In throwing his emotional locker wide open, Frank Ocean has made a tender, engrossing classic.

Far-out, fascinating, fantastic--just plain F-ing good.

It might be as modern as loincloth, but ‘California X’ is surely a future classic.

Frankly, it’s a delightful, demented journey into pure psych chaos. Essential listening.

Deerhoof's eleventh album continues their long tradition of delighting and confounding in equal measure.

What richly rewarding, flourishing, beautiful songs they are.

This is Peace using 90s sounds to channel that decade’s optimism into something positive for today.

This is music that demands to be played loud, and often.

A perfectly-crafted album rich in just about everything.

The Oklahoma songwriter is back with some of her most ebullient, ambitiously styled music to date on St Vincent.

Impressively diverse but united by a strain of quintessentially Maccabeean hopeless hopefulness, it's an outpouring of both technical brilliance and affective emotion that thrives in its sheer humanity.

It's really bloody good.

Another near-flawless piece of work.

Something's exquisite charms confirm that Chairlift mk.II are a much-improved proposition.

Oozing more nihilistic youthful abandonment than anyone since Black Lips, their manifesto sounds pretty appealing from here.

Forget hidden depths, Plumb exposes every inch of the Brewises' brilliance.

Occasionally the bare-bones arrangements, a virtue in the main, serve to expose minor shortcomings in the songs. But overall, it’s a quibble far outweighed by the thrill afforded by a record that’s as honest and open-hearted as anything this great band have put their names to yet.

With Loud City Song, Julia Holter marks the scene’s zenith, continuing her journey from obscurity, through marginality and onwards into accessibility.

These are songs that flinch as much as they fight, that veer wildly into strange territories but never overindulge and that, essentially, draw all of the best bits from Coxon's weird and wonderful arsenal into one inimitable package.

Irrespective of genre or decade, 'Rispah' is an astonishing tsunami of emotion which above all, makes you feel alive.

Constantly exhilarating, it's a sensory obliteration that proves that now, more than ever, APTBS are much more than just noise.

[WIXIW is] dizzying, discordant and heavily rhythmic, as Andrew, Hemphill and Gross weave found sounds, freaky fragments of melancholy off-kilter melody, spiralling keyboard motifs, flurries of strings and distorted vocals and riffs through electronics that crunch and crack like shattered glass.

Overall, this is a daring, dynamic and dramatic debut.

While some of the abstract material here is frustratingly opaque, how many other ‘pop’ acts can you name that would have the brass cojones to drop a near 20-minute track right in the middle of their record? Astonishing.

An album of chilly, detached beauty.

It’s the longest and best Laura Marling record yet.

It's an album that reels you in, enveloping everything in a black mist, from the slick protestations of 'Dark Star' to the surging intensity of closer 'Leading To Death'.

Their LP betrays nothing other than attention to detail, enviable knowledge of their musical history and the ability to chisel hunks of belligerent punk that could revitalise the genre.