While their evolution in favour of modern soul perhaps won’t fill as many dancefloors as their earlier releases, Closer Apart is one of the most life-affirming and addictive records of the year, from a collaboration that truly justifies its existence.

Deafheaven have not just made one of the best metal albums in recent memory, they’ve made one of the best albums of the decade, full stop. It’s a powerful, honest record, and further proof that music always has new places to travel.

Despite the heavy subject matter, the album feels optimistic and imbued with a belief in the potential for humanity’s transformation.

By tackling the mediocrity of a chart-topping genre head-on and infusing every track with genuine polemical anger, Miss Red and The Bug have created a record that is as thrilling as it is timely.

Still Trippin’ doesn’t have the crossover punch of DJ Rashad’s Double Cup, which definitely influenced it, but the potential is there just the same.

This is a revealing, thrilling album by an artist who took a very particular experience and used it to create a beautiful project.

Expectations hits a lot more than it misses. Bebe Rexha is no ordinary singer. She’s a chameleon who can switch vocals, blend with any sound, and find rhythm with any tempo. She is an artist that can make other genres pop.

An album that has Blawan back and showing us why he matters to us techno heads.

With Redemption, Jay Rock elevates the level of his artistry while creating resonating tunes.

Any flaws feel minor, and they only lightly chip at this monolithic piece of work, where commonplace rap stories breathe in ways they haven’t before. The mystery is this record’s greatest strength, and it lives in every crevice, spicing up what could otherwise just be a collection of especially hard bars.

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.

As is often the case with PC Music-affiliated works, this is an album which displays, and not infrequently, extraordinary flashes of inspired production work, but can descend into tedium with as much suddenness. ... And when the whole affair does eventually draw to a close with the hum of an air conditioner and the sound of the flying Jony Ive heroine thing from Wall-E, you will probably give an audible sigh of relief. And then spin the whole album again.

While I can’t help missing the volatile momentum of previous records, Listening to Pictures still animates its sonic space with the kind of detail few musicians have the vision or audacity to achieve.

The whole experience is charmingly woah-dude in a way that never feels caricatured or insincere. Great pleasure is taken in employing the familiar apparatus and codes of psychedelia and, well, making them psychedelic again.

Recorded on an eight-track in her flat, Colt steadily emerges as a feature-length celebration of what solitude can yield when approached with creative ablution in mind and the right amount of inspiration at one’s disposal. Woods sounds at home in her seclusion and strikes a chimeric midpoint between electronic and acoustic worlds.

Throughout the album, Allen’s lyrics remain devastatingly frank. ... No Shame might sound more mellow than her earlier razor-sharp sass, but beneath the surface lies a gloom, one I’m glad Lily lets us see.

Age of sees Daniel Lopatin, like the AIs of his album, escape his digital restraints and make his most human record to date.

Their best record to date, Ecstatic Arrow reminds us of the astonishing things you can do with pop music if you dare defy conventions.

Her talent for writing great ballads à la Dusty Springfield is still evident, too, on ‘Lost’ and, of course, ‘Far From You’--completing the sonic palette of a magnificent pop album.

The Los Angeles multi-instrumentalist returns with Childqueen, which retains stylistic elements of The Visitor but packs a groovier, struttier punch.

Nature provides a home for Welcome Strangers. It offers shelter, and sheds vital warmth--and light--in times of uncertainty. It’s the bedrock of this heady compendium of haunted disco lullabies for foggy urban woodland raves and psychotropic campfire sing-alongs.

Chapel Perilous ranks easily as one of the best things they’ve produced to date.

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

This is not as viscerally thrilling as many of his other releases; it is warm, it is something to quietly contemplate.

While there might be a pleasing inevitability to their sonic tryst--and even to its shagging-and-dying trajectory--there is nothing predictable about Here Lies The Body.

The album doesn’t feel like a compilation though and works well as a whole, even though it covers a lot of ground.

Deeper Woods comes wholly recommended to fans of House And Land, likewise the reverse. While the two projects recall differing subsets of folk music history, they both sound relevant and vital, no matter how many decades back they reach.

