It is a remarkably exposing record that showcases Ntuli’s mastery of her instruments. Opener Sunrise (In California) sets the tone, shifting through Robert Glasper-style chord progressions, while its counterpart Sunset (In California) taps into the plaintive phrasing crafted by the father of South African piano jazz, Abdullah Ibrahim.

His lyrics tend to overshadow his skills as a tunesmith or his musical eclecticism, but if you listen to the more manageable two-CD set, you’re struck by how melodically strong and varied his output sounds.

These dozen tracks have a pure, hymnal quality. Rather than sounding bleak or dark you can hear the healing process under way.

Listening to the album feels like witnessing a fireworks display, each song exploding to reveal intricate patterns before quickly vanishing as the next one launches.

Bridging past and present, Sweet Justice is a breathless, intoxicating album bursting with ideas and creativity, and reveals something different and compelling with every listen.

Listening to Now and Then, it’s hard to see what Harrison’s objection was in purely musical terms. A moody, reflective piano ballad, it’s clearly never going to supplant Strawberry Fields Forever or A Day in the Life in the affections of Beatles fans, but it’s a better song than Free as a Bird or Real Love. And posthumously reworked as a Beatles track, it definitely packs a greater emotional punch.

These subtle, interesting songs lost out to brasher, more basic tracks – Welcome to New York, Style – on the original 1989 tracklist, but who’s to say whether their inclusion would have affected Swift’s trajectory? Clearly she made a pretty good call on that front. This carbon copy of her blockbuster album doesn’t rewrite history but adds some instantly treasurable footnotes.

Intriguing and affecting.

What Hackney Diamonds has in profusion is really good songs.

This is an album from an artist who refuses to sugarcoat human experience. That Woods is able to set her unflinching insight to hook-filled, restlessly genre-blending tunes makes her a talent not to be sniffed at.

This is one of the year’s best and most distinctive pop albums, and it’s to Sivan’s credit that even as the genre speeds up around him, he’s keeping pace while making sure to feel the breeze rush by.

Perhaps no album could tie together all the diverse strands of Stevens’ musical career but, as it ranges from lo-fi singer-songwriter to baroque orchestration to opaque electronics to warped pop, Javelin comes surprisingly close: a remarkable achievement in itself. That it sounds like a holisitic album, one that flows rather than fractures, is remarkable, too – but it does, carrying the listener along with it as it goes.

Cousin isn’t a completely unprecedented left turn but nor is it a straightforward reanimation of past glories. It’s something else; an album that feels simultaneously familiar and different, satisfying and disquieting.

An extraordinary album.

Laugh Track, the National’s surprise 10th album, is billed as the second half of Frankenstein, with all but one song written at the same time. But the link feels surface-level: Laugh Track does away with the airy atmosphere and hand-wringing solipsism of Frankenstein, instead adopting a more grownup take on the existential conundrums of earlier National records.

There are an awful lot of singer-songwriters around exploring the kind of subjects Mitski touches on here: disillusionment, isolation, broken relationships, overindulgence. But it is questionable whether anyone else is doing it with this much skill, this lightness of touch or indeed, straightforward melodic power: in the best possible sense, Mitski feels out on her own.

The Best Thing in the World is a wonderful piece of creaky minimalism, a kind of steampunk techno created on double basses, massed guitars and a vintage synth. Best of all is Naked Like Water, a gently pulsating West African funk groove, featuring interlocking basslines, scratchy guitars and gospel singer Donna Thompson’s wordless voice rising above the aqueous vocal harmonies. Sublime.

It all adds up to quite a voyage: the Merseysiders’ most fully realised set of songs since their debut.

The other striking thing is how sharp her lyrics are, behind their unassuming conversational veneer: only Pretty Isn’t Pretty’s assault on beauty standards feels a little boilerplate. Elsewhere, she’s witty.

A really masterful album.

It’s a variation on the old disco trick of marrying elated music to despondent lyrics, but it really packs a punch, partly because the elated music is incredibly well done, and partly because the vulnerability on display here feels genuine and convincing.

For That Beautiful Feeling doesn’t deliver hits such as Go and Galvanize, but like each of the pair’s previous nine albums it contains moments that will claw into your lizard brain and refuse to leave, whether you last went clubbing yesterday or three decades ago, when their debut single, Song to the Siren, dropped.

This second album of their second phase continues to do pretty much the same as they’ve ever done, but is all the lovelier for it.

Its production hones Burna Boy’s sprawling influences into music that feels punchy, inimitable and impressively streamlined.

After a decade apart, Be Your Own Pet are a far better band: explicit, tight, even more inventive.

As character assassinations go, The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons is a riotously good time. It’s no major reinvention of the Hives’ electrified vocals, staccato guitar, and relentless pace, but it finds the band heavier, louder and faster than ever.

You sense some listeners will find Sundial too ethically complex and contrary. Hopefully many more will flock to Noname, who brings piercing intellect and joie de vivre to tough questions. A librarian, yes, but also a moon stalker.

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.