Tunes 2011 To 2019 frames the artistic development of someone whose older music sounds more inspired but is still capable of greatness. ... 12 years since his last album, we at least get a large chunk of his often incredible catalogue in one place.

A Carrollian multiverse of shapes, sounds and ideas that only becomes richer the longer you spend there. It might take some time, but it's endlessly rewarding.

Gas is the sound of a man freeing his mind and allowing it to wander. To listen to Box is to seize that same opportunity.

Biokinetics has aged so well that it could easily pass for a new album. The production level is exceptional by today's standards, and it has more teeth than much of the music it inspired, especially contemporary dub techno, most of which sounds vanilla by comparison.

The history of misogyny that followed Journey In Satchidananda complicates the serenity and innovation within it.

Beyoncé is clearly itching to experiment with her sound. This latest album may not be her most cohesive release, but it does come with a handful of well-executed surprises. ... The album falls flat when it tries too hard to immerse itself in a culture that does not belong to Beyoncé.

These very much sound like live performances, and they're all the better for it. Short of seeing him in concert, Spaces is as close as you'll get to hearing Frahm at his best.

Throughout Honey, the pure, raw emotion that has always defined Robyn's music is still there. Now, she's just dancing to a different beat.

Black Origami can be intimidating: it's dark, relentless, and makes substantial demands on the listener. But it's also powerful and distinctive. In the world of rhythmic electronic music, nobody else is doing it quite like this.

On Natural Brown Prom Queen, she proves she belongs to no mood, genre or period of time. Over a placeless mix of sounds and endlessly dynamic beats she comes of age, shaping Black histories into exciting futures, all while making it clear that her idea of home is wherever she decides it is at any given moment.

Listening back now, it still pumps. But it's a palatable pump, with enough hooks and vocals to work as well over pasta as in a field at 4 AM. Funnily enough, the tracks that have aged best are the ones that pump least. ... Though other remixes in the middle section update the production techniques, they don't really advance on the festival-pleasing 4/4 or big beat predictability of the originals.

On his Warp Records debut, Safe In The Hands Of Love, Yves Tumor joins the ranks of Arca and SOPHIE at the millennial generation's pop vanguard, a group whose fluid approach to music and imagery is eradicating the gap between underground and mainstream.

Whatever you want and could ever require from the progressive soul textbook is up in here. Darts, slaps, bops and most definitely thumpers. ... Renders a greater reward than we could ever envision. Voice Notes gives us just that.

Magnificently re-mastered... an exemplary introduction to the duo.

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

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

While GREY Area was a collection of great songs, Sometimes I Might Be Introvert feels like a therapeutic breakthrough. ... A body of work so rich with innovation, so broad in its influences and so powerful in its storytelling that we'll still be finding new things to love until the next one comes along.

Heaven To A Tortured Mind isn't necessarily the most dynamic release by the artist, but in its best moments, it's a heaping dose of musical ingenuity.

It is the kind of music you could imagine spending the rest of your life listening to.

The set stumbles, though, when it's at its most raucous.... When Green trusts his own downbeat instincts, though, LateNightTales feels comforting in a way few mixes do.

This more mature approach to storytelling is what makes MAGDALENE a raw and outstanding album about love. The lyrics have more depth than LP1, bearing a universality that perhaps one can only write after an especially honest heartbreak.

Art Angels wipes the fog from her lens and lays out her vision, clear and uncompromising.

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

It's almost certainly the producer's most ambitious and most vital work since Untrue.

Whatever's at the heart of these sonic fictions, it drove Crampton to reach for new audio possibilities, not for the sake of novelty but to keep pace with the futurity of her visions. It sets the album apart from other pieces of audio collage because it's not sound design for sound design's sake: it's what's required to bring the drama to life.

The whole album bleeds into one magnificent mess, thanks in part to some incredibly short track times, but also to the nature of the music itself.

It never feels like Dreijer is playing catch-up. Plunge is the natural next step, a realization of impulses that have long lain dormant, or at least unrecognized.

Even if Have You In My Wilderness is Holter's most accessible record to date, it's riddled with enough puzzles, lyrical twists and delicate refinement to remain intriguing listen after listen.

