Run the Jewels is savage and witty, rich in gritty truths and genuinely affecting wisdom. It may not be the best thing either artist has done, but fans of both will still find plenty to love.

Its complex web of emotion and sound make for one of the most confounding yet gripping albums made in 2014; while it isn’t without its flaws, it captures the zeitgeist in a way that few other albums have managed this year, and has both revelers and detractors speaking passionately.

Though a marginally lesser album than predecessor MAYA, Matangi is nevertheless dynamite.

Rap Album One breaks away from rap conventions in an effortless manner.

Nguzunguzu have always had something that stood them apart from imitators, but with Warm Pulse they are coming into their own as a reference in their own right.

Patience (After Sebald) is an unnervingly quiet album.

An album that is both powerful in its execution of an idea, but also quite sure of its own modest signature.

Punish, Honey intrigues, but it’s the prospect of where Seb Gainsborough goes next that’s really fascinating.

It's really working out for him.

Future’s lyrical sensitivity wouldn’t work without the album’s pitch-perfect production.

Ital has finally found a place to call home, and it suits him very well indeed.

Skillfully and bewitchingly arranged, its neatest trick is in the way it enfolds so many distinct personalities into Glasper's own vision, his music always complementing their voices without ever being dominated by them.

Production-wise, the album sounds as if it could have easily slipped from any number of top tier rap labels, yet with Gates at the helm, the journey is deeper, darker and far more invigorating than anything from the last couple of years with a Rozay, Em or Hov co-sign.

By the end, you only want more: you find yourself wishing that Neneh Cherry and The Thing would just go ahead and cover every song in the world in this inimitable manner.

Herndon is quite unique, using her instrument to engage in a constant dialogue with her immediate environment in such a way that makes conventional divisions --between the natural and the synthetic, or between the everyday and the extraordinary--seem dated.

This album is not just exciting for its sound, but for what it promises too.

Rather than limiting this EP's scope, restricting it to the use of only one synthesizer allows Terje's innate quirkiness and sense of humour even more room to maneuver.

Whereas 2009′s Missing Chairs carried a prissy frivolity in its floridness, Piramida is a noble, self-possessed creation; a masterclass in considered arrangement.

In terms of its complexity and level of skill on display Breakthrough is a big step up for Bensussen.

An extremely promising debut.

Gorgeous, beguiling, strange and way way out there, records like this restore a sense of mystery and wonder to the world.

Whilst Nostalchic is Lapalux’s most full-bodied work to date, it’s also one of the finer examples of how the recent house-meets-r’n'b explosion can be executed with subtlety and finesse.

Witchhouse appears unable to develop far beyond its basic origins, but Dexter instead hones, and in the process has produced something of a genre zenith--making slow-moving, essentially eventless music persistently compelling. No mean feat.

This album is as life-affirming a piece of music as anything else you’ll hear this year: there’s nothing more uplifting than a good band getting better.

Despite a couple of missteps and the odd moment of doubt, I can't remember the last time a series of three full-length records released this close together has captured me--and others--in the way that this has.

Reform Club's prime influences may be rooted in techno's past but what it lacks in formal innovation it more than makes up for with a rich and profound personal expression that will keep you company long after the rest of the world has shut down for the night.

Order Of Noise [is] a meaty, satisfying listen.

Thomson's manifesto is articulate, incisive and practically book-length.

Cutler’s music hasn’t tended to concern itself with tension so much as otherwordly harmony. When he introduces a bit of friction--between the real and the imagined, the grit of life and the sheen of fantasy--the results are all the more seductive.

This album is a good example of how to revive twenty-year-old sample relics and construct new, wildly dilapidated material from them like they were so much reclaimed timber.

Burial's appointment as cemetery caretaker, presiding over the skeletons of rave, was always going have limited traction--after all, there's only so many ways you can express a bereavement--but perhaps in this EP he's found new purpose amongst the ruins.

Tiffany’s voice at its most confident-sounding, it becomes clear that Rainbow Arabia have come on leaps and bounds from their debut, releasing an evocative, vivid album beyond the expectations of most.

