Spring King are at their restless best when Musa--who sometimes vomits on and just-offstage from exhaustion--sounds uncomfortable.

Patience is impressive, for sure, but The Invisible still leave us wanting to see much, much more.

Strange Little Birds is a record that’s human to its very core, revelling in flaws and failures, but never losing hope. And in that way, it’s the perfect mirror for its creators’ 22-year career.

A direct continuation of the Gaslight man’s Americana-driven Horrible Crowes side project of 2011, only imbued with more confidence.

Bass, horns, strings, organ and choir provide the backbone, and when Whitney allow themselves to kick it up a gear and really let rip, as on ‘Golden Days’ (with its cathartic “Na na na” outro) or the George Harrison-meets-The Band magnificence of ‘Dave’s Song’, they’re untouchable.

An album packed with shimmering highlights.

ever. The Kills are finally hitting their peak, but a low-key kind of peak.

Perhaps the highest compliment you could pay this EP is that if you didn't know who it was and had no preconceived notions about what it should--or shouldn't--sound like, you'd think you had stumbled across something very special indeed.

A melancholy blend of shoegaze, hardcore and alt rock overlaid with Palermo’s dark and dreamy vocals.

As on their debut, the sound is slick and polished and the songs are snappy and unpretentious, but there’s a lack of wit or invention.

Most tracks last over five minutes and the longest comes in at 12. It gives the impression that Toledo is doing what he wants and making the music he wants to hear. You can’t help but love him for it.

It’s not only the consistent songwriting clout that elevates this album from recent efforts by Grande’s teen-star peers, Demi Lovato and Selena Gomez. Even if most of it is co-written, the modish message of empowerment feels honest coming from Grande.

Cloud Nine could certainly do with a few more musical ideas, but this shouldn’t trouble Kygo unduly--after all, the same problem never held back David Guetta and Calvin Harris.

There’s surely enough here to bag him some space under Rihanna’s umbrella-ella-ella.

These People is the solo record most aligned to Ashcroft’s Verve peak, right down to employing the same string arranger and bunging on one gigantic romance anthem, ‘This is How It Feels’.

Fizzingly fun, this third mixtape sees Chance finessing but certainly not hampering, his freewheeling nature.

Seemingly existing on a higher plane, this feels like upended R&B beamed down from outer space, encapsulating everything from the smoothness of Sade to the edginess of Aaliyah.

Konnichiwa is a landmark in British street music, a record good enough to take on the world without having to compromise one inch in the process.

An album of eerie, elusive beauty.

The album was recorded in close friend Ben Kramer's house in leafy Massachusetts and is plush with piano, trumpet (from Will Miller of fellow Chicagoans Whitney) and a more mature take on their Rolling Stones obsession. The five-piece have added consideration and restraint to their usual wheezing approach.

Every so often a new band will arrive clamouring that guitar music isn’t dead, as if they’re mid-CPR. Yak have crash-landed clutching its still-beating heart, wearing an irrepressible grin.

Features Blake's richest and most emotionally resonant work yet.

It can be a taxing eardrum workout--its beefed-up guitar work (from Walker, Stu Mackenzie and Cook Craig) and jackhammer rhythms (drumming duo Michael Cavanagh and Eric Moore) barely let up. But it’s also loads of fun.

Making relevant, accessible, uncringey protest music in this day and age is such a difficult task that most artists have decided not to bother. Anohni has been brave enough to take that risk, and the most vital album of recent times is the reward.

Cohen’s obvious enthusiasm for his music humanises the man behind the headlines.

Views should be a slog. But remarkably, his signature brand of downbeat introspection remains gripping.

White Lung have somewhat softened their ragged edges and in doing so have created one of the most compelling albums of the year.

The problem is that Ferg fails to provide a coherent musical vision to go with these compelling reminiscences.

Honey suffers when its producers smooth out their rougher edges to accommodate Katy’s chart-star status.

Lemonade is strikingly varied. ... Where her huge team fails to innovate is on the album’s drab middle few cuts about acceptance and forgiveness--chief among them the horrible hoedown ‘Daddy Lessons’, which blends whooping with boring rhymes (“Daddy made me fight / It wasn't always right”). But the final four tracks see quality return, and penultimate track ‘All Night’, in particular, is one of Beyoncé’s most nuanced vocal performances to date.

He sounds similarly out of it on the dreamy-as-hell pair ‘Drunk And On A Star’ (“I’ve gone dizzy, like a ship/ When that water comes into it”) and ‘Ferris Wheel’ (“Well I lose my mind, sometimes”). By the end of this sublime record, you’ll have lost yours too.

Nothing here totally confounds the suspicion that Yancey was a brilliant producer, but merely an able rapper. Still, as a respectable cap on a great body of work, The Diary will do nicely.

Slay-Z is a blast. What sets Banks apart from her peers is her ability to bounce effortlessly between genres.

