dance music means that, for all its delicacy, Severant never feels retro or overly derivative.

This remains a rock album that won’t sound out of place in the daytime schedule on 6Music.

This might be their most enjoyable release since 1991's Lived To Tell.

This album still contains some of the strongest pop songs of the past few years, plus evidence of a restless, experimental desire to keep moving on that makes you hungry to hear what they're going to do next.

Whilst Sun Ra's enormous back catalogue will always mean that certain aspects of his music may be deemed unrepresented on any given compilation, this collection has huge appeal for both newcomers and obsessive fans alike.

She has delivered a body of work where she has given herself the space to be resilient, vulnerable and inspiring.

While A Trip To Bolgatanga can’t be considered an epochal release as some of their earlier outings, it provides a particularly transportative soundtrack for the coming scorching days.

Thirteen minutes of bliss (or chaos, depending on the listener), Mclusky has proven their continued dominance in the noise rock world, while giving fans something satiating to devour until the next release.

Nothing Important is a remarkable record--at times deeply, painfully intimate, but also witty, bawdy, surreal, disquieting, nostalgic, brash and fearlessly individual.

All The Way is particularly strong, however, for both the production of Galás' piano and its melodies--there is an added, foreboding subtlety which comes through with more clarity here.

An album of scope and unbridled invention, drawing from the past (in both music and aesthetics) to create a universe of sounds and textures that are quite unlike anything around at the moment.

For a band whose titling and artwork is so important for the images they conjure, reverting to a tighter focus works for them. Carlson's guitars, clearly the focus, get to step back from the angular and the lugubrious. Instead, red-lipped riffs flutter over careful and precise percussion, evoking crimson dresses striding down gold corridors. And underneath it all--the star player--Adrienne Davis’s steady, world-eating thud has never sounded better.

Voices From The Lake is a love letter to slow, concentrated listening.

Wand's resultant mixture of the frenetic and the smooth is intoxicating.

A teenage dream of a record.

Much has been made of these vocals, and they certainly do stand out on the recording. That said, any serious listener has heard both precedents and antecedents (Leon Thomas, AMM, about half of both the Nonesuch Explorer and ESP-Disk catalogs) for Coltrane's approach.

Welcome to Condale is a refreshingly ambitious, variegated take on the 80s both conceptually and in its execution.

Snow Globe is just a fantastic bloody record full stop.

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

'Blogging' opens the album on a high, with Graham Lewis' instantly recognisable bass guitar locking into a four-to-the-floor disco groove between Robert Grey's drums and squelchy synth stabs, rewriting the Bible using a contemporary, internet-generation terminology of "Google style maps", "Amazon Wishlist" and "Blackberry Hedgefunds." 'Shifting' similarly applies the language of espionage and global politics to the end of a relationship, over a melodic, summery sway that nevertheless maintains the band's customary sense of distance.

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.

These songs will do very nicely, thanks, as reassurance that Gallagher can still deliver evocative and memorable tunes.

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

A terrific follow-up Mogwai’s No.1 smash.

Nisennenmondai will fill your head with strange, billowing thoughts as their compositions sprint towards infinity. Approached in the correct spirit--principally an understanding that this is music that will ask questions rather than provide answers--their conjurings are irresistible.

Phased bottleneck guitars, Rhodes pianos, basses and synths lay a solid foundation, each instrument perfectly balanced with the other, though keeping a distinguishable part in the harmony, giving the songs a layered and complex structure never overdone or taken too far as Cohen croons on top.

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.

On the Water is a 'love album', but much more than that--seldom has a long player narrated so fluidly, consummately and lucidly, a journey of self-realization.

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

Aside from sonics, the almost obsessive way in which the lyrical themes are fleshed out is another way in which this album is delightfully skewed.

Dead doesn't so much kill Spectres' songs with these remixes as reanimate them and turn them loose on their creators, and the world.

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.

There is nothing new here, nothing especially innovative either. It’s just an album that consistently hits its target in a magnetic, mesmerizing way, and one that if you let it will swallow you whole.

Across seven songs, she builds an intimate ecosystem of sound: an act of re-inhabiting the body through vocal layering, breath and harmony.

Wanderer, although not explicitly confrontational, subtly undermines this longstanding and limited perception of What Cat Power Is. Marshall herself sits in the producer’s seat, and gone is the gloss of 2012’s Sun; these 11 songs are stripped back to the sparse bones of piano, guitar and that distinctive, smoky, Southern States voice.

Seasons of Your Day is a no-frills, no-fuss album from a band cocooned in their own impenetrable dreamworld, untouched by the passage of time.

Whether this album’s your first insight into Prison, or you’re a die-hard fan, on Downstate, the band hooks listeners in with a unique compilation of progressive stoner rock songs.

The flawless tracks on Gandadiko roll together with the ease of a musician at his best. The resilient message of Samba's lyrics in the face of adversity is ably backed up by the sonic power of the music with a confident hypnotic flow throughout.

Above all, it represents a bold, sensorily majestic step in the right direction by an artist no longer content to tread water.

Insides mostly works pretty damn well, and will certainly appeal to fans yearning for the good times hinted at all those years ago.

He's in playful mood and the tunes certainly don't suffer as a result.

Musically the album is on-point and lyrically it's prone to Kelly's customary laugh-out-loud clunkiness. Despite all that, though, Kelly has made another really great album.

Visions is a more focused album than the spaced-out Halfaxa or the disparate Geidi Primes but one of the key charms of Grimes' sound is its unforcedness.

