Temporal, transforms music initially written for theatre and dance into standalone pieces. Often these are simple constructions--a looped bassline, a drone, a simple melody repeated over and over again – but the effects can be pleasantly disorientating, suited to an album that aims to explore temporality and motion.

There’s certainly nothing new about their sound and fury and throbbing basslines--they fit comfortably into a lineage stretching from the Cure and the Chameleons to the Killers and White Lies--but they have timeless, high-quality songs. The new ones are more direct and--potentially impacted by the death of their close friend, Frightened Rabbit’s Scott Hutchison--more impassioned.

Rogers’ elegant knack for production is subsumed by more prosaic emotional balladry on her debut, with lyrics that rely too heavily on imagery of light and dark.

His seventh is his strongest in years: funky, focused and rooted in the present.

Assume Form feels like Blake opening out, adding fresh, noticeably brighter colours to his palette. Whether or not a smidge more commerciality turns this album into the kind of hit he was predicted to have at the start of the decade, it is immensely pleasing to witness an artist who seemed to be at a dead end now moving forward.

Less immediate than 2014’s Chambers and 2016’s Balance, not least because whereas previous sets featured some English lyrics, here Quintanilla sings solely in Spanish, partly as a result of US-Mexico border tensions. ... While most of these songs weigh in at around the three-minute mark, the two highlights come when they stretch out and lock into lengthier grooves.

At times, she sounds mawkish or uncertain, and when the introspection becomes gloomily self-absorbed, some tunes are too slight to save the day. At best, though, this is soft, quietly determined pop.

This ambitious, arresting album feels like the work of an artist wielding her considerable talents with newfound confidence and conviction.

You Tell Me is an unpindownable record: familiar enough to sound comforting, but new enough to pique your interest and make you listen for the way forms have been taken and bent.

If there are moments where the album overplays its hand--a warped spoken-word track titled Detournement perhaps lays it on a bit thick--there’s a confidence about its stylistic leaps that means it feels like the expression of an authentically idiosyncratic imagination rather than someone being weird and eclectic for the sake of it.

There is a slight uptick in vocal musicality compared with his previous work. ... He has plenty of average lines--almost as offensive as the rightly controversial “Jewish money” lyric in ASMR is the weakness of “you get burned like toast” as a simile--but his catchy flows always make him magnetic, especially when paired with universally brilliant production from Metro Boomin, Kid Hazel and others.

Bad Bunny feels less like part of the current pop landscape than an artist operating slightly adjacent to it. He is separated from the pack as much by a desire to take risks as by his roots.

The covers fit into a lineage of classic guitar pop, but are then encumbered by being too tasteful.

The end result is an album that you sink into, which gradually envelops you: moving, painful and elating in equal measure.

None of his problems has robbed Phillipps of his facility, and Snow Bound drips with his trademarks: the melancholy lyrics paired with joyous melodies; the surging, oddly maritime cast of the music; the interaction of guitar and organ; the open-heartedness of it all (even at his most cynical, the tone of Phillipps’ voice and the major-chord bounce of the music makes him sound in love with the world).

Isolation is a record that feels rich, self-assured and deeply personal--and one that should ensure Uchis isn’t relegated to second billing ever again.

Melodies are frequently forced and characterless, and many songs possess an almost computer-generated quality: either riddled with counterintuitive combinations (Sean Paul singing about the sacrifices of single mothers on mega-hit Rockabye) or resembling other people’s work (the unbearably twee We Were Just Kids is steeped in Ed Sheeran-style nostalgia; the lyrics of Out at Night resemble a poor man’s Nice for What).

It taps into the reality of Christmas, where the flipside of the fireside glow can be lonely desolation.

Their confident, complex textures hew to similar structures across Sistahs’ 11 songs. More of them could do with the indomitable payoff of It’s You, which seems to exorcise the feeble lover they indict in the verses.

A Legendary Christmas’s sophistication is both its big selling point and its major drawback. The arrangements are beautifully done and sepia-toned. ... You start longing for a moment where it loosens its tie, when Legend lays into the sherry and really lets rip.

Clapton sounds barely recognisable on these ghosts of Christmas songs past. His diminished voice heaves out Away in a Manger as if between sobs. On a collection profoundly lacking in seasonal trimmings, he occasionally buries some cursory sleigh bells deep in the mix.

Where Mayer and Harriott engaged in a jerky, slightly awkward sound-clash, Korwar’s fusion is seamless.

