Rest is still the most French record you’re likely to hear all century.

‘v2’ is narrower in its oscillations, but all the more incisive, with zither-like textures and guitar screams that morph into sharp pulses and tinnitus-evoking tones. ‘v3’ radiates with a sense of melancholy and loss, and makes for a fitting final manifestation of what is another triumph for Kali Malone.

Listeners willing to put in the hours to engage with Saltland on their level will find reams to love about their debut , a record so carefully considered that making a song and dance about it all feels a little garish.

With Tunes, 2011 to 2019, a collection of songs released originally in EP form over the last eight years, sequenced by Burial himself and released to commemorate Hyperdub’s fifteenth anniversary, we are able to make cohesive sense of how Burial’s aesthetic grew more expansive and conceptually concise while mirroring our evolution through a decaying society.

Above all, it’s the melodies that stand out, whether in the wonderfully whacked out melodies of ’You Make Me Forget Myself’ or pacy ripples of ‘Sequence One’, all delivered with an insouciance that’s rather satisfying in these times.

Mint Chip is full of misdirection but never feels contrived. ... Their songs are tightly composed, danceable streams of consciousness.

A thoroughly good larksome house record.

The thirteen tracks that make up the album are wonderfully wonky. They are also incredibly catchy, with subtle sci-fi tinges to them. But this is what we’ve come to expect from the South London post-punk outfit. On All Fours is the strongest release to date.

Bertucci might not have the reach of Taylor Swift but, in creating such affecting work, she’s generating a legacy that will hopefully last for as long as there are still humans pacing these receding coast lines.

Elder have crafted a lush and carefully-orchestrated record, approaching from a different angle than their peers, or indeed their previous attempts.

Change is musically daring but familiar – the austere yet affective electronic backdrops elicit Broadcast in their prime, or High Scores-era Boards of Canada.

The music Melt Yourself Down make on this eight song, 36-minute debut album is insanely full of energy and ideas, a tumultuous barrage of snaky, infectious hooks and punishingly addictive grooves.

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.

Nobody could question the fact that these guys mean it with every fibre of their being, and Meir is music to make Norway proud; a new majestic fanfare to welcome hog-riding warriors into Valhalla.

By embracing its influences with as much lithe confidence as it embraces the idea of endings, Woman's Hour avoid sounding derivative by making pop music that looks you in the eye. If you meet their gaze, you won't find any tears, but you will find understanding.

The steadiness in their performance is captivating and a pleasure to immerse yourself in. There are great rewards to I Don’t Know, in this regard.

The message of humanity and hope that the decolonisation doom of Divide and Dissolve carries grows in strength with their work’s consistency and volume. In that sense, Systemic is no less devastating and uplifting.

Mogwai’s attitude towards experimentalism shows in the darker corners, the nooks and crannies of their sound where little glow worms of ideas grow and decay. Elsewhere this is well-orchestrated, subtle and playful, with the confidence to indulge both themselves and the audience.

There is much to savour in Caminiti's enthusiastic and emotional attempts to expand on his own musical lexicon.

It's not a perfect album by any means, but I don't think it wants to be. It just wants to, be. Musically it walks a proverbial tightrope and often loses balance. The beauty, however, is in the moments when it does fall. Because for every time Mazy Fly falls from the sky, there is always a safety net on standby briefly followed by the next enthusiastic trapeze flip in Chrystia Cabral's psychedelic circus of one.

The record ends brilliantly with the superb one-two of ‘Trankil’, a truly brilliant pop track, and the immensely sympathetic ‘Aminiata’. The brisk, crisp, ‘that’s your lot’ ending on each of these two tracks somehow makes listening in so much more enjoyable.

Lean and yet lush, No More Blue Skies might boom slightly less than 2019’s My House but it is more richly arranged, the sound built out with sax and strings as mastermind Andrya Ambro carefully details a beguiling series of stark, spidery vignettes.

The Take Off And Landing Of Everything is the sound of a band prising an encouraging aesthetic edge from the sheer enjoyment of ageing. It bodes well for the future.

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.

Its use of frayed tones and frequencies as the organising basis for movement and propulsion allows the music to seep into the cracks and pores of the space around you, extracting the anxiety and dread inherent hidden in our world around us. Embrace the abyss and enjoy.

