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.