A remarkable, shamanic talent.

It may not be great art, but it is exhilarating, cheerily undemanding fun, something in scant supply at the moment.

What songs these are, genuinely good enough to be compared with peak Dylan: like him, Crutchfield is adept at nestling into the almost comforting niche of heartache and hopping out again with a grin.

Her one-off impulse to Make A Statement is the only predictable 2020 pop move on an otherwise outlandishly great second album.

Almost 30 years into a career you would once have put money on ending within five, Gigaton suggests Pearl Jam might still be around long after Trump is a distant memory.

It is an ambitious album that can turn from hedonism to hope on a dime. And with its genre-hopping ethos, bold orchestral choices and pleasing tunefulness, it is the first truly boundary-pushing record of the 2020s, cementing its creator as a daring virtuoso.

Sometimes, the effects are like Clannad on speed. Nervous souls should persevere with opening tracks Ella and Fager Som en Ros. But throughout, Myrkur’s vocals are beautiful and bright, especially on Harpens Kraft, a Norse supernatural ballad, and House Carpenter, once sung by the Watersons and Joan Baez. Elsewhere, deeply eerie, pagan atmospheres rule.

Here songs bleed into each other, with sonic references dotted throughout to neaten up threads that previously he would have left to unravel. By balancing the two sides of his musical personality – not to mention add some levity to that boring, bad-taste id – After Hours feels like the first Weeknd album in a while to offer up a clear, singular vision rather than something frustratingly abstract.

There’s something understandably confident about Colores, from its grand concept album status (every song is named after a colour, although the lyrics seem conceptual only in so far as they largely revolve around how sexually irresistible Balvin is) to its brevity.

It is the intensely poetic high of an often exceptional record.

Dury carries it off. His phrasemaking and delivery is immaculate: he plays with accents, albeit within a limited palette, and you listen to The Night Chancers believing it to be a real world.

Oleaginous and rasping, Morrissey is often lost among the strident music as he hectors people afraid to be themselves.

It’s a collection of sounds quite unlike anything you’ve heard before, which is quite an achievement.

His most fully formed yet and pushes this experimentation to its furthest extreme, his sax sounding like melting wax on his 13 cover versions of jazz standards.

It’s a tough sell for anyone not already on board with McKee, especially since the songwriting is rarely persuasive enough to take the edge off the intensity.

In rock, technical brilliance can sometimes impede immediacy, but Code Orange use it to achieve total and thrilling omnipotence. They are a reminder that visionary music never wears a genre tag.

It has nostalgic nods to their first musical loves, bits that nod back to the first records they made, plenty of vim and spark but without the fuel that was first ignited by that spark. And, of course, it has toe-curling attempts to be current, just in case there really are disenfranchised kids listening.

Their skill lies in rearranging familiar elements into something that sounds fresh, largely down to their curious take on songwriting. Porridge Radio are melodically strongest when they seem to be trying the least hard.

A certain cosiness produces fillers So Happy and New York Ivy, but abandoning the comfort zone delivers some of the best things here.

There are some moments of relatively steady rhythm on Rampa and Raataja, but it is techno of the most bludgeoning kind and, given the surrounding chaos, you can never settle into it. Just as the climate crisis can feel alienating in its scale and gravity, it is easy to recoil from this fire alarm of a record.

Metheny subsequently dubbed in classical orchestral parts by himself and other classy arrangers. ... They will be superfluous for some, but they do provide this fine album with the bigger soundscape, richer textures and probably wider appeal Metheny was after, cooling the improv heat hardly at all.

With songs as good as these, there’s no need to grow up and stop slacking off.

UK hip-hop and albums bemoaning the current state of things are two crowded markets: The Long Goodbye is potent, original and timely enough to stand out in both.

While Errol’s jittering restlessness can make it hard to trace a narrative identity across the record, instead it plays like the sonic journal of a promising new talent, still establishing exactly what it is he wants to say. Until then, his experimentation is more than beguiling enough to keep fans waiting happily.

