Lollipop is the best Meat Puppets album since the halcyon days of Up on the Sun and Mirage, full of scudding lysergic country-rock grooves bound in twisting skeins of dervish lead guitar.

There’s an openness about Hawley’s writing here that cuts straight to the quick--as if he’s digging through the ruins of his own Hollow Meadows, to try and shine a light on his soul.

This year's version features the usual relaxed jazz-pop grooves, sophisticated horn arrangements and tinder-dry ironic tone.

This deathly intrigue is drawn from Lenker’s own personal traumas, which she successfully spins into something that feels universal. But you don’t come away from this record feeling downcast. It’s more a reminder of how fleeting yet beautiful life is, and an appeal to make the most of it.

On Kill the Lights, though, he makes the arduous process of self-editing sound simple; with no fat or frills, the melodies shine through in gorgeous fashion.

As ever on Welch & Rawlings records, their harmonies are sublime, warmed by guitarist Willie Watson’s third part; but there are fewer dark shadows here than usual, with songs like “Good God A Woman” and “Yup” offering light-hearted fables of God’s and Satan’s dealings with women.

Balancing the political disquiet is a vein of romantic yearning, with Kirk’s plea in “Moment” for “desire deserving of something more” offers a fitting summary of the album as a whole.

He could easily have served up another full helping of R&B romance, but instead he’s tested himself – something you rarely see in artists of his stature. It’s impressive.

Qualm may just be the album to solidify her position as one of the most exciting DJ’s in the world at present, as Hauff continues to carve out her very own unique, innovative position in an often cluttered electronic dance landscape.

The 13 songs on Blue Water Road roll out in warm, slow-rolling waves of sensuous R&B.

The result is a fine album, subtly varied in both musical style and lyrical slant.

Cypress Hill demonstrates across the record, the more things change, the more they stay the same. The Cheech and Chong of hip-hop are back – and are as clear-headed on hazy-eyed matters as ever.

A skilled interpreter, Simpson’s bruised baritone murmur morphs to fit the contours of each song.

This is the perfect moment for Fearless (Taylor’s Version): there’s no time like a pandemic to be given a dose of nostalgia, and it’s nice to have a refresher of some of the best pop songs committed to record. Even the six “from the vault” tracks that didn’t make the cut first time round feel oddly comforting.

Brilliant and bittersweet, Shoot For the Stars Aim For the Moon is the work of someone whose success should have been stratospheric.

Though frowned on by some purists expecting the traditional fare of the family band The Watersons, the siblings’ original songs were eagerly accompanied by luminaries like Martin Carthy, Richard Thompson and Ashley Hutchings, who bring a roguish enthusiasm to tracks such as “Rubber Band”, on which even the horns seem to have their cap at a jaunty angle.

It’s a welcome opportunity to revisit Sting‘s lengthy collaborative resume; if anything, Duets serves as a reminder that not only has the man been doing this for a long time, but when he does team up with a new artist, he strikes just the right balance in letting the featured player shine, and letting the song belong to them as well.

Heart Under thrums with menace, a glint of teeth always on display yet never fully bared. Heart Under is an album rooted in anticipation: Just Mustard know it’s the glimmer of danger that’s most enthralling of all.

Example's obvious delight in sensory experience shines through in his intricate play of syllables and the warmth of his singing voice. His best yet.

Amo won’t satisfy all of BMTH’s fans, but it’s certainly accomplished, catchy and eclectic enough to bring in some new ones.

They pushed the single envelope in various directions – processional chants, electric-organ improvisations, big-band “space bop”, and at the furthest extreme of his sonic galaxy, the furious free-jazz of “Cosmo-Extensions”, guaranteed to clear the floor at any party.

The album slips into a febrile combination of reminiscences, boasts and complaints that manages to keep an eye firmly on the present whilst gazing fondly back on former tribulations.

What’s most impressive about Adams’ 1989 is the experienced troubadour’s eye and ear with which he brings out the material’s underlying strengths, finding melancholy currents lurking beneath supposedly upbeat, celebratory songs.

It's a more considered and persuasive analysis than most of his younger, grimier peers can offer.

