These 12 songs deal with death and loss – themes that have never felt so tangible for so many. Yet, Field Music pull off this balancing act for one simple reason: this was their very gift to begin with.

Sweep It Into Space has all the ingredients for a pleasant listen, while doing little to separate itself from the rest of their discography.

His newest resembles an above-average B-sides compilation: something to tie over the diehards while they wait for his next official album.

Instead of wry irony or wallowing in hopeless abandon, Pale Horse Rider achieves something more like a fellow soul joining in on watching a fire in the distance.

It is the soundtrack to rousay’s year of insularity, isolation, and adaptation, and harmonises beautifully with anyone who’s undergone similar feelings of repression and growth during this period.

This music is fast and hard, but there are fewer risks than it might at first seem. Those hoping for the band to push themselves in a new direction are going to be slightly disappointed, while those who have vibed with this collective since day one will likely appreciate ULTRAPOP for what it is – another album by The Armed.

CLAMM are strongest when processing their internal states of mind.

With “Get Up! Come Walk with Me/Composition 7” – as with Broken Mirror: A Selfie Reflection in its entirety – White, Holley, and a cast of energized musicians question the post-human age while celebrating the creative process.

When they really let themselves down is on the sappiest songs.

The band’s shape-shifting compositions create a forward momentum well suited to a journey through different levels of Hell on Earth.

Iglooghost surveys beyond the sensory, straining to activate neurons in unexplored areas of the brain. As a result, elements that shouldn’t work somehow end up sounding cohesive, vibrant and new.

That’s what How Many Times is: another record about lost love. Yet, what saves Rose’s version from sinking into tired banality is the earnestness of it all: she displays the full gamut of her emotions in the songs, from longing to anger, yearning to acceptance.

For such a prolific, genre-blurring artist, we are lucky as listeners that all the pieces Ryley Walker’s set up over the past decade could coalesce in such a fine, tight 40 minutes.

Dry Cleaning seem a working-class band, but they are not a political band in that same sense. This concept is mimicked across many post-punk bands past and present, but instead of trying to stay firmly between those politically-charged guardrails they have stepped outside of them and created their own scenic route.

Head of Roses, also Wasner’s Sub Pop debut, is her most direct record yet, full of what is definitely her clearest, most emotionally stirring work to date.

These tracks strut with a more upbeat cadence and disposition, without straying from the same earthbound concerns that marked Erez’s previous material.

Is 4 Lovers is the band’s most playful album to date too, oscillating between The Beatles, Lenny Kravitz, Big Black, early (aka: good) Muse and The Rapture.

The tracks on G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END! share a sense of triumphalism brought about by the communion of music. The album soundtracks the end times, while offering glimpses of hope.

On Half A Human, they’ve taken steps to create songs that better reflect their states of mind and, as a result, have uncovered a new confidence and self-assuredness. Regardless of their music’s reception, their changing circumstances, the world at large, they’re right where they want to be.

What Silberman’s managed to accomplish with Green to Gold is admirable. Instead of quitting music he’s pushed forward and accepted his limitations in pursuit of his passion.

sketchy. may not be their out-and-out best work, but it’s proof that they still have the guts and the songwriting ability — as well as their ever-present, obvious earnestness and candor — to do what endeared their work to so many in the first place.

Collections From The Whiteout excels in storytelling and lyrics but doesn’t always prove the easiest experience. However, this is an album that becomes more comfortable with each progressive listen, unwinding in the listener’s consciousness like the sung stories themselves.

It’s clear that OH NO will not be remembered as one of Xiu Xiu’s most stellar records. Yet, as usual with collaborations, it’s likely that each listener is likely to find their own tracks they ditch, just like different ones will stand out, given the varying degrees of artistic touches these additional musicians bring with their own aesthetics and histories.

Most of this review has been spent trying to use genre to back the record into a corner, but there is still so much ineffable that can’t be captured in words. Menneskekollektivet is impossible to pin down. That’s the thrill.

“Movement 9”, at just two and a half minutes, puts a resplendent cap on proceedings, the LSO’s strings tying things off with forlorn grace and pomp. It’s like an echo of what’s come before, the tremors from the encounter between Sanders and Shepherd resonating out into the infinitude. It leaves us in no doubt that we have just witnessed a meeting of monolithic proportions.

Benny and the rest of Griselda are a force so reliable and prolific that they should be boring by now. But The Plugs I Met 2 suggests that we’re just getting to know them.

There’s some pleasure to be had here, but for all of those except those of us pawing the floor with anxious, somewhat embarrassed memories – and as the album cover even seems readily to acknowledge – this is perhaps a pill best left unswallowed.

It’s effortlessly buoyant, especially now that he’s reclaimed his image; he’s not the sad and desperate crooner he was once made out to be. Wise sounds more liberated because he is. This serpent is brandishing new skin, redefined and transformed, not by the will of others but by his own love-led volition.