The density of the production occasionally subsumes their appealing vocal melodies and fails to mask a lack of emotional punch that lyrical anxieties about the planet’s future can’t provide.

Fabulous stuff: Soccer Mommy could go anywhere from here.

As Suddenly underlines, [his career has] ended up somewhere exciting: in a niche of its own, where electronic auteur meets singer-songwriter, where an innate feel for pop music and the dancefloor co-exists with experimentation.

Hayter brilliantly conjures atmosphere, but could perhaps hone some more arresting melodic progressions like her lament on Kingscorpse. It is Walker’s voice, blasted beyond melody into pure ranting expression, that seals the record’s strongest moments.

Marshall remains an unequivocally talented, trailblazing artist but this album’s bagginess and unremitting gloom mean it often struggles to hold the attention and unfortunately lacks much discernible appeal at all.

Their finest album, full of the tough, hooky rock that made stars of the Go-Gos, the Bangles and ‘Til Tuesday in the 80s.

Ordinary Man was made in a few days with a core band of Duff McKagan, Chad Smith and Andrew Watt, who also produces. It sounds like it, in good and bad ways: there’s real urgency to Straight to Hell, but there are perhaps too few genuinely memorable songs.

Miss Anthropocene seems a more personal project than its advance billing suggested. It doesn’t add much to the climate change debate, but as a representation of what it’s like when fame turns dark, it is powerful and compelling.

his is a record that tries to bottle the intricate energy of jazz improvisation into an orchestrated studio production when it has always been the freedom of live performance that has marked out Boyd as an artist. If he makes room for more of that in the studio, we would have a mighty record.

The album features samples of earthquakes, shovels, shredders and screaming peacocks – an industrial-era Bosch painting turned into music. This nightmare is expertly arranged throughout, though in the second half the maximalism starts to feel like a means of papering over weak songwriting.

There are other times when the songs feel half-finished: Expecting to Lose lopes along pleasantly enough but its wordless chorus sounds like a placeholder that was never removed, and You Need Me has the same issue.

There’s everything from an Italian house piano to acid house 808s. But fundamentally, for all its genre-blending, The Slow Rush is stunningly pure and heartfelt pop.

It just feels subdued and unassuming, which are curious things for mainstream pop to be. It’s a tentative, rather than all-guns-blazing, return, with a by-any-means-necessary bubblegum single dutifully tacked on to throw his record label a bone.

Its triumphant sound comes from the artist’s clear joy in realising these compositions, which shines through every exuberant moment.

They have a default setting, which is a kind of arena goth (Death Drive is Suicide at stadium scale). But at its best, West of Eden is thrilling and unsettling.

There’s no doubt Jackson is gradually carving out a left-of-centre niche, with a retro sound that is cleverly evocative and curiously idiosyncratic rather than just derivative.

By sampling and placing his work within the radical future of Chicago’s jazz scene, McCraven honours Scott-Heron’s memory anew.

An album that doesn’t grab your attention with pyrotechnic displays, opting instead for a slow-burning, unassuming kind of power: a low-key delight, but a delight all the same.

Butler has produced Old Wow like a soul record, full of space and warmth.

Ultimately Be Up a Hello is a fun albeit bumpy ride through future-retroism, best felt in the moment itself.

Kesha is reconnecting with her former self. High Road is unmistakably the work of the same glitter-pop artist who tore up the charts in 2009, but with a new sense of underlying self-awareness.

Even at their poppiest, Destroyer remain an acquired taste. This time around, it’s one more than worth acquiring.

Stretches of forgettable melody writing kill the mood somewhat, particularly towards the end, but the best songs – Insert Generic Name, Guttural Sounds – truly put the dream in dream-pop: rapturous, vivid compositions that drift down Wilkins’ very particular neurological pathways.

Big Conspiracy leaves you wanting to hear even more.

There’s not enormous substance here, but it’s a fine amuse bouche.

Power, for all its lovable energy and admirable experimentation, occasionally suffers from an excess of both.

