Although some darkness is present, A Man For All Seasons delivers a sense of hope. The album’s charm is in its vulnerability.

Musically, it’s a travesty. .... Little glimmers of Mike Patton’s personality do, accidentally, seep in. His campy performance during ‘Heaven’s Breath’ lands somewhere between Alice Cooper and Nick Cave.

A vital artefact, 1985: The Miracle Year catches Hüsker Dü at their most inventive, straddling the line between hardcore ferocity and pop accessibility while revealing a potent mix of raw power, emotional maturity and musical ambition that helped pave the way for alternative rock’s emergence from the underground into the mainstream.

There are highlights, sure (twigs is too preternaturally talented to avoid those completely), like the gleeful ‘Sushi’ or gorgeous closer ‘Stereo Boy’, but even the more compelling tracks like ‘Cheap Hotel’ – a satisfyingly eerie piece of slow-garage – would rank towards the bottom of EUSEXUA’s track-list. What’s odd is that we know twigs can do this style justice – she has an album from early this same year to prove it – so its bewildering to hear her deliver one unrewarding song after another.

What you’ll know after listening to Vesper Sparrow, is an option for the album of the year.

Lopatin doesn’t just wring moments of grin-inducing audacity from the archive, though, but a startling degree of emotional range too. .... It’s a magic trick he pulls off again on Tranquilizer: sifting through the graveyard of our computers’ dreaming and conjuring something enchanting.

A Little Death showcases Rousay’s ability to convey complex feelings of nostalgia, bringing to mind the themes of films such as Aftersun or Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind in their wistful approach to the portrayal of memories.

While track-sequencing can edge towards clunky territory at times, How You Been is a colourful murmuration of percussive, glacial synths and exploratory jazz interplay. Exciting, expansive and entrancing, SML are evidence of the supergroup’s enduring power.

After the insular mood of Quaranta, with its themes of addiction and depression, it’s refreshing to hear Brown having unabashed neon-lit fun.

Their seventh stellar album in a row. .... The Alchemist makes for an inconspicuous partner, creating eerie soundscapes upon which Woods and ELUCID make things a whole lot eerier. And make no mistake, there are some hair-raising cuts here. .... Armand Hammer are equally adept at turning the world suddenly inward, punctuating political madness with moments of real poignance.

The album is spacious yet claustrophobic, improvisatory yet focused. You find something new with each return visit.

Across seven songs, she builds an intimate ecosystem of sound: an act of re-inhabiting the body through vocal layering, breath and harmony.

For all their compositional and audible dissimilarities, each group of tracks represents a strident argument for the place of the human and the instinctive even amid finished pieces which, at first exposure, may read as more electronic than organic. .... Throughout each EP there’s audible glimpses of the rooms the live performances took place in: shouts and applause being the obvious ones, the sense of space and warmth more felt than heard.

Throughout, Tobias balances the baroque, saturating instincts of chamber pop with urgent, to-the-point rock segments, the romantic swells of plucked and bowed strings on ‘Political Solution’ or ‘The Scam’ tempered by the almost post-punk gestures of ‘I Feel Hated’ that hug Tobias’s soulful cadence with hard-driven indietronica à la Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

For the listener, its rawness can feel akin to ambulance chasing or scrolling the sidebar of shame. But in the fishbowl of fame that Allen has existed in since ‘Smile’ came out in 2006, it’s also a massive eff you to the prurient media class. .... Here it is in all its hypnotic, looking-at-a-car-crash glory: vomiting up beautiful couplets of utter emotional desolation and romantic hopelessness.

The growing distance of time and space unfortunately seems to have had an effect on the album, which, while not without its bright spots, is disjointed and lacks the group chemistry that’s kept their best work so resonant over the years.

Hamdan stays true to her musical roots while capturing the anguish of our times. She balances grief with persistence, tempering pain and disappointment with the experimental grooviness she’s known for

There’s a distracted short-attention-span looseness going on that feels artificial and I hope it is, because otherwise it’s just thick. Shallowness worn proudly. Where some lines technically work, overall it gets so disjointed and almost comedically dumb-arse, it becomes less than the sum of its parts.

The band, led by its creative core Douglas Dulgarian, have managed to fuse the noisiness of reverse-reverb effects and jungle breaks with the dark, heavy textures of contemporary shoegaze. And Lotto, their most recent outburst, might well be their greatest.

‘Out Of These Blues’ adds a country twang to the formula. ‘Live With Hope’ uses a gospel choir. A couple of others are more stripped back and equally forgettable.

The first seconds of ‘Freestyle’ are a patchwork of samples giving way to a tight and propelling track that shares its dark allure with 90s alt-rockers Morphine. Punctuated by bass saxophone, the spoken-word vocals are articulate, bringing to mind Howard Devoto at his best.

On their best album to date, it makes for extraordinary music, rich and rewarding. The smallest tonal shifts define the way the next moment feels.

SickElixir is the sound of technology having long widened the disparity between the ruthlessly wealthy and those clinging on by the half moons of their brittle fingernails. .... Blawan has provided the perfect soundtrack for us to writhe about to, like maggots in the dark.

The great joy of Agriculture’s music is the way they make these abrupt shifts flow naturally. On their second album they broaden the scope of their sound while integrating its many aspects more fluidly.

This is unabashedly retro-stuff, cut from the same silken cloth as Timbaland and Noah Shebib. But that’s no bad thing. Rochelle makes the sound her own, effortlessly. Some music is just cool, plain and simple.

The album unfolds at its own unhurried pace. Initially, it can feel almost vaporous, but its textural richness rewards patience; with each listen, new layers emerge, like light shifting through water at different times of day.

The trio’s music here is still that much more dynamic and to the point, especially as Ambarchi’s ghostly riffs start waving through the groove’s valleys and mountains, evoking the intricate loops of his solo albums.

Perhaps the main strength of 41 Longfield Street Late ‘80s is that these songs rarely turn out to be what you thought they might be, which is a fairly on the nose metaphor for life itself – especially viewed 35 years later through the distorted prism of the 2020s.