Ultimately, this album will draw the attention of McCartney fans and of the artists involved, and will remain a curio for the rest. Yet it’s good to see rock’s ultimate ‘Elder Statesman’ reaching out to a younger generation and trusting them with his material. Not all of McCartney III Imagined works, but when it does it sounds genuinely exciting.

Sweep It Into Space is as solid a selection of songs as they’ve ever produced and broadly typifies why they are so beloved.

Framed by the presence of two vehemently liberated and reflective originators, its modernist physicality and spatially paralleled forms will continue to position Lewis and Milton as noteworthy musical institutions, and its insidious observations of contemporary traditions will forever alter those who come in direct contact with it.

There’s certainly a lot to take in on Ben Howard’s fourth album – not all the ideas work in fairness, and there’s a few too many moments which feel like half-sketched ideas. Yet Dessner makes a decent foil for him and for those who have joined Howard on his career journey to date will be more than happy to continue travelling with him.

Djourou sees him continue this trend of musical mergings, although this time it is the inclusion of vocalists that provide the main points of difference.

While a few too many tracks fall into formula, now and again a track appears which stops you in your tracks, such as Lovato’s cover of Tears For Fears‘ Mad World (using the Gary Jules/Michael Andrews template, which sounds even more effective and eerie in this context). If anything, the album ends up becoming tripped up by its own ambition.

Paradigmes is an album that, whilst recalling a concession of progenitors, has no modern-day comparison.

Iglooghost has succeeded in an enviable task: he has managed to create a signature sound while innovating and progressively adding to that sound, and Lei Line Eon is a fine showcase for this unique artistic vision.

It’s a worthy successor to Beyond Skin, and could even bag the Mercury Award which its predecessor somehow missed out on.

While Homecoming could hardly be described as a massively commercial record, it’s certainly Du Blonde’s most accessible album to date, and the short running time means that it never outstays its welcome.

G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END! might follow a certain well worn path but still sounds magnificent, especially at volume, pulling you in like a rip tide.

Displacing the emotional in favour of engagingly tenuous perspectives, this precariously magnetic album, much like the contents of Dourofs, will absolutely floor you.

On Head Of Roses Wasner still manages to deliver an album that feels both highly individual and effective in what it tries to do. It also subtly extends the sense of musical reinvention which has been ongoing since the direction-pivoting Shriek.

Taken as a whole, Deep England is a remarkable, memorable thing. Disquieting and disorientating for sure, yet offering plenty of strange, macabre pleasure.

If you take this for what it is, then you’ll have a great time, but the second you start to think about the longevity or replay value of this album, it all starts to come apart at the seams. This is a great album for the fans, but that’s essentially all it is.

Song Of Co-Aklan is unlikely to win any fresh converts to Cathal Coughlan, despite it being more commercial than a lot of his output. For those who have fallen under Coughlan’s spell though, there are plenty of new treasures to discover in a fine summation of one of music’s true maverick characters.

Overall though, this very welcome comeback from Loney Dear does feel a little too stripped back and one-paced at times, so while it’s certainly an interesting development in style, you are left wishing for a little bit more of the zip and zest of Svanängen’s earlier efforts.

To use an oft-heard cliché, Fir Wave is a life-affirming album – in the broadest possible sense. It celebrates natural phenomena that exist beyond our own life spans, to be present (we hope) long after we have departed.

It is a key work – a significant milestone – in the grand history of not only Sanders’ career, but the whole free jazz style he helped pioneer. ... This is a truly joyous album, and a purely pleasurable experience.

Anchoring the album with his own painful history and never admitting defeat, Balfe has scripted a exhilarating album that contends with unimaginable loss whilst warmly celebrating persistence.

serpent has crafted a spatially attentive album centred around representation and reverence, inclusivity and acceptance.

It’s hard not to see Playground In A Lake as the most ambitious Clark release to date, an adventurous collision of different musical worlds that also carries an important underlying environmental message. It offers a bold pointer towards the future, both in terms of Clark’s own ongoing musical journey and the broader fate of the planet.

Tune-Yards are always going to be an acquired taste for some people, and while this album mixes the accessible with the avant-garde, there will probably be people who are left cold by the restless energy and sometimes overtly meandering melodies. There are more than enough moments on Sketchy though to show that Garbus and Bremmer can strike musical gold when they want to.

After such a traumatic few years, it’s a minor miracle that Silberman is now back in The Antlers fold and sounding as good as ever. What’s more, for a band who made their name playing epically sad, often emotionally traumatic songs, Green To Gold sounds positively sunny and mellow in comparison.

