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.

L’Rain has produced another fascinating record, a reappraisal of past work, while managing not to repeat herself. It is a very interesting album, as much about resilience as it is grief.

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.

An extremely accessible record for a broad-range of new listeners and one that’s easy to return to.

He lacks the humour, more explicit angst and emotional confidence of John Grant and lacks Garneau's devotion to melodrama and pop. He is hardly Stephin Merritt. He exists independently as a cultural explorer as well as simply a very fine, very sensitive songwriter.

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.

‘Wited, Still and All…’ is a soft and broken, but strangely discordant cut, while ‘Of This Ilk’ and ‘Vital’ allow the more musically daring sides of the group to surface, with start-stop rhythms and razing riffs fencing the mass of metal aftershocks. As the album nears its end, there is a sense of something huge moving past just beyond the reach of senses, leaving a trail of subtle melodies behind. A way forward where there was none before.

This is an album that vindicates maturity, long years of toil, cumulative effort, resilience, patience, wisdom.

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.

The reissue's bonus material, culled from the original cassettes Darnielle recorded to, fails to outshine the album's original tracks, but does offer a few highlights.

Either it sounds like 35 years of extreme metal and fast hardcore boiled down into one molten sea of fury, or you straight up don’t get it and are doomed to exist on the other side of the glass. See? This us-and-them rhetoric feels more fun the more you listen to this album.

The really great thing about this heavy, intense album, as punishing as it is beautiful in its resolve, is that it shakes to the core the philosophies that Björk laid out so methodically on Biophilia, but she still finds a dark difficult way back to hope and love.

The tropes of romantic art are self-consciously manipulated, but the artifice is made plain, and the finished work feels more real as a result.

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.

All the material contained within is new, and very good. The bands are in fine form, building on their former forms.

Virgins is Tim Hecker at his most thought-provoking and enigmatic.

Mitski’s devotion to music has resulted in a tremendously earnest and endearing record.

It is these three songs [MMMOOOAAAAAYAYA, Pool Hopping and Threatening Each Other re: Capitalism] that, in their hugeness, tend to overshadow the rest of the record on initial listens. Though the remaining tracks should not be missed or dismissed because of that.

Goat has distilled what could have so very easily become an overblown meandering jam fest into a punchy, forceful and infectious masterpiece of cosmic rock & roll – the will is palpable, nigh a trace of fat on these bleached bones.

The Scientists never really broke through to a wider audience. But what they did do is leave behind a body of work that was picked up by subsequent generations and cited as highly influential. There’s certainly much to enjoy here but there’s also plenty to re-affirm their cult status in the greater scheme of things.

It’s emotive, heavy, satisfying. It’s Deftones. They’ve made their album again and, honestly, you wouldn’t have it any other way.

Funny, weird, irreverent, a bit messy in places, Wet Leg’s debut feels like a rollicking night out at your local indie disco compacted into thirty-six brisk and breezy minutes. Across a dozen by turns funny and fraught tracks, the highs and lows of twenty-something life are captured with zinging joie de vivre.

Dalton famously believed that a singer shouldn't have to raise her voice to be heard. These minimalist arrangements, whether it's Isobel Campbell affecting a slight twang to match her guitar or Larkin Grimm legitimate twang (and the album's only banjo), are a fitting tribute in themselves.

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

There is nothing comfortable about these traditions, but the evident joy in each other’s skills pushes the three musicians to peaks of subtle innovation. What News is just the latest in a string of Alasdair Roberts albums which turn our idea of folk music upside down and give it back to us charged with a new potency.

Voices From The Lake is a love letter to slow, concentrated listening.

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.

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.

With features like BIA, Jorja Smith, Reykon, Tyler The Creator and Bootsy Collins, Uchis’ debut is clearly meant to make a big impact, and her romantic-tragic persona complements it beautifully.

It is the sound of a musician coming to terms with the excruciation of making art and exposing himself without armour.

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.

Fatigue deserves to be listened to in succession. It needs you to sit down with a cup of tea, it needs to be envisioned and thought through. You need to let it embody a change for you, and take you somewhere else, where you can sit in the duality of your own emotions. Each song is preceded by an interlude to piece the emotions of each track together.

Herein lies Róisín Machine’s beauty at its most uncomplicated: every single one of its songs implores you to dance, and in doing so implores you also to forget the human fragility of which you are so incessantly reminded. Vicariously through Róisín Murphy – be she god, machine, person, or something floating between them – we can forget our fragile bodies, losing ourselves in a blissful utopia, even if only for an hour.

Above all, it represents a bold, sensorily majestic step in the right direction by an artist no longer content to tread water.

As is often the case with PC Music-affiliated works, this is an album which displays, and not infrequently, extraordinary flashes of inspired production work, but can descend into tedium with as much suddenness. ... And when the whole affair does eventually draw to a close with the hum of an air conditioner and the sound of the flying Jony Ive heroine thing from Wall-E, you will probably give an audible sigh of relief. And then spin the whole album again.

