It’s not going to change the musical horizon, as there’s absolutely nothing new here. But the oldies – the hilarious Chicken Payback, the beautiful 50s ballad I Love You, or the exuberantly wonderful One Glass of Water – are strong enough to make this both a worthy successor and a promise for the future.

I can tell that you are dubious, but I can assure you, gentle listener – these are the goods.

The White Stripes continue to surprise and entertain simultaneously.

The Woods is solid, well crafted and intensely energetic, but a magnum opus it is not.

Face the Truth is probably the most eclectic of all Malkmus’s work. There are elements of every Pavement album in amongst the tracks, with familiar noodly guitar intros, shouty, jaunty refrains and languid deadpan-rap segments.

OK, it’s a depressing mess, needlessly turning the existential dread-ometer up to 11. But hey, it’s got a nice tune and you can dance to it.

Rather than a credible follow-up, it’s another great album in its own right.

As far as the songs go, there’s not a bad apple in the bunch. And some, like Lavender and its wonderful one-note melody, or No Reason to Cry and its breezy vocals, are really terrific. But oooooh, the cheese in that sound.

It takes an album like Pretty in Black to make you realise the life affirming power of great pop music.

Rather than the nostalgic, distant wistfulness of last year’s work, Bem-vinda is much more open, and while there are complex rhythms and arrangements in abundance, none of this gets in the way of some eminently hummable tunes.

There’s so much here to enjoy, we can tolerate the occasional lyrical overreach.

One of the best rock albums of the past twenty-five years.

Barnes seems to draw from a bottomless well of creativity, and is capable of the most sublimely unexpected melodic phrasing. At the same time, he can come off as a little too intellectual for his own good.

It shows off a fantastic songwriting talent, if not conveying the live magic.

British Sea Power are not only the best band around, they’re also the best songwriters.

There's such an embarrassment of riches in Lost and Safe.

An absolute beauty of an album.

These are essentially songs of innocence and experience tinctured by world-weariness simultaneously infused with an earnest lack of guile. A brief criticism would be: a little more sound and a little less fury, please Will.

Guero is a record with lots of great ideas and some very good songs... but I can't help thinking that there's just something missing from this release.

What makes M.I.A. so good is her simplicity. Not quite electro-clash, not quite hip-hop, not quite grime, she's a world onto herself with little more than a groovebox and her voice to sustain her.

Sensitive enough to charm you, yet with songs hard enough and strong enough to keep you from getting bored, Silent Alarm is already a strong contender for debut album of the year.

Their best full length yet.

Inexplicably, predictably, Daft Punk have become the first band to produce a retro post-parody of their own work.

Wind in the Wires is a beautifully executed album that has everything: pace, panache, and clean sentiment.

If you’ve enjoyed what you’ve heard before, you won’t be disappointed – all the darkness, grime and perversion is here or implied.... But if you’re looking for variation, innovation, or thematic depth, it’s unlikely you’ll find it here.

Dignity and Shame is just another day in the world-weary lovelorn characters that Bachmann has so vividly brought to life for the past five years with his Crooked Fingers entourage.

If you have everything by the Scottish gang of five, this is good excuse to remind yourself of their genius in different circumstances. If you are new to them, then it is a fine introduction to a band whose importance and integrity over the years is unquestionable.

This is the year’s first great summer album.

Intellectual without being snotty, encyclopaedic yet accessible, it takes the seemingly stalled electro model and kick-starts it into outer space.

Outside Closer weaves an oddly distinctive set of roundelays between the Air-like poppiness and cheery melancholia of the negatives and the Massive Attack jams with The Clash in Reykjavik melancholia of winter 72, concluding with two of the most depressing songs I’ve ever heard.

This will surely be counted as one of the most remarkable, individual, and adorable albums of the year.

Those in search of classic Barlow would do far better to dig out their battered old copies of Bakesale.

This is the best album of the year so far.

Stunningly good.

Like 2003’s Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts, Before the Dawn is commendable for its almost obsessive attention to detail that has produced a collection of gorgeously layered and dense songs without ever sounding laboured.

Granted, this is no masterpiece, but it’s quite good and very often it is even compelling.

Contains some of his most memorable moments to date.

A bold, brave, and beautiful record.

The reason The Futureheads is so good is because, quite simply, the music is simply stunning.

The good news is that there is no real filler on the album, but this uniformity of quality equates to an album where every song is good, but where few are really great.

[Your] chances of finding a more assured and promising debut this year are pretty slim.

From the outset, it is clear that this album is a triumph.... An album of great beauty, potential and emotional involvement.

Unconventional harmonies and slurred vocals are an acquired taste, and some of the more out-there lyrical moments might bemuse you first time round, but give it a chance.

Not only are the songs uniformly excellent, they also show a mastery of the art of controlled dynamics, of tension and release, that most young bands ignore to pursue the catharsis of sustained intensity.

Bits of Medulla sound similar to Vespertine, but there’s a marked distinction in the means of delivery and enough change to keep things interesting.

The tracks highlighting Vik are showstoppers as usual, and his dominate wordplay only reiterates why others should drop the mic when any of DOOM’s personas enter the booth.

Although Kiss and Tell doesn’t quite match the dizzy heights of its major influences, it is without a doubt Sahara Hotnights’ finest album to date.

In Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts, M83 have created an ethereal electronic masterpiece, and one which, thankfully, doesn't sound like a relic from the Warp Records back catalogue.

There’s just so much going on throughout that you can’t stop listening.