Embracing the participatory rather than lurking in personal mistrust, and supplementing their formerly disconsolate narratives with unusually contented flourishes, these diverse new manifestations substantially demonstrate that Xiu Xiu still exist in a universe of their own design, but that maybe they’re ready to temporarily negotiate ours once more.

Songs From Isolation is a gorgeous collection that hits home in these bizarre times. Intense and distinctive, it’s the sound of someone finding solace in music – and that’s something we can all relate to right now.

It’s an album that’s easy to feel intimidated by at first listen, due to its sheer scale and ambition. However, after a few listens you’ll be in no doubt that Genesis Owusu is one of the most exciting names of the year.

Philips is very much the band’s driving force. Her musical persona is a collage of punk-rock heroines and sliver-screen starlets. She has the rebelliousness of Kathleen Hanna with the lusty charm of Poison Ivy.

It probably won’t be to everyone’s tastes – at times, it all becomes a bit too doomy and inaccessible, such as on Theme From Muddy Time – and newcomers to his music may be best pointed towards Your Wilderness Revisited instead. Nevertheless, this is another fine example of Doyle’s talent – and, considering he only turned 30 earlier this year, indicates a lot more to come in the years ahead.

Japan would go on to at least one better album than Quiet Life, but they would never again capture the same kind of nervous youthful energy they display here. An essential album from an essential band.

Expansive and unified in its character, Future Times is a considered album, actively concerned with the spontaneous expansion of boundaries, be they geographical or psychological.

These intense, dramatic songs are the perfect companion to these times – at long last, The Anchoress is stepping out of the shadow of her famous friends to show that she’s an almighty talent in her own right.

The upshot is a record freewheeling in scope which unfolds tastefully, never once losing sight of the forest for the trees.

Poster Girl, although far from perfect, is an encouraging sign from Larsson, indicating her adventurous spirit and perhaps paving the way for future triumphs.

In an interview once, she admitted, “I see things in my head. I dream in colour”. This posthumous addition to her near perfect catalogue confirms that statement, expertly revealing how attuned to the universe she was and how vibrantly her imagination shone in the dark.

With Carnage, Cave and Ellis have successfully balanced introspection and self reflection with the tumult and confusion of the wider world. It’s a hugely powerful statement.

At best, When You See Yourself is the finest collection Kings Of Leon have put out since their peak years, and at worst a collection of good tunes to listen to this spring and never hear again. That’s a win-win, no matter how you look at it.

Avid listeners have known all long just how funky, playful and revolutionary she’s been, a genuine musical magpie, but sat barefoot on the cover in the centre of a tenement of abstract coloured birdhouses, her eyes closed, on this record this Liver bird’s calling any stragglers back to the roost.

As Days Get Dark is a remarkable return, a new Arab Strap that updates, deepens and re-energises their sound.

The album comes to a far too sudden close with a rendition of the old Warner Brothers standard As Time Goes By, Aphek distractedly strumming her unplugged instrument as the tracks air of optimistic wartime reverie prevails. Giving a cheeky wink to those who’ve found themselves silently swept up in her thrall, she leaves everyone hoping that’s not all, folks.

This compilation, the fourth and possibly final in their Switched On series, collects some of the various EPs, compilation tracks and tour 7″s they made between 2000 and 2005, along with some deep cuts that stretch back to the Mars Audiac Quintet era and proves the critics wrong.

They inch ever closer to the boundaries of the mainstream with this simmering assortment.

Banane Bleue is a contrast of blissful pop music and highly contemplative soundscapes, juxtaposing our ideal version of living and a difficult outer reality. This record captures the essence of ‘the blue banana’, a place too vast to navigate and too complex to fully understand.

It all confirms Believer to be a suite of disaggregated, miniature sonic tapestries from a pair of young Scandinavian polymaths that delivers a welcome reminder of music’s endless capacity to surprise and delight.

In lesser hands this mélange of vocalists and styles would be an unholy mess, but with experienced mood masters Raymonde and Thomas at the tiller In Quiet Moments is holistic audio balm to soothe, hug and give hope in these ‘unprecedented times’ and beyond.

This is sensitive, heartfelt and resolute rock music that shuffles its feet while looking at the stars.

With this fun and obnoxiously reverent album, they should get the inmates rioting.

On this outing, greater rewards arrive from a more engaged, active approach to listening, one that helps ensure that nuances and small details are appreciated. It might not ultimately have quite the impact of their earlier work but it still has much to offer, showing them still capable of responding to new creative surroundings and edging forward with small refinements to their sound.

