Beyoncé's got the tour out of the way first--with this year's Mrs Carter jaunt--and released a singleless, multi-layered, head-spinning album second. Maybe she knew what she was doing after all.

If there is a difference it's in the richness of the emotions and textures.

The mood never feels trite on And Then Life Was Beautiful, but oddly infectious instead, perhaps because the songs are really strong, the lyrics admirably uncliched.

Not everything here works, but taken together Folklore and Evermore make a convincing case for Swift’s ability to shift shape and for her songs’ ability to travel between genres: as lockdown overachievements go, it’s pretty impressive.

[A] collection of stunningly simple songs.

Styrofoam articulates body dysmorphia, New Trick bemoans strangers who stare, and LOL rues a certain strain of vulnerability. But like all successful pop music, PWR BTTM can convert their highly specific sentiments into something universal.

It's like the strangest early-80s radio station you can imagine, complete with a song about gender confusion entitled Menopause Man. Beguiling stuff.

Made Possible is at once vintage Bad Plus in its striking themes, nonchalant time-bends and full-on collective improv, and proof of this awesome ensemble's continuing evolution.

Grimes collaboration Nihilist Blues convincingly addresses fears of ageing, while the (gulp) classically orchestrated I Don’t Know What to Say – about a friend’s cancer death – is undeniably touching. However, elsewhere, the likes of Medicine, Mother Tongue and In the Dark are anodyne pop that is liable to alienate the band’s fanbase and makes an uneasy fit with their desire to experiment.

It's unique and warm and beautiful, as love letters are supposed to be.

Hackman is more confident than ever. With her singles The One and I’m Not Where You Are, in particular, she delivers lethally sharp pop hooks. The more low-key moments cut just as deep.

Down IV – Part II is unlikely to shock devotees, but recent lineup changes seem to have rejuvenated the Louisiana quintet's approach, resulting in their strongest batch of material since 1995's widely adored debut album, NOLA.

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.

With poetry suffusing both lyrics and music, Fontaines DC capture being young in all its excitement and challenges, its confidence and despair: those years where it feels like you’re trying to find a foothold with your hands. It’s not easy, but then what great album, or life, ever is?

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.

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

This record is an epic, emotional endeavour, and a stunning one, too.

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

It's a wild,disorientating but exultant experience, using voices, keys, guitar, percussion and electronics to embrace minimalist, quietlyclanging churchbell sounds.

Parquet Courts have produced a debut that's both instantly addictive and lastingly rewarding: a smart, snappy concoction of worldly wisdom and garage-rock gratification.

Just don't dip into the album fleetingly - it's music that's hard to appreciate in snippets, but more than satisfactory when devoured as a whole.

Before the Dawn provides a memento for those who were there and a vague indication of what went on for those who weren’t, without compromising the shows’ appealingly mysterious air: a quality you suspect the woman behind it realises is in very short supply in rock music these days.

If anything, Flower Boy captures Tyler at his least tormented and twisted; it is an album of exquisitely arranged, melodious synth-rap, wistful and reflective, heavy on the heavenly. It’s not all dreamy--watch out for the occasional profane pothole--but largely this is the work of an evolved artist and mature person.

It’s a sustained and hypnotic march through minimalist, post-Sabbath landscapes, and crucifyingly heavy on every level.

Out of Silence sees him at his most contemplative and tender, at the most troubled of times. If you missed out on watching this album being born, rest assured the songs will be there waiting for you, whenever you’re ready to listen.

Even those untouched by spiritual connotations of this music should be able to embrace its truly numinous energy.

Medulla may divide Björk's audience, but, combining intellectual rigour and sensual ravishment, it is brave and unique.

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.

The tunes are uniformly gorgeous. No one expects career-best stuff from a reformation album, but the sighing melody of The Ballad is among the loveliest in Blur’s catalogue.

A collection that sees El-P update his sound and his flow to combustible effect.

It's a classy, mostly acoustic set, dominated by fiddle, guitar and banjo, but T Bone Burnett uses clarinet and piano for a bleak, adventurous reworking of The Battle of Antietam.

Seamus Fogarty has joined the big league with Domino Records. This stunning, mercurial album shows us why. Held together by Fogarty’s lovely unadorned voice, it constantly unwinds and uncoils, taking us on magical journeys through fable and modern life and back again, often in the same song.

As ever, Sleaford Mods are a voice that must be heard.

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.

You could argue that This Is Happening lacks its predecessor's startling sense of mapping out new territories, but if it confines itself to doing what LCD Soundsystem do, it does it all incredibly well.

No Age are one of those rare bands who can be all things to all punks, from art-school noise types in their lofts to teenagers squabbling in the streets below--and they are in the form of their lives.

