What makes The Moths Are Real such a well, lovely listen is just how unforced this all is--not out of twee naivety, but by a brilliant sense that these songs are their own worlds, telling their own stories, with a bit of a twist.

An album that's otherwise remarkably deft at uniting the many aspects of Kevin Martin's musical output to date.

Those who had their hearts set on another batch of coy, cloudy electro-pop from the Swedish singer/songwriter might consider the song [Gunshot!] a bummer, but for the rest of us, it and the other eight tracks that comprise I Never Learn make for a stirring, pristinely rendered expression of heartache.

These very personal surges of sound swell in the ether, seeking out like-minded listeners. His “Audio Virus” – a collection of electronic hardware items that range from the esoteric to the obsolete – purrs like a living being. The hums and crackles it emits, a constant feature as one track slides into the next. Whilst that sounds cold and machine-like, the lunges of notes often reach heart-wrenching heights.

Pain: the quintessential Deaf Wish family album.

Although it feels they've truly thrown the kitchen sink and their full repertoire of synth syncopation at it this time, it's truly a thrilling and spine chilling ride, one that leaves your bones shaken to the core.

Mediation Of Ecstatic Energy is undoubtedly Wong's most fully realised, varied and intriguing set of compositions to date.

Their energy is utterly thrilling and secondly, Hollandaze hints at so much more and should ensure that Tzenos is not reduced to journalistic footnote of merely being a cuddly version of Big Black.

Richly textural and delicately performed, Setting exude a lingering warmth, their edges softened as if left out in the sun. It’s lethargic in all the right ways, untroubled by the need to shock or surprise its audience – and yet surprise it does.

It's Real is a beefier, buffed-up expansion of the debut's rough-hewn sound, but the added polish doesn't nerf Ex Hex's powers as much as it re-energises them.

Seasonal Hire offers no grand statements and reveals no great mysteries. Ultimately, this is not a particularly ambitious record; no musician is stretched wildly beyond his or her limits. And yet, largely because of its off-hand quality and ease of execution, Seasonal Hire offers moments of intoxicating strangeness and beauty.

St. Vincent's real genius is the way it manages to project an aura of perfection while simultaneously showing us its guts; it suggests that while the polished surface may not be a lie, exactly, it's based on a series of elisions that we're all uncomfortably complicit in.

The result is a beautifully eerie song cycle whose pulsing analogue heart is even darker than the penumbral territories the band usually inhabit.

William Doyle’s Great Spans Of Muddy Time fuses the emotional honesty of 1960s girl groups with muscular electronica to create an atmosphere of absolute sincerity and uncertainty soaked in pop yearning. It is an album that truly sinks in.

Funeral Songs is neither the first nor last gloriously raw album to be laid down in such a state.

There is no being taken on a conceptual journey, or losing yourself in these tracks. They overwhelm and punish your ears and synapses, disappearing before you get a chance to acclimatise yourself. Asymmetric guerrilla dancefloor bangers in effect.

The combination of Diggs’s hyper-enunciated double-time flow, William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes’s twisted industrial production, and high-concept albums strikes me as original.

As illustrated by Kunk, the band is a breath of originality in the often-hackneyed worlds of punk and hardcore. Play this album the next time you want your dance party to devolve into a cannibalistic orgy.

It might be less daring than some of the other hankerings, but there’s no room for emotional snobbery on Plunge, no victory that’s not worth celebrating: those seized, stolen intimacies she’s grubbed around for, the flashes of desire and flushes of pleasure, are things to be savoured.

[A] challenging but beautiful album.

Chapter 3… is a record that has their trademark sense of restless grandeur and tough tunefulness.

This album marks a continued evolution in a subtly different new direction for this most idiosyncratic of American alternative bands, one of the few "allowed" to deliver this most unsettled of musics in a quasi-mainstream setting. After repeated listens, I've come to the conclusion that it and No Answer: Lower Floors represent a welcome refinement of something Wolf Eyes have been articulating since their humble beginnings way back in 2000.

Butler shows that there is strength in numbers and in being able to amplify the skills of fellow collaborators.

It's a work of music that seismically shifts in front of your ears. Melodies form crystalline shapes that grow, morph and solidify under a haze of generative ambience. Some of those ideas laid down on Get Lost have taken shape as an LP, designed to play through from start to finish.

If Mason’s last album Boys Outside was a window on his struggles with mental ill-health, Monkey Minds moves from micro to macro as he harnesses his strong sense of social justice, while continuing to hone the crisp electronics that so perfectly soundtrack his ghostly, exhortatory vocals.

A bleakly beautiful collection of compelling brevity, and while it exercises several demons across its ten tracks, it remains very much possessed by a singular spirit: that of an artist continuing to rise, even if he has to dig down uncommonly deep before springing past his peers.

With their fifth album, Artificial Sweeteners, Fujiya & Miyagi once again mine opposite ends of the lyrical spectrum whilst delivering their most musically satisfying collection to date.

As the album comes to a close with reflective ballad 'A Long Time Ago', it becomes apparent that Stay Gold isn't much of a departure from their previous outings. It is however, more consistent and ambitious--both thematically and sonically--than The Lion's Roar, allowing First Aid Kit to gather a well-deserved period of buoyant momentum, flourishing beyond an element of pastiche.