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.