It’s an often pained and personal set, with only one song not written by Akyol.

Springsteen on Broadway is a really charming album--charming enough, in fact, to convince a Boss agnostic that there’s more to the man than they might previously have thought--and its charm rests on Springsteen’s alternating conflicting desires to let light in on what he calls “the magic trick”, and suggest that it might really be magic after all.

Staring at the Sky is awful, like a snarky parody of a self-pitying grunge track that’s evidently meant in deadly earnest. There are really chilling moments, not least Train Food, with its ominous piano chords and feedback-laden guitar backing given a creepy intimacy. ... And there is stuff that just seems slight, as if its disjointed brevity isn’t always just an aesthetic decision, but occasionally also a way of covering up a scarcity of ideas, a lack of material.

The album has some filler--the mumble rap of Splash Warning and Uptown Vibes’ reggaeton--but mostly it is a cinematic tale of a man freed, though still carrying the burden of representation.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with The Prophet Speaks, but Morrison has not made an album destined to be pored over for clues. If he is offering any enlightenment, the message is simply: don’t forget the old masters.

One of the best rap albums of the year, a smoky iceberg of great emotional depth.

Growing Pains gets two great chorus melodies, while I Don’t Want To resolves very satisfyingly. But there is some production that sounds suspiciously like focus-grouping, from post-Winehouse soul to xx guitars, and the ersatz digital instrumentation is as featureless as an overly filtered Instagram post.

Warm is an easeful record: it offers its appeal without supplication, or insistence. It’s really rather lovely.

It’s one that never sounds as if it wants you to relax, but neither does it ratchet up the tension enough. It falls betwixt and between.

For an album that veers between the hallmarks of happy hardcore and ghostly choral incantations, Queen of Golden Dogs makes a surprisingly satisfying whole. That’s largely thanks to Gainsborough’s efforts to maintain the balance between entertainingly jarring and modernity-evoking erraticism and a gratifying sense of beauty and peace that feels age-old.

Gloriously silly it may be, but this album is as bright as that favourite copper kettle.

Art Brut’s first album in seven years is trademark zippy, tuneful guitar pop, although there is perhaps more of a nod to new wave and power pop than there once was.

Perhaps inevitably, the desperate urge to cover every musical base from dancefloor to soul-ballad means that there is barely a track here with any distinctive identity or even a tune.

LM5’s flaws aren’t really down to its US-focused slant, unwittingly funny though that sometimes is. They’re the classic flaws of today’s pop albums: it’s too long, its highlights appearing amid boilerplate filler, including the ho-hum Monster in Me and American Boy. ... Padded it may be, but the strike rate is high enough for LM5 to prolong Little Mix’s career even further, at least in Britain.

This meeting of joy and aggression is what defines Oxnard, and the effect is not always pleasant--it makes .Paak’s trademark grooves difficult to luxuriate in--but it is still a compelling mode, and one that rehomes his old-school tastes firmly in the present.

She’s at her most arresting in A Little Song, where her piano echoes John Cale’s version of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah and her exquisite idyll is gradually penetrated by an industrial noise, perhaps a signifier of harsher truths or realities--or the modern world.

The screwed sprite-like vocal effects of Picture You and Darkness Visible’s indistinct dystopian miasma (soundtracking a reading from Paradise Lost!) suggest a new identity crisis.

The musical mood of much of the album is a dense, unsettled fug: slightly paranoid, rather unfocused.

This is music potent and adventurous enough to grip you without you understanding a word of what she’s actually singing.

What’s particularly notable about COWYSP2 is that it excels in a pop context--songs like Hate Me and Runaway feel at once fresh and familiar, swarming with hooks and infectious choruses that pierce the fuggy instrumentation, while managing to cover new sonic ground in an accessible way.

The songs’ difficult birth has given them a bracing, anthemic, heartfelt and occasionally even eerily dreamlike quality. Architects aren’t a band for anyone with sensitive hearing, but it’s hard not to be moved by this loud, cathartic howl.

The songs are well crafted--the title track in particular has a wonderfully turned chorus--but the band’s work frequently sounds weirdly interchangeable with other artists who occupy the Top 40.

Propaganda sounds like Muse are trying to be Prince, which isn’t entirely convincing, while Get Up and Fight bolts on a power ballad chorus to an elegantly restrained verse. But it’s still the less poppy moments that are most exciting.

She is self-effacing, emotionally incisive and capable of inciting teenage fervour in cynical souls. There are few like her.