That there are spots of filler on the first hour of Beyonce’s new trilogy suggests we’re in for indulgence, but that there are brisk bangers and Lemonade-like leaps of genre too bodes well for Beyonce’s defiant emotional renaissance.

While this follow-up shares some of the annoying mannerisms that curdled one’s enjoyment of The 1975’s 2013 debut, it’s ultimately a much more enjoyable and considered work, one which starts to deliver on the immense hype that accompanied their emergence.

Always prey to their psychedelic tendencies, here MMJ swallow the full tab and dive headfirst into a whirlpool of supposition, analogy and swirling guitars.

There's an ease and comfort about the songs that suggests they fell into place naturally, rather than suffering endless alterations; and the band seem content to let them breathe and take on a life of their own, rather than freight them with unnecessary adornment.

Clocking in at a scant 31 minutes, you could call The Age of Pleasure a quickie – but one that more than manages to scratch that itch.

Wreathed in mellotron, vibrato guitar and ghostly backing vocals, several songs evoke the windswept psych-pop of The Coral, whose singer James Skelly co-produces Blossoms.

Where 2016’s Take Control--with the exception of the aforementioned Dury collaboration--felt like one big raging scream, Acts of Fear And Love sees the band showing their sensitive side as well.

The record itself functions like an escape pod. When confined within Bastille’s catchy hooks and imaginative, era-spanning production, what lies ahead suddenly isn’t so terrible. The future is bright – for 30 minutes’ worth of bops, at least.

On their sixth album, Calexico finally sound more like a band with memorable, individual songs, than a project dedicated to creating audio soundscapes evocative of the American southwest.

Origins is further proof of Reynolds’ pop songwriting capabilities and also his ambition when it comes to pushing the messages that matter onto the charts. And there’s no doubting his sincerity. It’s a refreshing quality in a pop frontman.

Like some hibernating agit-prop agency awakening to meet the needs of these hard times, Gang of Four are in typically brusque form on their first new material for 16 years.

Moreover, Newman never sounds more quintessentially Newman than when experienced, as here, alone at the piano, with the lyrical intricacies and ironies of his songs dependent on just his laconic delivery and trenchant accompaniment for their effect.

Crush is an insight into Shepherd’s brilliant mind and – such is the sheer variety of this album – a way to inspire one’s own imagination.

Here, Lewis does what she does best: adds the glossy sparkle of Hollywood and a sunny Californian sheen to melancholy and nostalgia, with her most luxuriantly orchestrated album yet.

This is deeply personal material that’s as impressive if not as game-changing as anything esteemed rap figures Kendrick Lamar and Childish Gambino have produced in recent years. Miller has turned his anguish into one of the year’s most disarmingly pleasant records.

Throughout, Tweedy’s arrangements are the soul of discretion, employing the merest suggestions of rhythm and texture to show Staples’ iconic voice to best advantage.

It’s probably the pandemic’s impact on the live music scene that makes an album like this feel more welcome than it might have last year. It’s still not comparable to the real thing, but it does remind us of what we’re missing.

Magic Mirror is an impressive and mature debut.

There’s been a lot of hype surrounding her since she made it on to BBC’s Sound of 2018 list. Miss Universe justifies it.

With Modern Kosmology, long-time Manchester folktronic siren Jane Weaver has made her most completely realised album yet, albeit by dispensing with folk music almost entirely, in favour of more forceful Krautrock and psychedelic influences.

It's still suffused with a retro 1960s vibe, but this time the garage-pop influences prevail, with a sizeable side-order of psychedelia courtesy of the edgy West Coast lead guitar that streaks tracks.

He wields with sumptuous beauty, from the Floyd-like swathes of mellotron and piano carrying “The Boat Is In The Barn” and the stately “Lost Machine”, to the implacable electropop fizz of “Evermore”.

For someone who claims she has no words left, she manages to say rather a lot.

It’s their most poppy and psychedelic-leaning work to date, bursting with colour and fuelled by a multicultural band featuring Elenna Canlas on keys and backing vocals, and Ish Montgomery on bass.

Her vocals – and the album itself – are dextrous, flexing between those high notes and lower registers at the most unexpected moments.

