Not only does Sweet Heart Sweet Light hit all patented Spiritualized thematic buttons squarely between the eyes – religion, drugs, sickness and redemption – it is also a record that covers everything with a Wyoming sized scoop of full-fat icky sentiment.

The music Melt Yourself Down make on this eight song, 36-minute debut album is insanely full of energy and ideas, a tumultuous barrage of snaky, infectious hooks and punishingly addictive grooves.

It's more that Kveikur feels more like an unfinished trip (through said glaciers, perhaps), where the destination is in sight, but seen only from the halfway point.

CAPRISONGS is light on its feet and more accessible than her tricksier electronic work but, whether she's delivering dancehall, hip-house, afrobeat or drill, almost all of these are songs which could only have twigs' name on them – take the glitchy, snatched vocals on 'ride the dragon' or the elegiac harp at the end of 'lightbeamers', mixed among the sub-bass and the hi-hats. CAPRISONGS is a testament to twigs' voice.

Lopatin doesn’t just wring moments of grin-inducing audacity from the archive, though, but a startling degree of emotional range too. .... It’s a magic trick he pulls off again on Tranquilizer: sifting through the graveyard of our computers’ dreaming and conjuring something enchanting.

With Master, they've made their biggest leap forward yet, with the band members leaping across genre divides with a confidence and sure-handedness that shows them at the peak of their powers.

Gurnsey here bounces back with a project nostalgic of the late 80s and early 90s club scene – a very characteristic return for a most uncharacteristic artist.

Bertucci might not have the reach of Taylor Swift but, in creating such affecting work, she’s generating a legacy that will hopefully last for as long as there are still humans pacing these receding coast lines.

Put simply, nobody else could make music quite like this, no matter which part of the electronic fringe they might call home. Daniel Lopatin is in the zone.

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.

Full of ire and desire. .... Gordon is no luddite. She’s incorporating sounds and techniques that – and apologies for bringing age into it – most other septuagenarians would recoil from.

The results are nothing short of magnificent, producing a set of tracks whose fizzing surfaces are always disturbed by some new action just beneath, where ridges of static ruffle and tumble over one another, and where harsh regions of higher density sluice violently into the foreground.

Its confident shape-shifting compositional power and instrumental thunder make for one of 2014's most immediate and satisfying releases.

The music is cryptic, otherworldly, and uncanny. The dislocation of Smith’s voice from The Fall is jarring and thrilling at times.

For all the synthetic otherworldliness, this record is unflinchingly honest in its assessment of the United States as well as a very personal and raw portrait of Steven’s own humanity and fallibility. There’s no dogma, only equivocation.

By deconstructing their identity, Saint Etienne have created a coherent sequence of remarkable songs which sound like everything else they have done and nothing else, at the same time. It is a very impressive achievement.

As the album's outlook nosedives towards irreversible melancholy, Nobody Wants To Be Here And Nobody Wants To Leave becomes increasingly hypnotic.

The Argument may not be the best place for novices to acquaint themselves with the work of Grant Hart but for long-term observers it proves to be a welcome return from a singular if erratic talent.

They've arrived at a romantic, odd, ambitious pop record that eschews musical theatricality for punchy, 40-something's take on the complexity of love from the view--and this is why it works--of one who is still, at heart, an incurable and incorrigible teenage romantic

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.

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.

A shining, distorted, expertly constructed, open-ended record, that might be Xiu Xiu’s best.

Dense, professional, and thoroughly realized, Mirror Traffic will become a lot of people's favorite Malkmus album. He sounds more like Malkmus than ever, and it makes me shiver.

WINK is CHAI’s most comforting listen to date, but that doesn’t mean they’ve left behind the fun or the bold, animated bite of it all. Instead, it’s a record that builds on everything they’ve done before, understanding their strengths together as a group and then growing something more immersive and insightful from it – all while remaining deliciously joyful.

It’s the sound of joyous, playful experimentation squatting the rarefied worlds of chamber ensembles and concert halls. .... Even when Daniel steps furthest into abstraction it never feels like pretensions towards aloof, high art alienation.

Distracted feels like something rarer: a deeply human, painstakingly crafted album. Stephen Bruner has taken our collective exhaustion, our grief, and our hyper-connectivity, and transmuted them into a masterpiece of progressive R&B.

The only way to respond to the sourpusses is to ensure the music is very, very good, something that KoKoro can more than justifiably claim.

Beautifully composed and beautifully produced.

Some of the tracks in the album are some of the best that Moiré has made to date.

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

While the Tinariwen formula may be familiar, Emmaar sees their sound refined without losing any of the group's rebel edge and defiant spirit.

So not an out and out album of doof dancefloor bangers, this is more the evolution of an artist, at comfort in her environment, and holding her own.

It’s the product of a chronic overthinker refining his teeming thoughts into crystalline song, forming an album that doesn't shy away from the gravitas of grand gestures, and, more importantly, the emptiness that follows when they prove to be futile.

