In his mock-poetic manual Peri-Bathos (1728), Alexander Pope opens by describing the afflictions which beset inhabitants of the lower Parnassus. The aristocracy living further up the mountain commit burglaries, and, "taking advantage of the rising ground, are perpetually throwing down rubbish, dirt, and stones upon us, never suffering us to live in peace."

If popular music is dead and done and there’s nowhere left to go, rising duo 100 gecs, from St Louis, Missouri, are here to prove there’s still deranged fun to be had cannibalising the corpse. The second album from the pair, both in their late twenties and with a background in electronic production, is a post-modern assault, garish and unapologetic, part satire (possibly), part avant-punk noisiness, and part wilfully infantile and ridiculous.

One of the greatest things a musical artist can achieve is world building. That is, creating a distinctive type of environment, language and coordinates for everything they do such that the listener is forced to come into the musical world, and to engage with it on its own terms rather than by comparison. It’s something that musicians as diverse as Prince, Kate Bush and Wu-Tang Clan achieve have achieved, likewise plenty of more underground creators too.

Ambient is everywhere now. After a quiet (lol) 2000s, when it rather disappeared into the cracks, perhaps tarred with the sense that the more cosmic sides of the Nineties rave experience were passé, beatless music steadily rose in profile through the 2010s – aided by the rise of “post-classical”, increased accustomisation to home cinema and immersive gaming soundtracks, the wellness movement.

The Velvet Underground’s music is hardly heard for 45 minutes in Todd Haynes’ film on the band. The director’s debut documentary instead sinks deep into the early Sixties New York underground culture they rose from. It is as much a loving tribute to the cinema of Jonas Mekas and Andy Warhol as the songs of Lou Reed and John Cale.

John Cale has always walked a cutting-edge. At 80, he is still making music that stretches the mind. He is accompanied on his most recent album by a number of talented and original ground-breakers from both sides of the pond – from the eccentric and pure voice of Natalie Mering (aka Weyes Blood) to the Stockhausen-flavoured explorations of Actress, the psychedelic anarchy of Animal Collective to the avant-pop sweetness of Tei Shi.

Want an antidote so forced seasonal cheer and the catchiness of Christmas pop? How about some almost entirely atonal drone, clatter and throb with titles like “Fish Death”, “Tales for Violent Days” and “Dissonance Émancipee”?

Christeene is not so much a musical entity, as a performative assault, an artist who pushes drag somewhere visceral, caustic, wilfully edgy and defiantly unpolished. The creation of New York-based, Louisiana-raised Paul Soileau, her videos and shows have thus far probably been more important than her albums, but her third raises the bar.

The journey of Ross “Hudson Mohawke” Birchard has been truly one of the most extraordinary in modern music. From teenage scratch DJ champion and happy hardcore raver in some of Glasgow’s more feral club environments, in the late Noughties he quickly moved through making rhythmically fractured hip hop.