There’s so little light here that the cheeky Sugar Daddy is forgivable--plus there’s a forthrightness to their exhortations to “saddle up and ride” that adds to their theme of women without time to waste.

Overall, it’s an album that ably and enjoyably revisits their classic sound, while never quite escaping the long shadow of those former glories.

A collection of songs that sink deeply into the subjects of death and old age with poignancy but never self-pity.

The follow-up to Glynne’s ubiquitous debut is generic Top 40 and soul-pop finished to a high standard.

Most of these songs, when they finish, bustle out of a door and evaporate with no hooks left in your head. But played with a straightforward setup of guitars, drums and strings, their garage-y freshness make them a pleasure to fleetingly sit with.

Holter doesn’t drop quite enough of these joyful crumbs to cajole the listener through the entirety of this 90-minute epic--yet there remains a glut of beauty and braininess in store for those willing to stick around.

Without the luxury of diegetic songs, the Radiohead frontman’s music for Luca Guadagnino’s forthcoming Suspiria remake is instead much more traditional, belonging in the background to ramp up the emotional cues, and as such is not as satisfying a home listening experience.

With the rise of R&B classicists in the form of Jorja Smith, Ella Mai and Mahalia, Nao presents a compelling alternative to the mainstream.

He sounds as comfortable in his musical skin here as ever.

Whether the album ends up exerting the kind of influence over the Top 40 that her earlier releases did seems questionable--it feels almost too opaque and inward-looking for mass appeal. As evidence of a unique artist pursuing a personal vision in a world filled with the commonplace, however, Honey is perfect.

The loose instrumentation lets Cherry lead the way: her lines often sound extemporised, shifting easily between wisdom and soulful desolation. The effect is intimate yet expansive.

Ashcroft has sanded off almost all the edges: where his last record nodded vaguely in the direction of electronica, this one hugs at the roots-rocker end of his musical palette: pedal steels and acoustics are much in evidence.

Songs that are as euphoric as they are charming.

The result is a voyage through America that is both dreamlike and dystopian, exhausting but oddly compelling.

It’s the full-bodied and fiery tunes Dangerous and Shot Clock that shine through, with their honeyed yet passionate vocals, pointedly candid lyrics, and throwback instrumentation modernised with dark synths and percussion. These are better signs of Mai’s authentic R&B star potential than any millennial slang.

It’s an uneven ride at times, but there is much to enjoy here.

Of course, there are moments so barbed you can feel the blood being drawn--twice they are those when Grant is looking back in bitterness to his teens. ... Best of all, though, are two gorgeous ballads, in which Grant appears to mourn the relationship that caused him to move to Iceland.

Vile ultimately has such an instinctive facility for melodic logic that behind the shaggy locks and purple haze, there’s a clear-headed, big-hearted songwriter at work.

While there seems to be a macabre sense of humour at work in the decision to start the album with a children’s choir. Otherwise, this is trademark, huge, at times semi-operatic, industrially heavy black metal.

Existing at the point where intense focus becomes total nihilism, the unique, funny Working Class Woman depicts Davidson’s fight to resist homogeneity, and the cost of doing so.

What distinguishes C’est La Vie is Houck’s command of his material: there’s nothing here that sounds tentative or uncertain.

As a serious drama about addiction, and the supernatural, transformative, sometimes erotic power of music, it needs songs that are earnest and instantly classic. Against the odds, it succeeds.

The 18 eclectic tracks hang together because of a gleeful joie de vivre, and are the best songs of the band’s career.

This one offers six [tracks], and none break the nine-minute mark. It’s more sonically expansive. ... That doesn’t reduce the effect of the riffs: they’re still pulverising, but now they sound like an advancing storm front rather than as if you’ve been trapped in a sudden downpour.

European Heartbreak has a lovely, human optimism, and leaves a warm glow and a feeling that all things--however uncomfortable--eventually pass.

On the most adventurous pieces, such as This Life and Keyed Out, the instruments are made to shiver and thrash as if on a hospital gurney, struggling for equilibrium, as Hecker’s trademark plumes of static billow beneath.

Dancing Queen is often surprisingly ingenious. Occasionally Cher uses her trademark Auto-Tune like a crutch--it’s a cop-out on One of Us--but mostly it acts as a kind of interstellar portal that elevates Abba from the dancefloor to the cosmos.

