It’s different, daring, and, fortunately for the trio’s fans, effective.

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

DNA Feelings is a beautiful follow-up to Of Matter And Spirit. Investigating what it is to be human, and how transcendency might happen today, Devi winds ideas together and crafts her own sonic spirituality.

This is music for interplanetary airports and as much as it soothes, it sonically unsettles. But that said--when the project is taken holistically--the listener also risks being unsettled by the contexts that lie in its peripheries.

For those that need a bit of background music The Slow Rush is a competent record, but it’s impossible to actively listen to it for a prolonged period of time without despairing. At least now that this is out, there probably won’t be another one for a few years.

A bold introduction and dynamic arrangement sticks to the formula while constantly evolving and developing. The sharp production allows each instrument the space and sonic textures to open up expansive new worlds of unfolding sounds and wider influences.

Bougaïeff’s record is toying with the same aesthetics as Nine Inch Nails, but with the dancefloor’s (and hindsight’s perspective) rather than a powerlifting miseryguts’ – and the result carries much more positivity, lifting us up and through the darkness and into the (strobe) light. ... This album is ideal for anyone who likes moving their body and counting at the same time.

Side one exemplifies 2020 in that it’s not entirely successful. While there are great ideas bursting to get out, it also lurches mechanically and is difficult to love. It often feels laboured, like Kirk is giving himself a migraine trying to reinvent something because you suspect he feels that’s his job. Flip the record over and the outlook changes. Once he submits to the pulsating rhythms and allows himself to be free then there’s a gold rush.

‘Future Times’ is a comforting record, delivered by a highly-skilled musician taking on the epically harsh world of the 2020s, and facing off against the dark forces with the pure power of mind-melting music. That kind of optimism is in short supply and we need more of what Plankton Wat has to offer us: mind expansion, inner calm, and irresistible fuzz.

Crystal Vision does indeed seek to provide a kind of crystal vision, resulting in a more direct love-letter to the ties that bind, and in doing so Fake weaves a sense of body, community and connectedness.

Like everything else they’ve done, it doesn’t sound limiting or calculated or agonised over – it just sounds vibrant and magical.

Cannell’s music thrives most when she takes the airy, washed-out sound of her bass recorder and mixes it with the twinkling, prickly textures and harmonies of a twelve-string harp to make mysterious palettes. .... Much of the music on The Rituals starts to feel monotonous. Most of Cannell’s melodies slope upward, made of ascending slurs that recede into a pillowy bed, yielding little variation. But with closer ‘A Lost Nightingale’, her ideas coalesce into a sombre yet optimistic meditation.

Miss Anthropocene is a Kanye West of a listening experience. Strengthened by listening less hard and chilling out. Weakened by due diligence and the artist’s cerebral disconnect between what she's great at making and who she believes she is.

This is an utterly spellbinding record that shows with maturity that the band only grows and improves. If this is their last, it is an exit at their peak, proving their relevance and importance more than ever.

In Pale Bloom, Davachi reconnects to the piano on a spiritual level, releasing whispers and wishes of delicacy and delight into the ether.

All The Way is particularly strong, however, for both the production of Galás' piano and its melodies--there is an added, foreboding subtlety which comes through with more clarity here.

Melody's Echo Chamber is a glorious album. Its success lies in the balance between Prochet's ability to break out of the (supposed) shackles of her structured classical composition education, while still delivering a suite of songs that are coherent, eminently listenable and blend lightness with dark foreboding.

Sounding freer and better than she ever has before.

Some might feel that at 55 minutes and 17 tracks and with so much going on, Shook is perhaps a little long. Yet to these ears it never feels bloated and it’s hard to see what might be pruned without losing some of the record’s impact.

Trappes has a strong sense of dichotomy, that every aural high has a low, the smooth always has the rough, the light is brought down by the heavy. It is an embodiment of grief, which subdues us with shock and makes us lash out with anger. .... And like grief, even though Trappes’ songs don’t feel linear, there is still a progression in them. There isn’t a definite resolution to the album, but it’s cathartic all the same.

The band, led by its creative core Douglas Dulgarian, have managed to fuse the noisiness of reverse-reverb effects and jungle breaks with the dark, heavy textures of contemporary shoegaze. And Lotto, their most recent outburst, might well be their greatest.

By the album’s end, they seem to be stuck in a cul-de-sac. The next album, one hopes, will come along soon and help them out.

It doesn't have the polish of 2015’s La Vie Est Belle, but is more daring in its exploration of its diasporic soundscapes.

Half Divorced is packed full of pep. They’ve stomped on the gas and it burns along like a raging forest fire.

Compassion is slightly less impenetrable and esoteric than Barnes' other albums, its emotions slightly more telegraphed. But it loses none of his power to enthral, disturb and enthuse.

Eyeroll is organic and expansive, woven around the bouncy sounds of struck, scratched, and stretched rototoms, mutated voices, squiggly trumpet noises, and the ambient sounds of Ziúr’s flat in Berlin. The resulting music is restlessly rhythmic and capable of growing into a multitude of textural and structural directions.

To my ears, the songs here still feel like detailed, unfolding odysseys rather than studio happenstance but, no matter their method, the results catch lightening in a bottle, again.

What Tunng have shown with Presents…Dead Club is that addressing grief and death doesn’t have to be devastating. It can be thought-provoking. It can also be simply pleasurable.