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.

Sufjan Stevens’ Carrie & Lowell is perhaps the closest comparison in terms of musical and emotional tenor, but Byrne’s album is ultimately as singular as the woman singing it, and as unforgettable as a departed friend.

My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross feels like a particularly powerful entry in her discography: surrounded by music that’s beautiful but relatively straightforward, that voice seems more extraordinary still.

Among the hackneyed British soul tropes, the 24-year-old clearly has a distinct vision of off-kilter pop.

Like the Dorset woods they describe, I Inside the Old Year Dying is eerily forbidding, but intoxicating, and easy to lose yourself in.

The Velvet Underground-worthy Los Angeles: City of Death is the closest this Swans incarnation comes to rock and unusually for a band of this vintage, they’re still springing surprises, such as the way Michael Is Done suddenly erupts into beatific rapture reminiscent of early Brian Eno.

If only the music on her major label debut album was as interesting and innovative as its author is, or even as diverting as Unholy.

Like all second albums that offer only minor adjustments to a debut, Work of Art leaves you wondering a little about what the future holds. But such thoughts are easy to dispel during the half-hour it plays for: you’re too busy enjoying yourself to worry.

LaVette is the true focus, leading the fiery JB’s-esque funk of Mess About, and declaring “champagne and a joint would do me just fine” on Plan B. She’s glorious company, and when she croons sadly “I keep on rolling, but the thrill is gone” on See Through Me, the electric charge of her voice makes a liar of her.

Sitting somewhere between remixes and reimaginings, the songs on Jarak Qaribak illustrate the elasticity of this songbook, highlighting how its longing melodies can be reapplied into new voices, transmitting similar emotions through unusual settings.

Hypnotically melodic, clever, stylish, serious, fun, addictively unexpected and euphorically danceable, it’s the kind of pop they don’t make any more.

Dixon’s fourth album tightens its lens: skipping by in 30 minutes, its songs possess a renewed urgency and velocity. But his writing is more literary and exploratory still. Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!? (named after three of Toni Morrison’s most celebrated works) provides an embarrassment of imagistic riches.

It’s an album about hedonistic abandon that occasionally makes hedonistic abandon sound like something challenging a therapist has tasked you to do before next week’s session. Then again, the album’s brevity means those moments pass quickly, to be supplanted by moments when Monáe sounds as light and warm as the music behind her.

This is a strong second showing from a group that’s relaxing into itself while not compromising its razor-sharp worldview.

Despite a handful of the elder Gallagher’s irresistible everyman anthems, much of Council Skies is unambitious and generic to the point of tedium.

The tunes are noticeably more polished, the dynamic shifts punchier: it’s as if the desire to express something about Hawkins, or to make an album that stands as a worthy memorial has given them a fresh sense of purpose and momentum.

It has taken Water From Your Eyes six years to reach a point where their music feels genuinely original, a journey that feels worth it. There’s a lesson in there.

There are gorgeous songs here about Clark’s Pacific north-west home and her family – but it often feels as if she has mistaken seriousness for honesty. Aside from a few lovely ballads, such as the sparse Buried and plaintive maybe-breakup song Come Back to Me, most of these songs feel anonymous.

The effect is gorgeous, atmospheric – at times spine-tinglingly so – and undeniably cool. Yet she doesn’t distinguish herself from the glut of similarly minded artists from Greentea Peng to KeiyaA.

His voice is undeniably powerful; moreover it adds some grit and heft that’s lacking among sappier balladeers. So, occasionally, do the lyrics.

It’s horribly revealing of both men’s weaknesses. Eno’s contributions are witlessly unimaginative.

Releasing this material as a live album is a virtue – the audience’s roar after the absurdly pretty Turbines/Pigs has a thrilling note of disbelief.

A consistent album rather than a collection of tracks – or worse, a handful of big tunes padded out to album length with filler – Good Lies is filled with moments like that: you can spot the influences, but they’re always passed though a filter, presented in an original way.

The songwriting never dips below classic.