The result is very convincing; as much a young artist finding her voice as an AI besting the machine.

They function as compassionate anthems that rally against the wrought iron tempestuousness of youth.

What is impressive about absent origin is that the sprawling album does have a focus. There are repeated themes — feminist and internationalist snippets as well as musical motifs. And the albums winds down in a logical way as the soothing string arrangements and bird song of ‘an infinite thrum (archipelago)’ give way to the piano and more operatic singing of album closer ‘the abandoned colony collapsed my world.’

It’s a record like Lice’s that can reinvigorate and re-energise. Yes, it may be at the end of some sort of sonic spectrum but your ears will become less misted and more clear.

Flatland feels perfectly formed out of the clay of a multitude of styles, and, with rhythms this tight, it's something of a triumph, even if it reflects nothing back but strobe lights.

Proof serves as a nostalgia trip for long-time fans of the septet and a summary introduction for the curious. With thirty old songs, three completely new tracks, and eleven new versions of well-loved classics, this album marks a satisfying closure to their first nine years as a group.

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.

Escapology is eccentric, full of twists and turns, screechy, glitchy and ambitious – undoubtedly a rare breed. After you complete the final mission, you are finally immersed in the artificial soundscape of closer ‘T-Divine’. The closing credits roll in. You have managed to escape and survive. Ultimately though, the listening experience does not transport me into a hyperstitional future. I feel more catapulted into an alternative past, which was polluted with fragments and ideas from the future we are inhabiting at the moment.

This is the beauty of My Krazy Life, which manages to break the homogenous mould of the majors by retaining an unshakeable sense of local identity.

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

This is a vital debut that captures a dark, uncertain time, but counters displacement--in all its forms--with grace, nerve, and a spine-tingling call to arms, and perhaps just as importantly, a call to dance.

As ever with William Basinski, Cascade is deeply melancholic and subdued, music to embrace in the deep of a sleepless night. But it also unfurls to reveal layers of brightness that went undetected on 92982, as the increased pace of the loops blurs and breaks apart the piece's monotonous (in the best sense of the word) repetition to reveal the deep humanity at the work's core.

This is a new incarnation of The Julie Ruin, and it's still raising the goosebumps on my arms.

It has been worth the wait. It’s not as if music’s timeline moves in anything but circles today, so the delay doesn’t present an issue. This is the music of yesternow.

Very programmatic, AAI allows Mouse on Mars to fully flesh out their ever implicit techno-humanist sonic philosophy, a certain anarcho-progressivism with a tech-utopian bent. The record serves as a magnifying glass to their career-long preoccupations.

There’s a cohesion and a vigour to Tick Tick Tick that may make it Mallinder’s finest and most enjoyable record in at least ten years (take a bow Hey Rube’s criminally slept on Can You Hear Me Mutha recorded with Fila Brazillia’s Steve Cobby in 2012).

Astroworld is no Rodeo or Birds In The Trap Singing McKnight, but it’s a beautiful creation of sonically striking sounds.

An album that is constantly surprising, occasionally unsettling, frequently beautiful and always mysterious.

All in all, there's enough to see and hear to make this one museum worth queuing up for.

Tender and defiant, it pays respect to its history while resolutely facing the future.

New History Warfare 2 is superfine, breathtaking, at once unnervingly exploratory and highly accessible, a record which leaves you grasping in vain for adequate reference points and peer comparisons.

It’s the product of a chronic overthinker refining his teeming thoughts into crystalline song, forming an album that doesn't shy away from the gravitas of grand gestures, and, more importantly, the emptiness that follows when they prove to be futile.

A physical and spiritual journey unravels in the 37 minutes of the record.

There are moments when the repetitive nature of some of the tracks does wear on you a little bit. ... But these are mere moments of filler on PL, an album which cements the reason why Paranoid London’s tunes appeal to a scene looking for a sound that’s rugged, dark, and illicit. And in that regard, PL has it in spades.

What is also quite impressive about this album is that amidst the dominant beats and densely textured arrangements, Georgia’s presence and her words are never shrouded. Furthermore, her openness and vulnerability throughout is immensely commanding and as you go through the tracklist, you become increasingly curious to hear where she’s at.