There’s a universality to More which benefits from Cocker’s inimitable, offbeat perspective.

It's full of memorable lines and nagging hooks, but also the sense of something ungraspable, resistant to easy interpretation.

On Treasure House they find an impressive balance: classical, symphonic music melds with garage and post-punk, giving credence to the cliché that opposites attract, outstanding in its complex sounds and arrangements.

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

It washes you in sound, and if you let that sound wash over you, what it does is exquisite.

With Lost In The Dream and his band The War On Drugs, Adam Granduciel has made an incredibly strong case that his heroes should now be considered his peers.

Traditional airs 'Women Of Ireland', 'Carrickfergus' and 'Curragh Of Kildare' are evocative, stately and impassioned, respectively and alternately, and Rowland's bolshy old yelp has softened to a croon. He brings the kind of authority he didn't always have 30 years ago, along with a hard-won wisdom that gives him the character to handle this stuff sincerely.

Either it sounds like 35 years of extreme metal and fast hardcore boiled down into one molten sea of fury, or you straight up don’t get it and are doomed to exist on the other side of the glass. See? This us-and-them rhetoric feels more fun the more you listen to this album.

Pastoral may be an album of satire, but it’s not the cheery-pallid rural parody of Cold Comfort Farm, Five Go Mad In Dorset or even Hot Fuzz. Gazelle Twin’s Pastoral jester bares its teeth with glee; its smile is part Punch and part the grotesque little homunculus of Aphex Twin’s ‘Come to Daddy’.

The takeaway sensation of their epic and sprawling second record is quite simply one of pleasure. They embrace the ridiculous and the sublime in equal measure.

The spirit of ‘Pussy Power’ percolates in OneDa’s searing lyricism and rapid-fire flow all the way through Formula OneDa, underlining exactly why she represents an exciting and inspired future for the Mancunian hip-hop scene and beyond.

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.

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.

Lord Steppington is arguably his finest since Domo Genesis' No Fools mixtape, certainly an album on which his production is more freewheeling than it has been in a while, noisier, angrier, determined.

The album is spacious yet claustrophobic, improvisatory yet focused. You find something new with each return visit.

Abandon is quite short for a full-length album, but its physicality and intensity leaves the listener exhausted in a way that doesn't require further expansion.

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

There is a dichotomy at play of denser, more distorted electronics at one pole and soft, minimalist arrangements at the other; gauzy sounds cut against metallic harshness within songs and across the album. But with this expansive approach, Afternoon X feels focused and cohesive.

The album isn’t uplifting in a simplistic sense. Often, it’s blotted with shadows. In her lyrics, Zauner has a fondness for zig-zagging from ebullient to devastating, often when you least expect it (“With my luck you’ll be dead within the year / I’ve come to expect it,” she croons on ‘In Hell’). And yet at a molecular level, Jubilee is a rush.

If Learning was a private primal scream, Put Your Back N 2 It is Mike Hadreas' first public display of his escalating talent.

IV, doesn't really vary the template. They have nothing to prove; from the onset the record is a guided tour into the myriad depths of aural destruction. ... As always it’s the plodders, the pounders, the punishers that stand head and shoulders above the rest.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Wald nods towards electronic Kosmische music of bygone years while simultaneously reflecting and commenting upon Betke's own back catalogue.

Complex and sophisticated, if i could make it go quiet is one of the most enticing new albums I have heard in a long time.

This resultant collage, produced by all this cutting and pasting of personal experience and observational wisdom, is a wonderful snapshot in time of the thoughts behind one of the most unique voices in British rap.

It’s emotive, heavy, satisfying. It’s Deftones. They’ve made their album again and, honestly, you wouldn’t have it any other way.

The pared down arrangements showcase a set of mostly previously released material in a way previously unheard. The at times slightly slower pace reveals more depth and warmth to the arrangements and, if anything, offer more than in this form than they were originally presented.

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.

A stunning example of the intermingling of bodies, both sonic and artistic.

The woozy charm that oozes through the shaded vocals and the lulling chug of the record mean that some of its delightful intricacies can be missed without leaning in closely.

This record is snug, unthreatening and comforting, which means anyone looking for rage and catharsis ought to give it a wide berth. But for many of those preoccupied by the kind of concerns that trouble Sam Beam--chiefly thoughts of mortality and fallibility--Beast Epic will be a long, warm, healing embrace.

Whilst bands like Tame Impala made a quick buck imitating aspects of Dungen's sound, Allas Sak shows that Gustave Ejstes will continue to perfect and update his craft.

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.

These compositions are haunting because Grouper gives them space to breathe.

What Do We Now is a record of beautifully put-together songs played on an acoustic guitar then beefed up by a band (mostly Mascis himself on overdubs, plus a little piano from The B52s’ Ken Mauri and some slide guitar played by Toronto musician Matthew “Doc” Dunn).

This is perhaps Faust's most solid and coherent body of work since their 1990s resurrection. It roars with sadness and anger at a world's squandered opportunities.

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 body music, sure, but not for crowds of people eager to move--this is music to spend the night in to.

While still destined to divide his audience, with the excruciating and brilliant NYC Hell, 3:00AM, James Ferraro has quietly and calmly made some of the most affecting and intoxicating music of his career.

This record is perhaps the first time we see Drenge exploiting the additions that were initially made to their live band, and exploring the expanded instrumentation to its full potential.

It's a boldly contemporary record whose wily 70s spirit isn't lost amid the fuzz.