He’s released a peach of an album.

It’s a detail that in outlook and delivery brings to mind the offbeat confessionals of the late Dory Previn. Mitski’s a rare talent.

The Mountain is Gorillaz’s best album since 2010’s Plastic Beach. It’s ambitious, kaleidoscopic, thematically cohesive and packed with the kind of bruised melodies that cement the Blur frontman’s status as the bard of middle-aged melancholia.

These are great musicians and great songs, assembled for an even better cause.

Barnett’s fourth record Creature of Habit sees her replace rip-roaring rock with earnest self-reflection, all while leaning into a softer sonic palette.

Sexistential is a stunning search for self-acceptance after motherhood and a long-term relationship coming undone.

Problems arise with I know You’re Hurting and Life Boat, a combined 10 minutes the album could arguably do without. The same could be said for the five minutes of thank you credits in Fin. Where the hell is my editor? might have been a more apt battle cry. Still, given its emotional heft and likely cultural impact, it’s an album that could turn Raye into Britain’s Beyoncé. It’s a towering achievement.

Showing little signs of ring-rust, Arirang is a great comeback by an outfit that even hardcore fans may have felt had lost their way across a series of increasingly syrupy releases prior to their hiatus. They have returned to their hip-hop roots and are re-engaging with their Korean identity.

It is fantastic to hear these artists back on the barricades, performing with energy and passion.

The whole album is a lot of fun. .... Britpop may ultimately be too old-fashioned to put the 51-year-old Williams back on the pop throne, but if it had come out in 1995, it might be counted as a vintage Britpop classic by now.

Probing the paradoxes of someone who feels powerful in her art but vulnerable in her life, Welch’s masterful album affirms that she really is one of the greats.

The power of West End Girl lies in the way it clearly presents itself as one side of the story: a woman trapped in her own head. Narrative tension builds because listeners can’t pull out for a wider perspective on the situation, allowing us to share in Allen’s claustrophobia and paranoia.

What Wet Leg have done instead is nudge their formula – and their image – enough to maintain people’s interest yet not enough to alienate those drawn to their innate weirdness in the first place. It was the right move

Now, it has come full circle, Carner has matured and Hopefully! represents the poetry of a loving father.

Van the Man is back doing what he does best. Remembering Now, his 47th album, is 14 songs of beautiful and reflective music addressing aging, romance and a sense of yearning for the landscapes and landmarks that made us who we are.

There’s so much to enjoy here for long-standing fans – a mellow soundtrack perhaps for the four-wheel pilgrimage down to Glastonbury, with some fittingly thought-provoking messaging on automotive responsibility going forwards.

Lotus is an absorbing and powerfully honest album.

Delivers what most Sparks fans want from them most – a barrage of the kind of eccentric yet immediately connective synth-pop bangers, which only Chaplin-moustached keyboard maestro Ron Mael, now 79, seems capable of writing, and which Russell, 76, his sky-scraping high notes miraculously uneroded by passing time, delivers with characteristic theatrical gusto.

Whether Pot Of Gold’s lullaby or any of Felt Better Alive is exactly hit material by 2025 standards is hard to say, but it’s wonderful to hear this wayward hero sound so happy to be alive.

Like the best rap albums, Home? is infused with musicality, drawing on reggae, afrobeat, garage and R’n’B, punctuated by horns, guitars and a swimmy dubby sensuality. Wretch is a sharp wordsmith who also sings with a raw sweetness reminiscent of Bob Marley.

Pink Elephant doesn’t have quite the same swagger as earlier albums. It is almost too personal, like listening to a preacher begging for forgiveness from his flock. Yet the sheer power of Arcade Fire in full flight should be enough to restore any sinner’s faith in rock and roll.

Despite the album’s occasionally jolting stylistic shift from darkness to light, there’s something reassuringly well-crafted about Sable, Fable. In a world of fluff and mayhem, it feels solid, needed even.

This is a set of absolute bangers including a barrel-house Crocodile Rock romp through Little Richard’s Bible, the twisty Americana-flavoured fantasia of Riverman and a moving Elton solo finale on When This Old World Is Done Me. On such evidence, we’re not done with him yet, nor he with us.

Folky stand-outs like Monochrome cast a warm glow, and Carry On concludes with the expertly poignant wordplay and emotive refrain which will surely have Anglo-American audiences weeping. Five albums in, the Mumfords will, indeed, carry on.

