June: 18 albums you need to hear this month

Grace Jones

'Warm Leatherette' (Deluxe Version) (Island/Universal)

Grace Jones is the gift that keeps on giving. Not only is she still delivering blistering performances at the age of 68, but her albums only seem to get more influential as time goes on. 1980’s ‘Warm Leatherette’ was the record where she broke away from disco and embraced new wave, post punk and reggae, covering the likes of Joy Division and Roxy Music, assembling the legendary Compass Point All Stars and taking on her androgynous look. It still sounds somehow classic and futuristic at the same time, and the rare and unreleased mixes and dubs are worth the price of admission.

9/10

Audion 'Alpha' (!K7)

Has it really been a decade since Audion’s ‘Mouth To Mouth’? The answer, it seems, is absolutely, and while there have been a smattering of releases since then – including seven singles in 2009 and the ‘Audion X’ retrospective in 2013 – this new album is just what the doctor ordered. ‘There Was A Button’ and ‘Napkin’ both seemingly take their cue from ‘Erotic Discourse’ before heading into malevolent Planet E territory, and the creepy robo-vocoder voices permeating ‘Gut Man Cometh’ make it a spooky delight. Trippy instrumental ‘Traanc’ is probably the most quintessential Audion track, while ‘Destroyer’ and ‘Sucker’ scream Circoloco 2016 until their production lungs run out of steam.

8/10

Marquis Hawkes 'Social Housing' (Houndstooth)

Ever since his arrival in 2012, Marquis Hawkes has made sure his house music is always pumping, prickly and served with a big dose of reverence for Chicago. Far from pastiche, though, the still rather mysterious man behind it all manages to lay down bumping beats and scintillating percussion that are off-kilter and ghetto-fried, as well as being hugely fun. His debut LP is fine proof of that: all 13 tracks are club-ready weapons that range from slamming and sleazy to swinging and acid-laced, variously shaded with influences of Derrick Carter, Dance Mania and DJ Sneak. Catnip for DJs and dancers alike, this is as visceral yet charming as house gets.

9/10

DJ Shadow 'The Mountain Will Fall' (Mass Appeal)

Genius clearly isn’t enough sometimes. This album shows that DJ Shadow’s superhuman abilities – in reassembling sounds, samples, textures and melodies into something greater than the sum of their parts – have clearly been undiminished by time. There are ebbing and flowing synths that pluck at the heartstrings, single drum hits that alone can make your synapses tingle and gorgeous hooks and atmospheres agogo. But Shadow clearly wants more: he then tweaks everything here to within an inch of its life, either with quasi-Squarepusher micro-edits, manic trap and crunk drum patterns or over-the-top production bordering on EDM. There are a few tracks (including the two straight-ahead rap tunes and haunting closer ‘Suicide Pact’) where he does actually let the groove unfold naturally, but that just makes even more frustratingly clear how much better the rest of this record could be if only Shadow would just ease off on the tinkering and fidgeting. Sometimes, it seems, more is actually less.

5/10