Larceny and sharp, immediate hooks permeate everything they do, and so it is with Right Thoughts, Right Words, Right Action.

The entire album is a feast for the senses, its production DIY yet lush, kitsch yet rich.

ATOMOS is certainly a sensitive and thoughtful piece of work on its own, but the ultimate success of the listening experience is in its ability to stir an emotional reaction, and impose a state of thoughtfulness on the listener--and presumably on the dancer too.

With 1989 she has succeeded in leveraging the most cordial and familiar of pop music outpourings to something that feels like a statement, a work of note and the sinew of some kind of emotional connective tissue–binding tastemakers, rock critics, guys I work with and my 12 year old cousin; irrevocably and unexpectedly.

In and of itself, EUSA is a beautiful piece of work that acts as an aural snapshot of one man’s vision of security and peace.

Flight b741 could have come off as overly kitsch or ironic, but King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard stick the landing.

This is Svenonius with just an electric guitar, a microphone, an analogue-sounding drum machine and a tape deck, creating the rawest and most stripped-back manifestation of his singular muse to date.

TVAM’s debut album looks both backwards and forwards, drifting in a somnambulant hinterland of psychic anxiety. It conveys a disgust for our regurgitated culture while pilfering with abandon; it’s a cerebral endeavour, and it’s also a peach to dance to.

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.

Lament proves itself to be a remarkably effective listen because it is an utterly egoless record; a record that, in binding many stories from all sides, creates a feeling that is ultimately sans-patrie.

Concise and ambitious, delivering its poisonous punch with characteristic sweetness, the track and the album it concludes are inarguable proof of Deerhoof’s unerring genius.

While its episodic narrative veers off into realms of absurdity akin to standalone send-ups, it proves--especially after a repeated listen--a fun, texturally dense celebration of the possible, a showcase of real daring that has been the payoff of countless prog odysseys of yore, the perfectly bonkers lineage of which it so clearly stems.

Clocking in at 35 minutes it's a breezy listen, but one that stays with you. The musicianship is excellent, the production spot on and, despite its restless nature, the album hangs together nicely.

Certain passages evoke Popol Vuh or Cluster (for all the Brazilian flourishes, Simian Angel feels quite German) while others bring to mind avant-garde composers like Robert Ashley or Laurie Spiegel. All this is created seamlessly, the parts fusing into one another to create a vivid, if mysterious, tapestry.

Nothing’s Real is proof that Shura has carved out a name for herself in a distinctly oversaturated market. Here is a pop star that has undoubtedly arrived.

It’s as engaging a release as you could hope for. The melodic sheets adorning the surface offer enough solace for casual listeners whilst intrigued parties will locate heart-heavy layers if they lean in just a little. As you might expect from the steady hands at the tiller, this is a cortex-hugging drone record of beauty and depth. A soundtrack worthy of living your life to.

It may not be the Rapture many were expecting this year, but this triumphant return to form is pretty glorious nonetheless.

From its funereal ballads to its hook-infused jams, Innocents is uniformly satisfying and catchy as hell, suggesting a fascinating possibility--if this is the album that he has waited his entire life to make, then at the grizzled age of forty-seven, Moby is only now entering his prime.

There's something very satisfying about listening to a woman whose career has been marked by deeply ambivalent encounters with the machinery of the music industry--who was briefly being touted as the next Marianne Faithful under Loog Oldham, and whose work was later forced into a folk mould on Diamond Day--finally seize the means of music production and create an album on her own terms.

Crucially, this is an album lacks cynicism and one that bathes in a love of its antecedents so deep that the final results are as seductive and mesmerising as their live show.

There Is No Space For Us is certainly more straightforward than its predecessors, though it’s no less creative for the exercise of reining in some of their more indulgent moments.

There was plenty of belligerence and protest on 2017’s World Eater, an album that quite literally bared its teeth, and a track like ‘Wings Of Hate’ delivers exactly what you expect it to. But there’s exasperation and frustration here too, and it’s not quite the maximalist, terrifying work one might expect given the subject matter at hand. Personal grief also informed the year Power spent working on Animated Violence Mild, so following a more reflective, emotionally resonant path makes sense.

Despite that introductory flash, Newman and Spigel are equal partners in Immersion, and there's no way of telling where one's contributions begin and the other's end. The instruments themselves are also equal collaborators.

On first listen it might seem simple, almost naïve; but it becomes increasingly complex as the record progresses, and with every listen. It builds convincingly until its final track, by which point your head feels like an echo chamber for stray rhythms and juddering off-beats. Afrofunk is alive and kicking.

Third Law in fact sees him taking a wise look inwards, re-appraising and drawing upon his influences and past techniques, and adapting his music accordingly, resulting in an album that is far more detailed and interesting than its predecessor.

Where some calls for more variety amongst the virtuosity here aren’t entirely without merit, the finesse of Dutch Uncles uniquely emboldened pop craft is arguably without comparison at present.

Melt Yourself Down combine a pan-global cannon of jazz, afrobeat, and western pop to arrive at a truly thrilling kind of party music. Some parts may be garish, others recall the Klaxons a tad too potently, and some moments are more forgettable than others, but in essence 100% YES is the purest of escapist experiences. The most fun you can have without taking your daily exercise.

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.