It’s an album that needs the thick-skin its title connotes to listen--you won’t emerge from it feeling joyous, but you will emerge seeing a truth that will deeply unsettle.

Lydon's ever-inspiring love of de-dub postulates continually throughout the album – it's such a perfect return.

It's quite brilliant and perfectly flawed: the sort of album you don't mind getting run over whilst listening to.

Ultimately it's the breaking of a cycle that leads to change and, on this record of both progression and recollection, Esben And The Witch suggest that they haven't yet quite achieved that.

With only ten tracks, half of which are under three minutes long, Personal Computer feels just a few bits short of a byte and you may well find yourself moving straight onto Unknown Mortal Orchestra's back catalogue just to get some closure.

There's a dryness that inhabits this music; and listening to to these future-past musical reliquaries (especially the fragile--and aptly named - end track, 'Death Of The Ego') you wonder whether it could all crumble away if subjected to the slightest breeze. Regardless; there is also a sense of an extraordinary concentration at work.

This is a deliberate Difficult Listen, an Atrocity Exhibition, an Intense Humming Of Evil. If you've always been a Stewart-skeptic, there's a good chance you'll dismiss this as Super Hans conjuring a powerful sense of dread; if not, it's likely to genuinely unsettle.

Thomas White sings, oddly enough, too well, lacking the fragility of Nick Drake, the androgyny of Stuart Murdoch, not to mention Jim Morrison's virility.... Idiots! is an excellent journey through the more poppy instincts of Electric Soft Parade.

Even if Have Fun With God occasionally meanders or strips its source material back a little too far, its value lies in the way it extends the course of Dream River (which itself sounds like a continuation of Callahan's 2011 magnum opus, Apocalypse)

Lioness: Hidden Treasures is an appropriately muted set, with Mark Ronson and Salaam Remi producing an honourable and moving tribute to the Amy Winehouse.

The engagement with dance music and half-improvised feel lends it an irresistible forward momentum, something that picks up pace throughout the album to exhilarating effect; the album's second half in particular creates a disconcerting sensation of constant acceleration, until it finally collapses into its closing throes and falls away.

Mind Trap is a triumph of feelings over ideas, of making sounds bigger and more mobile than the spaces (or heads) that contain them.

Retro styling contextualises Love and Devotion and, crucially, the album's story is delivered with an emotional heft that many current producers aspiring to hypermodernity would do well to note.

One immediately clear difference between Two Way Mirror and previous Crystal Antlers work is the fact the band, led by vocalist and bass player Jonny Bell, have improved immeasurably as musicians.

Expectations hits a lot more than it misses. Bebe Rexha is no ordinary singer. She’s a chameleon who can switch vocals, blend with any sound, and find rhythm with any tempo. She is an artist that can make other genres pop.

Okay, so it won't be most people's cup of tea, but Gauntlet Hair is a brave and defiantly individual effort.

It may not be the Rapture many were expecting this year, but this triumphant return to form is pretty glorious nonetheless.

If this is her last record then she hasn’t gone out on her finest note, but that’s certainly not to undermine the album. Maya Arulpragasam’s body of work remains an important reminder of the exciting prospects of cultural exchange and the immigrant experience. Taken in that light, AIM is a fitting addition to her oeuvre.

Keely's is a singular mind that luxuriates in its own logic, but on Original Machines it luxuriates a little too much. Cheeringly, though, there are superb moments and doodles, the pace of which makes for an inventively utilitarian listen.

For all the talk of madness, it would seem more than ever that Sebastien Tellier knows exactly what he's doing.

Overseen by Sune Rose Wagner of The Raveonettes, all the songs are so instant that it makes the album something of an onslaught on the senses - multiple listens will be needed for clear favourites to reveal themselves in a slow strip tease.

The past, present and future collide in a sublime celebration of technology, history and humanity, in all its flawed and triumphant glory, filtered through one man's attempts to understand and explain his small but significant place in the interconnected, universal whole.

There’s just enough time to get lost in thought before you’re jolted back to the beginning again. Only ‘Long Assemblage’ has any ambitions to break out from the sketches, a five-minute exposition that dares to create anything like a narrative arc, carried along by some intrepid hi-hats. Otherwise it’s soft and languorous and thoughtful, and occasionally a little bit sinister.

Where debut EP Summertime! and the über-hyped eponymous first album's songs had an oddly melancholic joyfulness that captured a number of imaginations back in early 2010, here there's a quiet switch to an oddly uplifting melancholy. On the best songs, that is – too many just sound gloomy and dull.

They've always been a subtle unit, resisting obvious moments of catharsis in favour of subtle dynamics, but here they manage the trick that Khanate mastered so effectively and create a tension that derives as much from the fear of silence as it does from the threat of noise.

It sounds ominously worth, but on listening the level of fun is obvious too. Layer upon layer, spoken word singing weaves around carefully crafted atmospheric drum patterns and rudimentary grooves, sounding unpremeditated--spontaneously surreal.

A musical punch-up from start to finish, Goldblade choose their targets well as one blow is delivered after another. You might want to roll up your sleeves and get stuck in.

On the whole, though, these songs are at their best when grounded in low region trickery: rumbles, clipping sounds, droplets, shudders, judders and all manner of absorbed low freak-uency eeriness, as exhilaratingly creepy as anything offered up by trip-hop's most skilled practitioners.