The result is a genuinely exceptional and entrancing album, opaque but effective, filled with beautiful, skewed songs, unconventional without ever feeling precious or affected.

It all adds up to a landmark in American music, an instant classic.

Accompanying him for the hour that Reality lasts makes for an endlessly fascinating journey.

The prevailing mood is one of euphoria - of clouds parting, sun shining and hearts melting.

There are times when the less charitable might be inclined to shout at Toledo to pull himself together, but Car Seat Headrest increasingly feel like a significant band, and Toledo like an unusual and compelling voice.

It’s a rich, deep and strange album that feels like Bowie moving restlessly forward, his eyes fixed ahead: the position in which he’s always made his greatest music.

The songs on m b v, however, are more melodically complex, intriguing and often pleasing than anything he has written before.

Now and then, the band delve back into their previous, less rarefied styles. ... Those diversions create moments of gut-wrenching contrast, making hackneyed rock tropes feel surprising again--proof that with this softening of their sound, Big Thief have alighted upon something that packs a real punch.

This feels like a record that contains a great deal to pore over.

Perhaps no album could tie together all the diverse strands of Stevens’ musical career but, as it ranges from lo-fi singer-songwriter to baroque orchestration to opaque electronics to warped pop, Javelin comes surprisingly close: a remarkable achievement in itself. That it sounds like a holisitic album, one that flows rather than fractures, is remarkable, too – but it does, carrying the listener along with it as it goes.

Microshift manages to be both their most accessible work and their most intense: the sound of an already powerful band gaining not just clarity, but focus.

It’s both appealingly direct yet perfectly thought-through.

One of 2015’s most addictive, pulse-racing noisy joys.

Arise may be too long on genre music and short on improv for jazz hardliners, but for many it will be a fascinating perspective on an African Caribbean family lineage shared by McFarlane and her gifted drummer and producer Moses Boyd.

It feels genuinely different and exhilarating.

The guitar-led Kingdom pokes at Brexit and the messiness of our government but lacks personal touches, as does by-numbers ballad To Lose Someone. But these are mild complaints amid otherwise distinctive songwriting.

Karol’s skill is in evocative melodies that transcend any language barrier.

Beyond his trademark agitated yelp and panic-attack rhythms are all manner of surprising and compelling sonic twists.

Realign your expectations, and what gradually emerges is a record of enigmatic beauty, intoxicating depth and intense emotion.

The album title comes from Menig’s near-death during childbirth, and her subsequent realisation that we are forever “on the cusp” between death and life, heartbreak and euphoria, all of which are in fulsome supply here.

It's hilarious, chilling and exhilarating: further evidence of the unique and enviable position Cave finds himself in at 50.

It is as gloriously varied as her 1980s output. Some tracks see her taking Steve Reich-style minimalist marimba riffs but escorting them through endless harmonic mutations.

Listening to Choose Your Weapon can hover between delirium and frustration, delight and outright annoyance, often in the very same beat.

Fussell makes the good-natured workplace bitching on Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues feel both particular and timeless. These are exceptional songs, performed exceptionally well.

There are remarkably few longueurs, and plenty of great stuff lurking among the discs of unreleased material.

Reward is appropriately titled. Give it time and it fully reveals itself, getting under your skin in the process.

Iyer is the antithesis of a ­contained and cerebral artist. ­Historicity, for the traditional jazz ­format of an acoustic piano trio, features fewer explicit ­contrasts of tonality and ­extremities of drama than Iyer's more familiar duets with saxist Rudresh Mahanthappa, but it offers a different agenda.

Not every effect works (the gloom of I’m a Mother is too airless, the electronic pulse of Longpig too enervating), but on the whole, it’s hypnotic.