Subtract is easily his best album. But it’s also the first Ed Sheeran album since his debut for which you can’t confidently predict eye-watering commercial success.

The songwriting here is often very good, even timelessly classic.

This is her fullest and most colourful release to date, but it’s still a dense work that takes time to reveal itself. Casual listeners are unlikely to be rewarded.

By and large, this is pop music made by people who really know what they’re doing. The songs have bulletproof melodies and killer choruses, while snappy lyrics abound.

It all hits just the right note between accessible and experimental: idiosyncratic and intricate yet straightforwardly enjoyable, Variables is unwavering in its brilliance.

It’s an album that manages to be different from anything they’ve recorded before yet perfectly in keeping with their past: a comeback worth waiting for.

Always soulful and forever in the groove, Okumu’s seamless genre switch-ups ensure I Came from Love finds strength in its multiplicity.

There’s enough worthwhile stuff to ensure that fans will be happy – you can overlook its shortcomings while the title track rages – and that touring won’t seem entirely like an exercise in running through the back catalogue. Equally, no one hoping to convince a non-believer of Metallica’s greatness will reach for it over the classics.

Hecker seems to want you on guard, braced for cataclysm. Nerves fray, discords linger, that sense of panic accumulates and draws you helplessly in. And this allusive, wordless album starts to feel eerily modern and big.

You will find little robust melody or Piano Man finesse in these strange symphonies. But rummaging through Gately’s mazy, beautiful disorder is a beguiling adventure in its own right.

Blondshell, rich with bitter experience and untrammelled honesty, offers a robust shelter where listeners might start to find it.

Soothing, moving, occasionally disquieting and utterly immersive, Sundown suggests its predecessor was something else entirely: merely the first step of an entirely unlikely and entirely delightful career renaissance.

Parisien’s Dou is a dreamy sax melody with the composer at his most Bechet-like, while Peirani’s Nomad’s Sky often suggests an imploring voice, with softly whooping soprano sounds rising over long arco-cello chords. If ever there was a powerful argument for jazz being an attitude to music-making rather than a genre, it’s this rare gem.

Smart but chaotic, funny but disturbing – Scaring the Hoes is a confounding victory.

There is so much to revel in here. ... They remain a radical band while making music that is reaching out to the mainstream – while also giving off the thrilling sense that there is so much more to come.

There is scope for flashes of greater dynamism but in their consistency, Aftab, Iyer and Ismaily reveal the beauty in quietude.

It is her quietest, most wilfully inscrutable record in a long time, perhaps since 2015’s glacially paced, rebelliously quiet Honeymoon. ... Instead, many songs here are subtle, vaporous, but potent all the same.

Whether they’re running away from or towards something is anybody’s guess, but crucially, Tumor remains one step ahead of the rest.

Neither a disaster on the level of their iTunes launch, nor a triumph to match Zoo TV, Songs of Surrender sits somewhere in the middle of that sliding scale of success.

There’s a naturalness and a flow in evidence, and charm, too. You can’t imagine anyone who rushed to the download sites was disappointed with what they found.

It’s utterly transfixing – not just for the gorgeousness of the tone, but for the absolute wondrousness of the melodies.

Past//Present//Future suffers from a sense of sameness – compact or not, the songs eventually blur into one mass of pop hooks and distorted guitars.

Karol’s skill is in evocative melodies that transcend any language barrier.

Here Uchis couches her velveteen mood pieces in pillow-soft R&B, creating a suite of songs luxuriant enough to bathe in.

Ugly is an album that carves out its own space: messy but vital, it deserves to be huge.

This will be too much of a standards-like set for some, maybe – but even if Mehldau the solo pianist has had to trade rock’s muscularity for a chamber-musical delicacy, his power isn’t far beneath the surface.

Divorced from cartoon alter egos, big concepts and Albarn’s apparently limitless power to persuade big stars to do his bidding, it reveals itself as that most prosaic of things: a fantastic pop album.

[Seven Tears] builds gently, then feverishly, shivering with love. This whole album carries the same liberating feeling throughout.

