A record that captures nostalgia without devolving into anachronism or retrograde – a fine line that Nas is well-versed in toeing. As ever, Nas is his own lynchpin. Tracks including “Store Run” and “Moments” demonstrate the rapper’s gift as a lucid narrator of his own experience.

An album which contains no filler at all, each track blooming in its own way like a collection of strange desert succulents, with a whole lot of hollerin' and a touch of Lieber-Stollerin'.

Rebooting the euphoria of their 2004 debut, Funeral, WE is a big old blast of an album. One destined to lift the spirit, inflate the soul and get fans dancing giddily through the carnage of 2022.

Big Thief have done it again. Despite the 2024 departure of their bassist of nine years, Max Oleartchik, the Brooklyn-built indie band’s sixth album sounds like another instant classic.

Close your eyes as you listen to Montero and you can almost feel the rainbow confetti falling from the ceiling and sticking to your tears. This album isn’t the creation of a gimmick-spinner. It’s an album bursting with technicolour heart.

If such bittersweet reflections came packaged on a solo Albarn release, they’d probably be set to sorrowful, detached, acousto-electronic sounds. But his old friends have alchemised those sentiments into songs that elevate his suburban tristesse into moments of sheer ecstasy.

His brilliant fourth album Love Is Magic takes listeners on a similar thrill ride [as his 50th birthday], dominated by swirling loops of grand, romantic melody, sly twists of sardonic wit and heart-stopping drops of sheer honesty.

A record that will go down as a milestone not just as a work of art in its own right, but as the perfect celebration of queerness, female power, and self-worth.

It sounds – for the first time in a decade – like Clark has slipped out of her high heels and found an equal strength in this barefooted soul.

Thoughtful, engaging and utterly contemporary, it’s one of the albums of the year.

Over 15 tracks, a giddy mix of moods, genres, cultures, languages and time periods is woven together with virtuosic ease by Anoushka Shankar’s liquid sitar, Johnny Marr’s shimmering guitar and Ajay Prasanna’s gliding bamboo flute.

Is there nothing they can't do?

A record that finds the 52-year-old Grant on his most romantic, melodic form, as he looks back on the pleasures and fears he faced growing up as a gay kid in America’s Midwest. ... A lovely, generous album.

[Wrecking Ball is] unquestionably his most potent album so far this century.

There’s so much deliciously analogue texture to cherish here – all bakelite, mahogany, coconut shells and bougainvillea, with woodwind you could drink and percussion you could tuck behind your ear. It’s 2023’s hippest release. Get up, get down, kick back to it.

A brilliant, nigh-on faultless work from an acknowledged master.

Popular Problems--note the drolly contradictory title--finds his agreeable baritone growl applied as usual to romantic disappointment and political venality with vivid, jolting metaphors (“I see the ghost of culture, with numbers on his wrist”) cutting to the quick.

Her appetite for the heart-on-sleeve razzle dazzle of it all is glorious. This Music May Contain Hope is a pure audio spectacle that will have you screaming for an encore.

It’s an album that makes a church of its elegant electronica: all vaulting arcs of yearning melody and glimmers of stained glass that dance upwards, to the familiar urban spire of Thorn’s beautiful, hangdog voice.

This intense story-driven format lets her sound sharper, smarter, and more clear-eyed than before. .... Allen sounds newly alive in the contradictions we loved her for: acid-tongued and soft-hearted, ironic and sincere, broken again but alright, still.

The result is beautiful, visceral and, predictably, emotionally devastating.

It’s rare for music to be both deep and breezy, isn’t it? Minnie Riperton does it on “Lovin’ You” (1974) – all those casual la-la-la-las sinking into something profound. Corinne Bailey Rae did it too, with “Put Your Records On” (2006), flagging the nourishment of some much-needed downtime. Olivia Dean’s second album, The Art of Loving, manages the same feat.

Though already condemned by Van himself, there's much to appreciate about this 4-CD expanded edition of one of the greatest albums ever recorded. It's fascinating to follow the development of a track such as "Caravan" across half a dozen takes.

In its commitment to euphoria, Dance Fever is an album that looks forward to the release of all the pandemic’s pent-up energy at this summer’s festivals. ... I hope she never learns to keep a lid on her wonderful wildness.

It's an enchanting snapshot of British rock'n'roll at its moment of greatest revelation, the point at which the Tin Pan Alley production line of ersatz Elvises was rendered utterly obsolete.

One of the most thoughtful, moving and necessary albums of 2019 so far. ... Tracks are at once astute and deeply personal in how they capture vignettes of everyday life and spin them into important lessons.

On Noonday Dream, he expands the Cornish landscape that has impacted his previous work and brings in sounds and instruments that spark the imagination for places further afield, in the most exquisite way.

Although the sonic mood mellows after the first two tracks, listeners will be invited to share the transcendent joy in memories of a lost child; the awe of an uxorious lover whose prayer-like love for his wife is a continual saving grace; and the frustration of a caged man with an “open road” of a heart.