Fetch picks up right where Horizontal Structures left off: von Oswald allowing the group's myriad tones and timbres to bleed out and coagulate.

There's so much blood and soul poured into Music for the Quiet Hour that it almost feels effortless. Along with the fascinatingly fragmented Drawbar Organ EPs, the box set presents what's either a closing chapter or a new beginning in the career of one of electronic music's most luminous illuminati.

The strength of In These Times is in its considered arrangements. The melodies take center stage rather than solely the kinetic rhythmic attack McCraven can unleash whenever he pleases. And when he pleases, his percussion charts can hit with a ferocity that shudders like drum licks plucked from a lengthy Fela-meets James-Brown after-hours live session.

For all its mind-melting attention to detail, Hertz's music has rarely sounded so evocative.

When a record is so dazzlingly abstract (or abstractly dazzling), it seems harder to interpret in emotional terms, too. But like LeWitt and his primary-coloured paint brushes, or Dan Flavin and his store cupboard of strip lights, Dillon isn't offering us a feeling so much as giving us a space in which to feel.

On ORCORARA 2010, Crampton fleshes out a unique sound world that's desolate but lush, harsh yet hopeful. It feels like one of her greatest, most permanent works.

The result is one of the most punchy, lyrically explorative UK rap albums of the year.

Arca's most accomplished work to date.

Some tracks, like "Mouth Mantra," simply feel overcrowded. The Haxan Cloak, who mixed the album, struggles to find clarity in busier moments. But the story, visceral and tragic, transcends these imperfections in the telling.

There's a palpable lust for life throughout the 20 tracks, but Edna is at its most arresting when Headie details his journey from custodial sentences to commercial success with unflinching candor.

There is a kind of pure, cathartic rage in Virgins and it leaves moments of intense peace in its wake.

once Random Access Memories unravels, it is, at its best, pretty magnificent.

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.

What we're left with is an uneven album that's rarely as profound or as meaningful as it tries to be.

With nothing more at their disposal than techno's characteristically sparing palette, Dozzy and Neel have built something so rich that it has the feeling of a feature presentation.

Reform Club is full of conventional beauty; protracted strings and pads which soar, pulse, float or shimmer on a dub-tinged substrate.

The LP boils down a generation's worth of London music into a restlessly creative mix of dance music, infused with emotions both celebratory and mournful.

Cheek's vocals are versatile, often soaring into her upper register, then trickling into lower notes. Much of the lyrics across the album are a challenge to make out, but it's a delight to pull scattered meaning out of the obscurity.

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.

As the realised aspirations of Myson's inner-teen, Hollowed is startlingly articulate and mature.

Oil Of Every Pearl's Un-Insides, SOPHIE's first proper album, presents her artistic vision in a purer form than anything she's done before. It is at times unapologetically poppy, beginning with the opening power ballad, "It's Okay To Cry." But it's also utterly, defiantly weird, flouting conventions of rhythm, composition and, perhaps most of all, taste.

It's meant to be experienced in one fell swoop. Once the record works its magic on you, it'll be hard to pull out a single moment.

If only Tension lived up to the promise that she might be given something different. As it is, though, it's another entry in a rock-solid catalogue of dependable, uplifting club pop.

Though far from perfect, New Energy is one of Hebden's most intimate and personal albums, with all the idiosyncrasies that come with that.

Shade is another beautiful and often devastating entry in the Grouper catalog.

A standout record in an already peerless discography.

Whatever the differences on Narkopop, the album is remarkably true to the project's past: this is music that takes inspiration from childhood memories, bygone eras and the natural world. The results can feel like another dimension, but the album is also intensely personal.

On its own terms, the Midsommar score is a sometimes brilliant but limited affair that showcases both Krlic's genius and how that genius suffers under the constraints of a film.

The album nostalgically embraces all corners of rock music past with post-punk, heavy metal glossy shoegaze and more, while still pushing the boundaries a good distance forward. ... If The Asymptotical World was the sunset preceding the meteor, then Praise A Lord is the big hunk of rock itself. The resulting explosion—in all of its chaotic, god-defying beauty—leaves a fully formed rock superstar emerging from its ashes.

