If you were enchanted by Skeleton Tree’s other-worldly sadness, Lovely Creatures offers an extraordinary illustration of Cave’s restless creativity. It leaves you relishing the possibility that the best is still to come.

This fabulous box-set finally unites the trilogy. Tragic, poignant, yet uplifting, Newbury's tough-guy singing will often inexorably reduce the listener to tears.

There is nothing disappointing about the way he conjures art from emotional defeat. Toast deserves to be acclaimed amongst his finest works. Twenty-one years since the album was made, Young has reminded us once again why he stands tall amongst the greats of the rock era.

What feels right (or at least absolutely right now) about Metric is the perfect balance, every element in its place and in service of a set of sinuous, hook-laden, elegantly crafted pop songs.

As a body of work, Crushing feels small, intimate and inward. But these are big songs, full of big ideas, from a big talent.

Blue Weekend both refines that sound and takes it in dizzying new directions. Rowsell’s lyrics have never been more absorbing in their examination of friendship, heartache, anxiety, acceptance and self-confidence.

An album for the ages, as well as being an awards season shoo-in, it is sure to succeed in doing precisely what Burna told Billboard his music is all about – “bringing people who don’t even speak the same language together to dance.”

The brilliance of No Thank You is how Simz uses her brazenly unapologetic narrative to spin out larger points about institutional and generational racism, the danger of business practices indifferent to their human impact, and links all of that to contemporary mental health crises.

For an album drawing on despair and recovery, Dancing with the Devil… The Art of Starting Over is a life-affirming pleasure from top to bottom.

It is a reminder that, beyond the thrill-seeking singles, the mainstream audience still favour meaningful, emotional songs, delivered with passion. Rag ’n’ Bone Man’s debut is full of them.

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.

Hegarty has mastered the art of turning performance into a kind of ritual ceremony and the magic of these symphonic concert recordings blows their previously released versions out of the water.

Long Live the Angels is something special, the sound of a gifted, grown-up singer-songwriter using all the tools at her disposal to put her own heart back together.

Perhaps the most extraordinary achievement of this funny, hard-hitting, thrilling album is that it actually sounds like a coherent and purposeful piece of work, a statement of what hip hop can mean, and where it can go.

Cohen’s triumphant return to the live arena is reflected in the growling assuredness of his vocals. An absolute treat.

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

It’s an expansion of her wonderfully experimental R&B, with all the candour listeners expect from this masterful songwriter. ... SOS is well worth the wait.

There cannot be another musical duet around at the moment who are able to make two acoustic guitars and two voices produce a sound that is so subtle and yet powerful.

Swift’s remake is astonishing in its exactitude, another reminder that she is a star of a different magnitude with a mastery of her own talents and a bold business acumen. .... All of the new songs are satisfyingly deft and clever, replete with sinuous melodies, burbling synths and agitated percussion that correspond with the updated eighties stylings of the original. .... The one new song that really punches its weight with Swift’s original 1989 singles is the razor sharp Is It Over Now?

Mixing up elements of rock, pop, blues, jazz, soul and funk, each song finds its way into a supple groove and just bounces around there as though Amadou's guitar strings and Mariam's vocal chords were made of musical elastic.

This live album by The Jimi Hendrix Experience is a compelling and beautiful tribute.

Its beauty lies in the intuitive simpatico of the playing, with different elements rising to the surface at just the right moment. It used to take them months in the studio to achieve this blend. Now these old road warriors can conjure it in a single take.

The album was recorded in Berlin and the dark pulse of that Krautrock influence gives the songs a steely sleekness of purpose (and real cohesion), while the band layer a vigorous variety of sounds and tempos on top to keep things interesting.

The pure beauty and emotion of Rosalia’s vocals and the sensational grooviness of her rhythms all speak for themselves, offering a fantastically fresh take on Latin flavours and modern urban pop.

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

It is an enormous pleasure to report that the new David Bowie album is an absolute wonder: urgent, sharp-edged, bold, beautiful and baffling, an intellectually stimulating, emotionally charged, musically jagged, electric bolt through his own mythos and the mixed-up, celebrity-obsessed, war-torn world of the 21st century.

The joy here is in basking in the creative process, how Dylan chipped away at differing tempos, alternate arrangements and revised lyrics for each composition, ultimately to arrive at the final 11 tracks.

Underneath the almost soporifically smooth old-soul and country polish, Adams's ear for a delicate melody and feel for the shadowy nuances of emotion give this latest chapter beautiful depth.

