Theory Of Colours works equally well as a collection of chill-out jams or club tracks for DJs. It's a dance floor album that isn't all that concerned with the dance floor, which makes it a pleasure to listen to from front to back.

They've become powerful songwriters since they focused on the craft in 2010, and Foam Island shows it off more than anything else.

Eyeroll is Ziúr's most punk record to date, planting her proudly on the fringes where she's happiest.

A singularly impressive work.

Trumpets, drums, vocals, violins, flutes, saxophones and cellos make for a much fuller, richer and more authentic sound than ever before.

On Restless Idylls, Lobo has cemented Tropic Of Cancer as her own, crafting a signature sound that is sleek and addictive.

Fire is a classic-style Bug album, just with everything turned up to 11. It's more intense, but the rhythms are familiar and the format is the same.

Though Malone's music can often feel still, one thing's for certain about Does Spring Hide Its Joy: it'll move you.

Roisin Machine captures the singer at her most triumphant, finally comfortable in her role as an alt-pop icon—there's something casual and more assured about this Roisin Murphy.

The complexities of romance, alcohol dependence, the fragility of life and untimely death weave in and out of intricate arrangements of manipulated vocals and bold melodies.

Sleek, confident and totally captivating, New Epoch is bound to attract interest and even incite excitement in those who might have thought the 140 BPM form outmoded and uninteresting.

While some of Black Up isn't a million miles from his former group's darker corners, it's not particularly like much else. It's all present tense, in a way too little is, and brash, bold, and weird about it. Per one of his more baffling lines: "up, or don't toss it at all."

From the way the melodies climb through the hanging atmosphere of "Ripples" to the Sasha-like glitter of "Cloud Refuge," Swirlings is full of lovely, considered music that sticks in your mind long after the synth fog dissipates.

The result could have been an album so mournful as to lose itself in self-serious introspection, but Dedication's brief track lengths mean the album is breezy in a manner unbefitting of its ostensibly grave subject matter.

LP might be Ren Schofield's shortest album as Container, but it's also the one that best captures the full elemental force of his music.

A well-considered and promising debut album, one that knows just when to stop and breathe before breaking another sweat.

Da Mind Of Traxman Vol. 2 might not be Traxman's most innovative album, but that's fine. It's still one of the genre's most singular records so far.

Elasticity rewards repeat listens from start to finish.

In the end, LP1 is probably the most singular pop album of the year. It's testament to how emotionally affecting one person's realised vision can be.

While the record is certainly appreciable on purely musical terms--this is evocative, heart-tugging stuff--when knowledge of Kirby's intent lurks underneath the damaged acetate grooves, it becomes something else entirely: A poignant interrogation of memory loss and aging.

It's hard to argue with the result anyway: Its slow build and aching vocals stand out as a purposeful moment of perfection on a record chock full of them.

This collection gives a certain joy that a hyper-specific brand of record collector gets from the "not gonna make it easy on you" type of inspiration.

Free from spatial or historical associations, these songs now feel modern and ancient at once. The album's undulating textures can distort familiar surroundings and plunge the listener into heady contemplation. It's a defining work for Davachi that once again demonstrates her uncanny ability to draw new and arresting shapes and feelings from familiar materials.

There's so much clarity and hope to be found in Jayda G's marriage of production with songwriting that any cloying moments are easily forgiven.

This is their most focused mix yet, and even though they're ostensibly working with a finite number of resources, the well of obscure disco cuts seems far from dried up.

Their music is timeless but pulls on nostalgic heartstrings—it can be goth, earnest, sad, happy, distant and close all at once. It scratches a very specific itch for atmospheric pop and rock music that most of their imitators still can't touch.

Second Line offers an impressive level of immersion from an artist who's spent years inviting us into her own personal universe.

The way he calls back to nearly all of his past projects, one could make the mistake that Hebden's best years are behind him. That would be missing the point, though. Regardless of all the attention he's received from his massive performances, he's still looking for new ways to be Four Tet.

The striking concept alone is enough to make this album worth a listen. That it turned out to be so inspiring is a happy byproduct of the whole experiment.

Ambiguities can make Olympic Mess's charms difficult to excavate, but it's well worth making the effort to do so.

Lafawndah's stripped-down approach invites us to sit in these new environments, culminating in an album that feels as thoroughly absorbing as a good novel.

It has hooks galore, but embedded in brilliantly strange music.

[Amphis (Reprise) is] a quiet, almost reverent close to an album that further refines the disorienting beauty we've come to expect from Luke Abbott.

