With their second album’s more deliberate pace and new focus on Beth Cosentino’s voice, Best Coast have taken a confident step forward without even seeming to try.

Electric Guest’s debut LP is a 10-song line dance that’s contagious and kinetic, all connected by the striking boy genius Asa Taccone. It both moves you and moves with you.

The long wait is over, and the celestial debut from Oxford five-piece Fixers delivers in spades.

On his last album, Richard Hawley was in the gutter. Now he’s gone to the heavens. With one hell of a bang.

A concept album based on a city in the dystopian future predicted by the comic Judge Dredd, full of 8-bit…ish synthesizers with a tinge of subtle orchestration that combine to make a weirdly addictive, near-compulsory listen.

Seemingly far-fetched on paper, this collaboration between hazy US psych-noise types Sun Araw and M. Geddes Gengras and legendary reggae harmonisers The Congos proves a hypnotic, often beautiful triumph that, amongst its other strengths, reboots roots reggae for the 21st century.

The main feeling conveyed by this record is one of sheer, unbridled excitement of re-discovery – a renewed appreciation of the music you grew up with, an appreciation that is so much deeper now your hair starts growing in funny places and you don’t qualify for a student train ticket any longer. Essential, empowering, nostalgia-free escapism.

Raw emotions colour much of the Minneapolis quartet’s stellar debut record, giving voice to an anguish as well as the resolve to move forward musically and personally.

This is not an album that screams for our attention, but it deserves it all the same. Adventures In Your Own Backyard is ambitious without feeling overblown, intimate without falling to sentimentality and subtly, delicately compelling.