Only a few acts have really transcended local industry mores and enlightened amateurism to make something of truly wider, lasting appeal. And maybe none more so than The Homesick with this record, which should surely sneak through the gates of classic pop heaven.

The creation of an ever restless and fecund talent, Massive Oscillations is a beautifully bold and powerful album that should bring Wacław Zimpel to the attention of a wider and deserved audience.

Labyrinth is strong, but dwarfed by connections to work which have made an indelible mark upon popular culture in a way this album likely won’t. There is still substance to these compositions however: it’s an electronic, neo-gothic record which brims with strangeness and decay.

Be Up a Hello is Jenkinson’s strongest album for a decade and is easily up there with his best work.

Algiers will always be big, bold and unapologetically earnest and while you’d stop short of saying something like they’re a vital band for our times, it’s good to have someone around who cares for them as much as they do.

As the f-bombs scatter and sloppy seconds diss tracks land hard, Kesha’s integrity and emotional depth leans in too. She may be a Malcolm Tucker of chart pop but there is so much symbolism – and often raw courage – in Kesha’s creative reclamation of her self, it can be dizzying.

A joyous exposition of masters at work. OOIOO are still unlike any other band I can think of. They are resolutely themselves.

UR FUN is as concise, focused, and sparkling as of Montreal have ever been.

With Mind Hive, the band continue to evolve, surprise and quietly inspire.

The result is very convincing; as much a young artist finding her voice as an AI besting the machine.

Although Seeking Thrills has many brilliant tracks, ‘About Work The Dancefloor’ is still Georgia’s signature song – and a neat summation of her mind set. It seems that while thinking about and working tirelessly on her songs, she can slip into dreams of their impact in a packed venue. Fortunately, Seeking Thrills is often good enough to take listeners to that delirious high with her.

It’s a spun-out, pastoral journey that attempts to unbox and contextualise the ‘now’ within the history of twentieth century Britain, after the end of the First World War. And yes, be warned, it only folds out to reveal itself at a careful walking pace. So you’ll need to buy in and have patience to get rewarded by its – real and significant – qualities.

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.

An intriguing listen. Just when you think you have it worked out, Souleyman changes the script, and tempo, and you’re back to square one.

With Tunes, 2011 to 2019, a collection of songs released originally in EP form over the last eight years, sequenced by Burial himself and released to commemorate Hyperdub’s fifteenth anniversary, we are able to make cohesive sense of how Burial’s aesthetic grew more expansive and conceptually concise while mirroring our evolution through a decaying society.

Odds Against Tomorrow is contemplative and, at times, undeniably beautiful. If earlier albums like A New Way to Pay Old Debts desublimated blues and roots music, Odds Against Tomorrow resublimates it. On this set of tracks, Orcutt mourns the loss of expressivity in music and conjures the fantastical spirit of the blues.

North London girl gang Girl Ray’s surprisingly pop-minded second album has more in common with the bard’s saucy woodland comedy than at first you might suspect: quips, troublesome romances, and pleasing rhymes abound against the backdrop of a hazy LA summer.

Re-working black histories through both a personal lens and the structure of modern technologies, Moor Mother has created an album as a mythos of possibilities, a cartography of hope.

To even summarise each moment of Drift is a challenge. What I can say is the elements of surprise and familiarity work together to form a deep, dark and wonderful hole, unmanageable by its very nature, and beautifully chaotic. The essential ingredients of Underworld are all there.

Like a young monster venturing out into the world on its own, Volume Massimo, despite its pretences towards a pop sensibility, is still a beast at its core, but it’s an album that showcases just how much Cortini‘s aesthetic has developed since his early days.

With Wrecked, ZONAL and Moor Mother have made a joyously feel bad album whose grinding negativity and tidal heaviness provides a necessary form of catharsis, that sloughs or burns off the stench of ego and know-betterisms. It demands a form of humility from the listener both of their place in the world, and of the experience and position of others.

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.

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.

On Your Wilderness Revisited, Doyle sheds himself of the bad habits he developed as an emergent successful recording artist in East India Youth and takes on the role of the Proustian artist. He takes pleasure in and extrapolates beauty from the suburbs that raised him, and takes pains to share that beauty with us.

Everything here is distorted. Everything as resonant as it can possibly be. Sharpened, infinitely intensified and yet simultaneously blunted and blurred. There is just the right amount of detail.

Twigs still finds ferocious power in her music, her femininity, and her sexuality. But on MAGDALENE, she tampers that ferocity with a radical sensitivity and vulnerability that indicate a broader maturation in her artistic development.

The latest iteration of Homme’s continuous project has come a long way since the epic jams of the late 90s, having evolved into more refined, and fully realised series of releases, never failing to inhabit the spirit of risk and adventure.

