When does the avant-garde become folk? Both of the participants in this album have certainly been on the very cutting edge of sound-making, on multiple occasions. Conrad Schnitzler was a student of radical artist Joseph Beuys and leading light in the utopian thinking and radical soundmaking of 1970s West Germany as a member of Tangerine Dream and Kluster.

It’s been a hell of a four years for Glass Animals since their last album How to Be a Human Being, from a well-deserved Mercury nomination to drummer Joe Seaward requiring neurosurgery after a near-fatal bicycle accident. But while Human Being was leap forward in writing and production, new release Dreamland is a more subtle development. This is music designed to float on a sunlit pool to, though given lockdown restrictions, you may need to get creative with an air bed and your home lighting.

Queen, performances and production design drive this campest, funniest and sexiest of the post-Star Wars space boom. Flash Gordon is a film about a classic American comic-strip hero made by a cynical English director, Mike Hodges, and dreamy Italian producer, Dino De Laurentiis.

Like Fantastic Negrito’s previous, Grammy-winning albums, Last Days of Oakland and Please Don’t be Dead, Have You Lost Your Mind Yet? holds up a critical mirror to life in the USA in the same way that What’s Goin’ On, Sign of the Times and There’s a Riot Goin’ On did in previous periods of soci

A couple of years ago a vinyl white label appeared of a track called “Crumbling Down”. It was a breath of fresh air. Warmly crafted Afro-centric percussion, pared back but persuasive, it dragged the ears in, emanating a heads-down beachside vibe.

Alanis Morissette was relieved when fame’s comet swiftly fell to more manageable levels, having crashed into her full-force 25 years ago, when she was just 21. Selling 33 million copies of Jagged Little Pill means, though, that she remains on many people’s minds.

Be careful what you wish for. Turns out the dream that most bands yearn for isn't all it's cracked up to be. Fontaines DC's debut album, Dogrel went large (and won a Mercury Prize nomination and BBC 6 Music's Album of the Year). They toured like crazy and nearly imploded. But, just a year later, they're back. And this time it's personal. The title song perhaps explains the progression "that was the year of the sneer now the real thing's here".

RKO’s Dance, Girl, Dance was remarkable as a vehicle for two emerging stars, Maureen O’Hara and Lucille Ball, that stealthily radicalised its backstage setting and tried to slap moviegoers out of their comfort zone – probably the reason it failed commercially on release in August 1940.

Made of Rain is the Psychedelic Furs’ seventh album since their 1980, self-titled debut and, while the band has shed a few original members since then, brothers Richard and Tim Butler are still front and centre of this post-punk colossus. After a break that lasted most of the 90s, the Furs have been touring again since the turn of the century, but it is only now that they have inevitably tired of playing the part of living juke boxes, knocking out the hits from their glam-tinged purple patch.

Max Richter is the million-selling star of post-Minimalism, the composer of moody symphonies of a stillness that suggests otherworldly bliss and inner peace. The boundary between Richter and New Age isn’t always clear, not least in the work he makes outside his justly celebrated film soundtracks, where drama demands a greater variety of tones, textures, paces and rhythms.