His vocals are by far the album’s most potent aspect, bringing grace and wonder even to the more routine material, and hoisting the better songs to classic status.

Del Rey’s deliciously twisted pop fuses hip hop beats with her breathy vocal delivery; their mutual power is in their ability to keep things hidden, whilst seeming utterly explicit. It’s a heady mix to be caught up in.

Twelve Nudes is Furman’s most urgent and cathartic record to date.

Tegan and Sara’s last album, 2016’s Love You To Death, was a bold stadium-pop record; this one is less polished, but just as punchy. ... Most people read their teenage diary and cringe. With Hey I’m Just Like You, Tegan and Sara have painstakingly, tenderly, written theirs out again.

he record is a confident immersion into a genre he’s only toyed with before. And just as Good Thing never fully sacrificed Bridges’ style, neither does Gold-Digger forget his roots.

An ambitious reach for new heights.

The results are frequently transformative, and always enjoyable.

Eight albums in, and some of that edgy math-rock experimentalism has been lost, along with two original members of Leon Bridges’ band. But what they now lack in raw, ferocious edginess, they make up for glorious driving riff on Performance.

What’s impressive is how Thundercat makes this music, with its complex structures and zigzagging rhythms, so human.

Working with a lo-fi palette of mostly acoustic instruments, they’ve conjured a weird wonderland in which Angela Carter meets Bjork round at Robert Wyatt’s.

Few songwriters can juggle seriousness and whimsy as adeptly as Paul Simon on Stranger To Stranger, his best album in several years.

The past typically isn’t the most comfortable place to inhabit, but Swift embodies her younger self fully, imbuing these tracks with the same immediacy and emotional heft as she did all those years ago. Country twang or not.

Thanks to the remarkable instrument that is Furler's voice: huge but fragile, fearlessly ragged and wild, seemingly a conduit of a tumultuous past that has included drug addiction and mental health issues, it perfectly counterpoints her songs' robust construction in a way that makes you wish she kept every song she wrote for herself.

Despite the occasional challenge of big blasts of (gleefully disruptive) discord on tracks such as “trolle-gabba”, those considering dipping a toe into avant garde pop will find the waters are warm on Fossora. Give it time – it’ll grow on you. Like a fungus.

A confident return from an artist now comfortable in who she is.

Musically, Dark Matter is some of their catchiest and punchiest material in years. It’ll have you nodding your head – but it’ll never let you get comfortable.

Accompanied by a crack hometown band for whom the intricacies of New Orleans’ distinctive second-line rhythms are clearly second nature, it’s a parade of infectious funk and soul right from the moment Bruce Springsteen romps through “Right Place Wrong Time”, to the Doctor’s closing roll through “I Walk On Guilded Splinters” and “Such A Night”.

Commontime is full of engaging ideas and genial character, by some distance the most assured and complete of Field Music’s releases.

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.

The simpler arrangements allow more room for Rhys's sleek harmonies to drive his whimsical wordplay: accordingly, the album has the lush, beguiling charm of a sun-kissed soft-rock album by The Beach Boys or The Young Rascals.

The song order mirrors the real-life messiness of dismantling a past relationship while falling in love with someone new. ... She frequently weaponises her voice, snarling and howling her pain into the ether; on the French-spoken piano ballad “Falaise de Malaise”, though, she is whisperingly vulnerable. What an extraordinary artist Martha Wainwright is.

On Everything Hits at Once, the Austin-formed indie veterans have compiled a glimmering collection of songs that date back to 2001’s Girls Can Tell, or are as recent as to come from 2017’s Hot Thoughts. There’s also a brand-new song, closer “No Bullets Spent” (built using parts from “Dracula’s Cigarette” of their Get Nice! EP), which is a low-simmering take on power and corruption.

Dave Alvin's latest album may be his best yet, its tales of the flipside of the American Dream set to gritty blues riffs that speak of long months on the road.

An album that’s as enchanting as it is astute, from a band to treasure.

At its best, on “Ride My Dub”, “Expanding Dub” and “Call It Dub”, the results offer snatched glimpses of the eternal in the fleeting moment. Even better than its parent album.

The meringue-light and snow-bright Visions is a sort of cut-up, laptronica take on the kind of sugary, girly electro-pop confections Prince produced for a succession of female starlets in the late 1980s.

On her third album, the self-titled Kelsea, she finds a balance between the two. There’s more than a hint of early Taylor Swift on perky opener “Overshare”, while “Club” is as uplifting a “not going out” song as you could hope for.

"Moving" apes the shameless anthemic yearning of Coldplay, and "A Different Room" has the windy bluster of U2. But it's the tiredness of the songwriting that cripples Where You Stand.