The weirder moments--the molten strings and xylophones--redefine the band as a powerful and original force.

This album proves Lewis can master the mainstream, too, with earworms to soundtrack parties from Brooklyn to Brixton. So much more than “just a DJ”, one suspects that within a few short years, Lewis will be selling out stadiums.

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.

Her most measured and mature work, and perhaps the most accessible to those as yet

It is, rather, an hour of wonderfully immersive music, which moves from dancefloor physicality to spiritual meditation with the dexterity – we can confirm – of a true master.

Women In Music Part III just hits it from top to bottom. It is the album in which Haim at last fulfil their potential, a summery California pop rock treat in which the blissful ambience is backed up with emotional grit and substance.

At its heart, this is a serious work, with an underlying somberness. ... Almost 60 years since we first heard from him, the old protest singer is still composing extraordinary anthems for our changing times.

[Giles] Martin and co-engineer Sam Okell have done a loving job, getting away from some of the oddities of the familiar stereo mix done by Abbey Road engineers. ... It is like seeing a favourite movie again in high definition. It doesn't replace the original, it enhances it.

On a production level, this album is cutting-edge, on a lyrical level it is brutally brilliant. It will melt your ears and your heart.

Scrub away reputations and this album is so much stronger than the latter-day works of many of Fay's contemporaries.

Bridgers’s modernity is actually a kind of timelessness, yet delivered in an emotional and lyrical lexicon that speaks directly to this moment.

It’s bleakness on a stick. But Anima is also a dystopian rhapsody that will stay with you long after the moment and rates as one of the purest expressions yet of Yorke’s devastated world view.

Cuz I Love You is absolutely splendid, a joyous album to put a smile on your face, a song in your heart and your booty on the dance floor.

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

The song kick-starts the album's powerful sense of forward motion, of a woman struggling to wrestle free from expectations, relationships and religious convention.

Creating a 21st-century album that is still able to deal in an original and touching way with the big and interesting subjects of love and death is a trick that many folk and country musicians try to pull off and few achieve, especially in the impressive way that Gretchen Peters does with her 2015 album Blackbirds.

Her approach is confident and challenging, but not arch – several direct, haunting love songs are as delicate and affecting as any Adele tear-jerker.

Welch's singing throughout is extraordinary, shifting gears effortlessly from melancholic softness to high-powered exultation, even ululation. Every gasp, growl and fluttery trill seems perfectly placed.

Welch’s self-mythologising is extravagant, her poetic language overloaded, yet her lush music binds it all into something magical on songs that exploit explicitly female archetypes to examine her own psyche.

A tone of urgent honesty pulses through the album, a visceral need to connect that shatters the production's glittering surfaces.

Whatever Big Time’s genre, it is a mature and accomplished album; a requiem yet also a quiet celebration. It’s probably the most honest album you’ll hear all year.

The new Rolling Stones album is the best thing they have made since their Seventies glory days. Which, it might reasonably be argued, de facto makes it the best rock’n’ roll album of the past four decades at least.

The Magic Whip turns out to be a triumphant comeback that retains the band's core identity while allowing ideas they'd fermented separately over the past decade to infuse their sound with mature and peculiar new flavour combinations.

The results are fantastic: an album of world-beating standard yet still intimate and friendly, an epic of the everyday, a romance of the real.

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 lads have given this album everything, everything and then some.

From DNA’s punchy electro mantra about identity to LOVE’s tender sing-song reggae pop meditation on fickle emotions, DAMN is an album of surface sheen and hidden depths, where words and music operate in beautiful synchronicity, a constantly unfolding dance that lends each new approach a sense of investigation and revelation. It is dazzling.

Now he inhabits classic lines by songwriters like Johnny Mercer with weathered ease.

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.

This anthology provides a marvellous opportunity to revisit Mitchell in her glorious prime. Indispensable.

She has drawn comparison with Kate Bush and Bjork, not because she sounds like them, but because she has a similar blend of extraordinary vocal ability, florid imagination, and genre-bending boldness. Desire is the album where it all comes together for this late blooming art-pop siren.

Some will scoff, but imagine a beloved grandfather at a family gathering singing ballads of love and yearning from his lost youth, and you will get some idea of the power of this extraordinary record.

The movement back and forth between the chiselled simplicity of the core Suite itself and the freedom of the improvisations that spin out from them creates a sense of epic scale. It’s a more than worthy addition to the Coltrane recorded legacy.

