Albums

Bells in the Ruins is a collection that requires both care and consideration. While the thorns outnumber the roses, both are necessary, one cannot exist without the other.

Playing on your expectations, Z Berg paints a series of pastels and watercolours that form a new vision of how to engage with your surroundings.

If Rory Butler keeps up the sort of quality evidenced here, he’ll not be looking back on a career where anything was wasted. Go and buy it.

Dark and yet cleansing, while the skies that Cinder well sings of may be overcast, there is a light that shines through this album that warms the chill in the soul.

Samantha Crain’s most personal album to date, crafted to reflect how her life changed over the past three years, focusing not on the past but a brighter future.

Expanding contributions and embracing The Jayhawks’ broader influences, XOXO’s wide-ranging musical moods reaches out to a wider audience while never disappointing the faithful.

Sofia Talvik revisits Paws of a Bear for a stripped-back rework featuring just voice and guitar, all one take re-recordings that bring an added intimacy to the pervasive melancholia.

In many ways this could be seen as a companion piece to 13 Rivers – it should find a home amongst any music collection belonging to lovers of rich, melodic, song composition.

JJ Draper’s second EP, The Theft and The Flight is comfortingly familiar, yet fresh and innovative, underpinned throughout by Draper’s personal approach truly coming into his own.

Live Across Scotland is as near as you could get to capturing Skerryvore’s live sound and the atmosphere that goes with it.

Northumbria is truly authentic, it both connects and communicates with a brutal honesty and warrants investigation. I, for one, look forward to future music from ConChie.

An album that picks up steam and spirit moving on to better days, Suzanne Vallie’s Love Lives Where Rules Die lights the darkness that can live within our hearts.