Fashion Week is the most vibrant and least menacing collection of tracks Death Grips have released.

Oneida prove once again that they can change course anytime they want, and the journey will remain exciting.

Wild Pendulum soars with the sounds of a band comfortable in their own skin, free of past pressures and ready to celebrate the present in magnificent style.

Coracle is a perfect soundtrack to the hazy, misty-morninged Indian summer we're enjoying. Long may it continue.

Every expansion is followed by certain randomisation of energy; some may object that album's sound is overcrowded, bringing together seemingly incompatible stylistic patterns. Too many new ideas that need to be quickly processed are restlessly thrown, but never scattered, in raw fluxus.

Fortunately, It Is What It Is takes the listener’s needs into consideration by counteracting giddy one-liners heightened by energetic accompaniments with introspective ruminations coupled woven into sultry arrangements. In adjusting to the shifting sonic plains, the listener is presented with a gloriously rewarding stretch of tonal stability in the record’s third act.

The whole album is a cabinet of curiosities to discover and decipher.

This makes for what might be the most polished album in the Neubauten canon, though one band’s polish is another’s poison. There are still interjections of metal perc here (played by N U Unruh) or electric drill (played by Rudolph Moser) there, and if it’s a less dangerous record than some of its predecessors, that’s mainly in the health and safety sense.

>>> might cast an eye on the same mood-inspiration material of 70s avant rock and 80s chilled post-punk, but this album is no trite, bland replication.

There's nothing fetishistic, voyeuristic, or pathetically ambiguous here, more an outpouring of disgust that we seem to be in similarly horrendous times again. There are moments of beauty here too, of course, for that contrast has always been a hallmark of Jamie Stewart's songwriting, and what makes Xiu Xiu bleed where others merely pose.

There are a lot of different elements in the mix here – prog, reggae, folk, loungecore, even a little disco – and perhaps some listeners may initially feel a little inclined towards indigestion. However, the vision behind it all is singular and persuasive and balances its more unconventional aspects with strong harmonies and vivid lyricism.

The question of whether BRAIDS will return or not melts away in this deeply personal insight into Blue Hawaii's emotional and physical connections with one another.

The latest iteration of Homme’s continuous project has come a long way since the epic jams of the late 90s, having evolved into more refined, and fully realised series of releases, never failing to inhabit the spirit of risk and adventure.

Meat And Bones is a welcome return from a band whose absence has been keenly felt over these last few years

It’s not one for complacent listening as they are quick to pull the carpet from under you. Songs have a tendency to morph into storms. It’s turbulent, but also exhilarating. You can not help but feel rejuvenated after listening to it. With this record there’s certainly a good time to be had.

It might not represent a radical new kind of futurism, but at its yearning, technicolor best The Bones of What You Believe captures the sound of pop music working out how to use the recent past to move slowly but surely again into the future.

It’s sombre, yes, but it’s also calm and reflective – a moment to pause and consider where those of us opposed to the systems that have created our current crises go from here.

Despite the undercurrent of anger and frustration in some songs, the album is rich with the triumph of black womanhood. The overall result feels positive.

There's no centerpiece and no massive reinvention. Much of the songs place on the drone-noise-ambient continuum. But the sheer scale of Chemical Flowers feels bigger than what came before. Recorded in solitude in the Essex countryside, Chemical Flowers is charmingly ambiguous, floating around in some galaxy between labelmates Lee Gamble and Yves Tumour.

SOS is twenty-three tracks long and sonically it sprawls all over the hood. From low to high, clipped to soaring, SZA’s vocals are icily superb and her overwrought writing is vivid throughout. These progressive, ambitious melodies act like stitching to hold together the patchwork of an exceptionally diverse approach to genre and production.

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.

In its fullness and emptiness, all at once, Limbs is an album that dares the listener not to fall for it. Keeley Forsyth is a world builder and Limbs is an outstanding record.

I found hooks I hadn't noticed while playing it worming through my head days later, and there's no better testimonial to Rustie's managed moreness than that.

Feed The Rats is gloriously over the top, tipping towards the precipice of ridiculousness, yet the sheer brutality of it is what steadies the ship here.

