As usual with Newsom, the deeper resonances resound louder with subsequent exposure.

The songs themselves are good. Grounded in pathos, they tend to be handsomely crafted ballads about love and its various agonies – but it’s her vocals that sell them.

Despite its 16 tracks, not once does Long Lost feel crowded. The pace is unhurried, the phrasing exquisite.

An album which contains no filler at all, each track blooming in its own way like a collection of strange desert succulents, with a whole lot of hollerin' and a touch of Lieber-Stollerin'.

Drawing on the embattled, hopeful possibilities of early Seventies soul, rock and folk, its chamber-classical and folk instrumentation allows for pleasure as well as despair. This is a Radiohead album to make you feel, better.

A brilliantly-realised evocation of addiction building to crisis-point before the inevitable comedown heralds a change in priorities, it gives some idea of what Clark herself may be building towards.

This is the most country she has ever sounded. The most lavish, too, despite the album having been stripped back to only its most necessary parts.

Sometimes I Might Be Introvert is the most thrilling album of the year.

While the production here is as slick as IGOR, though, there’s less of a through line. IGOR was the devastating pieced-together parts of a broken relationship. CMIYGL plays fast and loose with its subjects, relying instead on the music itself to carry listeners through. ... Tyler, the Creator continues to defy expectations.

It belongs in that hour when the sunlight dims, everyone leaves the park, the disposable barbecues are smoking abortively, the makeshift Lilt bottle bong's started to taste like shit and you don't know whether to go back to bed or fritter away your last tenner in town.

Killer Mike and El-P bring typically sharp, visceral observations, chugging beats and superb guest artists onto their most successful studio effort to date.

Big Time is a rich, uplifting album that shakes off sorrow, having stared it squarely in the face.

The first line of the first song encapsulates the adolescent angst which blossomed over and over throughout the band's career, with varying degrees of wit, empathy, contempt and self-pity.

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.

At an age where the pressure is on to have everything worked out, Harding sounds delightfully free.

The follow-up to 2014’s LP1 is the sound of a woman teetering on the brink of collapse, gathering herself, and then erupting into a kind of defiance.

The live recording of this record really helps deliver that communal feeling. They feel so present and close that listeners might feel they’re violating the pandemic rules.

The Roots' 13th album may be their best.

Traverses Eighties-indebted dance, swirling alt-pop and homespun lo-fi across a tight 10-song track list. There are reprieves – where the energy quietens to syrupy, fluid ballads on which Zauner’s voice lolls as opposed to skips – but the emotional journey is always upward.

There’s no track on Jaime that is likely to make waves – not in the same way as some of the better-known Alabama Shakes tracks, such as “Hold On” or “This Feeling” (the latter of which was recently used to remarkable effect in the final scene of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag). But what lovely ripples it makes.

Songwriter Tim Elsenburg makes great strides forward with an ambitious cycle of songs about identity and history.

Over a visceral torrent of motorik punk-pop pummels recalling prime Pixies or McLusky, Joe hails his “beautiful immigrant” blood brother “Danny Nedelko” and celebrates his “mongrel” upbringing on “I’m Scum”--in a world run by bullish right-wing sex pests, his aggressive compassion is a potent antidote.

It’s not so much that she’s changed direction completely, as that she’s drained her art of the obfuscating sonic blabber to leave her pop aesthetic.

New record is a self-knowing contradiction to The Weeknd’s past celebrations of impermanence via one-night stands and sleazy affairs. Now he understands, even regrets, his flighty behaviour.

I’m pretty sure that Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You is going to be one of my albums of the year. Because few records managed to be this soothing, and interesting too.

Homegrown is his most personal. Intended for release in 1975, Homegrown retains Harvest’s country-rock sound, but has more of an intimate feel.

The tracks on i/o grow both on and in a listener like seeds germinating. Those who like their song structures neat and tidy may struggle with the jazz odysseys, but Gabriel asks very little of his fans – just time. Give him that, and you will find this album gently becoming part of you on a cellular level.

There’s prodigious ambition here, and moments of great pleasure.