From the arresting cover (a comically unsalacious shot of a semi-naked Hackman holding a piglet to her breasts) to the startling contents, Any Human Friend signals Hackman’s coming of age as an artist with real purpose and 
star power.

The result is the gorgeous Tomorrow is My Turn, which shows off the full singing range and power of the frontwoman for innovative string-band trio the Carolina Chocolate Drops.

Nike, a skeletal hip-hop number that hears Shygirl compare the joy of a fling to ordering a Big Mac, is one of a few dud moments. Otherwise, Nymph is a distinctive, sensual and striking debut.

It's great to have Lee Ann Womack back with such a sad and lovely album.

Here, in the company of his oldest colleagues, he [Damon Albarn] takes stock of his past in the most finely crafted songs of his later career. It is the sound of Britpop all grown up.

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.

The album stands as a triumphant poke in the eye to modern listening mores. It sounds like a leisurely road trip around the hazy fringes of the most intense summer of your life, back in the days when summers – like this album – comprised segueing chapters.

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.

Thoughts on suicide, homelessness, injustice, heartbreak and mortality are framed with supple grooves, melodious chords, gorgeous harmonies and lushly detailed arrangements.

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

This is a softer, more introspective approach than her barn-storming debut, but this 12-track album doesn’t lack the punch and bite of its debut in spite of this.

From the opening chimes and birdsong to her sultry vocals, the album cocoons you entirely in its plush, sensuous world.

The real deal, untampered with, apart from a slight cleaning up of the 1964 sound. .... This album won’t change the history books, but it’s certainly a welcome addition to the Coltrane canon.

There is a neat cover of Creedence’s Have You Ever Seen the Rain but the best songs are her own heartfelt and brooding country ones.

What an absolute joy it is, in which the grand old man of songcraft flips through his own back pages with genuine relish, a man in his 80’s revisiting the words of his firebrand youth and finding entirely new meanings there.

Springsteen drives proceedings with acoustic strumming, the rough tones of his voice rooting the symphonic gorgeousness in gritty reality. It stands comparison with his very best solo albums. Lyrics offer character sketches, lives caught with a few deft lines and evocative melodies.

At first listen it sounds messy, but the more you play it, the more inspired and essential each brutal interruption becomes.

A record with moments of pure, solar heat.

What’s Your Pleasure has a sleek and sensual disco glamour replete with fantastic pop hooks, taking a spin around the dance floor worthy of Studio 54 in its glitterball glory days.

It’s a remarkably polished debut.

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

Tempest’s turn of phrase is constantly arresting.

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.

Sometimes, Forever, though on the whole a rockier, more grown up record, still has its moments of teenage innocence: Shotgun and Feel It All The Time seem like continuations of the biggest singles from color theory, royal screw up and circle the drain, that became sad anthems for disenchanted youth.

Leonard Cohen is back with a posthumous album as great as any from the late period of his considerable canon. And that is very great indeed.

It feels remarkably intimate: a half-shuttered window into the world of the man behind some of the world’s most famous songs. If only Simon were to pry open said window slightly wider, one would feel more fulfilled – but there’s always future albums for that.

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.

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.

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.

He made this latest emotionally and intellectually supple album specifically for that dance community.

Twelve top-class tracks also feature Chicago-born guitarist Dennis Cahill.

What songs they are: melodious, wise, elegantly understated but emotionally resonant.

This is Jacklin’s most personal offering yet and while the pain of mining her soul for such material is clear, through these diary-like confessionals, so too is her catharsis.

Suddenly is a work of slow-burning beauty from one of the brightest sparks in the electronic firmament.

Electric is the second really fantastic pop-dance blast of the year.

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

It is not reinventing the pop wheel but everything is done with an appealing combination of taste and passion.

Each track has a timeless quality, as suited to a Seventies mid-west saloon as a students' indie disco.

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

The more conventional songs radiate power too, from straightforward pop-rock anthem Hurricanes to the electronic thud of Holy — her It’s A Sin moment. The album’s final three tracks feel superfluous, but Sawayama ultimately succeeds where Dr Frankenstein failed: her creation greater than the sum of its parts.

The guitar playing throughout is fantastic, rhythm and lead entwining around Williams’s beautiful, ruined voice, rising to a fury on tough rockers. ... It is an angry record but one that can make you shake your fist into the void and feel that, at least, no matter how bad things might look, you are not alone.

What you get is pure and fluent Simpson musicianship.

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

Trio The Bad Plus are joined by saxophonist Joshua Redman, and the intricate compositions challenge and inspire the soloists.

The contents of this 8-vinyl, 4-CD set are mighty impressive.

The harmonies are gorgeous and the lyrics thought-provoking. A good start to the year for folk music.

His weary regrets are cradled in a simple, swaying hammock of piano, violin and mournful horns. ... It’s a miserabilist masterpiece.

Whatever your political convictions, it is impressive to see a veteran superstar doing something to challenge and potentially alienate listeners. Streisand's 36th album is at once an overblown, schmaltzy epic, and a bold rallying cry that has the courage of its convictions. You won't know whether to cringe or cheer.

They exhilarate and seduce the listener into a world that makes enduring and acknowledging turbulent times a bit more glamorous.

There is a clutch of fine songs here written for Nelson by some of Nashville’s leading contemporary tunesmiths, including the title track (a celebration of life on the road) and elegiac ballad Dusty Bottles that are surely destined for classic status.

