Burgess says that he “fell in love with the world again” after Covid, and you can hear that across Typical Music: After This and the sublime The Centre of Me (Is a Symphony Of You) hurtle forth with all the lust for life and seemingly boundless joie de vivre of their creator.

It’s the gospel-charged 12-minute live take, Rejoice, that stuns: a collective jam opened on a beckoning bass hook and driven to a rampant finale with the band locked into an almost choral unified voice, it really tells you why, after all these years, this group can still sell out the world’s concert halls in a blink.

A solid country-pop record. It’s a celebration of endings: a fortifying, bridging album that guides its author towards, hopefully, happier times.

It’s a relentless, wilfully sugary bombardment that stands or falls by the quality of the songwriting. When the tunes are strong, it’s cheerily flimsy fun. ... When the tunes aren’t strong, listening to Demon Time feels like standing within earshot of a tween who is frantically scrolling through TikTok without earbuds, which either makes it a brilliantly constructed mirror of our times, or an album-length public nuisance, or perhaps both.

Tied together by a desire for authenticity and marked by a ferocious culmination of frustration and self-actualisation, As Above So Below is Tembo’s most cohesive body of work yet.

The songs are tightly written even when their structure tends to the episodic or their tempos shift gear. They’re also finely balanced, the choruses big and bold enough to attract attention but not overshadow the main attraction’s essential essence. Osbourne’s bleakly desperate wail is front and centre, his lyrical preoccupations intact.

If Älskar can occasionally feel identikit, there’s a refreshing honesty in its compromise between raw confessionals and acknowledging the pressure to “make it through the bullshit flying at me, write something catchy and turn it into money”.

His latest album’s confident sonic step forward – Yungblud is still very much a work in progress.

Amid some formulaic tracks, Your Life Is Mine is a welcome and superb curveball, Grogan’s darker tale of “an ocean of tears, the fury of the years” delivered over Cocteau Twins-type shimmering guitars.

Flood is an album that requires patient and careful listening, peeling back the layers in each song to find the pulsing heart beneath. There’s nothing as immediate as the songs on Donnelly’s debut, but that’s not a bad thing – these 11 tracks ebb and flow like water, washing into and over one another to create a sense of something pure and boundless.

Smith’s music often sounds like a dozen mobile phone ringtones going off in a video games arcade while a west African drum circle rehearse on the street outside. Occasionally, this cacophony sounds sublime.

The Chats are treading a fine line between stupid and clever, but there’s no meanness of spirit here.

The result is an album that’s alternately charming and cliched, that involves boilerplate beats and sparky musical invention. That said, nothing about it is going to turn off the teens that constitute Aitch’s fanbase.

For the power of revenge as a notion, it’s a limited emotional palette for a writer as gifted as Darnielle to work with. It feels more like a brilliantly conceived and executed exercise than something to return to.

Just succumb to its unique invention, curious shifts in tone and plethora of weird juxtapositions: something that’s easy enough to do.

An ebullient record brimming with sheer love of the craft.

Traumazine is an album that leaves you reeling slightly, both impressed and strangely grateful – convinced of Megan Thee Stallion’s brilliance, and glad you’re not on the receiving end of it.

The Alchemist’s Euphoria is rarely dull, and often hugely entertaining. But one still longs for Pizzorno to make the album that is as great as the breadth of his imagination suggests.

The issue is that none of the songs that all this gorgeous production whirls around are actually any good.

It’s rousing stuff, and with indie-pop producer Lawrence Rothman on hand, her vivid, intentionally raw fiddle-playing is balanced well with expressions of her softer side, seemingly taking inspiration from peers who are blazing trails beyond country’s traditional bounds.

The unpolished edges feel like the sound of a band falling in love with each other all over again. More than that, even, you get the sense of them staking out new ground together: their sound, usually soft and steady, becomes a thrilling lesson in catharsis.

Touted as Act I of a confirmed trilogy, Renaissance falls short of being Beyoncé’s best full-length, but it still fulfils her liberationist aims. ... Her sense of freedom throughout is palpable, and an infectious spur to action.

Her debut is a great, carefree soundtrack to dancing through the struggle.

