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.

The main business is killing, of course, and business is very good. It’s one of the reasons why Tomb Mold are among the most respected names in the new school of old school. But by allowing their own ideas to run wild atop it all, they’re also comfortably one of its most creative.

It’s in the staggering breadth of what Code Orange dare to do here that’s as striking as how much they want you to break your neck from turning your head every time they dart around a corner.

Taken individually, both NULL and VOID are brilliant albums from a collective who understand music’s role as a vessel for emotional articulacy. Put them together, and they are creatively anything but their combined title, while also somehow perfectly expressing a feeling of being both.

EndEx doesn’t win many points for going where no band has gone before. The album, and its creators, do deserve credit for continuing the Fear Factory tradition, as an industrial metal band preoccupied with questions of how technological advancements adversely affect our lives. If you fear the future, this is the soundtrack for you.

Very occasionally, such as during the first half of the otherwise excellent Crashed Out Wasted, that compulsion to pour honey in our ears can lead to a little too much saccharine. But on the whole, Race The Night is a journey worth taking, deftly hitting all of the touchpoints that make Ash such a special band.

If life is still depicted largely as a struggle against despair, these songs nevertheless suggest that small moments of happiness can be found amongst the darkness. If the message of No Joy is ultimately one of perseverance, it’s fitting that this is an album which seems set to grant its creators a new lease of life.

Those still pining for the slick, sparkly, arena-sized rock bombast of the masterful This Is War will be left wanting, but such is how things go on Mars, and it’s a hearteningly better album than the awkward, confused America. The guitars are back.

As obvious as it is to say, Baroness are completely singular in what they do.

There is a very good rock record waiting for you here – and certainly one that deserves to be appreciated by many more than nine people.

It’s testament to how thrilling Rivers Of Heresy is that by the time you reach at closing track The Looming, released, somewhat boldly, as the first single from the album, that its impact hasn’t been lessened.

Like the very youth it seems to be chronicling, Learning How To Live And Let Go flies by in a blur, blindsiding with the contemplative poignancy of arms-round-shoulders closer It Ain’t Easy.

With a nod to the classic rock that inspired them, Greta Van Fleet continue to contort those great influences in challenging and evocative new directions.

There might be a heavy dose of sarcasm in the seams of its shell-suited soul, but Super Snõõper is never arch or cynical. Rather, it’s an exhilarating endorphin rush you’ll want to return to again and again.

As usual, PVRIS demonstrates the value of existing in the spaces between genres, and that moments of combination and contrast are often the most exciting.

It comes across like the soundtrack to a great lost ’90s teen movie and, best of all, with its irresistible energy and eminently quotable lyrical couplets ('I have to say you look like Hell / Oh well'), the whole thing’s an absolute blast.

Yet while this album rails against the world our plutocratic/oligarchic overlords have created for the rest of us, it also displays a vulnerability that’s rare in hardcore and post-hardcore.

A trip worth taking, over and over again.

As a QOTSA album, In Times New Roman… is dark and disorientating; for Joshua Homme, it feels like a wholly necessary outpouring of creative catharsis.

Sixteen albums in, that they continue to surprise and create as much as they do is to be celebrated on its own. That it represents their best work in a decade is the triumph of a genuinely magnificent band.

An overwhelming addition to a back catalogue not lacking in transcendental power, Purge finds Justin channelling distress and disgust into music that hits both body and soul, creating something wonderful out of horror and pain. This really is a perfectly-titled album.

Tomorrow Never Comes is more of a delight than really it has any right to be. Certainly, it’s a good deal more compelling than any of its authors’ more recent albums.

It prises beauty from unimaginable suffering. Make no mistake, Foo Fighters have delivered a masterpiece – one they never would have wanted to have to record, but a masterpiece nonetheless.

For those who like their rock and metal to hit with swift immediacy, Take Me Back To Eden’s hour-plus runtime might prove a bit of a slog, but if you allow yourself to be fully immersed in Sleep Token’s world, the sonic rewards are plentiful.

True, not all these 10 songs are gonna be fan-favourites, but this return at least partly captures the sense of catharsis brought so brilliantly to that stage in South Wales.

