If this is, indeed, the end, it’s a wonderful and profound way with which to say goodbye. It would, however, be a great shame if this was the last we ever hear from Aaron West, because this is more than an album. It’s an actual life.

Dark Matter is many things. It’s thrilling. It’s moving. It’s surprising. It’s a band still operating at the peaks of their powers.

ABOMINATION is frequently a colourful, outlandish listen, bold in scope and teeming with ingenious lines.

Their rebellious spirit is intertwined with a sense of total, inspiring self-love and in creating that feeling of empowerment, Humble As The Sun feels revolutionary in a fresh new way.

There will be doubters and there will be haters, but Heaven :x: Hell is Sum 41 at their zenith and is, without any shadow of a doubt, the album of their career.

Nonetheless, even if the follow-up to 2022’s Garageband Superstar isn’t wildly innovative, there’s a smorgasbord of catchy tunes fizzing with sugary energy.

The Mandrake Project is a colossal idea carried out by an artist who revels in snowballing ideas and having to work hard to cram it all in. It’s the most Bruce Dickinson of all Bruce Dickinson’s solo works. It's also the best.

Ultimately, though, this is a record with the kind of undeniable quality that will captivate fresh-faced newcomers just as much as weathered veterans.

This is punk at its most multifaceted and emotional, overflowing with desire and angst.

Despite only clocking in at 42 minutes it feels like it drags on for ages. And the copious use of samples to remind you it’s an industrial record gets tiring.

At the point where most bands start to slow down, Pissed Jeans have hit the accelerator.

The Liverpudlian quartet have every reason to be overloaded with strident self-belief, but the striking vibrancy and surging energy with which they translate it to these 12 tracks is utterly remarkable.

It’s evocative stuff, but what makes it more compelling is that it’s delivered by a 43-year-old woman whose tastes can’t be contained by low ceilings, so these observations don’t necessarily arrive with the musical backing you might expect.

Musically, TANGK finds IDLES’ style rejuvenated, with drum patterns drawing from soul, techno and hip hop. The sparse beats and ominous background hums of POP POP POP are reminiscent of Radiohead’s Kid A.

Ultimately, this album is a promise that as brilliantly beguiling as Chelsea Wolfe has always been, her big picture is still coming into focus.

Unlike the rest of us willpower-lacking lightweights, he manages to succeed; crafting an album that nods to the Rattlesnakes’ past but strikes out boldly for a bright new future.

Ignore the anodyne song-titles like Versions Of You, Bad Time and Scars. Sonically, we’re right back into the gravel of early-2000s classic From Here To Infirmary and Good Mourning. Guitars slice, grate and gouge like murder weapons. Matt and Dan Andriano’s vocals are loaded with more wry, world-weary bittersweetness than they have been in years.

Exhilaratingly expansive music balanced by a sense of darkness and foreboding, travelling simultaneously into outer space and inner turmoil. SLIFT’s expansive energy and transcendental creativity provide a uniquely rewarding thrill.

It’s a return to rock with a capital 'R'. In fact, make that three capital 'R's.

As they get older and wiser, when they focus their songwriting skills like they do on Saviors, they are as sharp, bright and essential as they’ve ever been. And they still know who they, and you, are.

In their own distinct ways, they both sound like the end of the world, and this jointly-created album sees them gleefully pulling preconceptions out of shape.

Balancing an instinct for dancefloor-crushing industrial with gloomily lush soundscapes, Rat Wars suggests that even when HEALTH are at their most meticulously state-of-the-art, a fervent need to express honest emotion finds humanity overriding tech to emerge as the dominant element in their work.

Polished production courses through veins of Zig, with each track elevated above its component parts, as the genre-muddling star incorporates elements of industrial, metal and jungle amongst the record’s heavier junctures, with piano and cello bolstering the album’s more delicate passages.

A satisfying, feisty record made for blasting loud enough to annoy the neighbours, and for partying the existential dread away. This band’s not cooling down anytime soon.

As ever, SAVED! is a genuinely haunting record from an artist whose emotional articulacy is unlike any other. Creatively, it is an inspired idea, carried off by a unique talent.

This is an excellent album in its own right, but ONE MORE TIME… also points to an even more exciting future for blink-182.

It’s all written with smartness, a rough, street poetry, and a huge dollop of Americana populated by burned-out restaurants and big cars and rock’n’roll dreamers and John Hughes suburbia.

Sanguivore may well be Creeper in their ultimate form, and by embracing their biggest, most bombastic sound ever, they’ve created black magic.