It's the band's most mature work to date and perhaps the only one that feels like a true album.

By showing so much of themselves in all their imperfect glory they clearly don't give two hoots what anyone else thinks. Love and monsters is all well and good, but self-indulgence and punk spirit is the true and unlikely dichotomy at the ever breaking heart of Half Japanese.

While many of the songs are gloomy as ever they are not cynical or nihilistic in their view of love or other subjects. Nor are they especially sentimental.

The challenge of making something so immediate and inviting is obviously one everyone involved has taken to with gusto, and as both a musical work and their most daring experiment to date, the record is a resounding success.

An evocative sonic portrait that juxtaposes the human-made sounds of the railway and the surrounding landscape.

Raime are past masters of sombre carnage, and this here is their moment.

Though the album very occasionally loses its way, getting mired in space-age jazz stylings, it is undoubtedly a superb album that greatly expands on the classic Vanishing Twin sound and mixes it with a sense of experimentation that only occasionally fumbles.

It’s so bloody infectiously JOYOUS that I can’t help but get swept along by the dazzling melodic hooks, rampaging beats, thirty-year throwbacks, and glitched out breathy vox.

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.

Whilst there have been several releases so far worthy of consideration as amongst the best the year has to offer, none have felt quite so necessary and potentially healing as this one. ... It attains a transcendent, mantric like force through repetition of multi-tracked vocals and the resonating squall of guitar that it emits cloud-like from the deceptively simple core of its construction.

NOT TiGHT is a solid showcase of the pair’s considerable chemistry.

A dash of extra variety, and an increasing ability to transform clever layers of sound into well-structured songs, make this his best contribution to date.

Companion Rises is the sound of rattling shackles and tension not resolved but placated. The narrator rooted on earth by their surroundings still has a poetic awareness of the ethereal and the far-flung. Companion Rises is Ben Chasny’s valiant attempt to cast himself skyward.

Restless Idylls doesn't transcend, or greatly advance the template set out by Tropic of Cancer's past work, but it refines that template to its purest and most evocative expression to date.

a softer focus feels like a breakthrough: simultaneously freer and more composed, closer and more abstract, sweeter and more caustic.

Oneida prove once again that they can change course anytime they want, and the journey will remain exciting.

‘v2’ is narrower in its oscillations, but all the more incisive, with zither-like textures and guitar screams that morph into sharp pulses and tinnitus-evoking tones. ‘v3’ radiates with a sense of melancholy and loss, and makes for a fitting final manifestation of what is another triumph for Kali Malone.

The steadiness in their performance is captivating and a pleasure to immerse yourself in. There are great rewards to I Don’t Know, in this regard.

What this sense of apparent introversion leads to, however, is anything but a soft or slow record. On the contrary; Oh No often grooves harder and faster than Pull My Hair Back, with Lanza’s voice still invoking early Madonna and Cyndi Lauper.

This isn't a record you dismiss on one spin and parts require some work from the listener, but given proper attention Theatre Is Evil unfolds into something multilayered and quite lovely.

Up to this point, Hopkins is best known for the work he does with others, as an arranger for Coldplay, an in-demand producer and a talented collaborator, but Immunity is the record that defines him. You'll be blessed if you hear a better album of electronic music this year.

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.

Compared to the preceding Plunge, this new album is more adventurous, perhaps, attempting to summon diverse and emotionally challenging experiences of a relationship. Depending on a listener’s experience and expectations, Radical Romantics can be found as uncomfortable as it is accommodating. The album tackles its subject with an attitude that exudes boldness and acceptance.

Wide Awake still sounds like Parquet Courts, but it’s a far more colourful, warmer and bolder version of the band.

Who is William Onyeabor? is a surprising--yet camp--African reinterpretation of funk and disco, meant for our bodies and souls.

Anxiety's Kiss will be the record that will garner this humble band the respect they so justly deserve.

This is a great album, and it's incredible to see Fernow again broadening the scope of the noise genre.

Her debut album The Spoils felt like a spell thrown into a mirror of static, and more than a decade later, her newest album trembles with a similar sense of rupturing enchantment.