Afternooners is deceptively complex for soundtrack music.

What is on display here is the potential of unbound artistic striving. I dare say this may not only be Shepherd's magnum opus, but one of Sanders' greatest works as well.

Jlin has plenty to say, and she has a remarkably strong and distinctive voice with which to say it.

Though he's had plenty of strong releases in the past, this one has the inspired feeling of an artist truly finding his footing--a breakthrough, in other words.

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.

Raven's underwater mood is all-consuming and meditative, so much so that it takes several listens to fully comprehend all the infinitesimal details that contribute to its brilliance—the sound of water bubbling, a flourishing synth or Kelela's pristine, whispered harmonies.

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.

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.

Sound Ancestors is an ideal entry into the world of Madlib.

It traces Yaeji's emotional development, coming to terms with anger and resentment she had suppressed as a child—a period that she channels into her charged and surprisingly bracing new LP.

Pete Swanson isn't "going" anywhere but his own scorched-earth path. If you can withstand the heat, it's probably worth following him for a bit.

Rochelle Jordan is staking her own claim to the dance floor without losing sight of her intimate, sometimes vulnerable songwriting.

Reflection bangs, sounds enormous cranked up loud, but it's also dreamlike and soothing. There is plenty of pain and uncertainty in these tracks. But altogether, the album is a salve for the listener, and maybe for James herself.

Taking touchstones from familiar genres and refiguring them into something completely new, it's like a microcosm of the label as a whole.

LCD Soundsystem have made a better album than they've ever done.

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.

Science Fiction Dancehall Classics is a treasure trove for newcomers as well as On-U completists (there's a generous number of previously unreleased tracks), and a fascinating piece of dance music genealogy.

Modern Jester is one of the most accomplished noise albums of the last several years. Excellent are the chances that it will go down as one of his very finest works.

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.

An album that finds Cantu-Ledesma orchestrating perhaps the most gorgeous ambience of his career so far.

They massage the album's plentiful organic charges into a sonic puzzle with an almost symphonic reach, one that's as challenging, bounteous, and ultimately unknowable as anything you'll hear this year.

It probably wasn't hard for Koze to look beyond house, because it never completely won him over. Knock Knock makes a case for others to do it as well.

In some ways it's arguably dubstep's first concept album, an expansive and visionary "what if," a dreamscape of a post-globalization, collapsed multicultural society where cultures collide uncontrollably.

Sakamoto has made a workaday logbook into something transcendent, partly because of its intimacy. Whether it's one of his major works is a question for future historians, but coming amidst an ongoing struggle with cancer, its bravery is defiant and splendid, the sound of an artist's soul laid bare.

There's an intense and cautious feeling to Sakamoto and Nicolai's approach, keeping everything at a constant volume and introducing changes only gradually. Glass is good for close listening, trading narrative for pure texture and mood.

Sinephro's spaces not only feel full of life, they're built with the very sounds of it, too, reminding us not to take it for granted.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Adorned with production that's as sympathetic to UK underground dance as it is to modern R&B and classic soul, Devotion is a classy affair that delights in its own refinement yet stays pinned to the earth, a talented singer and songwriter realizing her potential at just the right moment.

Loscil's tenth album for Kranky sheds light on unexplored aspects of his well-established sound. That he makes subtle breakthroughs via the decay and manipulation of a single brief recording makes Clara a quietly impressive achievement.

Not sequenced in simple chronological order, Livity Sound feels like a real album even when you know it's not. That's a testament to the unity of their aesthetic and the clarity of their vision, with three years' worth of tracks from three different producers all sounding like they could have been made in the same session.

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.

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

While Demdike fans will have heard a lot of this stuff by now, Sean Canty and Miles Whittaker are still better than just about anybody else in the way that they thread found sound, field recordings, library music and generated sounds and beats... one hell of a package.

Martin and Robinson cycle through stages of grief, derision, self-hatred and abject loneliness with an honesty that could make you flinch.

Piñeyro taps into the rarefied air of so many early IDM records, a mix of beauty, nostalgia and melancholy.