Led Zeppelin III is where the band's dynamic and musical range really comes together and, for this writer at least, the most satisfying of the three.

This is an incredibly sexy album and the grooves contained within it are deep and wide.... The companion disc in this package offers an intriguing insight in the creation of Led Zeppelin II and one that highlights both the production skills of Jimmy Page and the musical contributions of his cohorts.

Clockwork Angels is an extremely accomplished piece of music composed and performed absolutely flawlessly.

Memento Mori is an absolute triumph. It’s almost the real songs of faith and devotion that they’d spoke of thirty years ago. Universal themes of mortality, love, anxiety; a handful of pop gems and what feels like an economical stripping back of the stadium-ness of previous works, making it their best long player this side of the century.

It astonished ... It is a celebration of sound at its finest and most pure: from the smallest scratch to cathartic crescendos, from spiralling improv to contemplative silences. Every note, whisper, bleep, and shift is significant. It is marvellously multifaceted but never obnoxious: a refreshing, one-of-a-kind conversation between jazz, classical, and electronic.

Deafheaven have not just made one of the best metal albums in recent memory, they’ve made one of the best albums of the decade, full stop. It’s a powerful, honest record, and further proof that music always has new places to travel.

Cluster had rewritten the linguistics of modern sound and then turned away without any further heed. Somewhere, someone would always be playing live in der Fabrik from here on.

A debut so exquisitely tooled I cannot find a thing wrong with it.

What was perfection has become even more perfect.

Wed 21 continues the intrigue, amplifies the obsession, and is 2013's most addictive and compelling album made by anyone anywhere. I have no end-of-year list. Just Wed 21.

Revisiting these deep-cuts from their catalogue and presenting them to audiences in an official capacity some twenty years later reaffirms an appreciation for Stereolab’s inimitable innovation. ... In many ways, delving into Electrically Possessed is akin to experiencing The Wizard of Oz for the first time. Initially, the aural stimulation is overwhelming, much like the shock of yellow bricks set to guide the audience through the fantastical world.

Here augmented by three additional CDs of b-sides, Peel Sessions, alternate mixes and a live recording from Manchester’s Russell Club, the original album still sounds like nothing else from the time, as if a line is drawn on the sand and the full potential of what punk had to offer is finally realized. Indeed, Metal Box is still so far ahead of the curve that if it was getting its inaugural release now and it’d still be daring other bands to catch up.

It's so lean and spare sonically that it feels like a dash of cold water to the face after the cacophonous, dense To Pimp A Butterfly; it's so light on its feet that it makes Good Kid, M.A.A.D City feel ponderous in comparison. It does this while also staking its claim to being Kendrick's most philosophically profound album to date.

One of the purest, most ferocious, most generous albums I’ve heard. A simple offering, and an outright masterpiece of emptiness and full-to-bursting-ness at the same time.

The Art of Losing has been in the can for a couple of years now, delayed by the pandemic. It’s been worth the wait: this is a special record. They don’t come along very often. Quotable, immersive, moving, imaginative, delicate, and dramatic. A stellar achievement.

The demos themselves, while manna for nerds like oneself, are for the most part hardly revelatory.... a singular album in both intent and execution, and the most satisfying expression of Dulli's dark, dark heart. The grunge era's answer to Millie Jackson's Caught Up, it remains a triumph, an album whose impact is no less powerfully felt 21 years on.

Slave Vows, then, is a masterpiece, its black-hearted explosions and sordid vibes coming from a darker place than most of those pantomiming their way through rock & roll. But while there’s bleakness here, there’s also that sulphurous sound of resistance, of high drama at very real stakes.

Reward is Cate Le Bon’s most emotionally astute record to date, and her melodic prowess is the strongest it’s ever been. With that, Reward sounds like a modern classic, because it has a longevity that very few records possess.

II is nothing short of a modern classic; the sound of a band fusing elements of electronic music with raw psych-rock to devastating effect--something more lauded bands have failed to do.

