Her fourth album feels like an unjustly forgotten classic.

Radical Optimism lacks a unique personality as a result – particularly compared with the vivid writing of her peers. It’s a well-made album with mass appeal and, of course, there’s no law that pop music has to be deep. But the adjective in its title certainly doesn’t belong.

Self Hell doesn’t always successfully navigate the difficult terrain between pleasing a hardcore following and broadening a sound, but the band certainly aren’t standing still.

You Should Know Me is ingratiating simply by virtue of having a full, sinewy bass line; Gutter Punch, although borrowing liberally from Billie Eilish’s Bad Guy in its second verse, is destabilising and magnetic. For the most part, though, Porij can’t help but feel warmed over.

What ties it all together is her beautifully honed skill as a songwriter. For all the sonic uproar, the melodies are impossible to miss, and so is the personality she imprints across the album: troubled but self-aware, wryly funny, the doubts and fears and worries she expresses completely at odds with the confidence of her approach to risk-taking, shape-shifting music.

If it’s hard to avoid a certain deja vu in the urban Manchester feel or Johnson’s signature drum fills, there are more bubbling electronics this time and the songs span a spectrum from introspection to euphoria.

If you wanted to pick holes, The Tortured Poets Department is a shade too long.

David Kennedy’s drumming is riveting, both finicky and louche as he sways through Dilla-time funkiness and math-rock detail. Guitarist Finlay Clark is in some ways a minimalist, repeating pretty riffs or expertly chosen chords, but there’s nothing minimal about his generous playing. .... Most astonishing of all is Jessica Hickie-Kallenbach, singing with more power and confidence than ever before. Her luminously soulful voice is a distinctive instrument, with vibrato that makes whole songs shudder with life.

I’m Doing It Again Baby! takes big, bold swings. Some of them miss.

Devoid of weak tracks or ideas that don’t gel, it’s an album that sounds as if it was made by someone who knows exactly what she’s doing. .... An original pop voice: Fabiana Palladino might well be one of 2024’s best debut albums.

The duo also make room for classy experimentation, adroitly merging jangly blues with languid hip-hop on Paper Crown. The gaps are filled with a series of sunny Beatlesque numbers that feel lightweight and often rather inane. It’s an all-bases approach that doesn’t feel so much like an identity crisis as a slightly underwhelming diffusion of the band’s once heady magic.

If the results don’t quite hold together, Cowboy Carter still proves Beyoncé is impressively capable of doing whatever she wants.

This set’s beautiful opener Defiant, Tender Warrior builds a bewitching trance from soft piano wavelets, growling bass accents and snare-pattern whispers before Lloyd’s breathy tenor long-tones and enraptured top-end warbles even begin.

He experiments with texture and even puts it through a vocoder but, for all Elbow’s adventures, the foundations are still classy songwriting, heart and soul.

On Tigers Blood, she returns clear-eyed and spirited with a twisting country album of anthemic earworms that evoke long summer evenings, intimate chats and misty-eyed regret.

The majority of Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran settles for gliding in one ear and out the other without leaving much impression, but without actively driving you up the wall either: the state of sublime mediocrity in which a lot of current pop chooses to operate.

It’s rare to hear an album that scales such songwriting peaks with the spectacular one-two of Cardinal and Deeper Well before flopping back into total blah-ness. This album proves the line between sublime simplicity and vacant banality can be surprisingly thin.

If the album were 10 tracks rather than 18 – many of which could in turn lose two minutes from their runtime – Timberlake’s musical redemption might be more of a home run. Invariably it sags.

Putting Grande on a pedestal helps no one, and the beatific, mature Eternal Sunshine brings her safely back down to earth.

Centrepiece Turning the Prism slackens the narrative tension, but there’s still something gripping about sitting with its pure affect: arrhythmic beats landing like red-mist punches, Kubacki’s guitar rearing up with an equine whinny. That violence reverberates even through the more placid ambient tracks, resulting in a grim, magnificent record that trades in real horror.

The music is similarly unbothered by what anyone who isn’t already onboard thinks, resting almost entirely on a push-and-pull between the sound of Gallagher and Squire’s former bands.

Y’Y finds Freitas at his most wide-ranging, embodying soft natural ambience as well as dramatic action on the piano. It is an album of mood music that refuses to settle, leaving the listener moved and invigorated.

Even at its most melodious, Playing Favorites still sounds fierce and raw, an object lesson in altering your sound without losing your essence.

MGMT seemed deeply nonplussed by the celebrity Oracular Spectacular conferred on them. But while you wait and see, Loss of Life is a delightful thing to immerse yourself in.

Stevie Wonder’s Overjoyed (a fittingly ecstatic Iyer homage to Chick Corea’s interpretation) is unfolded over a rocking left hand and Tyshawn Sorey’s crackling polyrhythms, sparking one of several breathtakingly headlong Iyer solos on the set, coolly placing fragments and twists of the original theme into the onrush despite its scorching pace.