Largely flirting with conformity from a distance, Gore really comes into its own in the latter half, when Deftones open the silo doors on their buried missiles of epic melody.

They return to their roots for the addictive ’90s swing of ‘Make U Love Me’ but--frustratingly--after the sultry ‘Summer Rain’ the album quickly slips off piste. ‘Who Hurt Who’ is a wet Disney ballad, while the limp dancehall and incessant pitch-shifting of ‘Ratchet Behaviour’ grates. Third time lucky it might not be, but it’s not a million miles away.

It’s easy to simply pore over Savage’s frantic wordplay--which peaks when evaluating kebab-wrapping techniques on ‘Berlin Got Blurry’--but the music is equally brilliant.

The album’s lyric booklet is very bare, offering little explanation. Sometimes this spare approach works, sometimes not.

Metal Resistance shines brightest during tracks such as the epic, melodic ‘Amore’, which draws more heavily on J-pop. For the most part, though, its adherence to the aforementioned formula can be quite boring.

Zayn has clearly achieved his aim of making an album of sexy, credible pop-R&B.

It’s a fan-pleasing record that’s actually more Beach Boys than peak Beatles.

This album isn’t quite what we’ve come to expect from The Last Shadow Puppets, but that’s just how we like it.

Yet it all hangs inexplicably together, thanks to heavy doses of charm and wit, its ability to propel your emotions from thrilled to weepy to lovelorn in a trice--and the promise that Kiran Leonard might grow into a properly important figure in British rock.

This is certainly the kind of music punk had to be invented for. It probably won’t make it onto the Radio 1 playlist, but don’t be surprised if something from Stiff pops up on Mid Morning Matters.

Denser than any of their three albums, New Misery blends catchy solos, beefy drums and thick synth parts indebted to Spiritualized and OMD with Cullen’s voice--which remains evocative of some dreamy American high school utopia.

For all this uncertainty, the record is incredibly assured.

Packing too much tunefulness and pop sensibility to ever feel crushingly miserable, Compassion is nevertheless ripe for wallowing in.

Over the course of a 35-year career defined by excess, reinvention and the occasional brush with genius, Primal Scream have made all sorts of albums, but not one quite like this.

Over the album’s 12 tracks, Stefani doesn’t mope once--in fact, a lot of the time she sounds like she doesn’t give a s**t. ‘Where Would I Be’ and ‘Send Me A Picture’ say it with Disney dancehall, while ‘Me Without You’ is the closest she comes to balladry, singing “I don’t need you/not a little bit” over polished trip-hop.

ii is a record that unveils itself slowly, initially sounding ugly and abrasive before the melodies surge to the fore. Once you look for it, there’s beauty amidst the ugliness.

As parting statements go, Post Pop Depression is solid gold proof of his genius.

Both muted and epic, Second Love foresees a future where torch singers are forlorn replicants and a post-human’s ElectroFolk.2 port is hard-wired to its heart. You’ll believe they can 3D-print love songs now.

There are few unfamiliar messages and it’s all dense and considered, but never overwrought or explicitly angry. What really emerges is Kendrick's nuanced worldview.

If this really is Poliça’s “final paper” (as Leaneagh’s called it), then they’ve excelled themselves with the most intimate and empowering album of their career.

At 47 minutes, Long Way Home may seem lengthy for a debut, but it feels cohesive without boxing Låpsley into a limited sound.

Distance Inbetween is a cohesive, imaginative psych-rock record that grows with every listen. Welcome back, boys.

Such confident, experimental songwriting points to a rebirth for Wild Nothing, and means ‘Life Of Pause’ can be considered alongside indie records like Tame Impala’s ‘Currents’ and Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s ‘Multi-Love’.

SVIIB is a fitting eulogy for a musician and a band ever connected with both.

Any record that burrows as deep into your psyche as I Like It... should be considered essential. It’s hugely clever and wryly funny, too.

It’s equal parts witty and serious, poppy and knotty, cracking wise one minute, then demanding you sit quietly and listen carefully through some complicated soul-searching.

Overall, Painting With is a dizzying, lurid treat, almost too much to take in, craving its natural habitat. And it’ll really come alive out in the wild.

These overly earnest lines [in ‘Weathered,’ ‘My House Is Your Home,’ and ‘Surprise Yourself’] do a disservice to Garratt’s talents as a musician and producer, because the artful melodies and textures on Phase really do shine.

More an obscure self-portrait than a Picasso masterpiece, The Life Of Pablo retains its author’s status as the most interesting man in music. But he makes it seem like harder work than the effortlessness we’re used to.

I'm Up represents Thug's most accessible and immediate work to date.

This is the band’s sixth album in an 11-year career and it feels at once fresh and self-assured, bearing its painstaking complexity with a striking nonchalance.

At its most cute, on the sublime ‘Intrusive Thoughts’, it’s a gauzy roll in summer hay, but when the guitars start to scowl it quickly turns from fey to feral.

