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.

It's magical, from start to finish.

The result is something stranger and more off-kilter than either of its predecessors, but equally distinctive.

Hunter is a tempestuous album full of haunting, unsettling vocals; it resonates with evocative power.

Fans of the band will find a lot to applaud on Dude Incredible and it's one of their more efficient, immediate LPs.

Sarah Davachi is delving deep into the intervals between these states, to the place where emotion dwells, and is holding us down there until we can feel it roaring through our lungs. Just don’t forget to breathe.

A couple of tracks have endings so abrupt they feel artificial. They definitely have me wishing for longer codas and wig-outs. Does she ever let it go on longer? Is this instinct, or discipline? A plan, or just how songs came out? But crucially, where Limbs felt like someone still developing their sense of direction, The Hollow sounds like someone nearing absolute mastery.

The band’s indefinite hiatus has not been in vain, as they have clearly been spending this time carefully piecing together what feels like their strongest album in years. Instant Holograms on Metal Film also feels particularly emotionally resonant.

One of the most darkly enthralling instrumental records of the year.

Mangled and volatile and filthy though it may be, Jummy is deeply refreshing.

Voivod have a hardcore following and for most, this much anticipated album will be received with adoration. For the rest of us, it's to be hoped that with relatively new bandmate in Mongrain, this is a transient moment before they head off to fight new battles.

Far more than a collection of club tracks, it's an elegant, fully realised narrative.

Nobody could question the fact that these guys mean it with every fibre of their being, and Meir is music to make Norway proud; a new majestic fanfare to welcome hog-riding warriors into Valhalla.

This is some of the raddest music you’re likely to hear this year. Rad in its overall excellentness and radical as to its forward-thinking nature, sounding so even today, though recorded at the height of Ceausescu’s suppression and censorship.

This kaleidoscopic mix emphasises the Black Jazz catalogue's consistently searching brand of music, and both complements and abridges one of jazz's most undersung and thrilling musical footnotes.


With this album, Ministry Of Wolves have done both Anne Sexton and the Brothers Grimm proud; bringing their own gothic legacy to bear, and returning their work to the dark forests where they belong.

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

It's the great triumph of this collection, one that goes beyond whether it hangs together as a body of work. In bringing together artists from around the world Shirley Inspired should help to ensure that these tales are not forgotten.

Like Tyler and Brooks, Sheppard unveils his pleasure in what he sees around us gradually, his final destination ultimately unimportant so long as the quest is enriching. This is a trip that comes seriously recommended.

Heather Leigh has emerged from centuries of tradition and the improv world she is most closely associated with, to deliver a work of art that exists in a world all of its own.

Ghost Stations is designed to arouse thoughts of “abandonment, empty spaces and dereliction”. But that denies the album’s soothing, ultimately positive nature. It may offer a melancholy tour of desolate scenes, but they’re lent the nocturnal beauty of ancient structures bathed in subdued lighting, any sense of threat exchanged for a reassuring sense of security.

There is no doubt that Become Zero is a heavy record in every sense, an obliteration of the senses to leave one wrung out and euphoric, offering both epiphanies from Heaven and elegies from Hell.

Jim Jones And The Righteous Mind play it straight and with a total conviction from a lineage that includes The Bad Seeds, Tom Waits, The Stooges and all the way back to those primal urges that fuelled that first generation of rock & rollers as much as they did the seekers of hidden knowledge.

What makes Jane Weaver and Modern Kosmology such a joy is that it comes as sharp and welcome relief to so many of the serious and po-faced purveyors of cynically cosmic vibes. This is music that simultaneously celebrates and explores, that takes pop as its foundation and then builds a multi-layered space on it that welcomes one and all.

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

Don’t Look Away is a supremely confident album from a songwriter who has found his place and knows his music. It completes a trilogy which is essential listening for anyone who wants to hear why the psychedelic lineage of the past 50 years is fresh and alive.

Deaths is particularly, brazenly haphazard: it was written and recorded briskly, around full-time jobs, and the results are thrillingly erratic without ever feeling rushed.

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.