North London girl gang Girl Ray’s surprisingly pop-minded second album has more in common with the bard’s saucy woodland comedy than at first you might suspect: quips, troublesome romances, and pleasing rhymes abound against the backdrop of a hazy LA summer.

Re-working black histories through both a personal lens and the structure of modern technologies, Moor Mother has created an album as a mythos of possibilities, a cartography of hope.

To even summarise each moment of Drift is a challenge. What I can say is the elements of surprise and familiarity work together to form a deep, dark and wonderful hole, unmanageable by its very nature, and beautifully chaotic. The essential ingredients of Underworld are all there.

Like a young monster venturing out into the world on its own, Volume Massimo, despite its pretences towards a pop sensibility, is still a beast at its core, but it’s an album that showcases just how much Cortini‘s aesthetic has developed since his early days.

With Wrecked, ZONAL and Moor Mother have made a joyously feel bad album whose grinding negativity and tidal heaviness provides a necessary form of catharsis, that sloughs or burns off the stench of ego and know-betterisms. It demands a form of humility from the listener both of their place in the world, and of the experience and position of others.

A transcendental eloquence comes out in this unique artefact. What we have is a series of sketches, providing a fitting closing statement to his legacy as a series of ideas strewn together, much like his life beginning as a poet. ... Thanks For The Dance stands out as an emblem of the artist’s life work. Dancing between satire, melancholy and tenderness, his final words stand out as the mark of a worldview drawn from a life lived in the shadow of his own genius.

It’s very easy for a reviewer to play armchair warrior and forward claims for all sorts of nonsense for music they like. But this is a glorious, heart-stopping, essential album. You’d have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by it.

On Your Wilderness Revisited, Doyle sheds himself of the bad habits he developed as an emergent successful recording artist in East India Youth and takes on the role of the Proustian artist. He takes pleasure in and extrapolates beauty from the suburbs that raised him, and takes pains to share that beauty with us.

They don’t sound like a band trying to tap into an otherworldly and infinite negation, they sound like a band trying to recreate their early power and glory.

Everything here is distorted. Everything as resonant as it can possibly be. Sharpened, infinitely intensified and yet simultaneously blunted and blurred. There is just the right amount of detail.

Twigs still finds ferocious power in her music, her femininity, and her sexuality. But on MAGDALENE, she tampers that ferocity with a radical sensitivity and vulnerability that indicate a broader maturation in her artistic development.

The latest iteration of Homme’s continuous project has come a long way since the epic jams of the late 90s, having evolved into more refined, and fully realised series of releases, never failing to inhabit the spirit of risk and adventure.

If to stir is to mix and combine, or to transform something that was one thing into something else, this shows what Kleijn and MacKay can do so remarkably when set to that task.

But where her EPs stubbornly wrapped tracks of jarring, syncopated beats around those massive tracks, Athena leans more towards R&B, and Parks takes advantage of the space of an LP to smooth out any previous idiosyncrasies.

Their bravest and strongest work to date.

With its huge, graceful scope, FIBS smirks slyly at any presumptions or hopes listeners may harbour. These fibs are alive – a thriving, amoebic album consuming the petri dish in which it was formed.

Judging by the results of Juice B Crypts, this revitalisation of purpose feels very much like something radiating directly from the artists themselves. Hardly a complete renewal or about-face, but rather a refining of methodology and intent, a distillation of what made them so exciting to begin with.

The album dazzles with the thrilling cocktail of styles Gordon’s been through, as if changing channels on the coolest radio on earth. But she never makes herself fully at home in any of them. ... Gordon’s bet is that the people are ready for weirdness, that the world can embrace its complexities. And the only way is forward.

Regardless, however you or I might feel about almost-literal computer music is beside the point. The strong sense of perpetual emergence – of listening in on an intelligent system gaining confidence – makes Blossoms an especially remarkable listen.

Sonic Citadel is Lightning Bolt at their most poppy and accessible.

It would be a stretch to say that this album is easy going, but it’s probably the most accessible of his records. It’s exciting to find such an artist trying out more populist forms.

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.

The Practice of Love reveals the sensitive humane core that was always behind Hval’s practice of enlightened dissent. The album develops an elegant approach to solving the existential problems of love, care and intimacy from the position of otherness.

There is a playful freedom on display from start to finish. By increasing the importance of the bass and keyboards (a move possibly inspired by fellow Swedish prog compatriots Anekdoten) and simultaneously writing with string arrangements in mind, the innate grandeur at the heart of this band’s music has never been as audible as it is now.

There are clear signs of the heights he’d soon reach on A Love Supreme five months later. Observing such incremental shifts is both fascinating and valuable, and while the performances are all deeply satisfying it remains a tad disappointing that archival projects like this one tend to blot out contemporary work that proves that jazz continues to push forward in the present.

From first note to last, The Fiery Margin is a recording that exudes complete confidence.

The poetry of Gruff’s lyricism is second to none. His ability to flit from language to language between projects, expressing himself with elegance and eloquence in either, is not only an enviable talent but a unique one.

One of the best dance LPs of recent times from one of the moment’s most valuable artists.