On the strength of Tell Dem It’s Sunny’s liltingly exploratory grooves, a world-wide audience will surely start getting acquainted with this maverick icon-in-waiting.

For Melancholy Brunettes is an odd, subtle, suffocating album essaying a complexity and ambiguity you don’t often hear in modern pop.

The 11 songs here are another slice of juicy joy, and the final track implies that it won’t actually be the last we hear from him.

Mayhem is exciting but exhausting, a battering ram sonic assault. In such bland pop times, it’s good to see her parking her tanks back on the dance floor.

I am blown away by this album, which will reward a lot of listening.

It [TV Dinners] is one of a handful of exceptional songs that raise this album above Fender’s base level tendency towards passionate but undistinguished rocking. The most exquisite is the clipped guitar and synth mesh of the downbeat Crumbling Empire, that brushes against Springsteen’s Philadelphia with hints of Don Henley’s The Boys of Summer in a song about returning to the ruined scenes of his misspent youth.

Pop music has become saturated with soft, emotional ballads (the songs of Billie Eilish and Gracie Abrams spring to mind). McRae offers a welcome change – if you want tunes packed with snappy, catchy choruses and racy lyrics that make you feel powerful and sexy, then look no further.

Deep-pocketed obsessives who’ve managed to keep pace with Young’s reissues may be disappointed to hear that most of the raw versions of these songs have appeared before. But for more regular fans, the music on this album is wonderful. It’s supremely chilled yet deeply soulful, a dream soundtrack for early-summer evenings

It more than stands on its own merits.

Automatic is a lovely thing, made with understated soul and humour.

Alexander’s fantastic voice is pushed to the fore, making the most of rich, appealing, high vocal tones reminiscent of Green Gartside of Scritti Politti or (in more modern terms) multi-billion streaming superstar the Weeknd. Even Dizzy sounds better in this context, a breathless banger that shakes off its Eurovision failure to spin around the dancefloor once more.

There’s a wonderfully empowering sense of elders handing down sublime idealism and wisdom for our entertainment and enlightenment. Behind dodgy titular spelling, Renascence is top-class.

Hurry Up Tomorrow is certainly a bold way to drop the curtain on a phenomenal career, a luscious pop epic about how awful modern fame really is.

Variously evoking euphoria and melancholy, awe and introspection, Mogwai’s latest triumph further cements their status as Great British originals.

The joy of Eusexua is not so much its oversexed content as its alien sounds, incorporating elements of acoustic balladry, industrial rock, ambient soundscapes, moody trip-hop (one of her co-producers is Marius de Vries who has worked with Bjork and Bowie) and shimmery electropop (on Like A Girl and Perfect Stranger, Twigs evokes Madonna and Kylie Minogue at their most sparkling).

It is another fine album from one of the country’s finest singer-songwriters, quietly but productively ploughing his own fertile furrow.

Lambrini Girls’ music is not for everyone, but nor is it meant to be, and, taken as a statement of intent from one of Britain’s most hyped new bands, it’s a pretty ballsy one. Big d--k energy, indeed.

With his new album, Afrikan Alien, Salieu cements all this raw potential by creating a galvanising record that roots itself in uplifting immigrants and unifying warring factions of an inner-city community.

Mahashmashana is Tillman’s best album yet. It’s hearty. It’s massive. It’s (captain) fantastic.

The title From Zero suggests a band starting again. That’s not strictly true. But it sounds like a thrilling second chapter.

Like many of his recent releases, it is bathed in qualities of ancient grace, a tender, philosophical, sometimes humorous looking back at life and forward towards death that reflects his advancing years, yet it also sounds astonishingly contemporary.

In moments, it becomes too saccharine, particularly with the tooth-achingly twee track Darling. But .... When he then takes aim at rappers who fake their street credibility despite enjoying middle-class childhoods (probably a diss towards Drake), you’re reminded that there are few major label emcees still capable of such honesty.

There is something so cathartically bleak about Songs of a Lost World, so epically pessimistic and emotionally wrought, that the results are perversely invigorating, transmuting powerful feelings of loss, grief, anxiety, anger and self-doubt into a work of such grandeur it leaves the listener strangely exhilarated and uplifted.

