Her best work to date. ... Violins courtesy of Rob Moose (The National, Bon Iver) make this in part an elegy for her own experiences. What a marvel this album is.

Roth fits Hunter like a glove, bringing out the warmth of his brass section and framing his raw voice in perfectly judged R&B arrangements that spark and bounce.

Departures in sound are often unwelcome when we're already so happy with where a beloved band are, but, in this case, their experiments are a complete success.

The result, in tracks like “You Got To Run” and “No No Keshagesh”, is uniquely uplifting, a powerful affirmation of steely spirituality.

A great storyteller, Del Rey consistently delivers the who, what, where and when. She picks out the telling details – turquoise jewellery, the TV in the corner, “on the second floor, baby”. She sketches a backstory (“I come from a small town”) and then tells you how it all feels.

McCartney gives Lennon’s vocals space and prominence, blending his own voice sensitively into that wondrous brotherly harmony we thought we’d never hear afresh again. The lyrics – while reading like a typical holding-pattern Lennon love song until greater inspiration stuck – resonate now after 40 years of loss. .... “Now and Then” is the musical event of the year and one of the greatest tear-jerkers in history.

Titanic Rising isn’t Bob Seger meets Enya. It’s better.

By the time her vocals roll in on “God Above”, you’re already caught in the slipstream of Drop Cherries. ... Marten dials back her sound to paint tender, intimate moments using only strokes of orchestral watercolour.

WAAITT is a compelling, conscious-jolting account of a life of two halves.

Like Picasso, he acknowledges that the chief enemy of creativity is good taste--which is just as well, since it's not a quality with which he seems over-burdened on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. For which we should all be thankful.

There's an urgency and drive about these tracks that's simply exhilarating.

Manic descants, discordant pianos and abrupt changes in time signature at once complement and compete with each other in a carefully crafted clatter. The melodies are wonderful. The lyrics, too – conversational yet precise.

Bennett and Gaga dance through [Cole Porter's] witty wordplay and bring nuanced humanity to the deft melodies he dashed off in his suite at the Waldorf.

Soul Time! is a near-perfect expression of retro-soul style that grips from its opening bars.

Deeper Well is a revelation – as though Musgraves stumbled on an oasis after months in the desert.

The Staves are like a distillation of all that's best about the folk heritages of England and America.

The subtle melodies of Midnights take time to sink their claws in. But Swift’s feline vocal stealth and assured lyrical control ensures she keeps your attention.

Not only did they change the course of rock music; they also sustained an inspired creativity for almost two decades, something that the career arc of this retrospective brings into focus, right down to the Bacharach-esque touches of the final unreleased tracks, which pleasingly bring things full-circle in certain ways.

Honestly, there isn’t a duff track on here. Every beat is elastic, every note and sample bold and shiny. Future Nostalgia is 37 minutes of pure sonic spandex.

Gag Order comes loaded with deliciously weird and compellingly urgent hooks.

If there’s any justice, its follow-up, Saves the World, should see MUNA joining the ranks of those who have brazenly borrowed their sound.

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

Comprising equal parts Stones raunch and REM-style country-rock, songwriters Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley are working at the peak of their powers.

As before, echoes of classic Primal Scream/Stone Roses psych-rock underpin the grooves, which lope and stride infectiously.

Bulging with 55 previously unreleased outtakes, Come All Ye is an education, and as entertaining as it gets.

All told, it’s a magnificent, career-defining set, full of hard-won wisdom, assertive independence--and compassion in abundance.

REM’s brooding masterwork. ... It’s an album of shadows and contrasts: “Drive”, for instance, opens proceedings on the cusp of adulthood, imparting youthful rebel spirit with a warning sense of duty for the future, before “Try Not To Breathe” offers an extraordinary image of an old person eager to leave the world to the young.

Kouyate's electrification of his ngoni lute is just as effective a sign of resistance: fed through a wah-wah pedal, his serpentine, fleet-fingered lead lines gain a fresh, assertive power on songs.

The older he gets, the better the conversational-confessional flow of his rapping, which allows him to stroll through a 10-minute bragathon like “Mel Made Me Do It” without breaking a sweat or losing the listener’s attention. He raps about trips to Dubai and giving up weed like he’s sitting beside you at a London bus stop.

The sheer grace and ambition of Ants… will prove tough for 2022 to top. A huge leap forward, headfirst into the unknown.

Chaos is incoming. Yet the Welsh artist’s sixth album never fully unleashes that chaos; she restrains it, wrestles with it, and in doing so exacerbates its sense of unease. Written in complete isolation in Cardiff, Pompeii demonstrates Le Bon’s flair for the surreal, while exploring themes close to home: religious guilt, family, death.

