Remix collections tend to be a mixed bag. Mixes Of A Lost World is no different.

Goddess doesn’t stick to one style, and though there are echoes of Gibbons, Del Rey and Sade, the album’s coherence comes from its themes and overall mood and not by remaining within a single niche.

Much as Wolf himself has moved on from his string of tragedies to create something beautiful, what fuels this record is the belief that this is possible on a grander scale.

The outcome of this pairing is an uneven affair, with deep troughs and high peaks.

On Death Mask, Fearless lifts the lid on what lies beneath and exposes his true self in ways that he’s always been reluctant to entertain. Fearless honesty suits him.

There’s a universality to More which benefits from Cocker’s inimitable, offbeat perspective.

Everything on the album is audible but nothing is settled. He has a skilled compositional hand and an ability to shape the shapeless.

The album captures a specific kind of contemporary attention span: fractured, fleeting, slightly numb. It’s sparse, suggestive, and pointedly uninterested in conventional structure.

There is an intimacy inherent in the way that caroline let the stitches, scraps and seams show across this record, and masterful playing and songwriting matches the presentation perfectly.

At 34 minutes, The Foel Tower is a relatively brief window into the romantic and naturalistic world of Quade, but every second is made to count on this gorgeous record.

Another masterpiece from this most singular of groups, Crooked Wing deserves to soar.

The band’s indefinite hiatus has not been in vain, as they have clearly been spending this time carefully piecing together what feels like their strongest album in years. Instant Holograms on Metal Film also feels particularly emotionally resonant.

The production credits read like a fever dream: The Alchemist, Kenny Segal, EL-P, Conductor Williams, Preservation, Messiah Musik, Sadhugold, Ant, Shabaka Hutchings, Steel Tipped Dove, DJ Haram, Willie Green, Jeff Markey, Saint Abdullah, and Human Error Club. And yet, the sound holds together. Disorienting, yes. But deliberate. Woods is the constant: his voice measured, ghostly, sometimes smirking.

He’s come up with ten numbers that linger plenty enough for earwormery to set in.

Mclusky are here with us now and guess what? They’ve grown up. Don’t panic: they’re as daft and irreverent as ever but there’s a newfound inventiveness to their songwriting that’s clearly the result of experience. With Falco and drummer Jack Egglestone perennially busy with projects like Future of the Left and Christian Fitness, the past twenty years haven’t been spent idly, and it shows.

Abyss doesn’t chase innovation for its own sake – it chooses clarity over chaos, presence over posture. In doing so, Anika crafts a document that’s less about sound as spectacle and more about the quiet horror of being awake in the wreckage.

It’s one that may feel familiar to fans of his hard, unfussy, crisp-but-rugged production style but this vision of techno is deceptively idiosyncratic and contains within it a number of important clues to uncovering Child’s true relationship to the music that’s been his bread and butter for the last three decades.

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.

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.

More harmonically rich than earlier releases where bass and kick reigned, this album places vintage organ motifs at its linguistic centre. These recurring textures make the record distinctive, not only within Moss’s discography but within contemporary dance music at large.

In an era of genre-less music, it’s nice to hear an album that does one thing and does it well, capturing a landscape so old it never really gets old.

Heydarian’s approach in his second album is quite respectable. He makes no bold statements; and avoids falling into the trap of pseudo mysticism and over technicality. His music is subtle, mature, humble, and simple, yet worth exploring.

Just as it’s often repeated that serious science fiction is written about the present rather than the future; this cinematic soundtrack seems reflective of contemporary reality much more than an invented narrative.

That anyone could craft work so head-spinningly euphoric, so joyous and life-affirming, as a deliberate response to the unmooring felt following the death of their partner and amid an ongoing war with their own mental health, is a kind of miracle. But that’s just the start of what’s marvellous about this magnificent record.

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.

Listening to Antigone, one can hear everything Ishibashi has achieved in these fruitful past few years coming to a head. It’s a risk-taking, ambitious album-length statement that further cements Ishibashi’s place in a rare pantheon of artists – one including O’Rourke, Scott Walker and Autechre – making some of their best work thirty-plus years into their career.

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.

Constant Noise redirects attention to the urgent task of repairing the fractured connections within our society. At times, the message may feel on the nose, but to articulate an appropriate emotional response, such directness may be warranted in an era where division reigns.