Equal parts rock, hip-hop and experimental, it's one of the most interesting records of the year thus far.

If things occasionally become one-dimensional it's arguably the admission price for the many successes this album packs.

Mala in Cuba is a statement of consummate mastery-of a form, of a tempo, of a set of tools-shaped by the implacable creative imagination of one of the finest producers of his generation.

Smith never went away exactly, but Bleeds feels like as storming comeback.

Loud City Song is her most broadly scoped and epic album to date.

Its best moments draw you to the formative dance floors of Space's past, the parties where he watched dancers react to the thrilling amalgam of styles that would become footwork, and where he danced himself, absorbing the lessons that would feed into a genre based on movement.

Those of you disappointed in similar efforts this year by Hercules & Love Affair or, say, Jessica 6 will find many of their itches scratched here.

By carefully balancing these ideas with unambiguous dance floor moments, Tangerine hits the sweet spot that many of the best electronic albums occupy.

It's a more expansive, more ambitious and more accomplished Raime than we've heard before.

None of these ventures feel forced, instead they flourish under the weight of some heavy emotional themes. After this versatile and unexpectedly wholesome depiction of a broken heart, Mykki Blanco has earned some deserved beauty sleep.

This is not Jaar's best album, nor is it his strangest, but it's a wonderful listen that tempts you to get lost in its many layers. It is beautiful but confounding, an artwork whose "solid form" still passes through like water trickling down between your fingers.

I Hope You Can Forgive Me, ten songs under a half hour that move quickly but stay with you long after, is a full-fledged real-time resume that demonstrates how complex rhythms and careful arrangements can elevate the human voice to the ultimate instrument.

Captain Of None places Schott's voice front-and-centre and folds in her long-burning love for dub and reggae rhythms, making for her most approachable and otherworldly record yet.

It's an album of gorgeous sounds and textures that prefer to lay in the dark and be discovered rather than assert themselves.

Harlecore is the souvenir, a collection of dance music so deliriously upbeat you can't help but surrender to it.

There are no new tricks at hand here, no experimental forays into the goonier psych-prog ends of the space disco genre. And you know what? Thank f*** for that.

It's tricky to make music this mopey without sliding into shtick, but Holy Other pulls it off, balanced right on the brink of bathos.

Though it's way too long to listen to in one sitting, Grime 2.0 is catnip for the grime fan, and good bait for those new to or curious about the genre.

Wise's third album is striking not only because of his unparalleled voice or his candid verse, parts of his artistry that already caught our attention on the last two albums, but because of the way these elements come together in such an assured way, in a space that demands swagger bravado from its virtuosos delivered with a welcome vulnerability.

Their lush synth textures are a few tints darker and their songwriting is a whole lot tighter.

The Night Land lands in beautiful and occasionally unexpected places.

Sebenza sounds like nothing else out there and yet LV's knack for genre-mincing produces an album that sounds both timeless and completely of its time, crossing musical and political borders with confident finesse.

Not so serious, just damn fun. Davis is taking big swings, purposely stomping through giant puddles like a kid again, eager to see how stain patterns form. So even when he misses, he still hits.

The album's wordless songs are almost as riveting as their counterparts.

It's infectious and almost a little too odd, yet it's totally at ease. In other words, it's DJ Koze doing what he's done for well over a decade.

Hye Jin refines her sound, pulling from trap and boom-bap, not to mention dubstep and techno, to turn out a coming of age hip-house album. Before I Die is the clearest artistic vision we've heard from Hye Jin.

Together, Dom Maker and Kai Campos are something truly special. Apart, they still sound pretty damn talented, which makes this diversion a welcome one as the group work towards their next grand statement.

On Giant Swan, the duo display a fearsome mastery of techno dynamics, but it's their detachment from that world that makes their music so compelling.

JIAOLONG is one of the year's most consistently compelling LPs, whether as home listening evening fuel or out and about in the sweaty rooms for which it was designed.

Taken as a whole, Incubation is an album that lures you into dark places in your brain rather than moving your body on the dance floor.

In the hands of artists as confident and unflinching as these three, the scope for discovery and growth becomes infinite. The darkest of gems.

They'll be fully outted soon--with an album this good, the backstory can't help but see the light of day--but even without the anonymity, Tiger & Woods will be plenty spicy.

The extended runtimes on Perpetual Now provide each of these pensive sound pieces enough room to tell their own meandering stories, with a dynamism that takes you out of time, placing you firmly within each boundless, everchanging meditation. At this music's core is an insight into the machinations of rRoxymore's mind.