This is a concise and clever record.

DNA Feelings is a beautiful follow-up to Of Matter And Spirit. Investigating what it is to be human, and how transcendency might happen today, Devi winds ideas together and crafts her own sonic spirituality.

Minus is a statement of intent from an artist who has found his voice and shaken off his past.

Every track on Grid Of Points is captivating.

Excellently crafted beats emerge throughout the album in tracks like ‘Neon Pattern Drum’, ‘Emerald Rush’--also released as a single--and most notably in the hefty ‘Everything Connected’, which Hopkins describes as a “massive techno bastard”.

Iceage’s efforts to expand their sound not only permeate this record, but make it their finest work to date. They have always been a more-than-capable band, but this album suggests they could one day be a great one.

With her third album Dirty Computer, that she’s truly achieved a tour-de-force. ... There are times though where Monáe’s feminism feels disappointingly cis- and vagina-focused--I wish she’d taken the time to explore the politics of non-cis women and non-binary people a little more. But Dirty Computer succeeds at what it came to do--it’s here to make you think, and it’s here to make you dance. It is the most clearly delivered result of Monáe’s vision so far.

Conquistador is recognisably cut from the same artistic mindset as Earth 2 or Primitive And Deadly but is as different from them as they are from each other. Each record Carlson releases, as Earth or under his own name, seems to both evolve from and react to the previous one.

Sleep are telling us they have been experimenting in the laboratory-studio on their rare strain of heavy music, turning the art of thundering stoner rock into a science. And with that fusion of the two cultures, this album delivers the monument to their craft they have long promised.

This a sensitively curated survey of Czukay’s many-splendoured oeuvre, and it makes a good case for Czukay as the OG granddaddy of modern German music.

An album that is dense, involving and rewarding.

Park Jiha has composed, performed and produced an album that treats clarity with the utmost respect, in that it realises that with lucidity comes an understanding of calamity and disorder. The world she has created succeeds because of that understanding. So much music that tries to fuse the traditional with the contemporary fails because of an idolisation of its parts; Communion idolises nothing, and is all the more tangible and engaging for that.

Where 2008’s Rubbed Out and 2014’s Await Barbarians saw him reconfiguring Hot Chip’s understated synth-soul with impressive results, Beautiful Thing bears the outline of transition rather than bold progress.

Hippo Lite is somehow softer, more palatable, indeed liter than DRINKS’s previous output, but not at the expense of the punchy attitude, the sense of humour, which has made them so captivating from the beginning.

This is not the Manics’ best album, but it is one of their most charming. As a document of where they stand it is endlessly fascinating.

The circular drum-like sculpture was intended to create an ever-changing architectural kaleidoscope of organic shapes and colours, but the 12 tracks do this on their own. They oscillate and breathe, melding in with the synapses of the listener and lulling them into a rapturous state.

Her delivery style at best gives delicious mile-a-minute tongue-twisters, enhanced by that distinctive New Yawhk-Latinx accent. The brash vitality of the way Cardi B spits is genuinely thrilling and potent.

With features like BIA, Jorja Smith, Reykon, Tyler The Creator and Bootsy Collins, Uchis’ debut is clearly meant to make a big impact, and her romantic-tragic persona complements it beautifully.

The record ends brilliantly with the superb one-two of ‘Trankil’, a truly brilliant pop track, and the immensely sympathetic ‘Aminiata’. The brisk, crisp, ‘that’s your lot’ ending on each of these two tracks somehow makes listening in so much more enjoyable.

There is nothing comfortable about these traditions, but the evident joy in each other’s skills pushes the three musicians to peaks of subtle innovation. What News is just the latest in a string of Alasdair Roberts albums which turn our idea of folk music upside down and give it back to us charged with a new potency.

McMahon examines masculinity, vulnerability and how cultural consumption converges with personal demons, and it has resulted in an album of immense integrity, defiance and beauty.

An immersive journey, to be sure, it’s one worth taking the time out for to experience in a single sitting.

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.