Minor quibbles aside, however, All I Need is Britain’s pop industry going head-to-head with America’s heaviest hitters, and triumphing.

It’s not quite the revelatory departure we might have hoped for, and has the rich but unfocused feel of something worked on perhaps too long with obsessive fervour, but it’s also subtle and interesting; an intriguing soundtrack to an era of change.

Forget all the baggage, this is just a band in a room, and the noise they make is thrilling.

When she strains so hard on ‘Alive’ that her voice becomes pretty ragged, it’s thrilling. If you can buy into its concept, Sia’s play-acting is very entertaining indeed.

Hymns finds a fully-in-control Okereke, still tangled in the electronics of his solo albums (“Rock’n’roll has got so old, just give me neo-soul,” he admits on ‘Into The Earth’) fusing with Russell Lissack’s spectral shoegaze guitars to steer one of the century’s most pioneering underground bands into more mature and absorbing, if murkier, waters.

For the most part, this is an album of love songs: not in the trite, wishy-washy sense of the word but as an elemental and all-consuming force.

The album may seem short at only nine tracks, but there are enough ideas crammed into Curve Of The Earth to call it one of the most well rounded records of 2016.

Rhe majority of this 46-minute album is gripping, a sickening start to the year that makes Saul’s temporary departure all the more understandable.

This time, Suede sound bolder, brave and better than they have in over 20 years.

With Daughter's second album, she's more poignantly present than ever and her suffering is an emotional exorcism we can all find strength in.

Part of what makes Leave Me Alone such a blast is the impression it gives of Hinds as a tight-knit girl gang, on and off record.

One of the few certainties we can take from this restless, relentlessly intriguing album is that David Bowie is positively allergic to the idea of heritage rock.

A dreamy debut that’ll get under your skin and into your head.

It’s refreshing that his second is so subtle.

Belying its also-ran billing, Darkest Before Dawn... is a minor masterpiece of dark, smart, modern hip-hop.

It’s a worthy follow up to last year’s excellent, sprawling fourteenth album Revelation’.

It’s nowhere near his best work--it’s clear why tracks like ‘Oatmeal’ and 'Catacombs Cow Cow Boogie’ didn’t make his albums--but Cass McCombs' cutting room floor is grimier than most, and this record is a consistently intriguing portrait of the odds and sods of a fascinating career. Listen to it, then buy his entire back catalogue.

Where all this fits in the mesh of the Prince pantheon is anyone's guess, but it's in the good part, and after nearly 40 albums that's an achievement.

While Monastic Living might say something profound about this awkward, enigmatic band, if you’re out to explore Parquet Courts for the first time, the facts are plain: you should pick any record rather than this.

Ultimately, this is tinkering around the edges of a formula rather than a bold stylistic shift--and while this makes Kannon an easy disc to recommend to newcomers, ultimately it goes nowhere SunnO))) haven’t gone before.

Few More Days To Go seldom offers easy listening or conforms to expectations--but it's easy to tell what Damon and others see in them, and you can expect to hear more from Fufanu.

Big GRRRL Small World is a decidedly broader and more mature offering than 'Lizzobangers', and, in terms of Lizzo's long-term appeal, that can only be a good thing.

Maybe it’s because the whole sex-food thing is so overdone that the 18 tracks never drag, and it’s not often you can say that about a hip hop or R’n’B album.

['Savior Breath' is] such terrific fun, you can't quite fathom how the same band could be responsible for something like 'Iron Rooster', which moseys on far too long and a little too close to Neil Young's 'Old Man' for comfort, but normal service is thankfully resumed with 'The Neverending Sigh', ensuring the record ends on a fittingly-thunderous note.

Lindberg’s first solo LP moves in mysterious, often circuitous ways, emphasising mood over melody and aesthetic over dynamic. Which is a polite way of saying that it’s something of a grower, whose charms are revealed like arcane secrets only to those with patience, persistence and a lack of proximity to heavy machinery.

If A Head Full of Dreams really is to be Coldplay’s last hurrah, then they’ve gone out with a flashbang of colour and catharsis.

The guitarist and his normally hands-on producer are facilitators, with Tzur as the star. That might upset Radiohead fans expecting a stop-gap, but shouldn’t detract from an what's a largely immersive record.

It works well as a fun stop-gap before Segall’s next solo effort, ‘Emotional Mugger’, arrives in January.

Caracal is about Disclosure maturing, moving on and showing the listener how to rave respectably. This is dance music for grown-ups.

As disarmingly brilliant Mutant can be at times, it’s still deliberately obscure.

The resulting album is a total knockout.

You just can’t shake the feeling that the whole thing is just far too safe. You can’t blame team Adele for following a formula that has so far resulted in 30 million album sales--but here’s to a little more innovation on ‘29’.

It is thrilling, weird, danceable, frequently inspired and Day-Glo to a fault.