It’s surely fair to deduce that the intended ‘reset’ is all about returning pop to its early years’ sense of wonder, both sonically and emotionally. On that level, its nine tracks resoundingly succeed.

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.

It's a sprawling beast of an album and a remarkable piece of creativety from 68-year-old Russell.

“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.

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

A confident, interesting and accomplished album. But Marten is operating in a crowded field. Weyes Blood, Nina Nastasia, Lana Del Rey and Marling all plough similar furrows.

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

Wuthering Heights consists of just 12 songs, clocking in under 35 minutes. But songs like Dying for You, Chains of Love and Always Everywhere pack such a punch that their conciseness never feels like a curse.

It sounds modern and old fashioned at the same time, infused with an adolescant self-absorption that is at once depressive, funny and wise beyond its years.

Simultaneously beautiful and befuddling, dazzling and irritating, Utopia has something of Stravinsky or Stockhausen about it. On some level, it may be a work of brilliance, but I suspect it is too far adrift from the rest of pop culture to appeal to anyone but a Björk devotee.

His peculiar mix of antagonism and soul-searching may not be enough to convert non-believers, but this bold, ambitious debut suggests that grime has found its most accomplished ambassador yet.

What a wild and wonderful listening experience this is: bristling with ideas, constantly shooting off at different angles but always replete with earworm melodies, plush with glittering sounds, charged with intelligent and emotional lyrics and underpinned by a syncopated rhythm section that shifts gears effortlessly from tightly coiled to blazingly expansive.

It is no surprise that the sound is full of all the kind of clanking noises and sci-fi effects that have long steered Charli just left of the mainstream. Yet somehow this set of 11 short songs has a directness, immediacy and intimacy that has eluded her before. ... This album showcases the least mannered performances of her career. She makes you feel these songs.

The album never quite catches fire like their live performance but it gets close.

It’s a cracking album, whose influences are delightfully esoteric.

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.

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.

A fun, enjoyable vessel that spotlights a magnetic talent. The music might not entirely be Panic! at the Disco’s own – but like fellow Vegas bigwig Elvis, that’s clearly no barrier.

Their last album, The Seldom Seen Kid, managed the rare feat of winning the Mercury prize and huge public affection. So how do Elbow follow it? With continued greatness and without fuss.

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

Like FKA Twigs’s Caprisongs, Beyoncé's Renaissance, and SZA’s SOS, Raye’s My 21st Century Blues deserves to be listened to from start to finish, then again, and again.

Freed from the constrictions of slavish imitation, with production from her new and more experimentally inclined collaborators, Aaron Dessner and Jack Antonoff, these six songs offer an intriguing lens through which to view this more innocent version of the savvy star, imbued with the dreamily nostalgic ambience of an adult remembering her bright-eyed youth.

The album, produced by the celebrated Béla Fleck, has treats galore.

The songs Memphis Women And Chicken, Tuscaloosa, 1962 and Foolish Heart are highly enjoyable, but the highlight is the complex and moving Errol Flynn.

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.

A triumph of marketing, it’s hard to escape notions that this shiny “new” version of the Anthology series essentially comprises remasters of previously remastered rejects.

In Coping Mechanism, we see the singer becoming bolder and braver as she departs from mystic R&B and soul roots. In just 11 full-throttle tracks, Coping Mechanism gives us a glimpse at the future of rock.

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

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.

Every tiny detail is in aesthetic congruence with the initial feelings that birthed these songs – all of which you’re made privy to in violently vivid detail. Broken Hearts Club is an expertly sequenced, perfectly packaged ode to a lost love.

While this pastiche is obviously intentional, it never really feels like one. It also creates a much more romantic and intriguing world to fall into than the closed-curtains one of its predecessor. Josh Tillman remains a curious cat, but here he also sounds like a much more contented one.

It is edgy fun with pitch-black humour masking real emotional content, although the tension between the darkness of the lyrics and sweetness of the vocals wears thin over a whole album.

Each thoughtful sonic soundscape washes elegantly into the next, toward the long, lush finale.

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.

