An indulgently rich record that keeps revealing more on double-digit listens. And at various moments, just when you thought it couldn’t get any heavier, it does. .... Being crushed underneath this album is one of the great musical experiences of the year.

Her fourth album feels like an unjustly forgotten classic.

What ties it all together is her beautifully honed skill as a songwriter. For all the sonic uproar, the melodies are impossible to miss, and so is the personality she imprints across the album: troubled but self-aware, wryly funny, the doubts and fears and worries she expresses completely at odds with the confidence of her approach to risk-taking, shape-shifting music.

If it’s hard to avoid a certain deja vu in the urban Manchester feel or Johnson’s signature drum fills, there are more bubbling electronics this time and the songs span a spectrum from introspection to euphoria.

If you wanted to pick holes, The Tortured Poets Department is a shade too long.

David Kennedy’s drumming is riveting, both finicky and louche as he sways through Dilla-time funkiness and math-rock detail. Guitarist Finlay Clark is in some ways a minimalist, repeating pretty riffs or expertly chosen chords, but there’s nothing minimal about his generous playing. .... Most astonishing of all is Jessica Hickie-Kallenbach, singing with more power and confidence than ever before. Her luminously soulful voice is a distinctive instrument, with vibrato that makes whole songs shudder with life.

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.

If the results don’t quite hold together, Cowboy Carter still proves Beyoncé is impressively capable of doing whatever she wants.

This set’s beautiful opener Defiant, Tender Warrior builds a bewitching trance from soft piano wavelets, growling bass accents and snare-pattern whispers before Lloyd’s breathy tenor long-tones and enraptured top-end warbles even begin.

He experiments with texture and even puts it through a vocoder but, for all Elbow’s adventures, the foundations are still classy songwriting, heart and soul.

On Tigers Blood, she returns clear-eyed and spirited with a twisting country album of anthemic earworms that evoke long summer evenings, intimate chats and misty-eyed regret.

Putting Grande on a pedestal helps no one, and the beatific, mature Eternal Sunshine brings her safely back down to earth.

Centrepiece Turning the Prism slackens the narrative tension, but there’s still something gripping about sitting with its pure affect: arrhythmic beats landing like red-mist punches, Kubacki’s guitar rearing up with an equine whinny. That violence reverberates even through the more placid ambient tracks, resulting in a grim, magnificent record that trades in real horror.

Y’Y finds Freitas at his most wide-ranging, embodying soft natural ambience as well as dramatic action on the piano. It is an album of mood music that refuses to settle, leaving the listener moved and invigorated.

Even at its most melodious, Playing Favorites still sounds fierce and raw, an object lesson in altering your sound without losing your essence.

MGMT seemed deeply nonplussed by the celebrity Oracular Spectacular conferred on them. But while you wait and see, Loss of Life is a delightful thing to immerse yourself in.

Stevie Wonder’s Overjoyed (a fittingly ecstatic Iyer homage to Chick Corea’s interpretation) is unfolded over a rocking left hand and Tyshawn Sorey’s crackling polyrhythms, sparking one of several breathtakingly headlong Iyer solos on the set, coolly placing fragments and twists of the original theme into the onrush despite its scorching pace.

In truth, Lytle’s crestfallen songs – sung in plaintive sigh suggesting Brian Wilson channelling Charlie Brown’s existential angst – are a seductive joy, and getting lost in his soft-focus happy-sadness is an addictive pleasure all its own.

Not everything on Tangk works, but the vast majority of it does, with an urgency that draws you into its message of positivity: reason enough to break out the freudenfreude.

Dissociative, distinctive album.

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.

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.

It makes for an album that’s too involving and engaging and powerful to count as merely more of the same: you leave the turmoil of People Who Aren’t There Anymore feeling moved, rather than jaded.

[Bending Hectic is] one of the best things Yorke and Greenwood have put their names to in at least a decade. Like the rest of Wall of Eyes, it really doesn’t feel interstitial, like a placeholder until the definite article reappears. What that portends for Radiohead’s future – if anything – is arguable; the album’s quality is not.

Halvorson’s fusions of written and spontaneous music reach an entrancing new seamlessness and seductive warmth with this terrific set.

So it’s dreamy and fuzzy but sharp, witty and danceable with it; varied but coherent, consistently enjoyable. It’s an album on which Kali Uchis sounds not just like an artist who is now doing exactly what she wants, but one who also knows exactly what she’s doing.

It is a slow-burning piece that encourages us to view time in geological rather than human terms – the rapturous, otherworldly sounds that the planet might continue to make long after humanity’s extinction.

Musically, the album isn’t dark at all. It’s overwhelmingly lovely, with classy hooks and rousing choruses.

I Get Into Trouble is a generous and deeply emotional record that embodies what Zietsch does so well: offering the listener a window into her most vulnerable thoughts, while also holding a mirror to the social structures that have led her there. Through this album, Zietsch bears witness to both herself and the world.

There’s a lovely intimacy and openness to songs such as When I Hold You in My Arms and while his voice has lost some of the old youthful power, it has gained in tenderness, nuance, humanity and warmth.

It may be as imperfect as Pink Friday was, but Pink Friday 2 offers more than enough supporting evidence to make the latter claims sound like anything but hollow boasts.

It’s dense and rewarding and has more interesting things to say than the earnest but pat song titles – Live and Let Live, Love Can Heal – suggest.

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.

The good news is you don’t need to subject yourself to The Idol to appreciate its soundtrack. Although most numbers riff on the show’s content, their musings on the ugly underbelly of celebrity and disturbingly dysfunctional relationships are ambiguous enough to be enjoyed on their own terms.