In Furneaux, a travelogue split into two durational phases, is explicitly built around archival sound recordings accrued from across the globe over a 10-year period, and emerges as a ferocious and often anarchic statement of intent from the noise composer.

Together with the slimmed down line-up, Nature Always Wins feels like the start of a new chapter for Maxïmo Park. They’ve always been better than a ‘landfill indie’ punchline, and they prove it in spades on their seventh album.

While perhaps lacking the simple yet intricate beauty of his purely instrumental work, In The Furrows of Common Place is another strong release from Ghedi, and fans of Chris Wood, Alasdair Roberts, Seth Lakeman and other modern folk luminaries will find much to enjoy in this confident and atmospheric collection of songs.

It is the penultimate songs that show some signs of invention.

It’s a clear attempt to deliver a more mature, varied work than Nothing Great About Britain, and in that it succeeds. But considering his lofty aspirations, there’s nothing here that others rappers like Dave or Akala – both blessed with greater emotional intelligence, intellectual gravitas and grasp of social and political issues – haven’t done better.

It confirms how they’ve always been a band that have explored human emotion in deep, meaningful ways but Distractions feels like something more, like the beginning of a fresh chapter in their story.

A Billion Little Lights is a good album when heard in isolation, but it pales in comparison to those albums that inspired its creation.

Open Door Policy is quite possibly the best Hold Steady album since 2008’s Stay Positive.

An album that’s up there with their best, one of their most powerful and cohesive statements to date.

Me And Ennui… is pure articulation. Just when you think that Sarah Mary Chadwick has shone a light on every one of her warts, here comes the ‘and all’.

Ultimately though, Music is a case of too much filler, too little killer, even when divorced from its controversial origins.

Undaunted by the pressures they continue to face, Virginia Wing present a disarming form of resistance to life’s troubles.

In the face of personal and public devastations, the friends have avoided inertia and constructed a garish and cathartically atonal album that unbelievably manages to avoid catastrophe.

Throwing a light on the minutiae of his fraying psyche doesn’t always make for the easiest of listens. No longer buoyed by adolescent concerns, Alec Ounsworth may not be in the happiest of states. But if you heed closely you’ll hear the sound of one man’s combing for moral redemption amidst societal and individual collapse. And that deserves applause.

Legacy+ shows two sides of the Kuti coin that, while inevitably reflecting and respecting the history of Fela, also show his restless quest for the future and what that holds carries on with subsequent generations.

Django Django’s style is well-worn by now, and a little more stylistic or structural invention wouldn’t go amiss, but Glowing In The Dark still delivers the goods with ease.

Distinguished by its wide eyed, maddeningly flamboyant mélange of ideas, these Perth psychonauts’ latest is so potent you risk getting tinnitus and/or a contact high from each monolithic twist and turn.

What keeps you coming back to Good Woman is a sense of hope and optimism that shines through – that sense that, despite the grief and pain, there’s always better times ahead. Maybe it’s exactly the sort of record we all need in these times, and it certainly contributes towards this being the best Staves album of their career to date.

This is a characteristically strong, uncharacteristically sloppy (in a good way!), album by one of the few remaining shining lights of rock music. Greatness is almost a given at this stage.

Black Country, New Road are no gods, but this inventive and likeable album should earn them a million or so disciples.

The full blast of bass and guitars from Nic Bueth and Alex Sprogis that respectively fortify tracks like The Big Curve, Decoration and Slideshow are as grotty, inexorably heavy and domineering as the world frontman Charlie Drinkwater finds himself lashing out at.

Occasionally the sparkly pop stylings and dependably profound poetic musings give the record an air of interchangeability, but this minor parlour trick merely invites an opportunity to explore the contents further at a pace comfortable to the listener.

Alive After Death is a record interesting enough to satisfy those with a taste for the transgressively predictable, as long as you don’t scrutinise it too much.

Somehow, there’s an odd clarity to be found amongst all the noise, distortion and decay. The Body might have looked to their past in finding the sound for this album, but in creating this slab of grief and anger, they’ve managed to be uncannily prescient. This is probably one of the most relevant and affecting albums of 2021.

Weezer have made one of their most catchy and insightful records to date.

It’s a conflicting record, filled with swells and dry spells, but the forecast is generally clear in all directions.

This is a good, and sometimes great album, that feels like it’s a few tracks short of being a masterpiece.