In truth, Lytle’s crestfallen songs – sung in plaintive sigh suggesting Brian Wilson channelling Charlie Brown’s existential angst – are a seductive joy, and getting lost in his soft-focus happy-sadness is an addictive pleasure all its own.

Not everything on Tangk works, but the vast majority of it does, with an urgency that draws you into its message of positivity: reason enough to break out the freudenfreude.

As per usual, the actual music is hard to hear over the accompanying clamour, but if you strain your ears you can make out an album that’s an improvement on 2021’s Donda. It’s still uneven in a way that occasionally makes you wonder what on earth Volumes 2 and 3 of Vultures are going to sound like.

Dissociative, distinctive album.

On paper, All Life Long looks like hard work for anyone whose musical tastes don’t usually dwell on the avant garde fringes. The reality is that it requires virtually no effort on the part of the listener: you just have to let yourself succumb.

It’s all very pleasant if familiar – not as thrilling or groundbreaking as, say, 1976’s Super Ape: Jesus Life all but mirrors Max Romeo’s reggae classic Chase the Devil (recorded with Perry’s band the Upsetters and later sampled by the Prodigy). Still, it’s hard not to be moved by the atypical and lovely Goodbye, which features piano and strings by classical composer Hugo Bechstein.

relude to Ecstasy is a delight, filled with enough ideas to suggest that they’ll come up with just as many more the next time around: the Last Dinner Party’s confidence may stem less from the hype they’ve provoked than the fact they know how good they are.

The band’s wash of guitars and vocals tap into the renewed interest in shoegaze while also channelling Pixies/Breeders grungy pop and mournful Cure/New Order basslines; their youthful energy and production gloss gives 30-year-old sounds and styles a more contemporary reboot.

It makes for an album that’s too involving and engaging and powerful to count as merely more of the same: you leave the turmoil of People Who Aren’t There Anymore feeling moved, rather than jaded.

What An Enormous Room doesn’t yet fulfil Torres’s stadium-sized promises, but form and ambition align on album highlight I Got the Fear.

[Bending Hectic is] one of the best things Yorke and Greenwood have put their names to in at least a decade. Like the rest of Wall of Eyes, it really doesn’t feel interstitial, like a placeholder until the definite article reappears. What that portends for Radiohead’s future – if anything – is arguable; the album’s quality is not.

Halvorson’s fusions of written and spontaneous music reach an entrancing new seamlessness and seductive warmth with this terrific set.

No wheels are being reinvented here but it’s another tune-filled, uplifting, solid winner.

So it’s dreamy and fuzzy but sharp, witty and danceable with it; varied but coherent, consistently enjoyable. It’s an album on which Kali Uchis sounds not just like an artist who is now doing exactly what she wants, but one who also knows exactly what she’s doing.

It is a slow-burning piece that encourages us to view time in geological rather than human terms – the rapturous, otherworldly sounds that the planet might continue to make long after humanity’s extinction.

Musically, the album isn’t dark at all. It’s overwhelmingly lovely, with classy hooks and rousing choruses.

I Get Into Trouble is a generous and deeply emotional record that embodies what Zietsch does so well: offering the listener a window into her most vulnerable thoughts, while also holding a mirror to the social structures that have led her there. Through this album, Zietsch bears witness to both herself and the world.

McRae is still fitting a lot of currently popular boxes without escaping them. There are highlights, but the overwhelming impression is of placeholder pop, filling space until something different comes along.

There’s a lovely intimacy and openness to songs such as When I Hold You in My Arms and while his voice has lost some of the old youthful power, it has gained in tenderness, nuance, humanity and warmth.

It may be as imperfect as Pink Friday was, but Pink Friday 2 offers more than enough supporting evidence to make the latter claims sound like anything but hollow boasts.

There’s not nearly enough of that bullish intensity on The First Time, and far too many songs like Too Much, an A&R-by-numbers team-up with the BTS member Jung Kook and the behemoth UK drill rapper Central Cee.

It’s dense and rewarding and has more interesting things to say than the earnest but pat song titles – Live and Let Live, Love Can Heal – suggest.

It is a remarkably exposing record that showcases Ntuli’s mastery of her instruments. Opener Sunrise (In California) sets the tone, shifting through Robert Glasper-style chord progressions, while its counterpart Sunset (In California) taps into the plaintive phrasing crafted by the father of South African piano jazz, Abdullah Ibrahim.

There’s no obvious storyline to Clarke’s cinematic adventure, just the same note of dread ringing throughout. But the righteous Blackleg provides an emotional hinge to this largely wordless album, setting a scab-bashing miners’ song from 19th-century Northumberland to a pitch-dark chasm of drones.