[Noname] enlists a cast of varied, rich voices: Raury’s starry eyed spirituality, Xavier Omär’s velvet croon, and Cam O’bi, who sums up the record’s charms perfectly on Diddy Bop: “This sounds like growing out my clothes, with stars in my pocket, dreaming about making my hood glow.”

This is an insinuating record, a sunshine-and-haywains counterpart to the sinister English ruralism of the likes of Hacker Farm, but one that nags at you once its charms are clear.

Musically, Giants of All Sizes is richer and stranger than anything they’ve released since their commercial breakthrough. Even when it finally settles back into more comfortable lyrical terrain – My Trouble’s hymning of cosy domesticity, On Deronda Street’s paean to parenthood – the music strays beyond their usual comfort zone: ragged and underpinned by glitchy electronic beats. It suits them out there.

Treats can be a slavering, snarling beast of an album, but beneath the bravado is a sweet centre.

It’s a great album to listen to on headphones--the level of detail and the clarity of the aesthetic choices really become apparent.... It’s bliss.

Kids See Ghosts is a shotgun blast to the senses, swarming with blistering electronics, laser-cut samples, psychedelic crescendos and edges as blurry as a half-remembered dream.

It's the subtlety, and the self-awareness, that make this album exquisite.

It’s less experimental but still impressive, for Lynn, who is 83, is in remarkably powerful voice, mixing nostalgia with new songs.

Might well be Holmes' best.

Mostly, though, Lee counterbalances her darker experiments with playfulness and hope. Her genre-fluidity creates moments of unexpected beauty.

Blondshell, rich with bitter experience and untrammelled honesty, offers a robust shelter where listeners might start to find it.

The words and their delivery are obviously the point of Let Them Eat Chaos, but they aren’t the only thing that makes it compelling. From the slowly pulsating electronic currents of Breaks to Perfect Coffee’s early Chicago house chug, the music is uniformly great.

This is a triumph of impressionism, where the digital and organic coexist in a radically beautiful whole.

Some of the top lines are nagging in their immediacy – the joyous “do-do-do’s” on the 90-second Bop positively tickle you in the armpits – but others are cleverly minimal, like the announcements on the chorus to Empty in My Mind.

If No Shape is a less straightforward pop album than it first appears, then something similar is true of the lyrics. It certainly maps out a more positive emotional territory than its predecessors.

On paper, All Life Long looks like hard work for anyone whose musical tastes don’t usually dwell on the avant garde fringes. The reality is that it requires virtually no effort on the part of the listener: you just have to let yourself succumb.

This record is a living poem that captures the angry tension of being alive in 2019: trying not to look directly at the oncoming crises, trying to love and give and dance in the midst of firesmoke.

The tracklist ebbs and flows between tunes unknown to the audience, Buffalo Springfield material and songs from his teenage years (the tremulous lament for youth, Sugar Mountain), and strikes a consistently plaintive note. It's this banter with the audience, however, that leavens proceedings.

The songs here sound as if the tension built up over such a long spell of lying dormant has been released to thrilling effect.

There are fleeting, faraway echoes of John Martyn at his wooziest, but Mills has crafted something very personal and individual.

Here Uchis couches her velveteen mood pieces in pillow-soft R&B, creating a suite of songs luxuriant enough to bathe in.

Swapping campfire cosiness for expansive joy, they sound so accomplished the Flaming Lips comparisons fall by the wayside.

It makes a very attractive sampler. For fans who know that the dark, lamenting Crescent preceded it, and the legendary and hippy-hypnotising A Love Supreme followed, it’s a fascinating hybrid of Coltrane’s song-based earlier methods, and his incandescently devotional late period.

There's no over-personalising and, God Is in the Roses aside, no easy sentimentality.

It adds up to an album that manages to be both unexpected and of a piece with its author’s back catalogue. ... Western Stars is powerful enough to make you wish Bruce Springsteen would take more stylistic detours in the future.

Lovano's total authority over the materials and his instruments glows through every track.

Yeezus is the sound of a man just doing his job properly.

Wildheart mints a signature musical style; moreover, it’s a signature musical style that doesn’t sound much like anyone else.

Quivering in Time transcends the temporal as well as the planar, but crucially, it doesn’t leave us behind.

The album has an energy both attractive and intimidating.

Gibbons is less effective when trying to imitate those operatic tropes: her vibrato sounds uncomfortable and uncontrolled, particularly on the first movement, and it doesn’t help that she is a contralto trying to sing in a soprano range. But her artless, almost conversational approach brings indefinably human characteristics to the work. Her range is particularly suited to the lower setting of the second movement.

