They're reunited with vocalist N'Dea Davenport but don't really need her, their dressing-up-to-go-out groove being the thing.

While this may once have been filed under 'shoegaze', now we can call it 'noisy dream pop' and just wade in its wash of guitars.

Michigan auteur Hawthorne has synthesised his influences into perfect power pop, with the help of producers including Pharrell Williams.

Within the first 60 seconds it's alluded to Blue Peter and Taxi Driver in successive lines. Wind in the Willows it ain't.

It's an assured collection of pure pop with an independent sensibility, equal parts Kylie and The XX.

A real gem.

There's no progression or narrative, it's immersive rather than engrossing. Slow Focus is an album to steep yourself in.

Meta-pop doesn’t come much more moving than this.

Sistrionix is a hugely enlivening 41 minutes of deliciously distorted vocals, instantly memorable fuzz-up guitar riffs, handclap breakdowns, and vicious put-downs of cheating lovers and sleazebags.

There isn’t a shadow of doubt expressed here about where Mavis is going, but there is plenty of feeling that the journey, like all journeys, is bordered with darkness.

Divine Comedy’s Neil Hannon and Pugwash’s Thomas Walsh strike another fine balance between cricket’s arcane specifics and its universal metaphors in cucumber-crisp batches of catch-all pastiche-pop.

A fascinating collection of songs from the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Though it's far from his worst album, it's his least commercial – with its harsh beats, mangled vocals, and Marilyn Manson samples, it mimics the aesthetics of a DIY mixtape.

However much you think it a tired formula, this lot shake it awake with their relentless charm.

It's a clever, sensitive record.

This is smooth jazz raised to a high art.

Ice on the Dune is a seamless suite of elegiac synthpop, with fairydust-flecked melodies, a perpetually peaking bass end, chord changes that reach into your heart, and fantasising falsetto vocals.

A couple of tunes, including the title track (one of two West Side Story selections, along with "Tonight"), can even sound a little pedestrian, the swing faltering. But, given time, most of it works.

If his follow-up doesn't evince quite the same exuberance, it still twinkles with a well-travelled exoticism.

It's that rare thing: an album that will reward repeated listening by drip-feeding you its secrets.

There is joy in these grooves; the attentive care of studio perfectionists, and the warm embrace of an old friend.

The weird, aquatic-sounding requiems are getting better all the time.

The band return to the slow-and-low, sinister alt-boogie that made their name, with Homme's satisfying dirty badass guitar sound in full effect.

There is nothing not to love about it.

CocoRosie [is] squat, inventively, somewhere between Fever Ray and Joanna Newsom.

In short, if Land of CanAan were a Stevie Wonder album, it would be Hotter than July rather than Innervisions.

The occasional off-kilter touch throws things sufficiently askew to deny listeners any complacency.

It's an album which makes you feel warm.