Not an easy listen, but a satisfying one.

It’s rare for music to be both deep and breezy, isn’t it? Minnie Riperton does it on “Lovin’ You” (1974) – all those casual la-la-la-las sinking into something profound. Corinne Bailey Rae did it too, with “Put Your Records On” (2006), flagging the nourishment of some much-needed downtime. Olivia Dean’s second album, The Art of Loving, manages the same feat.

Nothing about Invasion of Privacy is formulaic.

Dave Alvin's latest album may be his best yet, its tales of the flipside of the American Dream set to gritty blues riffs that speak of long months on the road.

He drifts like a spectre through a labyrinth, exploring his favourite themes of sleep, reality and the subconscious. The tones here are stark and bleak, compared to the claustrophobia of 2014’s Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes. ... By the end of ANIMA, you’re left wondering about those dreams that are just out of reach, but also what we risk losing when we look back.

Never once do Sons of Kemet compromise on their fiercely individual sound.

While The Breeders may not be reclaiming their youth on their latest effort, they’re not trying to: they approach All Nerve with the sensibility of a band that embraces how they’ve grown since their early punk days.

Of course, it takes a certain degree of patience (or pretension) to unpick the record entirely, but once unravelled listeners are rewarded with a dystopian world best described as sci-fi sleaze.

Although the fear was that Adam would be spreading his father’s legacy too thin, each track has the weight of a completed thought, not a sketch bulked out.

With the skirling, Arabic-tinged drone-rock textures of his band The Space Shifters augmented by cello and Seth Lakeman’s violin, the album’s miasmic charm imbues even the rockabilly standard “Bluebirds Over The Mountain” with new, mysterious depths.

While Negro Swan elaborates on Hynes’s best work, he remains grounded in cosy bedroom-pop by shambling drum machines, vocal compressors and gratuitous psych pedals.

On Don’t Forget Me, she’s found a beguilingly relaxed momentum.

This is a polished, playful album, though it has a DIY edge to it.

It’s cool to hear Vernon choosing fun at last. It’s a decision that’s opened up a whole new court for his melodies to play in. A slam dunk.

Staples called this his most personal record yet. Perhaps it’s this new vulnerability that makes the album so great. Or maybe it’s the whip-smart one-liners. Or the vivid storytelling. Staples will say this latest triumph is just a dude doing some different things.

Gaga’s return to outsider-empowering form could not be more timely. At a moment when America’s leaders seek to shove its marginalised citizens back into the shadows, she invites them back into the centre of the floor, celebrating their defiant differences in the bright strobe lighting. Maga? Oh nah-nah!

While copious application of phasing offers a link to Tame Impala’s psychedelic roots, the absence of guitar wig-outs may disappoint some fans.

If the Grammy-nominated Forever was their blistering hellscape, Underneath is a glitchy, industrial wasteland.

On her latest effort, the singer-songwriter proves that the power of reinvention suits her just fine.

Nadia Reid’s 2015 debut Listen To Formation, Look For The Signs heralded the arrival of a prodigious talent, the young New Zealand singer-songwriter’s confessional material embodying an emotional intelligence and honesty akin to Laura Marling and Judee Sill, her folk leanings tempered by languid jazz inflections set among a patina of subtle sonic textures. Preservation continues in like manner.

Pre Pleasure is one of those rare records that reveals the whole artist, cheap kicks and all.

The Purple Bird is reassuringly well-crafted and woodsy.

It’s excruciating in its honesty – even for Lenker, who’s hardly known for shying away from her feelings. Now she bares her pain with complete abandon. It’s quite extraordinary.

As beautiful as it is exciting, Suddenly is an uplifting album that embraces the change and shifting perspectives that life throws our way.

It's the most simple, directly dance-oriented they've been since Disco, putting down a marker for the rest of the album.

Experimentation is generally to be applauded, but too often here it works to the detriment of the songs.

While there’s a moreish quality to the off-key guitar of “Imperfect for You” and an unexpectedly golden flush of brass on “Ordinary Things”, Grande’s delicately conversational tone is often left having to compensate for her lack of strong melodic snags.

An album, that restores to R&B some of the adult concerns that powered the genre through its '70s golden era.

There's an urgency and drive about these tracks that's simply exhilarating.

The Swedish pop innovator take charge over nine expertly produced tracks, exploring matters of sexuality, relationships and desire with playful candour. It’s brilliant, too; Robyn’s voice is commanding but also curious, enveloped by tremendous salvos of house and electronic sounds.

Bill Callahan's follow-up to 2011's gorgeous Apocalypse finds him in the company of a small, discreet band, whose gentle shuffles are coloured mostly by guitar, fiddle and flute, as his muse flits haphazardly about him. [The Independent scored this a 3/5 in the actual printed edition not 5/5 as seen on its online edition]

Big Thief have done it again. Despite the 2024 departure of their bassist of nine years, Max Oleartchik, the Brooklyn-built indie band’s sixth album sounds like another instant classic.

