The record holds up alongside standout moments from Dear's discography, but adopts an unexpectedly rugged disposition.

There's no doubt you'll hear a lot of records in 2012 that sound like Whispers in the Dark, but you'll rarely hear it done this well.

Rare, Forever has all the hallmarks of a big, crossover dance music record, but no one's doing it quite like this.

Working Class Woman is special because it looks beyond the personal highs and lows of touring to the cracks in the foundation of a lucrative club culture that requires constant, exhausting effort to achieve some semblance of stability.

All Melody is remarkably well-rounded. It's not a techno album, it's not a classical album and it's not an ambient album, but it at times resembles all three.

Visa finds Ripatti attuned to a very specific, focused energy, and the result is some of his best work.

What I Breathe feels like both a jumping-off point for dance music newbies and a feast of great ideas for those who have been around the block a few times. It's all held together by great pacing, frankly amazing production and a lack of cynicism that feels refreshing, open-hearted to the very last moment.

It always felt like the UK dance community was collectively cheering for Katy B's success, and Little Red shows how much she deserves it.

A surprisingly coherent record full of vignettes that feel alternately archival, ethnographic and as usual, flickering and ephemeral-glimpses of musicality that flutter away just when you get comfortable.

It still sounds like music from the furthest reaches of the galaxy, but after three decades of getting to know Sean Booth and Rob Brown, the feelings wrought in their work have never been clearer or more heart-rending than on SIGN.

Gamble successfully deploys his robotic collaborators as tools in his sonic worldbuilding rather than as ends in themselves.

Phoenix fully establishes a distinct Eartheater style, building mountains underground and finding worlds of meaning in deep introspection.

Pinned down somewhere between pared-down jazz and emotive R&B, Duval Timothy continues to find insightful ways to tell stories by way of repetition. When ideas are this robust, the extra stuff becomes less important.

On Loom, she takes her interest in found sound to a gloomy, thought-provoking new depth.

For fans of Ø, or anyone keen on abstract, contemplative electronic music, this is a fine release with more than a few fantastic moments.

Overload is suffused with love: love for self, love for community, and especially love for Muldrow's longtime creative and romantic partner, the rapper Dudley Perkins.

Like Reed, Tarelle and Inyang are involved in gritty, street-level investigative poetics. ... This is detective work, through which they hope to discover their own place—figuratively and literally—a sense of purpose, of honest labour.

Pleasant is the word. But not simple. Quiet has just as many corners worth peeking down.

Whatever Loop The Loop's flaws, Jenkins has definitely found his C, and he's justifiably pleased about it.

t's a work of clever, classy and timeless R&B that builds on some of the most enduring and ubiquitous music of the last 30 years.

[A] formidable, baffling, often delightful behemoth of an album.

For many, it was going to be hard for Tellier to surpass Sexuality's sensuous odyssey. Thankfully, My God Is Blue does at least equal it.

Like all good pop, News From Nowhere is brief, never falling victim to the temptation to get lost in soundscaping. Instead, it builds those immersive realms in just a few minutes with each track.

The results are unmistakably Mount Kimbie, showcasing their love for pop, R&B, electronica and Krautrock, while also forging a new identity for themselves within indie rock.

For the most part, though, their method bears fruit, yielding an irresistibly catchy pop record that holds true to its humble Welsh roots.

Platform is full of beautifully corrupted, synthesised signals.

Mod Prog Sic is the latest stop on this journey, taking the band to an evolved new place for a deeply satisfying blend of primal expression and visceral pleasure.

Because Of A Flower pieces together a similar set of songs to ~~~, but with a more open and assured mindset.

The complexities of No Highs are masked by its minimalism. Hecker pairs expansive and bright songs with more repetitive compositions, capturing the beauty in uneasiness and vice versa, and keeping the album from blurring into an ambient haze.

A much more concise statement than last year's Welcome To The Chi, Double Cup is an exciting portrait of a maverick artist with complete creative freedom, and the skills to hold it all together.

Though it finds Smith at her most reserved, The Mosaic Of Transformation feels like a breakthrough, melting the pop-savvy hooks of her past records into one gorgeous, rarefied sound, as invigorating and smooth as electricity flowing through circuits.

Ecstatic Computation is marked by sudden breaks from predictability. Stylistic influences and sonic textures are varied, yet they're cohesive. The result is an album that's both provocative and blissful.

The combination of these two forces is both inspired and insane.

It's another entry of his sublime wanderer's music as Torn Hawk, and includes some of his most arresting and sonically numbing creations to date.

The Killer seems to reveal a pattern on Pawlowitz's part, yet it somehow remains every bit as viscerally captivating as his best material, a formula still as cryptic as it ever was.

