A taut, at times challenging, but engrossing collection of sounds.

Good intentions, interesting sounds, and a handful of great songs; compromised by an inflexible house style. It makes listening to the album from start to finish an experience that is occasionally rewarding – especially with a decent set of headphones – but ultimately, well … trying.

A powerfully confessional record steeped in mystery.

Deciding to reflect on states of mind some of us could resonate to – especially this year – BE serves as a chronicle of what 2020 has been during lockdown: a year of uncertainty, anxiety, depression and frustration. But it also delivers hope for the future.

Send Them To Coventry is an album bursting with life. Pa Salieu sounds confident and convincing whatever style he turns his hand to. Whether or not it’s the best album of 2020, it’s surely one of the most interesting, and should be a strong contender for awards in the coming months.

The results are beautiful, an upside to all this desolation, a lengthy excursion among the snippets. Perhaps there could have been a couple more of these at the expense of some of the shorter, less obviously complete pieces, but as a fascinating clear-up exercise, Lamentations makes a virtue of its small sorrows.

It delivers an impressive belt around the chops from the start, with ‘Valleys’ building from eardrum-realigning bass to a full-force techno-rock wig-out.

Side one exemplifies 2020 in that it’s not entirely successful. While there are great ideas bursting to get out, it also lurches mechanically and is difficult to love. It often feels laboured, like Kirk is giving himself a migraine trying to reinvent something because you suspect he feels that’s his job. Flip the record over and the outlook changes. Once he submits to the pulsating rhythms and allows himself to be free then there’s a gold rush.

It’s a mixed affair, with moments of excellence interspersed with filler over a sprawling twenty-two tracks. The production is a strongpoint on FlySiifu’s, with fourteen different producers making a contribution across the project. Most of the beats are dreamy and relaxed, almost merging into one another such that the album frequently feels like one long, continuous melody.

In so many ways, Monument encapsulates everything Molchat Doma has to offer. Having recently signed to Sacred Bones Records in January and a successful few months of nonstop streams, 2020 has really been a strong year for the group.

As a collection of songs, Disco is a terrific soundtrack to washing the dishes or a dance-off. But this album itself underestimates its own artist, which is in a small way unforgivable.

For open ears the recordings on Pakistan Is For The Peaceful offer immersive ever-spiralling tracks that reach ecstatic heights as they open up endless waves of spiritual harmonies, beyond the drone and into the unknown.

BENEE may not necessarily be an album artist, but listeners will find that most bases are covered within Hey u x’s 13 tracks. ... There’s a song here for every playlist, even if consuming all 13 in a row becomes a bit of a drag.

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

What Tunng have shown with Presents…Dead Club is that addressing grief and death doesn’t have to be devastating. It can be thought-provoking. It can also be simply pleasurable.

The pared down arrangements showcase a set of mostly previously released material in a way previously unheard. The at times slightly slower pace reveals more depth and warmth to the arrangements and, if anything, offer more than in this form than they were originally presented.

Theoretically there’s enough variety here to take Bolan’s songs in the many and varied directions they deserve. The results, however, are mixed enough to ensure that debates about Bolan’s place in the canon of greatness will continue.

Frusciante has given space for Maya to breathe, for the powerful breakbeats to push things forward to their full potential.

The combination of Diggs’s hyper-enunciated double-time flow, William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes’s twisted industrial production, and high-concept albums strikes me as original.

There is a sense of nostalgia throughout, with tracks such as ‘Angels Pharmacy’ and ‘Remembrance’ featuring female vocalist Zsela giving off hazy club vibes. The turn to voice, Actress’s first time, has formed a deeper sense of worldliness, the invasion of corporal sensation into his production style.

Dark Hearts marks an astute shift away from the energy of the clubs, focusing instead on hazy synth pop. Languid ballads run through the album and their production feats, led by the work of Stefan Storm, are best enjoyed on headphones.

SIGN is a welcome detour, a diversion, and in these difficult and complicated times, a salve of sorts. It’s as close to chill-out music as the duo are ever likely to get, making it the perfect Autechre album for 2020.

The album manages to be wholly fulfilling. Each track takes on its own character, sometimes wispy and laid black, channelling the unbounded soulfulness of Erykah Badu’s New Amerykah albums like on She’s My Brand New Crush. At other times they’re pointed and deliberate, such as ‘Cut To The Chase’, which does away with sung lyrics entirely for statements spoken over tribalistic percussion and futuristic electronic harmonies.

All things considered, this is a brilliant record from Metz, and perhaps the closest they’ve yet come to capturing their incredible live performance on record.

In Silver Ladders, Mary Lattimore brings the harp back down to earth still covered in clouds, but also threaded with veins of gloom that marble its silvery glow.

For an album that is extremely paired down, it is complete in all its meditative richness and erudite honey light. Gold Record presents itself as an album of quiet epiphanies - reaching into the interior space of the quotidien and feeling around for something that is tempting to romanticise, but instead, producing it before an audience with a frankness that trumps a flourish.

Napalm Death continue to exist to push sonic boundaries and challenge dogmas, and it’s great to hear them have fun here while further broadening the vitriolic sound they’ve defined into a singular movement.

For all the synthetic otherworldliness, this record is unflinchingly honest in its assessment of the United States as well as a very personal and raw portrait of Steven’s own humanity and fallibility. There’s no dogma, only equivocation.