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.

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.

Vernon guest-spots aside, though, To See More Light matches its predecessor in terms of quality.

Patience (After Sebald) is an unnervingly quiet album.

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.

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

Whilst My Name Is My Name has one of the best selections of beats on a major label rap album in years, and Pusha’s enunciations are still as sonically potent as a decade ago, his singularity largely comes across as a stubborn resistance to change in the face of how ambitious the LP (and so much new rap, frankly) sounds, and suffers from a tracklist too concerned with features to allow this singularity to reign supreme anyway.

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

With this record Laurel Halo has created a strong work that, while being notable and challenging for its unusual, compact combination of pop, ambience and musique concrète, is also immersive and enjoyable for this exact reason.

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.

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.

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

Despite its patchier moments, fIN's effective command of light and shade make for an involving listen, and it's a sound that's pretty much Talabot's own.

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

Kill For Love matures with each listen, and there's enough craftsmanship at work to more than compensate for the more listless moments.

Though the songs on Swisher are occasionally a little too long--even the shortest is more than five minutes, and ‘Andrew’ nearly 10--they’re mostly dynamic and varied enough that boredom never really has the chance to set in.

While it may take until the next album for these darker elements to be as rewardingly complex as Wilner can be, it’s still an immersive trip.

This timid spike ['Afterlife'] in urgency is short-lived, swallowed whole by closer ‘Supersymmetry’ and its 11 genteel minutes of caressing synth-loops and mental nothingness, completing perfectly what is an utterly tangential statement.

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.

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.

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

Booth and Brown are old hands these days, their territory firmly staked out. It’s gratifying to see, if only briefly, that they haven’t lost the element of surprise.

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.

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

When it works, it makes for gloriously contradictory pop--it's just a shame that the formula isn't a little more consistent.

Swing Lo Magellan features some of the Dirty Projectors' most straightforward pop songs to date.

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.

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