Re-Engineering is very much an album designed to be played as a seamless whole. It's warm, fun, curious and deeply entertaining.

Crash Recoil relishes in the same spontaneity offered by Child's live performances, composed of songs that feel more structured like cinematic scenes than traditional techno tracks.

Part of the reason why LXXXVIII is so enjoyable is all these callbacks—it's catnip to a diehard Actress fan. There's a few new wrinkles on there, sure—the jazzy chord changes, the piano, the almost formless ambient sections—but mostly it's what he does best.

Like any such grand project, it's daring and indulgent, occasionally weighed down by its own pretence, and the result is several songs on the album that seem to unspool in no direction in particular. But that unwinding is usually gripping, and like the other two albums Björk's recent renaissance—Utopia and Vulnicura—Fossora stuns more often than it doesn't.

It's a boisterous, life-affirming record that successfully blends essential elements of dancefloor house music with some of the more convivial markers of Peruvian and Latin American music and culture at large.

On the self-produced Will, there's an extraordinary confidence behind Barwick's voice and arrangements.

Even in the depths of despair she still managed to turn out something that feels lush and enticing. DREAMER is one of those albums people revisit for all kinds of reasons, whether they're sitting drinking wine with friends or out on a walk in need of a good cry.

It's her most capital-A ambient album, without the sometimes harsh interference of her favored found sounds and field recordings. Yet at the same time, it's so quiet that it slips into the edges of comprehension just when you've determined you're going to get to the bottom of it. All the better to listen to it again to see what you missed—and then again, and again and again.

Tranklements recalls Robert Hood's Motor: Nighttime World 3: both exhibit a confidence and composure perhaps unique to veteran producers.

Without succumbing to simplicity, Klein's latest release delivers an intimate vision of the mayhem, loss and detachment that can ensue from a whirling cycle of panic and redemption.

Key to the Kuffs certainly finds one of underground music's true antiheros in irresistibly infectious form.

It's another sharp turn in the road on the winding journey of a creative nomad.

Sharp and fiery, Isoviha lacks any restraint, capturing the paradoxical multiplicity and singularity that makes all of Ripatti’s output so memorable.

If Outrun was a fast-paced drive that made the city look like an endless stream of light-trails, Reborn is a beautiful retro pastiche that intentionally slows down to let you take in just how far you've come.

A testament to her versatility and willingness to experiment, Man Made entrenches Greentea Peng's position as one of the UK's most exciting young songwriters.

In many ways Ghost Systems Rave is as bumpy and nerve-jangling as a joyride in a stolen Ford Fiesta. Whether that's your idea of fun or not, no one could ever claim it's clean and healthy.

These are synthetic sounds that have a sense of natural decay built into them, but Prudhomme unleashes them with such carefully built momentum, the music can't help but feel optimistic.

Sometimes it feels like one of the best records I've heard in recent memory, other times I wish it would just get to the point faster. But I think that's by design. ... To appreciate Escapology is to look at it as one piece in the puzzle, not an album so much as it is a single cog in Goodman's latest piece. It asks more questions than it answers, but poses them like few other artists could.

This music suits periods of poignant, existential anguish.

Through throat singing, traditionally performed as a dialogue between two women, Tagaq tells ancient stories of the lives of her people from a modern perspective, preserving tradition while helping it evolve.

Dreams Are Not Enough is a remarkable return that achieves things the first three Telefon Tel Aviv albums were never quite able to.

Salton Sea feels engineered for eminent listenability.

When relationship blindspots are exposed in "Always You," the untroubled lust of earlier tracks matures into some of the album's most introspective moments.

Where her past work could sound like it was written for a grandiose 18th-century opera house, Living Torch is closer to the long-lost sonic component of a modern art installation, endless in its possibilities and imagination.

Krell's still part of a pop vanguard, but his music is more than ever a welcoming gesture.

An elegant and often bewitching entrant in the surfeit of night-weary synthscapes.

Schlungs does nothing to diminish Mungolian Jet Set's reputation as one of the most genuinely entertaining acts around.

Patten is clearly willing to toy with his numerous ideas in lieu of easy hooks, and he concedes remarkably little here.

Throughout the record, there are gestures toward what has already passed and what will eventually come. With its constant shifts in energy, Ecce Homo succeeds in opening up new temporal and textural dimensions.

Lyrics like "I can't live in a world / that won't keep its shape," on "Through Your Atmosphere," sung by Faris Badwan of The Horrors, can be interpreted as a man taking a more clear-eyed view of everyday reality, rather than escaping into nightlife's transient peaks. Butler can still deliver those peaks.

