There’s more here than mere novelty appeal--enough to make you hope they repeat the experiment at some point.

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

It's an eccentric, all-consuming blizzard. GI Jane is Jackson's take on pro-pop, Vista on west coast disco and Memory on classic 60s songwriting, all bathed in a wash of glitch.

On this form, there are few around who can match them.

Bicep pull it off with considerable aplomb. Isles’s melodies are lush or wistfully melancholic, but the beats are too tough and driving for its contents to be mistaken for something you’d play at a dinner party.

It all meanders a little, but getting lost in these songs proves to be an unexpected adventure.

The sonic influences are worn a little too plainly for Prestige to feel like a landmark release, but by borrowing from musical history with such care and respect, Girl Ray have made an album that is very difficult not to raise a smile – or a frosty Midori sour cocktail – to.

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

What seemed like a bracing one-off explosion now feels like something else: a group in it for the long haul, whose best work might well be ahead of them.

Singer Tom Smith tempers his constant anxiety with flashes of optimism, his brittle nihilism with gooey sentiment.

A command of melodies and songwriting ensures that it all fits together wonderfully, throwing a party for the world.

His fourth album, Gliss Riffer, continues that singular journey [the edge of pop and experimentation] and coerces elements of pop and madcap electronica into a convincing mix.

The real surprise is that this unexpected step from comfy balladry to something more interesting sounds quite natural – the only element that doesn't fit is the free-floatingly doomy lyrics, which foretell unspecified personal and global calamities.

How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb may be unadventurous and melodramatic, but it is packed with disarming moments.

Anthems for Doomed Youth isn’t perfect, but it succeeds in redressing the balance, reminding you that before Doherty became an embarrassing red-top fixture, he and Barât were genuinely great songwriters with a uniquely skewed vision.

Sonically, the record gradually unfurls into something similarly captivating though, as Clark ditches the guitar rock for pop that is rich, nuanced and constantly surprising

An unlikely but often brilliant comeback.

The austerity of Harvey's self-imposed constraints is uncompromising but rewarding; she forces herself out of her comfort zone, and takes the listener with her.

There are flickers of the old fire on There’s a Riot Going on (which bears no similarity to Sly and the Family Stone, to the surprise of precisely no one).

Spalding’s voice has never sounded so assured in its dizzying ascents from mid-range murmurs to falsetto swoops. Her singing variously suggests Kate Bush, Janelle Monae or even a female Jack Bruce with a 21st-century Cream.

Crutchfield’s [voice is] full of elasticity and billow, Williamson’s offering a sweetness and a trill. When they meet, as on the warmly unapologetic Hurricane, something magical is sprung.

A sense of bittersweet happiness and streamlined sadness flows through its 10 tracks.

The faint air of pie-eyed 60s silliness (song titles include Spider Cider and Idea for Rubber Dog) and Dwyer's cartoonish vocalisms could put some off, but there's more than enough sunny, funny, manic charm to make it all work.

The songs swing from cosmic and ethereal to mischievously earthy.

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).

Laughter in the studio punctuates songs that sound as much of a delight to record as they do to listen to: Lotta Sea Lice is at least the sum of its two talented parts.

The sound of rock'n'roll at its most raw and untamed.

A welcome surprise.