The National have arguably never struck that balance [between tenderness, optimism, humour and melodrama] quite as sweetly or persuasively as they do on Trouble Will Find Me, a layered, resoundingly human work that extends their winning streak without so much as breaking a sweat.

On their best album to date, it makes for extraordinary music, rich and rewarding. The smallest tonal shifts define the way the next moment feels.

As well as being aware of frequencies in our immediate surroundings, deep listening observes cosmological energies. Angel Tears In Sunlight seems to resonate with Oliveros' observations by interweaving distant galaxies with her own rapturously intimate sonic sphere. One of Oliveros' greatest assertions is that is not only the ear that listens – you listen with your whole body.

The dark alchemy of Waterslide – named after one of the art-pieces Margolin painted during lockdown – ultimately flows from the manner in which it slithers under the skin even as it engages with that part of your monkey brain that enjoys a zinging pop song. ... As with much else here, the moment is beautiful and ugly and extraordinary.

There’s no obvious world-building or self-contained story to give Frank the pomp and circumstance you might expect from a major breakthrough rap record in 2022, but he doesn’t need one. The subtlety and detail of his songwriting does that on its own. The world is his for the taking.

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.

Laibach seize every opportunity on Also Sprach Zarathustra to bring out the grandiose psychodrama and tension inherent in a founding tract of modern philosophy, rendering what could have been merely bombastic and brutal as spectacular and even sublime. It might not be greatest present that has ever been made to humanity, but it is a resoundingly impressive feat.

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.

Open is magical, calming, intriguing, beautiful. It makes me smile to listen to it.

The album is a masterclass in orchestration and pacing. .... The result is deeply compelling and will have listeners coming back time and again to uncover more in these thrilling pieces.

The sound design is absolutely phenomenal, rich in detail. New components, from the clanging of chimes to the rattling or chains, enter from moment to moment. It’s every bit the album Engravings was: a vast world of sound unfolding on a battlefield which exists between the ears.

Blank Project represents one of those rarefied moments in which an established artist meets the expectations set by her previous career, and then exceeds them in the most exciting, tangential of ways, resulting in something thrillingly different, hella moody, and deeply exciting.

Forty-two minutes of profound pleasure all in all, which both challenges the clichés of guitar-based heaviness and mines them for their ore.

Infinity Machines is a painful modern masterpiece, and it's urging us to listen to the voices in our heads.

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.

Everything works beautifully on what's still their most sublime piece.

It's ambitious, personal, unusual and, crucially, touched with brilliance.

Nothing feels hashed out in haste or haze; every beat, clatter and hiss is perfectly orchestrated. The recordings sound cavernous--this album envelops you, and everything is in its right place. The beauty of Sequence is how deftly Rattle guide you into a narrow slipstream that somehow ripples out into an infinity.

There is an intimacy inherent in the way that caroline let the stitches, scraps and seams show across this record, and masterful playing and songwriting matches the presentation perfectly.

Bowie sounded like Bowie again. .... Judging by the excellent A Reality Tour live album, remastered and resequenced here, Bowie was on a roll. .... The ground was being tilled for Bowie’s extraordinary swansong, Blackstar. .... His late-career bits-and-bobs tracks, as evidenced by the music gathered on the Re:Call 6 compilation and The Next Day Extra and No Plan EPs, were often fantastic.

Outsider soul from a true original.

Send Them To Coventry is an album bursting with life. Pa Salieu sounds confident and convincing whatever style he turns his hand to. Whether or not it’s the best album of 2020, it’s surely one of the most interesting, and should be a strong contender for awards in the coming months.

Not interested in following in anyone's footsteps, Arca borrows back the skeletal remains he made to West and creates new albeit strange life. Gorgeous and ghastly, Xen is no clone, but it may too resonate through generations.

Dark Energy was already a significant left turn for footwork and Black Origami is a leap into the future from that, with probably only ‘1%’ (featuring Holly Herndon) from Black Origami sounding like anything on her first album.

What These New Puritans offer with Inside The Rose is something rich, deep and warm, constantly shifting, challenging. This is art for the head, for the heart, for the soul.

It’s an album that if you take it at face value will delight, but if you stick around and penetrate its surface, you’ll find one of the most transfixing albums in recent years.

Dan’s Boogie, Destroyer’s fourteenth album played by a decades-established seven-strong band, sounds magnificent from the outset, a tribute more than anything to doing this job for so long.

Smoke has certainly raised the stakes for any aspiring Chicago producer in creating the most consolidated longform effort in the genre to date.