What rides at the top and takes your attention pretty much all the time is Taylor herself. Her words are honest and palpable, but also unflinchingly direct.

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.

The diversity of styles on CAPRISONGS would likely end up a disjointed mess in any other hands, but with twigs (and her stacked team) on hand, it all sews together brilliantly. It bounces back and forth from outwardly confident to more stately anthems of self-love, and even songs that might seem throwaway in isolation are key in sequence.

Heavy, lyrically well-tread and packing a mean proto-motorik groove, from start to finish it has an automotive heartbeat with both eyes on the horizon. It is the sound of Wooden Shjips finally bringing it on home.

As moving as those songs are, The Smile are more intriguing when they shift slightly further away from Yorke and Greenwood’s established palette.

Like anyone daring to take a glimpse into the future, Hutchings is met with confusion, astonishment and alienation. Fortunately, he assimilates the tools, knowledge and creative bandwidth to acutely document them, and more importantly, navigate them in a useful, inherently joyous way.

Ultimately, this is sound of two dons recognising their rightful place at the top of the summit, surveying their kingdom and proceeding to piss all over it. And it sounds fucking glorious.

Food for Worms‘ greatest strength is to chronicle how incredible it can feel to be in the presence of this band, at this moment. It feels as if you could almost reach out and touch them, rip open their shirts and feel their sweat.

Blue Raspberry is Kirby’s most pointed, honest, and resonant self. There’s heaviness everywhere, and it should be excavated in doses. Still, her voice remains in bloom, providing a levity that yet again makes a Katy Kirby listening experience a comforting one.

Each track on in|Flux has a soul and heart of its own.

Articulation balances the sterility of machine commands with the vivacity and pensiveness of the human experience like few other albums in the field have managed. Just at the moment when you feel as if you know where the music is headed it skews in on itself and refuses to accommodate your whims, moving itself to more unconventional spaces in order to breathe and react with themselves, not the needs of others.

The songs he thinks up are somehow both resonate and impossible to anticipate--old and new at once.

In any case, Leave Home is no doubt one of the most gut-punched and brain-addled rock rock records to arrive in quite some time.

While there may not be a song to soundtrack an Amazon advertisement in this bunch, it'll work nicely to soundtrack bleary summer nights–probably for years to come.

In short, it’s an album so attuned to the dualities of life, that it ultimately says something profound and essential about how we exist and move through this world.

While her last proper album, 2019’s orchestrally-imbued All Mirrors, was something of a coming out party for her grand artistic ambition and scope, Big Time is the coming out party for her true personality. In order to do this, she’s stripped away the grandiosity and reverted back to the country and Americana sounds that she calls home.

As the record unravels those far-reaching human touches, supported by the more grounded electronic elements, become the emotional sticking point with a surprising amount of staying power.

King Woman perfects the approaches outlined on Suffering here, constructing soundscapes that are gossamer and pummeling, sparse and layered, heavenly and apocalyptic.

Anime, Trauma and Divorce is a self-help rap record that manages to be heart-breaking and humorous at the same time, and never takes its audience for granted, which is a rare find in any medium.

End of Everything is not an obviously uplifting album, but it is in many places breathtaking.

The only caveat to Themes is that its stark cohesion demands a single two hour sit-through to soak in the weight of its patient, holistic, slowly-unfolding approach.

It’s impossible not to come away beaten and bruised by the undulating savagery that emits from a Show Me The Body record. However, from the same wringer, hope miraculously springs eternal. On Trouble The Water, the New York band burn more intensely than ever.

With this album, Curry wants to let the world know who he is and what he stands for, and the music is all the better for it.

While actually even shorter than her last album’s nearly-28 minutes, Here in the Pitch feels heavier, more substantial, and more robust than almost anything she’s done before.

Although this is an album about oneness, we are here for Peng, and these moments where we feel closest to her as a person are some of the most rewarding.

Illusory Walls is a definitive document of the power of their combined ability and belief.

