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.

The album sounds like something knocked out almost live in a spirit of excitement, rather than with objective vision or commercial muscle. I’d be hard pressed to assert that this (unlike CS&N) amounts to more than the sum of its parts, rather than a celebration of great parts. But it is impossible to argue that as a group, Boygenius are pretty super.

The melodies are lovely, if conservative: as elegant and classically tailored as her gowns.

If you can look beyond the occasional ham-fisted blip – the command to “stop tap dancing around the conversation” that closes out the otherwise-astounding We Cry Together is the most egregious example here – then there’s so much reward.

Easily the best thing she has done since her album of Muscle Shoals sessions, New Routes, which she made in the early Seventies.

There is, as Bush intended, much more air around the songs, which can reduce their original, raw intensity but also gives them a more mature, lingering potency.

More than half a century later, those youthful ambitions are herein fulfilled, in 10 tracks of maturity and majesty.

Despite what the polished sonics might suggest, Twelve Carat Toothache is an ambitious record with real range, proving that Post has found his groove as America’s kaleidoscopic king of new-era pop.

Adopting a very domestic lyrical setting whilst grappling bravely with big issues, Shortly After Takeoff offers ideal lockdown listening, a touching black comedy of emotional isolation.

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.

It may be billed as a tribute to a lost star, but this Winter wonderland serves as a reminder that the blues is still very much alive and kicking.

As a follow-up to What’s Your Pleasure?, it’s inevitably a little doomed, lacking that record’s magical conditions: the unexpectedly fresh energy amid the lethargy of lockdown. Still, after Pleasure’s anticipatory teasing, That! Feels Good! offers a perfectly competent climax.

No tracks are particularly surprising from a production point of view, but it’s the affecting lyrics which have always been Carner’s strength. ... The newfound sharpness in Carner’s delivery has brought a much-needed grit to this album – it’s exciting.

Inspired by his hometown of Torquay and musically taking a leaf from Steely Dan and Fleetwood Mac, swapping his computer for the studio seems to have paid off with these brilliant, sunset funk songs.

At a time when hip hop has become the default music of choice for the masses, it’s a reminder of the genre’s subserve roots--and evidence that, deep into middle age, Slim Shady’s power to shock, offend and amuse endures.

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 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.

This sprawling, tender lucid dream of an album morphs into various shapes: angular and jagged, lush and distorted, Twin Peaks-esque surrealism, wistful and surrendering. Whether Shaw is proposing friendship or not, Stumpwork offers us more than enough.

Pecknold enthusiastically revealed how the album was a direct result of his indulgence in MP3 piracy, as he tracked back to discover Fairport Convention, Roy Harper, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, Bob Dylan and all the heroes of the Sixties folk boom.

First Two Pages of Frankenstein is up there with Boxer, the band’s 2007 album on which they thrillingly found their musical feet. This is the sound of a band who’ve honed their sound to such an extent that they’re now towing a whole new generation in their wake.

As a record, Time isn’t just a sonic heart-swell for listeners, it’s the latest shift for a singer-songwriter who seems as if she’s constantly stretching toward the most whole version of herself.

Sonically adventurous and genre hopping.

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

At best, its familiarity is warm and inviting for seasoned fans; for some it will feel lazily identical and lacking in ambition. But it’s an overwhelmingly powerful and energetic musing on the never-ending anxieties and strain of life that don’t leave just because you enter adulthood – exactly what keeps their fans coming back.

While its modernity is expressed by mixing and matching genres or adding digital zing to familiar tropes, for all its bravura exuberance and pop slickness it is old fashioned to its core.

The result is more urgent, less reassuringly structured than your typical Elbow record.

While these songs are like discarded pub furniture, Bramwell sounds like a wiley old alley cat, sat on top of it and looking up.

Thirty years on, Albarn sounds just as dissatisfied with the state of the modern world, yet he still appears to have at least a cartoon finger on its pulse.