You’re So Impatient rattles along like a lost mid-’60s garage-psychedelia nugget, but with a simmering fury that lurks unresolved. The near title track, Jane (The Night the Zombies Came) gives baroque chamber-pop a surreal cinematic twist, with its Morricone twang and offbeat “Jane!” chorus shouts.

Everything about this album suggests someone at peace, from the tone of voice to the smoothness of sound and transparency of lyrics. It strikes me as Marling’s least ambitious yet most satisfying album, as if she has stopped trying to write self-consciously great songs and yet they still arrive, smaller but perfectly formed.

It’s Heaton through and through, as are cultural reference points including Bovril, bus drivers, 50p bets, Deirdre and Ken Barlow, and pubs. Lots of pubs. It’s a bit of a musical picnic.

Taken alongside Brat’s first iteration, it’s a fun, crazed musical triumph; explored as its own entity, it can feel somewhat like a cynical marketing ploy dreamt up by suited bigwigs.

Safe hands, then, when it comes to glossy, catchy hooks and tight structure: almost every track on It’s Nothing feels like it could be a single, as much 1980s synth pop as 1970s soft rock, with an undeniable glimmer of Haim on songs like Rotten Peaches.

It’s the same mix that made their Mercury-winning album so irresistible, but the range of musical references from jazz and West African Highlife and the London street is even bolder, the solos from keyboardist Joe Armon-Jones and trumpeter Ife Ogunjobi freer and more generous.

Through his distinctive voice and sound, Mustafa has carved out his own section within folk. Finding beauty in the ugly, this assured artist bared all.

In Colour might have been more ambitious in its production, but In Waves is a no-nonsense, euphoric work, perfect for a sunny day or a dance inside a club.

If the song strategies seem predictable and the sentiments over familiar, the album as a whole still grips my heart and squeezes. I find myself wanting to listen to it again and again, and I can’t say that about every album I review.

The songs are cerebrally bold but really get going when Gilmour finishes singing and launches into ambitious codas that remind us what an extraordinarily gifted guitarist he is, with impeccable touch and tone that can shift sublimely from tender melodiousness to flaming rock-outs.

It reminds me how much I miss the devilish Old Nick, but it’s a privilege to bear witness to such a beautifully realised artistic, emotional and philosophical journey by one of the greatest singer-songwriters of our time.

Espresso shot Carpenter into the spotlight, but Short n’ Sweet shows she is here for the long haul.

The Texas-raised Malone proves genuinely good at this stuff, with a sharp lyrical wit and sweet singing voice that rises to heights of soulful passion when needs be, notably on the disco flecked What Don’t Belong to Me and twisty alt-folk of Nosedive (the latter with Lainey Wilson).

Lungu Boy should go down as another triumph for Asake. The Nigerian’s third album is at once cohesive and versatile and will surely see deserved play in the bedroom, at the gym, on the dancefloor and beyond.

Don’t go into this record expecting grand revelations or the sort of ferocious rock swagger that characterises the work of other artists who have worked with Rubin in the past; its softness is wholly responsible for its charm.

It doesn’t let up for a moment: all 10 songs open with clever soundbite hooks as they push hard into verses that sound like choruses, bridges that sounds like anthems, and choruses that sound like Chris Martin, Ed Sheeran and Elton John got together to write the ultimate Eurovision jingle.

The Death of Slim Shady is funny, shocking, contradictory, utterly outrageous, offensive, sentimental, clever, dumb and occasionally even (whisper it) wise.

This is Kasabian’s second album with Pizzorno on the microphone, so tightly honed that if it had been a young band’s debut, I think we’d be clambering over ourselves proclaiming Kasabian rock’s saviours.

On her second album, This Wasn’t Meant For You Anyway, Lola Young has all of the grit and charisma of a seasoned artist.

The album is full of such deft perspective shifts and twists, on sharply written songs composed mostly with her eldest son Teddy (a fine singer-songwriter in his own right).

The Secret of Us marks her move into a more anthemic sound – one that sounds remarkably Swiftian, ready to be blasted out in larger venues. .... The album also features Close to You, a track Abrams teased seven whole years ago but never released – and it’s the clear highlight, all deliciously retro-synths and introspective lyrics that refrain from taking themselves too seriously.

It is clear she has found strength in the discomfort. Reckoning with self-destructive feelings of fear, dissociation and anger, the album is a journey to personal healing, ending with the gentle song Invisible Wounds, which evokes the image of Aurora tending to her wounds, stitching her heart back up.

