I Slept On the Floor is a marvellous, and intense, debut.

The warm but haunting Trouble Will Find Me will surely cement their accession to the rock mainstream.

There’s an interior dialogue throughout, which is sometimes more intriguing than musically engrossing. ... But there is transcendental beauty here to get lost in.

Kate Tempest’s follow-up to the dazzling Everybody Down is similarly ambitious in scope, fired by the same compassion and delivered with the same level of energised loquacity.

What’s impressive is how Thundercat makes this music, with its complex structures and zigzagging rhythms, so human.

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.

It’s not quite godlike, but Yeezus certainly feels like it was created by a higher power.

Backed by a band who vigorously play to his timeless strengths, he sounds as sprightly as ever.

Re-Animator packs global anxiety and paranoia into exquisitely crafted songs. A superb album.

What’s Your Pleasure? reveals the magic that happens when an artist feels truly free.

Prelude to Ecstasy gleefully delivers.

Throughout is a sense of wonderment at being alone. Perhaps solitude is an underrated pursuit, but with Inner Song, Owens makes a highly convincing case for it.

Nomad confirms Bombino's promise, but with a few added surprises.

Nothing about Invasion of Privacy is formulaic.

Dave Alvin's latest album may be his best yet, its tales of the flipside of the American Dream set to gritty blues riffs that speak of long months on the road.

He drifts like a spectre through a labyrinth, exploring his favourite themes of sleep, reality and the subconscious. The tones here are stark and bleak, compared to the claustrophobia of 2014’s Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes. ... By the end of ANIMA, you’re left wondering about those dreams that are just out of reach, but also what we risk losing when we look back.

Never once do Sons of Kemet compromise on their fiercely individual sound.

While The Breeders may not be reclaiming their youth on their latest effort, they’re not trying to: they approach All Nerve with the sensibility of a band that embraces how they’ve grown since their early punk days.

Of course, it takes a certain degree of patience (or pretension) to unpick the record entirely, but once unravelled listeners are rewarded with a dystopian world best described as sci-fi sleaze.

Although the fear was that Adam would be spreading his father’s legacy too thin, each track has the weight of a completed thought, not a sketch bulked out.

With the skirling, Arabic-tinged drone-rock textures of his band The Space Shifters augmented by cello and Seth Lakeman’s violin, the album’s miasmic charm imbues even the rockabilly standard “Bluebirds Over The Mountain” with new, mysterious depths.

On Don’t Forget Me, she’s found a beguilingly relaxed momentum.

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.

This is a polished, playful album, though it has a DIY edge to it.

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.

If the Grammy-nominated Forever was their blistering hellscape, Underneath is a glitchy, industrial wasteland.

On her latest effort, the singer-songwriter proves that the power of reinvention suits her just fine.

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.