Although some darkness is present, A Man For All Seasons delivers a sense of hope. The album’s charm is in its vulnerability.

The instrumentation fits perfectly with the otherworldly, thoroughly non-jazz sounds of Toral’s guitar pedal wizardry, and the absence of an expected dissonance between the two feels strangely hypnotic.

A glorious return from the off, III begins amidst a shocking cloud of fuzz with everything a little broken up around the edges.

Sama’a is the sound of a band at the peak of their powers, their spontaneous interplay, invention and commitment undimmed. In the music of Ahmed Abdul-Malik they’ve found an infinite universe.

There is an eerie majesty threaded through this record that trickles through, burrows under the skin and then keeps going.

It sounds, somehow, like a record from the 1960s that nobody made. Not because it sounds retro, but because it has the self-evidence of something that should always have existed.

HEAL sounds as gorgeous as a vulnerable folk rock record, but as defiant and powerful as arena rock.

As an album that can trace its lineage to tripped out rock & roll of The Cramps' classic Psychedelic Jungle, this is a record that will delight the type of antisocial delinquent given to dabbing, dropping and freaking out.

Japanese Breakfast is turning into an artist with much to adore, unabashedly authentic but creating music that we can still all see a little bit of ourselves in.

Magus is fairly free of wild excess or brain-flaying drama. It is Thou’s most traditionally and accessible metal album so far, with a series of rewarding riffs scattered across the record.

A powerfully confessional record steeped in mystery.

The songs have all benefitted from these unexpected levels of time and space to add additional material and occasional re-writing. Pulling from the twin pressures of studio time and commercial schedule combined to give the songs a sense of gentle completeness.

JP3 is a rollicking delight, exactly the sort of album we need right on the crest of summertime. Its power, though, will last way beyond the summer.

Life on the whole feels a little more erratic than usual for many of us and in under 45 minutes, Wu-Lu manages to skilfully capture this.

From Kobza’s “trad walz inflected” ‘Bunny’, released in 1971, to Ihor Tsymbrovsky’s wonderfully melodramatic chanson, ‘Beatrice’, from 1996. Along the way we get gems like The Hostilnia’s marvellously doleful rap, ‘Sick Song’, from 1992 and work by the remarkable Svitlana Okhrimenko from Sugar White Death.

Time To Die is not perfect, but it's a nastier, hungrier album that stands with their best work.

Ekstasis is ecstatically good.

An album that's otherwise remarkably deft at uniting the many aspects of Kevin Martin's musical output to date.

Celebration Rock encapsulates the kind of affirmative, collective experiences that define an entire adolescence.

It’s with By The Fire that Thurston Moore goes properly into orbit. Make no mistake; this is an album that stands shoulder to shoulder with the very best of his alma mater.

But where her EPs stubbornly wrapped tracks of jarring, syncopated beats around those massive tracks, Athena leans more towards R&B, and Parks takes advantage of the space of an LP to smooth out any previous idiosyncrasies.

They’re not just a crack musical unit--Kyle Seely and Matt Palmer, especially, have developed into a guitar duo to rival prime Thin Lizzy--the quintet feel like a great band-as-gang for our times. Morally upstanding without being dour or didactic, in control of their own image and destiny and capable of tuning to the key of life.

Harmonicraft often strays into pastiche when they attempt to cling on to their past, but comes into its own when it strides confidently into new realms.

Their eleventh album proves there’s plenty of life in the old dog boys yet.

Where Have You In My Wilderness faithfully stuck to pop structures and verse-chorus-verse dynamics, Aviary appears through-composed, as though its songs were written purely according to whatever felt like the right thing to do next, and not dictated by any of Holter’s more traditionalist habits. This doesn’t make it a difficult listen, though--this is an album steeped in beauty, a celebration of sound.

The majority of Sinner Get Ready unfolds in beautiful, regal form that belies the sheer horror of the words. ... Hayter saves the most accessible moments for last, almost like a reward for those who have trekked through the excruciating stories that have preceded.

What Saint Etienne articulate across I’ve Been Trying To Tell You is that thirty-one years into their career, their propensity to completely envelop their audience is as palpable as ever. Without hesitation, their latest offering is amongst their finest work. One that will certainly sound and feel as resonant and elevating over the next three decades and beyond.

It's good to know that, like you and me, he's swimming hard against the ever increasing tide of shit and still, in the main, coming up smelling of roses and refusing to back down.