Rockstar might have got away with the obviousness of its material if it had opted to do something interesting with it, but virtually every cover here seems to have been made as close to the original version as possible.

His lyrics tend to overshadow his skills as a tunesmith or his musical eclecticism, but if you listen to the more manageable two-CD set, you’re struck by how melodically strong and varied his output sounds.

The trouble with using simple riffs is that they can easily skew naive or simply dull; too often in the quieter sections, the duo opt for ponderous arpeggiated runs of notes that make their songs feel pedestrian rather than merely slow. But when they bring in groove (as on Woe), or let noise fill up the space – be it shredded or screamed – they carry the listener aloft to a hard-won clarity.

These dozen tracks have a pure, hymnal quality. Rather than sounding bleak or dark you can hear the healing process under way.

Listening to the album feels like witnessing a fireworks display, each song exploding to reveal intricate patterns before quickly vanishing as the next one launches.

Bridging past and present, Sweet Justice is a breathless, intoxicating album bursting with ideas and creativity, and reveals something different and compelling with every listen.

It’s well-made, hooky – but nevertheless, Golden is an album bound to leave more agnostic listeners pondering what the fuss is about.

Listening to Now and Then, it’s hard to see what Harrison’s objection was in purely musical terms. A moody, reflective piano ballad, it’s clearly never going to supplant Strawberry Fields Forever or A Day in the Life in the affections of Beatles fans, but it’s a better song than Free as a Bird or Real Love. And posthumously reworked as a Beatles track, it definitely packs a greater emotional punch.

These subtle, interesting songs lost out to brasher, more basic tracks – Welcome to New York, Style – on the original 1989 tracklist, but who’s to say whether their inclusion would have affected Swift’s trajectory? Clearly she made a pretty good call on that front. This carbon copy of her blockbuster album doesn’t rewrite history but adds some instantly treasurable footnotes.

Of course, there are still jokes about masturbating, having sex in a church and how to pronounce the word turpentine – but there’s an existential bent to the whole ordeal, too. As their younger selves sang in 1997: I guess this is growing up.

Intriguing and affecting.

What Hackney Diamonds has in profusion is really good songs.

This is an album from an artist who refuses to sugarcoat human experience. That Woods is able to set her unflinching insight to hook-filled, restlessly genre-blending tunes makes her a talent not to be sniffed at.

This is one of the year’s best and most distinctive pop albums, and it’s to Sivan’s credit that even as the genre speeds up around him, he’s keeping pace while making sure to feel the breeze rush by.

This tension leaves For All the Dogs in a strange limbo: its highs are higher than many recent Drake records, and its lows are far lower.

Perhaps no album could tie together all the diverse strands of Stevens’ musical career but, as it ranges from lo-fi singer-songwriter to baroque orchestration to opaque electronics to warped pop, Javelin comes surprisingly close: a remarkable achievement in itself. That it sounds like a holisitic album, one that flows rather than fractures, is remarkable, too – but it does, carrying the listener along with it as it goes.

It is crammed with weepy ballads that skew painfully boilerplate.

AI is poignantly used to mutate vocals and interpret composition, as opposed to the track Memories of Music, where it seems to be given freer rein to write – the result is slapstick played extremely straight. Despite such misfires, Again features some of Lopatin’s most touching music, where the disastrous and the sublime are always second-guessing each other.

Yet despite this genre-hopping, most songs eventually end up in the same realm: that of a bland, plodding vaguely sentimental ballad boasting at least one instantly memorable hook.

Cousin isn’t a completely unprecedented left turn but nor is it a straightforward reanimation of past glories. It’s something else; an album that feels simultaneously familiar and different, satisfying and disquieting.

An extraordinary album.

The desire to offload and flaunt her current relationship at length means Scarlet loses the snappy brevity that was Planet Her’s calling-card. After a while, you feel that points that have already been made are being reiterated, and a long album is made to seem longer still by its weird structure, a glut of slower and more abstract tracks taking up most of its second half.

Laugh Track, the National’s surprise 10th album, is billed as the second half of Frankenstein, with all but one song written at the same time. But the link feels surface-level: Laugh Track does away with the airy atmosphere and hand-wringing solipsism of Frankenstein, instead adopting a more grownup take on the existential conundrums of earlier National records.

It all adds up to an oddly dissatisfying return, albeit one that suggests the Top 40 would be a lot more interesting with Diddy producing it.

There are an awful lot of singer-songwriters around exploring the kind of subjects Mitski touches on here: disillusionment, isolation, broken relationships, overindulgence. But it is questionable whether anyone else is doing it with this much skill, this lightness of touch or indeed, straightforward melodic power: in the best possible sense, Mitski feels out on her own.