These severely abstract inventions require so much brain power and digital dexterity that Jarrett often groans and growls like a tennis player returning a difficult shot. Fortunately, in amongst them are reflective lyrical numbers which radiate a moving sense of solitude, in which you can sense him relax.

Alpha Zulu is a robust addition to their already acclaimed catalogue.

What’s new is the subtly layered sound, which embraces a string quartet as naturally as street sounds, and has an intriguing unpredictability. Sometimes a number will launch off with a call-and-response simplicity and then take an unexpected turn.

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

Protest albums don’t come more subtle and moving than this.

Price’s fantastic fourth album, Strays, advances boldly into terrain occupied by such exalted US rock craftsmen as Jackson Browne and Tom Petty, with soulful vocal swagger, a widescreen band sound and a poetic lyrical depth that should leave most of her Nashville peers prostrate at her feet.

What comes forth is disarmingly honest music that indicates a newly mature era for UK rap.

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.

Whilst Paramore's music tends to be all rage and release, solo Williams offers something much more quirky and cerebral, delving poetically and occasionally combatively into her insecurities. The elaborate intricacy of writing and production may be a lot to take in for all but devoted fans.

You don’t need to be in an altered state to become overwhelmed by his mastery of controlled cacophony. It is a pleasure to report that everything is still beautiful in Pierce’s strange sonic world.

Seventeen Going Under would benefit from more such restraint, to really bring out the vulnerability and sensitivity underpinning Fender’s oeuvre. It is not much of a criticism to note that he doesn’t have the dynamic range of his musical hero yet. Fender may not be ready to take on the mantle of the Boss, but he’s a worthy apprentice.

This is music with a big, gleeful smile on its face. And it is accompanied by clever and compassionate lyrics.

At its best, the grooves have the funky plasticity of an electro-Prince, sprinkled with baffling but thought-provoking lyrics. At its laziest, it sounds like a mumble rapper warming up over a jam whilst doing throat exercises. It's got groove though, and enough mysterious depths to warrant further investigation if you should somehow find yourself stuck at home with nothing better to do.

From its raucous, raw-edged opening salvo to the softer, weirder, ruminative closing tracks, Blunderbuss crackles with life and energy, hauling roots rock out of the dusty museum and into the dazzling light of the modern day.

The references are frank, from the satirical title (he made the album while receiving Universal Credit during the pandemic, and the cover depicts him receiving a giant cheque for £324.84, the current monthly allowance, from besuited men in celebratory style) to the succinct writing within.

They capture Reed’s early processes, fragments of ideas that would morph into his definitive work. ... We sense that all that remained for Reed to do was to become Lou.

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.

Full of groove and grit, it's raw and enjoyable.

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.

Yet for all its exuberant DIY spirit, Young Fathers’ songs sound like another bunch of interesting demos, full of passion, spontaneity and left-field inspiration, but too often failing to really nail the song or message down.

Sour is a melodramatic pop opera of broken teen dreams: right now, it puts Rodrigo in the driver’s seat, and woe betide anyone who gets in her way.

Jazzy, soulful, philosophical and intimate, Jones seems to have found a poetic lyrical voice to match her sensuous voice and sensitive piano phrasing.

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.

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.

The result is never maudlin, but big, bouncy and entertaining.

At its best, it’s like a movie soundtrack. String interludes behave like camera pans between scenes; fuzzy production gives everything a dream-like quality.

If Laurel Hell is anything to go by, Mitski is only getting better.

They do owe a musical debt to Ali Farka Toure (whose songs they started out covering), but they’re definitely etching out their own groove.

Jones’s voice has weathered better than most, taking on an oaken quality, with rich low notes and just a patina of tiny cracks adding some antique class. There’s no false tooth sibilance, and every lyric on Surrounded by Time is crisply enunciated and delivered with conviction and thought.

Although some of his anecdotes could drag on repeated listening, he is an engaging raconteur.

It's a fun-loving, tune-heavy indie/punk/pop romp, with girlie la-la harmonies, a none-more-cheesy organ sound, and welcome vocal echoes of Britpop femmes Elastica and new wave heroine Lene Lovich.

Harlem River Blues (Bloodshot Records) ranks alongside the best American roots music being made at the moment and his concerts should not be missed.

What makes it so compelling is a classic rock Americana set up deftly interweaving lazy twin guitars and splashes of Hammond organ over steady rolling chord progressions that gather power with each repetition.

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.

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.

The 12 tracks that make up Expert in a Dying Field are lean and propulsive, with hooks that get under the skin.

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.

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

The Gabriels are making thunderous, thoughtful music with commercial snap.

The Long Goodbye is an angry, funny, clever and, at times, swaggeringly brutal examination of a national identity crisis, on which Ahmed demonstrates the skills of a master rapper, aided by the emotional edge of his thespian delivery.

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.

Sweary, punky and bilious, Spare Ribs is unlikely to win over new converts but it is as good as anything in Sleaford Mods extensive oeuvre.

A jazzy, soulful, understated account of breakup and recovery, that shimmers like a gorgeous summer groove and lets La Havas’s tender singing and cryptic lyrics carry the bittersweet emotion.

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

Given the circumstances surrounding its creation, there is unsurprisingly a sadness at the heart of Two Ribbons, but even in quieter moments such as the acoustic Strange Conversations, or the atmospheric interlude In The Cemetery, the air is of light breaking through. And, equally often, there is a redemptive clarity and a wonderful sense of healing.

Horan’s sound of choice is much more understated, typically revolving around folky, acoustic strings and soft vocals. The Show, his third solo offering, is more of the same.

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.