Nicolas Jaar — Space Is Only Noise

I can’t believe no-one made the obvious connection between this Chilean boy-wonder and the less-fashionable Gotan Project. Both acts combine slinky, seductive beats and snippets of foreign-language dialogue to make not-quite dance music.

You definitely won’t be tangoing to Jaar’s spacious, self-contained compositions. They’re witty and full of energy, but it’s a somewhat listless, intermittent energy, like that of a dragonfly.

When he isn’t sampling obscure French films and jazzy electric pianos, Jaar drapes the songs in his gently treated vocals; the overall effect is of weightlessness. Space Is Only Noise is a powerful debut that bodes well for the future of minimal, off-dancefloor techno.

Shabazz Palaces — Black Up

With a voice not dissimilar in texture to that of Gonjasufi, and a hyper-literate take on rapping not heard since DOOM teamed up with Madlib, Ishmael Butler’s Shabazz Palaces travelled to oceans never imagined, let alone charted.

The beats were bewildering; a mashup of the Brainfeeder crowd at their most stoned, and something more worldly—credit multi-instrumentalist Tendai Maraire for that part of the fun. Black Up had fragmentary moments that reminded you of an époque, a scene, a smoky club, but they all combined to make up a tapestry that perplexed at every other moment. Butler’s arcane references to philosophy, religion and more had me reaching for my bookshelf only to find the rug pulled out from under me as the mood of the music took another about-turn.

Real Estate — Days

A languid, end-of-the-summer release from these industrious New Jerseyites, Days doesn’t exactly break new ground but captures a particularly nostalgic version of youth in a startlingly mature and measured way. From the cooing vocals of Martin Courtney, which conjure visions of a more lucid Ian Brown, to the perennially jangling guitars, which look back to early R.E.M., here is an album which takes pleasure in simplicity. Never outstaying its welcome, each song uses maximum economy to summon striking images, rather like Fleet Foxes did with the bucolic on their debut.

Gimme more: “Easy”

PJ Harvey — Let England Shake

A lot’s been written about how appropriate it was for Polly Jean Harvey to dig up memories of the bloodiest war of them all for an academic contemplation on strife and suffering in the same year as so many military breakthroughs. The Arab Spring set in motion the construction of wholesale revolution; Bin Laden was executed under the noses of his tacit condoners; and Obama brought the troops home from Iraq. And soundtracking it all was a timely reminder of the heavy price we pay for liberty and democracy, with Harvey’s sweetest tones evoking the most horrible scenes.

Against this studied backdrop, it was also a joy to report that Let England Shake was a brutally effective set of compositions. With pattering drums, muted piano chords, and the occasional brass fanfare, the album is atmospheric without being ambient; much of the focus is given over to those powerful words, with the music being sympathetic in that most British way—rather like the band playing on as the Titanic sank.

Girls — Father, Son, Holy Ghost

Back in 2009, James Murphy said he was going to help the Minnesotan indie rockers Hockey Night in a classic power-pop endeavour. When it came to fruition, Free Energy, as it was known, was somehow less than the sum of its parts. Not so of Girls, whose second album takes familiar tropes (heartbreak, whirring Hammond organ, classic rock, flute solos) and uses them to conjure up something that might be a bit of a masterpiece.

The eleven tracks on Father, Son, Holy Ghost span quite a distance, and evoke memories of a dozen different bands you’ve definitely heard before and a hundred melodies you feel like you’ve heard before. There’s a pocket-Black Sabbath lurking in “Die”, and a late-period Led Zeppelin slant to the centrepiece “Vomit”. And all these sweet chord changes and vocal harmonies are assembled and crafted so lovingly, and caressed beautifully in the production booth, that you feel like you’re hearing a more canonical version of LCD Soundsystem—the best 60s and 70s cover band, albeit one which writes its own stuff which then sounds instantly familiar.

Melodies and emotions you’ve known your whole life: what’s not to love?

The Weeknd — House of Balloons

In a year when Jamie XX’s forlorn brand of sensuality cropped up here, there and everywhere, and when some of the most high-profile releases were mixtapes made by relative nobodies, no-one combined the vibe with the vim better than the dehumanised Abel Tesfaye, going by the stage name of The Weeknd.

With clapped-out drum machines underscoring delicately overdriven electric guitar and drenched synths, House of Balloons was about being overcome with emotion but masking it with hollowness and vacuity. Hence the sweary bits and the narcotic bits which were interwoven into Tesfaye’s buttery R&B croon.

Panda Bear — Tomboy

In which Noah Lennox redefines the game for aspiring chillwavers. After the filtered history lesson of Person Pitch, Tomboy is instantly more organic and guitar-driven, even if those six strings are mutated beyond instant recognition. Lennox’s gloriously transcendental vocal arrangements remain, set against arrangements that are expansive and unhurried, but inexplicably more concise than their predecessors.

Here’s an artist who’s still “gazing in wonder at the sheer splendour and excitement of being alive”, as I put it at the time of the album’s release.

Wild Beasts — Smother

You should know how much I loved this album from things like this, this and this. Explorations of ambient electronic music (think Oneohtrix Point Never, Emeralds) and the non-superficial evocation of the pastoral (Talk Talk, Kate Bush), packaged into what is nominally termed art rock. Smother demonstrates that people who don’t like guitar-based music can make better guitar-based music than 90% of mankind.

Oneohtrix Point Never — Replica

As great as you would expect of an album made of samples from 1980s commercials ripped off VHS compilations. The defining musique concrète of our generation, imbued with emotion and snatches of humour.

Until now, Daniel Lopatin has never sounded simultaneously focused and rigorous. On Replica, the familiar techniques are refined and perfected, turning the base and meaningless into high art. For the best evidence of how much fun serious artistry can be, listen to “Nassau”, with its gloop of vocal loops which forms a slurping breakbeat reminiscent of Radiohead’s “The Gloaming”, but with more personality. Elsewhere, as on “Sleep Dealer”, Lopatin uses more obviously gorgeous samples to craft something multifaceted and serene. The progression from his previous LP, Returnal, is so apparent you don’t want to look down for fear of falling.

James Blake — James Blake

His numerous EPs and 12” singles stretch the gamut from tortured torch songs to chopped-up dubstep, but Blake’s debut LP was an exercise in restraint. There are sporadic moments of hysteria, like the bruxist breakdown on “I Never Learnt To Share” and the out-there a cappella of “Lindisfarne I”, but this is a predominantly solid release. So often, vibrant jazz piano and scholarly chords on a Prophet 08 underpin tasteful experimentation, which made Blake the target of some unfair criticism (“Dance music for bedwetters” was the most damning). But look past the hype and Blake’s own reality-distortion field, and there’s gold to be had.

Blake’s a young man unafraid of reinventing soul in his own 3AM-club image, and the weirder the music gets, the more the underlying churchly vibe shines through.

Cut Copy — Zonoscope

Basically devoid of higher meaning, this recalls New Order at their least po-faced moments. The rhythms bounce and the synths burble; tropical percussion plants you on the dance-floor; Dan Whitford’s vacuous exhortations send you into the stratosphere. Occasionally, something like the glammy chillwave of In Ghost Colours crops up—the chiming guitars on “This Is All We’ve Got”, the relentless stomp of “Where I’m Going”—but the predominant mood is like that of a fitness video.

For the final song, the band whip up a Balearic banger which, six minutes in, blisses out all the way to daybreak, riding the same loping beat and sequencer pattern for a further nine minutes.