If to stir is to mix and combine, or to transform something that was one thing into something else, this shows what Kleijn and MacKay can do so remarkably when set to that task.

But where her EPs stubbornly wrapped tracks of jarring, syncopated beats around those massive tracks, Athena leans more towards R&B, and Parks takes advantage of the space of an LP to smooth out any previous idiosyncrasies.

Their bravest and strongest work to date.

With its huge, graceful scope, FIBS smirks slyly at any presumptions or hopes listeners may harbour. These fibs are alive – a thriving, amoebic album consuming the petri dish in which it was formed.

Judging by the results of Juice B Crypts, this revitalisation of purpose feels very much like something radiating directly from the artists themselves. Hardly a complete renewal or about-face, but rather a refining of methodology and intent, a distillation of what made them so exciting to begin with.

The album dazzles with the thrilling cocktail of styles Gordon’s been through, as if changing channels on the coolest radio on earth. But she never makes herself fully at home in any of them. ... Gordon’s bet is that the people are ready for weirdness, that the world can embrace its complexities. And the only way is forward.

Regardless, however you or I might feel about almost-literal computer music is beside the point. The strong sense of perpetual emergence – of listening in on an intelligent system gaining confidence – makes Blossoms an especially remarkable listen.

Sonic Citadel is Lightning Bolt at their most poppy and accessible.

It would be a stretch to say that this album is easy going, but it’s probably the most accessible of his records. It’s exciting to find such an artist trying out more populist forms.

For You & I is consistent in its spirit with the label’s catalogue: often in its sound, too, although in a decade and a half Hyperdub has covered enough ground for this to be nebulous. That spirit, though, manifests itself in a defiant queerness; a grab-bag approach borne of big city multiculturalism; and a clear fascination with, and love of, sound in general.

The Practice of Love reveals the sensitive humane core that was always behind Hval’s practice of enlightened dissent. The album develops an elegant approach to solving the existential problems of love, care and intimacy from the position of otherness.

There is a playful freedom on display from start to finish. By increasing the importance of the bass and keyboards (a move possibly inspired by fellow Swedish prog compatriots Anekdoten) and simultaneously writing with string arrangements in mind, the innate grandeur at the heart of this band’s music has never been as audible as it is now.

There are clear signs of the heights he’d soon reach on A Love Supreme five months later. Observing such incremental shifts is both fascinating and valuable, and while the performances are all deeply satisfying it remains a tad disappointing that archival projects like this one tend to blot out contemporary work that proves that jazz continues to push forward in the present.

From first note to last, The Fiery Margin is a recording that exudes complete confidence.

The poetry of Gruff’s lyricism is second to none. His ability to flit from language to language between projects, expressing himself with elegance and eloquence in either, is not only an enviable talent but a unique one.

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

Trupa Trupa’s ongoing refusal to engage with anyone but themselves is certainly addictive to listen to.

Ignoring the slight imperfections in the music itself – it strays into self-indulgence at times, as on ‘Honour’, which spends the second half needlessly stumbling around a relatively uninteresting rhythmic motif – Klein’s motivation for the record is deeply original, a fascinating example of what can happen when you shun precedent and subvert expectations. The result is truly compelling.

There are moments when the repetitive nature of some of the tracks does wear on you a little bit. ... But these are mere moments of filler on PL, an album which cements the reason why Paranoid London’s tunes appeal to a scene looking for a sound that’s rugged, dark, and illicit. And in that regard, PL has it in spades.

It’s a big, sonorous, unearthly offering, and it’s difficult to imagine it being created separately by two men, with cut and paste and some incredibly deft stitching. How they’ve managed to bring this Frankenstein’s monster together as a coherent work is testament to a modern friendship by two brilliant musicians using up-to-date technology.

An album that is constantly surprising, occasionally unsettling, frequently beautiful and always mysterious.

They are now making music that, thanks to its lack of grandiosity and ornateness, has a seeming air of distance. It could almost pass through you unnoticed. But they leave traces in your brain that linger and slowly burn inside of you, long after you’ve stopped listening.

Ebbing and flowing between order and chaos, A Universe that Roasts Blossoms for a Horse feels like a long ride in an entropic machine, programmed to descend into mire and din. As such, it’s never dull, it’s just you sometimes wish it had a couple more places to go.

Lover is a fabulous record, full of super-fun standout pop hits that make your heart burst. It oozes with Swift’s much more palatable upbeat sass. She’s in love and also thinking about different kinds of love.

Rhythm plays a strong role in all Pharmakon albums, but Devour has a stronger pull and a denser composition. One rhythmic track layers on top of another, sometimes swallowing each other up and sometimes taking songs into different directions. ... Devour isn’t a rallying cry for change, it’s a reflection of the ugliness of it all, from the inside out.

