The way repeated listens allow its unobvious rhythmic and melodic logic to take root is fantastically rewarding.

It is a deceptively difficult trick, to capture the humanity and irregularities of music in a way that does not feel cloying, but over 12 tracks on their debut album Brisbane’s the Goon Sax manage it again, and again, and again. This is some kind of wonderful.

Devoid of weak tracks or ideas that don’t gel, it’s an album that sounds as if it was made by someone who knows exactly what she’s doing. .... An original pop voice: Fabiana Palladino might well be one of 2024’s best debut albums.

The result is her first triumph: a collection of literary and emotional songs to have you whooping with joy or fighting off tears, with tunes that deliver new riches with each listen.

Sonically warm and sparkling, Sorceress marks another high point for a band that keep defying the odds by making silly old prog rock sound stupidly exciting and audacious.

Her fourth album, No Words Left, is her starkest, filled with lyrics about uncertainty and isolation, and yet her most striking, conveying the strongest sense of her artistic identity yet.

The Satanist is as untamed and direct as its title suggests: a flawless paean to free will and the human spirit.

In spring 1967, Dylan and the Band were out of step, but ahead of the curve. Now, 47 years on, even the listener overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of what’s on offer here--who doesn’t want to hear the false starts and fragments and gags--might conclude that the highlights are as timeless as rock music in the 60s got.

These are as great as any Australian pop I have heard, from Kylie Minogue to The Easybeats. Similarly, Blasko’s music often feels like it follows the lineage of mod and the core values of that style: aspirational, inspirational, forward looking, tightly wound, late-night fuelled. Every now and then, Blasko wanders into glam-stomp diva territory. And of course she owns it.

A genuinely remarkable album: self-obsessed but completely compelling, profoundly discomforting but beautiful, lost in its own fathomless personal misery, but warm, funny and wise. It shouldn't work, but it does.

Marius Neset, the 25-year-old Norwegian saxophonist who surfaced in the UK last year with Django Bates (his teacher and mentor at Copenhagen's Rhythmic Music Conservatory), not only combines Brecker's power and Jan Garbarek's tonal delicacy, but has a vision that makes all 11 originals on this sensational album feel indispensable, and indispensably connected to each other.

There is so much to revel in here. ... They remain a radical band while making music that is reaching out to the mainstream – while also giving off the thrilling sense that there is so much more to come.

Hot Thoughts is loaded with tunes, invention and adventure.

Robert Wyatt, that most eloquently lackadaisical of jazz-loving English troubadours, has made some unforgettable albums over his long solo career, but this will rank among the frontrunners.

This is an admirably coherent collection of songs that are as uncompromisingly intricate and strange as they are incisively melodic.

Each track, often on the theme of soured love, has a simplicity and a directness that is characteristic of the best pop.

This is a smart, soulful and immersive work of art.

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

Both albums are sublime. Taken together they're hip-hop's Sign o' the Times or The White Album: a career-defining masterpiece of breathtaking ambition.

Its triumphant sound comes from the artist’s clear joy in realising these compositions, which shines through every exuberant moment.

This was Fela on classic form.

One of 2015’s most addictive, pulse-racing noisy joys.

Madlib channels a deep, intertwining lineage of Black music through Sound Ancestors like folklore oration, storytelling with the sorcery of a beatmaker who knows how to make an instrumental really sing.

Young is still a force to be reckoned with. There is urgency and energy here.

Mitski’s songwriting trademarks are strong enough to transcend the stylistic revamp--arrangements that are rich without being precious (Pink in the Night), plus her terrifically mordant worldview.

It sounds timeless and contemporary; the instrumental interludes and the stylistic and tempo shifts all hang together because of his warm, sincere vocals and fantastic songwriting.

Some Waller devotees will recoil, but this is a respectful tribute from a remarkable modern-music mind.

It is an ambitious album that can turn from hedonism to hope on a dime. And with its genre-hopping ethos, bold orchestral choices and pleasing tunefulness, it is the first truly boundary-pushing record of the 2020s, cementing its creator as a daring virtuoso.