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.

Each of the eighteen tracks gathered on Livity Sound absolutely wrecks on a big rig, ripping ragged from the speakers, turning small basement rooms into packed, humming resonance chambers and settling teeth and viscera rattling.

Yeule sits in a coterie of future thinkers making eclectic pop music, and since the scene has become a cultural firecracker in the last few years, many artists are seeing praise for work that rests on its recent success. Glitch Princess moves the goalposts once again.

Pure Comedy (or, I would say, Tillman in general) doesn’t suffer for its big ideas, it thrives on them; the real problem is the constant circling and underlining and pointing out those big ideas when just letting them sit and mystify in their black hole weightiness would do.

Previously, Brian Leeds made music that you could dance to. Now he makes music to lose yourself in.

Spare, affecting and hauntingly melodic, For The World is a timeless record, looking back only in a human, personal way--not to some lost golden age, but over a life lived, with all its ups and downs, losses and gains.

It's rich and hypnotic, but it's not an easy listen: the gloom of many of the tracks will feel oppressive to some.

Le jour et la nuit du réel proves something else entirely: that these hunks of wood and wire and circuitry still have the potential to surprise. And to delight us with those surprises.

If age and the rigours of the road can start to tell as a result, the energy level is still there, whether on a strong version of the Gore-sung late 90s highlight ‘Home’ or a lovely turn through Memento Mori’s striking lead single ‘Ghosts Again’. There’s a bit of a bonus this time out. Following the live cuts, four songs from the Memento Mori sessions are included. It’s understandable why they didn’t make the cut, feeling more like good enough album tracks at most.

You might not have thought to put Anderson and Kronos Quartet together, but they did think of it, and the results are, in both the philosophical and the colloquial senses, sublime.

With three of the nine songs clocking in at over seven minutes-long, every note is earned and necessarily. Extended instrumental breaks and outros never feel gratuitous, if anything they allow the listener to fall deeper into the song, to lose track of time.

The composer with the Radio 6Music soul has constructed something elegant, thought-provoking and comforting that will genuinely make you wish it was October.

Crucially, her sense of humour remains intact, sharp and lethal – the sweet laments carried by her increasingly accomplished voice feel often to be one step away from, not laughter exactly, but self-deprecation, or a mordant smile at her own expense.

Loom is a brave and raw document from the frontlines of grief, exhibiting the full range of its manifestations beyond sadness – its vacancy, rage and disorientation, delivered with a sweet disposition, enchanting you into a greater and richer awareness of what lies beneath, revealing deep beauty in the collision of exhilarating creativity and inevitable doom.

Their best record to date, Ecstatic Arrow reminds us of the astonishing things you can do with pop music if you dare defy conventions.

Developed over a rough couple of years for the band, with both singer Valentine Caulfield and drummer Alex Macdougall battling sickness and enduring multiple rounds of surgery, it nevertheless arrives sounding invigorated and defiant.

Astroworld is no Rodeo or Birds In The Trap Singing McKnight, but it’s a beautiful creation of sonically striking sounds.

You Are Eternity is not po-faced, despite its thematic and sonic weight, it's concise and does the job with a glint.

Ndola emphasises the need to acknowledge and learn origin stories to gain a deeper understanding of how music works both locally and globally in the present. Far from just another spectacularly re-playable adventure from Kampire, this is the most convincing evidence to date that she’s an excellent musicologist and historian, not just an exceptional DJ.

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.

It is a bold, expansive body of work that should have all the praise heaped on it because, without warning, she dropped one of the strongest albums of the year on us.

While ‘no body, no crime’ is easily evermore’s biggest misstep, there are a handful of forgettable songs on here. ... evermore benefits throughout from a more forgiving production style, but the songs are slightly less good here: it doesn’t have a song as accomplished as ‘the last great american dynasty’, as revelatory as ‘peace’ or a crowning achievement like ‘exile.’ It is generally a joy to listen to, and it is a joy to see her so comfortable and so prolific.

Memento Mori is an absolute triumph. It’s almost the real songs of faith and devotion that they’d spoke of thirty years ago. Universal themes of mortality, love, anxiety; a handful of pop gems and what feels like an economical stripping back of the stadium-ness of previous works, making it their best long player this side of the century.

R.A.P. Music is an album that takes the energy of hip hop's rebellious instincts as its heart and reminds us of their importance.

In contrast to the usual free improvisation idiom and its tendency to meander between abstract figures and skronking freakouts, the four pieces here – each of them around twenty minutes long – are locked into steady, slowly shifting rhythms that give the music a funky, cosy feeling ... A lovely, warm album.

At turns subtle, delicate, naked, brutal, and deeply affecting in a way rarely managed by contemporary dance producers, and it's both a continuation of his previous work and a departure further than ever before from the DJ weapons that made his reputation.

The minutiae of each song’s sonic environment reveals far more than a casual listen, making this an album best experienced through headphones.

A Mythology Of Circles isn’t a radical reinvention for the Brooklyn-based composer, but it is a significant leap forward in her craft.