When Megan moves away from her standard lyrical fare, perpetuating her beef with Tory Lanez on opening track Shots Fired or penning the poppy tune Don’t Rock Me To Sleep, the results are some of the best moments on the album, and if these aspects of her style had been explored some more it could have made for a more diverse LP, but Good News is still chock-full of catchy hooks, stellar verses and feisty attitude.

Seeking New Gods is simultaneously thought provoking, questioning, elegant and unsettled – but it is fundamentally a feelgood album. We find Gruff Rhys at his most natural, his winning blend of a slight, endearing shyness balanced by extrovert, psychedelic tendencies.

It’s a rare skill to be both silly and devastatingly tender, and it’s all here to revel in.

A band who, three decades into their career, still sounds as fresh and exciting as they did when they first began.

Whereas some Avery albums have struggled to convince, the work here is fleshed out and artistically vibrant, the only noticeable weakness being an overly goofy ostinato on Lone Swordsman, though IDM had a few of those in its time. All in, Ultra Truth is an accomplished, moving record.

Ambitious yet restrained, elegant yet exciting, Veckatimest is an endlessly-rewarding album which seems destined to vie with Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion for the title of the year's best.

It’s a thrill to listen to their experiments, their tinkering with sounds and ideas.

It all adds up to a magnificent third album which serves as the crowning point of a career that is, excitingly, still in its infancy.

In short, Pavement's influence will continue to be felt for years to come, and this compilation admirably explains why.

Clever, original, complicated, sometimes frustrating but more often revelatory, it will, given time, uncover its manifold delights.

ny quibbles are minor here though, for Devotion is a truly impressive debut album from yet another talented British singer.

One of the best albums of the year so far.

Nothing As The Ideal never fails to entertain and covers much ground in doing so. It’s a case of which aspect do you like about the band at times, though: the metal side or the stoner rock side. You probably won’t be disappointed if you sit in either camp; equally, however, you may feel disappointed that you haven’t had enough of your preferred All Them Witches fix.

Life Metal resonates in the surrounding air particles long after the last track concludes, and will reverberate in the minds of listeners longer still. A truly magnificent, very real, and ultimately restorative record.

It’s the sort of album which flows naturally along, with not a song, or even a lyric out of place. She’s been flying under the radar pretty consistently for a decade now, but if there’s more records of the quality of The Spur, more people will inevitably fall in love with Joan Shelley’s music.

Houck’s sixth full-length album takes the mournful country-rock seemingly perfected on Here’s To Taking Things Easy and runs with it, creating his most realised record yet.

Yo La Tengo have nothing left to prove and this allows them the room and scope to simply showcase their talents, which are many and admirable as well as being both under-exposed and under-appreciated.

They’ve produced one of the very best albums of the year, despite the long gestation period.

Clara is a supremely accomplished record, and deserves to sit with previous career highlights like Submers and Monument Builders as a masterclass in abstract electronica.

They are like nothing you've ever heard before and everything you one day hoped you would, too strong for the charts and too corrupting for MTV.

Mesmerising as the words and delivery are, the album is also musically excellent.

This sense of being aware of our own impending death leading to a heightened sense of life sums up perfectly The Airing of Grievances, an album that bemoans the past, shrugs it's shoulders and raises a glass to the future.

With simple, delicate moments of memorable poignancy such as Banjo or Amen, he has now made a late masterpiece.

Although The Girl Is Crying In Her Latte might not be quite equal joyous recent peak Lil’ Beethoven, it’s impressive that, on their 26th album, Sparks are incorporating new sounds and concepts, whilst still sounding exactly like themselves.

It should be an overblown, riotous mess, but it's perfectly held together by musicians seemingly forged as one by long nights in spit and sawdust boozers, and in singer Craig Finn, a lyricist of remarkable poise and eloquence.

Until the release of this album, Shepherd’s output might have proved hard to follow for the casual listener, comprising as it did sundry white label releases, one-offs and remixes. Fortunately, Elaenia acts as a brilliant encapsulation of a huge talent.

Both artists possess in spades the ability to make affecting, heavyweight emotional music. This emotional intensity and willingness to continuously explore the possibilities of sound (heavy or otherwise) is what May Our Chambers Be Full pivots around over the course of these seven incredible songs.

Glitch Princess certainly isn’t an easy record to listen to, yet neither is it wilfully difficult or unwelcoming. It’s perfectly emblematic of the pop period we’re living in, with a new generation of artists changing the meaning of what it is to make pop music on their own terms.