Not everything he tries works – it’s a relief when the chaotic rock/rap crossover British Hell comes to an end – but despite its diversity, it hangs together as an album, the tracks bonded by a rough-edged grit.

18 is a peculiar and hugely uneven record.

An album that transformed Lizzo from an alternative hip-hop curio to a recognised star. But whatever the pains staked in its making, Special pulls its task off with style.

Beatopia is an enjoyable sojourn down a well-travelled sonic avenue, but not the most memorable of trips.

It’s noisy, jolting and filled with gruesome imagery, but somehow arid and remote, music presented with a self-satisfied smirk (“idiots are infinite, thinking men numbered”, drawls Greep at one point) that prevents wholehearted commitment. Maybe it takes on a different, more direct power live.

Her spoken words, songs and sighs give shape to this tempest of jazz, hip-hop and R&B, whirling together a who’s-who of Black classical.

The record teems with understated but headily intimate images: the minutiae of a bruised mind, artfully distilled.

The Other Side of Make-Believe has its longueurs – the lumbering Mr Credit among them – but it also has its pleasures: it doesn’t sound phoned in, which is much to its credit. Long past the point where they’re in the business of attracting new fans, they nevertheless keep moving, albeit subtly.

If the music never quite achieves the power and majesty of Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, it has something of that great work’s certainty and inevitability, which is more than enough.

It’s an extremely powerful album – Cave and Ellis are superb writers, at the top of their game – even if you wonder how often you’ll listen to it, or indeed, what one quite vocal section of his fanbase will make of it.

Progressive to the very soles of its nine-minute songs, and characterised by a level of instrumental proficiency that is, occasionally, emotionally detached.

Sometimes, Forever is at its most engaging when Lopatin’s sound designs appear to be working in sympathy with the grimmer aspects of the lyrics and at odds with Allison’s penchant for a toothsome pop melody.

Honestly, Nevermind therefore offers a weird combination of the unexpected and business as usual. ... There is something really admirable about Drake’s desire to reach beyond the music his audience expects, and to do it well. You just wish he would apply the same restlessness to his persona.

An album that’s inventive, angry, witty, original and pretty irresistible. Supernova is a riot of its own.

These are new landmarks in Halvorson’s already inimitable discography.

These are new landmarks in Halvorson’s already inimitable discography.

Magic Pony Ride excels when it is carefree and cantering, losing its allure when it stops to let reality sink in.

Gold Rush Kid gets better the further it moves away from the standard blueprint, into emotional territory that, if it isn’t exactly dark (happily for him, Ezra seems to inhabit a world where every problem comes with a resolution) is certainly more overcast.

You would struggle to describe The Versions as anything other than a mixed bag. The weird thing is that it somehow works as a tribute to Neneh Cherry regardless of the contributions’ quality: the good tracks emphasise what a fantastic songwriter she is, and the less successful ones make you feel her absence and underline her uniqueness as a performer.

It’s very difficult to read anything even vaguely meaningful into lines like “while Emma eggs her head she looks the same” (World of Pots and Pans). It’s the only element of this album that serves as a reminder of its creators’ inexperience – the rest is a masterclass in a new kind of classic rock.

When it reaches its most pumping, Baby, We’re Ascending tends to sag; these songs feel slightly untethered, or even half-hearted, next to their spirited, amorphous cousins. Occasionally, Throssell finds a balance to the two warring halves of Baby, We’re Ascending.

Some of the top lines are nagging in their immediacy – the joyous “do-do-do’s” on the 90-second Bop positively tickle you in the armpits – but others are cleverly minimal, like the announcements on the chorus to Empty in My Mind.

There are nice sonic touches here and there: the off-key slide guitar that opens Folding Mountains; the filtered house squelch of Best Feeling. So on its own terms, Mellow Moon succeeds. Even so, you wonder if it might not reflect a young artist pulling his punches.

Heavy Pendulum is certainly the sound of a renewed band and is, like everything they’ve recorded since 2003’s Antenna (their ill-fated attempt at commercial crossover), an unapologetically fierce beast.

