Blue Weekend is Wolf Alice’s best work yet – a confident, euphoric, blistering 40 minutes that’s guaranteed to be on many people’s ‘best of’ lists at the end of the year.

Man Made suffers from too much material, not enough editorial oversight, and not nearly enough inspired composition.

Dreamers Are Waiting is a very welcome return for a band who have been away for far too long.

This is another instalment of quietly intriguing music, ornate and intricate, but also organic and alive. It’s good to inhabit her world once again.

Even at its most introspective, All The Colours Of You is an often invigorating return from a band who, despite their veteran status, still have their collective finger on the pulse.

Blackberry Smoke are the ultimate antidote to bad vibes, and You Hear Georgia is more than just escapist fun, it’s a superb record.

Clara is a supremely accomplished record, and deserves to sit with previous career highlights like Submers and Monument Builders as a masterclass in abstract electronica.

Reprise offers a pleasant, even graceful but ultimately insubstantial retrospective of an artist who can be fascinating when he’s not overly focused on his pleasant, insubstantial brand.

This music is less underplayed than a confident expression of mid-life experience.

Numan’s consistency is also his biggest downfall. There’s simply no reason to listen to Intruder if you’ve heard any of the albums he’s released in the past decade, because it’s virtually identical to his previous works.

While there may not be anything to rival their breakout hit The Night We Met for ubiquity, much of the band’s fourth album sounds like the sort of warm hug that many people are desperately searching out for right now.

Skellig is a searching piece of work. Beautifully constructed, it is at times uncomfortably sparse and weather-beaten, but its resilient head remains unbowed at the end. As an image of humanity through and after the pandemic it comes into clear focus, providing solace for those who need it too.

Seeking New Gods is simultaneously thought provoking, questioning, elegant and unsettled – but it is fundamentally a feelgood album. We find Gruff Rhys at his most natural, his winning blend of a slight, endearing shyness balanced by extrovert, psychedelic tendencies.

Shining a searchlight on new terrains for themselves, Fly Pan Am have generously quenched our insatiable appetite for revealing non linear melodramas. Causing a staggering commotion, this sometimes inscrutable, yet eminently danceable, album is a passport to uncover alien customs and engage in orgiastic corporeal activities.

It all adds up to another fascinating entry in the ever-evolving Lambchop spectrum, all slow texture, repurposed approaches and augmented familiarity. Showtunes then, but for an alternative world where unhurried immersion and quiet advancement are key.

The Power Of Rocks is a deceptively calm affair, so feel free to roll up your jeans and wade in. Just brace yourself for how crisp and punchy you might find it initially, because it takes a while to get acclimatised. But once you are, you’ll want to dive down to its murkiest depths.

If Afrique Victime tells us anything, it’s that Mdou Moctar’s fire and passion are drawn from his homeland. The results are staggering.

Big | Brave’s music doesn’t feel in the slightest contrived. This is rock music, for want of a less reductive term, at its exhilarating and imaginative best. In Vital they have created something you can’t quite grasp or capture, yet the invitation to attempt it is all too persuasive.

Black To The Future is both musically and thematically bold and important. It is a major statement contextualising the present, aiming to better understand the past and, hopefully, providing a provocation for a better future.

Rarely straying into alien territory, the Dunedin quintet remains as restless and decorous as ever on Scatterbrain, proving that even the unsteadiest of minds can achieve greatness again and again.

Never content to hinge on traditional modalities, this surprisingly resilient and provocative collection reveals how Allen and friends triumphed against social barbarism and cosmopolitan functionality. As the title succinctly attests, there was seemingly no end to the late musician’s skill, and thankfully no end to the legacy he created for others to benefit from.

Even though it has some misfires, this album is still understatedly fun, driven by a pure zest for blues music that is impossible to shy away from.

Weller could easily be forgiven for just living off that immense back catalogue. Instead, he’s relishing that elder statesman role and striving forward. He may not be the angry young man of the past, but his fire is still burning bright.

Kennedy's eclecticism becomes its charm. [Jun 2021, p.86]

Daddy’s Home may lack the more exhilarating, guitar-shredding moments of some of Clark’s earlier work, but it’s possibly her best, most considered album to date. Six albums into her career, St Vincent is arguably becoming the defining artist of her generation.

Deploying ominous cinematic pacing and diaphanous harmonics, the transient Kaminari effectively incorporates an illustrative quality reminiscent of Cocteau Twins‘ Liz Frazer, before the Montreal musicians revert back into classic rockabilly mode and on the voyeuristic shuffle of Sarabande, they fixate on the more gonzo hallucinatory aspects of tropicalia and Turkish psych rock.

Exploring increasingly adventurous songwriting terrains and expanding their studio capabilities whilst managing to retain some of the fire that once sparked up their engines, Iceage have delivered another tour de force.

Despite these quibbles, there’s a definite sense on Life By Misadventure of a major step up from Human. It’s a conscious move to move Rag’n’Bone Man up to the level of the likes of Michael Kiwanuka and Ray LaMontagne – if he carries on at this trajectory, he’ll have a career to rival them both.