The Car feels warmer and more soulful than its predecessor, in its orchestral sweep not dissimilar to Turner’s first side project as The Last Shadow Puppets, 2008’s The Age of the Understatement. As such, it may be more a solo album than an Arctic Monkeys record, but it’s a very good one nonetheless.

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.

This is a very good project and will cement Digga D as a force on the pop charts, but if the 21-year-old wants to reach the next level and avoid becoming a pastiche like 50 Cent did, he will need to do more of the unexpected and dig a little deeper into his subconscious when it's time to drop that studio album.

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.

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.

Black Terry Cat makes confident use of R&B grooves as a base from which to explore more exotic sounds.

You can hear the ghostly outline of OK Computer looming amid the gloom and distortion. Also palpable is a growing ambivalence. ... For every scratchy, hissing road to nowhere, there’s a sublime bit when Jonny Greenwood’s guitar cuts through and York starts to howl like a sad but vaguely vengeful pop demon. And suddenly all your misgivings tumble away, and it’s a privilege to be lost in the labyrinth of Radiohead’s collective subconscious.

For an album that brings together so many threads of Weller’s career, there is not much in the way of rocky guitar drive or punk energy. Yet there is an open-minded spirit in the way Weller mixes songcraft with ear-catching sonic details and structural adventure.

Gifted keeps giving: Koffee achieves a brilliantly confident debut with the promise of more good things to come.

Stunning. ... With slick, tasteful production from Jack Antanoff built around shining guitars and perfectly balanced vocal arrangements, this is a powerful addition to the genre.

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 straight-ahead album of gorgeous, elaborate, amusing and affecting songs.

Backed by his father's old orchestra, Fela Kuti's son Seun shows how afrobeat should be played: its irrepressible funky surge offset by truly scorching brass fanfares.

He seems to have found a new and more sincere voice, less bullish than we have heard him before, whilst using a fantastic roster of contributors to push the mood and narrative.

The album’s inability to communicate with itself – each song an island – does bring some drag to the album’s runtime. Nevertheless, elegiac and anthemic, each song has spark.

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.

The album is both consistently breezy and emotionally upfront, going to-and-fro between galvanising dance anthems and gentle, psychedelic country ballads à la Kacey Musgrave’s Golden Hour.

If this was a debut, we would be hailing Andrews as a precocious young genius. But perhaps, in this age of acceleration, amid a pop blizzard of viral memes and instant digital fame, the slow maturing of a truly substantial talent is something to really celebrate.

He’s released a peach of an album.

It's simply a great album from start to finish - wonderful tunes, superb musicianship, star guests and a unity of purpose about delivering a fitting tribute to the music he loves that raises this album to such a high level.

Lasting a little over 30 minutes, See You In The Stars is almost cocky in its brevity. There’s not an ounce of fat on it, and it’s all the more satisfying for it.

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

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.

At times, Koenig is reminiscent of Paul McCartney in nursery rhyme mode--tunefully sweet and silly. Yet Koenig’s pithily epigrammatic lyrics throw a bit of intellectual grit in the mix, even if they possess all the clarity of a cryptic crossword.

Twenty-six years after their last album, 58-year-old Rowland and his roughly reassembled crew have made a record that manages to combine fresh new stories with the heart and nervous energy of classic Dexys.

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.

It is music of emotion and imagination, shifting perspectives in ways that are deliciously intangible, intent on moving the heart rather than the feet.

While they make no claims to be a wildly original band--they listen to Black Sabbath and they have been described as the all-female Joy Division--what makes them so compelling is their fierce focus.

Although something of a melting pot, this is an original and accessible album, blending world influences with old time American music.

Blending hi-tech and lo-fi, modern synthesised sound and old-fashioned song writing, her work plumbs torrid emotional depths, similar to alt-rock stars such as Lou Barlow.

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.

This is a laidback album, drawing on the dreamy Seventies milieu of Laurel Canyon with a touch of the easy listening sumptuousness of Burt Bacharach. It is about the ways lovers drift apart, evoking the fall of Autumnal leaves rather than blood on the tracks.