Overall, this is a powerful statement from a laudably liberated artist. A record red in tooth and claw.

Hold the Girl is eclectic and searching, a little glossier than Sawayama’s debut, perhaps, but also much more introspective.

There are moments when it all starts to feel a little bit too doom-laden. But Williams saves not only the best, but the most hopeful, until last. ... An impressive but relentless album.

Martin Simpson applies his dazzling fingerstyle technique to a broad range of material.

It’s a fascinating oddity streaked with sex, violence and sorrow, a sort of seedcorn of the Robert Rodriguez aesthetic, presented complete with the lithographs that accompanied the original, albeit in cramped CD size.

“Riser” features Jaki Liebezeit-style tom-toms behind cosmic contrails of synth trapped in a cavernous ambience; while string synth and wordless vocal keening drape like fog around “Abandoned/In Silence”, whose clarinet line establishes accidental but apt echoes of the theme to Exodus.

With Modern Kosmology, long-time Manchester folktronic siren Jane Weaver has made her most completely realised album yet, albeit by dispensing with folk music almost entirely, in favour of more forceful Krautrock and psychedelic influences.

Perhaps reflecting the three years spent touring after their marvellous Music In Exile album, the excellent Resistance finds Malian desert-rockers Songhoy Blues forging firmer bonds between their native modes and Western styles.

Jupiter’s songs remain daringly iconoclastic, from the anti-monarchist critique of “Benanga” to the anti-materialist slant of “Pondjo Pondjo”; but there’s still plenty of room for pure pleasure, as per the dashing, ebullient celebration of dancing, “Ekombe”.

It’s a public catharsis which succeeds through a combination of subtlety and the determination to derive general observations from personal experience.

The euphoria of parenthood is effusively conveyed in several tracks, though the overall mood created by the heavily reverbed vocals, drones and pulses remains pregnant with potential distress.

A masterclass in modernist antiquity.

It’s infectious stuff, right from the opening bars of “I Don’t Wanna Be Without You”, a languid shuffle of organ and saxes, with occasional castanet flourishes accenting the rumba groove.

This apple hasn’t fallen too far from the tree: like her dad John, Lilly Hiatt has a gift for unpicking knotty lyrical themes in a personalised blend of countrified rock music.

An album that frets gently and artfully at the wounds of human attraction and rejection.

Walls is unchecked, indignant and raw, and though it ends with a note of despondency, it is a triumph.

In a Galaxy is a record that takes you far beyond the borders of the world you’re familiar with, and into something altogether more colourful.

He’s already had a No 3 album, without the kind of major label backing many of his peers enjoy. The follow-up happens to be even better.

Across the album she stretches her voice into familiar, hushed shapes – but the record marks a clear evolution of an artist done with being called pretty.

You Signed Up For This is an effortless pop debut. As an already established singer, Peters had little to prove, but after a shimmering first album, she has laid any residual doubt to rest.

All 10 tracks are stacked with hooks, making it as good as their 2009 breakthrough album, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. ... Mars’s sophisticated stream-of-consciousness lyrics operate in perfect synchronicity with the album’s sound. Melancholy themes of mortality are balanced by a giddy commitment to seizing the dance floor moment.

Perimenopop is destined to get listeners hot and bothered; Ellis-Bextor remains as cool as ever.

It was worth the wait, of course.

Petals for Armor doesn’t offer up an easy redemptive arc towards happiness; it is a Herculean effort to pull yourself out of depression. But in letting us in on that effort, Williams has created something special.

Perhaps the most wonderful thing about Senjutsu is just how much fun the band are having. It’s an album built to entertain, full of theatre, full of gold-standard musicianship. They keep things neat at 10 tracks, but when they do indulge themselves a little, it’s worth it.

Across the next nine tracks they deliver pounding pop thrills and arena-sized catharsis, in a style that refines their distinctive sound instead of pimping it up, Noughties style.

A remarkable case of sonic reinvention.

Fender has refined both his songwriting and his sound.

Through the album there’s a mesmerising rhythm, a kind of rocking horse motion that spurs you on to the next track. ... On Swimming he was adrift, searching for a lighthouse beam that would bring him back to “a place of comfort”. On Circles, it sounds as though – if only for the briefest of moments – he found it.

As ‘Harry’s House’ flings open the doors of its party garage, Styles navigates this confusing emotional territory with a funk shuffle and future soul panache worthy of the Purple One himself.

Costello’s peerless lyricism often mirrors his tone, and here it’s suitably refined.

Sensitively produced by Marta Salogni, the result is both seductive and hypnotic. .... I may already have found my album of the year.

Augmenting her folksy troubadour style with Latin percussion and an acappella group for that streetcorner-symphony flavour, she effectively expands the notion of Americana to accommodate another cultural strain alongside the usual blues and country influences.

