The tone here is more robust than [Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down's] thoughtful reflections on history and poverty, taking its cue rather from the ribald pillorying of conservatives in tracks like "No Banker Left Behind" and "I Want My Crown".

A late-career lapse into gimmicky covers of “Silent Night” and “Can Can” aside, this compilation is a marvellous confirmation of pop’s fringe possibilities.

Trip-hop pioneers Morcheeba continue to broaden their approach on Head Up High, incorporating dancehall, dubstep and rock elements into grooves informed by European soundtrack/library music. Remarkably, they still keep it infectious.

It's easily the best work Diddy's been involved with in his entire career.

Swift doesn’t need her lover to save her, as she notes on album standout “Call It What You Want”, which is, arguably, the best song Swift has ever made. Its lyrics are more open and willingly vulnerable than anything she’s done before.

For a while on this overlong album, he brings something new to the usual hip-hop parade of brandy and bitches, lasciviousness and loyalty.

The band seem guided more by instinct than any sense of formula, but there are some superb embellishments – a fearsome guitar solo on “Take the Long Way”, eerie synth ripples on “Retrograde” – that build to the surprising final track, “River Cross”.

When I Get Home is an album, yes. But ultimately, it’s a sleepy, uplifting antidote to the often painful reality that black people, particularly black Americans in Solange’s experience, have been increasingly facing in recent years. We’re in the midst of ever-escalating chaos. But here Solange has come, offering us a chance not just to rest, but to relish in that languidness.

The raging country-punk counterblast “Country” unleashes her disgust at the country establishment’s backward attitude towards women. Elsewhere, her sympathies remain firmly with the downtrodden and desperate, as in her straight-talking depiction of teen pressures faced in “High School”, a bruised parade of class clowns and cheerleaders, pep pills and pregnancy.

An album of polished pop. Perhaps this will put her at the top where she belongs.

While Negro Swan elaborates on Hynes’s best work, he remains grounded in cosy bedroom-pop by shambling drum machines, vocal compressors and gratuitous psych pedals.

Former Hüsker Dü drummer/songwriter Grant Hart exhibits huge ambition on The Argument.

The Weeknd weasels his way queasily into unprotected affections under cover of arrangements whose dark, miasmic synth tones and itchy, sludgy rhythms blend the apparently conflicting worlds of R&B and industrial new-wave.

It’s been just over a year since Bieber released his worst album. He’s returned with his best.

It's beautifully presented in an absorbing blend of acoustic guitar, piano, cello, and the occasional tint of vibes or ambient colouration.

An absorbing, intermittently amusing album.

Occasionally, the meandering nature of Mvula’s song structures can leave you grasping for more melody, but the moods she creates are always clearly defined.

Apocalypse is Bill Callahan's best release in some while, sustaining a unity and intimacy of mood throughout.

Singer Julie Baenziger, aka Julie Ann Bee, whose debut album reveals a similar mix of emotional openness and affinity for the natural world as Laura Veirs, with something of Veirs's inquistive approach to musical textures, too.

Across the album’s 13 tracks, she flits easily between pop’s peripherals and its core, dispensing emotional catharsis all the way.

It offers an engagement with the notion of music as a lived obsession that far outstrips their mostly meagre intentions.

Few musicians ever achieve such complete dominance and superiority on their instrument as Jerry Douglas: not a single voice is raised in challenge to Douglas's mastery of the dobro. This latest, guest-laden album shows why.

It’s a record that sucks in all of the band’s best-known sounds and blows them out in a wild confetti blast of twisty-indie-anxious-punk-jazzy-joy.

Mogwai's score for the French TV series Les Revenants places certain restrictions on the band's style which, it must be said, work to their advantage.

Never Let Me Go expands on the disassociation Molko encapsulated for so many misunderstood Nineties teens, applying it now to the entire human species.

Satisfying and wholly enjoyable album.

Thankfully, Burn Something Beautiful confirms his own fund of creativity is far from drained, the collaboration with Buck and McCaughey resulting in all three’s best work in years.

Americana is the kind of concept album that Bernie Taupin might have written for Elton John; but being Ray Davies, it’s not so much comprised of fond, mythopoeic imaginings as the more specific (non-political) relationship that still subsists between Britain and America.