That Helm had less than a year to live obviously lends his performance poignancy, but as epitaphs go, Carry Me Home isn’t really one suffused with what-might-have-been melancholy: it’s too exuberant, too vibrant for that. It sounds more like a man going out in a blaze of glory.

By the end it's impossible to ignore the fact that this is a long record with flagging momentum. But it's also impossible to ignore this intriguing debut's promise. Preacher's Daughter has lyrical richness and atmospheric potency to spare.

This is music for the rocky mountaintop that invites the listener to place themselves in the humbling context of a wider cosmos. Following a compass resolutely his own, Air sees Cover ascend to the realm of the similarly spiritual visionary Kamasi Washington.

Harry’s House is extremely well turned out, ticks a lot of the right boxes and has abundant charm, which makes it a perfect reflection of the pop star who made it.

Mr Morale & the Big Steppers is absolutely crammed with lyrical and musical ideas. Its opening tracks don’t so much play as teem. ... An album that leaves the listener feeling almost punch-drunk at its conclusion.

Were A Light for Attracting Attention actually that day job’s long-awaited follow-up to A Moon Shaped Pool, you wouldn’t be crushed with disappointment, which is far from faint praise. Whatever the future holds for the Smile, their debut album feels like more than an indulgent diversion.

Lke most 23-track albums, Un Verano Sin Ti could have used a nip and a tuck. But when it hits its heights, it leaves you puzzled at Britain’s lack of interest in Bad Bunny.

Soft Cell return with an album that makes the very best of their vantage point as synth-pop elders with an eye on the future. *Happiness Not Included cleverly compares the 80s promises of a future straight out of science-fiction (“rocket ships and monorails, electricity that never fails”) with how things have actually turned out.

If We isn’t a return to the standards Arcade Fire reached on their debut album Funeral or 2010’s The Suburbs, it’s an improvement on its predecessor, and quite possibly enough to avert a slow slide down the festival bills.

On their eighth album, the lyrics are again in German, the riffs again pound and all you might expect is present and correct. At times it’s so on the nose you all but roll your eyes.

Two Ribbons is a fabulous album.

Between Rousay’s drones and disruptions, melodics and arguments, the album becomes a place for feeling in the present, untethered by time, as familiar as a memory and as placeless as a dream.

In a polarised era, there’s something cheering about Fontaines DC’s bold refusal to join in, to deal instead in shades of grey and equivocation. There’s also something bold about their disinclination to rely on the most immediate aspect of their sound.

If you’re willing to meet Bob Vylan on their rough-and-ready terms, The Price of Life offers a decent return on investment.

The violence could be wearying but his undeniably brilliant flow – nimble but punchy – invests it with drama.

Confident and wearing her effort lightly, Cabello has finally carved out her own space as a pop star.

Wet Leg have certainly got people listening, and by channelling their sense of humour and showmanship into a series of tracks that are far more nuanced and three-dimensional than the infuriatingly repetitive song that made their name, they’ve ensured their debut album is well worth hearing – again and again and again.

Pillow Queens add a few more extended shredding sessions to the template, but they largely stick within the bounds of this classy, serious style. It’s not one that gives the group a particularly distinctive flavour, but it is at least able to contain all the feelings of confusion, fury, outsized desire and whatever else the listener wants to extrapolate from this evocative if slightly nebulous record.

Sinking into Chloë and the Next 20th Century’s lush, sepia-toned arrangements, escaping with him is a pleasure.

A conventional jazzer DePlume isn’t, but he has found a dedicated constituency outside the mainstream. An intriguing artist.

Gifted covers a lot of musical ground in less than half an hour, from the sweet, harmony-laden lovers rock of Lonely to Shine’s dabbling in the kind of easygoing acoustic reggae beloved of beach bars the world over, albeit underpinned by an immense electronic bass.

It’s all well-trodden stuff, and Kelly adds nothing new, but Mainstream Sellout is so much fun that – as the title suggests – it’s easy to leave your integrity behind and mosh along.

They’re past their best nowadays, but this is a decent effort after a quarter of a century.

Hardcore proggers may be a shade perplexed by Mehldau’s use of their heroes’ hits, and though preacherly Christianity is discreet, it’s certainly in earshot. But it’s possible just to relish a unique contemporary musician’s ingenious mingling of a traditional and contemporary sound palette, with plenty of characteristically freewheeling jazz detours on the way.