Her voice is slightly deeper than it was, with a rich timbre indefatigability earned through lived experience. George Gershwin’s Summertime offers a rueful backwards glance. The years melt away for The Circle Game. Both Sides Now has the poignancy of a 79-year-old singing words she wrote aged 23

Diehard Dexys fans doubtless would not expect anything less, but even if you don’t count yourself among their number, The Feminine Divine might leave you glad he chose to continue doing what he alone does: after all, genuinely unique figures are thin on the ground in pop these days.

Love Hallucination isn’t cosplay but an affirmation of Lanza’s unique ear. Her tactile heavy bass, cirrus-wisp synths and spun-sugar falsetto have deepened: the low end is diamond-hard, her playful freestyle-inspired melodies and moods glimmer like the light refracted through the gem.

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.

Drake’s presence might have broken Who Told You in territories hitherto resistant to J Hus’s charms, but the album has the ability to follow through.

Sufjan Stevens’ Carrie & Lowell is perhaps the closest comparison in terms of musical and emotional tenor, but Byrne’s album is ultimately as singular as the woman singing it, and as unforgettable as a departed friend.

My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross feels like a particularly powerful entry in her discography: surrounded by music that’s beautiful but relatively straightforward, that voice seems more extraordinary still.

Like the Dorset woods they describe, I Inside the Old Year Dying is eerily forbidding, but intoxicating, and easy to lose yourself in.

The Velvet Underground-worthy Los Angeles: City of Death is the closest this Swans incarnation comes to rock and unusually for a band of this vintage, they’re still springing surprises, such as the way Michael Is Done suddenly erupts into beatific rapture reminiscent of early Brian Eno.

Like all second albums that offer only minor adjustments to a debut, Work of Art leaves you wondering a little about what the future holds. But such thoughts are easy to dispel during the half-hour it plays for: you’re too busy enjoying yourself to worry.

LaVette is the true focus, leading the fiery JB’s-esque funk of Mess About, and declaring “champagne and a joint would do me just fine” on Plan B. She’s glorious company, and when she croons sadly “I keep on rolling, but the thrill is gone” on See Through Me, the electric charge of her voice makes a liar of her.

Sitting somewhere between remixes and reimaginings, the songs on Jarak Qaribak illustrate the elasticity of this songbook, highlighting how its longing melodies can be reapplied into new voices, transmitting similar emotions through unusual settings.

Hypnotically melodic, clever, stylish, serious, fun, addictively unexpected and euphorically danceable, it’s the kind of pop they don’t make any more.

Dixon’s fourth album tightens its lens: skipping by in 30 minutes, its songs possess a renewed urgency and velocity. But his writing is more literary and exploratory still. Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!? (named after three of Toni Morrison’s most celebrated works) provides an embarrassment of imagistic riches.

This is a strong second showing from a group that’s relaxing into itself while not compromising its razor-sharp worldview.

The tunes are noticeably more polished, the dynamic shifts punchier: it’s as if the desire to express something about Hawkins, or to make an album that stands as a worthy memorial has given them a fresh sense of purpose and momentum.

It has taken Water From Your Eyes six years to reach a point where their music feels genuinely original, a journey that feels worth it. There’s a lesson in there.

Releasing this material as a live album is a virtue – the audience’s roar after the absurdly pretty Turbines/Pigs has a thrilling note of disbelief.

A consistent album rather than a collection of tracks – or worse, a handful of big tunes padded out to album length with filler – Good Lies is filled with moments like that: you can spot the influences, but they’re always passed though a filter, presented in an original way.

The songwriting never dips below classic.

Subtract is easily his best album. But it’s also the first Ed Sheeran album since his debut for which you can’t confidently predict eye-watering commercial success.

The songwriting here is often very good, even timelessly classic.

This is her fullest and most colourful release to date, but it’s still a dense work that takes time to reveal itself. Casual listeners are unlikely to be rewarded.

By and large, this is pop music made by people who really know what they’re doing. The songs have bulletproof melodies and killer choruses, while snappy lyrics abound.

It all hits just the right note between accessible and experimental: idiosyncratic and intricate yet straightforwardly enjoyable, Variables is unwavering in its brilliance.

It’s an album that manages to be different from anything they’ve recorded before yet perfectly in keeping with their past: a comeback worth waiting for.

Always soulful and forever in the groove, Okumu’s seamless genre switch-ups ensure I Came from Love finds strength in its multiplicity.

Hecker seems to want you on guard, braced for cataclysm. Nerves fray, discords linger, that sense of panic accumulates and draws you helplessly in. And this allusive, wordless album starts to feel eerily modern and big.

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

Soothing, moving, occasionally disquieting and utterly immersive, Sundown suggests its predecessor was something else entirely: merely the first step of an entirely unlikely and entirely delightful career renaissance.

Parisien’s Dou is a dreamy sax melody with the composer at his most Bechet-like, while Peirani’s Nomad’s Sky often suggests an imploring voice, with softly whooping soprano sounds rising over long arco-cello chords. If ever there was a powerful argument for jazz being an attitude to music-making rather than a genre, it’s this rare gem.

Smart but chaotic, funny but disturbing – Scaring the Hoes is a confounding victory.

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.

There is scope for flashes of greater dynamism but in their consistency, Aftab, Iyer and Ismaily reveal the beauty in quietude.

It is her quietest, most wilfully inscrutable record in a long time, perhaps since 2015’s glacially paced, rebelliously quiet Honeymoon. ... Instead, many songs here are subtle, vaporous, but potent all the same.

Whether they’re running away from or towards something is anybody’s guess, but crucially, Tumor remains one step ahead of the rest.

There’s a naturalness and a flow in evidence, and charm, too. You can’t imagine anyone who rushed to the download sites was disappointed with what they found.