The music offers further evidence of how far outside rap's usual strictures West operates. OutKast aside, mainstream hip-hop doesn't really do ambiguity or irony, but just as West's arrogance occasionally appears to be a protracted joke, Late Registration finds him in thrillingly subversive form, working in the production booth to undercut tracks' messages and shifting their meanings.

Spiritual, lovelorn and vulnerable, this is the album Diamond has deserved for decades.

This strange summer of arrested development is steadily ending. Folklore will endure long beyond it: as fragmented as Swift is across her eighth album – and much as you hope it doesn’t mark the end of her pop ambitions – her emotional acuity has never been more assured.

Qualm, is a victory lap. It is, on paper, an uncomplicated beast: a live hardware workout of claustrophobic, rhythmic acid techno. But her ability to draw out harmonic elements from the cacophony of it all is deft--that cassette tape feel is still evident.

Fantasy Black Channel is the most thrilling British debut of the year for its spirit of invention, its surfeit of ideas and its ear for a good tune.

There's a theory that REM were never the same after their lyrics became audible, but Lifes Rich Pageant is packed with songs on which the new clarity of Stipe's vocals bears dividends.

It’s remarkable as much for the quality and range of her singing as for the inventive arrangements.

Jazzers might still balk at the high-concept planning, but it’s remarkable how much polish has been applied without cramping the band’s irrepressible creative energy.

Simon’s lyrics are finely honed, from the conversational The Werewolf to the confessional title track, a moving exploration of his creative process.

Nothing less than a thorough exploration and devastation of folk’s most conventional tropes is Lankum’s impressive game.

There’s something hugely impressive about coming up with an album that somehow manages to be both incredibly discomfiting and easy to listen to.

Orchestral textures, such as the eerie woodwind motifs of Moth and austere strings of Lamplight, conjure the darkly sexual charge of the film.

What makes it so compelling is the haunting vocal writing. Full of gently lapping lines, close imitation and moments of honeyed homophony, all underpinned by tactful percussion, it is startlingly different from the driving, hard edges of much of Lang's work with the Bang On a Can collective.

The jokes, in places offensive, are relentless and ribald. There is no apology, though, no concession; just a considered, virtuoso application of talent.

It's marked by the fresh excitement of mapping out new territory rather than the more craven pleasure of wallowing in nostalgia: an object lesson in the value of not giving people what they want.

Whatever he’s doing, the results are uniformly fantastic: rich, fascinating and moving, packed with gorgeous melodies and arrangements that feel alive, constantly writhing into unexpected new shapes.

The fearless try-anything spirit of Paul Welly, it seems, is still alive and well.

Dystopia is an absolutely blistering return to the state-of-the-art bombast and refined technicality of past glories like Rust in Peace and Endgame.

For fans of chiming, literate, lovelorn pop, Picaresque is an absolute treasure trove.

You could never describe You Want It Darker as merely more of the same. As striking as the sense that its themes are of a piece with the rest of Cohen’s oeuvre is the sense of an artist willing to move forward.

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

This new album contains 10 sublime reflections on religious sites and buildings.

Carrie & Lowell is a delight in every way, surely one of the albums of the year.

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.

It’s strange and disorientating, idiosyncratic and frequently astonishing, a modern-day psychedelia that owes almost nothing to that genre’s hackneyed conventions and never forgets to temper the sublimity with darkness.

This is the kind of songwriting quality that bands can take years to reach, or never reach at all: brilliant, top to bottom.

Full of the kind of bathetic genius English pop used to excel in, Art Brut are life-affirming - and are worth 500 of almost every other new guitar band.

A darker and more eccentric record than its predecessors, Distant Satellites may not be the album to change all that, but it's still another masterclass in supercharged emotional songwriting and fearless sonic curiosity.