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

Patti Smith's latest album, her best in a while, is held together by a spine of pieces themed around exploration.

The songs on Me Moan are steeped in sinister intimations of bad desires, wanderlust and dark secrets, essayed with varying degrees of intelligibility over arrangements that mostly eschew the commonplace.

Furfour finds the duo at their poppiest: even though they create songs from improvised sounds, there’s an engaging, hypnotic charm to tracks like “Milky Light” and “Heavy Days” that’s strongly reminiscent of Eno’s pop side.

Overall Sigrid achieves exactly what she’s set out to do: add some grit to her previously pristine pop.

They’re sounding less thuggish and more nuanced than of old. But they’ve still got that off-kilter alchemy.

The Long Sleep is more concerned with the lifecycle, the existential, and, in parts, is more sonically expansive.

The Future And The Past is a journey of self-discovery brimming with hope and grooves made to help Prass and her listeners find optimism.

With his new Brotherhood, he's finally found the ideal vehicle to indulge his taste for "Cosmic California Music".

If it's not quite the landmark that was Wilco (the album), it's not far behind, as absorbing as any you'll hear this year.

She has pulled off the difficult trick of developing a new signature sound, without losing the personal perspective that separated her from the pack in the first place.

Even if you don’t love This Could Be Texas, it’s a hard album not to respect. English Teacher have well and truly arrived: the class had better pay attention.

As on A&M's albums, he's captured the trio's charm and lightness of spirit within infectious grooves built around Sam's cyclical acoustic guitar riffs, with the individual raps supported by their warm, uplifting harmonies.

With Warp and Weft, Laura Veirs delivers her most satisfying set of songs since Carbon Glacier, but here, the arrangements devised by Veirs and her partner/producer Tucker Martine are so much more expansive and illuminating, creating a rich tapestry of ideas and idioms.

The proof is in the pudding; that pudding being a deliciously prickly collection of songs as lyrically bawdy as ever.

Yes, there are moments when their sound threatens to stir up the ghosts of indie landfill past – his staccato “ah ah ahs” and “la la la” drawls on “The Races”, for instance – but ultimately the charm and unpredictability of their vignettes see them through.

“Sleep All Summer,” which features Archers of Loaf frontman Eric Bachmann brings his harsh vocals to the forefront of the track, which unfortunately make it challenging for Case to standout. But it’s a small flaw in a gorgeously curated record that reveals Case is never really done reinventing herself.

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

Through it all, Middleton somehow locates the appropriate settings for Shrigley’s perverse poems (or is it the other way round?) with charging techno pulses animating the hysterical protests of a teenager appalled at the vandal antics of a “Houseguest”, and chuntering stomp-beats illustrating the grotesque primitivism of a homicidal “Caveman.”

Riderless Horse obviously isn’t an easy listen. At times – as on “Go Away – it gets dirgy. But its truth-hounding also delivers poetry and restful release.

Smith’s voice remains a thing of wonder throughout.

Trying Times falters slightly in its final third – “Obsession” registers more as a sketch than a song – but these are minor frictions in a record whose emotional logic is otherwise unerring.

On Different Kinds of Light, Bird isn’t an entirely new artist, but here she proves she was never the one-dimensional singer some might have pegged her for. Not then and not now.

Schmilco seems diffident and restrained, mostly built around the folk-rock strummings of Jeff Tweedy’s acoustic guitar, with minimal embellishments. But it’s exactly the right approach for the bitter, painfully personal songs he has written here, which address the living and the dead, the loving and the lost, and most of all Tweedy’s own furies and frustrations.

There’s a sway to the melodies that slip around you, supportive but unassuming, like an old friend’s arm around the waist.

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

This album feels like the most cohesive and considered statement of who he is, both as an individual and as a solo artist. Stylistically, it has everything: chamber pop, grunge, classical, Latin, rock.

American Head addresses something more universal – memories of childhood, adolescence and family, and their lifelong imprint on us – with an expansive sound that is equally accessible, tender and surreal.

Truly, a remarkable debut.

When the funk gets this good, with a relaxed, propulsive charm that belies the P-Funk density of the arrangements, why bother modernising?

Some tracks on The Good Witch serve as incantations to manifest a better lover; others spit curses on past ones. All of them, though, convincingly set Peters up as the next musician to confidently march us into another sad girl summer.

Wonderfully unsettling.

