Ultimately Moonbuilding 2703 BC is an immersive, imaginative journey into the unknown that, unfortunately, won't end up being the space travel concept album of the year. Public Service Broadcasting have already locked that down. Top marks for effort though.

The majority of the tracks on the album are put together in such a way as to make you want to dance as well as take you on a journey, and by the third listen in you really begin to find yourself immersed.

Sangare sounds energised by the new production context: the new sound becomes her, and as one would expect it is her power, verve and versatility that truly carry the album. [Jun 2017, p.70]

Moor Mother’s voice is an essential anchor on Open the Gates, but the album is more exciting taken as a group work than just the next in a long line of collaborative efforts.

This album, more than any punk tune, is the sound of the suburbs; rather than being from the suburbs, it sounds like the suburbs. If you think that’s no recommendation, just hear it. There is beauty here, and sadness, and peril, and deep, deep soul.

While made from individually minimal, looping rhythms and uncomplicated textures, Drift Multiply is rendered into a harmonically luxurious and sonically dense whole.

While there are many masterful qualities to what Tamara Lindeman has created with this record, more of the introspective numbers such as ‘Trust’ and ‘Robber’ would have made for a more sonically rewarding body of work. Otherwise, this is a vivid and vibrant return.

Simply, we are left with more evidence of a true American original, who was also as important in his own way as Harry Smith or Alan Lomax and other such college-educated curatorial spirits.

Avec Le Soleil Sortant De Sa Bouche have produced a record which is at once ambitiously progressive, admirably methodical and unassumingly joyous.

It offers astonishingly rich pickings--its pillowy-soft surfaces might have all the edges filed away, but there's a stunning amount of detail packed into each of its eight tracks.

The core remains. It is a worthless task to try and work out exactly what exactly it is Sundfør practices, beyond an extreme form of uncompromising pop.

Even the more overtly psych-rock tracks spill into new territory or shake you out of your reverie. ‘Counterbalance’ surrenders to punk fuzz. Three and a half minutes into the mesmeric drip of ‘How Could You Run’, Rishi Dhir’s sitar obliterates all hope of stupor. ‘Slipping Away’ sounds precisely the opposite – urgent and present – and ‘Empty Sun’ is equally formidably paced.

Demen's debut album is worth listening to in its own right, regardless of any nostalgia for the 4AD sound. She takes a studied-sounding array of influences from contemporary ambient and drone, infusing them with a more operatic, vocalised melancholy.

None of this feels glib, not in the circumstances, and not when the music steers clear of mush to come out gorgeous, taut and streamlined.

There is a playful freedom on display from start to finish. By increasing the importance of the bass and keyboards (a move possibly inspired by fellow Swedish prog compatriots Anekdoten) and simultaneously writing with string arrangements in mind, the innate grandeur at the heart of this band’s music has never been as audible as it is now.

As the title states, the tones and timbres of the album are blue. But it’s not the crushing, overwhelming darkness that you might expect. By the time you reach the final track, the sombre ‘End In Blue’, in which all beats have been stripped away to leave only Chen’s voice echoing against a background of drones, you get the sense that a hard and relentless journey is almost over and that just ahead, at the end of a tunnel that has sometimes felt like it would never end, there’s a glimmer of light.

R Plus Seven is music that's more programmed than performed. But behind that programming is a very human kind of agency, pushing the right buttons. Amidst an excess of prosumers, Lopatin proves here to be an actual pro.

Soaring and swooping in all the right places, there's no denying the gorgeous ethereal shimmer and dizzying demonstrative pull of these songs.

As much as Mess is a drive further across electronic borders Liars explored in 2012 with WIXIW, it is simultaneously a consolidation of all that has come before.

While the variety of styles and approaches on display is mesmerising if not dizzying, the cuts on Yowzers feel as if they truly belong together, connected by an intangible thread – a sensibility which eclipses pure aesthetics and bridges concepts, worlds, and compositions across boundaries.

The Practice of Love reveals the sensitive humane core that was always behind Hval’s practice of enlightened dissent. The album develops an elegant approach to solving the existential problems of love, care and intimacy from the position of otherness.

Despite the fact that listening to one of their albums in full feels like a 40-minute bludgeoning, there’s something oddly heart-warming at play here. Unsane are not chameleons or shapeshifters but rather stoic veterans unashamed to continue honing a sound many would argue they perfected decades ago.

While it’s a short EP, it doesn’t disappoint. If anything, he presents himself as a soloist with an unexpected sound for his high-pitched countertenor voice and very far from those earlier ballads we have heard from him.

More than a mere souvenir or stopgap, Versions is a sumptuous release that affirms both the increasingly unique and essential nature of Zola Jesus' music and the enduring genius of JG Thirlwell.

We might have heard these tropes a thousand times before, but on Kykeon, Rhyton use them to make something richer and more nimble than the flabby freak-out-by-numbers psych that's currently clogging up rock's bandwidth.

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

Bringing together the Def Jux man’s icy pen and instantly recognisable flow with a riff that bassist John-Michael Hedley had been playing with for a couple of years has resulted in arguably the most overtly political statement of Pigs’ career. It’s a hulking beast of chugged rhythms and swirling guitars.

It’s not just a mongrel mesh of genres. It’s stretching and cracking them into new shapes, creating something fresh, hyperactive, and utterly pop.