Across the eight tracks of the album, she shifts between intimate personal reflections and extensive ambient meditations with the elegance of tides swelling and settling.

It’s one of the young year’s best all-out rock records, the kind of fantastic full-length that some kid in a garage will one day look back to themselves, maybe when plugging that guitar in for the first time.

Kveikur is the band’s noisiest and most muscular record yet. The variety of experience it offers not just from Valtari, but from the band’s entire catalogue, means that it stands among their best.

With Skinty Fia, Fontaines, D.C. continue to position themselves as one of the more emotionally broad-banded and nuanced acts to emerge from the latest post-punk wave. Soundscapes are evocatively sculpted and frequently galvanic, melodies and lyrics consistently enrolling.

While at this stage of his career a new Dylan release may only be heard by longtime listeners, it must be judged against all music. Even by such lofty standards, Tempest succeeds enormously, placing it not only in the upper half of Dylan's catalog, but also with the better submissions of 2012.

Florist’s latest project stands as the culmination of previous collaborative and solo work, featuring the band as a whole at their most minimally precise; and Sprague, in terms of songwriting, vocal performances, and composition, at her most versatile and visionary.

Fossora is an incredible and vulnerable project that refuses any easy categorisation. Björk’s dives into sonic obfuscation have never once eclipsed her refusal to be anything except open-hearted and honest. Her power is in how she allows herself to feel and let these emotions guide her artistic expression.

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.

Public Storage might initially seem a bit oblique with its monochromatic, solemn moods, but like a faded family photograph, there’s a lot of subtle warmth to be found if you rummage through it long enough.

Some might lament the lack of tension in this album, but when the music's this beautiful, who needs it?

Squid’s music is full of: humanity and the inherent hope within it. It’s what makes Bright Green Field a joy to return to time and again.

Vince Staples is certainly not an easy album to tap into, nor a particularly fun one, but for those interested in a piece of art in which the barrier between the creator and onlooker is veritably nonexistent, to the point of shared claustrophobia, look no further. ... Staples’ scars have never been more visible: he’s practically put them on display for the world at large. If that’s not bravery, I don’t know what is.

Her second album is an unpretentious thrill, the nature of its creation inextricably linked to its lyrical outlook, made by a woman who’s been through the wringer but has emerged from a period of turmoil daringly and undoubtedly herself.

This debut’s musical landscape happens to cover an emotional vastness that far surpasses simply anger. There’s heartbreak, melancholy, humor, hopefulness, and even victory—so much more than rage. No matter the emotion, Androgynous Mary finds the band united on the same front, firing on all cylinders through its straightforward punk agenda and nuanced sentimentality.

With Passage, Exitmusic has turned in one of the more ambition, evocative, and engaging efforts of 2012.

Thursday continues a linear narrative that House of Balloons started and its far from an afterthought or epilogue.

Total Nite comes less than a year on from Children of Desire and feels like a natural continuation of their sound.

A Western Circular is likely to remain a curiosity – but it deserves much more than that. Here we have a gleaming, respiring and perspiring ode to the joy and pain of life, the looming shadow of death – and the importance that it gives to our daily struggles. All of these ideas are packaged up in lovingly arranged and sung art-pop songs, which sound as breezy and warm as an evening sitting out on the seafront with some close friends.

This is a life-affirming album which is not held back by the restrictions of linguistics and the limitations that words bring, and it may be just what you need to lift you out of yourself in these troubled times.

This newest effort is more interested in exploration than invention. Like following the development of a Miyazaki, there’s a sense of wonder to a fantastical realm, which harmonises in a dreamlike logic. Emotional archeology, for beginners and experts alike, it resides among the group’s five best efforts.

Goodbye Bread may not change the face of music, cause, y'know, it's only rock 'n roll. But it's damn hard not to like it.

ILYSM captures its maker’s emotional state urgently and obtusely. Though sonically more subdued than other recent Wild Pink material (like the celestial alt-country stunner “Florida”), the transitions between the songs are often brisk and quite abrasive. They manifest like cracks formed inside a glass sculpture right before collapse.

Each track posseses different sounds, colours, styles and textures, but they combine to make an odd but strangely appealing whole.

Pinch & Shackleton stands as both artist's most accessible and perhaps best work.

It’s somehow arguably her most wide-ranging album (stylistically and topically) while also feeling remarkably of a piece; succinct even.

Veering from their signature alt-folk ditties chronicling the immediacy of transference and love, The Errant Charm presents a dense rendering of that blissful numbness promised by a life of aloof detachment.

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.

In contrast to the self-aware grandeur and show of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Quik's done much the same thing he did in '91: put out a great rap record, plain and simple.