The Best Thing in the World is a wonderful piece of creaky minimalism, a kind of steampunk techno created on double basses, massed guitars and a vintage synth. Best of all is Naked Like Water, a gently pulsating West African funk groove, featuring interlocking basslines, scratchy guitars and gospel singer Donna Thompson’s wordless voice rising above the aqueous vocal harmonies. Sublime.

It all adds up to quite a voyage: the Merseysiders’ most fully realised set of songs since their debut.

The other striking thing is how sharp her lyrics are, behind their unassuming conversational veneer: only Pretty Isn’t Pretty’s assault on beauty standards feels a little boilerplate. Elsewhere, she’s witty.

A really masterful album.

It’s a variation on the old disco trick of marrying elated music to despondent lyrics, but it really packs a punch, partly because the elated music is incredibly well done, and partly because the vulnerability on display here feels genuine and convincing.

For That Beautiful Feeling doesn’t deliver hits such as Go and Galvanize, but like each of the pair’s previous nine albums it contains moments that will claw into your lizard brain and refuse to leave, whether you last went clubbing yesterday or three decades ago, when their debut single, Song to the Siren, dropped.

This second album of their second phase continues to do pretty much the same as they’ve ever done, but is all the lovelier for it.

Its production hones Burna Boy’s sprawling influences into music that feels punchy, inimitable and impressively streamlined.

After a decade apart, Be Your Own Pet are a far better band: explicit, tight, even more inventive.

The first half of Everyone Else begins as you’d expect – heady, fast-building, glamorous – but in the latter half, Lindstrøm pulls away from crowd-pleasing into thornier territory.

World Music Radio proves that Jon Batiste is capable of coming up with [new ideas]. They seem to arrive when he sounds most like himself: an artist with jazz background, a deep knowledge of musical history and an iconoclastic streak. It also proves he is capable of sublimating his own individuality to fit in; when it tries too hard, it simply adds to the slush pile of nondescript pop.

What Comes Will Come, a skronking synth-pop-rap song, finds Owusu-Ansah sinking himself into production that strikes an interesting midpoint between goth-rock and shimmering synth-funk, one of the rare moments on the album that feels musically akin to the disorienting genre mashup of Smiling With No Teeth. These passages offer welcome electricity on an album that too often plays it safe and plays it vague – capitalising on an algorithm-breaking debut with more of the same.

As character assassinations go, The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons is a riotously good time. It’s no major reinvention of the Hives’ electrified vocals, staccato guitar, and relentless pace, but it finds the band heavier, louder and faster than ever.

You sense some listeners will find Sundial too ethically complex and contrary. Hopefully many more will flock to Noname, who brings piercing intellect and joie de vivre to tough questions. A librarian, yes, but also a moon stalker.

The sonic influences are worn a little too plainly for Prestige to feel like a landmark release, but by borrowing from musical history with such care and respect, Girl Ray have made an album that is very difficult not to raise a smile – or a frosty Midori sour cocktail – to.

He's a canny grounding force, and has a sharp ear for bringing together seemingly disparate ingredients. Utopia could have used more of that sure hand.

The good news is you don’t need to subject yourself to The Idol to appreciate its soundtrack. Although most numbers riff on the show’s content, their musings on the ugly underbelly of celebrity and disturbingly dysfunctional relationships are ambiguous enough to be enjoyed on their own terms.

Her voice is slightly deeper than it was, with a rich timbre indefatigability earned through lived experience. George Gershwin’s Summertime offers a rueful backwards glance. The years melt away for The Circle Game. Both Sides Now has the poignancy of a 79-year-old singing words she wrote aged 23

Diehard Dexys fans doubtless would not expect anything less, but even if you don’t count yourself among their number, The Feminine Divine might leave you glad he chose to continue doing what he alone does: after all, genuinely unique figures are thin on the ground in pop these days.

Love Hallucination isn’t cosplay but an affirmation of Lanza’s unique ear. Her tactile heavy bass, cirrus-wisp synths and spun-sugar falsetto have deepened: the low end is diamond-hard, her playful freestyle-inspired melodies and moods glimmer like the light refracted through the gem.

I’m not so daft as to believe that a Barbie soundtrack album should have made for groundbreaking or era-defining art – but on a level of pure enjoyment, listening to a concept album about Barbie does wear thin very quickly.

The tunes are uniformly gorgeous. No one expects career-best stuff from a reformation album, but the sighing melody of The Ballad is among the loveliest in Blur’s catalogue.

Drake’s presence might have broken Who Told You in territories hitherto resistant to J Hus’s charms, but the album has the ability to follow through.

Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) dilutes some of the original’s acid. One issue with Swift revisiting her older work is that her voice has changed with age. Now 33, she’s a much richer and more skilled singer than she was then, but their piercing, youthful twang was what made these songs kick harder in all their dressing-downs and rabid desires, emphasising the sense of a girl wading into adult waters.