Here’s an hour or so of music that’s cold as the cosmos and as unsentimental as physics, but something you can nonetheless gaze upon in awe.

So, while ...Like Clockwork doesn’t have that many feel good hits of the summer, there are plenty of lullabies to paralyze.

You could even argue that To Be Kind is Gira’s first rock ‘n’ roll album, and though Swans’ records are invariably seedy, To Be Kind is downright sexy, tender like a snake and surprisingly intimate.

When the whole thing drops back to its kickdrum-hi-hat backbone in the closing minute, it’s as stringent, and as satisfying, as any techno moment of recent times.

It’s bleak and bittersweet, and it’s very well done.

Even given the sheer wealth of variety and detail Fhloston Paradigm crams in, it’s never lofty or inaccessible; instead, it both upholds an electronic music convention even as it carves its own singular niche.

At its most cleverly executed, Polysick's sound world is easy on the ears but never quite easy listening – entrancingly, exotically beautiful, but with a barb in its tail.

It might be their fifteenth album in a 30-year career, but Push The Sky Away proves beyond all doubt--even mine--that the group is still at the top of their game.

13 Moons holds a broader appeal than some of his more abstract or challenging LPs. That said, there’s nothing particularly straightforward about the album.

Panda Bear’s fourth full-length is a mature album of peace and reckoning, one that weaves ghostly textures, plumbs watery depths, but ultimately happens on something comforting and tranquil.

As its title suggests, Quixotism’s narrative arc is obscure, and as such the album contains no real highlights or low points; instead, each part maintains a discrete identity of its own, serving both as groundwork for each subsequent part and the basis for its counterpoint.

These four tracks may cry out for proper soundsystems and bear many of dance music’s hallmarks, but their lengths (they add up to nearly half an hour), discordant layering and meandering structures render them more suited to body listening than the dancefloor.

The final outcome is a trebly plastic-fantastic quality, rendering Shrines closer in tone and texture to coke-rap than ethereal indie.

It’s an album that feels measured and well timed and yet avoids sounding over-polished or awkwardly stage-managed.

As long as you’re prepared to accept that it’s a Hollywood production inspired more by Steely Dan and California highways than Cajmere and French basements, then Random Access Memories is a treat.

The music is certainly some of El's most engaging yet, and should possess real lasting power.

Primal but denatured, >> leaves you feeling wired, lethal and focused; dehumanized.

Unfidelity stands out as a keeper.

Despite the occasional tendency to soar above when her songs could benefit from some earthiness, in the main Ware's sheer, confident boldness carries the day.

The result, unexpectedly, is his most ambitious record yet.

Alternate/Endings is as bleak as it is imaginative, a drum ‘n’ bass opus from a producer who hasn’t quite turned his back on hip-hop.

[Ciara sounds] blissfully triumphant and uncomplicated on a record from start to finish.

Love Letters proves to have all the pop addictivenss that Riviera did.

Rather than a portrait of Fuck Buttons’ time in the studio, Slow Focus is a hovering meditation on a distant, eerie landscape; a panorama with a sustained, totalising gaze that figures an expanse in perpetual decay and dis-ease.

Acousmatic Sorcery's imperfections are unapologetic and unconcerned, largely stamping all over any chances of bringing the overall experience down.

Like much of the best music of recent times, Colonial Patterns sits outside of chronology, peering fascinatedly in.

Too Bright creates a captive audience in its effusive refusal to let you look away.

Plenty of new producers are doing interesting things on the outer fringes of the style--Filter Dread is probably Runge’s closest contemporary--but nobody sounds quite like this.

Honeymoon is by far Del Rey’s most beautifully made and cohesive album.

This is the best footwork album released by Planet Mu to date, and sits comfortably in the upper echelons of their discography. Traxman has set the bar incredibly high.

If Dagger Paths was a revelation, Engravings is a refinement, long to arrive but worth the wait.

It's very difficult not to like these songs--for their clarity and craftmanship, but also the strength of their ideas.

More sweeping and grand than any of their previous records, the trio’s fourth LP is by far their most cinematic.

Mantasy is a noticeably self-contained work: it unfolds gradually and deliberately, full of wholly beguiling details.