As gripping as the album is all the way through-it seems to chart an on/off relationship even more directly than their eponymous album did-its best moment is actually its first. Opener "Angels" is one of the meekest xx tracks, but it's easily among their most powerful.

Shepherd's flawless Eglo catalogue had the power to coax his followers off the dance floor with him, and Elaenia's sophisticated sense of musical accomplishment ought to keep them there.

The progression in Atobe's work is incremental. Beyond the title-track, Yes mostly does away with the classy, tech house-style snap prevalent on 2018's Heat. For an artist that emerged as a model of consistency, Atobe takes a surprising amount of left turns.

The band's mix of disco, funk, new wave, dancehall and West African music would in most hands sound muddled or derivative. What happens instead is music filled with life and imagination of the kind described by Stuart Evans, the cofounder of the Green Door Studio, who once likened Golden Teacher to seeing "a robot dancing with a leopard."

It's in this border between a club setting and the divine that Fountain comes alive. Using her voice as a modular system, Pramuk suggests a ritual that's both folkloric and futuristic.

Halo tackles these chunky themes and textual cacophony with a score that never sits still, folding synthetic sounds into acoustic recordings and darting across time and space with the efficiency of a jump cut.

A diverse, compelling tapestry of 2-step, house and broken beats.

We Stay Together isn't a retread of Passed Me By, it's a continuation--but there are signs of life this time.

On It Is What It Is, Bruner—unlike Pastorious—finds a way out, channeling his pain into great, uplifting art.

The result is one of the most emotionally powerful synth albums in a time where they seem absolutely dime a dozen.

It's a powerful formula, and Dall and Ander have basically perfected it here.

Bring Me the Head Of... will not win Dunn an army of new fans, you are either on his wavelength or you're not. It is, however, among his finest work to date and shows an ever-growing refinement and understanding of his chosen medium.

It's invigorating, vulnerable and, at times, uncomfortably raw.

Keszler has been able to turn the overwhelming nature of urban life into something beautiful, and it's one of his best records as a result.

The album bops and bangs as he explores throbbing Detroit techno and bouncy Kraftwerkian synth pop, overlaying those genres with recordings of his time in Hong Kong to create a deeply spiritual album that fuses traditions, lineages and memories.

By drawing energy from Garcia’s abundant source, these remixers try to answer those questions in their own respective sonic languages, offering intriguing answers and new ways to hear Garcia's potent energy.

Most of The Edge Of Everything is top-tier drum & bass with an experimental bent.

She's continuing the very tradition she's studying, ending her intimate and vulnerable album with a cover that finds new purpose by making someone else's words—and grief—all her own.

Morgan sings and raps on the LP, the first time they've used their voice on their records. That helps make Power their most accessible release. The singing is charmingly unpolished.

It keeps intact what makes her one of the most exciting UK pop acts of the 2020s, gesturing towards the mainstream while still keeping one foot in her musical hometown. It's the kind of record a promising artist puts out before they release something truly next-level.

He might have translated his sound into electronics with Excavation, but here Krlic's music feels more wrenchingly human than it ever has been.

It's a record that balances the hardcore continuum with emotion as she turns out club tunes touched by vulnerability.

Listening to WOW delivers genuine warmth, happiness and light. Within these settings, Shilonosova expands her ever-evolving and inquisitive personal soundworld of beautiful music for the body and the mind.

Unpatterns is very now, yet by employing key electronic music touchstones it sounds classic as well.

Gordian is a delightful listen, packed with plenty of rewarding oddities if you care to sit down and really take your time with it.

Fleshed out with flecks of African-style guitar and tumbling bass...there's still the trademarked bedrock: that motor-fueled, machine-grind churn.

serpentwithfeet is not a project that deals in restraint, but it's the mix of melodrama and newfound control that makes soil a great record.

It's just Jamie Teasdale, an already accomplished producer, freely chasing his inspiration and coming out the other end with near genius in the process.

House of Woo may be playful and irreverent, but that shouldn't disguise its status as a potent exploration of sound.

On the most fully realized vision of the Fever Ray project yet, Dreijer unspools some of their best lyrics and pop songs since The Knife's 2007 smash "Heartbeats.

You Are Eternity is like a long and endless tunnel: for all its twists and turns, you're always in the same sensory deprivation chamber.

Further Out Than The Edge's vibrant cast of characters, lively experimental rhythms and rich improvisation underlines why Speakers Corner Quartet are so firmly embedded within South London's musical landscape.