This is not the moment where he will become a superstar, but it’s a promising beginning to what should be a very long career.

The theme of pining which was thread throughout her debut mixtape Cut 4 Me is still present here, but more pointed and poetic this time around. Each song beams with growth.

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

Ultimately, Beauty Behind the Madness is a heftier House of Balloons. Its weight is carried in the access to better production and drugs, and what the album truly accomplishes is proving that The Weeknd has never been wretched.

DS2 is a relentless, dud-free hour that adds in most of his recent highlights to complete the story of his last year.

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

Prurient’s masterpiece.... Frozen Niagara Falls is also one of Prurient’s most accessible works, with Fernow’s arrangements constantly pulling you along.

Its subtle nuances reveal themselves with repeated headphone listens, and though it could use a bit of a trim, there’s plenty here to entice the listener to just lay back, lose yourself, and float.

Calling the album “ambitious” doesn’t capture the order of magnitude with which Lamar has expanded his scope, as he moves from the singular to the plural without ever straying from the personal.

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.

This honest emotional core is something that Vincent has always put into his music, but rarely has it felt quite so effortless as it does here. It’s the kind of album you could imagine non-house and techno fans getting behind quite easily, and shows that his appeal shouldn’t just be limited to vinyl collectors.

The combination of pop and EDM is nothing new, but rarely has it felt quite so enjoyable as it does here.

If Goldenheart was a monumental but monolithic edifice of an album, Blackheart is a shape-shifting house of mirrors in permanent flux, light where its predecessor was heavy, welcoming instead of forbidding.

Björk’s most fully realised, accessible record in years.

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.

The Pinkprint is ultimately Nicki’s most cohesive project.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Bestial Burden, remarkably, achieves exactly what it sets out to do: to turn the gory inner mechanics of the body outward, and lay bare its unpredictable capacity for self-destruction.

Ruins is one of her finest works, full to the brim with emotion in spite of the aching space at its heart.

As an artistic step forward, Les Sins certainly registers.

Black Metal is an exceptional record. It is a stronger, more complete statement even than that seen on The Redeemer, primarily because it lays bare its own contradictions.

On 1989, she makes mountains out of molehills, but this approach feels one part the ironic distance of the digital generation, one part sincere embracing of the impact of life’s speedbumps. Nothing could be more 2014.

It’s the sheer energy on display that pushes Run The Jewels 2 through. The production is popping throughout, funky as hell, and often dotted with unexpected twists and turns.

The result is a curious mix: a subtle and often beautiful record about not very much at all.

Soused may not be the best record either Sunn O))) or Walker have released in the last few years--those accolades go to Monoliths & Dimensions and The Drift, respectively--but it’s still an endlessly compelling work, the match between singular solo artist and the pivotal group every bit as thrilling as you’d expect.

Aquarius is quite a complicated and accomplished album in that it’s amplified the potential of the mixtapes, making Tinashe into an unquestionable contender for real popstar status, without sacrificing the weirdo introspective soul that made them so special.

You’re Dead! finds ways to keep things pumping.

Each track says something different, but with his honest subject matter and his unique arrangements constantly in focus, Snaith never loses his way.

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

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

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

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

It’s solid, proficient, fun--not quite transcendent, but, the sort of left turn that feels natural and uncontrived.

Shabazz Palaces deserve credit where it’s due for building their sound outward; if Black Up established their status as hip-hop outliers, then Lese Majesty solidifies their place in the pantheon of rap’s oddball geniuses.

Drone albums are by their nature immersive, but it’s rare to come across one so tempestuous, evocative and compelling from start to finish as Wilderness of Mirrors.

There are moments of sheer beauty and reckless fun all over this record, but there’s a looming question mark over whether or not listeners will feel motivated to pick their way through the expanse to enjoy them.

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

As with any major pop album, LP1 is a crew effort, there’s no doubt as to whose hand is on the rudder.

La Roux’s march may has slowed to a stroll, but she proves here that she can captivate at any pace.

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.

The sounds that Dall brings to bear here are often gorgeous, a sun-dappled, analogue-soft electronica of rippling synths and glinting percussion that recalls--and sometimes strongly--the atmospheric IDM of the mid-90s.

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.

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.

Whether or not stadium pop is to everyone’s taste, this is it in its smartest and most human form.

By and large, the songs on Why Do the Heathen Rage? are brilliantly executed hybrids that manage to subvert received ideas even once you’ve processed the album’s premise, thanks to superb transposing and Daniel’s knack for lashing together motifs from utterly different styles.

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.

Krell’s most complete album to date: not because it exactly answers the question of where his position is in relation to pop--nor the question of the title, nor any questions at all--but because it perfectly captures that oscillation that has always been at the centre of his work.

Packed with bold ideas and striking new forms, Da Mind Of Traxman Volume 2 is as good a testament as any to the ongoing vitality of footwork.

