Much of Keep Your Eyes Ahead, like the softly plucked 'Shed Your Love' or the Dylanesque 'Broken Afternoon,' could easily backdrop drippy TV dramas, but that isn’t necessarily a knock. Both are beautiful tunes.

His tendency to cram a million ideas into every song gets toned down, too, but fans of that aesthetic shouldn’t worry; the songs are as intricate and delightfully off-kilter as ever.

She sounds like she’s rediscovering the thrill of making music, and a nervy triumph pervades.

There are a few moments when Auerbach's production touches threaten to distract from the grooves, but the overall quality is so impressively high that the occasional misstep is quickly forgotten.

Song for song, however, this is the best QOTSA album in a decade, delivering all the swagger and skew of their greatest work without rehashing it.

All the emphasis on getting the realness down doesn't distract from Bridges's butter-smooth vocals and inventive phrasing. Instead, the understated arrangements allow us to really hear his voice, unadorned by excessive studio shaping.

Emotional, stunning and one of the strongest debuts of the year so far.

Twice nominated for Britain’s Mercury Prize, Calvi has consistently delivered brilliant albums. This new era of openness only serves to push her to more relevant and engaging levels.

The album plods occasionally, but then the band’s mastery of mood shifts kicks in and a dreamy landscape and simple, jangly verse turn into a big, beautiful chorus.

What sets Yuck apart is their excellent songwriting. It takes hooks to pull off songs like these, even if they're buried under piles of grunge, and Yuck have hooks in scores.

Pala is a party record aiming directly at the pleasure centres – not at all a shallow pursuit.

We keep hearing about the death of rock ’n’ roll supplanted by some fleeting, trendy sub-genre; but with more confidence than ever, these dudes remind us just how powerful the pure stuff can be.

You have to admire the way Gaga fearlessly throws herself into, say, a disco mariachi arrangement on Americano, but she should be careful: her frequently righteous tone and overindulgence in clunky Catholic metaphors threaten to mire her memorable melodies in schlocky self-help proselytizing.

Schmilco is also sly and great, but superficially it feels like complex, mid-life personal stocktaking.

His debut album (named after his street, not the city in Oz) is a charming collection of lo-fi bedroom pop ditties that has the thematic naïveté of someone who’s just left his teen years and hometown behind.

Cold Specks’s anticipated follow-up to her excellent gospel-indebted folk-soul debut, I Predict A Graceful Expulsion, is a much louder, much more rock ’n’ roll, much more experimental experience; fuzz and feedback and unexpected elements (like synths on Let Loose The Dogs) constantly make things more interesting.

Pallett’s inventive textures lend emotional weight to some of the deliberately mundane lyrical details, so the album is at once beautifully ethereal and painfully real.

Apple's return to music is not only undeniably powerful, but Idler is arguably her best work yet.

A Wu-Tangy darkness permeates the whole album, which is cluttered with gems both musical (live sax and jazz flute) and lyrical.

It’s a fairly light album and doesn’t do anything new musically, but it’s solid; you don’t feel like it needs to be anything else.

Sky’s post-post-punk mellowing proves a welcome development, revealing maturity instead of postured snarling.

Through varied production, Q strikes a balance between his hard persona and the party vibe found on Habits’ catchiest tracks.

The result is one of their most serene and sonically consistent efforts to date.

Sounds like one big, happy family get-together.

Wacky pseudoscience aside, the results here are relatively accessible, at least by Matmos standards.

While curiosities and lost tracks usually only appeal to the fan who has everything, this album stands as a perfect complement to Springsteen's mid-70s work.

The songs’ simple moods--at times sentimental, winsome and ecstatic--nicely play off the depth and obsessive detail in the music.

Killer Mike is the Jäger shot of rap: efficient, acrid and totally devastating.