While there is room for improvement, I Hear You is an impressive debut album, tackling a multitude of genres with remarkable confidence. It’s yet another step in the right direction for Peggy Gou.

Charli has crafted a perfect pop album (with the help of the most in-demand producer in the business, AG Cook). Brat is authentic, sensitive, and you’ll be raring to go out once you’ve finished listening.

It’s fair to say there is nothing groundbreaking on offer, just another set of beautifully constructed and performed songs of soul and meaning.

Dark Times undoubtedly makes for more challenging listening than Ramona…, but for listeners willing to put in the time and effort, prepare to be rewarded.

Sometimes, Cage the Elephant’s lyrics can veer into a teen angst that jars against their middle-aged image: “I don’t want to play those games, will we ever be the same?”. But when they sound this good, they can just about get away with it.

Eilish has made something rich, strange, smart, sad and wise enough to stand comparison with that classic [Joni Mitchell's Blue], a heartbreak masterpiece for her generation, and for the ages.

Chinouriri has cited African choral group Ladysmith Black Mambazo as one of her major inspirations – alongside Coldplay, Lily Allen and the indie folk trio Daughter. It’s her range that lends Chinouriri success in this latest release.

A Dream Is All We Know is that rare thing: a perfectly crafted, concise collection of 12 songs that brim over with good-will and optimism.

Lipa’s cooly commanding voice holds the attention on expansive melodies that make the most of her range, flowing between rich low tones, a husky middle and sweet highs. It is precise, luxurious, energetic without ever really breaking a sweat.

At times you might wish for a bit more sonic edge to match some of the biting lyrics, but this is a solid debut from exciting young talent – there’s little evidence of any teething problems here.

Like every previous Pet Shop Boys album, Nonetheless is clever, fun, and at times very touching.

Clark never makes the mistake of letting an instinct for experiment detract from her elegant pop songcraft. All Born Screaming is an art-rock classic for the ages.

While it is less commercially focused, there is no discernible drop of quality on the expanded Anthology, crammed to bursting with beautifully worked songs that add different shades and angles to her essential premise of a woman working out why her love life has left her in such emotional tatters.

This irresistible album is yet more evidence that London’s musical scene might just be the liveliest in the world.

Made up of 11 taut tracks, the highlights come thick and fast.

In terms of emotional insight and sheer singer-songwriter genius, it is not in the league of such heartbreak classics as Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks and Joni Mitchell's Blue, but at least it reaches for such heights.

With This Could Be Texas, Leeds-based quartet English Teacher have crafted a record really quite striking in its lyrical and sonic ambition.

Clever, sexy, angry, soulful, witty and fantastically bold, Beyoncé stirs up the western and puts the you know what into country. I think it’s a masterpiece, but don’t expect to hear it at the Grand Ole’ Opry any time soon.

The best thing about Real Power is the way three perfectly balanced musicians concoct a sound of such thrilling dynamism, wit and energy without ever getting in each other’s way.

Another beautiful slice of country-tinged magic that never descends into nostalgia.

Ultimately, this is a brilliant record about clearing out the emotional crap and stripping things back to their essence – the perfect soundtrack to lull us out of our collective wintering and into some mental spring cleaning.

Eternal Sunshine is pop at its sexiest – 13 songs designed to lodge themselves in your head for eternity, whether you like it or not.

You don’t have to be greater than the sum of your parts when the parts are already as great as this.

11 songs of such staggering clarity that I found myself breathing a sigh of relief halfway through that bands like this still exist in Britain.

Coming Home is a hugely impressive reminder of Usher's pop skills, and another testament to the enduring appeal of high class RnB.

It’s a remarkably polished debut.

Wall of Eyes comprises just eight tracks but it’s far from slight. String arrangements by the London Contemporary Orchestra add a lush cinematic quality to the album.

Little Rope is undoubtedly Sleater-Kinney’s most commercial album yet. Crusader, in particular, brings to mind the palatable grunginess of No Doubt, and lead single Say It Like You Mean It – with a video starring Succession’s J Smith-Cameron – echoes WH Auden’s Funeral Blues.

The mix of trap grooves and synth balladry is perfectly of the moment, lacking the boldness of a truly original talent. Yet there is something appealing in the sweet melodies and sour attitude of a singer who sounds like she might actually be starting to enjoy herself.