Whether this album’s your first insight into Prison, or you’re a die-hard fan, on Downstate, the band hooks listeners in with a unique compilation of progressive stoner rock songs.

A Shaw Deal is an aural patchwork stitched together with the technical ability and confidence of an established sonic manipulator, but above all that – it’s a beautiful ode to friendship and music’s healing power.

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.

If you’re welcoming another wired morning, indulging in orgiastic dance floor exploits, or simply want to lose your head, Decius have got you more than covered.

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.

A terrific follow-up Mogwai’s No.1 smash.

It’s an album that, as much as it looks inwards lyrically, is finally just as universal as Weather Station’s climate change-themed breakthrough album Ignorance, a remarkable achievement in itself.

It’s a boundary-pushing work that, depending on the listener, could be considered either powerfully engrossing or deeply alienating.

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.

It’s not bad, sometimes it’s even very good, but it ought to feel much more significant than this.

The good news is that BMB still tear it up. These recordings hit like the gut-troubling, sub-bass fists of a sonic pugilist.

Heavily drenched in the pursuit of nostalgia, Prismatics is hypnagogic pop at its most loyally rendered, the pixelated synthscapes encapsulating a temporal exploration of an envisioned utopia that has since been lost.

You’re Only Young Once But You Can Be Stupid Forever can be regarded as a lighthearted counterbalance, yearning for both innate and planetary peace while making no concessions concerning personal and artistic perspective.

This latest release, Mosaic, is Fennesz at his most cinematically emotional. The catharsis at times risks spilling into soundtrack-type material, but Fennesz’s trademark textural warmth keeps the music immersive and involving at all times.

By deconstructing their identity, Saint Etienne have created a coherent sequence of remarkable songs which sound like everything else they have done and nothing else, at the same time. It is a very impressive achievement.

The result is a collection that, while it lacks the retrospective finality of the song-driven True North, a meditation on the passing of time that closed Chapman’s career as a singer-songwriter, nevertheless underscores the idea of Chapman as a guitar player who didn’t need words to express himself. And that’s no mean feat on Tuttle’s part, especially as, coming to Another Tide cold, you could easily believe it was the work of younger artists pushing into new territory.

While Stein’s arrangements are frequently simple, they are never sparse. Despite the minimalist approach to the songs, the production still sounds full, allowing distant echoing sounds to emphasise what’s there rather than imply what’s missing.

Nobody Loves You More is the sound of an all-timer breaking vast new ground while holding her head high.

Ballads Of Harry Houdini is more like a spiritual sequel to the rockier and cross-genre Highway Songs from 2016. It feels deceptively slimmer with just six songs, rather than nine. In fact, its total running time is ten minutes longer. Maybe more focused, then?

If the start of Too Cold To Hold is faintly predictable, the rest of the album opens up into something rather more unexpected. The band have always weaved elements of hip-hop and jazz into their messed-up punk-funk but here they’ve refined it and pushed it forward. The sounds seem richer and more ambitious.

It is a gorgeous, masterly and strangely addictive album.

The band’s twisted takes on dub, electronica and popular music find transcendence through the contributions of guests, like vocalists Chen and Ben Eberle, live strings, horns and piano, and the nuanced production of Seth Manchester.

Natur stands out in that it is less about the conflict between the two and more about their mutual evolution. Nature and technology are not dueling forces to place against each other, but a continuum that needs to be reckoned with.

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.

Rhetoric & Terror is a multi-textural album, constantly swinging in different directions, resulting in a less immersive time than Nonpareils’ debut. The album is constantly in flux, moving between different states like Hemphill’s mind.

From Kobza’s “trad walz inflected” ‘Bunny’, released in 1971, to Ihor Tsymbrovsky’s wonderfully melodramatic chanson, ‘Beatrice’, from 1996. Along the way we get gems like The Hostilnia’s marvellously doleful rap, ‘Sick Song’, from 1992 and work by the remarkable Svitlana Okhrimenko from Sugar White Death.

It would take a hell of a reinvention to pull back Primal Scream from this stinking brink. Come Ahead is a record that fails, fatally, to recognise that Bobby Gillespie was always Primal Scream’s least compelling element.

With Chromakopia, Tyler, The Creator crafts an album that is as much an exploration of identity as it is a sonic masterpiece. .... Collaborators – Childish Gambino, Willow, Doechii, GloRilla, Lil Wayne, Sexyy Red, Solange, and Teezo Touchdown – each adding distinct textures and perspectives that enhance the album’s emotional complexity.