British Sea Power are bravely bringing beauty into an increasingly ugly world, whether that world wants it or not. They ought to be given a medal. For valour. For Valhalla.

Li’s latest foray in pop is a brilliant display of growth, both personally and professionally. She once again proves that there’s no such thing as boring in her music.

His songs are clusters of dark, foreboding images--“Spray your days with coffin nails”; “Entrails made into garlands to welcome my way”--reaching an apogee in “Greatness Yet To Come”, a mystic vision akin to the Crossroads Myth. But the darkness is spiked with sweetness in songs such as “The Hermit Census.”

New album The Universal Want manages to feel relevant, but not preachy.

It’s one of the most considered and thought-provoking electronic albums of the year.

The band’s best work to date.

He's a bona fide hitmaker with a colossal YouTube following, working in the argot and style of his own generation

While the widescreen production of “The Man Who Built The Moon” strives to deliver the drama promised by “Fort Knox”, it doesn’t quite succeed. But it’s still by far his best post-Oasis work, an album which doesn’t try to challenge that heritage, but strikes out to explore new territory.

A blunt, bold album on which Hackman’s beatific voice sits atop methodically messy instrumentals.

This tribute compilation ranges far and wide accordingly.

Killer Mike and El-P bring typically sharp, visceral observations, chugging beats and superb guest artists onto their most successful studio effort to date.

Everything on this record feels more focused than anything she’s done before.

If mutant garage-psychedelia is your thing, then Aussie quintet Pond's Hobo Rocket should have your head spinning.

They are exciting precisely because they refuse to reveal everything about themselves, and because there is an ambiguity to be found in lyrics that come across as bluntly personal. It’s a talent that was present in their first two albums, only this time, they’ve let the light in a bit.

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.

Wu-Tang's most reliable rhymer here hooks up with Toronto hip-hop jazz trio Badbadnotgood, whose vibes, piano and grooves, augmented occasionally with strings, drape a 1970s symphonic-soul sound around his street missives. [21 Feb 2015, p.18]

Drew has always been a superb writer; and working with the likes of singer-songwriter Foy Vance and Kid Harpoon, he amplifies a well-tested formula of meticulous, modern production with retro-sounding equipment, beneath his old-soul vocals that sing about a futuristic, almost alien landscape.

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.

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.

The highs on That’s Showbiz Baby are so thrillingly nutty that it’s hard not to be all-in with the idea of Thirlwall as Britain’s galaxy-brained saviour of pop – at least by the time album two rolls around.

Throughout, he creates an absorbing sound-bed from folk-rock grooves embellished with unexpected tones and texture.

Already Disappeared, which was co-produced with Cate Le Bon in the sprawling desert expanse of Marfa, Texas, is not an easy album. It’s often bleak and experimental: Cox’s vocals burst through like distorted, burbling fragments of static, or appear muffled amid the instrumentation. This is a new side of Deerhunter that gives the listener much to contemplate.

For all his production skills, he remains first and foremost a vocal stylist of considerable ability.

The faithful will feel more than sated, and newcomers will find more to suck on here than a peppermint bass drum.

Fenian is an immensely enjoyable record. Chara and Bap have a great natural sense of flow, able to syncopate phrases in a way to ensure the punchlines hit.

Hive Mind feels much more collaborative, put together in studios and homes the band rented around the world. It’s undoubtedly one of their best works: the band have a synergy that draws the listener in, allowing you to revel in their irresistible confidence, and hope they might invite you to join the party.

Rising US indie combo Parquet Courts make giant strides on this third outing, where they locate an effective nexus where grunge meets meets avant-rock in colourful pop livery.

“Valid Jagger” and the Genet-referencing “Steed” are suffused with sensuous carnal urgency, while the turmoil of “Talk About It Later” is perfectly captured in the eerie, keening mellotronic strings riding its lumpy bump’n’grind.

Muse’s seventh album is--happily--anything but diminished.

A varied arsenal of approaches, but barely a mis-step.

It is further evidence of his mellifluous voice, somehow both relaxed and urgent; of his muscular grasp of his genre; and of his willingness to push its boundaries.

A stunning return.

Taken together, the results demonstrate how adeptly Amadou & Mariam straddle both local and global, with a truly "world" music that deserves mainstream chart success rather than niche appreciation.

There's always an ingenious, often unexpected, connection linking the music to the mood of a specific song.

