A brace of great tunes make the case: Rhododendron nods at Jonathan Richman’s Roadrunner, somehow making wildflowers sound gloriously disreputable. Saga, meanwhile, is a traumatised ballad that channels David Bowie, but with acoustic guitars and horns.

I Love You, Honeybear is actually an album that reaffirms your faith in the transformative powers of love.

This follow-up, an intoxicated, stylistically varied stretch of rigid drum beats, repeated riffs and odes to melancholy, doesn't hide its influences either.

Reason to Smile brings to mind Ms Dynamite’s 2002 Mercury-winning A Little Deeper : era-defining works that blend hip-hop with neo-soul and jazz, and storytelling that paints the Black British experience with the finest of brushes.

As on Power’s previous albums, there is a delicious tension between the ethereal succour offered by her voice and the turmoil these thrumming songs are processing. Often, wordless emoting is the only solution; Power’s tones flow like starlings above her mantric guitar and that of her partner and collaborator Peter Broderick.

It is fractured, offbeat, at times grating, yet contains some of the most achingly beautiful music recorded this year.

Her lyrics can be oblique and occasionally ungainly. But her voice--soaring, delicate--brings vulnerability and heat to this vision of a post-human world.

Only the uncharacteristically bitter Better Than That feels out of place on a set steeped in introspection.

This fifth album is arguably his most measured, setting his supple vocals to acoustic, subtly innovative arrangements.

His first album as Neon Indian was sun-struck and woozy; the mood, on the follow-up, has grown a little darker and on "Future Sick" the wooziness veers into nausea. Which makes the sunnier moments, when they come, all the more heightened.

The tunes attest that she’s not spreading her talents too far and wide.

It swings. It grooves. It’s not bogged down by a self-consciously poetic concept. And it feels like a record rather than a showcase, anchored by the production work of Simz’s childhood friend Inflo.

The album pulses with nervy energy. None of the new tracks outshine those we’ve already heard, though Numbers, produced by Pharrell Williams, comes exuberantly close.

Impossible not to like.

Pilbeam’s second album feels like a logical progression from her 2019 debut, Keepsake, a minor success in her home country. Where Giving the World Away sees a great leap forward, however, is with its lyrics.

Radiohead have long trafficked in existential dread and political anger, and in a wider sense of twitchy bereftness that bends to fit any number of scenarios – their very own aural shade of Yves Klein blue, maybe, just a little more bruised. This arresting ninth album is bathed in it.

Yet another reliably great outing, full of intriguing plot developments, yet in faithful keeping with White's previous output.

Hive Mind--their mainstream-facing fourth outing--offers up another set of come-hither sounds whose confidence has taken another leap.

This ninth outing is Pierce’s most assured in some time, doling out extra helpings of heady patisserie.

Only woolly lyrics stop the album achieving the sharp quality of its influences.

It is, of course, too long. But its peripatetic nature means you can easily assemble your own collection from its 21 tracks. Tense, urgent Broad Day, eerie Night Vision, or feisty duets Fine As Can Be and Princess Cut should all make that list.

At times, the whirl of ideas threatens to spin out of control, but more often, as on CIRCLONT6A, they cohere thrillingly. A welcome return.

Swift’s fifth record is a bold, gossipy confection that plays to her strengths--strengths which pretty much define modern pop, with its obsession with the private lives of celebrities and its premium on heightened emotion.

Menace and rapture are beautifully balanced in Cross’s minimalist alt rock.

Nashville-based duo Joy Williams and John Paul White have crafted a bewitching debut album of sparse, spectral Americana.

Held together by Grande’s skyscraping voice, Dangerous Woman throws a lot at the wall and, brilliantly, most of it sticks.

Alexander is better channelling any introspection into songs that reflect the morning after, with late album highlight Make It Out Alive giving Night Call a narrative arc via a post-big-night-out soother.

If some of Young’s ballads feel more conventional, the jazz-tinged Pretty in Pink reveals an artist who questions, but ultimately knows who she is.