In/Out/In isn’t a “new” album by any means so much as tracks that remained underdeveloped or unfinished at the time. ... [Basement Contender is] easily the gem here and provides a tantalising glimpse of what might have been still to come.

Crash is at its best in its subtler moments.

At his best O’Connor seems to be part of a lineage of pop craftsmen for whom melody trumps everything – you don’t need edge, experimentation or lyrical fireworks if you can come up with a tune as strong as Open the Window or as cute as Making Time. But at his worst, it sounds limp and insubstantial, compounded by the thin production (a sonic link to the days when O’Connor was uploading his bedroom-recorded songs to Soundcloud) and his voice, which can tend to the nasal and whiny.

Painless is audibly a second album, the product of an artist with eclectic tastes spending their time focusing and refining their talent – as if its author has developed the confidence to decide that less is sometimes more.

For all their sonic ferocity, the songs on Pray for Me have strong melodies and hooks in abundance.

Some of the arrangements are too middle of the road, but her piano runs are glorious, her voice still as pure as mountain air and – with a second collection apparently following – she is far from done.

23 also displays how good Central Cee is at the business of making records, not just writing. There are a lot of really strong musical ideas on display, some of which are the work of producer Young Chencs.

It occasionally feels demo-like, half-finished: the corroded electronics on Louie Bags are intriguing, but the song features what sounds like a placeholder vocal. Great lines are few and far between.

It’s impossible not to repeatedly turn Ocean Child off, and instead seek out the originality and uniqueness of the genuine article. Presumably, it’s what Gibbard would want.

Mainstream pop music should clear some room for her: it would make things infinitely more interesting.

There aren’t really bad Spoon albums. There are really good Spoon albums and there are excellent Spoon albums. Lucifer on the Sofa is one of the latter. What a delight.

This is music that uses 21st-century technology to conjure up images of liturgical chants and ancient temples.

Few Good Things sees Saba resurface, moving beyond the acceptance stage on an album that sounds and feels like one long exhale.

As it is, it feels like an act of quiet consolidation rather than a breakthrough, aimed squarely at existing fans, unbothered by grabbing anyone else’s attention.

Pompeii is noticeably more subdued than much of her earlier work. Where once there was a playfulness in the arrangements, the slow and austere songs here sound as if they’re carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders.

It’s the work of an artist who has succeeded on a big stage now working in miniature, sweating the small stuff with utterly charming results.

The Overload is a starting point for a number of routes, rather than a perfectly formed end in itself. Certainly, there are flashes of a smartness and depth to Smith’s writing that go beyond scabrous one-liners.

Fix Yourself, Not the World isn’t going to change the face of music, but nor is it going to do anything to impede the Wombats’ latter-day progress.

They offer the promise of something more perhaps in the future, with richer, bolder production: another tantalising glimpse of Earl’s unique and enduring charm.

There’s a lot that’s laudable about Caprisongs. Not least its desire to keep moving and changing – enough that complaining about something as straightforward as a paucity of memorable tunes almost feels miserly. But equally, it’s something that ultimately impedes your enjoyment of the album. As a soundtrack for the start of a night, it doesn’t quite pan out as you might hope.

Quivering in Time transcends the temporal as well as the planar, but crucially, it doesn’t leave us behind.

Not so much fresh takes on old favourites, Covers is more like watered-down versions of semi-hidden gems.

2020s pop music so brilliantly crafted that it causes you to realise how much other 2020s pop music is makeweight.

Marçal’s voice is just as playful and experimental as the production, veering from the melodic softness of Ladra, in which it counters the heavily distorted instrumentation, to the impassioned spoken word of Crash, and her warped lower register of Oi, Cat. It’s her mutable voice that gives this wildly varied album its sense of coherence – as well as its message.

The compilation highlights these artists’ attention to instrumental detail and their delicate fusion of popular international styles with new technologies to create the sound of a city. It is one that is both of its time and still repeatedly listenable today.

Novel presentation notwithstanding, it’s a remarkably immersive listen.

Bold, beautiful album.