Musically, it's painfully simple; sonically, it's painfully complex.

Each track is inevitably a wild combination of memories, ideas, and influences – midi-fied sacred harp singers clash with squiggly synthesis, fiddle collides with the most absurd funk bass. Meanwhile, the spectre of prog is everywhere and the club is never far away. Amazingly, it all works.

Discernible throughout Are We There is the sense that she is operating with more levity and confidence than ever before, and a song that ends with a joke, a studio outtake and the sound of laughter is the perfect way to see it out.

Shrewdly, she rarely repeats herself, keeping things fresh by always being adventurous. That’s worked throughout her career, and it works on Tension especially.

For all its complexity and dazzling scope, The Blackest Beautiful never loses its ability to channel the seething madness and, most importantly, fun of the band's live show.

From The Sea To The Land Beyond (whether encountered with or without the moving image) is a potent and poetic exploration of our own human mortality in contrast with the unyielding permanence of nature and the sea.

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.

Sangare sounds energised by the new production context: the new sound becomes her, and as one would expect it is her power, verve and versatility that truly carry the album. [Jun 2017, p.70]

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.

Shade reviews different ways Grouper has approached her work over the years, but is also a unique look at the style that has emerged as a result, even if some of the stops along the way are less polished. If Grouper is normally minimalist in her recordings and performances, Shade is like having Harris perform in your living room: it isn’t always flawless, but it is absolutely special.

A History Of Every One deposits its listener right up close, and seemingly the improvisations are adapted to take that into account.

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.

Even with each powerful stride forwards in his career, it never seems Baxter will quite escape the shadowing of his late father, Ian. Yet, perhaps it is this paternal context, this very partial eclipsing that leaves Baxter’s work with a great style of its own. After all, a light emanating from shade will always appear brighter than one already doused in daylight.

The density of soil has been scraped back, giving each song a lightness and an ability to breathe.

The range of sonic ideas, fully realized songs, and prodigious vocal talent on Kaleidoscope Dream arrives as the most pleasant of shocks.

An album that is assured, contemplative, and sometimes a bit sad.

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.

In its breadth of ambition and stunningly realised sounds, Dark Energy delivers more than just a new twist on an established style. Remaining tightly linked to the music of Jlin's forebears and contemporaries, it nonetheless maps out an inspiring and tantalising glimpse of electronic music's future.

Floreat isn't simply a seduction--in the most understated way, it's too intense for that.

Luxury Problems plays like a logical continuation of this chapter of Stott's music--the sweet spot between fear, obstruction and the warm embrace of total sound immersion.

So while the production isn’t as in-your-face as before, the flourishes that characterised those releases are here deployed to subtle effect on an album that’s only too happy to explore a variety of stylistic routes including blues, jazz, deep house and dub elements to make a surprisingly coherent and cohesive statement.

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.

While made from individually minimal, looping rhythms and uncomplicated textures, Drift Multiply is rendered into a harmonically luxurious and sonically dense whole.

By embracing the rich heritage of Black, queer dance music and adding a splash of her own magic, she’s created a genuinely captivating record. It’s a seductive sound – even worth waiting six years for.

It's a mind-bending metal album that casts the gaze of its extraterrestrial eye towards an unknown galaxy far away.

It’d be easy to assume the reason Every Bad sounds so vital is because its raw, agitated songs are the perfect soundtrack for these blighted times, built to be played while the world’s never-ending dumpster fire burns hotter and hotter. But it’s also got a slicker, more muscular sound than 2016’s home-recorded Rice, Pasta And Other Fillers.

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.

This is still a Grizzly Bear record, but thanks to a spin through the grinder of maturity, it's also now a Grizzly Bear that know when to hold back or let things flow in order to create an LP that connects emotionally. This was the one thing that its impressive but more technically minded predecessors often lacked.

The sheer ebullience, the devil-may-care attitude taken in the construction of these songs, makes it an album to treasure.

Nature provides a home for Welcome Strangers. It offers shelter, and sheds vital warmth--and light--in times of uncertainty. It’s the bedrock of this heady compendium of haunted disco lullabies for foggy urban woodland raves and psychotropic campfire sing-alongs.

Thrillingly, LP1 gives any record you might find us covering elsewhere on The Quietus a run for its money in terms of oddness.

Napalm Death continue to exist to push sonic boundaries and challenge dogmas, and it’s great to hear them have fun here while further broadening the vitriolic sound they’ve defined into a singular movement.

The resulting music is stunning, perhaps a little more difficult to get a handle on than Amaryllis, but offering an invigorating glimpse into new territory for Halvorson. Though more abstract than its companion volume, Belladonna’s instrumentation tugs at the heartstrings aplenty.