The confessional, autobiographical elements that are its strongest aspect also serve as its Achilles' heel: the whole enterprise depends on how fascinated the listener is with Rowland's psyche.

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.

Electric finds Richard Thompson at his most stripped-down and potent.

[A] strange and compelling work.

Nadia Reid’s 2015 debut Listen To Formation, Look For The Signs heralded the arrival of a prodigious talent, the young New Zealand singer-songwriter’s confessional material embodying an emotional intelligence and honesty akin to Laura Marling and Judee Sill, her folk leanings tempered by languid jazz inflections set among a patina of subtle sonic textures. Preservation continues in like manner.

Augmenting her folksy troubadour style with Latin percussion and an acappella group for that streetcorner-symphony flavour, she effectively expands the notion of Americana to accommodate another cultural strain alongside the usual blues and country influences.

[The first three] tracks follow fairly seamlessly on from MBV's previous work, but thereafter subtle changes are applied that tug the album into pastures new.

Its dark, unflinching songs certainly ponder humanity’s less attractive traits, with arrangements to match.

Her sweeping, layered ninth album is more ruminative than reactive: questions of family and legacy, memory and death swirl around one another until they’re one in the same.

There are echoes of Pops Staples’s gentle, miasmic guitar in the folksy gospel stylings of “Peaceful Dream” and the cyclical twang carrying the Black Lives Matter anthem “Little Bit”, warning youngsters to be careful around cops; but elsewhere the influence of Sly & The Family Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On is paramount.

Run the Jewels 4 is the culmination of their near-30 years of experience, during which time they have observed, listened and reacted. Their anger, hurt, elation and love – along with their near-psychic ability to read and riff off one another’s individual thoughts – build to the radioactive “a few words for the firing squad”, the album’s astounding apex.

On her best album in years, Thea Gilmore darts back and forth between sharp, intelligent pieces on dark themes--depression, loneliness, murder--and more positive songs about love and hope.

There are no pop bangers here, just exquisite, piano-based poetry. There are characters Swift has never introduced before. Some are fictional, it seems; some are inspired by family members; some are people Swift wishes she hadn’t met. Folklore’s songs care less for those showstopping one-liners and more about the small details.

Living in Extraordinary Times marks a band still working at their full capacity, bringing new ideas and sounds while retaining what inherently makes James James--big choruses, danceable tracks, and timely lyrics.

On Skinty Fia, Fontaines DC have nailed their themes of urban decay and defiant immigrant soul. They just need to find the courage to fully emerge from the chrysalis of their indie and post-punk influences.

Garwood forces the listener to adopt his pace--a sort of aural equivalent of the “slow food” movement. But it works.

Though that melancholy seeps deeper into songs like “So Now What” and “The Fear”, it’s never allowed to dominate, with the latter’s rolling drone groove quixotically tempered by the addition of mariachi horns, a typically off-centre touch.

With her delivery tacking impressively between sweet and smoky, "On the Road" recalls what happened when the Kind of Blue influence hit the likes of Tim Buckley and Tim Hardin.

The new instrumentation affords a more nuanced approach, from the thrumming bass, piano, tom-toms and subtly tingling guitar evoking the resolute support of “Broad-Shouldered Beasts”, and the keening, spacious synth textures of “Tompkins Square Park”, to the unison guitar thrash that opens “The Wolf.”

Tracks such as the blistering “Temple of the Sun” take no prisoners, taking little time before exploding into the kind of full-frontal assault we’ve come to expect from the heavier side of metal. Elsewhere “The Luminous Sky” takes a more frenetic approach though feels no less uncompromising, while “The Sacred Soil” closes out a record that not only shows exactly where Skeletonwitch are in 2018, but also where contemporary metal is at as well.

Save for the big live band arrangement of Dylan’s “Gotta Serve Somebody” that closes the album, it’s a thoughtful, intimate set.

Blixa Bargeld's collaboration with Italian composer Teho Teardo finds him in fine fettle on a group of typically sardonic songs set to unusual string and electronic arrangements performed with The Balanescu Quartet.

