Shout Out! To Freedom.... is a joy to listen to, packed as it is with warm tones, a boat-load of guest-stars, and an eclectic sound which dips between dub, rap, and house.

It’s the Arkestra’s second outing without their titular leader, who relocated to Saturn twenty-seven years ago, and like 2020’s Swirling, this does justice to his remarkable legacy and is a fine addition to an unfathomably vast discography.

There Is A Garden is a highly accomplished album which captures Beings’ live playing so well it sounds as though they’re recording it right now, inside your head.

Musically, >>>> is as strong throughout as the vocals are characteristically for the birds. .... >>>> arrives out of nowhere and it’s a fine addition to the canon, made all the more amenable by the cleverly engineered surprise of it all.

You’re Only Young Once But You Can Be Stupid Forever can be regarded as a lighthearted counterbalance, yearning for both innate and planetary peace while making no concessions concerning personal and artistic perspective.

The record activates a deeper form of listening and sonic perspective in a way that many field recordings do, without containing any direct or concrete sonic references. This is at the heart of what makes Even The Horizon one of English’s more compelling releases as of late.

Rest is still the most French record you’re likely to hear all century.

Iceage's You're Nothing is one of the most exciting, open-minded pop punk (not THAT sort) albums I've heard in years.

As a work that gathers up so much of what’s going on in modern dance and electronic music in 2017 and finds ways to make them click together, Mnestic Pressure feels like a game-changer, or at the very least a defining moment. Time will tell.

Everything on Flamagra sounds amazing. The beats are crisp and crunchy, the synths and loops are tight and catchy, the basslines are deep and wobbly and the vocals floating above it all take centre stage, but because everything sounds so perfectly measured it’s hard to get excited about the next song, as it all merges into one long sixty-two minute listening experience.

Medieval Femme plays to its strengths, with only a couple of disjointed cuts amongst an excellent collection, and even those keeping a tight ship on runtime.

On Drunk, Thundercat aggressively grafts said humour onto his spacy throwback fusion r&b, and the results are mixed.

As the album comes to a close with reflective ballad 'A Long Time Ago', it becomes apparent that Stay Gold isn't much of a departure from their previous outings. It is however, more consistent and ambitious--both thematically and sonically--than The Lion's Roar, allowing First Aid Kit to gather a well-deserved period of buoyant momentum, flourishing beyond an element of pastiche.

Gallarais is a quiet album, but a deeply unsettling one.

The band have delivered a wonderfully cohesive set of songs, and in the process have ensured that Modern Nature is their best release in many a moon.

In Kuedo’s hands, they’ve landed in nebulous terrain, drifting between possibilities of rhythm and bass, atmosphere and drone, noise and melody. It’s a beautifully complex tapestry.

Though a double album of 80 minutes, Reflektor feels shorter than The Suburbs, and better paced.

It's infectious, a record and a band that don't shirk away from documenting the toil, but also offer some fight, some life and some colour in setting about taking on the challenges to cope with it.

All in all, Sun Coming Down is a valuable step forward from its already very good predecessor. Despite all the past influences and references, the band succeed in not making the album sound derivative or shallow, rather adding an acquainted contemporary feel to the likely retromaniac taste of their music.

Through the toxic smoke of environmental catastrophe, a new romantic love emerged for Craig and was immediately complicated by long-distancing, infusing the record with the strangest blend of emotional contrasts.

You can’t fault the album for its lofty ambitions, though at times it feels overly wedded to a sense of gravitas, like the pianos on ‘The Slipstream’, which have all the solemn sentimentality of a Lloyds Bank advert. Closer ‘Safety’ is a much more arresting cut.

There's certainly scant magic here.

Warm and inviting, produced with precision and a glossy, futurist sheen. Largely written on the road before lockdown, it winds between moods, never settling on a single tone or genre. For the most part, it's joyful stuff. ... A couple of moments don't quite stick.

It washes you in sound, and if you let that sound wash over you, what it does is exquisite.

The constant sense of apnoea and claustrophobia saturating all his previous work is gone, leaving space for a rediscovered breathing. Sprouting, springing, beaming, the lyrics follow the course of the seasons, paralleling the introspective thoughts of a man’s healing and the ever-beguiling cycle of nature. There is a light that filters through the notes, irradiating the sonic landscape like sun rays at dawn.

The world has caught up to Lanza, but in staying true to her appeal as she explores new sides of herself, she’s sounding as fresh as ever.

This record is snug, unthreatening and comforting, which means anyone looking for rage and catharsis ought to give it a wide berth. But for many of those preoccupied by the kind of concerns that trouble Sam Beam--chiefly thoughts of mortality and fallibility--Beast Epic will be a long, warm, healing embrace.

In the early 1980s Swans and Einstürzende Neubauten broke new ground in their obsession with the body as a site of painful affliction, and traces of both can certainly be found in the grinding, reverberant noise that stalks Bestial Burden. Yet the album easily transcends its influences, forming a bleak, distressing narrative of a self on the brink of collapse.