I Don’t Live Here Anymore, is their greatest and grandest statement yet. Adam Granduciel’s obsessive nature when it comes to making records has paid off as the Grammy winners' fifth studio album is another triumph in sound.

The duo’s knack for high five-worthy boasts and massive one-liners remains undiluted. However, RTJ3 truly excels in some of its darkest moments.

Plowing Into the Field of Love was a champagne swilling, country honky-tonk left turn; and now comes Beyondless, a record altogether more iconic sounding, but no less strange. ... Iceage continue to be one of the most exciting bands in music.

She can’t do any wrong at the minute; this is timeless songwriting, and Tigers Blood is a worthy successor to Saint Cloud.

You're hearing a songwriter who seems to know exactly what she wants to make, and has all the tools to do that. A glorious, glorious album.

Singularity it feels like he’s levelled up the melding of two worlds: ambient and techno. Hopkins’ signature deep tissue massage bass is stitched together throughout, with unreal moments of musical beauty making Singularity a simply stunning album of emotional highs and lows.

LC! demonstrate once more that they are masters of drilling down into the minutiae of life, spotting the danger ahead, while remaining powerless to make better choices.

It’s sentimental, it’s oddball and it’s beautiful. In other words, it’s Grandaddy at their finest.

While this album could be characterised as a return to 'normality' for Dirty Projectors, such a label has no bearing on a group this relentlessly imaginative; a creative rebirth would be more accurate.

This is the band's darkest material yet. Opener, The Supremacy of Pure Artistic Feeling is an instant statement of the band's simultaneous deviousness and gorgeousness, which is a feeling that never really lets up over its 40 minutes until the seemingly krautrock-influenced The Right Kind of Adult. Come join the family.

Memories Are Now is a gorgeously delivered elegy to heartbreak and loss; powerful, perfectly executed songs to bring comfort and strength to the weary, broken and scorned.

Wall of Eyes is a kaleidoscopic, mind-altering pronouncement: The Smile are not a band of their component parts, not echoes of their previous ventures. They are something exciting, ambitious, and genuinely brilliant; a sentiment delivered so resoundingly by their work here that it will leave your ears ringing.

Love What Survives offers a scattergun approach to ideas, sounds and voices, and it could be their greatest record yet. With a looser grip, Mount Kimbie dip and dive through myriad musical worlds.

Small Changes seems to reach the listener’s ear with its patina built-in. A boundless effort that, while revelling in its musical referents – Sade, Gaye, Withers – stands tall, ceaselessly, beside them.

The musicality of It’s Real is deliciously idiosyncratic, yet refreshing and musically progressive.

Beautiful Thing, though, is more of a straightforward float through space, with a starry, galactic feel to the album.

More candid but just as magical, City Music is another magnificent record from Morby.

An album that functions seamlessly as a listen-in-one-sitting affair, with enough memorable stand-alone moments to keep the club contingent happy, Bicep's debut is a clear front-runner for best house record of the year.

By the time Continuum 10 closes the album with a flash of rapture, and a gentle piano progression that signals the closeness of the next rebirth, it feels like your soul has been thoroughly cleansed.

A beautiful record; you just wish the vocabulary existed to do it justice.

Bazan’s wit and compassion shine throughout a dark voyage such as this; as one witness to a brutal suicide turns to black humour, while another, in contrast, valiantly tries to retain their emotional openness in a job that often requires distance.

Atomic picks up where the krauty electronic wash that coloured Rave Tapes left off, and sees the band brandishing some of their most compelling work to date.

The queen of Dollywood has more than earned her place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with this stupidly fun and over-the-top love letter to the genre.

If previous releases made Laufey Gen Z’s jazz-pop queen, A Matter of Time affirms that title.

While it's a million miles from the techno of Holden’s earlier career, its rhythms and hooks are infectious. The Animal Spirits is, put frankly, one of the most complex, immersive and impressive albums of the year.

Not only are Ty Segall fans likely to be pressing this on people for the next few months, it also might be just about the best album he’s put his own name to.

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

Heavy Heavy is rarely an easy listen, but it's never less than engrossing.