Del Amitri’s bracing feel-bad pop-rock won’t be for everyone, but for those of us who appreciate sweet melodies set off with sour sentiments, it is perversely good to have the old curmudgeons back.

An English one-off, in fine voice.

It’s a rarity to have an album in which every song could genuinely be a single, but they’ve managed it here.

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.

Death Cab are back with a bang and a new-found self-assurance.

At 66 Raitt’s warm graze of a voice is better than ever, balancing the confidence of experienced with a more nuanced perspective. Inspirational.

While Touré acquits himself imaginatively in a variety of settings, the whirring, jangling opener Sokosondou, with just his own musicians, feels the most compelling track.

This record is rammed full of fantastically fresh and challenging beats and bears the hallmarks of Cherry's streetwise style.

While the Stones may not have struck oil with these songs, their energy remains undimmed, their back catalogue endlessly renewable.

It more than stands on its own merits.

Fifth time around, The 1975 get the equation right: pop first, art later.

Though certain tracks like In My Head leave you wishing she’d cut through the glistening sounds and breathy choruses with some power vocals, Mahalia’s pen is sharp, and her raw take on relationships and self-development is delivered with the diva attitude of Mariah Carey and the raspy cool of Erykah Badu.

Arrangements are simple and sparse, everything lightly touched, with only swells of strings and brushes of horn, harmonium and other instrumental colours buoying up her guitar and clear voice.

For every perfectly observed vignette of English life (Sunny Afternoon, Autumn Almanac) and pithily satirical narrative (Village Green Preservation Society, Dead End Kids) there's a clunking, unwieldy, elaborate novelty song (Supersonic Rocket Ship, Skin & Bone).

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.

100 gecs can also be (perhaps willfully) irritating. ... At their strongest, though – as on punky standout Doritos And Fritos – 10,000 gecs is a wonderful exercise in letting creativity run amok with no rules at all and carefully catching the resultant gold.

Amid all the delightful nostalgia comes one glaring disappointment. When Swift committed to the re-recordings, she promised they wouldn’t lose the heart of the original – and the lyrics would stay the same. But on Better Than Revenge, a bitter rebuke to a love rival, she’s done just that.

Despite the subject matter, this is an invigorating celebration of the joys of great songwriting and proof of the power of one man and his piano.

This is a classy debut, from a sophisticated talent who takes things at her own sweet pace. She may not turn out to be the next big thing, but Celeste sounds like she is in it for the long haul.

The toughness of Weller's art remains fully present here. An album of beauty and depth, True Meanings is further affirmation of a particularly sincere and probing talent, for whom music is a vocation rather than a career.

It's a gloriously mellow record, the sound of an artist remembering there’s a life beyond her touring schedule and daring to enjoy it.

He genuinely tries not to romanticise his despairing condition and is unforgiving about his own flaws, although the sheer gravity of his voice and dark appeal of his loner stance can’t help but exert their own seductive pull.

There’s plenty here to suggest Chloe X Halle have the chops to rival their superstar mentor [Beyoncé].

They take a sombre aspect of their native Northumbrian traditional music, regional accent and dialect intact, and, sprinkling in a few intriguing covers along the way, build something string-laden and luscious but also delicate, wistful and melancholy.

It's a cleverly constructed, well-written and cohesive piece of work - albeit possibly, at 13 tracks, two songs too long.

There’s nothing very new about the sound, but there’s a freshness and intelligence in the Lawrence brothers’ discovery of it.

He brings real feeling to his own compositions such as Let Me Sleep (At the end of a Dream).

There are a few moments here that feel like major label fodder, sure, but on the whole Kojey Radical deserves enormous credit for putting out an album that remains thoughtful and spiky despite its clear intention to get people dancing.

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

Beck has always been hip. Even on his 12th album, he manages to make the dawn sound like where it’s at.

It may be resolutely old-fashioned and, for sure, we’ve heard it all before, but the sheer pleasure in Porter’s singing is all but impossible to resist.

Sleaford Mods have lost none of their political bite, humour, and astute observational skill. UK Grim will cement their place as one of Britain’s most influential – and successful – UK bands.