But The Greater Wings, for all its inevitable connotations, is not a downer. It’s a beautiful testament to life and to the people we love and that keep us going, physically and spiritually. It’s also a testament to moving forward with grace and strength, and rediscovering that longing to live.

The vast majority of Ware’s fifth LP serves as a masterclass in following up a beloved previous album – taking What’s Your Pleasure’s core elements and stretching them into wilder and weirder directions. Now, that feels good.

Seek Shelter isn’t the big, era-defining statement, but a transitional album for the quintet, opening up the possibility of rock’n’roll in their arsenal. While this stylistic choice doesn’t fit 2021’s overarching trends, it proves just how good Iceage are at transforming their sonic interests into full-blown epics.

Two of the more prolific musicians of our time have come together to put out eight interesting tracks.

Like all the best songwriters, Tomberlin doesn’t act like she has the answers to the big questions, but knows that simply by being inquisitive she will eventually figure out her own truths, and she’s passing that wisdom along with this record.

While nearly everything else is still top tier pop music, but the Englishwoman leaves herself some room to grow. For now, Devotion is one the year's most promising debuts.

Empath’s Visitor is the stunning follow-up most young bands only dream of creating.

Ohms is the first Deftones record to feel entirely like all of the rest but also like none of them. It somehow manages to push the band into a new direction while leaving breadcrumbs from each album. With a wide range of enjoyment coming from each cut, Ohms further cements Deftones as the premier mainstream rock band to reinvent themselves every decade.

While their sound has come together quite well, its really Polachek's vocal abilities that leave the best impression.

Raekwon knows what he does best, and while this may not be as grand as his last, he does just that here, to the fullest.

Brun has such control of her craft, and that is made brightly plain across these two albums [After The Great Storm & How Beauty Holds The Hand Of Sorrow]. Which one you prefer will likely depend on which genre or style you have deeper inclination for, but taken together, they’re both excellent representations of an artist honing her tested and true style while also venturing out into new waters, easily proving just how capable she is along the way.

This is the return that so many of us have been waiting for, and his ability to come through on nearly all levels establishes Bolted as one of the very best albums of this year, electronic or otherwise.

This album is not served to us on a platter as a radio-ready hit record, and it is not made ‘for us’, but it gives us something better — the feeling of being a part of this music and not a mere recipient.

It's a spatial and musical theme across the whole of Impossible Spaces and it's perhaps the record's most deserving triumph.

Always grandiose and intimate at the same time, The Lemon Twigs have managed to perfect not only an uncanny reprise of FM rock (duly aided by producer and multi-instrumentalist extraordinaire Jonathan Rado), but also the type of excitement it provoked.

Featuring generous heaps of falsetto and sparse, jagged guitar licks, Fruit Bats' Tripper plays as a spectral highway romp that pairs jaunty folk-pop ditties with effervescent pop.

Katy B shows she's a vital voice to the smaller UK bass scene and her pop imbued form of garage has enough substance and personality to back her play for something bigger.

Mark Lanegan has accomplished something truly magnificent with Blues Funeral.

In the end, Sun And Shade proves far more complex than the label of psych-folk would indicate, to the point that its small flaws are easily forgivable.

We Stay Together is Andy Stott's second LP of 2011 and it's easily the heavier, more defined, and arguably better of the two.

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.

Much closer to Z than Evil Urges, My Morning Jacket proves that a leap back can sometimes be a step in the right direction, even if we end up "right back in the same place that we started out."

It's an album that continues to unpack itself after half a dozen listens--as beautiful as it is detailed.

Gas Lit is an important record from an important band. It doesn’t attempt to make things palatable for you, and nor should it. The record is a provocation to a difficult conversation, one that in all honesty shouldn’t really still have to take place in 2021.

It's a lovely, weightless set of songs from an artist whom we can now reasonably assume is capable of producing consistently great music.

