The duo’s knack for high five-worthy boasts and massive one-liners remains undiluted. However, RTJ3 truly excels in some of its darkest moments.

Plowing Into the Field of Love was a champagne swilling, country honky-tonk left turn; and now comes Beyondless, a record altogether more iconic sounding, but no less strange. ... Iceage continue to be one of the most exciting bands in music.

She can’t do any wrong at the minute; this is timeless songwriting, and Tigers Blood is a worthy successor to Saint Cloud.

You're hearing a songwriter who seems to know exactly what she wants to make, and has all the tools to do that. A glorious, glorious album.

Singularity it feels like he’s levelled up the melding of two worlds: ambient and techno. Hopkins’ signature deep tissue massage bass is stitched together throughout, with unreal moments of musical beauty making Singularity a simply stunning album of emotional highs and lows.

It’s sentimental, it’s oddball and it’s beautiful. In other words, it’s Grandaddy at their finest.

While this album could be characterised as a return to 'normality' for Dirty Projectors, such a label has no bearing on a group this relentlessly imaginative; a creative rebirth would be more accurate.

This is the band's darkest material yet. Opener, The Supremacy of Pure Artistic Feeling is an instant statement of the band's simultaneous deviousness and gorgeousness, which is a feeling that never really lets up over its 40 minutes until the seemingly krautrock-influenced The Right Kind of Adult. Come join the family.

Memories Are Now is a gorgeously delivered elegy to heartbreak and loss; powerful, perfectly executed songs to bring comfort and strength to the weary, broken and scorned.

Wall of Eyes is a kaleidoscopic, mind-altering pronouncement: The Smile are not a band of their component parts, not echoes of their previous ventures. They are something exciting, ambitious, and genuinely brilliant; a sentiment delivered so resoundingly by their work here that it will leave your ears ringing.

Love What Survives offers a scattergun approach to ideas, sounds and voices, and it could be their greatest record yet. With a looser grip, Mount Kimbie dip and dive through myriad musical worlds.

The musicality of It’s Real is deliciously idiosyncratic, yet refreshing and musically progressive.

Beautiful Thing, though, is more of a straightforward float through space, with a starry, galactic feel to the album.

More candid but just as magical, City Music is another magnificent record from Morby.

An album that functions seamlessly as a listen-in-one-sitting affair, with enough memorable stand-alone moments to keep the club contingent happy, Bicep's debut is a clear front-runner for best house record of the year.

A beautiful record; you just wish the vocabulary existed to do it justice.

Bazan’s wit and compassion shine throughout a dark voyage such as this; as one witness to a brutal suicide turns to black humour, while another, in contrast, valiantly tries to retain their emotional openness in a job that often requires distance.

Atomic picks up where the krauty electronic wash that coloured Rave Tapes left off, and sees the band brandishing some of their most compelling work to date.

The queen of Dollywood has more than earned her place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with this stupidly fun and over-the-top love letter to the genre.

While it's a million miles from the techno of Holden’s earlier career, its rhythms and hooks are infectious. The Animal Spirits is, put frankly, one of the most complex, immersive and impressive albums of the year.

Not only are Ty Segall fans likely to be pressing this on people for the next few months, it also might be just about the best album he’s put his own name to.

It all speaks of erudition, repetition used and abused in a dizzy concatenation. 25 25 is music as heartbeat (and screw the arrhythmia). Essential.

Heavy Heavy is rarely an easy listen, but it's never less than engrossing.

Vagabon is a record both stripped back yet electronically rich, genre disparate, but ultimately inclusive. A rewarding listen, it's an achievement beyond comprehension.

For his fifth album using the How to Dress Well moniker as an intravenous exploration of the hold that music has over our fragile human hearts, Krell has perfected his process.

I Am Easy to Find is littered with these ambitious flourishes, all of which add up to make a much broader and more pointed statement of offbeat intent.

This is still the band we fell in love with over a decade ago: confessional, honest, enthralling. It's just that this time out they're sleeker and sharper than before.

Meek’s vocals have always been quality, but on this release he has truly reached another level. The soft breathiness is used to the greatest emotive evocation yet, and the controlled manner in which his voice breaks cleanly into the following note in a way inimitable to few others than teenagers (certainly with less class than Meek) is impressive to the point of awe.