There is definitely room for some trimming. A third could easily be trimmed without damaging the listening experience too much. At the core of Face Stabber is a fun album that gets better with each listen but when it drags, and in places it does, it feels like a laborious chore to get to the good stuff again. The album lives up to its name. From the moment it starts it is an unrelenting, and visceral, album.

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.

If something’s missing, it’s in production that can’t hide ageing spread; over separate sessions, with separate moods. None of it parlays a singular vision. It’s not meant to. So although the songs often hit the spot (it’s a fuck ton more enjoyable than Teeth Dreams) it’s not a follow-up to Stay Positive.

There was plenty of belligerence and protest on 2017’s World Eater, an album that quite literally bared its teeth, and a track like ‘Wings Of Hate’ delivers exactly what you expect it to. But there’s exasperation and frustration here too, and it’s not quite the maximalist, terrifying work one might expect given the subject matter at hand. Personal grief also informed the year Power spent working on Animated Violence Mild, so following a more reflective, emotionally resonant path makes sense.

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.

The world has changed, and, though bruised and broken, the sincere, generation-galvanising Sleater-Kinney have changed for the better.

Cala is a record that, at its strongest, reaches astounding levels of beauty and emotional fragility, but at its weakest, is just a fading shadow of its most powerful moments.

I does follow a certain formula, but the band’s execution of it is inch perfect. All of Föllakzoid’s music swells and convulses with desert spectres and spirits, it’s music that occupies a world wherein the horizon can never fully be focused on, and all is far from how it seems.

Certain passages evoke Popol Vuh or Cluster (for all the Brazilian flourishes, Simian Angel feels quite German) while others bring to mind avant-garde composers like Robert Ashley or Laurie Spiegel. All this is created seamlessly, the parts fusing into one another to create a vivid, if mysterious, tapestry.

Bursts of reggae wooziness, gnarled free-jazz atonality, and electronic noise afford the album a shock of modernity and adventurousness without feeling forced or awkward.

From start to finish, this album feels like an exposed wound, freshly – you might almost say studiously – picked and mastered to tape. It is an album of baroque intensity and gothic flamboyance played out like one long cathartic scream. Like an onion, it offers up layer after layer to slowly unpeel, each one a potential incitement to the very bitterest tears.

It’s simultaneously a gratifying and frustrating listen. A lot of the homespun charm of ‘Pretty Girl’ has been jettisoned. The synths have clearly been given an upgrade. The drums sound expensive. There are musicians here who can play, and are probably on union pay scale. But no amount of major label gloss or ill-advised interposing guitar licks can disguise Clairo’s irresistible melodic gift, and strangely haunting/haunted voice.

C Joynes and the Furlong Bray have produced music that is finely considered and full of energy, amply repaying multiple listens.

This soundtrack creates an air of wonder and foreboding, that only very occasionally and briefly plunges you into the darkness. ... Working skilfully with a modest, mostly-stringed timbral palette, Krlic incorporates the traditional Swedish nyckelharpa (as did Mark Korven for The Witch) and the hurdy-gurdy to underpin the conventional themes and create an unsettling wheezing groan, characteristic of these ancient instruments.

Atkinson is a masterful, creative collector of such sounds, and she deploys them judiciously to great effect in her work. The Flower And The Vessel is no exception.

At its heart 45 is a fun album with a serious message. At times it feels like the album Prince might have made after watching too much Veep. The downside to 45, as with Trump’s whole administration, is that after a while the joke starts to wear a bit thin and you just need a break from it all.

It is impossible to separate the synthetic from the organic here. ... At points I find myself asking if some of the sounds that I am hearing are even really there or if my brain is just filling in the gaps. Each time I listen through an alternative medium, different textures emerge.

This is a very smart record, and one that bears repeated listening. The emotional maturity and frank lyricism shine through the electronic sounds and idiosyncrasy of her style, and ultimately good songwriting finds a beautiful symbiosis of sound and text.

Dolphine’s songs are mystical, yes--but by no means are they not also tough, topical and profound.

The minutiae of each song’s sonic environment reveals far more than a casual listen, making this an album best experienced through headphones.

Sonically, Purple Mountains embraces and accentuates Berman’s taste for cushion-edged, almost AOR country-rock, with none of the powerchords or uptempo jigs that peppered late-period SJs LPs Tanglewood Numbers and Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea.

Most importantly, as the band builds momentum on track after track, they never miss an opportunity to draw unexpected emotion from their grooves. Time and time again, they excel at finding and seizing every opportunity to fully capitalise on the underlying beauty of these compositions. Likewise, they never undervalue or underestimate the sheer power of gentleness.

