Pop music today is arguably more political than ever, but the very best pop songs offer either campy escapism or strengthening mantras. Petras clearly knows this. Her carefree hooks glisten like suits of armour.

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.

Perhaps all will be revealed on repeated listens, but for now Star Wars sounds like a band having an absolute blast with both the pop music form and the ways in which we hear it.

Here, the 50-year-old sometime novelist is in masterly form, reappraising his teenage goth years.

Two Ribbons is a fabulous album.

Rather than tinkering with tradition, he expands upon it with computer-generated hums and bleeps, tambourines and glockenspiel, warming the stark acoustic sound.

It manages to preserve the defiance, drama, faith and heart of the original gospel classics, while making them sound like contemporary music.

For all their sonic ferocity, the songs on Pray for Me have strong melodies and hooks in abundance.

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.

The album is imbued with a post-9/11 dread, which deters Fagen from recycling the nostalgia and Lynchian fantasy of his previous albums.

The muddy, unfocused production adds to a sense of missed opportunity. However, 23 has more than most seventh albums' share of otherworldly pop delights.

Derivative as it is, there’s beauty here, and something admirable in Walker’s insistence on so closely cleaving to his chosen path.

Right now, Collapsed in Sunbeams feels like a warm breeze in the depths of a miserable winter.

An ebullient record brimming with sheer love of the craft.

His muse was rekindled in 2015, when he decided to write a song for each week, and it’s burning brightly on his fourth, brilliant full-length.

Black Up, their full-length debut, connects black consciousness with the dark mysteries of deep space, synthesising tribal drums, kalimba and African inflections with fragmented beats and eerie, futuristic synths.

It's a virtuoso, and mostly upbeat collaboration, but the best track is the one new composition, Lampedusa, a gently exquisite lament for African migrants who died trying to reach Europe.

This slower second half of Hive Mind can fade into the background, as tracks such as Next Time Humble Pie and It Gets Better bleed into one another without the distinctive melodies of the opening numbers. Despite this sloppy editing, the Internet seem unlikely to disband permanently into their solo projects. Playing as a group can bring out the best of their individual talents, even if the connection doesn’t always hold.

Short, overdubbed dialogue solos by Speed, bassist Drew Gress and vibist Matt Moran add diverting interludes, and there's plenty of dreamy humming-glass sounds and luxurious accordion sighs to balance all this fine album's industrious busyness.

His sixth album is perhaps a smaller-scale, slower burn than 2013’s Wakin’ on a Pretty Daze: the likes of That’s Life, Tho and Stand Inside take a few listens to reveal their unobvious melodic logic, but when they do, they hit hard.

Produced so inventively that it still often feels avant garde, The Whole Love unifies Wilco's leftfield and pop sensibilities.

Thrilling, for all the blues.

Syrupy, multi-tracked vocals akin to Supertramp in a particularly foul mood have replaced the primal roar of old, while their tectonic hugeness has been supplanted by the wearisome over-indulgence of musos at play.

An unqualified yes: it’s more than OK, which is not something you can say about many Stones albums over the last 30 years.

It's carefully, even beautifully arranged--all burnished shimmers and echo-drenched harmonies--but oddly icy and melodically a little ineffectual.

The result is a bravely thoughtful mood piece, dominated by the half-spoken March 11, 1962, which chronicles her agonising phone call with her birth mother, who refused to meet her.

Nine Types of Light is a relatively relaxed affair with a focus on the simple love song.

The most radical makeovers highlight how great some of these songs are.

The spectre of Oasis lurks around Arctic Monkeys, proof that even the most promising beginnings can turn into a dreary, reactionary bore. For now, however, they look and sound unstoppable.

It’s not all so nuanced and well-written, though. Hey Big Eyes is tepid trip-hop, and Ocean of Tears is as gratingly overwrought as its title, even if Polachek’s vocal control is as exceptional here as it is throughout. But overall, Pang is a vivid and melodious portrait of a restless heart.

His Stetson, clean-cut good looks and Music Row polish might grate with alt.country fans, but his classily understated writing turns mawkish sentimentality into affecting art.

An ungainly compromise blessed with a handful of skyscraping sonic highlights.

Shattered is a grown-up, repeat-listen rock record of rare quality, and a great addition to an already astoundingly good back catalogue.

An intense, brooding piece of work.

V... is actually less tearjerking and portentous than IV.

An air of inquiry suffuses Laura Marling's third album, a mood of experimentation as cerebral as it is playful.

There are a few over-elaborate patches, but there’s some great and varied music here.

There’s the moody and mysterious Everything’s Changed, finely sung over a repeated riff, and a pained and personal ballad, You Never Asked Me, which already sounds like a standard.

