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In the reunion episode, which followed straight after the final airing on BBC One, Kush talked about seeing a counsellor to “help process my emotions and it’s really, really helped”, adding: “The one thing the race did teach is that it’s ok to ask for help.”

MEXICAN INSTITUTE OF SOUND & MERIDIAN BROTHERS

Ruido Tovar (Ansonia)

Five seconds of the first song here will tell you if you’ll love this or not. Do you like cumbia? Do you like lo-fi cumbia with keyboards that sound like they’ve been dropped in a fishtank then left out to dry? Do you like sunshine? Ruido Tovar brings the guitar of prime Meridian Brother Eblis Álvarez to the instrument junkshop of Mexican Institute dude Camilo Lara, and while there is clearly much dicking around, there is also tons of wonky, danceable fun.

Choice cut is the insanely wriggly single El Campeon, where an almost indiepop keyboard shimmer rubs up against itchy guitar taps and muppet-like backing vocals. Beck turns up on two songs, bababa-ing on the Loser-referencing Cumbia Beckiana and providing wide-eyed vocal sleaze on party strutter Ritmo Babilonia. Concorde sitting next to Danzen 8Bits kind of sums it up: Ruido Tovar is flashy, trashy, cheap and dusty, creaky knees on the dancefloor.

HAMMOCK

The Second Coming Was A Moonrise (Hammock Music)

Though resonant with the shoegaze sounds of Slowdive and LSD And The Search For God’s respective self-titled albums, and boasting features from the Flaming Lips, The Second Coming Was A Moonrise stands completely in its own realm. The first album to be released on their own label, it marks Nashville two-piece Hammock’s greatest venture to date.

Pretentiously titled? By no means – the album is sufficiently large and monumental to justify it. Hammock go beyond creating mere soundscapes, offering what feels like a real landscape to lose yourself within. Distorted droning dissolves into echoes and silences, inviting the listener on a meditative, trance-like journey.

The Second Coming… doesn’t demand your attention but takes a hold of it as you subconsciously slip into the recesses of its reverbed chords. It’s explorative, intimate, and expansive all at once, with the closer All The Pain You Can’t Explain climactically and cinematically encapsulating all the emotional intensity that the album at large subtly sustains.

words MENNA WILSON

The Second Coming Was a Moonrise by Hammock

Michael Smith is a creative from northern England who since the 2000s has made his bones in southern England, and drilled into its geography in the process. Until Strangers On The Shore, this meant London, with a previous book (The Giro Playboy) and his part of a music-and-spoken-word album with Andrew Weatherall hovering round a notion of a pre-gentrified Shoreditch, and what was lost when they scrubbed the grot.

Strangers… is a jagged account of moving to St Leonards-On-Sea, a small coastal Sussex town, with his partner and young son, and opening a bar for discerning drinkers – natural wines and the like. Is Smith doing much the same as his old bêtes noires did in/to Shoreditch? He doesn’t seem to dwell on this possibility. The bar holds its own against the various demons which face every hospitality venue in 2020s Britain, until one proves the last financial straw; this is the ending of the book, more or less, but it’s a perversely happy one.

Amidst this struggle to fulfil a modest fantasy, Smith finds time to think, read heavy literature (Greek philosophy, Gurdjieff, Crowley) and parlay it all into this state-of-the-nation-but-mainly-myself address. “I know no-one reads novels any more, if a novel is even what this is,” he says of Strangers…, which really isn’t a novel. Its structure of short chapters add up to something more like a collection of fancy-free lifestyle columns reminiscent of the halcyon days of editorial freedom, large budgets and no culture of being intentionally aggravating for clicks.

Smith is less convincing as a political commentator, which is a relatively minor element of Strangers… but manifests as sort of sub-Marina Hyde summaries of long-settled events whose necessity eludes me. In the main, though, his ellipsis-heavy fulminations sparkle, and induced in me empathy for a life largely unlike my own.

And as the friends travel up and down the road, and in and out of its bars and restaurants, they also move through a minefield of pressures and politics – of race, class, sex, age, economy – and attempt to navigate the precarious, prickly state of the modern world.

ED O’BRIEN

Blue Morpho (Transgressive)

Radiohead may be renowned for their inscrutability, but the symbolism of the title of guitarist Ed O’Brien’s new solo album is blindingly obvious. Named after a dazzlingly brightly coloured butterfly, the record is the result of a lengthy and complex gestation process, signifies personal metamorphosis and rebirth, and marks an emergence from the shadow of bandmates Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood.

The opening pair of songs in particular betray O’Brien’s day job: Incantations’ narrative of desired escape and emotional numbness circling and building steadily from humble acoustic beginnings to high drama and wordless wails, and the elegantly immersive title track infused with birdsong and elevated by Estonian composer Tõnu Kõrvits’ majestic string arrangements.

Elsewhere, outlier Teachers cuts loose with funk and guitar solo, and Solfeggio and Thin Places deliver suffocating atmospherics, before Obrigado’s sunshiny Latin vibe clouds over as it coagulates to reflective prog pace.

words BEN WOOLHEAD