The spacious, wiggly drum’n’bass of You, Love outclasses much of the jungle 2.0 around now, while You Broke My Heart but Imma Fix It is so nimble and textured it’s impossible to pin down. The slight downside: The Rat Road remains dominated by voices that are not Jerome’s, so it’s hard to hear the autobiography. But that’s a small caveat.

While many mainstream acts lean on jazzists to lend some flair, it’s rare that it goes the other way. But Dinner Party bring serious chops to contemporary music’s top table.

Voice Notes is conceptually and musically accomplished, flourishing with inspired narratives and sensuality at every turn. It seamlessly blends jazz, soul and electronica without overpowering the singer-songwriter’s supple vocals. There’s so much to love and savour.

The record is a career highlight from an accomplished artist producing luscious, storytelling music from experiences so foundational that they defy neat narrative.

While it’s an emotional listen, I Came From Love is not a difficult record, musically.

The usual downside of a live recording is that you’re left with a somewhat faint imprint of the feeling in the moment. But this album elevates the form, and further marks Dawid out as one of the most vital avant-garde artists of her time.

This 13-track album is a more emphatic, even angry work charting her emotional evolution [than mixtape What We Drew].

Her singing is excellent throughout, whether coolly confident on Be On Your Way’s account of letting a long-distance relationship lapse, or glassy and slightly numbed during Party’s hymn to hard-won sobriety. It takes a while to absorb how cleverly arranged songs such as Junkmail and Future Lover are, as 12 Ensemble’s delicate string orchestration adorns robust performances from Haefeli and Aguilella.

Backed by a gospel choir, 16-piece string section and horn fanfares, HMLTD confidently tackle musical styles as varied as choral harmony (Worm’s Dream), hook-laden soul (The End Is Now), grungy rock (Saddest Worm Ever) and plaintive pop balladry (Lay Me Down). ... It’s this richness that gives the album its depth, harnessing a large ensemble to showcase HMLTD as a band capable of committing to grand visions with brilliant intensity.

The result is magnificent: “dance” music that bursts out of the grid with retro textures, prelapsarian oscillations, birdsong and bells.

Oon The Record, Baker, Bridgers and Dacus pack layer upon layer into their sound, standing tall and exquisite.

It’s a sprightly, restless set, with Segal’s plucked cello providing a thrumming heartbeat to what is a communal, improvisational approach. ... This is truly fusion music.

Sprawling. ... Engrossing, audacious record.

There’s warmth in the album’s fusion of industrial grind with delicate melody, and producer James Ford sparks a revivifying weirdness in songs such as My Cosmos Is Mine. For a record preoccupied by death, its big heart bursts with life.

A handful of derangedly catchy singles have already rolled off the tracklist, highlighting the pair’s fluency with nagging melodies and killer hooks. The glorious Mememe still offers up an earworm crafted from bass and tinnitus.

Like her previous EPs, this latest release showcases Archives’ versatility, demonstrating how jungle lends itself to updates as varied as Brazilian party music, jazzy side notes and lo-fi introspection.

Mostly Radical Romantics is witty, inquisitive about physical and psychological relationships, and less austere than before. The songs produced with Olof are excellent.

An affecting album of depth and beauty.

This is, simultaneously, a very Albarn-forward, state-of-the-world Gorillaz record, and one packed with guests channelling different energies.

here’s a touch of pastiche on the doo wop of Thrill Is Gone, but overall the record showcases a self-assured songwriter, capable of producing swaggering floor-fillers. My 21st Century Blues is Keen’s artistic rebirth. Long may it continue.

The New Jersey trio’s most engaging album since 2000’s And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out.

Here, she unfurls a sequence of eight originals bound together by a cascade of imagery drawn largely from nature, in particular the bird kingdom, “a lawless league of lonesome beauty” the singer yearns to join.

This is a record designed to penetrate cell-deep, with slow, unspooling tracks such as Holier, where beats don’t intrude, the music hanging as though in a space out of time.

Over 10 tracks, Heavy Heavy retains the band’s urgent energy – the yelps and driving drums of I Saw and sub-bass breakbeats of Shoot Me Down – but that vitality works in service to an overall, infectious optimism.

Perhaps this generous album’s biggest theme is the passage of time, and recognising distances travelled.

The band’s intoxicating, questing spirit throbs through the strongest suite of music Coombes has assembled in 20 years.

Pleasingly, it’s well worth the long wait, in large part because the realisation of these songs feels more expansive than her earlier, more pared-back work, with Mellotron, synths – even drums – appearing alongside the more familiar acoustic guitar.

So while this endeavour can’t help but be tinged with deep bittersweetness, Electronic Chronic really exudes the warmth of a band tinkering about in their studio.

The chill, sparse productions foreground Clavish’s economical delivery beautifully, as he flirts with imploring vulnerability and vicious querulousness without ever committing to either.

