If you like smart pop and are not familiar, hearing Bird for the first time will feel like discovering a new planet.

Hot Cakes is a rock-solid home win from the band who still do feelgood hard rock better than anyone alive.

Words and Music, the first full studio album in an aeon from Sarah Cracknell, Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs, is a masterclass of pop theory and practice in perfect harmony.

These songs bounce, buzz and bubble along with timeless life.

The eighth Marilyn Manson album features some of his finest lyrics yet and, musically, it often approaches the heyday of Holy Wood and Mechanical Animals.

There is joy in these grooves; the attentive care of studio perfectionists, and the warm embrace of an old friend.

A delicious hybrid of Portishead and Nancy Sinatra.

The songs are sparky and Cherry is in excellent voice as she raps, sings and swings against the sparse, drum and bass-style backing orchestrated by Four Tet.

If music be the food of love, Kelis has cooked up something tasty enough to satisfy all but the hungriest of hearts.

Porter has made the best vocal album in an age.

Annie Clark’s fourth album is frequently extraordinary.

A good “deluxe” remaster job will do at least two things: one, it’ll strip away centuries of digital compression and make the music sound as if you’ve never heard it properly before; two, it’ll include additional material that gives insight into how the finished work was shaped. Moondance delivers on both counts.

Ghost on Ghost is as dense stylistically as it is lyrically.

There's not a duff track or dull moment in this 75 minutes of studio material.

The most vibrant, organic and energy infused African hip-hop debut since K'naan's The Dusty Foot Philosopher.

Love This Giant is a skewed and funky instant classic.

Everything is great.

As with some diseases, the album gets worse before it gets better, but by the end you're left stunned in admiration. Hell, there's even a redemptive arc. Amazing.

Gruff’s gorgeous voice helps humanise Feltrinelli. Never more so than on “Hoops With Fidel”, which, rather than demonising him and Castro, conveys the ideal of international revolution as a beautiful thing. As beautiful, in fact, as this album.

The Cumbrian quartet haven't fumbled the ball with the follow-up. Smother, recorded in the shadow of Snowdonia, tinkles and twinkles like the classiest adult-alternative pop of the 1980s.

The mood of uplifting-melancholia survives and this time out Vernon needs no dramatic backstory. Clearly, his is a talent that loves company as much as it loves misery.

Bad As Me is as good as it gets.

Meta-pop doesn’t come much more moving than this.

This is one of the most exhilarating albums of the year.

A welcome addition to the Beastie canon, and if it gets them back out on the road, it'll be an absolutely precious one.

Catchy yet abrasive, noisy yet intimate, kind of funny yet also kind of scary, this is post-pop at its most vertiginously original.

This is Cash at his rawest and most riveting, singing his soul out to platoons, prisoners and presidents alike. Hard to describe in terms that are adequate.

Bloodsports is effortlessly superior to its predecessor A New Morning, and averages out roughly on a level with Head Music (though more consistent in quality).