There's plenty to like about Neil Young and Crazy Horse's first work together for nine years, a collection of cover versions of essential American tunes.

The continuity stressed between body and tool, folk history and future, like the work of Meredith Monk or Björk, lures the listener away from the twin traps of techno-evangelist complacency and technophobic retreat with sweet inspiration.

RTJ4 supersizes their outsider aesthetic without squandering any hard-won authenticity. Icy disquisitions on the missing soul of modern America jostle with good-natured boasts from the golden age of hip-hop, yielding a remarkable hit rate.

The record’s dreamlike atmosphere is seductive and disquieting; a moving tribute to Albion’s troubled soul.

Every song is a wonder. It is unlikely Angels & Queens will inspire many imitators of its retro-future soul, its damaged doo-wop. It’s simply too good to be copied.

Perhaps Tempest’s greatest achievement is not to fall prey to the pressure for unnecessary revolution; her work sits more comfortably in the tradition of perfecting the groove, not changing it. That perfection might be illusion, but its pursuit can produce wonderful work, as it has right here.

Over seven elegant tracks, White and his musicians achieve the kinds of loveliness that Spiritualized, Lambchop, Cat Power and the Beta Band have tilted at, at different times in the past, and quite often missed.

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.

Reflective and exuberant by turns, it’s an outstanding album.

It is full of indecipherable songs, swaddling the brutal clarity of the techno DJ-producer duo’s early singles in something unpredictable, off-kilter. Choral vocals make you feel everything from terrified to strangely soothed.

Summer is traditionally the season for unearthing treasures from the jazz archives, and this is a real prize.

Recorded over the course of five years, this extraordinary collaboration deserves excellent speakers and a soft couch to catch the swooning listener.

Its 10 songs are stark but powerful, their anguish and insight given a deft, minimalist treatment by producer Kenny Greenberg. ... An aching, moving testimony, beautifully realised.

Brown’s storytelling is as witty as ever, with pungent bars that pop like pimples, spattering tracks with quotable filth. His best work by a distance.

Small Town Heroes may mourn victims of violence but it is emphatically a record stuffed with good times.

Ultimately, all are visions, alternately haunted and comforting. Subtle evolutions in mood and instrumentation come to peaks that are made all the more stunning by their scarcity.

Hip-hop is constantly being tweaked and nudged in new directions, but rarely is it reconfigured as radically, and thrillingly, as on this second album from Shabazz Palaces.

Comparisons with such late-career highlights as Johnny Cash’s American Recordings albums and Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker are inevitable, but Negative Capability really does belong in such exalted company.

Bevan has jettisoned the sleep paralysis pop of his early work for something even more dissociated and peripatetic. You might head for the vicious rave of Rival Dealer or Nightmarket’s sumptuous, pealing melody first, to swerve some long, austere, beatless passages, but this is a compilation of rare bravery and beauty.

To Believe is heartbreakingly brilliant: a collection of exquisitely assembled songs that appear delicate from a distance before revealing a close-quarters core strength. ... A triumph.

There’s not a weak song here. A genuine pleasure to listen to.

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

An exceptional record that deserves your time and headphones.

This is an album whose bone-deep grief sits inside music that’s very easy to tap a toe to.

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.

With less dissonance and psychedelic experimentation than Jon Hopkins or Four Tet, Fragments may be too care-home comfort for some, but it’s brilliant, wondrous work.

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

In an increasingly fraught world, it’s an unashamedly sunny sound. It makes for a gorgeous record in which to lose yourself for 40 minutes.

If the interplay between the band’s instruments makes gleeful mincemeat of genre, singing guitarist Isaac Wood’s equally remarkable lyrics regularly float to the top of the mix. Half-spoken, half-sung, they riff on granular scene references (“I told you I loved you in front of Black Midi”) and Gen-Z witticisms, but pack in plenty of timeless tenderness and anomie.

The Navigator might be full of site-specific anger and yearning, but like its predecessors, it is incredibly easy on the ear. The songs just flow--slinky, sad or elegant in their own ways.

The group maintain control throughout, making this a flawless and packed debut – one that has been worth the wait.

Seriously impressive, unashamedly grown-up songs from, and for, the soul.

Heart’s Ease proves a more confident follow-up.

A sumptuous listen that glows like a freaky summer love.

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.

The humour is often savage--a sprightly accordion heralds a story of damaged troops--but Cooder's aim is true. He's become a Woody Guthrie for our times.

Set over gorgeous production, and serving as a comforting reminder to black sheep and ugly ducklings everywhere that it pays to be true to one’s full self, Negro Swan is a dizzying triumph.

Bon Iver have imperceptibly moved from requesting close listening to requiring it, and i,i spins a mesmerising web of superficially insubstantial yet intensely majestic music. Listen closely and you can hear the language of pop being redrafted in real time.

[The two previously unreleased songs] comprise a fascinating companion piece for two classic albums.

It’s an aural through line as she dazzles us with her range: unexpected dancefloor bangers (Prove It to You), pellucid vintage soul and exultant funk.

Thebe Neruda Kgositsile (as his mum knows him) has as intuitive a grasp of how to punctuate a thought process with musical trigger points as any rapper in history.

She remains a real original.

