'Promises' the sublime collaboration between cerebral electronic artist FLOATING POINTS, questing tenor sax giant PHAROAH SANDERS and the LSO is issued on a marbled "End of the Year" edition which makes this round-up writer sorely tempted to buy it all over again.

'Illusory Walls' is the epic latest from Connecticut emo collective THE WORLD IS A BEAUTIFUL PLACE & I AM NO LONGER AFRAID TO DIE. Vocalist David Bello remains one of America's sharpest poets of precarity and, despite their now traditional between album line-up changes and lockdown-enforced remote recording, 'Illusory Walls' contains some of their most proggily technical and cathartically expansive music, particularly on the two epic closing tracks which account for half the album's runtime between them. The CD's been out for a little while now and there's a decent chance you'll have heard it on the shop stereo over the last few weeks but you can now get your hands on the indies exclusive coloured vinyl.

We've got a beautiful Dinked Edition still available of 'Tell Me What You Miss The Most', the sophomore record from Chicago-based singer-songwriter TASHA. The variety of her songwriting coheres around intimate production and a soulful, almost jazzy ease of delivery.

There's a second album of the year from prolific Arizona krautrock duo TREES SPEAK. Despite the somewhat cumbersome subtitle, 'Vertigo of Flaws: Emancipation of the Dissonance and Temperaments in Irrational Waveforms' sees them returning to the fleet-footed, fragmentary approach of their early work, blasting through 30+ tracks of psych rock exploration variously inspired by Can, Neu! and spy thriller soundtracks. Speaking of CAN, 'Live in Brighton 1975' captures an instrumental quartet line-up of the German greats on double-CD and gold triple-vinyl. Their countryman NILS FRAHM releases a new solo piano double-album 'Old Friends New Friends' compiled across 2009-2021 for his own LEITER imprint.