This album, more than any punk tune, is the sound of the suburbs; rather than being from the suburbs, it sounds like the suburbs. If you think that’s no recommendation, just hear it. There is beauty here, and sadness, and peril, and deep, deep soul.

There’s a lot to unpick here. The Mars Volta may well be one to grow on you. This is a record that can make you think a thousand things at once. But if you’re willing to sit and savour the taste before digesting, you’ll understand why it took so long to ferment.

Even though the idea of listening to another quarantine-inspired ambient record might seem off-putting, the rewards are simply too tempting.

There is not a song on Build A Problem that does not deserve its place on the album. They all have the potential to be favourites, depending on the day, your mood and what you want from a song. Smoothly woven from dodie’s most intimate moments, Build a Problem has it all.

If the continuing relevance of this material was never seriously in doubt, in resurrecting a swath of the Cabs material that had unfairly languished in obscurity for far too long, Mute have done a service in recovering an important transitional period for the group and for dance music in general.

Bringing together the Def Jux man’s icy pen and instantly recognisable flow with a riff that bassist John-Michael Hedley had been playing with for a couple of years has resulted in arguably the most overtly political statement of Pigs’ career. It’s a hulking beast of chugged rhythms and swirling guitars.

For some Communion will be too discordant, too warlike, too brutal to their sensibilities, a direct threat to their notions of what is "beautiful" in their world. But the chrome plated harshness of Rabit's music brings out a different form of joy, a pleasure that comes from catharsis, frustration, and alienation.

‘Bloom Baby Bloom’ had so much going for it. Why couldn’t Wolf Alice apply that level of vision, skill, invention and audaciousness to the rest of The Clearing? As radio friendly as Fleetwood Mac usually were, they didn’t win the world’s respect by holding back timidly for 80 per cent of each album, or being content to let only the vocals do the talking.

While there has was never any doubting their psychedelic influences and their way with a groove, Wraith offers something more. Full of variety and unpredictability, like the best science fiction it maps out a dreamworld of our times, a tonic against the deathly thoughts of the small hours.

This is a lovely record. The motion of ‘Circle Line’, the charm of ‘Summer Places’. Comma is an exercise in taste, expertise and skill as much as anything else, and it’s evidence (if it were ever in doubt) that contemporary modular synths can be used to highly emotive and beautiful effect.

These experimental techniques give Bachman's recordings a unique intimacy and a rare openness. His is a brave music of warmth, community and generosity.

Tinariwen's Tassili may not have the distorted guitars of previous records, but the acoustic recordings suit the contemplative mood and makes for a powerful return to their roots, as the musicians' circumstances, like getting lost in the desert, go in circles.

After giving The Book Of Souls another few spins, the record revealed its many qualities in measured doses over time.

It's that mix of astral expensiveness and strict artistry that makes Thundercat's debut LP The Golden Age Of Apocalypse as grand and visionary as its title.

From the toughest moments are borne the most compelling work, and, in Evile's case, in crafting an album as assured as Five Serpent's Teeth they surely deserve to sit atop the modern thrash elite.

Wed 21 continues the intrigue, amplifies the obsession, and is 2013's most addictive and compelling album made by anyone anywhere. I have no end-of-year list. Just Wed 21.

Primitive And Deadly is imbued with an energy of its own: a bold, if flawed update on the Earth model.

The album is distinguished, therefore, not only by impressive vocal athleticism but also by an astonishing extra-human tenderness.

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.

As it stands, Wake In Fright is a misanthropic social/personal/political blank cheque as bleak in outlook as it is righteously harrowing in sound. It’s 2017, and life’s a chasm. Uniform are staring right in.

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.

From first note to last, The Fiery Margin is a recording that exudes complete confidence.

With Mind Hive, the band continue to evolve, surprise and quietly inspire.

The creation of an ever restless and fecund talent, Massive Oscillations is a beautifully bold and powerful album that should bring Wacław Zimpel to the attention of a wider and deserved audience.

For all its conceptual maximalism, gen(r)e-splicing and densely irregular time layering, the compositions here are supremely considered pieces of continuously mutating gracefulness, spacious and expansive, stretched like a long fade-out into timelessness. Equally grounded and spaced out, on Seeing Through Sound Hassell has found an ideal balance of psychoacoustic and compositional values, the most sublime synthesis of tone magic and artistic craft.

In so many ways, Monument encapsulates everything Molchat Doma has to offer. Having recently signed to Sacred Bones Records in January and a successful few months of nonstop streams, 2020 has really been a strong year for the group.

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.

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.

It’s the Arkestra’s second outing without their titular leader, who relocated to Saturn twenty-seven years ago, and like 2020’s Swirling, this does justice to his remarkable legacy and is a fine addition to an unfathomably vast discography.

There Is A Garden is a highly accomplished album which captures Beings’ live playing so well it sounds as though they’re recording it right now, inside your head.

Musically, >>>> is as strong throughout as the vocals are characteristically for the birds. .... >>>> arrives out of nowhere and it’s a fine addition to the canon, made all the more amenable by the cleverly engineered surprise of it all.

