It’s a brilliant, confounding piece of work, in other words, although good luck finding its niche in your well-ordered record collection.

If you encounter this in a club and can pontificate, or even stay still, then you’re made of sterner stuff than I.

That remarkable square for detail is pedantic verging on obnoxious (charmingly so), but makes this his most captivating effort yet.

It remains quite literally sublime--i.e. it creates a stirring sense of awe and fear in the listener, by creating an abstract representation of a facet of nature that we are right to be humbled by and terrified of: giant oceanic waves.

Sonically, Purple Mountains embraces and accentuates Berman’s taste for cushion-edged, almost AOR country-rock, with none of the powerchords or uptempo jigs that peppered late-period SJs LPs Tanglewood Numbers and Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea.

If their late 90s records were marked by the fallout of Britpop and the fallout of relationships, The Ballad Of Darren is marked by this existential contemplation — not quite a breakup or a crisis, but the weight of the changes through the years. It’s a statement of where Blur are now.

The songs feel bigger, better, more expansive and fresher, while their collective deportment has something of a swagger about it.

With features like BIA, Jorja Smith, Reykon, Tyler The Creator and Bootsy Collins, Uchis’ debut is clearly meant to make a big impact, and her romantic-tragic persona complements it beautifully.

Abyss doesn’t chase innovation for its own sake – it chooses clarity over chaos, presence over posture. In doing so, Anika crafts a document that’s less about sound as spectacle and more about the quiet horror of being awake in the wreckage.

Kate NV has probably made her most confident and colourful statement with Room for The Moon. It’s an all-encompassing record, packed with plenty of reassuring elements to those already familiar with her work, but with acres of room for the listener to disappear into.

The album sounds rich, even if the people Brown sings about (and for) are not. The songs themselves are brain-swirls of half-remembered fragments, dreams, bits of song, ephemera that repeats in your mind against the everyday wash of thought. You’re captured in its sticky, squelchy synth web from start to finish.

That Cowboy Junkies are still making music this far down the line is to be applauded. That it ranks with the very best of their material deserves nothing less than an ovation.

It sits together as a cohesive body of work rather than a fragmented collection of club moments.

Nothing is another manifestation of Jaar and Harrington’s efforts to preserve a harmonious fusion of rock and electronics, without compromising either side.

Every track on Grid Of Points is captivating.

Despite the surfeit of sounds and samples in Powers’ productions, he’s made an album that can still breathe with moments of serenity amongst the freneticism, one that provides moments where the antagonistic, alienating sounds of modern life can be reworked to make something pleasing, even joyful to the ear.

With Furfour the duo has altogether eschewed contemporary psychedelia’s hackneyed reliance on drones and heaviosity, and in doing so have made a powerful case for catchy tunes as a vehicle for mind-expanding music.

Whatever the aural equivalent of a spectacle might be, that's Mutant, which firmly establishes its creator as an auteur.

Ersatz GB still trumps most records released this year as, one suspects, The Fall always will.

In the years to come we might turn to Plumb or Measure before Open Here to remind ourselves of the essential Field Music, yet this, their seventh record, is nevertheless a thing of immense songwriting charm and ideological strength, defined by its sardonic judgement of various seismic social shifts.

With Deep England, she drills into the marrow of a nation that in 2021 doesn’t really know itself and possibly doesn’t want to. The result is a fever dream splicing of Pan’s Labyrinth and a cider binge beneath an underpass that has got out of hand and turned unexpectedly nasty.

The Don Of Diamond Dreams feels imbued with a sense that alternative realities – different ways of telling stories, different mythologies to reflect our true nature – are always within our reach, if only we’re able to fully embrace our own imaginations.

Perhaps his most assured and confident album.

Singles [is] the first of their albums that really forces the repeat button; as good as In Evening Air and On The Water are, they're so emotionally draining that you don't exactly find yourself in a hurry to play them again right away.

These are still audio waters containing complex depths worth diving into, revisiting, pondering over, dwelling over, dwelling in.

Napalm Death continue to exist to push sonic boundaries and challenge dogmas, and it’s great to hear them have fun here while further broadening the vitriolic sound they’ve defined into a singular movement.

By embracing the rich heritage of Black, queer dance music and adding a splash of her own magic, she’s created a genuinely captivating record. It’s a seductive sound – even worth waiting six years for.

Until Silence is as brilliant a fusion of electronics and symphonics as those Bedroom Community projects, and yet it's also a far more user-friendly one.