It’s a very hard thing, to pick just a dozen albums from a year in which I have encountered so much fantastic new music (as well as a fair selection of dull, derivative or otherwise uninspiring stuff, naming no names). The number itself is entirely arbitrary, but I feel the selection needs to be at least that concise to mean anything; having looked back through the last year’s new music I wrote down everything that definitely needed to be in my dozen, and found myself with a thirty album longlist! I managed to shed seven for a shortlist of twenty-three, of which four were 100% definite, and everything else was entirely deserving of a place.