Ominousness is woven into the fabric of Until Silence, where beauty and bleakness coexist synergistically, as though it’s impossible to have one without the other.

With Ultraviolence, Lana Del Rey remains a singular figure in music, sounding (and addressing the idea of authenticity) like no one else.

An uncharacteristically difficult end to a record that’s not quite a paradigm smasher, but a must-hear for anyone who likes their hip-hop weird and with teeth.

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.

Their music is about 40 per cent less exciting shorn from the lurid splatter of their videos, but music in 2014 is a more interesting place for their presence.

It succeeds as an exploration of bodies, but more specifically, of the kinds of tension created by the dichotomies between them and within them, throughout an intimately crafted pop record that treads that careful line between wallowing and pleasure in the way that all the very best pop records do.

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.

Government Plates is sometimes just incoherent.... But in the end these are minor quibbles.

If his aim was to give musical form to the eastern DRC’s “unnerving beauty and unflinching horror”, then A U R O R A is a dazzling success.

In Conflict is an impressive record of worthy content, but the day he finds a way to reconcile his musical chops to his pop ear, then Owen Pallett will surely make his masterpiece.

Possibly, some will leave Luminous disappointed that The Horrors haven’t pulled off another quantum leap, but by slowing down and bedding into their sound, they’ve made a record that feels both studied and instinctual, elevated and elemental, and that’s no mean feat.

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

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

Al Qadiri doesn’t just walk the line, she strides.

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.

By and large, this is a downbeat record, one suggesting maybe Albarn recently had a listen to ‘Mr Robinson’s Quango’ and decided never to do ‘whimsical’ again. Still, there’s a couple of more upbeat numbers that work in neat counterpoint.

I Shall Die Here is a bracing listen, certainly no easier than The Body’s conventional albums, and in its application of intense studio treatment, at times perhaps even more intense. But it is also a whole lot better than The Body’s 2013 album for Thrill Jockey, Christ, Redeemers.

Z is billed as an EP, but that undersells the completion and cohesion of these 10 songs. Her voice may be gentle, the songs just left-of-center, but SZA’s lyrics demand attention.

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

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

The result is a strange paradox in typical Animal Collective style: a suite of songs that’s at times alien, other times sentimental; often cutesy, but a little too bristly to curl up with under a blanket.

It’s Album Time is an impressively balanced and varied record.

On Mess, surface is meaning, with the album’s vacuous hedonism merely another expression of the theme of spiritual oblivion that Liars have explored ever since their debut.

The Soul of All Natural Things realises her intent wonderfully, its gorgeously crafted pastoral songs a gentle invocation to inner peace.

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

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

Unfidelity stands out as a keeper.

There’s more than enough in this album to keep her in that position--so, come for the gay brostep, stay for the songcraft and character.

While My Krazy Life is YG’s debut, it feels more like an album-length celebration of Mustard’s ratchet revolution, a sound distilled from LA G-Funk, Atlanta snap and Bay Area hyphy.

While Oxymoron is never dull, thanks to Q’s indisputable skills as a rapper and beat selector, by its conclusion you’ll wish he’d given less of its runtime over to his gangsta persona and more to exploring his own identity.

Yes, fine songs. But in part, though, a little of the success of July should be attributed to producer Randall Dunn.

It’s a very puzzling record, but the last thing you should do is try and puzzle it out: just go with it and you’ll find its strange charms working much more quickly than you might have thought at first.

The whole EP is terrifyingly accomplished, there is sick genius at work in every nanosecond of detail, and it definitely makes you feel like the 21st century as per 20th century sci-fi principles is finally well underway.

There are runs of tunes that are almost entirely textural, which might be part of the reason it’s so easy to drift into, but are not really ones you’d chuck on a playlist.

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.

A record whose main theme may be death, but whose power comes from Kozelek’s vivid celebration of life.

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.

In short, this album holds together even better than On a Mission, and Katy B is still our best pop star.

Moodymann has inflated wildly, now standing at a monstrous 27 tracks in length through a generous stuffing of media samples and, in typical Kenny Dixon Jr fashion, a bunch of material that has already seen release.

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.

In terms of compositional sophistication, Doyle struggles to compete with the Jon Hopkinses of this world, his emotional brushstrokes unambiguous and delineated. But considering he’s a 22 year old home producer, comparing Total Strife Forever to last year’s EP shows that he’s growing exponentially.

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.

The percussion is low in the mix and the bass way up, giving the songs a molten, fluid quality. The parts themselves, however, are guided by an erratic intelligence.

In short: this is a techno mix--a really good one.

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

All in all, it’s as if the watery concoction of before has been distilled into a potent musical treacle--richer in atmosphere, sharper, artistically decisive and intoxicating.

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.