The title is in keeping with those of previous portentously handled albums from the Montréal art-rockers. There was their breakthrough 2007 set The Besnard Lakes Are The Dark Horse and 2010’s The Besnard Lakes Are The Roaring Night. The latter’s cover was similar to that of ...The Great Thunderstorm Warnings – a murky painting of a glowering sky hanging over a hostile milieu.

South London all-female post punkers, Goat Girl caused a bit of a splash with their self-titled debut album and early, belligerent tunes like “Scum” back in 2018. Now, however, is time for its follow-up and, unfortunately On All Fours is indelibly stamped with difficult second album syndrome.

When the concept album first properly took flight, in the late 1960s, before it became slave to the bloated artifice of prog-rock, it was an extension of the LSD-soaked times: “Songs aren’t big enough, man, I need a bigger canvas!” Famed albums by The Beatles, The Beach Boys, The Kinks and The Pretty Things sum up this golden period.

Their PR cannot put the band name in the header of promotional emails, as they’ll go straight to the spam bin, but Swedish punk outfit Viagra Boys have, nonetheless, become a name to contend with. It’s their wild live persona that’s put them on the map but their second album raucously – and tenderly – demonstrates they also have the range and the songs to explode into something bigger.

This breathtakingly lovely album opens with the aptly titled “Hey My Friend (We’re Here Again)”. Before the October 2020 release of ÖB and its related singles, the last record Finland’s Joensuu 1685 issued was a 12-inch on a Norwegian label which came out in 2011. This, the trio’s second album, was begun in 2008 just after the release of their eponymous first.

Dropped a month into the year’s first lockdown, Laura Marling’s seventh album landed like a soothing tonic to an odd and chaotic time. The stripped back production had an air of loneliness, yet the vocals were effervescent and soothing. The profoundly insightful lyrics of Songs For Our Daughter and Marling’s confident solitude was like a foreboding of how 2020 was to unfold.

Back in October, Fiona Apple – whose Fetch the Bolt Cutters, released in April, captured a particular early pandemic mood – was interviewed by Emily Nussbaum for The New Yorker Festival. “I think we women should be marrying our friends,” she told the journalist. “We have sexual freedom! We have dogs! We have fun! We can do whatever we want!”

It’s become something of an end-of-year list cliché to say that 2020 has been a great year for music despite being a catastrophic shitstorm when judged by any other metric you care to mention.

“Ah!” says 2020, “but clichés are clichés because they’re true,” and sits back smugly, arms folded, conveniently forgetting that this is a cliché in itself and so leading us into a whirlwind of circular reasoning. That’s just so 2020, right?

The music year draws to a close and theartsdesk on Vinyl presents its festive selection. We go easier on the cheesier at this time of year, but there are also gold nuggets in there too. Time to buy the vinyl lover in your life a little something? Here's a vibrant cross section of many, many kinds of music on plastic, running the gamut from Neil Diamond to a feminist concept album about mermaids.

Scars’s tour de force album Author! Author! has been out of sight for too long. Originally released in 1981, it first reappeared on a swiftly withdrawn CD in 2007. Apparently, there were issues about where the rights for its reissue lay. Now, it has re-emerged.