Overall, a confident, clear-headed quantum leap beyond their previous work.

On “Write a List of Things to Look Forward To”, backed by beautifully textured Americana instrumentation, she wonders why we keep trying: “We did our best, but what does that really mean?” This album is Barnett navigating her way out of her own head, reminding herself – and her listeners – that it’s good to care about things.

It's a gently moving meditation on the effects of solitude and nature on the soul, set to Lytle's characteristic blend of chugging guitar grooves aerated by bubbling synths and soothed by high harmonies.

The 10 albums that comprise this box set depict one of the most extraordinary career arcs in all of pop music, testament to the questing intelligence with which Joni Mitchell approached music.

At times, Yorke moonwalks into self-parody with lines such as, “What's the purpose?” But such sixth-formery is compensated by the gorgeous melody and elegant phrasing of “Bugging Out Again”, so beautiful it's hard to hear with your eyes open.

12 meticulously crafted songs. ... Just as the preceding art installation invited viewers to enter its vast head of LED lights and wonder, this album does the same.

A significant improvement on both Humbug and Suck It and See, suggesting they’ve found a more satisfying rapprochement with the classic rock that tends to come with the territory over there.

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.

Her best album in about a decade.

Reconstituted with a brawny two-guitar attack, The Hold Steady return with another portfolio of dirty-realist tableaux in Teeth Dreams.

It’s Blumberg’s longest commitment to a way of working, which is just as well because it is brilliant.

Flower Boy presents a surprisingly sensitive, thoughtful, even pleasant personality.

Flamagra--a playful yet melancholic, skittish yet meditative 67 minutes of cosmic genius--is one of Flying Lotus’s most accessible releases.

She's surely destined to become one of the voices of the year, while her accomplices' subtle confections of minimal electro throbs and stripped-back beats has an alluring simplicity that's like a refreshing, palate-cleansing sorbet.

A true original, at his very best.

Taking you on a journey which reveals new landmarks and perspectives each time you listen, To Love is to Live is a compelling and real cinematic picture of the emotions that life throws at us. It’s a journey you will want to relive.

Homegrown is his most personal. Intended for release in 1975, Homegrown retains Harvest’s country-rock sound, but has more of an intimate feel.

For all its promise that it never quite delivers on, I Quit is still another cool step in the band’s evolution – as well as a great way for fans to get their own step count up.

From start to finish, Plastic Hearts dresses catchy, Eighties-indebted pop melodies in rock’s studded leather, lets them spin a few wheelies and max out the speedo. It’s basically a truckload of fun with added blood and guts, driven by Cyrus’s reckless, open-throated, soul-bearing charisma.

Weeks’ haunting lilt is perfect for embodying the magic and fear of creating a life, whether writing letters to his unborn son on “Takes A Village”, mooning over 20-week scans on “Blood Sugar” or finally tucking the nipper in on “Milk Breath”. It’s gorgeous, but expect more gin and screaming on the follow-up.

Here for It All doesn’t exactly shake things up, but it’s a pretty, polished affair all the same, Carey sitting comfortably on top of her sonic throne and uninterested in relinquishing it any time soon.

Most B-sides compilations seem to have been thrown together to fulfill contracts but Dead In The Boot has a form and substance beyond that.

There’s the same penchant for itchy, unusual beats from the likes of 4Tet and Fred; the same provocative, philosophical flow; and the same undertow of paranoid wariness.

Expanded to a duo by bassist Nate Brenner’s promotion to full-time accomplice of Merrill Garbus, Tune-Yards’ characteristically confrontational approach acquires a new brusque confidence on this fourth album.

Sprints are smarter, and louder, than ever before.

As you’d expect from Elbow’s frontman, the songs on this debut solo album rarely stray too far from the sleeve on which Guy Garvey wears his heart.

The Ship is a strange amalgam of Eno’s familiar ambient approach with poetry--the latter delivered in a sonorous basso profundothat resonates with a sort of looming, warning warmth.

Both artists sound far more liberated here than on each of their separate solo projects; it’s a collaboration many will want to continue.

It’s emo at its finest, and the record ends as emotionally as it begins. By the final track, How to Socialise & Make Friends shows that Camp Cope are driven by the band unapologetically being themselves

A wealth of arresting images sprinkled throughout another excellent album.

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

Despite the diversity of themes and styles, the sense of a confident single voice comes through much louder and clearer than before in this new context.