Surrounding contemporary anxieties within a collage of expertly designated snatches of melody, the record feels slight at first glance before eventually revealing its complexities to the listener, without ever suggesting notions of self-pity.

A Common Turn is a questing and provocative record that’s both remarkably dynamic and audaciously exposing.

It’s not the sort of record you look to for big surprises or revolutionary moments, but if you’re looking for an excellent pop-soul record from an artist who’s going to be around for years to come, you can’t go wrong.

Spellbinding debut album, its vivid subject matter dealing with depression, sexuality, prejudice and matters of the heart with an uplifting old-school feel complemented by celestial vocals.

Had they been performed by any other band, these regularly mawkish and sorrowful lyrics could have tipped the album over into an joyless torrent of petulant whining but the Danish rockers’ mish mash of catchy hooks and reflective self-awareness skilfully instil just the right amount of vitality so as to prevent that outcome from happening.

Travelling beyond the accepted norms of the swarm of post punk girl groups operating at the same time, this Technicolor tinged album somehow melds droning krautrock sections and psychedelic experimentalism into its jaunty street hoodlum doo-wop core.

The layered and intricate soundscapes that embody Isles are testament to the vast and diverse musical influences that Ferguson and McBriar have explored and savoured over the years. Bittersweet and introspective, yet hopeful and spellbinding.

It may have been written and recorded in double quick time, but Won’t You Take Me With You is still an impressively assured, fully realised record.

Stripped back tracks, smart beats, punchy bass, and Williamson’s dextrous barked delivery are all in place, and it seems that the band are in their dis/comfort zone.

In spite of all that’s going on, the ground that Shame manage to cover, it all hangs together brilliantly. Drunk Tank Pink is a great album, from whatever angle you look at it.

With The World Only Ends When You Die, Skyway Man has come up with a boldly visionary record that is bursting with ideas and provides unexpected twists and turns at every corner.

Greenfields is a fine reminder of just how legendary a songwriter Gibb is, and while there’s no big surprises contained within, a Volume 2 would be a very welcome thing.

Half Japanese have once again smashed it out the park, this time with a bewitching assortment of rubbery love songs and caustic noise, all centred on the subjects we truly wanna hear about: celebrities, Hollywood monsters and unrequited love (often between celebrities and Hollywood monsters!).

The sound on Welfare Jazz may be more of the same glam-phetamine trash disko bomp that made the first record so distinctive – a ramshackle wad of low-end guitars that spit and burn like chip pan fires and boisterous oft intoxicated vocals with a surplus of undulating sax – but there’s something else that’s been added to their arsenal, something that was hiding in plain sight all along. The protagonist of these songs may not be all that apologetic as he pontificates of his transgressions, but he is at least man enough to put his grubby hands up and forewarn friends and lovers that he’s a little damaged. It’s a good start.

The rock history books have not been as generous to Live Skull as to their contemporaries, but with luck this crazy melodic record will go some way to restoring them as kings and queens of the urban jungle.

Akin to falling asleep next to an electric fire whilst snow begins to fall, Camila Fuchs have created an extrasensory gift of a record, one that is affectionate, woozy and a comforting delight in these most taxing of times.

An exuberant and heartening spin of the songwriting wheel, a carefree and not overthought documentation of how creativity can be harnessed and fledgling ideas brought to realisation More importantly, it’s a valuable addition to his catalogue that should provide happiness to many.

It is not instantly recognisable as Groove Armada, but it shows how the pair have moved on from constant festival sets and gigs to managing farms in France, as Andy Cato now does. Clearly they still want to have a good time, but the stress is now on music that feels older than it does new.

We Will Always Love You is an emotional rollercoaster, and a lovingly put-together tapestry that signals The Avalanches entering the 2020s as vibrant as ever.

In all aspects has Swift built upon her work on Folklore, creating a vast soundscape of poetical stories, and it is only at the end of this album you realise that Folklore did leave you wanting. Evermore also does this, not because it doesn’t reach up to the pedestal of folklore – in contrast, it covers the more complex ground.

It’s a bold, contemporary sounding record that is also aware of its broader lineage, something encapsulated by opening track Stranger Than Fiction.

Odin’s Raven Magic captures the group reconciling their actual genius with the mountains of praise heaped upon them.

The album reaches something of a climax with On Each Of The Six Fives Of The Moon, which features thick, metallic tones encircling over bleak and unforgiving terrain. Its Deathprod-like heaviness is sustaining and compelling in equal measure and, like much of the album, there’s little option but to submit to its force and embrace the imposing mass face-on.