This may be Carla Bozulich’s take on pop music, but Boy is rarely anything short of cathartic.

It's Kemp's uncompromising beat patterns and bouncing, funk-infused basslines that ultimately deserve the spotlight here.

Ghettoville might chronicle a dark patch for Actress, but once it hits its stride it’s as good, and as full of life, as anything he has produced.

Say Yes To Love feels like a purging, 20-odd minutes of urgent expulsion that leaves you feeling exhausted, elated and renewed.

While indebted to the music that came before it, No World is very much of the here and now.

By and large, though, Moiré counters spontaneity with poise.

An unobtrusively profound statement, cradled in soft-focus melancholy, it's a willowy but towering expression of disassociation, and deeply moving.

In Visa, Ripatti has constructed an album evocative of one extremely specific place--and it’s a place which couldn’t have been accessed by anybody but him.

Thundercat sprung The Beyond / Where The Giants Roam on us unexpectedly, but in its surprise and brevity is the awakening of his voice.

Unselfconscious and joyfully untrammelled, most importantly Never is charmingly weird--that quality so coveted by indie chancers everywhere.

Considering the trio are relative newcomers to dance music, the programming throughout Factory Floor is acutely deft. Elegant, in fact; so much so that the sound can comfortably be described as chic.

Remember Your Black Day is about that feeling of grim portent, the cold fear that leaks in through your TV screen, the dread that hunts you down, even as you sprawl on a sun lounger and sip your cocktail and stare out at the sea.

With Wolf, Tyler, the Creator is exciting again: maybe not as the ringleader of the Odd Future empire, but as a producer who just turned 22.

Minor issues like that [decision to release Stranger Than Fiction as a hybrid album/mixtape led to some questionable choices] make Stranger Than Fiction very good rather than great, but Gates hasn’t sacrificed any of the characteristics that garnered all this recent attention.

Although imperfect, The Electric Lady is a huge statement.

At its core, Long.Live.A$AP succeeds because it lets Rocky be Rocky: a rapper with a unique voice and an ear for captivating beats whose lyrical shortcomings can be glossed over with healthy servings of charisma and panache.

The album’s electronic feel sharpens the idea of sterility and a frictionless modern life, while providing, as British electronica has done since the days of John Foxx, a lexicon for existential nothingness.

Faced with trying to communicate a feeling as raw as lost love, he too has reached for the cliches. They may be banal and apparently devoid of sincerity, but for Blunt, they capture our inability to say what we mean or mean what we say in these strange, post-ideological times.

Rich and disorientating, KOCH accesses a different pace of life--or rather several, bewilderingly, all at once.

It's not without faults, but overall it's a undoubtedly a very welcome gift.

Bécs is seldom unapproachable; it’s also his style to leave just enough beauty poking through the seams.

As a portrait of a city, and a person, Acid Rap is about as good--and as honest--as they come.

Total Loss is a largely dud-free album.

Rather than the stunt-casting found in some dance-pop albums, the vocalists here exist intrinsically and organically in the songs, their vocals weaved into the fabric rather than simply wearing it.

Space Zone keeps the bar propped up impressively high without treading back over old ground.

For music that is over 15 years old, Back on Time sounds as fresh as a sitar-wielding half-stepping daisy.

Drums are present, but they often function as little more than pensive timekeepers. All the better to frame those tunes – artful, delicate things, rarely saying more or less than they need to.

To praise To Rococo Rot can be to undersell them; their most attractive qualities, their sense of minimalism and simplicity and concision, are hardly the sort of things you bellow from rooftops. And yet, it works, and beautifully.

For a record that wears its retro influences so openly, Psychic is surprisingly forward-thinking.

Steam Days is a worthwhile--if slightly unseasonal--listen.

It just is: mindless, unfathomable--a little like the digital fracas of our online lives.

Personality's not a start-to-finish winner like Glass Swords was, but it's refreshing and gratifying to hear Scuba step out from the shadow of the Berghain and dreary discussions of the "dubstep-techno crossover", and start to release some music that sounds like it was fun to make.