A masterclass in catharsis, Exorcism finds a chink of light in the gloom.

All primed for a 2am workout. Yet Tangerine is equally an album you may want to stick on when you get home at the end of the night, full of nuance, space and soft textures to help you float away.

Butler has produced Old Wow like a soul record, full of space and warmth.

This is a distinctive, sharp record that only these three UK voices could have made.

The highs are thrilling, and despite their obvious pedigree, arranged unlike anything else in contemporary pop. They also reveal the lows more starkly: the saccharine, coyly suggestive 8, played on a ukulele, and I Love You, which sounds suspiciously like Hallelujah, are better off left to YouTube ingenues than an artist of Eilish’s otherwise clear vision.

It doesn’t sound like anything else, it’s audibly the work of an artist mapping out their own fresh musical territory. But occasionally, it also feels like the work of an artist with their eyes so firmly fixed forward they’ve blocked out their audience: an emotional journey you watch, intrigued, from a distance, rather than feel or participate in.

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.

The result is an album that’s out there on its own, and not merely because it’s a song cycle set in the early middle ages that doesn’t make you want to curl up and die of embarrassment. Abstruse but weirdly accessible, recherche but pertinent, Peasant is quite an achievement.

The striking thing about Signs and Prayer isn’t so much Stormzy’s way with a well-timed and dexterous diss so much as the the quality of his lyrics when he turns his attention to other topics. ... He writes affectingly about depression on the closing Lay Me Bare, a purgative howl of a track that also tackles, in pretty painful detail, his estrangement from his father.

It seems faintly ridiculous typing this, given that it's 2013 and not 1952, but the very fact that a mainstream R&B artist has released an album open to that interpretation [of a relationship between two women] feels an impressively bold move.

It’s in the nature-driven tranquility of sole ambient cut My Body Is Powerful and the affirming vocal samples on spiralling single Can You See Me? where Octo Octa manifests the record’s intent, championing and validating her community. In this year of great tensions, music has rarely looked so up.

There’s nothing radically new here, which means it doesn’t have the same jolting appeal as Person Pitch. But rather than repeat himself, Lennox has successfully honed his sound.

This beautifully packaged anthology traces the former Screaming Trees frontman's journey toward becoming gothic Americana's own Man in Black.... Of the 32 tracks--12 unreleased--not one ups the pace beyond the funereal.

Happyness switch effortlessly between fuzzy pop and downcast, desolate ballads, alternately thrilling and charming.

The album is dominated by Homme's razor-sharp songwriting, which ranges from the robotic pulse of If I Had a Tail to the succinct thud of My God Is the Sun and the wickedly infectious Smooth Sailing.

In Conflict hits a perfect art/pop balance.

It’s often passionate, illuminating and fascinating, it frequently bears the hallmarks of self-indulgence, and some of it, you get the feeling, might only make sense to its author.

This debut is one of moments and mystery.

The further you get into the album, the more you realise how integral the orchestral arrangements are.

Qualm, is a victory lap. It is, on paper, an uncomplicated beast: a live hardware workout of claustrophobic, rhythmic acid techno. But her ability to draw out harmonic elements from the cacophony of it all is deft--that cassette tape feel is still evident.

It’s impossible not to be drawn into the conversational style of the lyrics. McDonald’s singing, to quote Lester Bangs, is “a raw wail from the bottom of the guts”, a perfectly imperfect instrument for an unstable age. Bass player Kelly-Dawn Hellmrich and drummer Sarah Thompson provide a sturdy framework and, crucially, just enough colour to hold the songs aloft.

If at first the songs feel ordinary, perseverance reveals the haunting quality of Arthur's imagery, and the rich patina of his careworn voice.

If Marsalis is sticking with familiar tunes, his band keep up such a stimulating four-way conversation that it all stays fresh.

Crucially, the counterfeit folk feel means that even most lopsided compositions have a reassuringly demotic and conversational feel.

Not everything he tries works – it’s a relief when the chaotic rock/rap crossover British Hell comes to an end – but despite its diversity, it hangs together as an album, the tracks bonded by a rough-edged grit.

It’s a zany but melodically substantial record, in which the best songs (Thank You Mr K, Freedom) sit somewhere between the oeuvres of the Lemonheads and the Ramones.

It works on a purely instinctual, emotional level. It feels like music aimed at the gut, rather than the head, which might explain its burgeoning appeal. In the best possible way, Love Streams is a draining listen.

He remains the master of creating ribald, flawed characters, but also the powerful, poignant weepie.

This eponymous album mixes grunge, garage, classical, punk, prog and much else into an exuberant melange that sometimes feels as if several songs are going on at once.

