It's a journey in which you don't need to know the words: this music is a licence to feel without prejudice. Like prayers or poetry, the potency is in the cadence, the rhythms, and the stirring of memory and imagination.

At times the music feels more like a classical arrangement than a bluegrass record--but it works.

From exquisitely tender, elegaic ballad Only Children (“‘Heaven’s wasted on the dead’ is what your mama said / When the hearse was idling in the parking lot”) to self-questioning anthem What I’ve Done To Help, Isbell and his band are firing on all cylinders. Honestly, if you like this kind of thing, the guitar sounds and solos on burning rocker Overseas are worth the price of entry alone.

It feels like Del Rey’s way of reminding us we still don’t know as much about her as we like to think. Blue Banisters hints, tantalisingly, that there is far more to reveal, while putting us firmly in our place. Make no mistake about it: Del Rey will do it all strictly on her own terms.

Producer Jacquire King, who worked on Tom Waits’s Mule Variations and Norah Jones’s The Fall, allows Della's gutsy sound to soar.

This is their 29th album, a delightfully silly set of eccentric songcraft.

In guitarist-singer James Dean Bradfield and drummer and multi-instrumentalist Sean Moore, they boast two incredibly gifted musicians whose dense arrangements glitter with intricate interplay.

Earle is a busy man, writing novels, acting and recording but he has found time to make his 14th album full of wonderful moments.

The crooning, woozy indie-pop of So Hard To Tell is reassurance Friday has a full spectrum of emotional arrows in her quiver and she’s going to hit all her targets.

The harmonising on Call to War is excellent and I particularly like the short and sweet To the Woods. An enjoyable album.

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

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

These songs are the strongest she’s written to date, with terrific hooks and melodies throughout.

With dreamy lullabies, hypnotic love songs and pointed politics all delivered with emotional stridency, Saint-Marie blends rich musicality with the force of righteous conviction.

This confident and assured album surely ranks among his best.

It is all so swaggeringly confident and honed to a perfect point, it is hard not to be caught up in its own sense of conviction.

Uptown Special veers wildly from high to low brow, stupid to sophisticated. Occasionally the mix jars but mostly it’s a compelling collision, falling somewhere between a chin-stroking jazz poetry recital and a riotous teenage disco.

PinkPantheress’s pop gift is to make something airily attractive out of elements that could be brain melting, as if singing with the internal voice of a generation numbed by the everything goes-ness of the internet.

Technically Gibbs is a flawless emcee and it’s great to see more of his melodic range on SSS, something that will deservedly bring in new fans. But for his next album, it would be interesting to see Gibbs explore the roots of his “hustler mentality” even further, and start to subvert some of gangster rap’s more impish clichés.

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

There is the odd failure (23 is a saccharine ode to her husband, the footballer Gerard Piqué), but Shakira still traverses musical styles like few others.

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

As so many are today, it’s a lockdown special, and this shows both in its more ambitious production and its slight air of self-indulgence.

On his fifth album, he seizes the mainstream jugular with a lushly romantic, brightly orchestrated and delightfully optimistic collection of epic love songs.

The sound is lean and clean, sharply separated with individual instrumentation shining through and not a lot of over-dubbing or effects.

It is the 12 songs he wrote and co-wrote that sparkle.

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

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.

It more than stands on its own merits.

Despite her weak voice and empty lyrics, the troubled Disney graduate has placed herself at the avant-garde of pop with this masterful mixture of über-cool dubstep and sugary pop.

At times she strives too hard for Tom Waitsian wonky Americana. But more often she makes the Canadian wilderness her own.

Knocking around for twenty years and now down to a duo, Cornershop are still coming up with brilliantly playful pop.

Del Rey has sometimes been characterised as a modern day torch singer but on Lust For Life she sounds like she is finally ready to take that torch and burn down her ex’s house with it. Lust For Life lets a bit of light into the darkness of Del Rey’s moody past works, hinting at emotional recovery without drastically altering her sensuous musical palette.

It's a heart-warming who's who.

A genuinely superior slice of small hours electro-pop.

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).

Freighted deep with lugubrious rolls of oily bass, sandy inhalations of desert strings, holy intonations and salty lust, Push the Sky Away is the audio equivalent of bathing in the Dead Sea.

Amidst skyscraping Queen harmonies and portentous Pink Floyd melodrama there are sensitive touches, with some elegant, slow-unfurling lead guitar reminiscent of Dire Straits.

It’s a brief cloud over a lovely record that is the aural equivalent of lying down in a sunny meadow, located somewhere between Stockholm and Nashville.

It sounds like a romantic gift to his new wife and a sentimental salute to his own childhood--a minor gem from a major talent.

Its dark, off-kilter twists and trapdoors become moreish as liquorice.

The Painter harks back to the producer’s woozy, worldly chill out beginnings. It even features Orton on two tracks. This is ambient music for grown-ups.

This is glorious summer music, possibly the summer of 1974, but sunshine all round none the less.

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.

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

Hannigan rewards close attention, though. Lyrical phrases float up that demonstrate she is a writer of great care, with an eye for an arresting image.

It’s an impressive, tantalising work from an artist who has dared to take the path less travelled.