While each of these tracks runs together almost seamlessly, the record is almost in danger of becoming a background presence. But there is a refreshing honesty to this consistency, prioritising texture and narrative over conventional structure or dancefloor impact. Long invites us to tune in and be moved, or to drop out and continue on as ever.

This is a remarkable record--it is wildly experimental and as comforting as a soft embrace. The most interesting art almost always has a sense of duality, and Slowly Paradise is no different; where it radically differs is in the lack of combat between those opposing forces.

Mr Dynamite combines something genuinely sinister with a sense of fun, and far from being a whimsical side project for its members, it can be regarded as a landmark release for all of them.

It's a remarkable record, a reminder of that Reich, unlike many composers of his era, has not become archive material. He continues to speak to the cutting edge of music, to experiment with new compositional directions, to be vital.

This album is a career highpoint for Sweden’s Skull Defekts.

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

The title track and the genuinely brilliant ‘MetaGoth’ Stripped to the bone and not so much sung as intoned by Josephine Wiggs, this is one of the creepiest yet compelling compositions The Breeders have ever put their name to. From there on in, the album goes through a variety of fits and starts before descending into anticlimax.

This, without question, is the most effervescent and creative album of his extraordinary career.

This is Eggland is a relentless, heartfelt statement of intent. You wouldn’t bet against them unearthing glory from the fringe for decades to come.

Lala Belu finds 2018 Hailu Mergia fired up by the prospect of playing with other talented musicians. The resulting sound is more wild, unpredictable cocktail of ideas that make his past solo releases sound like the demo tapes they were.

The collaboration works wonders for both artists, as the textural beauty of Poliça is expanded with the added depth that s t a r g a z e bring.

This album strays towards monotony at times, but a plum guitar solo or a sweet-sharp lyric will always hook you back in. Shannon & The Clams are a band of cult status, and this album should expand that cult--it is their most powerful and poignant work to date.

Silver Dollar Moment’s vibrancy is at odds with the current mood of the world, but it’s also a vital indication of where we’re at now in terms of indie music’s trajectory. It shakes off any negative connotations of modern indie, particularly in the ‘landfill’ sense of the word, and reclaims it.

You might not have thought to put Anderson and Kronos Quartet together, but they did think of it, and the results are, in both the philosophical and the colloquial senses, sublime.

It turns out that Transangelic Exodus is a fitting title, then, for an artist emerging from his early career and crafting a new project that’s satisfying and unique.

Brutal yet cathartic. ... Consisting of seven relatively short pieces across 36 minutes, The Hands plays like a succession of scenes or vignettes all attempting to communicate some opaque and unsayable knowledge.

It is by no means perfect, and at points misjudged, but for the first time since the early 2000s we have a record that runs the gamut of what makes Franz Ferdinand great: it is an album full of character, craft and flair all at once.

An album of sedative songs fading between each other, it feels more like a notebook than an album with a defining concept. It is easier to tackle Vision Songs Vol. 1 as if it were a continual chant.

This album is an excellent opening entry into what will hopefully be a new series of releases from Kaukolampi, one which rewards returning visits to the places beyond the restrictions of both gravity and mundanity.

Mother finds the band tremendous on all fronts, but the rabid, manic excitement of ‘Only Love’ overshadows everything else. There are no other moments on the record like it, nothing as intensely unhinged or exciting. However lovely and affecting the rest of the record is, as it drifts further and further into more serene climes, the spectre of this extraordinary early blast grows in the back of your mind, and you're willing them to let go of their beautiful refinement just one more time.

In the years to come we might turn to Plumb or Measure before Open Here to remind ourselves of the essential Field Music, yet this, their seventh record, is nevertheless a thing of immense songwriting charm and ideological strength, defined by its sardonic judgement of various seismic social shifts.

Love Jail is no masterpiece, but Wilson and his bandmates' instincts are most often good. There are far worse roadtrip companions.

Total Control have crafted a sonic scroll that is freer, weirder, and tighter than anything they have put together before.

On Change, Cindy Wilson finally shares her formidable pop intelligence, unmediated.