It’s a tender, chaotic, and messy experience that feels all the more natural because of Open Mike Eagle’s transparency with his audience. This is Eagle at his most directionless, and for the time being that’s exactly what we needed to hear from him, because that’s how many of us are feeling too.

With Forever Blue, she has created an album for those who like to close their curtains when the sun is out; it’s a debut of richness, depth and genuinely shattering emotional engagement – pure melancholic majesty to lose yourself in.

All Of Us, Together isn't an attempt to disown his early work and roots. Jamison just made the record he felt like making, and that's why it so easily matches his best material.

On Reflection, we truly see the breadth of her resourcefulness as an artist: both as translator and purveyor of gut feeling. The elemental building blocks are all you need to shape something completely new.

The band have taken their influences with their own abilities and made an album that is as accessible as it is excitable, and seems set to capture the hearts and imaginations of young lovers everywhere.

Crystal Stilts find a way to make you care, though, and that goes along way with music this raw and rapturous.

awE naturalE is at least a great, deep listen, and all that THEESatisfaction has done to challenge the listener warrants serious admiration.

Musically, the deft fusion of the delicate and the hearty reflects Harvey’s thematic explorations; the production is full of strange quirks, whether found sounds or unusual effects that are sometimes inserted and not repeated. The effect is that the music feels both hazy and alive, evoking the Orlam world in its strange splendour.

There’s an irresistible eclecticism on display, with each and every track serving as a unique adventure into some different corner.

It takes a certain degree of self-containment in order to encapsulate a place as well as Hundred Waters does, and it's clear that the band has it.

Thematically, Born This Way dances between fantasy and fiction and plays out like an autobiography; every track and moment weaved from the DNA and life of Gaga.

Yes, it's clearly obvious what Yuck's main influences are; they're placed very firmly on the band's sleeve. But with sounds that tie the band to modern indie as much as alt-rock, Yuck have crafted something incredibly refreshing, and more importantly, good.

This is the kind of album you just throw on to have fun. If anything, it proves My Chemical Romance don't need to be eccentric or theatrical to put out an enjoyable record.

With Quarter Turns Over A Living Line Raime fleshes out the promise of earlier work and delivers one 2012′s most compelling and listenable experimental records.

If they stick to the melodic folk at the core of their best songs, that fateful open-mic night could be the beginning of something really great.

With Nymph, Shygirl brings another original voice in the mix; good luck hearing a record that portrays sex in similarly tactile, authentic and effortlessly cool fashion.

New Brigade is over in about 23 minutes, and each second feels well worth your time. Though the band can get sloppy at points, perhaps even a bit repetitive, Iceage have crafted some very memorable tracks here; and more than anything, New Brigade shows that this band has much more to offer in the future.

Furling is a surprisingly dense record, its sonic pallet feeling deep and widescreen, even in its sparsest moments.

All of This Will End can be regarded as a riveting bildungsroman, the 25-year-old De Souza reflecting on archetypal initiations and processing essential insights, all the while reveling in diverse instrumentation and a seemingly endless supply of hooks.

It is Depeche Mode’s most self-aware album in a long time – and their most memorable. At 50 minutes and 12 songs, the album is lean and humble, paying respect to the band’s past while also returning to the tension that made their best material so enjoyable.

It’s not a perfect album – “Blue” feels slightly underdeveloped and I question whether the Robyn Hitchcock cover is completely necessary – but it doesn’t have to be. It’s mysterious, slightly messy at times, and filled with a gentle wonder that settles onto our skin like early morning sunlight. It’s a privilege to be in his company once again, even if it is just for 40 or so minutes.

As a product of Yorke’s mind, AMOK represents a measurable progression over The Eraser. It’s more experimental, varied, nuanced, and likeable.

Wild Pink’s third full length sees them at their most fluent, achieving a compositional and performative apex.

He remains an original, talented musician with his influences worn firmly on his sleeves; a contemporary proving that the past is still very much relevant.

