As well as the unexpected guest stars – Damon Albarn! Chaka Khan! – there’s also songs about arcade games, an instrumental, and experimental tracks based on vocal repetition. It’s a far cry from the band’s usual breezy guitar pop, but it works beautifully well.

It may not quite be the equal of records like Exile On Main Street or Let It Bleed (very few are, to be fair), but if Hackney Diamonds really is to be the final Rolling Stones album, it’s one incredible swansong.

Having produced one of the albums of the year with just her second effort, it’s incredibly exciting to ponder where she’ll go from here.

It’s a debut album that’s been well worth the wait.

Set It Off is the work of a talented rapper with an interesting taste in production. Offset just needs a bit more consistency to stick the landing.

The jittery electronics of closing track New Year’s UnResolution close the album, confirming L’Rain’s special ability to expertly splice sounds and styles to create something distinctive and original.

All of these tracks are elevated considerably by Lattimore’s production chops, as the skilled performances are turned into vast ambient soundscapes and she proves herself to be her best accompanist. If anyone in the alternative electronic world has been unaware of Mary Lattimore up until now, this album is a perfect insight into her creative abilities.

At first listen, it’s musically not such a close cousin of First Two Pages, but more its identical twin – the same brooding atmosphere, that bottled up tension that seems to have become Matt Berninger’s vocal trademark – yet over a few plays, it seems to slowly take a life of its own.

This is a magical, magnificent album – one of the best of Sufjan Stevens’ career.

She’s been able to defy expectations time and time again due to a combination of good taste, charm and a deceptively versatile voice, and Tension has its fair share of all three.

Isn’t It Now may well be a typical Animal Collective album, but it’s full of creativity and invention that not many bands could pull off after 25 years of recording together.

There are 14 tracks all in all, together with a couple of skits. Yet Smith refuses to fall into this trap, by some smart sequencing of the tracks: with the ballads mostly gathered towards the end of the record, Falling Or Flying feels like a coherent album rather than a collection of tracks stringed together.

It owes more to Timbaland or Mount Kimbie than the current mainstream, but this is the point – Vagabon makes this music sound so intuitive that it could well be the next big thing.

It’s fair to say that long term fans will greet Nothing Lasts Forever with warmth and delight but even when assessing it with a more critical eye, it’s hard to avoid thinking they’ve rarely sounded better.

Chaos For The Fly is a captivating debut that showcases his artistic evolution outside of the post-punk bombast of Fontaines DC. These songs bleed through in their honesty and lack of over-thinking to demand active engagement, to explore their intricacies and contemplate their themes.

Like all the best albums, it keeps you on edge, never quite knowing what’s coming next.

Bailey Rae sounds like an artist reborn. It may not be what you expect, but it’s all the better for that. Without a doubt, it is the best album of Bailey Rae’s career, and quite probably one of the albums of 2023 as well.

Of course their music is heavily in thrall to the 1960s, but they wear their influences with an easy-fitting indifference, like a comfortable jacket.

There may be nothing to touch Pretenders classics like Brass In Pocket or Don’t Get Me Wrong, but Relentless is an appropriately named album – the sound of a band constantly moving forward and refusing to submit to the dying of the light.

trip9love…??? is what happens when brilliant artists navigate their way around self-imposed limitations: most music doesn’t sound like this, but perhaps it should.

It is a unity of the best elements of James Blake’s music – the rare ability to move the feet of a large crowd and the heart of a single bedroom listener simultaneously. He nails both achievements with striking regularity here.

Clear Pond Road is an album that takes time to really get under your skin, but once its there, it continues to reward, enchant, and disturb. It’s another wonderful addition to the Hersh canon.

Guts is an immensely confident and assured record which confirms that Olivia Rodrigo is here for the long-term.

While it may not hit the meteoric heights of It’s A Wonderful Life or Vivadixiesubmarine, Bird Machine does act as an emotional and evocative farewell to one of the most missed songwriters of our age.

Hit Parade provides ample demonstration of her inherent and infectious sense of fun and her propensity for eccentric bops, qualities which have served her well across the decades.

Nothing ever feels glued or grafted on for some empty featured artist action; Halo, Beck and the samples collage together into the voyage as a whole, and combined with the ever-dazzling visuals that have rightly earned them their place in live music history as one of the most spectacular attractions on the circuit, it’s a testament to their never-ending quest of excellence.

There’s not much on this album which will raise the eyebrows of anyone familiar with their previous work, as it falls somewhere between the fuzzy glow of 1993’s Souvlaki and the dispassionate chill of its follow-up Pygmalion. But Everything Is Alive is joyful listen regardless, taking the cloud tunnel bliss of the best shoegaze and adding some pure pop pleasure. Cinema for the ears? More like dream visions for the soul.

By the time Free The Ruler’s soulful loop fades out, we’ve only come to a conclusion in the loosest sense. The listener enters Earl’s world in medias res and 25 minutes later he’s still maintaining, still working everything out, but the journey’s been nuanced and engaging.