On The House, Maine is vulnerable, honest and strong--he soars on this, his best album yet.

Songs Of Praise is an ambitious, ferocious debut from a band who might just have something new to say about being a (load of white men in a) guitar band.

In this transition from experimental noise that revels in randomness and discomfort, the album layers sound into intense, hypnotic rhythms that reveal compositional prowess.

Her latest creative effort, Tommy on Hyperdub Records, is the darker, more mature, older sibling to Lagata, and another firm exposition of her unique and extensive vocal ability and her creative, DIY production style.

It’s Alright Between Us As It Is is an album of variation. ‘But Isn’t It’ and ‘Shinin’ are weak, but this is a miscalculation in production and uninspired lyric writing, as opposed to anything which puts any lasting worry in our mind about Lindstrøm’s abilities. The work is not his most creative, he’s not redrawing any of the lines of genre which he himself first traced with previous works.

The Saga Continues is lacklustre. At times it ventures into sellout territory. It’s not a terrible album (maybe I’ll add a few tracks to my ‘Chill’ playlist) but it never breaks new ground and it never touches the magic of 36 Chambers. Instead, it settles in a slightly anaemic midpoint between nostalgia and commercial compromise.

On Romaplasm, Wiesenfeld seems to have finally made something that could pass as a pop record, exuberant in both its content and execution.

There are moments where Frost is clearly the architect and noise tamer, orchestrating becalmed undulations that offer repose, often of lament rather than of hope. ... Yet there are just as many moments when Frost lets his muse fuse with unadorned, unadulterated noise, creating arpeggios of tension that ratchet up steadily, the life raft tipping over, all feeling of equilibrium and control ripping away from the listener and composer both.

Saturation III is for the fans: their most abstract, their most experimental, and by far their weirdest.

Polygondwanaland is one of their strongest excursions yet, not just of this year but of any.

The songs are actually seven suites (on what is their seventh release) of kaleidoscopic, expansionist flailing and freedo(o)m, the only throughline being that they remain inherently odd and pleasurable.

Gallarais is a quiet album, but a deeply unsettling one.

This is Svenonius with just an electric guitar, a microphone, an analogue-sounding drum machine and a tape deck, creating the rawest and most stripped-back manifestation of his singular muse to date.

While the album itself falls short. The ambition is admirable, but what makes the songs commendable is their refusal to thrive. They are deeply melancholic. There's a focus on Rothman's drug addiction itself rather than the desire to resolve it, a resignation to dying rather than a desire to learn how to live.

A Pocket Of Wind Resistance combines powerful storytelling and songwriting to produce something special. Polwart and Murphy make Fala Flow seem unnervingly real, conjuring atmosphere through quiet incantation and simple but resonant instrumentation. They also deliver a strong political message in the best traditions of folk music, making health equality something to sing about.

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.

This is Svenonius with just an electric guitar, a microphone, an analogue-sounding drum machine and a tape deck, creating the rawest and most stripped-back manifestation of his singular muse to date.

The tropes of romantic art are self-consciously manipulated, but the artifice is made plain, and the finished work feels more real as a result.

At their most free-floating and understated, Bitchin Bajas almost casually demonstrate how apparent serenity still provides room for subtle explorations, additions to the predominant flow heightening the overall mood.

Rest is still the most French record you’re likely to hear all century.

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.

Like most bumper collections of this nature, Savage Young Dü is not a starting point. Sensibly, one should swot up on Hüsker Dü’s complete 1984-86 output first, then dig into this box and its wealth of eyewitness anecdotes and photos of puppy-fattened band members. Historical context suitably delivered, toast the lifespan of a great rock band and burn one for the guy who didn’t see this release hit the shelves.

Wizard Bloody Wizard still rocks hard enough to justify the occasional rebellious upward glance from the existential trudge down the long spiral into nothingness that they evoke so bleakly, and so well.

Some listeners are bound to find this repetitive too, and nowhere near different enough from his previous work. Yet To Syria, With Love is also Souleyman’s heaviest and hardest record since Leh Jani back in 2011.