February: 18 albums you need to hear this month

Aquilo 'Silhouettes' (Island Records)

Lancaster duo Ben Fletcher and Tom Higham create spellbinding and atmospheric pop that’s perfect for wintry church concerts. Like a warm embrace on an icy morning, the pair’s captivating harmonies come together effortlessly on debut album ‘Silhouette’. With a cinematic sound not unlike Hurts, ‘Almost Over’, ‘I Gave It All’ and ‘All I Ever Wanted’ are intimate tear-jerkers. ‘Human’ is a SOHN-produced highlight, boasting almost-apocalyptic production, while ‘Sorry’ is re-imagined by Iceland’s Ólafur Arnalds. ‘You Won’t Know Where You Stand’ and ‘Never Seen You Get So Low’ are just as powerful, each employing meaningful lyrics and faultless falsettos to tell stories. Ben Jolley

8/10

Calibre 'Grow' (The Nothing Special)

Northern Ireland’s Calibre is a technically astonishing producer, but he’s felt a bit constrained by d’n’b sometimes – especially when we knew what he was capable of at other tempos thanks to his Deep Medi 12”s in 2009 and 2010. So when these four slabs of vinyl from Craig Richards’ label with plain black labels, classy artwork and no information arrived with no warning, we were thrilled. The sounds here float between 2-step, jazz, techno, electro, Burial-ish ambience and – in ‘Over the Top’ – utterly perfect deep dubstep rollage, and at these slower tempos, Calibre’s sounds are able to breathe and evolve in throughly new ways. This album is a proper realisation of potential, and may end up achieving classic status. Joe Muggs

9/10

Matthew Dear 'DJ-Kicks' (Studio K7)

With electronic producers putting more emphasis on classical ambience than ever before, it’s no surprise that Mathew Dear (aka Audion) opts for a similar leafy path on his DJ-Kicks mix by opening with Nils Frahm’s ‘Ode’. But from there on in, the music returns to Dear’s signature synthetic robo-vocoder throb, with the sublime ‘Wrong With Us’ providing a killer early exclusive, before changing gears into hypno-bleep fairly fluidly. Similarly meditative house music moments from Italojohnson and Vin Sol also bring the heat in the first hour, while for the final furlong, he opts for two peak-time Audion exclusives and brings the mix to a close with DJ Khalab & Baba Sissoko’s ‘Kumu’. Ralph Moore

8/10