Urgent, upbeat, demanding and funky, Lipa is a finger-snap personified throughout Radical Optimism.

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

REM’s brooding masterwork. ... It’s an album of shadows and contrasts: “Drive”, for instance, opens proceedings on the cusp of adulthood, imparting youthful rebel spirit with a warning sense of duty for the future, before “Try Not To Breathe” offers an extraordinary image of an old person eager to leave the world to the young.

Kouyate's electrification of his ngoni lute is just as effective a sign of resistance: fed through a wah-wah pedal, his serpentine, fleet-fingered lead lines gain a fresh, assertive power on songs.

The older he gets, the better the conversational-confessional flow of his rapping, which allows him to stroll through a 10-minute bragathon like “Mel Made Me Do It” without breaking a sweat or losing the listener’s attention. He raps about trips to Dubai and giving up weed like he’s sitting beside you at a London bus stop.

The sheer grace and ambition of Ants… will prove tough for 2022 to top. A huge leap forward, headfirst into the unknown.

Chaos is incoming. Yet the Welsh artist’s sixth album never fully unleashes that chaos; she restrains it, wrestles with it, and in doing so exacerbates its sense of unease. Written in complete isolation in Cardiff, Pompeii demonstrates Le Bon’s flair for the surreal, while exploring themes close to home: religious guilt, family, death.

Fascinating, enjoyable and original.

This is a spectacular record.

Lemonade is fiery, insurgent, fiercely proud, sprawling and sharply focused in its dissatisfaction.

Though spoilt in places by distortion and too-prominent electric piano, the hitherto unheard material is notable for the innovative exploration of yet another roots blend, through the impassioned country-soul of songs such as “That’s the Breaks”. Clearly, in this most congenial of creative cauldrons, virtually anything was possible.

There’s a new sense of groundedness, as though, faced with certain inevitabilities, they feel more connected than ever to the world around them.

[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.

There’s an ever-expanding diversity of appeal to Turn Blue that should win new fans and please the faithful.

Overall, the album offers a surprisingly successful transformation that somehow enables one to hear this most familiar of material as if through new ears, a remarkable achievement in itself.

If it's not quite the jump from Bob Dylan to The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, it's the closest recent equivalent, a prodigious rate of development for such a tyro talent, all the more remarkable for not being reliant on significant musical progression, so much as raw songwriting ability.

It’s an album that cools and shimmers its way through a delicious range of nuanced moods and subtly layered musical ideas. Delightful.

It’s a record that celebrates motherhood as an expansion of creativity, rather than the stifling of it that she had expected.

Merritt’s refracted reminiscences frequently offer thoughtful and incisive insights into bigger issues, and with deceptive sleight of story.

Part of its success is due to Stevens' uniquely ambivalent position, at once ingenious and ingenuous.

The singer has matched Bernie Taupin's best crop of lyrics for years with his own most emotively apt melodies to produce a collection that both harks back to the intrigues and interests of his earliest recordings, yet manages to break new ground, quite an achievement for an artist in his sixth decade.

When pondering gets this skilled, and this fruitful, the dividends far outweigh the misgivings.

Kiss Each Other Clean is much more focused and homogenous, but there's still a lingering sense of abundant inspiration, eager to carry the songs off to different lairs.

Crash is a terrifically structured album, designed to get you up and shimmying off the lockdown pounds as tracks slot sleekly together. ... Crash is a top-down, foot-down trip.

The production here is superb. Tyler has never been one for traditional song structure, but on IGOR he’s like the Minotaur luring you through a maze that twists and turns around seemingly impossible corners, drawing you into the thrilling unknown. ... This is Tyler’s best work to date.

He's keen to please, but what's remarkable about The Lady Killer is that he manages to avoid all the bubblebath boudoir-soul cliches that litter most R&B albums.

It is an incredibly cohesive album though--it operates in its own defined space and has an intense frostiness to, which, for The National, is saying something.

It reveals a broader musical and emotional palette than they've exposed before.