At their best, which is often on Gigi’s Recovery, the Murder Capital combine muscular drama and skeletal grace with a confidence that Radiohead would be proud of.

Though Bubblegum is brief, at seven songs, Biig Piig’s sound brims with poise and promise.

Best described as a punk with a keyboard and tunes to burn, Nomates has dug even deeper for Cacti, her songwriting broadening its reach. Her deadpan takedowns remain heroic.

Late Developers marks a real return to form, and is the band’s most rewarding album since 2006’s The Life Pursuit.

Strays adds heady organ grooves and hypnotic southern rock to her band’s considerable chops. ... And throughout, her mountain stream of a voice retains its country authority, even when she’s writing a pop tune.

As these elegant tracks play out, mourning what we’re doing to ourselves and each other, there is just the merest disappointment that the sound of these songs is not as overwhelming as those of this album’s magnificently echoey predecessor, Titanic Rising. But quietude becomes these themes.

This Is What I Mean is a bold album about showing vulnerability, and continues the erstwhile rapper’s overarching mission to transcend the roles allotted to him.

The album’s two mightiest bangers are already out: Pulse boasts the kind of bass and 808 combo that gets your rig banned from venues, and Accumulator layers elements on with the skill that comes from ratcheting up the pressure on ravers for 30 years. But there are more workouts here invoking everything from electro to the eeriness of Boards of Canada.

While the scattered poetics of Anna Mieke’s lyrics are indeed dreamlike, the mesmeric artistry of her second album, Theatre, means that Mieke’s images, her sense memories, start to feel like your own.

Black Girl Magic finds Dijon expanding her sound to incorporate a wider range of queer Black contributions to dancefloor culture, producing a 15-track masterclass in disco, new jack swing and soulful house.

A deft, warming album that grounds the listener while coaxing them to think bigger.

Noticeably more cheerful than on 2018’s heartbroken Ruins. ... Best of all, though, is Angel, a gorgeously upbeat lament to lost love (“I love you, even if you don’t love me”) that recalls Fleetwood Mac at their most radio-friendly.

The result is an exceptional album that centres joy and community, radiates positivity and youthful abandon, and could well be the one to cross over to the big league.

A sleek, enticing record that certifies Cakes Da Killa’s place at the forefront of this sound.

There is one salient, nailed-on fact about this enigmatic album, however. It’s how easily its most anthemic cuts will slot into those revved-up Arctic Monkey festival set lists.

Underpinning everything are the Watkinses themselves, especially the agile vocals of Sara, who outshines California art rockers Tune-Yards on a cover of their Hypnotized. But it’s not a competition, just a great night out with a ringside seat.

Like Michael Kiwanuka, Carner’s first two albums were occasionally terrific but his third is a masterpiece.

Despite beats, synths and a signature “old Taylor” shout (“Nice!”), this is a return to pop that’s content to remain relatively subdued. In this smudged, low-lit headspace, Swift’s perspectives carousel round like a zoetrope.

The Unthanks don’t falter on what is their first “proper” album in seven years, though the nine minutes of the Sandgate Dandling Song, a Victorian ballad about domestic violence, inclines to the ponderous. They are better when airborne, as on The Old News or Royal Blackbird, a Jacobite song given a lively violin arrangement.

These songs feel personal, intimate and urgent.

Much of the playing here feels appealingly understated, given the sizable showing of backing vocalists (“6 or 7”) and lots of brass. This atmosphere of diffuse beauty is offset by livelier tracks – such as Natural Information or Bowevil (based on a traditional) – that double as thumping singalongs.

Impressive, but weirdly hard to enjoy. Into the Blue is similarly promiscuous, but more frequently dazzling.

An arresting, if not always comfortable creation from an uncommon talent.

Having explored the darker side of the dancefloor, Nymph finds Muise experimenting with its more irreverent aspects.

There are moments, as on Every Child Begins the World Again, so musically numinous and epochally sad that Lambchop approaches Nick Cave’s recent work.

Trilling flutes and whimsical clarinets break the mood of majestic ache that makes Fossora one of Björk’s hardest-hitting albums.

There are excellent Miles trumpet solos all over these tracks too, proving that he’d got his sound back after his late-70s breakdown.

For the most part it’s a rich and deftly arranged work, and though there’s a warmth that can sometimes border on cloying, he cuts through with chaos and levity.

There is a feeling of generous unspooling here, with hip-hop breakbeats (on one standout, Dream Another) and nods to machine-made music in among the sumptuous orchestral and genre-agnostic instrumentation.

This is a record about coming home to yourself, about feeling truly alive, one with the added benefit of being stuffed with bangers and not overburdened by corny shredding.

There’s barely a misstep in Autofiction’s 45-minute running time. A late-career triumph.

