It’s a superb return to the traditional album for Deacon. He's clearly learned a great deal making soundtracks, producing a record of a grand cinematic scale with a clearer eye on creating emotionally shifting tracks. Yet Dan Deacon maintains his constant look towards salvation and joy and retains an almost incomparable gift for conjuring them in a listener.

It all speaks of erudition, repetition used and abused in a dizzy concatenation. 25 25 is music as heartbeat (and screw the arrhythmia). Essential.

While Deliverance does have instances of real bracing power, it equally finds itself faltering in its most exposed moments where it really needs to connect.

Thought Rock Fish Scale arrives wholesome and homely rather than exciting or challenging, as if missing the lights of the big city.

At times, Miami Memory feels like a streamlined repurposing of pop music's warmest sounds – be it the glowing synth jabs on Stepdad or the crispest of snares on Far From Born Again and Divorce – all retooled with a new level of subtlety and honesty for Cameron. What you’re left with is ten great pop songs; bitingly funny, bombastically anthemic and gently sensual, often at the same time.

He’s skilled enough to make it sound agile and purposeful. You’ve heard the individual parts before though, with more range, colour, and taste. It’s Alright Between Us… will do its job, but on the cheap.

December is a difficult month for many ('The countdown's started / It’s a hollow toll for the heavy hearted') and these songs are likely to resonate with those feeling adrift. How comforting they are, despite the lack of 'wise men and virgins', is an additional triumph.

While some tracks like Panpsych and Eternal Return remain lost at sea – the latter's lurching tempo is a bit of an auditory mess – KGLW's experimentation with brass, strings, and woodwind definitely hits more than it misses. Drawing together calamity and fortune in a novel way, 15 years in, Phantom Island shows a band still having fun making music together.

TMBG’s 20th album, I LIke Fun, doesn’t mess with the template too much. If you come to this record knowing only the TMBG song used as the soundtrack to Malcolm in the Middle, you’ll get a hearty helping of everything there is to like--and, yes dislike.

While it may not be the collection of hits we were hoping for, The Sun Will Come Up, The Seasons Will Change is a little like a compilation of musical diary entries sprinkled with newly learnt wisdom: it’s fun, it’s new, and it’s Nesbitt's coming-of-age moment.

It’s fitting BODEGA’s debut has all the essentials covered; wry wit, shrewd observations and a vision of art rock’s finest punk party. Like, listen, like, like.

A masterpiece in wistful, cathartic electronica, his seventh studio album Fragments.

There is little to separate the tracks from each other, resulting in a batch of unmemorable songs. Lionheart promised much, but fails to capture the imagination in the way McEntire’s previous work has.

Packed with irresistible hooks and confessional lyrics, you'll find her best songs to date here; it's clear that Baby Queen understands the cinema of pop music.

It’s a chaotic, wonderfully soundtracked journey from one of the best underground musical collectives to come out of Glasgow.

Not only are the band adding to their soundtrack credentials but they're also getting rather good at the old pop banger.

On Future Politics we find Austra revolving on the spot, caught in a flattering beam of light but still hovering on the brink of taking those first, brave steps towards a radical utopia.

Weighty subject matter, then, but Harris’ John Darnielle-esque delivery rams the message home amidst their strongest set of tunes since 2006’s The Body, The Blood, The Machine, with Kathy Foster’s on-point harmonies (Thinking Of You) and propulsive bass (Always Never Be) adding purpose to their power-punk arsenal.

The album is chock full of thundering tunes and monster riffage. It might be that is all you need. Unfortunately, though, Carter has a tendency to call on his inner Billy Idol when he should be channelling Ian MacKaye (see Wild Flowers).

The results are rewarding. Could We Be More is a finely crafted unit that takes KOKOROKO’s span of influences (highlife and afrobeat in the vein of Fela Kuti and Ebo Taylor; a solid education in jazz; the entire city of London) and spins them through a dream machine of sorts.

It's the peppiest, jauntiest, most charismatic debut you’ll likely find in the next 12 months.

We’ve seen more than enough spark between the two on previous efforts to know that there’s a future for them; it’s just a shame they chose to rail against their best instincts this time round.

Lyrics are as simple and as witty as ever, focusing around sexual desire, jealousy and life in the pre-hipster East End in 2008.

OK, this sort of retromanic pop writes its own logical criticism in a way (repeated formulas, looking backwards instead of forwards, etc etc), but when it’s done this well, it’s a timely reminder that the true logic of pop is music that communicates directly with the head and the heart.

This album offers a view into the minds of a pair of singular artists who might differ in their delivery, but who both understand that a glimpse of truth is a whole lot more intriguing than a disingenuous attempt at the whole thing.

Sick Scenes sees LC! offering up a liberating set of songs about odious city hipsters, youthful nostalgia and future anxiety, wrapped up in the seven-piece’s usual glorious flurry of chipper riffs and witty lyricisms.

Weaves can flick between breezy, cute pop hits to tight-fisted punk snarlers in the blink of an eyeball, and the record's best tracks are a combination of both.

How to Be a Human Being is arguably yet more effervescent than its predecessor.