It’s the strange, appealing sound of a band doggedly following their own path, eyes fixed forward.

None of it is compelling or well-written – the constant lyrical repetition really grates – especially when he attempts grand statements.

While Shake occasionally excels at crafting musical gems out of dark paranoia, her themes are stretched somewhat thin over the course of the whole record and on some tracks she ends up sounding listless.

If Music to Be Murdered By covers a lot of old ground, it does so in considerable style. It’s a stronger album musically than its predecessor.

Her lyrical confidence is matched by the characterful production, which straddles R&B, country, trashy pop-rock, Kacey Musgraves-ish cosmic Americana and more. ... A major label pop album with real drama and humanity.

Miller’s lyrics possess a plainness that occasionally yields moments of heart-rending simplicity, but frequently wither into triteness and banality. Yet when his words fail him, his voice is able to communicate the pain more effectively.

This is one of the most profoundly, wondrously mediocre albums of our time, which is to say that it’s not even entertainingly bad.

The album is solid and dependable, rather than a source of head-spinning shocks and thrills: it knows its audience, and it knows better than to confound them if you want to keep bucking trends and filling arenas.

Jackson is empathetic and spirited as she sings about her fears of being left behind. But the Big Moon’s sharp update ensures they won’t be.

Songs segue into each other as war is considered from unusual angles.

Of course, this is Poppy, and so repetitive, Twitter bot-like lyrics remain the norm (“Chewy chewy / Yummy yummy yummy”, goes one refrain). But there are moments of musical complexity and bracing sincerity that her previous albums have lacked.

Barnes is blessed with the ability to take vintage influences and absorb them so thoroughly that what seeps out sounds different from her source material, and stamped with her own character.

Passing St Vincent’s songs through the hands of such a diverse cast of producers makes for a disjointed listening experience and broken narrative; but along the way, there are moments of raw, magnetic beauty.

A pretty well-executed genre album. Just don’t compare it to the rest of his mighty oeuvre. Should Kanye’s interest in gospel music prove temporary, this is likely to be remembered as an oddity rather than a baptism.

These are timeless songs of renewal, not sadness, underpinned with quiet, steely resolution and the knowledge that emotions and loves arrive like those four seasons, to be savoured while they last.

Lesser composers try to merely mirror the action on screen and intensify it, boringly magnifying your emotions – in his hopefully ongoing partnership with the Safdies, Lopatin is showing how contradictory, confusing and vital our dumb human impulses are.

Unlike his former One Direction bandmates, who swiftly picked their lanes, Styles is taking his time coming into focus. The results serve him – and his fans – well.

it consistently hits a sweet spot. It is packed with memorable hooks – singles Vossi Bop and Wiley Freestyle are by some distance the least obviously commercial things here – but never sounds obvious or craven in its desire for chart success.

He remains one of the most evocative, instantly recognisable voices in contemporary British music.

LP1 is a terrible pop album, but very effective contraception.

The album can be dazzling in its ruthless sense of purpose: the closing First Man is an effective tearjerker in which a new bride addresses her father, which may well end up where it clearly wants to be, as a staple of wedding dances. Sometimes, however, the songwriting is just so-so. ... A flawed album.

Kanda’s aptitude for melody is mixed and sometimes abandons him altogether, making the likes of Enigma and Garnet rudderless, but when he locks into one, his work becomes really compelling.

After You is a tasteful record – at times it’s exactly the soft, melancholy, adult house pop they play in the chic bar at 7pm in every Netflix drama you’ve ever watched – but it’s also got tunes, and Peñate has also finally lost all his vocal mannerisms, so you’re not distracted from those tunes.

Shlon is a short and sharp addition to his discography and proof that his passion for the music is undiminished.

Half of the Who did get old, which means there’s a strong chance this might be their last album. If it is, then they’re going out the way they came in: as cussed and awkward and troubled as ever.

The Christmas Present may be the perfect outlet for Williams’s wryly mawkish sensibilities, but it is still a gift few people will want to find under the tree.