An eclectic grab-bag of ideas that achieve varying degrees of success. When it hits the mark, you can understand why pop stars and left-field figures alike have been drawn into Skrillex’s orbit. But taken in one dose, it’s alternately exhilarating, frustrating and a little exhausting.

Over 40 minutes, it refines the sound of Pigs x7 and highlights the band’s strengths – presenting an unsparing induction into their mind-bending sonic vortex.

It’s not perfect – the title track is seven and a half minutes you might better use boiling eggs – but it is its own small wonder, as every Yo La Tengo album seems to be.

This Is Why stirs 00s alt-rock into the mix: the band have mentioned Bloc Party and Foals as influences. It’s not a combination that works without fail: there are tracks where the teaming of scratchy guitars and big pop hooks recalls the moment when the post-punk sound of 00s indie crashed into a Britpop-ish desire to make the BBC Radio 1 A-list, with irksome results – particularly on the single C’est Comme Ça. But you’re far more frequently struck by the deftness with which they weave the various aspects of their sound together.

Flamboyant on stage, behind the scenes he sought out, and achieved, a quiet, stable life. If that sounds boring, you should hear him sing about it. It’s not very rock’n’roll. It’s a lot more interesting and enduring than that.

My 21st Century Blues roars into life, hitting you with one fantastic song after another.

Luxury and gratitude are fine motifs, but without enough sonic distinction between tracks it gets boring fast.

You wish you got a bit more of the Sam Smith who was recently photographed for a magazine wearing goth-y platform boots, sock suspenders, tight blue satin shorts and an Abba T-shirt. They looked as if they didn’t care what anyone thought. It’s hard not to long for music with that attitude.

Playful, painful and loaded with hooks that worm their way to the surface, Honey feels ripe for bleak midwinter wallowing.

He’s abundantly talented, a singular and austerely powerful voice. But as Rap Game Awful proves, abundance can be a problem.

What Rush! lacks in heft – a couple of glancing lyrical references to sexuality and gender notwithstanding, not even Måneskin’s loudest cheerleader is going to claim it as a weighty album – it makes up for in enthusiasm. If that enthusiasm occasionally tips over into a cloying eagerness to please (Supermodel is a little too desperate to remind listeners of Smells Like Teen Spirit), more often it’s infectious.

Strays brilliantly rattles through country, psych and Patti Smith-style poetic rock’n’roll.

Although Space Man’s co-writers contributed to several other tracks, that song’s elegance is nowhere to be found among a litany of cliches and self-help guff so toothless it makes Ed Sheeran look like Nick Cave.

Moving far beyond the cotton-soft folk of her previous records, with Prize, Plain chooses to lean into her eccentricities – and the risk pays off.

Every Loser’s main flaw is that you’re left wanting more.

Coheed have been heavier and more forward-thinking than on Vaxis I, but they’ve never released an album with so many tracks primed to become hits. Rarely has almost an hour of sci-fi mumbo jumbo been easier on the ear.

These are beautifully elegiac songs, celebrating life’s transient joy, struggle, laughter and heartbreak, reflecting the fact that “sometimes the good die young, and sometimes they survive”.

Moin’s approach on Paste is barebones, but discerning – taking a craft knife to 80s and 90s indie music and using it to fashion their most fleshed-out release yet.

Much of this album sounds like a bleary-eyed afterparty, or the grey winter afternoon that follows, where your mind wanders back to an ex. It isn’t perfect, but it’s reflective, honest, funny. And Sorry only seem to be getting better.

She’s addressed the subject of mental health before in her work, but never quite as bluntly as on Broken, which shifts from a neat summation of depression’s ability to quietly get its claws into you. ... Meanwhile, the music business gets an extended kicking, particularly when it comes to its dealings with artists of colour. ... All of this is punchily, powerfully and, occasionally, wittily done.

SOS is very long – 23 tracks, well over an hour. It suggests someone continually adding to and augmenting a project, or perhaps throwing everything they’ve got at it, fuelled by the feeling that they might not do this again. The results are hugely eclectic.

