Hinterland is playful--a vibrant and urgent combination of genealogy and vision--and it is this that truly makes it a masterpiece. Not only does Campbell have the creative chops to create such richly evocative music, but she does it with a wink and a smile.

This is an immersive listen, full of eerie familiarity and suspended body horror; a quasi-mystical sense of oneness gives Anticlines cohesion and a sense of spiritual comfort, and somehow reminds of of the vast indifferent universe as we descend into environmental disaster.

The Pleasure Is Yours absolutely delivers on its title: it will surely make any room its in a sweeter place for playing it. But its proof, too, that sometimes you can have too much of a good thing.

Far from being self-proclaimed slack mothers their work ethic and life ethos is to be admired, if not from afar, but from the front row of a sweaty mosh pit as if your own existence depended on it.

This is not a live album, but an alive album, one of the most visceral, beautiful records you'll hear this year.

[Stott's] sound is so much more finely honed, well defined, better executed, yet left frayed around all the right edges.

Revisiting these deep-cuts from their catalogue and presenting them to audiences in an official capacity some twenty years later reaffirms an appreciation for Stereolab’s inimitable innovation. ... In many ways, delving into Electrically Possessed is akin to experiencing The Wizard of Oz for the first time. Initially, the aural stimulation is overwhelming, much like the shock of yellow bricks set to guide the audience through the fantastical world.

Comradely Objects is, in Horse Lords’ telling, a more studio-assembled record than late-2020 predecessor The Common Task, but the result is less ‘digital’ in sound. ... Horse Lords’ interest in “rural American guitar and banjo styles” is a matter of record, but this deployment of them is a fine new horizon.

It's flawed, but unlike the vast majority of Ellison's current contemporaries, its flaws and contradictions remain as intriguing as its positive points, and lend themselves to repeat listens.

Footworks remains the axis around which Jlin’s productions revolve, though her music transcends contemporary club trends, flirting with modern composition and theatre music.

Open Your Heart is the most thrilling and exciting album of the year thus far and one that demands your immediate attention.

The album also succeeds in capturing a spirit and essence of youth... the spunk, snarl and energy that comes with being one is integral to this record, even if isn't always fully realised.

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.

For the listener, its rawness can feel akin to ambulance chasing or scrolling the sidebar of shame. But in the fishbowl of fame that Allen has existed in since ‘Smile’ came out in 2006, it’s also a massive eff you to the prurient media class. .... Here it is in all its hypnotic, looking-at-a-car-crash glory: vomiting up beautiful couplets of utter emotional desolation and romantic hopelessness.

Värähtelijä is most definitely descended from trope-riddled black metal, but no other band is anywhere near taking the music in a more interesting and open-ended direction while retaining its brutal core.

Moot!’s frill-free tautness makes it anathema for casual listening, while repaying your commanded attention not with the spectacular structures of build-up, breakdown, or resolution, but with a sustained, flattening tension which would be dissatisfying were it not so completely gripping.

The tracks are constantly in restless conversation, playfully sparring, casting light on new angles every listen. .... Implosion conjures a dystopian Ballardian skyline, but at times is able to point beyond it, offering a glimpse of how much more the genre has left to explore.

Another masterpiece from this most singular of groups, Crooked Wing deserves to soar.

There’s a universality to More which benefits from Cocker’s inimitable, offbeat perspective.

Even if it could never feel like a childhood's worth of lovingly curated music, and even if the shock of the new's way out of its reach, it's still another out-of-its-time, forensically assembled wonder.

Despite this slightly bathetic penultimate track, however, Whatever The Weather is an excellent, and at times thrilling, exposition of a particular side of James’ music-making, a strange and alien concoction that reels you into its jellied depths.

For all their compositional and audible dissimilarities, each group of tracks represents a strident argument for the place of the human and the instinctive even amid finished pieces which, at first exposure, may read as more electronic than organic. .... Throughout each EP there’s audible glimpses of the rooms the live performances took place in: shouts and applause being the obvious ones, the sense of space and warmth more felt than heard.

This album flips that fail-state on its head courtesy of being 39 minutes of utterly triumphant fusion pop. Everyone should hear this.

This latest release, Mosaic, is Fennesz at his most cinematically emotional. The catharsis at times risks spilling into soundtrack-type material, but Fennesz’s trademark textural warmth keeps the music immersive and involving at all times.

Gone are the solemnly brooding Knife-like synthscapes and the ethereal soprano. In their place are sickly synths, wobbling queasily around the mix; relentlessly shuddering beats hammering at your skull from the inside; crunching electronic distortion and sinister skittering rhythms.

Wolf Eyes were never one-dimensional, but they're adding an increasing number of strings to their duct-taped noise bow and more moods, techniques, textures and subtleties to their bile-splattered palette.

Mogwai’s attitude towards experimentalism shows in the darker corners, the nooks and crannies of their sound where little glow worms of ideas grow and decay. Elsewhere this is well-orchestrated, subtle and playful, with the confidence to indulge both themselves and the audience.

They function as compassionate anthems that rally against the wrought iron tempestuousness of youth.