Lone doesn't reinvent himself on Galaxy Garden like he did with Emerald Fantasy Tracks, but the jump from one record to the next is made even more revelatory by the English producer's refinement and assuredness.

They're not reinventing the wheel, hell they're barely even reinventing themselves, but that's a good thing on this occasion, as they've created an album that will appeal to fans both new and old.

The results are fun as hell, yet it's hard not to feel like LV have accomplished something with some legs on it.

With Phasor, Lange navigates an important rite of passage, testifying to life’s glories and anticlimaxes. He’s become an unflinching realist without sacrificing his curiosity, his capacity for wonder.

If anything, Apollo Kids is the biggest reason to get excited about Ghost in years; putting out a seemingly rushed disc, he's outdone much of his recent work.

The trio delight in taking risks in a way that few rock bands on a major label do, and A Celebration of Endings is a wide-ranging record – even when they’re operating within an accessible framework.

Mount Wittenberg Orca is uniquely and charmingly straightforward.

Every song on this record is carefully crafted, and the way they’ve perfectly balanced the intimate bedroom atmosphere with the crystalline sheen of modern mainstream has created a set of unmissable pop pearls.

This kind of high-emotion, omni-genre electronic music is becoming the measure of artists working without geographical or scene ties and Held is one of the best examples

There is much one could say about how this EP compares to Rossen's past projects since that's all he's delivered to us, but he deserves more than that after accomplishing a great EP by himself.

Rainforest is an EP and it does leave the listener wanting. It works as a sort of mini album, finding enough variable direction to point toward a future template for Clams Casino with a myriad of aural directions when he does decide to craft a full-length.

Despite being almost twice the length, It’s Almost Dry very much adheres to the wisdom of its predecessor: there isn’t an ounce of fat on the lean, mean machine that is the album, with every second aimed with a precise, sinister purpose.

Such is the elegance and detail of Knox’s songwriting and voice – not to mention the exquisite instrumentation – that one can’t help but get swept up in it and extrapolate from it. In that regard, Won’t You Take Me With You is an unmitigated triumph from an artist who continues to dazzle and enthrall with each release.

Make Believe takes the listener from the same point A to point B as Santogold, but has no qualms about taking a completely different route, which is both more scenic and more difficult, but ultimately feels more fulfilling.

MUNA is the best soundtrack one can find for the next few months. Seemingly destined to join the canon of pop’s great cult-classics (Carly Rae Jepsen’s Emotion, Robyn’s Body Talk, among them), it’s an album whose legacy should last much longer.

Gloss Drop may be a less solid and coherent album than Mirrored, but it is still a remarkably promising follow-up. As always, the music is cerebral, engaging, technically stupefying, and utterly original.

The Plot finds the group building on their palate, zeroing in on the details more than ever before, meaning the straight up fidgety punk ("Sheena Is A T-Shirt Salesman"), keyboard-led silliness ("A Guide To Men") and the obligatory epic closer ("Notes On Achieving Orbit") are all better realised than their cousins on previous albums.

Iradelphic is the sound of an artist who already had a trademark sound coming into his own while still breaking out of his crackly IDM shell.

The album's relative indie rock minimalism stands out in stark contrast to many other bands who feel that this kind of straightforward approach is either too uninteresting or too tied to certain years in music.

The album is his most consistent and complete, finding room for singer-songwriter-type country, alt. country, harder rock and soul within a single record, while retaining a sense of direction and cohesiveness, as well as heart, soul and a satisfying emotional connection between artist and audience .

They deserve every bit of success this album brings them, simply because A Different Kind of Fix is one of the most accomplished albums of the year.

This is an achingly human journey into the vast mischievous subconscious, never trying to manipulate how you should feel.

Pompeii truly feels like a gesamtkunst rather than a collection of separate songs. The album reaffirms what makes Le Bon’s music such a useful prism to process thoughts and feelings that feel too immense to articulate within traditional means.