Neon Icon is that rare product of a rapper in the modern world--an album that perfectly encompasses everything they became loved for on their come up, amplified to the glorious maximum, aiming confidently into the future.

Jassbusters is the first release where Mockasin is accompanied by a band--and it’s a revelation. His usual exaggeratedly washy, reverby sound is anchored and evolves into something fuller, groovier, twangier. ... Jassbusters deserves a big fat red marker pen A.

In taking her sorrow, turning it on its head and finding inspiration in another magical place, she has produced something powerfully, uniquely transcendent: something vast and expansive, intimate and affecting all at once.

With Master, they've made their biggest leap forward yet, with the band members leaping across genre divides with a confidence and sure-handedness that shows them at the peak of their powers.

Whilst the band's previous two releases, 2009's Sensible Shoes and 2011's Bring Your Own, both showed progression in this direction and were wonderful in their own right, TPIYN outdoes them both and pretty much everyone else currently making this kind of music.

What it proves to be is an exhilarating, uneven, thought-provoking, over-egged, over-long, lucid, barnstorming, soul-infused hip-hop album of a type that, as I may have mentioned once or twice or five times, you just don't get any more. Except, of course, you do, and here it is.

It’s very easy for a reviewer to play armchair warrior and forward claims for all sorts of nonsense for music they like. But this is a glorious, heart-stopping, essential album. You’d have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by it.

The National have arguably never struck that balance [between tenderness, optimism, humour and melodrama] quite as sweetly or persuasively as they do on Trouble Will Find Me, a layered, resoundingly human work that extends their winning streak without so much as breaking a sweat.

As well as being aware of frequencies in our immediate surroundings, deep listening observes cosmological energies. Angel Tears In Sunlight seems to resonate with Oliveros' observations by interweaving distant galaxies with her own rapturously intimate sonic sphere. One of Oliveros' greatest assertions is that is not only the ear that listens – you listen with your whole body.

The dark alchemy of Waterslide – named after one of the art-pieces Margolin painted during lockdown – ultimately flows from the manner in which it slithers under the skin even as it engages with that part of your monkey brain that enjoys a zinging pop song. ... As with much else here, the moment is beautiful and ugly and extraordinary.

There’s no obvious world-building or self-contained story to give Frank the pomp and circumstance you might expect from a major breakthrough rap record in 2022, but he doesn’t need one. The subtlety and detail of his songwriting does that on its own. The world is his for the taking.

Laibach seize every opportunity on Also Sprach Zarathustra to bring out the grandiose psychodrama and tension inherent in a founding tract of modern philosophy, rendering what could have been merely bombastic and brutal as spectacular and even sublime. It might not be greatest present that has ever been made to humanity, but it is a resoundingly impressive feat.

The project is stunning and displays a wonderfully acute understanding of what it should do. Duterte knows exactly where this album should stand within her own discography and that of the wider world. Its song-writing is calculated without betraying itself to rigidity and its honesty is telling without falling into a trap of timidity. Anak Ko owes a lot to Duterte’s awareness of how simplicity can breed beauty. Its greatest trick is the delicate fittings of nuance amongst deceptively uncomplicated compositions.

Open is magical, calming, intriguing, beautiful. It makes me smile to listen to it.

The sound design is absolutely phenomenal, rich in detail. New components, from the clanging of chimes to the rattling or chains, enter from moment to moment. It’s every bit the album Engravings was: a vast world of sound unfolding on a battlefield which exists between the ears.

Blank Project represents one of those rarefied moments in which an established artist meets the expectations set by her previous career, and then exceeds them in the most exciting, tangential of ways, resulting in something thrillingly different, hella moody, and deeply exciting.

Forty-two minutes of profound pleasure all in all, which both challenges the clichés of guitar-based heaviness and mines them for their ore.