Where Polachek is erudite and poetic, Diamond is prosaic; where Polachek’s vocals are astonishingly skilful, swooping into high registers, Diamond’s are unremarkably ordinary. Except they are remarkable, in their way.

It’s just about enough to keep you browsing, but never enough to inspire.

The result is this beautiful posthumous collection. His songwriter son Adam has assembled a stellar cast of musicians, such as Daniel Lanois, Jennifer Warnes and Spanish guitarist Javier Mas, to do justice to the unfinished home recordings.

This isn’t only for completists – anyone will thrill to Russell, whose ability to anchor wandering thought with melodic resolution is as strong as Bob Dylan’s. His naivety is palpable here, and might be a bit much for some, with the title track and Just Regular People truly childlike. But that guileless stance, staring up at the world in confusion, hurt and wonder, is what sets Russell apart.

All primed for a 2am workout. Yet Tangerine is equally an album you may want to stick on when you get home at the end of the night, full of nuance, space and soft textures to help you float away.

The straightforwardly Coldplay-esque moments sound more straightforward and Coldplay-esque than ever. ... But the dabblings in gospel (Broken) and bluesy doo-wop (Cry Cry Cry) seem like the result of a long and fruitful search to pinpoint the genres in which Coldplay are least suited to dabbling.

It’s a mixed bag, as posthumous collections often are, but there is enough to suggest that much wider stardom was well within his grasp.

No Treasure But Hope is much as you would expect: subdued and crepuscular, everything stripped back so each musical element is distinct and has its own breathing space.

Updating Dion’s sound without frightening the horses – is a tough one. At its worst, Courage ends up peddling the kind of dreary, blanched take on contemporary pop that packs Radio 2’s playlist. ... The best tracks on Courage stick close to the music that made Dion famous.

Her backings are stunningly realised: collages of sawing strings, tones of meandering frequency, and drums that gallop like a horse let loose to nowhere. Lurching in the hull of the mix are sampled vocals from across history, snatches of what sound like gospel or field songs.

It’s a hard place to go with him; confrontationally stark, it may be the rare album that works better on paper.

Girl feels more exploratory than certain, never quite as assertive of its identity as one might hope. Still, their willingness to shift identity without compromising their core suggests Girl Ray could have a lustrous future.

These [Natural Hair, Between Me and My Maker & Ceiling Games] are the snatched glimpses of humanity that pierce through a noisy record with love and light.

Sometimes the results are stunning, as on the beautiful microcosmos of tiny, constantly shifting sounds that fade in and out of Mary Magdalene. ... Sometimes, however, the songs are weirdly stifling.

One of the Best Yet does exactly what long-term fans might expect a Gang Starr album to do. As a full stop to their career, it works perfectly. In the pantheon of posthumous albums, it lives up to its name.

Parks’s debut contains some of the most electrifying and viscerally gorgeous music put to record this year. She may have been inspired by north African one-stringed fiddle-playing and ethnomusicology more generally, but Parks wears her erudition lightly.

Like its predecessor, Alone in the Universe, this album is entirely good-natured, firmly in the lineage of classic ELO, without ever quite hitting the heights of the past. ... How far this autumnal romance will go remains to be seen but, for now, what a pleasure it is to have Lynne back.

It sounds timeless and contemporary; the instrumental interludes and the stylistic and tempo shifts all hang together because of his warm, sincere vocals and fantastic songwriting.

Endearing. ... Some more specificity to her lyrics might have been affecting, but the broad metaphors she couches her life lessons in are entertaining.

With only three songs stretching beyond the three-minute mark, the album is mostly made up of short sketches. Some are perfectly fine little ditties, but without more full-bodied tracks to act as support, Jesus Is King is a suite that constantly feels like it will blow away in the breeze. Confronted with the task of creating songs about religion, West delivers a set that lyrically is as thin as Bible paper.

On the whole, this is a record for comfort listening on headphones. Her voice is often intimately close in the mix, brushing up against your ear, unglamorous and unadorned.