It’s not always effective – there are moments of meandering, repetition and filler, points at which the band seem to reach their textural limits, and the occasional re-hashing of an idea they’ve already explored – but what’s most striking about Guadalupe Plata is that even these missteps gel perfectly with the ritualistic atmosphere they’ve whipped up. This is a brisk record, but one that leaves a marvellously macabre impression.

Both a graceful tribute and a testament to these musicians’ questing vision.

C Joynes and the Furlong Bray have produced music that is finely considered and full of energy, amply repaying multiple listens.

An admirable and invigorating work, Scramblers casts its eyes to the future of machine music and does not flinch in its steely gaze.

Funeral Songs is neither the first nor last gloriously raw album to be laid down in such a state.

The album manages to be wholly fulfilling. Each track takes on its own character, sometimes wispy and laid black, channelling the unbounded soulfulness of Erykah Badu’s New Amerykah albums like on She’s My Brand New Crush. At other times they’re pointed and deliberate, such as ‘Cut To The Chase’, which does away with sung lyrics entirely for statements spoken over tribalistic percussion and futuristic electronic harmonies.

As the title states, the tones and timbres of the album are blue. But it’s not the crushing, overwhelming darkness that you might expect. By the time you reach the final track, the sombre ‘End In Blue’, in which all beats have been stripped away to leave only Chen’s voice echoing against a background of drones, you get the sense that a hard and relentless journey is almost over and that just ahead, at the end of a tunnel that has sometimes felt like it would never end, there’s a glimmer of light.

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

The result is a suite of textured deep space drones haunted by existential anxieties.

Every track on this album has its moment in time, its place in life and its meaning in itself.

Every moment on the album feels open, inviting every spontaneous sound that enters the fold. Much of the album occupies an unsettled, unpredictable trajectory that’s coloured by a sense of poignancy.

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.

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.

Once again, the results are even richer and more rewarding than on their last outing. There are subtle evolutions and tweaks to their tried-and-true formula, sure, but it’s hard to say what makes one Acid Arab record better than the one before it (and, to be sure, this one is their best so far.)

Crash Recoil is as taut and sinewy as anything he’s done, yet there’s a certain looseness here too, a contemporary, accessible feel that suggests that by trying new things to break out of a creative rut, Surgeon is once again pushing the genre forward.

All in all, Potter Payper lives up to the title of his debut album, officially putting the real rappers back in style.

Creep Show’s second album Yawning Abyss reaches further into your soul, and once there, it really gets to work, rummaging furtively and stealthily metastasising. The more spins, the more you submit to its charms.

RPG casts a powerful spell but finds magic in the power of imagination rather than the supernatural. It is a celebration of the essentially human playfulness of gaming, storytelling and songs.

Dense snapshot lyrics put us in their head state, somewhere between reflection and rumination. As always with grief, there aren’t easy answers. But that act of picking at the cadaver leads to Iceboy Violet’s most focused and affecting set of songs, one that honours the humanity of its subject through bare writing.

Natur stands out in that it is less about the conflict between the two and more about their mutual evolution. Nature and technology are not dueling forces to place against each other, but a continuum that needs to be reckoned with.

The result is a collection that, while it lacks the retrospective finality of the song-driven True North, a meditation on the passing of time that closed Chapman’s career as a singer-songwriter, nevertheless underscores the idea of Chapman as a guitar player who didn’t need words to express himself. And that’s no mean feat on Tuttle’s part, especially as, coming to Another Tide cold, you could easily believe it was the work of younger artists pushing into new territory.

The trio’s real triumph is found by looking at the bigger picture, discerning the elegant way in which they connect the ends of these disparate threads, shaping a close-knit, immensely enjoyable whole.

Listening to Antigone, one can hear everything Ishibashi has achieved in these fruitful past few years coming to a head. It’s a risk-taking, ambitious album-length statement that further cements Ishibashi’s place in a rare pantheon of artists – one including O’Rourke, Scott Walker and Autechre – making some of their best work thirty-plus years into their career.

Heydarian’s approach in his second album is quite respectable. He makes no bold statements; and avoids falling into the trap of pseudo mysticism and over technicality. His music is subtle, mature, humble, and simple, yet worth exploring.

Even the more overtly psych-rock tracks spill into new territory or shake you out of your reverie. ‘Counterbalance’ surrenders to punk fuzz. Three and a half minutes into the mesmeric drip of ‘How Could You Run’, Rishi Dhir’s sitar obliterates all hope of stupor. ‘Slipping Away’ sounds precisely the opposite – urgent and present – and ‘Empty Sun’ is equally formidably paced.

At 34 minutes, The Foel Tower is a relatively brief window into the romantic and naturalistic world of Quade, but every second is made to count on this gorgeous record.

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.

‘Time Ring Rattles’ was added last year. Shorter and more frantic than the rest it bursts in the middle of the album, a spray of staccato dots and vivid daubs achieving a swarming mania. Calming down again ‘Sparkles, Crystals, Miracles’ is a warm and dreamy beauty, its mood gently ascending into a widescreen outro.