The confidence of the performances benefits strong contemporary material dealing with issues from outreach to domestic abuse.

Some are perfectly matched: the cycling strings of the poignant “The Electricity Goes Out And We Move To A Hotel” are like waves lapping at a wall, while the darting bricolage of scraping bow and “close-up” violin brings a real sense of desperation to “Dawn Of The World”. Anderson’s characteristic air of matter-of-fact wonder, meanwhile, lends a gentle charm to the epiphanies of “Everything Is Floating” and “Nothing Left But Their Names.”

Race is richly entertaining, immersive and evocative, orchestrated with fastidious care and feeling.

While the songs here lack the scuzzy charm of her debut, Tell Me How You Really Feel is a weightier, more direct record.

For his final recordings, Allman returned to Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, where gospelly backing vocals and burring horns bring a deep-soul tone and texture not just to a soul standard like “Out Of Left Field” but also to material like “Going, Going, Gone” and the Dead’s “Black Muddy River”.

NAO has hovered around a near-perfect brand of sultry, neo-soul-inflected R&B. Four years later, and she seems to have mastered it.

Though it could stand to sound more consistent throughout (at times The Staves sound like they’re throwing that proverbial spaghetti against the wall), Good Woman successfully demonstrates that even through life’s lessons and uncomfortable liminal states, family is the most stabilising force.

A brave, and welcome, transformation.

Beautiful, blissful melodies are buried in there.

All told, probably The Monkees’ best album, after their hits compilation.

There’s a little electronic noodling going on to remind us that, though Mering sounds supremely grounded, a part of her is still in exiled orbit around a damaged world. It’s soulful, and a little spooky.

The Kentucky combo Cage the Elephant manage to find a new wrinkle on the face of US indie-punk, thanks to an enthusiasm for yoking catchy melodies to abrasive guitar riffs that recalls the Pixies.

Their mega beats endure on No Geography, but this is also a stupendously successful splicing of past and present.

72 Seasons may not see Metallica doing anything new – but it does find their old machine firing on all cylinders. Old and new fans alike will be headbanging happily throughout.

For his part, Daltrey matches Johnson every step of the way, fighting his corner just as fiercely as in his dayjob.

The calm, methodical “Gravity Wake” blends stately Moondog-like drums with undulating synths and relaxed solo horn lines that inescapably bring to mind Terry Riley. Elsewhere, the use of rhythmic, murmured vocables in “Glossolalia” recalls Steve Reich’s Music For 18 Musicians.

For Life Love Flesh Blood, Imelda May has hooked up with T-Bone Burnett and his failsafe session crew of tasteful interpretive talent to effect a shift away from boisterous rockabilly towards more sensual torch songs like “Call Me” and “Black Tears.”

They now dart in yet another direction, devising a shuffling indie-dance style that recalls variously the infectious syncopations of Talking Heads, the baggy grooves of Happy Mondays and the campfire psychedelia of Animal Collective, but somehow manages to sound homogenously all of a piece.

For better or worse, Duster sounds as though it was created by humans. Imperfections are packed into structures that are more comprehensible, and far less nebulous. Each crackle, echo and strained vocal makes the limitations of being human seem not only clear, but beautiful in its vulnerability.

The best of confessional pop – think Beyoncé’s Lemonade – finds an original sound for an original experience and demands the listener’s attention.

It's Rose's harmonies that make the album special: warm and breathy, they seem to sidle gently into position, rather than cut with razor precision.

Heart, ultimately, is the key to a project which links personal, small-scale disturbances of loneliness and homesickness with broader concerns of population density and ecological sustainability.

Fender has refined both his songwriting and his sound.

It's quite easy to envisage entire arenas punching the air to songs like these and the pounding “You're Gonna Get It”, one of two tracks featuring Paul Weller.

The result is a record that is by turns lush and ethereal, a sonically cohesive venture into slightly unfamiliar territory.

Coup De Grace is Kane’s best work to date: punchy, cohesive and lots of fun.

Despite the hiatus, this guest-laden double-album finds the group still very much engaged, rattling out tongue-twisting, articulate verbal flows dealing more with social realities than self-aggrandising brags and outlaw fantasies.