Barn highlights both the strengths and weaknesses of this set-up: They Might Be Lost barely feels like a song, just the same chords Young has been strumming all his adult life, yet it manages to be eternal and deeply moving. Equally – and this is a little like complaining fire is too hot – one can’t help but feel some of these songs sound as though they were being written as they were recorded.

Unlocked is definitely a better album than Originals, but not an amazing album in its own right. Undeniable, sucker-punch songs are still notable by their absence.

A treasure trove of interesting musical ideas, as well as a source of transportive, restorative solace.

Some, this writer included, will miss the fascinating long-form stories of resourceful improvisers on these barely two-minutes-plus tracks. But McCraven is balancing jazz’s precious tradition and its present and future here, and that’s a priceless contribution.

At the other extreme, you could bill kiCK iiiii as Arca’s take on ambient music, although it follows Aphex Twin’s interpretation of the genre, where moments of blissed-out loveliness coexist with disquiet.

Boquifloja sets Arca’s voice over a downtuned guitar riff that feels faintly grungy: its chorus is simultaneously beautiful and unnerving, the music slurring in and out of tune, the vocals glitching and stammering. Xenomorphgirl takes another familiar sound, Auto-Tuned sprechgesang vocals, and maroons them in an alien electronic landscape that keeps shifting from calming to threatening.

It’s a restless, challenging listen – beats that sound like gunfire, churning and gibbering electronic noise. She distorts her vocals in ways that sometimes remind you of Prince as his female alter-ego Camille, or the helium samples of old hardcore, though they generally sound quite nightmarish.

It’s a brilliant reimagining of 21st-century pop as a space in which the traditional and experimental can cohabit.

In the 70s and 80s, you were never far from a new release repackaging Bowie’s pre-fame 60s material, usually with a cover photograph that deceptively implied the contents were contemporary rather than archival. Toy offers a more tasteful sampling of that era. It includes the two best songs Bowie wrote before Space Oddity.

Bloodmoon: I never feels like a compromise. Rather, it does exactly what a crossover should, excelling in ways that would have been impossible had either party gone it alone.

You couldn’t blame Adele for declining to even tinker with a formula that clearly ain’t broke. But she does, and it makes for 30’s highlights.

Red (Taylor’s Version) adds satisfying hues of deep, gothic black.

For all its exhausted, preoccupied darkness, The Nearer the Fountain is a genuinely beautiful album.

Rather than reflecting poignantly on the past, much of the rest of Voyage feels terminally stuck there.

[Let’s Do It] feels like proof that Diana Ross could still make a great album if she wanted to, if she was steered more carefully, or partnered more sympathetically. But she hasn’t been, and this is the result: Thank You, but no thank you.

= settles for gently nudging at the boundaries of what he’s known for, most notably on the opening Tides, which thunders along, driven by distorted guitars and double-time drums, and closer Be Right Now, which arrives unexpectedly welded to a Giorgio Moroder-ish synth line. As a result, whatever you already think about Sheeran, = isn’t going to alter it, and neither will a critic’s review.

The LP’s stunning centrepiece is the 10-minute Cruising, where Giske plays fast, florid, extended arpeggios, sometimes adding or subtracting notes, like Philip Glass’s additive process, while his fingers tap out a machine-like rhythm. All the time, Bratten is manipulating sympathetic drones and harmonics, creating a spectral shroud around Giske’s ecstatic burbles.

The culmination is a collection of quietly shimmering songs that demand to be played loud.

Despite the wavering quality, Blue Banisters is an important addition to Lana lore. That she can still manage to be this perplexing after a decade in the game is a massive achievement.

It’s a powerfully intense record that some may recoil from; confrontational and liable to catch you off-guard as Taylor crisply extracts gutting truths from the general murk of self-loathing, never sugarcoating grimness nor over-egging her attempts at self-affirmation. ... It’s remarkable.

Elvin Jones’s elemental muscularity is thunderously upfront in the mix, and Tyner often sounds like the man heading for the exit that he soon turned out to be – but this is a unique document of a landmark 20th-century band at a pivotal moment.

The guitar-led Kingdom pokes at Brexit and the messiness of our government but lacks personal touches, as does by-numbers ballad To Lose Someone. But these are mild complaints amid otherwise distinctive songwriting.

That tension between sweetness and distortion lurches across the album, coming together best in Chaeri, a gothic house devotional to a destitute friend. Tenenbaum seems to writhe through her agonies as she wonders whether she could have done more.

