Simple Songs is the most emotionally direct of O'Rourke's pop-oriented releases for Drag City, and the least likely to distance the listener with a cruel joke or winking musical allusion.

The songs not only feel like they exist in a vacuum, but that they demand the listener create one too. It’s an important and serious album because it forces you to experience it as one, it asserts itself as the only thing you can concentrate on.

There was always a worry that Gamel might be too self-consciously studious and challenging for its own arty sake, but as it transpires, it's an unnecessary and unfounded thought.

Idle No More is evidence that this band is serious (sometimes) and it's in it for the long haul.

RPG casts a powerful spell but finds magic in the power of imagination rather than the supernatural. It is a celebration of the essentially human playfulness of gaming, storytelling and songs.

Ypres is an eloquent meditation on such complacency, on valour and its misuse, as well as a memorial to the battles, and war, that was meant to end them all.

As well as command of the overall mood, Lipstate always demonstrates a steely command of her influences. But these mini homages don't swamp her sound--quite the reverse.

The best part about it is the Oh Sees manages to make this shift while still sounding like themselves, holding true with some killer bursts of distorted guitar and psychedelic reverb throughout.

Revelations very much sets the benchmark by which their subsequent work will be judged.

A New Nature does retain elements of the brooding intelligent gothic pop of their earlier work but this time around, Esben And The Witch's predilection for post and progressive rock is thrust to the fore.

His third album may not perform the economic miracles of the second, but it’s a powerful addition to Stromae’s canon and a beautiful gift to the world.

Sic Alps, a taut and absorbing listen, appears to have a mission to take conventional beauty and make it something more interesting by fraying its corners and smearing it with a little dirt. There is nothing Sic Alps could have done to create a better, more delicious sweet and sour record.

Under the Sun is well crafted, interrogating the listener and experimental where it needs to be, gifting you with something to gain throughout.

Divide And Exit is a record that demands you sit up and pay attention, unable to do anything else while it's on, a ticker-tape of frustration and smart tension blocking out peripheral vision.

Haiku Salut could be a curious fit for this – certainly, anyone looking for an evocation of the honky tonk contemporary to that era of silent film will be disappointed. Instead, Haiku Salut have delivered one of their strongest works to date.

Deciding to reflect on states of mind some of us could resonate to – especially this year – BE serves as a chronicle of what 2020 has been during lockdown: a year of uncertainty, anxiety, depression and frustration. But it also delivers hope for the future.

While many of the songs are gloomy as ever they are not cynical or nihilistic in their view of love or other subjects. Nor are they especially sentimental.

Temples then. A bit retro--check. Noel Gallagher and Johnny Marr likes them--check. Singer has amazing hair--check. A debut album chock full of references to their sources, but elegantly reformed and futureproofed--check.

While Here And Nowhere Else is a noisy onslaught that rattles along at a cracking pace, there's a real sense of fun and catchy melodies that Billie Joe Armstrong would be proud of.

Recorded on an eight-track in her flat, Colt steadily emerges as a feature-length celebration of what solitude can yield when approached with creative ablution in mind and the right amount of inspiration at one’s disposal. Woods sounds at home in her seclusion and strikes a chimeric midpoint between electronic and acoustic worlds.

Miles away from the poppy happy clappy smiley lovey dovey vibes of Twenty One or epic choruses of Serotonin, Radlands displays a new direction and confidence.

The results are beautiful, an upside to all this desolation, a lengthy excursion among the snippets. Perhaps there could have been a couple more of these at the expense of some of the shorter, less obviously complete pieces, but as a fascinating clear-up exercise, Lamentations makes a virtue of its small sorrows.

This time Numan struggled with depression in the past few years (which nearly broke up his marriage). This all comes through in the lyrics, which are mostly good (one particularly haunting line: "I don't believe in the goodness of people like me"), even if they lay it on a little thick sometimes.

It’s a wonderfully dexterous and developed body of work that gives more of itself with each listen.

The whole experience is charmingly woah-dude in a way that never feels caricatured or insincere. Great pleasure is taken in employing the familiar apparatus and codes of psychedelia and, well, making them psychedelic again.

[Endless and Blond(e)] are great--but they require time and, realistically, a step-back from the extraordinary (and sometimes ludicrous) hype that necessitates Ocean’s new works be either masterpieces or a complete let-down.

Ultimately, this is an astonishingly consistent album, particularly given Segall's work rate.

Crystal Vision does indeed seek to provide a kind of crystal vision, resulting in a more direct love-letter to the ties that bind, and in doing so Fake weaves a sense of body, community and connectedness.