What emerges are anthems of rebirth at the necessary end, in which we can count the constants. In this instance: fury, hope and fierce maternal love.

He’s clearly reached a level of celebrity where his audience are invested not just in the music but in Stormzy himself: if they’re willing to follow him down a more inward-looking path, This Is What I Mean is a good reward.

The record ends just as the party’s getting loose, with Londoner Josh Caffé commanding us to “Work! Serve!” over a deranged synth – more in this late-night ballroom house vein would be welcome.

Whatever havoc the pandemic may have wreaked on Mering’s already gloomy outlook, it’s done nothing to spoil her melodic facility. And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow gently bombards you with one fantastic tune after another.

Made in collaboration with electronic producer Photay, Kalak is a beguiling body of work, enveloping the listener in undulating synth melodies, layered horn fanfares and vocal features – all driven forward by Korwar’s ever-present percussion.

He may have landed on a sound, but as an artist Tomlinson is still directionless.

There’s no song as straightforwardly appealing as Girlfriend or Tilted. That said, there are moments when his innate songwriting ability is very much in evidence. ... But the album is peppered with tracks that feel formless and sketchy.

Shivering with tension, Trouble the Water is an exciting and urgent call to come together and kick off – at once a reflection of, and a cathartic release from, volatile times.

Endure reaches towards fun.

It’s an intense listen, demanding in the sense that you struggle to imagine putting it on in the background. Better to stick your headphones on and give Ultra Truth your undivided attention, something it amply rewards.

And I Have Been is a more straightforwardly elegant listen than I Tell a Fly. Melodies abound, orchestral elements trade off with electronics, and Clementine’s still-startling voice, an elastic tenor capable of shock and awe as well as succour, is front and centre.

Living Sky is a fine tribute by the indefatigable Allen to his mentor’s methods, and a remarkable late-life affirmation of his own.

Revolver’s new details tease out deeper meanings in the songs. Now more prominent, the low-lit backing harmonies on Here, There and Everywhere remake the tune as an old-fashioned rock’n’roll love song; the piano bending out of key on I Want to Tell You mirrors the narrator’s insecurity; and McCartney’s booming walking bass on Taxman illuminates the biting, cynical tone of Harrison’s lyrics. ... Revolver still sounds so vibrant.

Dry Cleaning’s second album isn’t a radical departure from last year’s outstanding New Long Leg. Florence Shaw still has the laconic, deadpan delivery of someone idly chatting over a garden fence. However, everything is slightly more refined, melodious and focused.

That confidence is the thing that binds Midnights together. There’s a sure-footedness about Swift’s songwriting, filled with subtle, brilliant touches.

It’s intense listening. The seven songs here last barely 30 minutes, but a powerful, concentrated half hour dose is all you need. Certainly – it’s all you need to stake a strong claim to the title of album of the year.

The Car is an enormously tactile record, full of strange textures – a lint-roller runs over velveteen, body paint clings to legs, arms, face, and tears are cried in a tanning booth.

Crutchfield’s [voice is] full of elasticity and billow, Williamson’s offering a sweetness and a trill. When they meet, as on the warmly unapologetic Hurricane, something magical is sprung.

While the technology-shy, primarily guitar-based Funny in a Foreign Language doesn’t exactly represent 33-year-old Healy mellowing out, it does highlight a shift in purpose. ... Thankfully, it’s not all about painstakingly peeling the lyrical onion. I’m in Love With You is the band at their most joyously straightforward.

Accompanying him for the hour that Reality lasts makes for an endlessly fascinating journey.

On their fourth album, Tableau, the exploratory, ambitious side of the band’s music has never been more clear. Many of the songs pick through various genres, magpie-style, subverting expectations.

Crucially, it doesn’t sound cynical: it's too idiosyncratic and eclectic. Instead, it sounds confident: the work of someone who knows their seemingly impulsive approach to rock and pop fits the current landscape and who’s taken that as carte blanche to do what they want. It's a confidence that never feels misplaced.