I Am A Bird Now is a beautiful, emotive, glorious, and sometimes sinister album that will top many a critic's list come the end-of-year polls, and justifiably so.

Will Bevan's done the unthinkable in managing to both appease and pull the rug out from under his fans.

Flying Lotus has added a new realm to his universe, answering one of life's biggest questions in the process.

This album is simply wondrous.

Dreijer has cemented her place within alternative music's dynasty, and it's refreshing to hear an outwardly queer and fiercely political artist convey a clear message without having the music, performance or reception fall over the potential weight of those themes. For as much as Plunge quite clearly contains these themes, it can and will be enjoyed as a universally creditable piece of brilliantly constructed art, and that is Dreijer's real success here.

Each listener should find their own things to contemplate, relate to and enjoy in these thoughtful, ornamental and fantastic songs, and that’s exactly the way it should be.

Fleet Foxes doesn't leave the stereo. Three, four, five times through-–these songs resonate over and over until they stick for good. A sign of a great record: words fail but a feeling remains.

While some fans of her earlier, more challenging, material may be mildly disappointed sonically by such a straight-up pop record, even they must acknowledge what an important album this is both personally to Monae and socially to the current world, and for that, it is a successful and pleasurable work.

It’s all masterful.

Blackstar sees him and his band nail a haunting mood.

The album’s major problem, more than anything, is that such a flabbergastingly brilliant end stretch hints at a better record that might have been, a furiously abrasive set of drum’n’gaze (sorry) that would have completely blindsided all of us, rather than the enjoyable grab bag of dreamy old and in yer face new that we in fact get.

Olsen’s most ambitious album yet. Taking a more polished--though not straight-up glossy--approach, Olsen sounds more vulnerable for having made her vocals more central to the mix.

You would have to search far and wide to find a transformation in an already great band that works as well as this. The key to it all is the vulnerability that MJ is now willing to put on display, giving the newfound musical incisiveness the emotional fuel it needs to really fly. If this isn’t one of the albums of the year then we must be in for something special.

With this fine writing, you show us you, unguarded, complex, sincere, like a dear friend I’ve invited over for tea that I haven’t seen in ages.

Uninterested in zipping from A to B, it is instead a moving, repeatedly devastating depiction of an artist who is still trying to figure out his place in the world as he moves forward in life, ever mindful of what we leave behind, the things said and left unspoken, the good and the bad that comes with trying to make it all make sense and the sobering knowledge that we cannot go back.

While there are inevitable parallels what with one album following the last so soon, this fourteenth LP from the fluctuating-of-membership Bad Seeds is a bolder creation that its predecessor.

Ultimately, Oxbow's seventh full-length is an incredible, cinematic experience which is at once rewarding and terrifying.

The darkness was always there, in Hadreas, in the songs, but now it’s in the music, Too Bright, to sound ridiculously over the top, has darkness in its soul.

What Live At The Hollywood Bowl, and its parent movie, shows us is their primal power. The sound and the fury (not to mention the banter) that conjured a roar unheard since, both on and off the stage.

The Seer is the culmination of Gira's 30-year-journey; his finest two hours, if you will.

It’s been said that Let’s Stay Friends is more pop than anything Les Savy Fav have put out before, but it’s still tight-fist tough.

If Björk’s last two albums were impersonal voyages of artistic license and collaboration, Vulnicura is deeply personal and so much more rewarding for it.

Piece everything together and this is where your mouth might, quite rightly, start to drool a little.

The finest thing that CSNY 1974 does is serve as a clear snapshot of this band at this extraordinary moment in their lives. It captures the musical excess of the era perfectly, and showcases how the four of them had grown in different directions since they’d first come together a few years earlier.

Throughout these eight tracks, she intuitively navigates within the dark and mysterious space of her psyche: an undomesticated, sometimes precarious landscape bustling with flora and fauna. With that rare quality of sounding both grand and plaintive, Fohr’s voice is accompanied by a prowling organ on ‘Brainshift’, as if scrutinising the terrain up on a hillside.

In Ctrl, SZA draws on her personal experience and explores women’s sexuality in a direct and honest way which was so far mostly reserved to male R&B and pop artists.

A brilliant album certainly not lacking in other highlights.

Another essential release then, but a step towards theory-over-content that Hecker never really needed.