Always Ascending is every bit as smart and dynamic as their acclaimed debut, but familiarity has dampened its dramatic impact.

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

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

If sensuous, whip smart R’n’B rocks your boat, Victoria Monét’s debut album, Jaguar II, is a luxurious treat.

Its low-budget weirdness will have you laughing into the new year.

Above all, Joy’All seems like the work of an artist content with floating through life, just having fun – and she’s brought us along for the ride.

Like his misogynistic streak, his sound is stuck in the past. What keeps our attention is his exuberant delight in language itself, such as his geometry pun in River: “this love triangle / left us in a wrecked tangle”. (Say it aloud).

The music is astounding, threading erudite raps through ghetto soul jams and panoramic orchestral interludes.

An album that ultimately serves as both an emancipation and a proclamation, Grande fully bending her collaborators to her will instead of merely playing in their sandboxes, and creating a blissful fusion of pop and R&B that is entirely her own.

Pound for pound and hook for hook, Duck is as strong an album as they have ever made: a bright, giddy, colourful collection of pop anthems to raise the spirits.

There's a real grace about The Longest River, the debut album from self-taught multi-instrumentalist Olivia Chaney.

Inevitably, 51 minutes of melodrama becomes draining. But it captures Del Rey's mystique perfectly.

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.

Hall’s deadpan tones offer the same strangely reassuring grounded presence on the opening track, a bullish political anthem Black Skin Blue Eyed Boys. Yet with its slick funk and soul groove, I can’t remember the Specials ever sounding quite so smooth.

There are inevitable misses as well as hits (House of the Rising Sun is a bit flat) but there is enough variety from musicians such as The Secret Sisters, The Milk Carton Kids, the Punch Brothers and Marcus Mumford (also the associate producer) to keep things rolling along.

Like the best rap albums, Home? is infused with musicality, drawing on reggae, afrobeat, garage and R’n’B, punctuated by horns, guitars and a swimmy dubby sensuality. Wretch is a sharp wordsmith who also sings with a raw sweetness reminiscent of Bob Marley.

This is not so much pop music, as music that might make your ears pop.

The tone switches dramatically between dynamic contemporary electro groove adventures, singalong pop and lush synthetic ballads, while veering emotionally between introspective vulnerability and strident defiance. Yet every track adheres to robust, classic songwriting principles, a kind of melodious elegance of structure gleaming through no matter how inventively deconstructed the arrangement.

Alison Krauss and Union Station have a marvellous chemistry as a band - and it's as impressive as ever on Paper Airplane, their first album together since 2004.

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

Van Etten evokes Eighties electro pop. You can almost see the dry ice and excessive mascara. The atmosphere is doomy and gothic, creating an underlying tension that casts her lyrics of devotion and self-forgiveness in a shadowy light. It’s as if she can’t quite commit to her own happiness.

If I may make up a word of my own, it is utterly bjorkers, and all you can do is dig it.

This is a set of funny, twisted, sharp-edged vignettes about the choices women face in the gritty, down-to-earth setting of daily working life – feminist pop as kitchen sink drama.

Theirs is a music of doomed melancholy –- plaintive, dark, and uneasy.

This record is undoubtedly their strongest offering since 2006’s Meds, strengthened by the inclusion of the sort of furious social commentary that made them such heroes to countless kohl-eyeliner-wielding teenagers in the late 90s.

Lotus is an absorbing and powerfully honest album.

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.

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