Todd Dedman

Inferno centres on the fragmentation and erosion of memory, on the concept of human performativity, and the notion of simulacra as pure distraction.

Sunn O))) rewards repeat listens as there’s so much going on under the surface. It’s majestic, euphoric, but also clearly not for everybody. But then you should never really trust the majority, anyway.

Ö will no doubt frustrate some, and delight many others. It is, after all, just a ride that doesn’t need to be taken too seriously.

Ricochet is a masterful record of restraint, realisation, and poetic maturity. Beneath the layered production there are pure earworms and killer hooks that are up there with the best of Snail Mail’s work, but the overriding themes are contrary to the aesthetic tone of both Lush and Valentine.

It’s difficult to not feel a little disappointed by how emotionally neutral much of Always With Me is. For an album about core memories, there’s little by way of raw emotion going on, instead it feels more like an adaptation of a life rather than a personal memoir.

Overall, We Are Love is a welcome return to form. Okay, they may never reach the heady heights of Between 10th and 11th again, but we should just be grateful that they still exist and are still looking to move their sound forward in ways that many of their ‘peers’ seem incapable of. It doesn’t always hit, but when it works it’s a glorious thing.

Noble and Godlike in Ruin sees Deerhoof create a mesmeric yet fundamentally angry album that’s a patchwork quilt of affirmations about cultural identity and unity.

Snapped Ankles, on their fourth album Hard Times Furious Dancing, want you to know that dance is a means of forming bonds, of creating unity and solidarity in the face of the crushing reality of the first quarter of the 21st century. It’s not a solution, but a valid response to stave off collective madness.

When Constant Noise triumphs, it absolutely soars. There is a degree of hope in the acknowledgement and awareness of the state that we’re in, and the dark euphoria that Benefits produce might not save us, but there would be far worse soundtracks to accompany our collective, manic dance into oblivion. Sleep well, all.

Songs of a Lost World might just be a masterpiece. It takes more than three weeks of constant listening to a record to make such a clickbait-laden, headline grabbing claim hold up to genuine scrutiny, but it’s as close to perfection as any of us could have hoped for.

To say that the band still have a bite to their sound might be a little unkind to a group of men who may not have most of their own teeth these days, but Rack is testament to the need to grow old disgracefully. It’s good to have them back.

angeltape highlights a band comfortable in their own aural space, while also looking to move into new sonic territories. It’s a consistently good album, and one that harks back to their previous work while also suggesting new possibilities as they move forward.

Glasgow Eyes isn’t far off being a great record, but those drops in quality aren’t just blips, they’re chasms.

The fundamental essence of Scope Neglect feels somewhat laboured in places, but some of its tracks are absolutely astonishing.

93696 is neither for the faint of heart, nor is it for those without the time to fully immerse themselves in the work as a whole. This is rapturous, though undoubtedly challenging, music from a band constantly moving into territory that few others could even imagine, let alone realise.

nature morte is a wonderful, difficult album that requires patience and indulgence. The rewards are huge, though.

Where others in the pop arena are desperate to be read as providers of sub-text and cryptic lyricism that’s contrived and amounts to little, Jepsen is the queen of unadulterated surface-level exuberance.

The eight tracks that make up Weather Alive all share a sense of wonder – at the world around us, the majesty and power of weather, and the positive aspects of fatalism – and they feel more organic than anything Orton has previously produced.

Autofiction is the third brilliant album the band have released since getting back together, yet it’s an entirely different beast to the majestic wonders of Night Thoughts and The Blue Hour.