JD McPherson’s Let The Good Times Roll was one of the most joyously unvarnished rock’n’roll delights of recent times, and this follow-up continues that album’s ingenious blending of heritage and modernity, sometimes recalling The Black Keys’ reliable way with chunky groove and quirky hook.

The first of two albums planned for 2017, From A Room: Vol. 1 builds on the success of Chris Stapleton’s Grammy-winning debut Traveller, through a similar blend of country songwriting smarts and soulful engagement.

Despite being further from their comfort zone, this second foray into theatrical composition, a ballet based around a Hans Christian Anderson parable, is vastly more adept, involving the deft interweaving of electropop and orchestral elements within a series of impressionistic tableaux sketching out the theme of conflict between creativity and destruction.

Signs that Cracker Island is designed to be a summer album sizzle though the heat-haze synths of “Silent Running” (featuring soulful contributions from Adeleye Omotayo) and the hip-sloshing dancefloor pulse of “New Gold” (feat Tame Impala and Bootie Brown).

Food for Worms sees Shame confidently embrace their flaws and resign themselves to the messy, beautiful chaos of their live shows. It’s all captured within this bedhead of a record.

The delicate guitar and piano figures and the sombre languor of strings behind Alison Goldfrapp’s breathy vocals create something akin to a cross between the dreamlike mythopoeism of old folk tales and the lush cinematic arrangements of Michel Legrand.

While not as immediately career-defining as Wake Up the Nation, there's no denying that with Sonik Kicks, Paul Weller is continuing the courageous, exploratory course established on 2008's 22 Dreams.

Common’s lyrical imagery is as evocative as ever on both. ... This is Common’s most hopeful album in years.

Musically, it’s an almost seamless blend of the two groups’ styles, variations on a sort of operatic indie-electropop, which recalls variously Freedom of Choice-era Devo, chattering Kraftwerk techno and, in the more melancholy environs inhabited by “Little Guy from the Suburbs”, a whiff of Leonard Cohen.

There's no denying the power of a set stuffed with riffs like “Honky Tonk Women”, “Brown Sugar” and “Jumpin' Jack Flash”, played with that inimitable loose/tight dialectic that characterises the Stones at their best.

Shorty here offers an explosive blend of funk, blues and jazz.

Throughout there’s a determination to find the appeal in paradox, notably the beguiling blend of cool and cumbersome that carries the love song “Prince Johnny” to another place.

The result is a work with greater resonance and presence, which might secure her mainstream success.

The backdrops feature dark sheets of strings and organ, the occasional lonely trumpet, and lumpy, superstitious drums driving the menacing Western mythos to its doom: not a forgiving place, but an engrossing one.

By the end of Post Traumatic, you realise Shinoda is right: this record is as much about Bennington as it is about him, but that’s what makes it so vulnerable and such a triumphant debut.

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

Delta Kream is a soundtrack for those hot and heady nights of late summer. It’s brilliant.

It's the sense of space that grips one's attention, sometimes just flecks of sound, like snowflakes in darkness, create a sense of brooding unease.

A master at cramming elaborate lines into verses far too small for them, Bradfield could have made Even in Exile a wordy tangle of exotic oppressions. Instead, to draw parallels with the “acceptable” brutalising of today’s socialist figures, he takes a more impressionistic approach.

This record’s greatest strengths (and weaknesses) lie in Young’s bold, blatant and occasionally bewildering commitment to being messy.

Save for a shaky cover of “Send in the Clowns”, Ferry remains as calm and collected as ever at the eye of these emotional storms.

Never once do Sons of Kemet compromise on their fiercely individual sound.

Whatever the subject, it’s always conveyed with unexpected charm.

The result is a quintessentially London record, as dark and moody as it is brash and innovative.

Tarpaper Sky finds him relaxed and confident in his craft.

It's always an after-hours, nocturnal experience.

This is not always a comfortable bracket for a Kurt Vile song to fit into. When he goes off the deep end though, diving into a vast pool of astral matter as he does on spaced-out closer “Skinny Mini”, it’s a deeply immersive and transporting album.

It's the communal sentiment underlying such ostensibly personal heartache that gives Williams's songs much of their power, that draws the listener in as an emotional fellow-traveller.