'Insignificance' is an album fraught with contradictions: tightly funky guitars sit alongside angelic piano and crunching 70s rock riffs shoulder belligerently up to honeyed pop harmonies. These are fascinating contradictions glued together with a binding harmonic honesty.

It's unlikely you'll hear anything as near to perfect, magical and downright lovely all year.

To anyone who's felt like they've been along to share even a little bit of that journey, it's an album-of-the-year contender that's bound to do nothing but delight.

Overall, Smother is brilliant, and a record by a band with a big brain, a generous heart, hungry ears and a permanent erection.

With filth, loose morals, anger, frustration, big guitars and even bigger choruses at every turn, it's got all the DNA of a pure-bred rock classic.

Compact and succinctly direct, its 16 tracks rarely break the three-minute mark but are packed with a greater density of ideas than its predecessor.

Maroon 5 are the new Police, the new U2: a wildly exciting rock band who understand how to make great pop music that works everywhere from the bedroom and the iPod to the radio and the stadium.

This album feels like it's tuning into everything, connecting with everything. Welcome to Maii. And welcome to the future.

“Arular”, as well as being a particularly great and brave album, could well be this year’s Portishead or Massive Attack.

[Dalle] may be the New Courtney Love, at times even the Punk PJ Harvey, but she also has a depth of emotion that was last displayed by Kurt Cobain.

It's probably Bjork's most succinct and inventive statement yet.

The key to 'A Rush Of Blood To The Head' is to be found not in Martin's presence, but in the intensity, dynamism, verve and style that Coldplay have now nailed, when comparisons to Radiohead, Echo and The Bunnymen and, perhaps most pertinently, U2's 'Unforgettable Fire', manifest themselves in a series of killer strides.

Merriweather Post Pavilion's rare combination of great songs and vital invention make this one of the year's most important records, already.

This is rap of mesmerising, addictive quality, written and delivered by a master in charge of every aspect of his craft.

Not since Oasis in their gloriously unstoppable and unapologetic heyday have we been given the opportunity to embrace such straight-ahead, ebullient, desire-fuelled guitar music.

This is rock with a big fat drunken grin scrawled over its face in lurid red lipstick.

It will undoubtedly top some end of year lists this Christmas.

It might be a little too airbrushed, arch and meticulous for some, but it's brilliant all the same, and, in the tradition of all great second albums, it could prove to be Hard-Fi's defining moment.

New Amerykah Part One: 4th World War is an insane, obscure and exciting record of the kind that very few artists have the guts or imagination to make anymore.

Beyond the grooves etched in this record, what is most exciting is the ease with which Arbez brushes aside the canon of 90s giants.

Untrue is a devastatingly accurate depiction of urban UK--plugging the listener into the matrix of some godforsaken south London satellite, with its identikit fast food joints, repellent inhabitants and anonymous decaying sprawl.

The most genuinely interesting addition to The Beatles' canon in years, it actually makes you want to dig out the originals and fall in love with the music all over again.

Alight Of Night is a garage-weaned, art rock, squat-dirty masterpiece.

A work so consistently stirring, stately, and pop-aware it makes most recent guitar-based art-rock albums look tawdry.

As sleek and assured as anything the trio have done.

'Deep Down & Dirty' just reminds you how influential and important the Stereos were, and continue to be.

If anything, this 25-song double set sees Belle & Sebastian at their finest.

Almost by accident, it seems, The Rapture have pulled it off: the album of the year.