Happy hour at the all-you-can-eat alt-rock buffet is clearly open. ... It’s all delivered rambunctiously enough that it’s easy to simply enjoy Gulp! as the alt-pop pick’n’mix it is. Go gorge.

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

Her follow-up to 2013’s sublime Pushin’ Against A Stone finds Valerie June expanding her unique blend of blues, soul and mountain music to create a distinctive hybrid in which past and future coalesce with gentle power.

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

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.

In range, energy and freshness, this may be their best album yet.

The entire thing is produced meticulously; each track slides into the next to ensure the party never stops. Club Future Nostalgia is pure, undiluted fun.

An engagingly outre delight.

Yet another career-best offering. .... Her voice is clear, pure and precise – delivered over deftly picked acoustic and swooning slide guitars – making each truth all the more devastating. Middle of Nowhere isn’t Musgraves at an impasse. No, she’s exactly where she needs to be.

His symphonic-soul innovations here would map out the course of much 1970s soul music, while his use of multi-layered vocals – the happy result of an engineer accidentally running two vocal takes in the same mix – added an extra element to Gaye's vocal armoury which he would use extensively throughout the rest of his career.

Imagine Killing Eve in audio form. They’re still that kick-ass. That sexy. That much fun. Put this album on your to-listen list, pronto.

Though their themes remain in the gutter, Suede aspire to monuments, and The Blue Hour will stand as another sordid masterwork.

The key to Flyte’s music is just how evocative it is, setting the scene perfectly and drawing you into their world.

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

Like Randy Newman, the Mael brothers have a knack for voicing the hopes and regrets of diverse, sometimes unsympathetic characters; and the latitude afforded by their operatic arrangements allows them to add commentary in real time, like an instrumental Greek chorus.

Letissier makes her vintage synths snap, crackle, pop, fizz, freeze, squelch, shimmer and soar.

Weller’s magpie tendencies pay dividends.

A set of songs seething with dark knowledge, as Bejar peeks behind the curtain of appearances in search of underlying motivations.

With Helplessness Blues, Fleet Foxes triumphantly deliver on the promise of their popular debut, the album that helped establish folk-rock once again as a formidable commercial force rather than just a fringe interest.

Realised here in more expressive interpretations, and interspersed with poems read by her daughter, the actress Gabrielle Drake, these songs are full of acute observations, deft allusions and metaphors, and the subtlest of emotional revelations, wielded with an English restraint redolent with the aromas of freshly-mowed lawns and cucumber sandwiches.

The character of the base music here is overwhelming: complex, ebullient and life-affirming, and in yoking this intricate dance music to his sophisticated New Yorker sensibility, Simon created a transatlantic bridge that neither pandered to nor patronised either culture.

You can feel the weight of the piano keys and sense the reverb on the mic, or its absence when Morissette lays her isolated vocals bare to stunning effect on “Her”. ... Superb album.

While the production here is as slick as IGOR, though, there’s less of a through line. IGOR was the devastating pieced-together parts of a broken relationship. CMIYGL plays fast and loose with its subjects, relying instead on the music itself to carry listeners through. ... Tyler, the Creator continues to defy expectations.

Colorado shows that Young, at 73, has lost none of his outrage and passion. ... Saying so much, so beautifully, Colorado was worth the wait.

The Queen Of Hearts, a sublime collection of old songs given contemporary heart transplants without ever betraying their essential original truth and spirit.

For Those I Love is as much a piece of history as it is a work of art. ... A staggering album.

A stunning celebration of Black, gay love. ... It is also a groundbreaking proclamation of personal acceptance.

Grunge-rinsed, feminist-flipped, upcycled Fifties guitar an’ all: Crushing is a triumph.