Quiet Signs has a slightly jazzier, more soulful feel than her last, folkier outing, with a faint nod to Joni Mitchell on Poly Blue and perhaps even a hint of the Drifters’ On Broadway to the beguiling, sumptuous Here My Love.

The superb What’s Your Pleasure? makes a case to reimagine so-called comfort zones as potential lanes of expertise: free pop’s women from the pointless commercial burden to reinvent, let them hone their craft, and you get assured marvels like this.

relude to Ecstasy is a delight, filled with enough ideas to suggest that they’ll come up with just as many more the next time around: the Last Dinner Party’s confidence may stem less from the hype they’ve provoked than the fact they know how good they are.

Sigur Ros's sudden accessibility doesn't tarnish their mystique, but deepens and colours it.

For all the dark wordplay, the album is an aural equivalent of that old American favourite, the schmaltzy biopic.

It's a pleasant, if limited set, and though there are echoes of the mesmeric style of Tinariwen, he sounds more like the attacking Vieux Farka Touré with less ambitious guitar work.

Sometimes her directness is harrowing: Where Did I Leave That Fire? opens with sonar bleeps and a cold ripple of piano, and finds Case all but dissociated from herself: "I wanted so badly not to be me." If this makes the album sound self-indulgent, rest assured it is far from it.

Angel Olsen's second album marries solo singer-songwriter stuff with buzzy, fuzzy alt-pop--alternating between one and the other so expertly that the strengths of both are highlighted, the weaknesses pushed deep into the background.

In an age of slurred mumble-rap and sing-song delivery, there’s an old-school satisfaction in hearing someone deliver their bars with such, well, finesse.

Too much of this album is the sort of thing people stick on to make their drug comedowns feel meaningful.

There are sturdy melodies on the quietly charming Cosoco or Cálculos Y Oráculos, but even an apparently conventional song is soon transformed by her edgy and intriguing off-kilter soundscapes.

Like the Fall or Captain Beefheart, Malkmus’s use of language is idiosyncratic (“numbskull chip off some old block, dagger glasses for the kid” anybody?) but demands immersion, while--at 51--his musical gifts are as bountiful as ever.

Another Tinariwen classic.

It is all as self-consciously stagey as a Wes Anderson movie - too arch and florid to really engage the heart, but bold and wondrous entertainment none the less.

In a genre hardly noted for springing surprises on its listeners, Extraordinary Machine sounds like a real achievement: however torturous the gestation, it seems worthwhile.

Music that is rich and deep and repays repeated listening. All the Breeders’ trademarks are here: the guitar lines that sit at unexpected angles to the chords, the shifts from light to dark, the curious sense of humour.

In a crowded market, Yesterday’s Gone manages to carve out its own little world, one that’s both unique and universal.

Sometimes, Forever is at its most engaging when Lopatin’s sound designs appear to be working in sympathy with the grimmer aspects of the lyrics and at odds with Allison’s penchant for a toothsome pop melody.

The music Low are currently making carries a similar, head-turning, where-the-hell-did-this-come-from air to Isn’t Anything and Loveless; as with those albums, the people behind Hey What are redefining how a rock band can sound. It says something – about Low and about rock music – that you have to delve back 30 years to find something with those qualities.

Here are 12 succinct, speedy, riff-happy gems smothered in snarling backtalk and shameless, glorious guitar solos.

This is certainly dense, endlessly mutating music that rewards multiple listenings.

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.

Ultimately, that’s the main problem here; just when you settle into Negro Swan’s groove, it changes tack, leaving you feeling weirdly unmoored from it and, worse, emotionally disconnected.

While the gunshot-littered Clartin and Goodies are far harder than any recent grime track, it’s the upbeat window-winders that really bang. The sound of the summer? You know it makes sense.

Lizzo has something to say, and a smart way of saying it ... but the potency of what’s here would seem more potent still if it had been allowed a little room to breathe ... Instead, Cuz I Love You keeps its foot pressed down hard on the accelerator for half an hour in an attempt to ram-raid the charts.

Dark Days/Light Years is their finest collection since 2003's "Phantom Power," a purple patch perhaps inspired by the band members' dalliances in various solo projects.

This is one of the most brilliantly gloomy albums in his long career.

Fuck Buttons have less in common with the overly cerebral noise boffins they're compared to and more with the likes of Ennio Morricone: sonic explorers mapping out the landscape's emotional terrain, albeit one that exists in some far-off galaxy.

Vince Staples is idiosyncratic and really impressive, the sound of someone walking their own path, uncoupled from current trends, shifting and changing as they go. You leave it keen to hear what his next album – apparently already completed – holds.

However arcane they may once have seemed, the truth is that Entomology's highlights were too good to stay obscure forever.

This is rich, strange, endlessly fascinating music: a subtle, beautiful triumph.