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.