There is an explosive exuberance at the heart of Enter Shikari’s superb seventh album.

Attention to detail makes …So Unknown an involving listen, but emphatically doesn’t detract from the band’s primary intention of rearranging your skeletal structure through elastic, chugging riffs and neck-snapping beats.

At an hour-and-a-quarter, like its predecessor, 72 Seasons is a lot to cram in in one go, a marathon. But it slaps consistently, and hard.

Alas, as with other City and Colour albums, this one suffers from moments of terminal blandness.

So Much (For) Stardust does have a foot in a past FOB, but where they're taking you is somewhere you weren't expecting, and it's equally welcome. Just as importantly, they sound like Fall Out Boy again.

It’s hard not to have fun when every track here feels suitably like its own adventure, and impressively still, BABYMETAL sound like they’ve been steering the ship through these parallel universes not for the first time, but for years.

This is extreme music heavy in both sound and content. But this is also part of the strength of the album. It is unflinching in its subject matter and depth of its darkness, just as it is unafraid to be exactly what it is. And that's something quite unlike anything else you'll hear in 2022.

Tantalisingly, this record also feels like the next building-block in a potentially genre-defining body of work. As much as we can’t wait for 100,000 gecs, however, there’s a mountain of fun to be had before we get there.

Dying Of Everything does not match or beat its predecessor, but that is not to say that it is lacking in any department, for it is a crushing slab of the dark’n’hard stuff executed with merciless precision and delivered with a killer mix.

Past //Present // Future dismantles every box the band have found themselves pigeonholed in, and sets them on their own path of integrity and triumph.

They’re making bigger leaps than ever. Even their more familiar-sounding songs show signs of metamorphosis.

Truth Decay is an album that sees You Me At Six grabbing elements from 2014’s Cavalier Youth and 2010’s Hold Me Down. Then it wraps them up into a time capsule of what it means to be a young adult in the ever-difficult 2020s.

Truly emphasising how far they’ve come since emo’s heyday, these songs have as much (or more) in common with alt.pop icons like HAIM, Alanis Morissette or Fiona Apple as even they do with even Paramore’s poppiest ‘rock’ contemporaries like Fall Out Boy and Panic! At The Disco.

One Day is a fearless from a band who punched the clock out cold.

When Måneskin tap into the youthful exuberance and fiery eccentricity that got them here in the first place, though, they’re still utterly unstoppable.

Every Loser is superb. But more importantly it encapsulates Iggy’s essence, not by reframing for a modern audience or pandering to trends, but drawing out the timeless qualities of its author: his anger, his sense of wonder and romance, and his downright strangeness.

The bad news for Disturbed fans, and unsurprising news for their detractors, is that Divisive is an average record. Hearing the first three tracks – opening single Hey You, the leaden Bad Man, and the forgettable title-track – one hopes they’re mere aberrations and that the quality high-octane arena fodder will arrive imminently. Alas, it never does.

This is a great rock album, built on its creators' own terms, and delivered with musical flash, songwriting panache and, at times, immense force.

It feels refreshing, and like a bunch of really good mates have got together to share their experiences with the world. L.S. Dunes could well change the tide on all things post-hardcore.

Cave World is an album brimming not just with colour and life, but also with a sense of striking unease that is pitched somewhere between the deeply sexual and the profoundly sinister. ... That all of this strangeness is carried aloft on a smorgasbord of varying musical styles makes Cave World all the more alluring.

Although it might not set your mosh muscles alight like the coffins on its cover, SMTB have improved their genre-exploring recipe with deeper flavours, keeping you coming back for more.

It’s very pleasantly chill, but after a while it does start to get a touch samey. Still, for those looking for something with vibe firmly in place, as ever, Turnover deliver exactly what you’re looking for here.

Pawns & Kings is classic Alter Bridge – nice big choruses, intelligent lyrics, rock music meant to be played on big stages – but with their muscle properly tearing through their shirts. And though for longtime fans this shouldn't come as a surprise, the level to which they've dived in here still may do.

Thematically taking place over one night, the seven songs that make up Datura are equal parts cinematic, catchy and cool, while also spectacularly showcasing Boston Manor’s creative growth.

It’s a ferocious, fearless record from one of Britain’s best.

