The challenge of making something so immediate and inviting is obviously one everyone involved has taken to with gusto, and as both a musical work and their most daring experiment to date, the record is a resounding success.

Old Ideas is the most musically considered Leonard Cohen album yet, and perhaps the first that sounds like the kind of thing you'd expect from an old master of the 1960s and 70s.

In The Shape Of Things Foxx, ably assisted by his new lieutenants and always with one eye on dreams of an imagined future, continues to make his most startlingly contemporary sounding music in years.

Chills On Glass has been sequenced, so that there are gaps between the songs big enough to drive a huge tour bus through, but each nugget is such an alien blast that you need a break to re-evaluate what just lubed past your lobes

It's as intoxicating a listen as anything we've heard from the duo to date, drawing its power from the combination of Blunt's ideas, fluid and often semi-literate musicality, and world-weary persona.

II mostly succeeds on its own terms, rather than as a refined package of each act's moodier moments, precisely because it does keep you guessing.

A Firmer Hand is such a thrilling listen because it eschews the platitudes of empowerment for something far more gritty, tough, self-critical – yet also unafraid to dish it 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.

Across 24 tracks, he meditates on the journey that has got him to where he is now, but also succeeds in looking ahead to a hopeful future, pointing to various chapters of his creative development along the way.

This album is a career highpoint for Sweden’s Skull Defekts.

With ‘Dirt’ and ‘Funhouse’, we find a similarly expressive Pop in action, wrenching every ounce of feeling from the words. Iggy as a seer not a sucker. It’s refreshing to hear. The only sad thing about the whole experience is not really registering the rumble of Dave Alexander.

More Light stands as one of Primal Scream's finest, most honest records, even if the ravens remain soundly roosting within the Tower's walls.

This is a lovely record. The motion of ‘Circle Line’, the charm of ‘Summer Places’. Comma is an exercise in taste, expertise and skill as much as anything else, and it’s evidence (if it were ever in doubt) that contemporary modular synths can be used to highly emotive and beautiful effect.

One immediately clear difference between Two Way Mirror and previous Crystal Antlers work is the fact the band, led by vocalist and bass player Jonny Bell, have improved immeasurably as musicians.

It’s an album made for obsessives to dissect, component by component. But independent from the technical obsession, Ishibashi creates a clear narrative through the album.

Densely packed, I Guess U Had To Be There contains nothing superfluous and no lines wasted – just impactful verses set against Bash’s cacophonous yet cinematic compositions.

Something political and socially aware, but rather than aid it stands adrift, documenting the prostrate torment that tears through most bereft of power and consumes by the traumatic fallout, all delivered in a sensory wave, something that absorbs and immerses, envelops, is inescapable, yet never lectures.

Dutch Tvashar Plumes is dominated by exquisitely expressive forms of abstract techno.

Da Mind Of Traxman, rarely overly solemn and ever-playful, is still far from a middlebrow defanging.

Miss Grit’s debut full-length dials down the dimmer switch for a more intimate entry into their songs. ... It is Miss Grit’s lovely voice that captivates – simultaneously strong and breathy, the way she effortlessly jumps between the notes of these interesting melodies really standing out.

Through electro beats, samples and soaring choruses, Lynch's voice is consistent, strong and always beautiful.

By conveying the masculine and feminine duality inherent in old musical traditions and modern musical developments, Bruun has composed a truly rewarding record that defies direct categorisation.

Machine is an album of military rhythms, deep sub pressure, rasping bass synths heavy enough to take chunks out of the earth, and massive, driving, low-end drones that occasionally sound like weeping hairdryers. Yet, through all of that, there are glimpses of a melodic melancholia.

Despite this slightly bathetic penultimate track, however, Whatever The Weather is an excellent, and at times thrilling, exposition of a particular side of James’ music-making, a strange and alien concoction that reels you into its jellied depths.

David Bowie hasn't sounded this relevant in an age. [Blackstar] marks the bold and rejuvenated beginnings of a second or maybe third wind.

In Search Of The Miraculous is a new way of being for Desperate Journalist: a rangy and colourful artwork, less insular than what has come before, and testament to its creators' increasingly fearless outlook.

This isn't Minneapolis blowing mind after mind in the mad rush, this is the groundwork, the early experiments, the demos en route to the full on experience. Drums sometimes barely sound there, mixes are merely what can be done with the tools to hand, it's not slapdash but it's not slick either.

It feels more that Earth have given us time to absorb what may come to be seen, in retrospect, as something of a magnum opus.