Previously unheard on any other archival release, these versions genuinely add to his already considerable myth.

This whirlwind album is full of feeling and fervour, and its liveliness affirms just why she is a singular talent.

There are blooping keys and retro drum machines on River Rival; Thinking of Nina feels like a long-lost hit from the 80s. Even better is Soft Boys Make the Grade, a tune that relocates Williams’s gothic bent into a killer soft-rock tune in which he sidles into someone’s direct messages.

As woozy and restless as these multipart productions are, she packs in plenty of sticky stuff: melodies, hooks, insistent figures.

Written on keyboards rather than guitar, Pre Pleasure was recorded in Montreal with Marcus Paquin of the Weather Station; you can hear the uptick in arrangement and production in the painterly thrum of the instruments.

Album of knotty nuance bathed in melodic succour.

You could dismiss Cheat Codes as dad rap, but this record is absolute joy from end to end.

It brims with the sense of release and joy that comes from the tiniest escape from confinement.

These sour notes aside [Energy and Heated], Renaissance is the feelgood manifesto that puts all the other post-pandemic party albums in the shade, a song cycle crammed full of homages to the historic continuum of Black dancefloor therapy.

Occasionally this can leave you longing for something less overblown, but this is Rogers 2.0: dancing sweatily in NYC karaoke bars and singing lines such as “sucking nicotine down my throat/ thinking of you giving head” (on new track Horses) and rocking out. Letting rip suits her.

Thankfully, The Theory of Whatever takes a gentler, more mature tack; no longer the mouthy street poet of the people, Treays is simply singing his heart out about his muted memories of love, nostalgia and hangovers. It’s a joy to perch alongside and listen to him reminisce.

Musically, Special’s a bit of a retread. Lead single About Damn Time, with its Saturday-night, last-song-before-we-leave-the-house vibe, bounces on a similar podium to 2019’s Juice, and the title track boasts imperious orchestration, just as it did on Cuz I Love You. But it works.

It’s an unsettlingly raw album, the sparse instrumentation – Nastasia’s soft voice and acoustic guitar, recorded, as ever, by Steve Albini – making her lyrics all the more stark and powerful. ... An astonishingly moving record.

Overall, About Last Night… manages to keep the party going – it’s just more convincing when tears mix with the prosecco.

A sumptuous listen that glows like a freaky summer love.

Best listened to as a whole, Hellfire is as challenging and unsettling as it is exhilarating. About as sui generis as it’s possible to get in 2022.

A well-polished gem – welcome back.

Pearson wears her talents lightly on an album that allows space for them to breathe. Sound of the Morning is a remarkably mature record; hopefully, future releases will be just as absorbing.

An ambitious album (it comes with an 8mm film and several quirky videos) from a unique artist.

This is a record full of elegant consolation, but one that refuses to patronise the listener.

Released from both internal and external shackles, Muna feels like phase two for one of pop’s best bands.

She can be puckish, yearning, impossibly weary, intimate – and that’s all on one track, 20 Years a Growing. The pair’s most engaging songs start spare, then meander with gathering intensity to an orchestral crescendo

This is an EP to fall into, as though in a swoon, its fine detail revealing itself over time.

More introspective and contemplative than his previous two multi-platinum albums, Gold Rush Kid finds Ezra becoming a man for all seasons.

Every Head album is a gem, but Dear Scott – named after a note-to-self by F Scott Fitzgerald, down on his luck – has a particularly deep internal lustre.

As several of her songs attest, music can be consolation in the most troubled times, and Big Time is a silky balm.

The most country thing about this body of work is the hard-lived wisdom it offers up. The love songs are very grown-up.

Two years on, this sequel is a similarly entrancing, sometimes frightening listen.

Ultimately Styles is more concerned with mood than minutiae. On Harry’s House he’s created a welcoming place to stay.

This electrifying, uneasy record stops, starts and turns, often within the confines of one track. The beats are restless; few comforting grooves are allowed to build for very long.

While there’s nothing as obviously stellar as Grammy-winning US Top 5 hit Boo’d Up or its even better sequel, Trip, Ella has always had a gift for parsing the everyday dramas of twentysomething relationships in relatable (and sometimes 18-rated) language.

Almost as good as a new Radiohead album.

The album takes a step back from the vast productions of Welch’s most famous work, with nods to the Rolling Stones (Dream Girl Evil) and plenty of unexpected chiaroscuro, the better to foreground her luxuriant voice.

A welcome return to form.

An ambitious, accomplished piece of work.

Although this album was written at her new house in Baltimore, when Sangaré got stuck there during lockdown, many of these tracks look to her home region of Wassoulou, whose sung heritage and stringed instruments she has turned into an international world music phenomenon.

Though not as affecting as the original, if we’re talking about club bangers, Kehlani makes it their own.

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