This is a complete change of mood to everything they've produced previously, for the better; here they sound alive and excited to be playing. It's encouraging to note that everything hangs together very well, strung together by the imperious guitars.

Whilst Bandana doesn’t have Piñata’s same effortless sense of an instant classic, it has considerably more urgency and contemporary punch, also reflected in the once-again immaculate choice of collaborators, Killer Mike and Pusha T in particular contributing a devastating sucker-punch to ‘Palmolive’.

Small wonders are waiting to be uncovered here, though they take considerable searching. While there’s limited novelty these days in live performances, given their ubiquity online, there are a few stunning examples scattered in the tapes. ... Reviewing these recordings may be superfluous. The songs were not designed to be heard but to be worked through and altered so it’s akin to reviewing storyboards or rushes.

On the surface, Garson’s album (not least the directive that it was to be played to help plants grow) seemed typical of that drift. Beneath the heavy topsoil of kneejerk A&R, however, a deceptively nuanced and downright irresistible feat of pure electronic minimalism lay in wait.

Ultimately, Beast is smart and cohesive but still joyous and daft.

The sonic backdrop is richer, more luscious and colourful, whilst rhythms that once would twitch are now more confident and loose.

Both a graceful tribute and a testament to these musicians’ questing vision.

These re-conceptualised variations still stick to her greatest strengths: pure musicality, melodic (re-)invention, and artistic lucidity.

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.

The Age of Immunology finds the group tightening some bolts and adding depth to their mythology, and it’s really quite a treat.

Simple orchestral riffs and warm west coast production are thickly glooped onto a collection of songs that otherwise may have been too mellow for his rock canon, yet too nice for a stripped-down solo Bruce record.

If Konnichiwa was Skepta’s coming of age, then Ignorance is Bliss is a comfortable consolidation, one that hints at the changes in the artist’s life without ever delving deep in. Nonetheless, the project comfortably asserts his place in the current moment as a unique figurehead of UK culture, possessing artistic ability in bags and a persona that suggests far more to come.

It’s a relief to state that their new album Polymer is very much Plaid’s best album this decade, and at least their best since 2008’s Heaven’s Door.

In Pale Bloom, Davachi reconnects to the piano on a spiritual level, releasing whispers and wishes of delicacy and delight into the ether.

This is a record which deserves your time and effort; it is not an easy listen and nor should it be. It is a dense and weighty work of art which examines the areas between life and death in which we shall all find ourselves. Kevin Richard Martin is making music about subject matters almost wilfully unconsidered by many due to the sheer terrors represented within their everyday realities. If you're human, then Sirens will resonate with you.

It’s not always effective – there are moments of meandering, repetition and filler, points at which the band seem to reach their textural limits, and the occasional re-hashing of an idea they’ve already explored – but what’s most striking about Guadalupe Plata is that even these missteps gel perfectly with the ritualistic atmosphere they’ve whipped up. This is a brisk record, but one that leaves a marvellously macabre impression.

Everything on Flamagra sounds amazing. The beats are crisp and crunchy, the synths and loops are tight and catchy, the basslines are deep and wobbly and the vocals floating above it all take centre stage, but because everything sounds so perfectly measured it’s hard to get excited about the next song, as it all merges into one long sixty-two minute listening experience.

There's no centerpiece and no massive reinvention. Much of the songs place on the drone-noise-ambient continuum. But the sheer scale of Chemical Flowers feels bigger than what came before. Recorded in solitude in the Essex countryside, Chemical Flowers is charmingly ambiguous, floating around in some galaxy between labelmates Lee Gamble and Yves Tumour.

This is music for interplanetary airports and as much as it soothes, it sonically unsettles. But that said--when the project is taken holistically--the listener also risks being unsettled by the contexts that lie in its peripheries.

Despite the strength of the track list, there’s little doubt that Groggs, Parker and Ritchie are the stars of the show. The trio’s chemistry infects every track on Injury Reserve.

It retains energy, but has enough twists and turns to still provide a consistently interesting landscape. They have made a beautiful confectionary, but one made with rigour, skill, and care. A joyful album, leaving me aching for a live performance.

Nothing Great About Britain, a measured yet viciously ribald meditation on the contradictions at the heart of Britishness in 2019.

For a band whose titling and artwork is so important for the images they conjure, reverting to a tighter focus works for them. Carlson's guitars, clearly the focus, get to step back from the angular and the lugubrious. Instead, red-lipped riffs flutter over careful and precise percussion, evoking crimson dresses striding down gold corridors. And underneath it all--the star player--Adrienne Davis’s steady, world-eating thud has never sounded better.

Even in its most unsettling moments, such as the silent gaps that punctuate the synth notes on closer ‘Bow of Perception’, Ecstatic Computation retains a sense of expanding horizons and joyful experiments.