Infinity Machines is a painful modern masterpiece, and it's urging us to listen to the voices in our heads.

The results are nothing short of magnificent, producing a set of tracks whose fizzing surfaces are always disturbed by some new action just beneath, where ridges of static ruffle and tumble over one another, and where harsh regions of higher density sluice violently into the foreground.

Everything works beautifully on what's still their most sublime piece.

It's ambitious, personal, unusual and, crucially, touched with brilliance.

Nothing feels hashed out in haste or haze; every beat, clatter and hiss is perfectly orchestrated. The recordings sound cavernous--this album envelops you, and everything is in its right place. The beauty of Sequence is how deftly Rattle guide you into a narrow slipstream that somehow ripples out into an infinity.

Outsider soul from a true original.

Send Them To Coventry is an album bursting with life. Pa Salieu sounds confident and convincing whatever style he turns his hand to. Whether or not it’s the best album of 2020, it’s surely one of the most interesting, and should be a strong contender for awards in the coming months.

Not interested in following in anyone's footsteps, Arca borrows back the skeletal remains he made to West and creates new albeit strange life. Gorgeous and ghastly, Xen is no clone, but it may too resonate through generations.

Dark Energy was already a significant left turn for footwork and Black Origami is a leap into the future from that, with probably only ‘1%’ (featuring Holly Herndon) from Black Origami sounding like anything on her first album.

What These New Puritans offer with Inside The Rose is something rich, deep and warm, constantly shifting, challenging. This is art for the head, for the heart, for the soul.

It’s an album that if you take it at face value will delight, but if you stick around and penetrate its surface, you’ll find one of the most transfixing albums in recent years.

Smoke has certainly raised the stakes for any aspiring Chicago producer in creating the most consolidated longform effort in the genre to date.

Each track here has a distinct and complementary topography. Places to explore, spend time in, and marvel at. The Necks remain at the top of their game.

Simply put: this is the artistic culmination of the last five years in the world of Adam 'Nergal' Darski and with integrity and quality like this, in combination with his uncanny ability to position his band on solely his terms, it's a match made in heaven. Or hell.

Channel Orange is a staggering step upwards from Nostalgia.

While not an unqualified success, particularly in its sequencing, the overwhelming majority of Bright Phoebus warrants every ounce of the reputation the record has spawned during its absence from the world at large. Where it sags, it recovers quickly, and where it rises, it rides upon thermal after thermal, scornful of gravity.

There's such a beautiful combination of elegance and exploration in this debut--Greenwood has created one of the best and most confident debuts in years, and you'd do well to bend your ears around it's intricate and delightfully planned out wonder.

A superb record--sharp and absolutely dangerous.

Opeth's Pale Communion is confirmation of artistic success borne from purity of vision--it is a sublime album of impeccable scope and execution, created by an extremely important band who have finally reached the pinnacle of self-actualisation through music.

A transcendental eloquence comes out in this unique artefact. What we have is a series of sketches, providing a fitting closing statement to his legacy as a series of ideas strewn together, much like his life beginning as a poet. ... Thanks For The Dance stands out as an emblem of the artist’s life work. Dancing between satire, melancholy and tenderness, his final words stand out as the mark of a worldview drawn from a life lived in the shadow of his own genius.

Sonically, she expands exponentially from her debut Stranger in the Alps. That album, elegant and wise, dealt mostly in acoustic guitars and fairly familiar folk influences. Her hero, Elliott Smith, was deeply felt. Punisher keeps some of the acoustics but also blows it all up: strings, horns, waves of mellotron melodies and nylon guitars create a greater sense of a swirling hurricane just waiting to happen.

A case can be made for the transitional albums, like 2011’s at ease with itself Suck It And See. The Car, however – in which a songwriter matures and finds an unexpected emotional range – is sure ultimately to be ranked in the band’s very top tier.

