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It's been a great year for music - and the best stuff is as diverse as ever. There have been comebacks (Orbital and Saint Etienne), epics (Swans - The Seer and Chromatics - Kill For Love), very good albums from genres I don't usually listen to, such as hip hop (Kendrick Lamar - good kid, m.A.A.d. city) and R&B (Frank Ocean - channel ORANGE and How to Dress Well - Total Loss), plenty of 80s and 90s-influenced sounds (Chromatics - Kill For Love, Wild Nothing - Nocturne, DIIV - Oshin and School of Seven Bells - Ghostory), excellent singer-songwriter albums (Sharon Van Etten - Tramp and Fiona Apple - The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do) and some truly ground-breaking electronic music (Burial - Kindred, TNGHT - TNGHT and Flying Lotus - Until the Quiet Comes).

My top 30 is perhaps more varied than in previous years. That could be due to my tastes changing or simply the quality of crossover albums. …

1. Beach House: Wishes
2. Burial: Ashtray Wasp
3. Hot Chip: Let Me Be Him
4. Underworld: Caliban's Dream
5. The Antlers: Zelda
6. Crystal Castles: Transgender
7. Burial: Loner
8. Sigur Rós: Dauðalogn
9. Burial: Kindred
10. Air: Seven Stars

I feel like it gets harder to do these every year. To really keep up with the volume of great music being released takes commitment and a real passion for discovering new sounds and artists. My aim is to hear at least fifty two records thoroughly each year. Any more than that is a bonus. 2012 was a peculiar year in the sense that I feel as though no single record truly swept me off my feet. Unlike previous years where there was a clear winner that felt life-affecting in the greatest ways possible, 2012 has been an almost clinical process of getting through the slew of new releases, amongst them multiple disappointments from long-established artists and a series of overwhelmingly surprising new releases from up and coming bands.

I've made the decision to omit Burial's Kindred only on the grounds that it was an EP and not a proper full-length. It was far and away the greatest EP I heard this year and builds on an already stunning back catalogue. …

Plenty of artists have slipped under my radar. From the time I stopped buying the NME (about 1997) to about 2007, I listened pretty much exclusively to dance music and vinyl became my thing by the turn of the millennium. I didn't buy too many albums, had no idea what Pitchfork or Drowned In Sound were and had never heard the word "hipster". So it was no shock that there was a whole world of music waiting from the point, about 5 years ago, when I took up my old listening habits again. Given the normal release cycle for artists, it was taking a few years for some bands to even register but, by 2012, I thought that surely there was nothing new to pick up on - unless it was a brand new artist, of course. How wrong I was. Enter Chromatics, Chairlift, School of Seven Bells and a few others. So, pleasant surprises has been one theme of the past 6 months.

Another has been the resurgence of established British bands. I'm talking about Orbital…