If you’re the type of person who can’t study in silence but can’t concentrate with lyrical music on, we’ve got the solution for you.

We rounded-up five chill instrumental albums that are essential for any study sesh.

The Life Of Clutchy Hopkins, Clutchy Hopkins

First off, if you’ve never heard of this dude before, don’t worry; many within the actual industry doubt his existence too.

Depending on who you ask or what forum you visit, Clutchy Hopkins is either a complete enigma of a man who lives in a cave in the Mojave desert, only emerging to do an occasional collaboration with MF DOOM, or rather it’s a pseudonym for a separate (or more than one) popular DJ.

What matters most is that this 2006 offering by him/her complements effective study like a vintage red.

The album itself is a palette of downtempo funk and jazz mixed in with a bevy of synths and world instruments. Each track straddles the line between hip-hop beat and elevator music, taking the best parts from each genre and leaving you with an album that is always relaxing but never boring.

Music For Airports, Brian Eno

I can’t make a list of calming non-lyrical albums without including the man who coined the term ‘ambient music’. This 1978 release by Brian Eno is probably the most suitable study music in his entire catalogue.

As the title suggests, Eno created this album with the intention of it being played in airports as a means of calming anxious passengers. 

I could say more about this album, but to me Eno himself summed it up best when speaking of the album’s creative process, “It should be as ignorable as it is interesting”.

Chinoiseries, Onra

In 2007, a French beatmaker named Arnaud Bernard (better known as Onra) went on holiday to Vietnam and brought back crates upon crates of Vietnamese and Chinese records from the 1960s.

It was with this material that he created the excellent Chinoiseries, a 32-track album that seamlessly blends Western hip-hop breaks with Chinese pop and rock. Like The Life of Clutchy Hopkins, Chinoiseries has a pretty obvious hip-hop backbone to it; most of the tracks would not be out of place as any rap artist’s backbeat, but the less familiar Eastern influence on it was what kept me coming back for repeat listens.

It’s a great album for studying while thinking fondly of your last trip abroad, or fantasising about your next one.

A Love Supreme, John Coltrane

If you’re not into jazz, go to the next entry in this list, I’m not going to try and convince you otherwise. If you are into jazz, then you already know how brilliant this record is.

Undoubtedly, Coltrane’s masterpiece is considered by many critics to be one of (if not, the) greatest jazz album of all time.

A Love Supreme is a great record for study sessions, half due to Coltrane’s beautiful mastery of the saxophone, but also for the percussion provided by his drummer, Elvin Jones. His dreamy cymbal washes and frenetic snare rolls make the perfect soundtrack to cracking open a textbook and slowly, but surely, making sense of it all.

Donuts, J Dilla

This is, by a country mile, my favourite album to listen to while studying. It’s a 31-track album, with each track going for around 1-2 mins, comprised entirely of sampled soul and funk breaks.

This isn’t some beat-tape I picked at random either: J Dilla’s credentials as a hip-hop producer are as solid as they get (his fingerprints are all over albums from A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, The Roots, and plenty of your other favourite hip-hop acts).

If I could describe Donuts with one word, it would be ‘warm’. Mandatory listening for any study session.

When he’s not writing for Uni Junkee, Luke Hickey can often be found in corners of the internet jabbering about the New York Knicks, thin-crust pizza and MF DOOM outtakes.