Produced by Dave Eringa (Manic Street Preachers, Idlewild), Angry Cyclist offers a little less gravitas than usual in truth, but the taut Telecasters that dominate The Proclaimers' eleventh studio album provide a tension that seems to sit well within the heart of these prescient compositions.

Slow Air takes time to process as we reflect on the musical journey we've been on, it's an escapist dream which can only offer more to the imagination with every listen.

Decidedly more disco for Mitski, Be the Cowboy is a showdown of electrowave and her signature fretwork that brings a pop pep to heartbreak and humanity’s greatest gluttonies. With that formidable force of a voice, she forces us all to be the cowboy and lament for a while.

While the subject matter and style aren't vastly different to anything Kathryn Joseph’s done before, the progression here is more of a tasteful expansion of what came before it. In terms of finding new ways to express oneself with honesty while staying true to what makes you special, this album is a roaring success.

While Nearer My God isn’t always successful, the imagination behind it is more than enough to give it your time.

Deaf Havana have moved with the times but it isn’t all sugar-coated and there’s still enough emotion to drive us towards their music.

For the most part, the songs here are less immediately grabbing than those on his EPs, with greater emphasis on atmosphere than thumping beats, but they share the same glitchy DNA.

Future Me Loves Me occupies a warm, energetic space between joyful hooks, melodic harmonies and lyrical substance.

Much like Ocean’s Blonde, Devotion unfolds and unravels in different ways upon each listen, giving you everything but never too soon. With it, Tirzah and Levi have created something fiercely unique, relatable and of the moment; one of the most crucial pop records of the year.

Once again working with Americana producer du jour Dave Cobb, Shires uses this record to push her sound to another level.

Physical boasts one hell of a range of tracks, some suited for dancing but all suited to telling Gurnsey's favourite story. With it he's created a new and independent take on house proving that Gabe Gurnsey is not just a member of Factory Floor but a solo artist in his own right and style.

The fact she’s instead opted for a bunch of gritty, Bunker Records-inspired analogue improvisations makes the end product all the more enjoyable. Qualm is also underpinned by a peculiar sense of Britishness.

Albums have come at a brisk pace in the last few years, but there have been some diminishing returns as the Manchester troupe try to find the balance between the big hitters and the bit between their teeth.

It may lack the richness and depth of her solo work, but that is replaced with absolutely towering riffs and Jurassic grooves.

Overall, TRU is a promising step for Ovlov, albeit one that doesn’t always succeed when it comes to standing out from its peers.

A couple of the more traditionally structured techno tracks can feel a little too cold and laboured, sometimes feeling longer than their actual run-time. Despite this, when it pushes boundaries and dips its toe further into avant-garde territory, Family Portrait can be an immersive exploration of dance music.

On Hive Mind, the positive impact of their time apart is quickly apparent. The opener, Come Together is mature and quietly devastating in spite of its perky rhythm, an emblem of solidarity in the face of senseless violence. There’s little else here in the way of political statements, though, to the album’s benefit.

Their combined creative nous is such that if the two took the time to craft something more elegant and thought out, they could deliver a classic.

Musically, the good ideas are palpable; a shame, then, that the lyrical ones take such banal centre stage.

Compared to their past work, the album lacks intensity and seems to rely on a heterogeneity of unrefined styles, making it seem more like an album of covers that flirts too closely to the tired hip-hop trope of a single, aimless verse.

Through it all, Lotic maintains a deep sense of nuance, sounds constantly morphing and remaining grippingly vital, still with great emotional intensity around every corner.

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.

As always Deafheaven are anything but ordinary.

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.

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.

Far from the carnival of featured guests that was 2017’s 26-track Humanz, though, The Now Now, at 11 tracks and with only three comparatively unobtrusive features (Snoop Dogg and Jamie Principle appear on Hollywood) is tighter conceptually but looser as a listening experience.

Nothing is broken with their sound, but the album feels like an extension of their previous work rather than a progression of it.

Bad Witch has a more palpable vein of nihilism coursing through it than perhaps any Nine Inch Nails release since the seminal The Downward Spiral.