In fairness, Coldplay have pivoted towards pop before – on their Stargate-produced, EDM-infused 2015 album A Head Full of Dreams – but it has rarely sounded as deliberate or as non-organic as this.

Seventeen Going Under is an album rooted in 2021 that, in spirit at least, seems to look back 40-something years, to the brief early 80s period when Top of the Pops played host to the Specials and the Jam. The result is really powerful.

Beyond sympathy and sentiment, Love for Sale disarms cynicism simply by being infectiously good fun.

The mood never feels trite on And Then Life Was Beautiful, but oddly infectious instead, perhaps because the songs are really strong, the lyrics admirably uncliched.

Its retro sensibility and guileless tone means How Beautiful Life Can Be is the guitar music equivalent of comfort food: undemanding, slightly stupefying, but immensely cheering all the same.

Here Employed to Serve prove past masters – Conquering is a gut-churning thrill ride of an album, mercilessly designed for maximal sonic motion sickness.

It hits an impressively eclectic sweet spot between hip-hop and pop, leaping confidently from trap beats and martial horns to grinding, distorted hard rock; from music that recalls early 00s R&B to stadium ballads. The genre-hopping is unified by melodies. Song for song, Montero has more hooks – and stickier ones – than any other big rap album thus far released in 2021.

The most freely spontaneous playing boils up on Ornette Coleman’s irresistibly grooving Turnaround, to the rapturous roars of the New York crowd.

The tidy landing constrains otherwise appreciably ambiguous songwriting that feels true to the wayward flux of Musgraves’ feelings – of the confusing aftermath of divorce, peppered with relief, mystery, disappointment. It feels like the first time this iconoclast has stuck to the script.

The music Low are currently making carries a similar, head-turning, where-the-hell-did-this-come-from air to Isn’t Anything and Loveless; as with those albums, the people behind Hey What are redefining how a rock band can sound. It says something – about Low and about rock music – that you have to delve back 30 years to find something with those qualities.

Personally, sonically and thematically, Drake seems resistant to change. It’s frustrating: the songs aren’t bad, and in some cases they’re excellent, a reminder of the unflattering emotional honesty that initially set him apart from his peers. However, they also hew to a formula that works for him.

Eccentric, bombastic heavy metal at its finest.

Sometimes I Might Be Introvert may or may not provide a commercial boost for its maker, but this rich, fascinating album cements Little Simz’s significance regardless.

The harsh fact is that the best verses on Donda don’t come from Kanye.

The problem is that it occasionally sounds like Dessner and Vernon were simply enjoying themselves too much while assembling their friends’ work. The album lasts over an hour, and somehow feels even longer, perhaps because its tone never changes. There are tracks here that could have used an unsentimental edit.

This is a great, great album, one that exists entirely on its creators’ terms.

There are plenty of lovely melodies, but it noticeably declines to deal in the primary currency of latterday pop, the banger, in favour of understatement. Bucking another current pop trend, it’s an album clearly designed to be listened to in full, rather than a collection of tracks from which to select additions to a playlist. It’s an approach that, at its worst, yields songs that sound undernourished – Fallen Fruit and Dominoes – but elsewhere it delivers, albeit gently.

Along with beats that feel refined yet retro enough to have come via mid-00s German labels, they create a comfort that sinks into nostalgia perhaps too easily for an artist so committed to continual evolution.

Her voice remains her most devastating tool, and she discovers new depths to her gift in layered harmonies and raw recordings.

It’s not one of UK rap’s periodic game-changing albums, but then, it’s clearly not meant to be: as retrenchments go, it does its job perfectly.

Downbeat moments are more than tempered by the songs’ life-affirming positivity. They tantalisingly anticipate catharsis, and are assembled and delivered with hope, love and affection.

The melodies and vocals are uniformly great; writing about the pressure of fame in a way that elicits a response other than a yawn is an extremely tough trick to pull off, and Happier Than Ever does it with aplomb.

It gradually reveals itself to be of completely different quality to anything he deigned to release at the time: a collection of largely brilliant, socially aware songs.

It takes repeated listens before hooks and memorable melodies begin to reveal themselves. Once they do, Life, and Another becomes a far more gratifying listen: swamped, at times, with unconvincing mystery, but beautiful, too.

WAAITT is a diverse record in many respects: touched by Afrobeats, gospel, electronica, drill and R&B, its most recurring sonic feature is a series of mournful piano figures. The album encompasses many different voices and Dave seems to be making a point of letting his collaborators put their own stamp on his songs.

