Gently marching strings furnish an aptly martial underscoring for the conflict imagery of “Treaty”, the latest of Cohen’s romantic mea culpas, which reveals how, for a Great Seducer, love is an essentially narcissistic, even solipsistic, pastime, its protagonist apologising “for that ghost I made you be”. It’s just one of several sharp, stinging twists casting new and unusual shadows on old themes in You Want It Darker, culminating in the mordant, bitter advice of “Steer Your Way.”

It's simply marvellous, an unalloyed joy from first to last, with Robbie Robertson's finely wrought storytelling songs augmented by a few well-chosen covers.

With Rifles & Rosary Beads, she’s created her most impressive and affecting work yet.

WAAITT is a compelling, conscious-jolting account of a life of two halves.

Titanic Rising isn’t Bob Seger meets Enya. It’s better.

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

Although the sonic mood mellows after the first two tracks, listeners will be invited to share the transcendent joy in memories of a lost child; the awe of an uxorious lover whose prayer-like love for his wife is a continual saving grace; and the frustration of a caged man with an “open road” of a heart.

Fuelled by a black humour that’s almost become her trademark, there’s heartbreak and ecstasy, desire, fear, uncertainty, acting on impulse, making mistakes and (maybe) learning from them. And those are tunes we can definitely dance to.

Set My Heart on Fire Immediately, lands with devastating precision. These 13 tracks are finely wrought works of art that draw as much influence from Purcell and Mozart as they do scuzzy Nineties post-punk.

This re-recording is a better, brighter version of a terrific pop album. Red is dead. Long live Red (Taylor's Version).

Finally, maverick genius Sly Stone receives due respect in this four-disc retrospective, as the leader of rock's first multi-racial, multi-gender, multi-genre band.

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.

Ingenious arrangements illuminate the songs, notably the blissful synth solo reaffirming life and love in “All Of Me Wants All Of You”, and the 12 minutes of keening sounds, like the moaning of whales, appended to “Blue Bucket Of Gold”.

Across 27 tracks, almost all with compellingly muscular melodies, she whips and neigh-neighs through every conceivable form of classic and modern country, roping in elements of opera, rock and hip-hop at her commanding, virtuosic whim. .... Cowboy Carter keeps on dealing aces.

That there are spots of filler on the first hour of Beyonce’s new trilogy suggests we’re in for indulgence, but that there are brisk bangers and Lemonade-like leaps of genre too bodes well for Beyonce’s defiant emotional renaissance.

What Simz does here is phenomenal. This is an album--and artist--to cherish.

All in all, it’s a fine addition to the seemingly bottomless corpus of Springsteen’s ever-expanding oeuvre.

As with Visions, this third album sees the band hopping between styles – folk, garage rock and shoegaze – only now they’re steering deeper into the corners and controlling the skids.

Four decades on, it sounds as revolutionary as ever.

GUTS sees Rodrigo smash her way out of the confines of small screen life and arrive kicking and screaming into her real life. No more red lights or stop signs in her way.

Despite the hiatus, this guest-laden double-album finds the group still very much engaged, rattling out tongue-twisting, articulate verbal flows dealing more with social realities than self-aggrandising brags and outlaw fantasies.

Rarely have his revelations been as direct, or as personal, as on Carrie & Lowell, a cathartic exercise exploring the effect of his estranged mother Carrie’s death on him two years ago.

Though frowned on by some purists expecting the traditional fare of the family band The Watersons, the siblings’ original songs were eagerly accompanied by luminaries like Martin Carthy, Richard Thompson and Ashley Hutchings, who bring a roguish enthusiasm to tracks such as “Rubber Band”, on which even the horns seem to have their cap at a jaunty angle.

On her new album, Eve, she explores a lineage of black female icons in a way that is both tender and compelling. ... The overarching sound, production and instrumentation on Eve are outstanding. ... Nina Simone said an artist’s duty, “as far as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times”. This is precisely what Rapsody has done – in the most resonant way possible.

Punisher ends with a thunderstorm of manic, discordant brass and drums and a pained scream, the physical culmination of the undercurrent of doom that has lurked throughout. But you emerge feeling not deflated but purged. Punisher has the effect of a particularly pummelling massage.

These 15 pieces sketch an entire world of music, coloured by the locale, and shifting between the smoothly lyrical and the propulsive rhythmic.

This revamp does at least serve as a reminder of the album’s untouchable greatness.

The subtle melodies on The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We can take their time to gleam through the murk. So give it time and space at night, when you’re alone, to allow its wild darkness to shine.