17 year-old Eilish has gone deeper into the weirdo-pop trench. Together with co-collaborator brother and producer Finneas O’Connell, she has drawn on trap and industrial pop to create a darkly humorous record about romance, rejection and addiction.

It's Real is a beefier, buffed-up expansion of the debut's rough-hewn sound, but the added polish doesn't nerf Ex Hex's powers as much as it re-energises them.

The tracklist, and the fleet-footed manner in which Halo mixes these selections, provides an excellent snapshot of 2019 dance music, one that is being propelled by a unrelenting tide of weirdness. It never quite reaches superlative highs or lows but it ticks along tirelessly, getting better with repeated listens.

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.

If you encounter this in a club and can pontificate, or even stay still, then you’re made of sterner stuff than I.

It's rich and hypnotic, but it's not an easy listen: the gloom of many of the tracks will feel oppressive to some.

What’s heartening about the first part of Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost is that this formula has not become tired. Rather, the band are adding to it incrementally and progressing into ever more interesting territory.

While some of the music drifts a little close to the milky reassurances of New Age music (‘Praying for Mother / Earth Part 1’ places seemingly random plinking notes over the top of rippling running water that challenges the listener to not run to the loo), other tracks, such as ‘Variation – III’ by Masashi Kitamura + Phonogenix, move gorgeous ambient chords around the sound of waves licking the shoreline, a peace punctured occasionally by a chū-daiko drum to wholly peaceful affect. Together, the twenty three tracks here promote a warmth that feels somewhere close to paradise.

While there has was never any doubting their psychedelic influences and their way with a groove, Wraith offers something more. Full of variety and unpredictability, like the best science fiction it maps out a dreamworld of our times, a tonic against the deathly thoughts of the small hours.

Little Simz' third studio album, Grey Area, sees her swing confidently through the duality of youth to harness the harshest of her vulnerable, raw moments, and the best savage, wisdom-weaponry, giving each reflection on herself pride and place on this record.

It is a record at once dark and joyous, fun and foreboding, gleeful and eerily apocalyptic. Curiously, it may also be the group’s most ‘organic’ record to date, an album whose every beat and every blip seems to question our sense of the real and the fake, the human and the alien.

In this time when dank edgelords across techno and industrial music are still flogging the dead SS cavalry charger of suspect aesthetics and prissy growling, it's refreshing to listen to a record where you've never a doubt that the sturm-und-drang is in aid of righteous causes. May the Test Dept cogs keep on grinding.

Death Becomes Her is an album from an artist who in now beginning to realise her possibilities, not just as a producer but as a performer, and as such she wants to get everything out there, squeezing every last idea into the album. And sometimes her take on pop music might be a little too abrasive to reach the playlists of many a commercial pop station… for now.

Sleaford Mods' eleventh album is a remarkable leap on from 2017's English Tapas, a record of consolidation that addressed the strange situation that the duo found themselves in--going from a niche concern more accustomed to playing alongside noise artists suddenly given column inches and selling out massive venues. This progress has come hand in hand with a keener knack for more fully developed tunes to bolster Williamson's hectoring. It is also, frequently, a hilarious record.

A masterpiece of sound design, that's no backhanded compliment. This album is the sort of sound design record that more sound artists should aspire to make.

There's nothing fetishistic, voyeuristic, or pathetically ambiguous here, more an outpouring of disgust that we seem to be in similarly horrendous times again. There are moments of beauty here too, of course, for that contrast has always been a hallmark of Jamie Stewart's songwriting, and what makes Xiu Xiu bleed where others merely pose.

It's not a perfect album by any means, but I don't think it wants to be. It just wants to, be. Musically it walks a proverbial tightrope and often loses balance. The beauty, however, is in the moments when it does fall. Because for every time Mazy Fly falls from the sky, there is always a safety net on standby briefly followed by the next enthusiastic trapeze flip in Chrystia Cabral's psychedelic circus of one.

This record is perhaps the first time we see Drenge exploiting the additions that were initially made to their live band, and exploring the expanded instrumentation to its full potential.

In Search Of The Miraculous is a new way of being for Desperate Journalist: a rangy and colourful artwork, less insular than what has come before, and testament to its creators' increasingly fearless outlook.

TUTTI feels retrospective in the sense that Cosey Fanni Tutti doesn't introduce anything strikingly unfamiliar to her sonic palette here, with its ambient closing tracks a retread back to Time To Tell. TUTTI though is essential in that it marks Cosey Fanni Tutti as the auteur of her own sound world, as well as being a strong facilitator, artist and collaborator.

State Of Run doesn’t reinvent the wheel: it touches on the arch grandeur of Varg, the trap-leaning stutter of Planet Mu labelmates Sinjin Hawke and Zora Jones, and the deconstructive spirit of 2013/14-era Goon Club Allstars. But the trio’s attention to detail shines through, and the full-length format gives them space and time to execute their rich visions.

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.

Ideal Woman does one thing and it does it well; throbbing, furious guitars and unpretentious, fierce lyrics.

Quiet Signs, as sparse and subtle as its name suggests, shares its secrets only with those willing to give their complete and undivided attention in exchange.

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.

Above all, it’s the melodies that stand out, whether in the wonderfully whacked out melodies of ’You Make Me Forget Myself’ or pacy ripples of ‘Sequence One’, all delivered with an insouciance that’s rather satisfying in these times.

This album isn’t a call-to-arms or doom merchantry, but rather a poetic statement of fact--short stories of and for the anthropocene, the product of a resignation to our inevitable demise.

The 20th anniversary edition of This Is My Truth… will by no means settle the long-standing war of attrition between its fans and it detractors, but it does provide a deep and rewarding dive into the band’s populist peak, an idiosyncratic era for one of the last two decades’ most idiosyncratic of rock bands.