Fascinating, enjoyable and original.

This is a spectacular record.

Lemonade is fiery, insurgent, fiercely proud, sprawling and sharply focused in its dissatisfaction.

Though spoilt in places by distortion and too-prominent electric piano, the hitherto unheard material is notable for the innovative exploration of yet another roots blend, through the impassioned country-soul of songs such as “That’s the Breaks”. Clearly, in this most congenial of creative cauldrons, virtually anything was possible.

There’s a new sense of groundedness, as though, faced with certain inevitabilities, they feel more connected than ever to the world around them.

[Lucinda Williams is] producing enough quality material to follow last year’s double-album Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone with another double-album of equivalent potency. The songs on The Ghosts of Highway 20 have the unerring ring of truth about them, shining glimmers of light into dark and unpalatable corners of life.

There’s an ever-expanding diversity of appeal to Turn Blue that should win new fans and please the faithful.

Overall, the album offers a surprisingly successful transformation that somehow enables one to hear this most familiar of material as if through new ears, a remarkable achievement in itself.

If it's not quite the jump from Bob Dylan to The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, it's the closest recent equivalent, a prodigious rate of development for such a tyro talent, all the more remarkable for not being reliant on significant musical progression, so much as raw songwriting ability.

It’s an album that cools and shimmers its way through a delicious range of nuanced moods and subtly layered musical ideas. Delightful.

Merritt’s refracted reminiscences frequently offer thoughtful and incisive insights into bigger issues, and with deceptive sleight of story.

Part of its success is due to Stevens' uniquely ambivalent position, at once ingenious and ingenuous.

The singer has matched Bernie Taupin's best crop of lyrics for years with his own most emotively apt melodies to produce a collection that both harks back to the intrigues and interests of his earliest recordings, yet manages to break new ground, quite an achievement for an artist in his sixth decade.

When pondering gets this skilled, and this fruitful, the dividends far outweigh the misgivings.

Kiss Each Other Clean is much more focused and homogenous, but there's still a lingering sense of abundant inspiration, eager to carry the songs off to different lairs.

Crash is a terrifically structured album, designed to get you up and shimmying off the lockdown pounds as tracks slot sleekly together. ... Crash is a top-down, foot-down trip.

The production here is superb. Tyler has never been one for traditional song structure, but on IGOR he’s like the Minotaur luring you through a maze that twists and turns around seemingly impossible corners, drawing you into the thrilling unknown. ... This is Tyler’s best work to date.

He's keen to please, but what's remarkable about The Lady Killer is that he manages to avoid all the bubblebath boudoir-soul cliches that litter most R&B albums.

It is an incredibly cohesive album though--it operates in its own defined space and has an intense frostiness to, which, for The National, is saying something.

It reveals a broader musical and emotional palette than they've exposed before.

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

Reflective, immersive and, in a more subtle way, euphoric, this is the record to put the art into The Avalanches’ party.

Happy hour at the all-you-can-eat alt-rock buffet is clearly open. ... It’s all delivered rambunctiously enough that it’s easy to simply enjoy Gulp! as the alt-pop pick’n’mix it is. Go gorge.

What Simz does here is phenomenal. This is an album--and artist--to cherish.

Her follow-up to 2013’s sublime Pushin’ Against A Stone finds Valerie June expanding her unique blend of blues, soul and mountain music to create a distinctive hybrid in which past and future coalesce with gentle power.

With Rifles & Rosary Beads, she’s created her most impressive and affecting work yet.

Staples called this his most personal record yet. Perhaps it’s this new vulnerability that makes the album so great. Or maybe it’s the whip-smart one-liners. Or the vivid storytelling. Staples will say this latest triumph is just a dude doing some different things.

In range, energy and freshness, this may be their best album yet.

The entire thing is produced meticulously; each track slides into the next to ensure the party never stops. Club Future Nostalgia is pure, undiluted fun.

An engagingly outre delight.

His symphonic-soul innovations here would map out the course of much 1970s soul music, while his use of multi-layered vocals – the happy result of an engineer accidentally running two vocal takes in the same mix – added an extra element to Gaye's vocal armoury which he would use extensively throughout the rest of his career.

Imagine Killing Eve in audio form. They’re still that kick-ass. That sexy. That much fun. Put this album on your to-listen list, pronto.

Though their themes remain in the gutter, Suede aspire to monuments, and The Blue Hour will stand as another sordid masterwork.

This re-recording is a better, brighter version of a terrific pop album. Red is dead. Long live Red (Taylor's Version).