With Konnichiwa, Skepta hoists grime to another level. It’s not just a case of his lyrical prowess, which goes some way deeper than most of his peers; it’s the way that he has fiercely retained control over his own destiny, overseeing everything from mastering to merchandise through the Boy Better Know collective.

It's on "Early Roman Kings" that the various strains come together most effectively, with Hidalgo's organ added to another Muddy Waters blues-stomp groove, and Dylan blurring history again in his depiction of the titular Romans "in their sharkskin suits, bowties and buttons, with their high-top shoes" – neatly underlining the gangsterism of imperial invaders of all eras.

Played entirely by Shauf save for the lush string arrangements, it’s a baroque-pop exercise with echoes of Seventies smarties like Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman and Steely Dan, though rather more empathetic than them. And less cynical.

On Blunderbuss, he's stumbled into some nasty business. These are songs of ruthless temptresses and treacherous men, of uncontrollable desire and unbearable guilt.

This intense story-driven format lets her sound sharper, smarter, and more clear-eyed than before. .... Allen sounds newly alive in the contradictions we loved her for: acid-tongued and soft-hearted, ironic and sincere, broken again but alright, still.

The result is an album of rare beauty and intelligence, rendered in imaginative arrangements containing sometimes startling harmonies.

On their third album Mommy, their blistering garage punk is finessed, their songwriting, sharp and sardonic.

More accomplishes in just three songs the transition between fan-settling familiarity and creative advancement.

NAO has hovered around a near-perfect brand of sultry, neo-soul-inflected R&B. Four years later, and she seems to have mastered it.

A wealth of arresting images sprinkled throughout another excellent album.

The wonderful Wildflower is cause for celebration, its Zappa/Beasties-style collage of voices, samples, beats, sounds, and especially laughter offering a joyous affirmation of life.

Sadly, this is about as deep as their politics go on Hot Sauce Committee Part Two, the more articulate sentiments of To the 5 Boroughs having been largely abandoned in favour of fairly standard bring-the-noise, boast'n'diss hip-hop pablum.

Plan B acquits himself remarkably well here.

Ry Cooder’s long investigation of the permutations of the blues and possibilities of justice comes to rest here in the religious balm which remains inseparable from American music.

Yes, it’s all cheesy as a vat of fondue. But it’s also a lot of fun.

At times, it feels as though the polite, considered Rodrigo could push ideas, emotions and melodies a little further than she does. ... But this is an incredibly impressive debut from a singer who’s only just learning to stretch her wings.

Whether The Horrors will willingly pursue that same trajectory to its logical conclusion seems doubtful, but for now Skying finds them breaking free of old bindings, eyes set on the wild blue yonder.

[Lucinda Williams is] producing enough quality material to follow last year’s double-album Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone with another double-album of equivalent potency. The songs on The Ghosts of Highway 20 have the unerring ring of truth about them, shining glimmers of light into dark and unpalatable corners of life.

The raging country-punk counterblast “Country” unleashes her disgust at the country establishment’s backward attitude towards women. Elsewhere, her sympathies remain firmly with the downtrodden and desperate, as in her straight-talking depiction of teen pressures faced in “High School”, a bruised parade of class clowns and cheerleaders, pep pills and pregnancy.

It’s fortunate that Jones chose to hold on to these songs – they form one of the most intriguing records she’s released in years.

Despite the record’s immersive qualities, the overwhelming effect is as satisfying as a plaster being ripped right off.

It’s an utterly cohesive record, perhaps to a fault; the individual parts end up consumed by the whole. If you vibe with it, though, Anhedonia has made an album that has real depths to explore – it’s just a matter of finding the right frequency.

The 13 songs on Blue Water Road roll out in warm, slow-rolling waves of sensuous R&B.

Soul Time! is a near-perfect expression of retro-soul style that grips from its opening bars.

Night Network isn’t a bad album, but it's not a particularly memorable one, either.

Centralia is by far the most satisfying release to date by the Brooklyn-based minimalist post-rock duo Mountains.

It’s as though she’s thrown a jumble of ideas up in the air without thinking too much about where they land. At times, this means her sixth record feels refreshingly free and at others a little too sketchy. But it’ll still make her fans think, sigh, shrug and smirk.

His barnacled baritone steers a steady course through Moog-soaked covers of favourite songs, with sombre lines about dark oceans, soulless days, and skirting a skeleton coast.

Todd Snider has the kind of audience rapport that comes only through years of one-night stands and the confidence that builds in one's character – even if that character is of an inveterate ne'er-do-well peacenik, wryly proud of his inability to grow old gracefully.

A bitterly beautiful album.

All told, it’s a magnificent, career-defining set, full of hard-won wisdom, assertive independence--and compassion in abundance.

This 30th-anniversary performance of the album at Glasgow’s Barrowlands doesn’t convey quite the sense of risk that accompanied their early shows, but the cocktail of noise and melody has largely retained its potency.

For all its glimmering synths and the robotic pathos of Taylor’s idiosyncratic vocals, this is a record with both heart and soul.