This is a far more reflective affair, with the lyrical gymnasium packed away

In moving beyond their avant-garde origins, the 'technopop' which comprises the latter half of this compilation has often been viewed as a descent into the lightweight, and a commercial sell-out. On the contrary, #7885 (Electropunk to Technopop 1978 - 1985) proves a mastery of superficially conflicting musical spaces.

Whilst Sun Ra's enormous back catalogue will always mean that certain aspects of his music may be deemed unrepresented on any given compilation, this collection has huge appeal for both newcomers and obsessive fans alike.

Any flaws feel minor, and they only lightly chip at this monolithic piece of work, where commonplace rap stories breathe in ways they haven’t before. The mystery is this record’s greatest strength, and it lives in every crevice, spicing up what could otherwise just be a collection of especially hard bars.

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.

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.

This is Shah finding her rhythm, enjoying herself doing tongue-in-cheek domestic subversion. It's the kind of album she has long wanted to make, when not urged towards a large scale social statement, like on her Mercury-nominated Holiday Destination.

Outsider soul from a true original.

The collaborations are abundant throughout Reflection too and mark some of James’ most assured offerings: her skills as a producer (particularly on drill tracks) are especially impressive. Through working with other creatives from afar, James starts to arrive at something that resembles peace.

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.

Acid Rap is by no means without its kinks--'Favourite Song' and 'NaNa' make for a definite lull to these ears--but the heady Chicago cocktail served up on the tape's other 11 songs paints a splat of vivid colour over the city's newspaper headlines.

Each of these tracks effortlessly conjures the swirling feeling of needing to make a decision – and questioning your own being – never quite settling, always moving.

With Lost In The Dream and his band The War On Drugs, Adam Granduciel has made an incredibly strong case that his heroes should now be considered his peers.

The Underside of Power is both the latest chapter in a long-running and universal story that seems to be nearing climax, and solid, sonic proof that Algiers are capable of not just acting with their hearts, but ripping them out and offering them up on record.

Science Fiction Dancehall Classics, with its blend of revamped urban dub and bizarre cybernetic aesthetics, proves the most suitable companion primer to Sherwood's own 2015 selective compilation, Sherwood At The Controls, Vol. 1: 1979-1984.

Moor Mother’s voice is an essential anchor on Open the Gates, but the album is more exciting taken as a group work than just the next in a long line of collaborative efforts.

For an album that is extremely paired down, it is complete in all its meditative richness and erudite honey light. Gold Record presents itself as an album of quiet epiphanies - reaching into the interior space of the quotidien and feeling around for something that is tempting to romanticise, but instead, producing it before an audience with a frankness that trumps a flourish.

Happier Than Ever is a record of many layers and nuances. It is primarily a deep dive into the dark side of overnight celebrity and the internet’s industrial-scale objectification of young stars. But the project is also is a study in loneliness and a baroque, at times almost gothic, picking apart of adolescent melancholia. It’s Lindsay Anderson directing an episode of HBO’s Euphoria. Or Edward Gorey illustrating Judy Blume.

Way Out Weather's lines and contours are beautifully rendered. But there are times when Gunn's songs don't benefit from the extra exposure, when one misses Time Off's murkier, more forgiving production.

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.

A perfectly fine release, Untitled Unmastered doesn't exist to change anyone's mind about Lamar.

Poison Season is a luxurious creation, dappled in sunlight, and summoning all the redemptive power of pop.

The resulting album, unsurprisingly enough, contains their most texturally diverse work to date.

It’s an album that is hard to categorise but its methodical beats, otherworldly production, intriguingly chaotic clashes of melody and hazy vocals all inexplicably mesh together, with Liv.e leaning further and further towards that vital point of breakthrough.

The Agent Intellect probably isn't a record to be throwing on every evening after (or indeed without) work. Distilling the sheer fallibility of the human condition across twelve insistent tracks, each full listen feels like an investment in the slow-burning revelation of some bigger picture, delivered with the ardent persuasion of a band fully able to defend wasting no time in capturing the magic.

[Chamber of Light] is like an exquisitely constructed mosaic of UK dance music signifiers, perpetually re-shuffled into new configurations and never losing that sense of possibility that lifts this album beyond the realms of nostalgia. LHF's modus operandi may seem anachronistic in 2012, but it's a damn sight fresher than most of the stuff out there right now.

50 Words for Snow is undoubtedly whimsical, but it's played and arranged so exquisitely that even the most po-faced should be able to acknowledge the scale of its achievement.

The methodical way in which the album has been put together is surprisingly artful and induces touching moments of real beauty.

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

Neurosis have not reinvented extreme metal on Fires Within Fires, and at this point it seems unlikely they’ll ever again record anything as gamechanging as Enemy... or 1996’s Through Silver In Blood. These albums and others give them ample credit in the bank to merely – merely! – bust out a new record every few years, tweak their various formulae, play by their own rules and timescales, and keep on delivering the goods in punishing, end-time-preacher fashion.