Tough Baby is dedicated to the idea that if you cut out the middleman and leave a group of people to their own devices – giving them uninhibited, creative freedom – it can yield profound results, and in the case of Crack Cloud, timely masterpieces rooted in hope rather than despair.

One of the best dance LPs of recent times from one of the moment’s most valuable artists.

It's a sparse, isolated and overlong affair that's more difficult to love than previous solo outings like the lush The Forester or the sweet Wild Dog. However, for an artist with the vision to take such on such a huge subject as the three-pronged relationship between one woman, her gods and her planet, even managing to squeeze it down to a mere 22 songs is achievement enough. That the album is spectacular, introspective and terrifying all in equal measures is just a bonus.

Apex Predator - Easy Meat retains the hyperactive energy and deadly pacing of its recent predecessors, and as a result, it gives their fans a diverse and devastating listening experience during what is a quintessential, zeitgeist-destroying grindcore album.

Metal, Meat & Bone manages to be both a hypnotic and focussed listen, despite its length. For all its otherworldliness this is certainly one of their most powerful efforts and, for my money, up there with early classics such as Meet The Residents or Third Reich ‘N’ Roll, other brilliant subversions of sacred cows and taboos.

McMahon examines masculinity, vulnerability and how cultural consumption converges with personal demons, and it has resulted in an album of immense integrity, defiance and beauty.

One of the finest debut albums this century. ... Bright Green Field is a brave and daring debut album that manages to mix experimental and avant-garde influences smack bang next to bouncy indie-disco post-punk motifs. I can’t get over how grand and great it is.

It's not often an album of such stature exceeds one's anticipations, but Honor is too astounding to not be revered.

Loom is a brave and raw document from the frontlines of grief, exhibiting the full range of its manifestations beyond sadness – its vacancy, rage and disorientation, delivered with a sweet disposition, enchanting you into a greater and richer awareness of what lies beneath, revealing deep beauty in the collision of exhilarating creativity and inevitable doom.

With the soundtrack to Les Revenants, they have created a work of aural tension; a masterclass in how implied threat is far more effective than a million scary monsters.

Melody's Echo Chamber is a glorious album. Its success lies in the balance between Prochet's ability to break out of the (supposed) shackles of her structured classical composition education, while still delivering a suite of songs that are coherent, eminently listenable and blend lightness with dark foreboding.

This is no retro throwback, Power Trip have poured their genuine, obsessive love of early thrash, but also Cro-Mags, Prong and Black Flag to create a boiling pot of modern metal mastery.

An important component to the Paraorchestra’s practice is melding analogue, digital, and assistive instruments. The results, as heard across these eight ambitious compositions, are completely spellbinding. ...

With her third album Dirty Computer, that she’s truly achieved a tour-de-force. ... There are times though where Monáe’s feminism feels disappointingly cis- and vagina-focused--I wish she’d taken the time to explore the politics of non-cis women and non-binary people a little more. But Dirty Computer succeeds at what it came to do--it’s here to make you think, and it’s here to make you dance. It is the most clearly delivered result of Monáe’s vision so far.

There are countless high points, memorable moments and addictive grooves on these two discs, and Haiti Direct is most certainly already a candidate for compilation of the year.

Just 16 exceptional tracks full of glowing wordplay, instinctively catchy intonation, and effortless genre whisking.

For all its conceptual maximalism, gen(r)e-splicing and densely irregular time layering, the compositions here are supremely considered pieces of continuously mutating gracefulness, spacious and expansive, stretched like a long fade-out into timelessness. Equally grounded and spaced out, on Seeing Through Sound Hassell has found an ideal balance of psychoacoustic and compositional values, the most sublime synthesis of tone magic and artistic craft.

Mission Of Burma are excellent, their new album is equally excellent, and an easy contender for best rock album of the year.

Innocence Is Kinky is a remarkable album, one which delves beneath the surface and returns with something both seductive and strange.

