It’s probably the pandemic’s impact on the live music scene that makes an album like this feel more welcome than it might have last year. It’s still not comparable to the real thing, but it does remind us of what we’re missing.

Magic Mirror is an impressive and mature debut.

There’s been a lot of hype surrounding her since she made it on to BBC’s Sound of 2018 list. Miss Universe justifies it.

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.

It's still suffused with a retro 1960s vibe, but this time the garage-pop influences prevail, with a sizeable side-order of psychedelia courtesy of the edgy West Coast lead guitar that streaks tracks.

He wields with sumptuous beauty, from the Floyd-like swathes of mellotron and piano carrying “The Boat Is In The Barn” and the stately “Lost Machine”, to the implacable electropop fizz of “Evermore”.

For someone who claims she has no words left, she manages to say rather a lot.

It’s their most poppy and psychedelic-leaning work to date, bursting with colour and fuelled by a multicultural band featuring Elenna Canlas on keys and backing vocals, and Ish Montgomery on bass.

Her vocals – and the album itself – are dextrous, flexing between those high notes and lower registers at the most unexpected moments.

The confessional, autobiographical elements that are its strongest aspect also serve as its Achilles' heel: the whole enterprise depends on how fascinated the listener is with Rowland's psyche.

The songs themselves are good. Grounded in pathos, they tend to be handsomely crafted ballads about love and its various agonies – but it’s her vocals that sell them.

Electric finds Richard Thompson at his most stripped-down and potent.

[A] strange and compelling work.

Gracie Abrams’s light graze of a croon skates elegantly over the sweet, piano-driven “Badlands”. Guest-free highlights include the delicately plucked “Alleycat”, resonant “Stay” and “Conversations with My Son”, which skips along its gorgeous acoustic guitar solo while Mumford’s lyrics pledge enduring love and support.

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.

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.

[The first three] tracks follow fairly seamlessly on from MBV's previous work, but thereafter subtle changes are applied that tug the album into pastures new.

Its dark, unflinching songs certainly ponder humanity’s less attractive traits, with arrangements to match.

Her sweeping, layered ninth album is more ruminative than reactive: questions of family and legacy, memory and death swirl around one another until they’re one in the same.

There are echoes of Pops Staples’s gentle, miasmic guitar in the folksy gospel stylings of “Peaceful Dream” and the cyclical twang carrying the Black Lives Matter anthem “Little Bit”, warning youngsters to be careful around cops; but elsewhere the influence of Sly & The Family Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On is paramount.

Run the Jewels 4 is the culmination of their near-30 years of experience, during which time they have observed, listened and reacted. Their anger, hurt, elation and love – along with their near-psychic ability to read and riff off one another’s individual thoughts – build to the radioactive “a few words for the firing squad”, the album’s astounding apex.

On her best album in years, Thea Gilmore darts back and forth between sharp, intelligent pieces on dark themes--depression, loneliness, murder--and more positive songs about love and hope.

There are no pop bangers here, just exquisite, piano-based poetry. There are characters Swift has never introduced before. Some are fictional, it seems; some are inspired by family members; some are people Swift wishes she hadn’t met. Folklore’s songs care less for those showstopping one-liners and more about the small details.

Living in Extraordinary Times marks a band still working at their full capacity, bringing new ideas and sounds while retaining what inherently makes James James--big choruses, danceable tracks, and timely lyrics.

On Skinty Fia, Fontaines DC have nailed their themes of urban decay and defiant immigrant soul. They just need to find the courage to fully emerge from the chrysalis of their indie and post-punk influences.

Garwood forces the listener to adopt his pace--a sort of aural equivalent of the “slow food” movement. But it works.

Though that melancholy seeps deeper into songs like “So Now What” and “The Fear”, it’s never allowed to dominate, with the latter’s rolling drone groove quixotically tempered by the addition of mariachi horns, a typically off-centre touch.

With her delivery tacking impressively between sweet and smoky, "On the Road" recalls what happened when the Kind of Blue influence hit the likes of Tim Buckley and Tim Hardin.