Congregation leaves off with an air of strength. On one level, from overwhelming darkness, they’ve wrenched a set of songs that are not only vitally relevant in the here and now, but which will stand the test of time. On another, it’s clear that Witch Fever’s journey is just beginning.

Done largely live in the studio, together, looking at each other, the already taut LOG energy thrusts even harder.

Smart, confident and put together with a real sense of intrigue, WILLOW’s latest record is a testament to having the belief to forge your own path. As coping mechanisms go, this one sounds like a winner.

As a big, glossy rock record that finds Bush aging both gracefully and garishly, The Art Of Survival is a success, even if it’s unlikely to win over any those who’ve remained immune to the band’s charms so far, and isn’t innovative enough to ensnare new listeners.

Here, her already fulfilled promise is given the opportunity to breathe and find even deeper depths of wonder and intriguing brilliance. Hear it and weep.

It’s perhaps not as instantaneous as the debut, as vile as Iowa or as catchy as Vol. 3, but it offers depth, discomfort and danger to those willing to dive into the recesses of The Nine’s collective consciousness.

As ever, The Wonder Years remain the best in their class. They remain as musically smart, emotionally intelligent, and reassuringly bullshit-free as ever.

So, 13 albums in, Clutch are still uniquely brilliant, master craftsmen of a form at once ingeniously simple and amazingly clever. And one that only they can properly do.

It might not have anything with the same riotous energy as It's A Raid, his punked-up duet with Post Malone that went off like a feral firework, but it still radiates a sense of the thing you love keeping you excited and feeling alive.

Opener The Funeral presents a far less cartoonish performer than he was on 2020's overly-cute second album Weird!. This alone makes the whole thing magnitudes more enjoyable. The energised electro-pop of Memories (a duet with WILLOW) and the brooding Sex Not Violence continue on a similar tack, showing a width of creative goalpost while actually keeping things together.

On The Sick, The Dying… And The Dead!, the war machine is resolutely in-gear. Whatever the cause (COVID weirdness, the sacking of long-time bassist Dave Ellefson, logging onto Twitter for five minutes), it's killer.

Physical Thrills is the sound of a band able to have a deep spring clean and polish up their best sides, to thrilling effect.

Nine records in it is inevitable that anything they do will have a particular sheen, but creatively, in performance, and in energy they continue to operate on a plane all of their own. And in a world of uncertainty, that's a very welcome thing.

It absolutely borrows plenty from all of Brendon’s influences – but that’s not a bad thing. Viva Las Vengeance is both consistently catchy and classic-sounding, and another fine addition to Panic!’s remarkably varied discography.

The Chats have the same natural knack for this stuff as The Ramones, able to make their point in 90 seconds while also having ripping punk tunes galore that sound no different to those on their High Risk Behaviour debut. It is quite brilliant.

It’s the pacier moments that make up the bulk of the highlights, but there are other areas of interest. Unwanted seems determined to be lots of different things to different people, ticking boxes left, right and centre in a way that seems ambitious rather than cynical, while mostly delivering on its multitude of promises.

Ultimately, any record which ends with a cover of cult anarcho-surrealists Rudimentary Peni can’t fail to convince in its sincere respect for its predecessors and inspirations.

A record which never really sags – an impressive feat for a mixtape of 17 songs, none of which are interludes – and instead engages the listener throughout, with a constant stream of fresh ideas thrown into the pot. When it comes to rock and hip-hop colliding, this is the sound of the future.

There are still elements of The Fall in the taut rhythms and the brief but potent guitar flashes are occasionally reminiscent of Jon Spencer or J. Mascis. As a whole piece, though, My Other People sees TV Priest continue to map out their own increasingly intriguing identity.

It’s interesting to hear Candy embracing their experimental side and, for anyone in any doubt, their industrial tinged noise is every bit as horrible as their hardcore – a wonderful spectrum that ranges from explosive anger to sinister brooding.

In truth not every track on BLEED HERE NOW quite justifies its inclusion. A trimmed down version would have been the best …Trail Of Dead album in 20 years, but this sprawling incarnation remains a comforting reminder of the warmth and weirdness of these perennial outsiders.