For a flag-waving LGBTQ artist riding the transgender express, the secret of Letissier's crossover charm is that she never lets polemic get in the way of a slick hook. It may be pop with a purpose, but first and foremost it is pop with a damn catchy chorus.

This set is a fine reminder of his magnificent legacy of film work.

Amaarae – real name Ama Serwah Genfi – has crafted and compiled 14 captivating and refreshing tunes, touching on topics from sensuality to spirituality.

A lovely, and rewarding record.

If you like quality songwriting delivered with panache, On The Line is on the money.

Dirty Computer establishes itself as a contender for album of the year, in more ways than one. The witty, interlinked songs tackle subjects that have fuelled much of the discourse around “woke” social consciousness in the age of #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter.

The album offers a rousing, belligerently upbeat response to global crisis, albeit at the time of composition they were addressing climate change, environmental activism, the impact of austerity and rise of fascism. ... This is the sound of a group breaking out of their shell and demanding to be heard.

The effect is classic Suede, with mature moments of recollection in tranquillity.

[James Blake's] most fully-realised album to date. ... Dizzyingly romantic.

With a rare display of vulnerability and contrition, grace and grown-up wisdom, Jay Z has delivered one of the most mature albums in hip hop history.

A brilliant tribute album, showcasing properly Lead Belly's cultural legacy.

“Wow” seems an appropriate response to this sublime album. ... Sam Lee’s Old Wow is a spine-tingling collection of traditional songs, artfully reinterpreted for contemporary ears and concerns. It is folk music that demands to be heard in the 21st century.

The songwriting class shows. In addition, the musicianship is top notch.

The wild, rattling bawlers are each distinctively turbocharged with reckless and richly textured energy, while the ballads run poignantly on their rims, leaking emotion.

Because there’s a rap-type of percussion to her music, it’s hard to tell whether she’s ready to break into an indie harmony or some lo-fi poetry – yet this unpredictability is what makes PAINLESS so exciting to sit through. ... This should rubber-stamp Nilüfer Yanya as a generational star.

A long, sad, brooding mediation on grief, the 17th album from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds is simultaneously their loveliest and most terrible.

Assured and still in thrall to the spinning lights, Little Red confidently and unpretentiously reflects Katy B’s transition from eager young clubber with a curfew to a mature young woman with a home of her own and the ability to hold a little something in reserve.

No doubts about this: Short Movie is a masterpiece.

Atkins makes the material sound genuine, largely because it is perfect for her. Where previously her slight, observational songs seemed barely able to carry her powerful voice, the emotional and musical heft of these styles enables her to really spread her vocal wings.

For all its despair at the cost of war, this is not a protest record, rather a consideration of our place in the greater scheme of things.

Grant brilliantly skewers his own depression, addiction, bitchiness and heartbreak throughout a record which finds him mixing his penchant for corduroy, laid-back melodies with a new, rawly exposed synth-pop that feels like it's seeped up from an underground carpark, all hard concrete and cold, flickering fluorescents.

A fizzy lifting drink of an album.

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

Ultimately, this is an album in which a troubled spirit seeks the relief of music to mesmerising and charged effect. And that is timeless.

Months from her 40th birthday, Ethiopian-American artist Kelela Mizanekristos has blessed us with a sexy, sultry masterclass in RnB.

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.

Throughout it all, Sheeran stays true to the essential artistic notions of the classic singer-songwriter genre by treating his music as a vehicle for emotional veracity, personal revelation and universal inclusion.

The result is a 12-track riot of feisty, unapologetically forthright, dance-led pop that embraces femininity of all kinds.

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.

This is a record Guy Clark can surely be proud to have as a tribute.

Their return should be heralded from on high, because it is the boldest, smartest, most colourful and purely pleasurable dance album of this decade.

There’s not an ounce of fat on these eight, energised tracks. Everything is sharpened by the awareness of mortality and there is alchemy’s in Pop’s ability to infuse such resignation with real electricity.

It is, as ever, heart-on-sleeve stuff, with all of Coldplay’s musical diversions bound together by Martin’s golden gift for melody, almost simplistically direct lyrics and emotive crooning. But, oh my goodness, you’d have to be made of sterner stuff than I to resist.

Bush is still making music that intrudes and abducts.

Does it succeed in his aim? Triumphantly. With bells on. Tinker bells, even.

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.

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.