Vince Staples doesn’t care for being labelled a rapper, perhaps, but in just "being himself” he has created one of the finest exponents of the genre this year. Hip hop is punk, it’s poetry, but also it’s party music--Big Fish Theory is an outstanding album that potently shows all of these exquisite possibilities. What’s more is, Staples makes it seem like the easiest thing in the world.

The Hunter is an example of how to crossover without selling out--something Metallica never learned--and no matter how many copies it sells, this is the mainstream heavy rock album of the year.

Cave is always the first to give fulsome credit to his band, and they aim true here in the most explorative, coherent and well-realised Bad Seeds album in years.

MASSEDUCTION defies expectation, defies definition and defies the very idea that definition can exist. It’s an album detailing the mess of identity politics and power structures, and yet it hits serious cohesive highs. There is no cookie-cutter remedy, no rallying cry, just a baker’s dozen viewpoints of the chasm where we once thought order, power, and meaning lived.

It is the kind of album you can listen to 1000 times, and on every single play a new intricacy will be revealed. The mark of genius is that despite this it never feels overburdened or complex. It is, put simply, an extremely ace pop record.

Circle have reached many great heights over the last two decades, but this new album again attains a new zenith.

It's that mix of astral expensiveness and strict artistry that makes Thundercat's debut LP The Golden Age Of Apocalypse as grand and visionary as its title.

The sound of Psychic is meticulous and luscious.

Pearl Mystic is the best British psychedelic album since the 1990s; maybe more than that.

By rights no group should be peaking after 30 years of making music together, yet that is the situation in which Oxbow find themselves. Will they ever transcend Thin Black Duke? Such are the ideas and attention to detail on this record, only a fool would bet against them.

They Want My Soul is focused, tight and impeccably produced. The songwriting is crisp and tight, Daniel's ear for a catchy and upbeat riff have resurfaced.

When it comes to Kosmische classics, this is an essential. If you don't have this in your record collection, you're doing yourself a massive disservice.

Sonically, there isn’t the same sense of startling reinvention with the stately sound of You Want It Darker, although it’s undeniably grander, lusher, more beautiful than its forbears; its melancholy mixture of string laments, orchestral flourishes and sombre choirs virtually compel you to bow your head in hushed reverence.

Meticulously structured yet fuzzily abstract, cloudily claustrophobic yet aurally vast, it sounds nothing like a traditional rap LP yet definably and definitively adheres to the most crucial characteristics of the genre. It’s certainly a marvel and may well be a masterpiece.

This is another incredible addition to Roberts’ Coin Coin project, and one can only assume that when the 12-album cycle is completed, it will be regarded as a singular masterpiece of twenty-first century sonic and narrative art.

The album--an immaculately drawn piece of jazz-inflected pop--is loaded with such originality that Mvula's carved out a niche of her own in 2013's musical landscape.

The Old Fabled River is an exceptional record, a powerful example of a living folk music based on exchanging stories and remaking cultures in the process.

Spare, affecting and hauntingly melodic, For The World is a timeless record, looking back only in a human, personal way--not to some lost golden age, but over a life lived, with all its ups and downs, losses and gains.

It’s a bold claim to suggest No Geography with its reasonably brief (for them) 46 minutes is up there with the controlled chaos and warped psychedelia of their earlier work, but it is. With its unifying themes of freedom, unity and attack, channelled via the medium of boom and sirens, it really is. After the best part of 30 years, there’s still no one else like them. Amazing.

This sense of place and space in Futures makes its suite of sumptuous love songs doubly poignant, turns them into glorious moments of both clarity and giddy disorientation amid the impending decay and desperation of time and events beyond the back door, the darkness glimpsed out on the horizon. The songs don't emerge as 'crafted' at all, rather you can't quite believe they didn't always exist in this form.

Here they've painted another masterpiece in post-midnight malevolence. Only this time, it's more hypnotic, with a new-and-Neu-found intransigence.