Sonic Citadel is Lightning Bolt at their most poppy and accessible.

It's a roiling, often tense, but just a little more calm and contemplative NIN, seemingly content to emerge and exist rather than to sweep all before it or punctuate a point.

Laid-back philosophies punctuate this album, which again suggests a kind of bemused contentedness with life. There's nothing too highfaluting or over-stretching, though musings are thought-provoking enough.

Dumb Flesh on the other hand feels like a direct continuation of the last superb Fuck Buttons album, Slow Focus, albeit a good deal warmer than its overpowering austere chilliness.

This is a record of infinite different energies, and as a result can be headspinning as it whirls from one to another, but beneath them all there is this deeper, more primal momentum at play - a hypnotic, looping repetition around which those myriad flourishes are wound.

Land of Sleeper is unlikely to win over anyone who doesn’t already enjoy Pigs’ (etc.) particular brand of stoner rock, but then, I doubt it’s really trying to. A steadfastly unsubtle affair.

Complex and sophisticated, if i could make it go quiet is one of the most enticing new albums I have heard in a long time.

Konono No. 1 Meets Batida isn't quite the sustained and magical dialogue it might have been, but it's an intriguing cultural experiment with moments of real alchemy.

In Detached From The Rest Of You, James refuses to offer the listener neat resolutions. Instead, she provides a profoundly honest documentation of her own frayed edges, translating the noise in her head into some of the most compelling electronic music of the decade.

It's both texturally ravishing and textually fascinating.

In Standing At The Sky's Edge Richard Hawley has forged his most fully realised and heartfelt collection of music to date. This requires your urgent attention.

The result is no sucker punch, but a knockout blow.

Behind The Sun could easily lose a couple of tracks and increase its impact, but Motorpsycho conspicuously always want to provide a fully immersive, all-or-nothing headtrip to the listener--and in this day and age, for that we should be very grateful indeed.

Though it's not masterpiece by any means, the fifth installment in Slipknot career is praiseworthy overall, especially given the circumstances surrounding its creation.

Here the instruments muddle together foggily and somewhat awkwardly. Fortunately, the songs themselves are strong enough to be of great comfort to those who felt lost twenty years ago and found some degree of solace in Troublegum.

There is a shadowy enigma within Esker that verges on the blissful, thanks to its peculiar melodic turns and idiosyncratic use of sonic effects.

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.

The whole experience is charmingly woah-dude in a way that never feels caricatured or insincere. Great pleasure is taken in employing the familiar apparatus and codes of psychedelia and, well, making them psychedelic again.

Their 2018 debut, Not With That Attitude, was a winning combination of bile, big hooks, and a great sense of humor and, although they didn’t need to, the band has expanded their palette on Contender and it’s paid off handsomely.

This album is too much of a piece to be picking out favourites, yet it is also one whose subtleties really reveal themselves on subsequent listens. Go on, dive in. Soak up the heat, discover what’s hidden underneath the overgrown foliage. You know you want to.

The eleven tracks here are life-affirming and motivational, from the evocative mother and daughter scaling a mountainous landscape on the cover, to the big beats that pervade This Is What We Do. The problem with the album as a listening experience is that it lacks a change of pace.

Full Moon is a distinctive and exuberant snapshot of an exceptional journey. It offers yet more proof that Moonchild Sanelly is a singular artist whose colourful aesthetic is not only discernible via her trademark blue mop of braids but in the joyous, sexy and defiant nature of her sound.

After the insular mood of Quaranta, with its themes of addiction and depression, it’s refreshing to hear Brown having unabashed neon-lit fun.

Saputjiji is a profoundly uncomfortable and rigid listen, stripped of easy melodies and devoid of false hope. .... She has built a towering work out of static, grief and unyielding resistance, proving once again that she is one of the most vital, terrifyingly brilliant artists operating in Canada today.

With its huge, graceful scope, FIBS smirks slyly at any presumptions or hopes listeners may harbour. These fibs are alive – a thriving, amoebic album consuming the petri dish in which it was formed.

Mantras build and collapse on themselves, choruses rise and fall, and enveloping you with a rich seam of guitar pop.

Whilst the album sounds confident and assured, its lyrical themes are built around questions, without ever proposing answers.

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.