What makes this more than merely a trip down memory lane is the always-inventive production and Aalegra’s elegant, preternaturally smooth voice, which she uses to chronicle the neglected fringes of minor romantic disappointment. Although catchy choruses haven’t historically been a prerequisite of her chosen style, the widespread absence of memorable melodic hooks does feel notable.

The music is slick and well-crafted – as you might expect, given the abundance of veteran LA sessioneers in the credits – rather than gasp-inducing.

A lovely reminder of the giant we lost and a righteous reminder that his legacy should be handled with care.

The diversity of the writing means that Mirror II occasionally feels more like a hugely enjoyable compilation than a single artist album: whether one trio can successfully contain three writers with such diverse approaches indefinitely is an interesting question. Hopefully yes.

Vince Staples is idiosyncratic and really impressive, the sound of someone walking their own path, uncoupled from current trends, shifting and changing as they go. You leave it keen to hear what his next album – apparently already completed – holds.

The title track finds him watching the news and sighing “things don’t look too good”. However, the tunes are stirring and uplifting and the overall spirit is optimistic.

The result is a dense, kaleidoscopic album that might take a lot of time to fully unpick, but clearly isn’t going to diminish in quality if you do so.

Planet Her’s breezy approach also has its limitations. For all its relative brevity, it sags in the middle, thanks to a succession of insubstantial ballads that even a guest appearance from the Weeknd can’t rescue from tedium.

It’s another album of exquisitely written songs to add to the pile of exquisitely written albums.

Bøe and Øye’s paired, timbrally similar voices remain a key part of the charm.

Elects to stay in its lane: a plethora of well-worn 21st-century pop tropes – tropical house sounds, post-Tame Impala floaty synths – but nothing you would describe as novel in the music or lyrics.

It doesn’t just retain the intimacy that made them so cherished, but makes it their signature sound. They exist on their own island now: a place to take refuge from the rest of the world, when it all becomes too enormous and terrifying to bear thinking about.

It has the distinct tang of an album that could be huge. There’s something undeniable about it, the beguiling sound of a band doing what they do exceptionally well, so that even the most devoted naysayer might be forced to understand its success.

Exodus provides a more fitting finale to a truncated career than the last album to bear DMX’s name, 2015’s Redemption of the Beast, released apparently without his knowledge by a shady-sounding minor label he had signed to when the majors no longer wanted to know. That release told you everything about what can happen when a troubled rapper falls out of favour; Exodus tells you something about his talent.

It’s a successful evolution: the maelstrom of moods stormed across the LP is masterful, from Hogwash and Balderdash’s slapstick skronk-funk riffage and the mathy, spiralling Slow, to Diamond Stuff’s tidal post-rock and Dethroned’s convulsive bassline.

It’s music that looks to the past, made by an artist too original to be a revivalist: memories and retrospection rearranged into something fresh.

For the uninitiated, it will seem a pleasingly buoyant, if conspicuously USP-less, soundtrack to a more universal anticipation of light at the end of a very long tunnel.

A collection of polished, precociously accomplished pop that doubles as one of the most gratifyingly undignified breakup albums ever made.

The now hugely successful pair can’t perhaps sing Burnside’s Poor Boy a Long Way from Home with any great factual accuracy nowadays, but they sound thoroughly in their comfort zone and utterly in their element.

The title track (from Iyer’s part in Karole Armitage’s 2011 ballet UnEasy) turns quiet, low-end murmurs into Oh’s tranquil, unhurried bass solo and then fiery exchanges with the drums. The hip, distantly boppish Configurations develops some of the most exciting collective improv on a set rammed with it.

It’s all hugely impressive and striking, the familiar made subtly unfamiliar, Clark’s famously incendiary guitar playing spinning off at unexpected and occasionally atonal tangents, its effect simultaneously heady and disturbing.

Monsters is a place where boundaries – generic, personal and otherwise – dissolve, leaving only pleasing sonic experiments and Kennedy’s strangely consoling words.

Tinfoil millinery is interspersed with a variety of more predictable and even more enervating rants.

It’s a perfectly enjoyable debut and a showcase for Michaels’ talent, but it doesn’t sound like the debut of an undeniable star.

There Is No End plays as a cohesive record because of Allen’s capacity to slot into place behind seemingly any collaborator without diluting his innate sense of rhythmic style. The album is a tantalising glimpse of the varied records Allen might have gone on to make; as it stands, it will no doubt inspire others to continue to shape the multitude of work he left behind into giddy new forms.

This is a truly lovely album, sweet without being saccharine, and a perfect accompaniment to the spring sunshine.

There are a lot of ideas, textures and moods that show she’s exploring her own artistry, but while the joy, freedom and fun are palpable, the result feels a bit messy.