Like Randy Newman, the Mael brothers have a knack for voicing the hopes and regrets of diverse, sometimes unsympathetic characters; and the latitude afforded by their operatic arrangements allows them to add commentary in real time, like an instrumental Greek chorus.

Letissier makes her vintage synths snap, crackle, pop, fizz, freeze, squelch, shimmer and soar.

Weller’s magpie tendencies pay dividends.

A set of songs seething with dark knowledge, as Bejar peeks behind the curtain of appearances in search of underlying motivations.

With Helplessness Blues, Fleet Foxes triumphantly deliver on the promise of their popular debut, the album that helped establish folk-rock once again as a formidable commercial force rather than just a fringe interest.

Realised here in more expressive interpretations, and interspersed with poems read by her daughter, the actress Gabrielle Drake, these songs are full of acute observations, deft allusions and metaphors, and the subtlest of emotional revelations, wielded with an English restraint redolent with the aromas of freshly-mowed lawns and cucumber sandwiches.

The character of the base music here is overwhelming: complex, ebullient and life-affirming, and in yoking this intricate dance music to his sophisticated New Yorker sensibility, Simon created a transatlantic bridge that neither pandered to nor patronised either culture.

You can feel the weight of the piano keys and sense the reverb on the mic, or its absence when Morissette lays her isolated vocals bare to stunning effect on “Her”. ... Superb album.

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.

Colorado shows that Young, at 73, has lost none of his outrage and passion. ... Saying so much, so beautifully, Colorado was worth the wait.

The Queen Of Hearts, a sublime collection of old songs given contemporary heart transplants without ever betraying their essential original truth and spirit.

For Those I Love is as much a piece of history as it is a work of art. ... A staggering album.

A stunning celebration of Black, gay love. ... It is also a groundbreaking proclamation of personal acceptance.

Grunge-rinsed, feminist-flipped, upcycled Fifties guitar an’ all: Crushing is a triumph.

On this, Gillian Welch's fifth album, the familiar blending of traditional sounds and moods with modern sensibilities is effortlessly sustained through songs like the mordant "The Way It Goes" ("Betsy Johnson bought the farm, stuck a needle in her arm, that's the way that it goes").

These are big themes, dealt with imaginatively by a singer and a band both operating at the peak of their powers. Album of the year?

On Basic Volume, he’s an alchemist producing gold from the depths of his city, placing his art ahead of himself, and on this thrilling, dynamic and complex release, that gold shines brighter than most other releases this year.

One of the truest, wisest albums you’ll ever hear.

Where most rock superstars sink into trad tedium by 69, Springsteen is still crafting sophisticated paeans of depth and illumination, a rock grandmaster worthy of the accolade. A must-have for anyone who has a heart.

That he manages to express such ethical and religious principles without coming across like a sanctimonious buzz-killer is quite remarkable.

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 brilliance here, but it’s when the album slows down that it becomes transcendent.

[It is] possibly the band's best album.

All 10 tracks are stacked with hooks, making it as good as their 2009 breakthrough album, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. ... Mars’s sophisticated stream-of-consciousness lyrics operate in perfect synchronicity with the album’s sound. Melancholy themes of mortality are balanced by a giddy commitment to seizing the dance floor moment.

It's an extraordinary collection, which demonstrates exactly why Guthrie was perhaps the only performer who could square the circle pointedly implied by the title American Radical Patriot.

This is music of stellar quality, from the smirking masturbation anthem “Low Yo Yo Stuff” to the berserk wizardry of “Big Eyed Beans from Venus.”

It’s hard to think of many other contemporary albums that are quite so beautifully arranged as this. ... This is a very special album indeed.

These 10 tracks are a masterclass in modern pop creation, pinballing from style to style without endangering their essential "TingTingness".

It all fits seamlessly together, a rich tapestry of weed-toked slow jams, woozy psychedelic infusions and pimped-out west coast joyrides. ... This record never takes a wrong turn.

For all its glimmering synths and the robotic pathos of Taylor’s idiosyncratic vocals, this is a record with both heart and soul.

GUTS sees Rodrigo smash her way out of the confines of small screen life and arrive kicking and screaming into her real life. No more red lights or stop signs in her way.

Ingenious arrangements illuminate the songs, notably the blissful synth solo reaffirming life and love in “All Of Me Wants All Of You”, and the 12 minutes of keening sounds, like the moaning of whales, appended to “Blue Bucket Of Gold”.

Musgraves has always been a brilliant songwriter but she’s never sounded as confident as this; it’s as though a wall has been knocked down and a little of that bolshy attitude has been paired back to make for some of her most personal lyrics.