Even when they the songs are nearly anonymous, Nile Rodgers’ guitar is buoyant and propulsive, and his playing is an unalloyed joy throughout. And there are points where the songwriting clicks, hitting a sweet spot between then and now.

She just writes fantastic songs: the melody of 5 Dollars is perfectly poised between sweetness and melancholy; What’s-Her-Face frames a lyric about self-loathing with an ominous cloud of electronics; Damn (What Must a Woman Do?) conjures a crowded dancefloor at 4am so effectively you can virtually feel the perspiration dripping from the ceiling. It is an album about pop music as much as any of the other topics it addresses.

It never quite feels as reckless as you want it to. The car’s being driven more carefully, which might be good for the driver, but it’s less exciting for we passengers.

Not only is Bernholz preaching to the converted, she’s also preaching to an audience who pride themselves on their tolerance for enduring hostility. It might make for a more engaging performance than straightforward listening experience, although Bernholz’s ingenuity does reveal itself.

It’s certainly an emotional and dramatic ride. From the thunderous strings and choir of opener As One onwards, this is an audacious record, stripped of the hand-clapping, guitar-pop ditties with which they made their name.

These wonderful recordings provide yet more evidence of his colossal talent, and, tantalisingly, it appears that there are still more to come.

If newcomers discover Shorter via this luxurious multimedia package, then Emanon will have done its job--but the music here is all that it really takes.

Even when referencing the haunting flattened fifth of Satie’s Gnossienne No 1 on pieces such as Famous Hungarians and Chico, Gonzales doesn’t linger or probe: he tells his story and gets the hell out. He’s like an Edwardian parlour pianist, reshaping the tropes of fin-de-siècle impressionism into a series of concise, three-minute pop songs. It’s very satisfying to hear.

On turning 60, the reluctant nostalgist finally allows time for some reflection, with a set of dreamily autumnal, wistful, even melancholy songs.

This ranks alongside the likes of Anselm Kiefer and Cormac McCarthy as a document of contemporary social collapse, and as such is the most important, devastating album of the year.

It is all gloss and shine, with sadness at industry-approved levels of maximum efficacy. Take 75% uplift, add 20% melancholy, top up with 5% not actually contentious controversy, and voilà: Cry Pretty.

The songs start to blur into each other, Baron-Gracie’s vocal affectations become grating, and the sense that Pale Waves might be writing to a formula becomes difficult to shake. You’re left with an album with ambitions bigger than its abilities.

It is refreshing to hear someone so emancipated from the rules of genre.

The fluctuation in sensibility, from people-pleasing pop to something more sophisticated, suggests Emenike is hedging his bets.

There are no hits and nothing from Graceland. Generally, sparser arrangements allow more space for Simon’s dazzling imagery and oblique but relevant ruminations on subjects including immigration (René and Georgette …; The Teacher), domestic violence (a bluesier One Man’s Ceiling Is Another Man’s Floor) and the state of humanity and the planet (Questions for the Angels).

Nothing Hurt is best when it lives up to its title and cocoons you.

Egypt Station is not without flaws. Quite aside from the misstep of Fuh You, it could use a trim. ... At its best, however, Egypt Station is an affirmation of an enduring talent, the work of an artist who has no need to try and be anything other than what he is.

Hunter is glorious and triumphant, a record that succeeds on any terms you try to force upon it.

Lacking any particularly memorable melodies, it is expansive and mellow, recalling 90s singer-songwriter fare with added R&B flavours, spacey instrumentation and psychedelic guitar wigouts.

He and Dessner have alighted on a magnificently big-hearted and original seam of songcraft.

Idles won’t be for everybody: this isn’t good-time, aspirational, radio-friendly pop. But for anyone in need of music that articulates their concerns or helps them to work through their troubles--or anyone who simply appreciates blistering, intelligent punk--they might just be Britain’s most necessary band.

Kamikaze is a variable, flawed album. The hooks are nothing special. ... When it’s on fire, however, it really crackles, blazing considerably brighter than any Eminem album for some time.

The results are characterful. Bloom is done and dusted in 35 crisp minutes – a time at which some pop albums are reaching their mid-point--and feels like a coherent, artist-led album rather than a bet-spreading collection of songs designed to hit every popular musical base.

Lightsleeper ends up being as frustrating as it is pleasurable.

The 15 songs feel overloaded with glam-ragtime-Vaudeville rockers. Still, it’s hard not to cheer when This Is My Tree sees the long-suffering antihero returned to his natural habitat.