#5: A Sunny Day In Glasgow - Sea When Absent

A Sunny Day In Glasgow have crafted a hard-earned career in dreampop, a genre that often spellbinds critics without challenging the radio-friendly unit shifters. On Sea When Absent, they've managed to keep the dream while playing up the pop, to sparkling effect. Jen Goma contributed vocals to the last Pains of Being Pure At Heart album, and you can feel a little of their crossover indiepop appeal present here, none more so than on the incredible 'Golden Waves', a finale that remains lo-fi while defying all lo-fi sensibilities, and a song seemingly built around choruses that channels Katy Perry as much as Cocteau Twins.

#6: Ian William Craig - A Turn of Breath

Ian William Craig is primarily a painter, so it's no mean feat that he's also created one of the albums of the year. It is identifiably the music of a visual artist, one who creates in broad strokes of colour and texture. Someone described the album as sounding 'like devotional music pulled out of the wreckage of a burnt church's cellar and played at slightly the wrong speed,' and there's a truth to that. A Turn of Breath is at once ecstatic and esoteric, turning ideas over as quickly as they fold, cutting and chopping soundscapes like a seasoned turntablist DJ. A lot of music is described as 'haunting', but 'Before Meaning Comes' truly sounds as if it was previously occupied by the spirit of a more hopeful tune, channeling a devotional tone as much as it desecrates something long since past.

#7: Kate Tempest - Everybody Down

Did you see Kate Tempest at the Mercury Prize ceremony? Jon Snow was visibly besotted. He wants to know what she's doing next: a novel? Yes, of course, she's already writing a novel, based on the characters in Everybody Down. What's impressive is that none of this seems unlikely. Listening to the prodigal poet's debut album is a revelatory experience, in which all facile comparisons fall short. The Streets? Please. This is character-based storytelling on a level that hasn't been seen in music since White Light, White Heat, and even then, the blow-by-blow accounts of a generation brought up on Primark and WKDs are barely comparable. The fact is that Kate Tempest is a ridiculous talent, not just in storytelling, but in matching those narratives up to meter and rhythm. She's a rapper and a poet, and if there's a young ginger kid in Britain setting hearts alight, Ed Sheeran is well overdue to be laughed off the stage.

#8: Owen Pallett - In Conflict

In album opener 'I Am Not Afraid', Owen Pallett deliberately uses the pronoun 'ze' to avoid gendering the protagonist. While his last album, 2010's sumptuous Heartland, had dealt mainly with 'author/subject binary', Pallett stated that he 'wanted to immediately establish that these definitions within In Conflict are more fluid.' The idea prevails throughout the record, and while it is lyrically less attached to the idea of authorship, In Conflict simultaneously strikes a more personal tone than the previous record, or any of his work under the Final Fantasy moniker. The stunning 'Infernal Fantasy', a Brian Eno collaboration based on a young LSD trip that ended in near-anarchy, talks about 'hallucinating as we try to make each other come', while 'Soldiers Rock' attempts to marry the personal to the political. While there are a few more duds here than Heartland carried, Pallett remains one of the few musicians working today to whom the word 'genius' could reasonably be attributed.

#9: Adebisi Shank - This Is the Third Album of a Band Called Adebisi Shank

Math-rock vanguards Adebisi Shank split up in September this year, shortly after bequeathing this shiny parting gift to the world. If you're not familiar with the band, or indeed the bemusing concept of 'math-rock', then perhaps you'll be familiar with the concept of Having a Tremendous Amount of Fun While Constantly Wanting to Punch The Air Out of the Sheer Fucking Joy of It All. That is the power that Adebisi Shank wield, summoning it like a Power Ranger beckoning his or her Zord. Do you understand? 'Big Unit' sounds like Biffy Clyro, in a world where Biffy Clyro are amazing. 'Turnaround' sounds like Vampire Weekend, Morris dancing on acid. 'Mazel Tov' sounds like 'Sledgehammer' playing through the Labyrinth Zone on Sonic 1. And if all that sounds like the worst kind of wacky, hyperbolic, journalistic claptrap, I invite you to listen and disagree. And you can thank me later.

#10: The Hotelier - Home, Like Noplace Is There

Emo's back! Which emo? Too poppy for the emotional hardcore scene of late '80s Washington, D.C.; too polished for the early '90s of Cap'n Jazz and the rest of the Midwestern scene. I'm going to be honest: we're probably closer to Jared Leto country here. But don't let that put you off the incredible songwriting craft here. 'An Introduction to the Album' is something of an understatement, building the song's sublime melody into a full-band jam to yell along to as it climaxes. From there it's nothing but slick emo-rock brilliance, as one track segues into another and several 'woah oh oh' chants rise and fade. 'Your Deep Rest' almost jumps the shark, an impossibly dramatic song about a protagonist who 'called in sick from your funeral' and contemplates the formalities associated with such occasions altogether, bringing to mind My Chemical Romance and their equally ridiculous 'Helena' in the process. If all that sounds a little pretentious and adolescent to you, your best course is to steer clear. But if you ever held a secret guilty pleasure for Taking Back Sunday, you could be in for a treat.

#11: Broken Twin - May

'I was looking for a title that was simple, and not giving too much away, reflecting the songs,' says Majke Voss Romme on her bio. 'Also it represents a time of year that seems to fit the songs. Spring is a time when everything is changing. It’s a hopeful season.' You would be forgiven for not instantly recognising these themes in May, which sounds as glacial and heartbroken as anything released this year. While 'Sun Has Gone' offers an obvious point of reference, it's the run stretching from 'Out of Air' (note Romme's trembling vibrato delivery of 'running down my spine') towards the album's close that really shines. Nils Gröndahl adds violin to the sparse piano and vocal arrangements, and finds his finest moment on the intense melancholy of 'In Dreams', though the contribution serves only to lengthen the shadows. If there are green shoots to be found here, it's in the dawn that is imagined at the other end of May's darkness.