I had gone out with friends to mark the end of university, and one by one they disappeared. With the music throbbing, I learned I could be comfortable in my own company

Between the ages of 16 and 21, the big night out wasn’t just a hobby, it was a calling. Getting together with friends, getting drunk, being blasted by music, meeting new friends in the smoking area, getting more drunk, somehow making it home eight hours later – these were things I excelled at, the precious moments where I could try to lose myself and avoid the anxiety that inevitably came with daybreak.

The escapism wasn’t just selfish fun. It felt like a necessary avoidance of reality, which for me consisted of having a mother with a terminal illness who would die when I was 19, leaving me at university to cope with my grief. Going out, dancing and chatting rubbish to friends was one way to survive.

Strange folk, lost pop, disco oddities and, um, Dido – here are the forgotten tracks that became this year’s most replayed revelations
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I grew up listening to the Mamas and the Papas’ hits but had never heard their albums before this year. I had no idea anything as creepy as Mansions lurked within their sunny oeuvre. Its sound is ominous, its mood one of stoned paranoia, its subject rich hippies sequestered in the titular luxury homes, haunted by the sensation that the flower-power dream is going wrong.

Lebanese singer-songwriter Yasmine Hamdan returns with mournful minimalism, Mohinder Kaur Bhamra’s 1982 album of Punjabi disco makes a comeback and Venezuelan-Guatemalan duo Titanic serve up ecstatic tracks
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A 40-minute suite of continuous, repetitive drumming might not sound like the most accessible music but south Asian percussionist and producer Sarathy Korwar’s latest album, There Is Beauty, There Already, turns this concept of insistent rhythm into strangely alluring work. Leading an ensemble of three drummers, Korwar develops a dense percussive language throughout the record’s 10 movements, channelling Steve Reich’s phasing motifs as well as Indian classical phrasing and anchoring each in the repetition of a continual, thrumming refrain. As the album continues, the refrain begins to emulate the hypnotic repetition of ceremonial rhythm, drawing us further into Korwar’s percussive world the longer we listen.