It is these three songs [MMMOOOAAAAAYAYA, Pool Hopping and Threatening Each Other re: Capitalism] that, in their hugeness, tend to overshadow the rest of the record on initial listens. Though the remaining tracks should not be missed or dismissed because of that.

Goat has distilled what could have so very easily become an overblown meandering jam fest into a punchy, forceful and infectious masterpiece of cosmic rock & roll – the will is palpable, nigh a trace of fat on these bleached bones.

The Scientists never really broke through to a wider audience. But what they did do is leave behind a body of work that was picked up by subsequent generations and cited as highly influential. There’s certainly much to enjoy here but there’s also plenty to re-affirm their cult status in the greater scheme of things.

It’s emotive, heavy, satisfying. It’s Deftones. They’ve made their album again and, honestly, you wouldn’t have it any other way.

Funny, weird, irreverent, a bit messy in places, Wet Leg’s debut feels like a rollicking night out at your local indie disco compacted into thirty-six brisk and breezy minutes. Across a dozen by turns funny and fraught tracks, the highs and lows of twenty-something life are captured with zinging joie de vivre.

As great as these tracks are though, it's difficult to shake the feeling that they just aren't really Daft Punk.

Dalton famously believed that a singer shouldn't have to raise her voice to be heard. These minimalist arrangements, whether it's Isobel Campbell affecting a slight twang to match her guitar or Larkin Grimm legitimate twang (and the album's only banjo), are a fitting tribute in themselves.

It’s ‘The Promise’, perhaps, that best shows how these elements have been streamlined for maximum impact: deliciously tricksy drum patterns and a bleach-guzzling melody are welded to a simplistic lump hammer thump to devastating feels-so-wrong-it-must-be-right effect.

Innocence Is Kinky is a remarkable album, one which delves beneath the surface and returns with something both seductive and strange.

There is nothing comfortable about these traditions, but the evident joy in each other’s skills pushes the three musicians to peaks of subtle innovation. What News is just the latest in a string of Alasdair Roberts albums which turn our idea of folk music upside down and give it back to us charged with a new potency.

In Colour is ultimately too tidy and, Young Thug features aside, afraid to take risks, and is therefore all the more beige for it.

Voices From The Lake is a love letter to slow, concentrated listening.

McMahon examines masculinity, vulnerability and how cultural consumption converges with personal demons, and it has resulted in an album of immense integrity, defiance and beauty.

For You & I is consistent in its spirit with the label’s catalogue: often in its sound, too, although in a decade and a half Hyperdub has covered enough ground for this to be nebulous. That spirit, though, manifests itself in a defiant queerness; a grab-bag approach borne of big city multiculturalism; and a clear fascination with, and love of, sound in general.

This album is more grounded than the last: $ilk and Khalil Blu’s arrays into progressive soul, as well as their Soulquarians-style samples and wavy melodies, counterbalance the former’s intensity with a sense of calm befitting introspection. Their refined production creates the kind of depth wherein $ilk’s more personal lyrics can come through.

With features like BIA, Jorja Smith, Reykon, Tyler The Creator and Bootsy Collins, Uchis’ debut is clearly meant to make a big impact, and her romantic-tragic persona complements it beautifully.

Excellent. .... The single guest vocal comes on the album’s only misfire ‘Childlike Things’, which bizarrely features vocals from North West, the eleven-year old daughter of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, who contributes a rap in English and Japanese. With its sing-song chorus, brattish chanting and self-consciously zany lyrics (“Like a chocolate teapot / Melt ‘em down and burn ‘em up”) it sticks out on an otherwise sophisticated album, and is just plain annoying.

It is the sound of a musician coming to terms with the excruciation of making art and exposing himself without armour.

This is no retro throwback, Power Trip have poured their genuine, obsessive love of early thrash, but also Cro-Mags, Prong and Black Flag to create a boiling pot of modern metal mastery.

Fatigue deserves to be listened to in succession. It needs you to sit down with a cup of tea, it needs to be envisioned and thought through. You need to let it embody a change for you, and take you somewhere else, where you can sit in the duality of your own emotions. Each song is preceded by an interlude to piece the emotions of each track together.

Herein lies Róisín Machine’s beauty at its most uncomplicated: every single one of its songs implores you to dance, and in doing so implores you also to forget the human fragility of which you are so incessantly reminded. Vicariously through Róisín Murphy – be she god, machine, person, or something floating between them – we can forget our fragile bodies, losing ourselves in a blissful utopia, even if only for an hour.

Above all, it represents a bold, sensorily majestic step in the right direction by an artist no longer content to tread water.

As is often the case with PC Music-affiliated works, this is an album which displays, and not infrequently, extraordinary flashes of inspired production work, but can descend into tedium with as much suddenness. ... And when the whole affair does eventually draw to a close with the hum of an air conditioner and the sound of the flying Jony Ive heroine thing from Wall-E, you will probably give an audible sigh of relief. And then spin the whole album again.

Musically, it's painfully simple; sonically, it's painfully complex.

His most stripped back to date, featuring mostly Dawson’s voice, guitar and percussion, so that when a saxophone appears it drops like a bomb. It is also his most direct and haunting work, and a confident, sophisticated achievement that is surely his best work so far. .... With End of the Middle, Rich has given us the album we didn’t know we needed.

Each track is inevitably a wild combination of memories, ideas, and influences – midi-fied sacred harp singers clash with squiggly synthesis, fiddle collides with the most absurd funk bass. Meanwhile, the spectre of prog is everywhere and the club is never far away. Amazingly, it all works.

Discernible throughout Are We There is the sense that she is operating with more levity and confidence than ever before, and a song that ends with a joke, a studio outtake and the sound of laughter is the perfect way to see it out.

Shrewdly, she rarely repeats herself, keeping things fresh by always being adventurous. That’s worked throughout her career, and it works on Tension especially.