At the heart of Ezra’s mainstream pop appeal is a sense of joy that infuses his music with radiant positivity. In such troubled times, Ezra’s escapism is pure gold.

The new songs shimmer with languid, sun-kissed grooves, anthemic choruses that U2 would kill for, along with a fine line in tender romance.

Every track offers up a smart blend of snappy lyrics and catchy hooks, and at least half are absolutely glorious.

All 11 songs are of high quality.

ere are a few moments of awkward student theatre wailing, but they're blips in an otherwise richly rewarding odyssey.

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.

Her second album, however, belatedly delivers on all Goulding's latent promise.

Some gripping songs of internal angst with rock touches set off by luscious strings and Harvieu’s timeless voice.

An album of real class.

This certainly isn’t an indie-sleaze revivalist album, nor is it an effort to prove their relevance. Cool It Down puts words and music to fears and concerns while shaking you into feelings of some radical hope.

Sonically speaking, Weller seriously kicks it.

The songs are sufficiently sophisticated and winning that The Waeve keeps sweeping the listener along on its intoxicating journey.

At times his roar-throated tone gets repetitive, but Denver singer/songwriter Esmé Patterson adds subtle vocal contrast on the haunting Silent Key.

This is What I Mean completely abandons the often very macho bullishness at the heart of hip hop, to show rap at its most sensitive.

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

On The End, So Far, the nihilistic furnace still glows hot, but amongst the fuming metal riffs, Slipknot also fume in a more creative way.

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

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

Coombes, a quite masterful musical auteur after three decades in the game, skillfully navigates the record away from one long mid-life nightmare. ... it’s another hugely satisfying listen.

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.

Psychic Life is fully in touch with such early-Eighties weirdness, but is also fresh, approachable and thoroughly spellbinding.

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.

There is an avant garde boldness here that is, at times, quite amazing.

It’s the sound of a band subverting expectations in the most dramatic fashion possible. And it confirms The Horrors as one of Britain’s most intriguing bands.

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.

What you get is pure and fluent Simpson musicianship.

For all its length (16 tracks) and elaborate staging (with videos for every song), the album has a focus and intensity unusual in multi-writer ensemble productions, a sense of purposefulness that holds the attention even when the songs sometimes drift off in search of a chorus.

What I like most is the sense that these two musicians are beyond caring about perceptions, simply determined to have fun. 44/876 is a treat for grown-up fans of either artist.

Sometimes [the strings'] swell threatens to overwhelm the quirkiness, but in the best things, such as Skies are Rare, they work perfectly together.

Delightfully daft.

These are powerful nuggets. Whether he’s addressing God directly or meditating on the nature of religion in more abstract terms (you never quite know), Cave’s words are potent and evocative.

She brings excellent phrasing to Haggard's powerful lyrics and there are two standout songs [Sing Me Back Home and Someday When Things are Good].

Furnaces is an album of bold and brutal self-examination of masculinity’s darkest aspects, in which Harcourt seductively acknowledges the appeal of giving vent to selfish impulses while implicitly acknowledging their devastating effect on others, and indeed the world.

The album has a bruised but tough essence, which comes across in 10 elegantly tailored songs detailing a disintegrating relationship.

Orton digs so deeply into her own personal spaces and memories that what she finds there is unique. Middle-aged discontent has rarely sounded so lovely.

It is only eight songs and comes in under 25 minutes long, yet it packs more hooks than a whaling armada. It is short, punchy and sweet enough to cause tooth rot, every moment crammed with crafted earworms and swaggering beats.

It's expensive but for Martyn fans it will offer hours and hours of fresh enjoyment of one of British folk's true greats.

Nutini has a voice that could transform any song, riding melodies with lazy restraint until suddenly unleashing notes that would have any throat specialist reaching for their speculum in alarm. On Last Night in the Bittersweet, he sounds like he’s having the time of his life.

Its 10 tracks offer a timely reminder of just why Oasis resonated so widely, empowered by a melodious and snappy songwriter with plenty of heart and soul.

Now 70 years old, she is back on form with her 15th album.

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.

When you rouse yourself from Gardot's dream, it can be hard to recall any individual song, but the reverie is beautiful.

These abandoned sessions probably would have been ignored had they been released when first recorded. But to ears and sensibilities realigned to Cash’s brilliance, this really is a lost treasure.

The result wittily, emotionally and triumphantly affirms his position at the head of the British rap pack. Like many of our most fascinating pop stars, from John Lennon to Robbie Williams, Stormzy lies on a knife-edge between ego and insecurity, self-confidence and self-doubt.

Welch still has the love--and the tunes--we need to see us through.

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.

The Australian singer-songwriter's fourth album evolves into a sweeping, original aural landscape through which she embarks on an involving journey of self-discovery.

This fifth album trades their signature Fender Stratocaster rock sound for hard-plucked acoustic guitars and lutes, conveying a majestic sense of space, the feeling that the music will unfold at its own pace, however long it takes.

The Kooks have come out fighting though, completely re-evaluating and overhauling their sound and the result is an exuberant fourth album bristling with character.

For although the album’s called Into Colour, its spectrum is mostly warm vintage tints: a cosy blend of sentimentality and sophistication.

This is an elegant, mature work of a songwriter and performer at the height of her powers.