At its most enjoyable, Surrounded By Time imagines a kind of alternative history for Jones. ... The other experiments are a mixed bag. ... That said, even the album’s missteps come with something oddly pleasing attached.

This is a big, beautiful album, a showcase for direct, punchy emotions and Giddens’ vocal versatility. She trained as an opera singer and executes astonishing levels of beauty and control on Monteverdi’s Si Dolce è’l Tormento and When I Was in My Prime, a folk song previously covered by Pentangle and Nina Simone.

Moments of excitement notwithstanding, the result is a frustratingly tentative step from a band who promised bolder strides this time around.

Her spry, lively vocals and her writing burrow into many territories: digital communication, environmental collapse, feminism, love and time, the latter nestling closest to the folksongs for which she became known.

It is tempting to suggest that the lyrics on Fearless might take on a different hue sung by a woman now in her 30s, but the new recordings militate against it. Backed by her touring band, her voice sounding essentially the same as it did in 2008, Swift has resisted any temptation to alter the songs’ pop-country arrangements or lyrics, even when the latter could have used a nip and tuck.

Shaw is the magic ingredient. Her lyrics – snippets of found text, but mostly her own writing – leap out, and have more impact from being delivered conversationally, freed from the rhythms and meter of the music. ... This is a debut to be excited about.

It’s an album that is simultaneously shocking, laudable and a little underwhelming.

Several tracks from Pastoral are radically reworked to become drum-free, drone-filled immersive soundscapes.

Sketchy is not that perfect marriage of progressive political messaging and musical pleasure – an elusive holy grail, that, or a contradiction in terms? – but it is a daring, fascinating and frequently very enjoyable attempt to square the circle.

For all the Dublin references, there’s a universality to the emotion; the music is finely-crafted enough to keep you returning, not matter how distressing the subject matter of the songs. There’s something here that that suggests Balfe could easily outrun the well-meaning, but limiting labels currently being attached to him – “Ireland’s potent poet of grief” – if that’s what he wants.

Black Honey have lost as well as gained, but this is a confident comeback.

What’s conspicuously absent are the kind of nailed-on pop anthems that peppered Bieber’s best album, the post-breakdown, career-saving Purpose: nothing here approaches the earworm status of Love Yourself or What Do You Mean? And that – rather than its failure to live up to any putative advance billing – is Justice’s biggest problem.

Chemtrails Over the Country Club does what it does exceptionally well. The songwriting misfires that plagued her early albums have been eradicated through that refinement; everything here is incredibly melodically strong, strong enough, in fact, that it feels beguiling rather than formulaic, which is an impressive feat to pull off.

There’s only one new Lynn original, the title track, co-written with her daughter; Coal Miner’s Daughter makes yet another appearance, this time as a recitation of the lyrics set to music – but her voice sounds frankly astonishing.

It is as gloriously varied as her 1980s output. Some tracks see her taking Steve Reich-style minimalist marimba riffs but escorting them through endless harmonic mutations.

It feels genuinely different and exhilarating.

For Those Who Wish to Exist proves Architects’ ability to oscillate between thoughtful, interesting, finely wrought compositions and gleefully hulking exercises in metal obviousness is still intact. The fact it often feels stultifying regardless proves turning climate anxiety into gratifying entertainment is a very difficult art to master.

If it doesn’t feel quite as remarkable as Ghosteen, that tells you more about the previous album than the quality of Carnage: Cave and Ellis’s musical approach is still vividly alive, the dense, constantly shifting sound complementing the richness of Cave’s writing now.

There is comfort in Neale’s introversion, but you long for her to burst free; for a hint more dynamic texture to fully render her vignettes.

Times’s contents underline what Experience already suggested: whether it’s down to his immersion in the original era or a natural affinity for making it, Lewis is really skilled at producing disco-infused pop-house. Instead of overloading tracks with obvious, high-camp disco signifiers, his talent lies in subtle touches.

Conflict of Interest feels closer in spirit to Dave’s expansive Psychodrama than British rap’s other big-hitting recent albums: smart and sombre, long yet free of padding.

Nodding to dubby post-punk, dream-pop, rave and disco, its experiments are half-familiar yet never ostensibly retro – an approach that tempers this exploration of a very modern malaise with a dose of nostalgic comfort and joy.

Taken on its own, Stop the Hate is a pleasing if somewhat unremarkable continuation of the Afrobeat canon, yet it serves to lay the foundations for Made’s second half, For(e)ward. Where Femi’s voice is endearingly wavering, the younger Kuti is far more forceful.