Although at times the sound experiments can feel too inward-looking, Howard balances the darkness and lightness of his palette with relative ease, producing a record of imaginative depth and danceable surface.

It’s reality music, and while obviously tailored around the life and times of Shawn Carter, offers so many narratives that the common man can relate to in astounding measures.

This is an album that deserves big headphones and large sweeping views of grey coastal days.

All of this means that, in spite of the anguished self-interrogation that went into its making, this still sounds exactly how a Toro y Moi album should sound. However, Boo Boo feels like what we might call a coming-of-age album.

In aping the sounds that made early rave great--hardcore, breaks and hard house--Vibert has sucked the soul from the genre leaving just a smattering of style. If this is an ode to rave, then it is a hollow one.

Bottling up teenage emotions and expressing it in effervescent electronica and wistful melodies, their self-titled debut is 16 tracks of minimalistic and clean compositions overridden with Paul Klein’s lovestruck lyrics.

The band’s approach to music-making has always been as eclectic as their references, but generally they’ve stuck to one approach per album. Unfortunately this is where Home Counties comes a bit unstuck. There’s quite a lot going on.

The majority of Grateful is forgettable at best.

Although littered with incandescent beams of hyper-melody--extending a hand to the youth of 2013’s ‘Days Are Gone’, Something To Tell You is patient and moves at its own, night-unending pace, where Californian sister act Este, Danielle, and Alana surf some kind of strange paradise between love and loss.

Without the visuals and context, the record can become excessively meditative at times, yet at its finest moments it re-forms the uninhabitable vastness of the desert-space as a blank canvas in the listener’s imagination, to be filled with inspiration of their own.

For the most part, the record warrants its own expansiveness as themes of self-doubt, isolation and faith slowly supernova among dazzling ambient instrumentals, careening string sections and Sufjan’s warped vocals that bring harmony, hope and futurism to the cold, dense expanse of space.

Featuring savage and often heartfelt, diary-like ruminations, CTRL pushes against the borders of convention lyrically and sonically, placing it on the upper echelons of potential ‘Best Of ’17’ lists.

While it doesn’t quite have the same urgency as ‘Based on a T.R.U. Story’ or ’T.R.U. REALigion', Pretty Girls Like Trap Music is perfectly positioned to be a 2017 favourite catering to both fans of this generation’s trap music and those that were knee deep in trap during its late ‘90s/early ‘00s inception.

Big Fish Theory is a record that not only sees Vince taking risks and progressing forward as an artist, but also another astounding example of what hip-hop should and can be in 2017.

If you’re looking for a 3am club techno sound, then this record probably isn’t for you; its delicacy makes rather for an introspective experience.

If 'Fleet Foxes' was an unbroken hike up from the foothills into the peaks of the Appalachians, 'Crack-Up' is more like the winding train ride home.

As an album, though still swinging from one place to another with glee, The Underside Of Power feels important, and very, very serious, as a body of work. It is one of the year’s very best albums, and sets out Algiers as one of the decade’s very best bands.

To hear tracks like ‘Dizzy Dizzy’ or ‘Halleluwah’ hacked down to mere Can-ettes for the humble 7” format feels a little like trying to make sense of a vast painted canvass simply by focusing on, say, the top left corner. Once you get over that, with singles typically being the most accessible or marketable moments in a band’s trajectory, this collection represents a superb introduction to the Can catalogue for anyone lacking the willpower or patience to trawl their albums or the goldmine of material presented on 2012’s essential ‘The Can Tapes.’

An intense, ingenious and utterly insane listen, Murder Of The Universe is another brilliant addition to King Gizzard's already stellar and ever-expanding discography.

Songhoy Blues have once again produced an album for all. The small-minded stamp of ‘world music’ does not apply here (or should anywhere really). This is quite simply a record for anyone ready to get down to some beautiful rhythms.

With a plethora of guest spots adding some serious variety to the already sonically multifarious album, hearing Big Boi go back and forth with the likes of Kurupt, Snoop Dogg, Eric Bellinger, and even Adam Levine of Maroon 5, makes it all the more fun.

Eight of these nine tracks constitute the best album for night driving under city street-lights since Growler's estimable ‘City Club’.

Never deviating from course, Sugar At The Gate adds one more stitch to the tightly-wrapped DNA that makes TOPS so immersive and enjoyable, its ten glossy songs bearing all the marks of a band that has taken yet another step toward mastering their craft.

All ten tracks, and their accompanying dub allies, have the presence and sound to claim dancehalls by the fistful.

A fine goodbye filled with easy charm and style.

At times Wolves' polished, pop-tinged punk sounds more like a proffered Pepsi can than a clenched Molotov cocktail, but it is still punk to its bones in a time when the label tends to be skin-deep.

The dirges are ditched, yet the previous elements they made their name with are overdone.

This is a beautiful album that’s as absorbing as it is emotionally affecting.