GOD's interest in questionable styles and its elaborate backstory seem designed to keep things interesting after the giant step forward that was R Plus Seven.

Years into his Daphni project, Snaith can still make familiar dance music sound fun all over again.

Serenitatem, the latest volume in RVNG Intl.'s FRKWYS series, harks back to Ojima's environmental music of the period. The delicate synthwork across the LP is uncluttered and unobtrusive.

In Hecker's uncanny knack for blending noise and ineffable sound together, he makes for a turbulent sonic trip that ultimately feels redemptive.

By faithfully spotlighting the range and craftsmanship of Japanese computer game music, Diggin In The Carts pays effective tribute to the place from which that pride stems.

It's striking how simple and affecting Devotion is as a whole. At a time when so much music is political and intellectualized, Tirzah's sincerity and candor is a breath of fresh air.

The Last Panthers goes further, illustrating a picture of its own.

Each production here feels less like a 10-minute single than a condensed DJ set, and The Orb navigate these spaces with a fresh wind in their sails.

By simultaneously disavowing and embracing the church, Malone has crafted a record of rare heft. The plaintive melodies that sit at the core of The Sacrificial Code often feel like they're stretching into eternity.

For all its appeal, DJ-Kicks isn't necessarily Halo's most striking mix. Her 2017 Boiler Room, which incorporated UK funky, grime-adjacent tracks, Príncipe anthems and Whitney Houston, felt slightly fresher, more expressive. But DJ-Kicks is still a success, a standout club mix that reflects the individual streak that runs through Halo's work.

Whether he's rapping about stripping copper out of abandoned houses or addiction, Brown manages to wring humor and, somehow, relatability out of grim personal stories.

F for all its lofty intentions and complex construction, it is a remarkably easy listen.

Programmatic as it is, ATAXIA has style and personality.

Following shaky albums from both Yorke and Radiohead, A Moon Shaped Pool suggests that they were right to keep the faith.

Sirens' darkness is matched by its delicacy.

The mechanistic form and function can feel totally lifeless, but there's a layer of mourning beneath the gleaming metal.

Many of the tracks on Hangin' At The Beach, much like Pink's low-key classic "Life In LA," grapple with the paradox of feeling lonely and alienated in paradise. Perlman's able to evoke these ideas without lyrics, using a casual, collagist approach to create his most profound work to date.

Trendy as Silver's interests may have become, On Vacation feels no less personal and awe-inspiring in its stillness.

The record hews especially close to a strain of plush acid, albeit with Aphex Twin's inimitable charm. But a short change of pace arrives from the dissonant "CHEETA1b ms800" and "CHEETA2 ms800," which seem to be brief tests of rich, textured patches from the Cheetah. These tracks complete a record that finds inspiration and style from obstacles and restrictions.

All of the extra effort has paid off: fabric 90 is a killer dance mix first, a technical exercise second.

Like Seeds Of Destiny, Life After Death is an unsettling work with glimmers of positivity.

Synthetic birdsong, rustling keys and a contemplative melody suggest someone pondering the world outside. The album, in turn, offers a glimpse into Kate NV's rich imagination.

Konnichiwa isn't perfect, but it mostly accomplishes the goals Skepta set for himself, and is certainly one of the best grime has seen so far.

Taking inspiration from our deep-rooted human imperfections, Anne is at once intimate and universal, honest and hopeful.

What's most impressive, though, is Gainsborough's commitment to integrating classical music on Queen Of Golden Dogs. The results, far from being grandiose, are rough, eloquent and compassionate.

Going back to make a new album from sessions that had already been used could have ended up sounding overworked. Instead, Anoyo is the counterbalance to what has been done. These albums shouldn't be compared, but taken in together.

Though Spawn only features on about a third of the album, the AI's conceptual impact is key to Proto. ... The compositions elsewhere are dense and overwhelming.

With Born Again In The Voltage, Barbieri goes deeper into undressing familiar timbres, this time with human voice and string instruments. With them, she's able to guide us on an introspective trek through the expanse of our own brains and the cosmos alike.

As a survey of Africa's influence on contemporary dance music, Basar is an inspiring document. As an album, it's every bit as good.

He may be trading more in the glow of nostalgia than the shock of the new, but he can still deliver the goods.

On Tundra, the duo's debut long-player for R&S, Lakker seem fully in their element. The ideas have room to breathe and consolidate themselves.

For Those Of You stands apart as a significant step up in Leeds' journey to carve out and master his own musical form.

Most tracks have a near-total lack of reverb that suffocates sentimentality without starving the record of atmosphere. As a listening experience, it's like pushing on a bleeding gum: knotty and perversely satisfying.