The Heat doesn’t offer a dramatic change from its predecessor stylistically.... What it does have is more energy, better material and more focus.

Definitely mysterious, but the songs on this record are obvious when it comes to the Concretes’ influences.

This Icelandic association seems to have triggered a benign crisis in Jimmy Lavalle's composition gland and stimulated his transformation from a major key minor artist to a minor key major artist in the course of this one volume.

Ta Det Lugnt is that rare joy, a work of art that both demands and rewards your attention.

Sonic Nurse could be the best guitar rock album since, well, Murray St.

Both pared down and unengaging at the same time, this appears to be a dead end.

They write some good tunes, and they have some appropriately strident abuse for lyrics. But there’s not enough for an album.

It’s unfortunate that the familiar sound of some of these tracks, the nagging suspicion that you heard this once before, is always hiding in the background, because there’s worthy enough material here.

Although it’s good stuff, there are few innovations here, and while the simplicity is welcome, you may not always notice that there’s an album playing.

In their insistence on trying to mix quirky, quiet electronica with beer-swilling pop, without the two informing each other, Athlete too often fall into a formulaic and predictable model.

Occasionally sounding like an air-raid in progress, as in 1956 And All That, Mclusky fortunately prove to be more than a one trick pony by the time grinding, pulsing closer Support Systems draws to an end.

Despite occasional moments of album filler, Delays have still given us an album with at least three slices of timeless pop.

Largely magnificent.

But, and here's the catch, at times the arrangements just don't cut it.

Tres Cosas does then what all good third albums should do – it takes the best bits from her earlier works, perfects the model, and then goes a little bit further.

A work of art, slightly rough around the edges and a little makeshift, but tremendously beautiful all the same.

Make no mistake: it may be a good two decades late, but ONoffON is the follow-up that Vs. has always cried out for. And as a result, it’s one of the finest records I’ve heard all year.

This is not for all tastes. Slow, broody, experimental.

The first five tracks are some of the rawest the nine-man conglomerate has ever served. But this all transpires within the first fifteen minutes of the disc. From there Pretty Toney takes a few ugly turns.

Faking the Books... is to Tridecoder and Scary World Theory as OK Computer was to The Bends – a quantum evolutionary leap that, taken consecutively, quite takes your breath away.

The Runaway Found is to be filed alongside Coldplay, Starsailor and Snow Patrol.

They honestly sound like no other known band.

While Satanic Panic in the Attic is unlikely to make significant waves outside of Elephant 6 and indie-pop circles, those lucky enough to hear it (and persist with it) will find very little to complain about.

Where The Volunteers falls down, surprisingly, is in the excessively slick production. Despite the ethos and lyrics, musically this is not the handmade, indie effort you might expect.

It is never fun, but is always compelling.

The result, when it flows, is music that verges on the transcendent.

I’d recommend ten to anyone who bought oaklandazulasylum; to anyone else, I’d recommend both with some urgency...this is the real thing, and you’ll never know how much you needed it until you hear it.

It's hard to underestimate how big and strange some of this massive album is.

Their initial EP documented a band that sounded ready to take on the world – but the follow up just shows that the journey may take longer than expected.

If you can distance yourself enough to judge Franz Ferdinand on its merits alone, it’s an impressive yet inconsistent debut record from a promising young band.

There are two great tracks here, three solid ones, and five complete duds.

Many numbers, such as the unbearably meandering No Christmas While I’m Talking, present themselves as merely background music - pleasant enough, sure, but doing little to draw the listener’s attention.

A welcome addition to the avant-garde canon, an album that demonstrates the continuing development and growth of Mice Parade and Pierce.

Side projects rarely eclipse their protagonists’ main works, but Apropa’t is one radical departure that finds the players perfectly aligning themselves to each other so convincingly that it’s hard to imagine Herren looking back again.

With all its shallowness and artifice, it can only ever be a guilty pleasure. But it is the most intense of guilty pleasures.

Still, three CDs of good-to-great music is a pretty acceptable ratio, and while this is not meant for the casual Cure fan, it’s an essential purchase for the hardcore ones.

It's a grower - no doubt about that.

To really get the most from Margerine Eclipse, consume it in its entirety in one sitting: songs that appear to be fairly average when dipped into randomly take on new elements when they take their place in the overall sequence.

No matter how cliched and predictable this record gets, there are always some undeniable hooks to lure you back in before your patience wears thin.

The Unicorns’ Who Will Cut Our Hair When We’re Gone? defines indie-pop, laden with hooks boasting a charmingly lo-fi sound devoid of pretensions and true to whatever whimsy their muse has stricken them with.

Despite the weak finish, Chutes Too Narrow is still a fantastic next step for the Shins, building on the wildly successful formula of Oh, Inverted World, while still managing to push their sound in new directions.

Rachel's albums are consistently greater than the sum of their parts.

This is a brilliant and varied album, risky and excessive at times, yet compelling and open throughout.

This record is half as clever as it thinks it is, and utterly inessential.

Although Trev gives Stuart Murdoch's songs a freshness and clarity that is entirely complimentary, the decision to unleash a flurry of TV melodrama string arrangements or flashy showbiz brass on half the songs leads to results that range from tolerable over-egging at best and annoying inanity at worst.

At least they're better than The Vines.

It's just comfortable and pleasant enough to convince yourself to stick around - never good enough to be satisfying, nor bad enough to be disappointing.

Musically, it's by far their most rounded and satisfying album to date.

Rather than being enjoyable, listening to Breathe in its entirety soon becomes a chore.