Wooden Shjips' approach with Back To Land is akin to seduction rather than press-ganging. Smooth and lustrous throughout, this collection should see Wooden Shjips emerge from their subterranean lair to reach a deservedly wider audience.

You might not have thought to put Anderson and Kronos Quartet together, but they did think of it, and the results are, in both the philosophical and the colloquial senses, sublime.

The lofty narrative brought to life by a collection of captivating soundscapes where visions of bliss are pockmarked by blotches of the quotidian. It rarely dips into the relentless optimism of utopian discourse but that makes this project all the more compelling; there's trouble in paradise but Efdemin's got it covered.

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.

While sonically the music does not possess the 'hard' edge of neighbouring Tuareg rock groups, there is a great fluidity in which the desert groove unfolds over spiralling guitar riffs and propulsive rhythms.

So in short Welcome to Mikrosector 50 is rather excellent, with the only real dud on the album being the slightly tedious 70s porno-funk of 'Quadraskank Interlude'.

Playing like a combination of its two predecessors that vividly incorporates the production expertise Martyn has accumulated over his decade-long career, The Air Between Words may be short on surprises, but it is rich in finesse and detail.

[The title track is] a challenging conclusion to a beautifully crafted, exploratory piece of work.

CAPRISONGS is light on its feet and more accessible than her tricksier electronic work but, whether she's delivering dancehall, hip-house, afrobeat or drill, almost all of these are songs which could only have twigs' name on them – take the glitchy, snatched vocals on 'ride the dragon' or the elegiac harp at the end of 'lightbeamers', mixed among the sub-bass and the hi-hats. CAPRISONGS is a testament to twigs' voice.

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.

‘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.

From start to finish, this album feels like an exposed wound, freshly – you might almost say studiously – picked and mastered to tape. It is an album of baroque intensity and gothic flamboyance played out like one long cathartic scream. Like an onion, it offers up layer after layer to slowly unpeel, each one a potential incitement to the very bitterest tears.

Indeed, on both of Lost Time's pieces, Fox and Millions make good use of non-drum instruments to further their percussive investigations. And although the steadiness of 'Post Encounter Effect' threatens to make it a little tougher to sit through than the more immediate, thrilling 'Telegy/Time Lapse', its implication--a renewal of our relationship with time, wherein we find agency--arguably renders it more satisfying.

Moreso than 2011's Tomorrow's World, The Violet Flame is an accessible blessing for longtime fans and curious newcomers alike.

The world has caught up to Lanza, but in staying true to her appeal as she explores new sides of herself, she’s sounding as fresh as ever.

This record is full of deft brass lines, clever little melodies and memorable refrains. Because at the root of everything For Those I Love writes great pop songs.

This apparently punkish slam out, is their finest to date. For it seems to capture the very essence of Islington Mill which, coincidently, is situated in the darkest corner of Salford.

The Something Rain is the sound of a band entirely reinvigorated, like a new band even, bursting with dreamy, soulful, intelligent songs, though you won't be surprised to learn everything is executed in the most understated way.

For longstanding Mega Bog fans, Life, and Another immediately stands out as one of Birgy’s finest records from start to finish. There’s a maturation to the stylistic choices and general trajectory of the instrumentation.

As these final notes trail off, Leaving None But Small Birds instills a trembling sigh, which resonates long after the last notes die.

Although a bit more polished sounding than past endeavours, Le Bon is blessed enough with both sound melodic sense and a strain of Welsh peculiarity that lends Mug Museum a singular sound.

Birthmarks is a deft exploration of selfhood and becoming, and a marked step-up from an artist whose trajectory has promised a release that could stop you in your tracks.

This is an album that sounds massive, pompous, threatening, druggy, psychically hollow, a mirror turned against the daily noise... and is all the better for it.

While Queendom isn't the most impactful musical project of the year, it is definitely enjoyable - a light song sequence that follows the classical traits of the 90s and 00s western pop, when celebrating yourself and talking about mellow love through R&B-pop compositions (like 'Hello, Sunset') were part of the playbook. And it is full of simple, catchy and relatable lyrics with well-thought-out hooks.