You’re Only Young Once But You Can Be Stupid Forever can be regarded as a lighthearted counterbalance, yearning for both innate and planetary peace while making no concessions concerning personal and artistic perspective.

The record activates a deeper form of listening and sonic perspective in a way that many field recordings do, without containing any direct or concrete sonic references. This is at the heart of what makes Even The Horizon one of English’s more compelling releases as of late.

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

Iceage's You're Nothing is one of the most exciting, open-minded pop punk (not THAT sort) albums I've heard in years.

As a work that gathers up so much of what’s going on in modern dance and electronic music in 2017 and finds ways to make them click together, Mnestic Pressure feels like a game-changer, or at the very least a defining moment. Time will tell.

Everything on Flamagra sounds amazing. The beats are crisp and crunchy, the synths and loops are tight and catchy, the basslines are deep and wobbly and the vocals floating above it all take centre stage, but because everything sounds so perfectly measured it’s hard to get excited about the next song, as it all merges into one long sixty-two minute listening experience.

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.

On Drunk, Thundercat aggressively grafts said humour onto his spacy throwback fusion r&b, and the results are mixed.

As the album comes to a close with reflective ballad 'A Long Time Ago', it becomes apparent that Stay Gold isn't much of a departure from their previous outings. It is however, more consistent and ambitious--both thematically and sonically--than The Lion's Roar, allowing First Aid Kit to gather a well-deserved period of buoyant momentum, flourishing beyond an element of pastiche.

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

The band have delivered a wonderfully cohesive set of songs, and in the process have ensured that Modern Nature is their best release in many a moon.

In Kuedo’s hands, they’ve landed in nebulous terrain, drifting between possibilities of rhythm and bass, atmosphere and drone, noise and melody. It’s a beautifully complex tapestry.

Though a double album of 80 minutes, Reflektor feels shorter than The Suburbs, and better paced.

It's infectious, a record and a band that don't shirk away from documenting the toil, but also offer some fight, some life and some colour in setting about taking on the challenges to cope with it.

All in all, Sun Coming Down is a valuable step forward from its already very good predecessor. Despite all the past influences and references, the band succeed in not making the album sound derivative or shallow, rather adding an acquainted contemporary feel to the likely retromaniac taste of their music.

Through the toxic smoke of environmental catastrophe, a new romantic love emerged for Craig and was immediately complicated by long-distancing, infusing the record with the strangest blend of emotional contrasts.

You can’t fault the album for its lofty ambitions, though at times it feels overly wedded to a sense of gravitas, like the pianos on ‘The Slipstream’, which have all the solemn sentimentality of a Lloyds Bank advert. Closer ‘Safety’ is a much more arresting cut.

There's certainly scant magic here.

Warm and inviting, produced with precision and a glossy, futurist sheen. Largely written on the road before lockdown, it winds between moods, never settling on a single tone or genre. For the most part, it's joyful stuff. ... A couple of moments don't quite stick.

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

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.

The world has caught up to Lanza, but in staying true to her appeal as she explores new sides of herself, she’s sounding as fresh as ever.

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.

In the early 1980s Swans and Einstürzende Neubauten broke new ground in their obsession with the body as a site of painful affliction, and traces of both can certainly be found in the grinding, reverberant noise that stalks Bestial Burden. Yet the album easily transcends its influences, forming a bleak, distressing narrative of a self on the brink of collapse.

Every track on Grid Of Points is captivating.

A respect for the original material is clear throughout, and the emotional power of Badalamenti's tunes is identified and played up wonderfully.

Densely packed, I Guess U Had To Be There contains nothing superfluous and no lines wasted – just impactful verses set against Bash’s cacophonous yet cinematic compositions.

The album dazzles with the thrilling cocktail of styles Gordon’s been through, as if changing channels on the coolest radio on earth. But she never makes herself fully at home in any of them. ... Gordon’s bet is that the people are ready for weirdness, that the world can embrace its complexities. And the only way is forward.

The Childhood of a Leader opens up further notions on the increasing use of mise en scene within Scott's music as well as positioning himself as a modern composer utilising cinematic techniques within narrative frameworks. It is an unexpectedly urgent addition to a master's late period canon.

All shot through with the psychedelic heft of Neil Young & Crazy Horse, this is not a flash in the pan, a fumble in the dark or an album which loses its way but a cosmic paean to perfectionism that creates order out of the most beautiful chaos.

This is techno music that fires the mind and soothes the soul; intricate, micro-tuned productions that work on a guttural level; electronic music that soars by aural intelligence rather than lumpen sonic trickery. In the end, you may not be healed by The Disco’s of Imhotep but you’ll certainly be uplifted.

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

Senni presents not so much a cohesive album here, but rather a series of studies on a form, like Domenico Scarlatti’s sonatas. But not like Scarlatti’s sonatas. More like Marc-André Hamelin’s revisionist Omaggios to Scarlatti. Senni produces music with alternating measures of respect and irreverence. But the results lack emotion. Scacco Matto’s production values are modern and bright. But they don’t move me to move.

Frusciante has given space for Maya to breathe, for the powerful breakbeats to push things forward to their full potential.