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

It’s an outstanding debut from a great new band who play it like they mean it.

Clever, bleak, funny, bracing, aware of a broad musical heritage but never in thrall to it: after you hear Nothing Great About Britain, it’s even more obvious why Slowthai stands out.

It's far from a scattershot ADD affair, though; fundamentally, Rustie has a knack for an irresistible hook, and for knowing when to stick with it and when to move on.

Too old to have their heads turned by mainstream success, but too big-hearted, maybe too grateful, to spurn it with a churlish how-do-you-like-us-now gesture, Build a Rocket Boys! sees Elbow doing perhaps the smartest thing you could under the circumstances: carrying on regardless.

The Waiting Room is not an album which needs adornments: there is a simple, traditional pleasure in its earthy, untampered warmth--it is an album to be ingested in one sitting.

The album has an eerie, almost childlike innocence: 10 songs of stunning candour and understated beauty.

Ndegéocello's work has often been heavy with mood while elliptical of songcraft, but Weather contains her most direct material since the early 1990s

Willie Nelson duets on Learning to Lose, and the highest praise for Price is that he sounds very much like the second most talented person on another beguiling album.

This is Earth's best-realised work to date – stunning stuff.

First impressions could not be more wrong. Demon Days goes boldly against the current trend for brash immediacy and instead repays time and effort on the part of the listener.

Jaguar is as sleek and refined as its namesake, the production luscious with live instrumentation and brass. By eschewing pop’s current see-what-sticks approach, Monét can build a luxury brand of her own design. She demonstrates her self-assurance by lacing Jaguar’s poppier moments with striking idiosyncrasies.

The sonic atmosphere he creates with sample-manipulators Jan Bang and Erik Honoré can be faintly terrifying--the three of them should be given a horror movie soundtrack immediately--but also occasionally beautiful.

My 21st Century Blues roars into life, hitting you with one fantastic song after another.

It is tempting to suggest that the lyrics on Fearless might take on a different hue sung by a woman now in her 30s, but the new recordings militate against it. Backed by her touring band, her voice sounding essentially the same as it did in 2008, Swift has resisted any temptation to alter the songs’ pop-country arrangements or lyrics, even when the latter could have used a nip and tuck.

An album that turns out to be one of 2014’s most idiosyncratic, low-key delights.

Favourite Worst Nightmare shows them pushing gently but confidently at the boundaries of their sound.

At times, the production can be overly fussy (see Going Somewhere), but tracks such as VV Violence (squelchy electro-funk by way of girlish electroclash) and Never Enough (a nod to smooth house dude Morgan Geist) demonstrate their ability to team that experimentalism with peak-time danceability. There could be a bona fide pop star in Jessy Lanza yet.

Now Only is an album it’s hard to imagine anyone listening to for pleasure: it’s incredibly brave and hugely--understandably--self-indulgent. What it does, unequivocally, is tell the truth, albeit a profoundly uncomfortable one.

Theatre Is Evil feels like sitting on the bed of your tattooed, far cooler cousin 30 years ago, while she tells you "all you need to know" about music.

The ambience of tracks such as Rough Going (I Won’t Let Up) is that of a boozy after-hours session in a backwater bar, while In a Black Out begins with fingerpicking guitar and choral backing vocals before being propelled into a dusty shuffle. But at the centre of it all is Leithauser’s distinctive voice--battered, bruised and pushing the Rod Stewart gravel-and-sandpaper-ometer into the red.

A gorgeously produced and emotive swansong.

Salad Days isn't the stuff of mainstream success, but it strongly suggests his cult is only going to get bigger.

this passionate record sounds more true to the E Street Band's spirit than do the absurdly literal Bossisms of the Gaslight Anthem. The Monitor is maybe 20 minutes too long, and by the end you'll be as exhausted as exhilarated, but there's the promise of a rare and vivid talent here.

The mixtape itself isn’t a huge change in direction.

Crucially, it doesn’t sound cynical: it's too idiosyncratic and eclectic. Instead, it sounds confident: the work of someone who knows their seemingly impulsive approach to rock and pop fits the current landscape and who’s taken that as carte blanche to do what they want. It's a confidence that never feels misplaced.

The former Staple Singers icon, who turns 80 in July, is in fearsome, eclectic form here.

Everything sounds precise and almost wilfully sterile, as if the whole thing were played by someone wearing rubber gloves.

Genial Texan magic.

Joseph Shabason plays saxophone with art rockers Destroyer and provides icy synths for the R&B outfit DIANA. His solo debut, however, is densely textured ambient jazz that is wonderful to immerse yourself in for 40 minutes.