Dry Cleaning have a sound that is as singular as it is dazzling.

This is an album full of emotional ambushes.

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.

Eleven songs and at least seven of them could be hits. A sensational album. Consider your summer saved.

This reissue (effectively 2008’s Collector’s Edition plus three excellent unreleased songs) proves that Radiohead’s reputation derives from their music’s depthless humanity, not its instrumentation.

Its blend of historical drama, ballad ghosts and philosophical memoir is compelling, made as intimate as if it were in your own skull by Polwart’s warm, wise, attention-commanding voice.

A bravura statement from an artist still sounding fresh three decades into his career.

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

As with all the best sets, it’s coherent but not repetitive, the ghostly Auto-Tune choir, which features on most tracks, sighing and whispering encouragement behind Banks’s increasingly empowered words. There are shades of Bon Iver and Billie Eilish in her layered, subtle sound, but also a rare, steely delicacy all her own.

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

It’s pretty special too. ... If a sense of discomfiture has run through all Sault’s albums – they challenge, seethe and weep, confound expectation, change tack abruptly – there is never a sense of a misstep.

It feels like a feast at a time when pop is offering up scraps. As she mentioned herself when announcing the album to a mix of anger, intrigue and confusion: “This ain’t a country album. This is a ‘Beyoncé’ album.” It’s also her fourth classic in a row.

These nine new songs see the band’s gift for melody and grasp of pop’s dynamics tweaked into transcendent shapes by the late house master Philippe Zdar and xx producer Rodaidh McDonald.

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

Starring his voice and nimble guitar, with subtly dramatic instrumentation adding texture throughout, this is less a record than a dream state designed to wash over the listener in one sitting.

Here she sounds more assured, even in her darker moments, and her strong, versatile voice is as extraordinary as ever.

A punk disposition suffuses many of these nine tracks, immolating assumptions around the j-word. Fly Or Die III (for brevity) rocks, rolls and generally throws itself around.

The playing and recording, needless to say, are immaculate.

Conflict of Interest, his third studio release, has both cinematic scope and tear-jerking moments.

Hard to believe it was 50 years ago. Nobody’s done it better since, and few have even tried.

This is an album that wrestles with the sisyphean slog of remaining engaged – with love, with work, with life. And you can dance to it.

It feels just as estranged of pop’s traditional structures and strictures as they’ve always been. It feels exhilarating; it feels like freedom.

This is a sexy, sparkling snapshot of borderless youth in 2023, with Amaarae emerging as an ascendant star.

This Tasmanian band’s debut is end-to-end faultless.

The magnificently eerie Four Kinds of Horses is the record’s peak, while maternal elegy And Still feels like the most open, vulnerable song he has ever sung.

While Lamar’s extended metaphor of a caterpillar turning into a butterfly begs for greater self-knowledge and transcendence. That bit might get old quickly. The rest won’t.

There is a form of mania at work here, but the results are propulsive and ecstatic.

Lu seems intent to immerse us fully, deeply, intimately into her gossamer creative vision--and she succeeds. An astonishing first album.

Recorded quickly, with most of the 10 songs featuring Anohni’s original vocal takes, it’s an album that manages to wear its heaviness lightly and quickly buries its way under your skin.

Yet another dial-shifting record.

This is a carnival of imagination with an intricate balance to its sequencing and a cohesion of sound and concept to die for.

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

To get the full effect, listen to the album from start to finish, over and over again. It’s a blast.

Gold Record marks another stage in one of the most intriguing about-turns in recent American music. The curmudgeon of Callahan’s early records might now meet humanity with a wry chuckle and an observational benevolence bordering on empathy.

It’s typical Monk--angular, mercurial, introspective--played by his regular quartet of the time, plus French saxophonist Barney Wilen.

From first note to last, Chronicles of a Diamond swaggers from the speakers. Even the love songs have new light cast on that hoary old topic by the roaring fire of Burton’s voice, while Quesada layers psychedelics and electronica into the orchestral mix, always conjuring new charms from familiar elements.

Songs such as The Wheel and Stockholm Syndrome offer thrills that can’t be denied, a preposterously exciting scrapyard soul.

The modulations and switches in pace remain as bold as ever, and Clark has a knack for memorable melody and a winning voice with shades of Kate Bush and Leslie Feist.

It’s the knockout closing pair that illuminate the band’s mastery of dynamics, unbearabletension and cathartic release.

Carnage was clearly made in the same creative breath as Ghosteen. We remain in the grip of Cave’s loss and its fractal of consequences – a haunt enabled further by Ellis at the peak of his powers.

You Want It Darker could be addressed to fans pining for a return to Cohen’s bleakest songwriting; or a lover, or a higher power.

Modern Country is a beatific and expansive ambient record daubed in acoustic and electric guitars, analogue oscillations, some really scary bells and no words; its meaning can be fluid.

There’s also great ingenuity in the shorter interludes comprising little more than random chatter over a simple melody (Can’t Stop). An album with this much flair and originality is hard to fault.

Cynics will cry foul, that Beyoncé remains an entitled superstar, raging at a paper tiger. Those cynics will be ignoring one of this year’s finest albums.

It's a downer, but timely and affecting, with moments of beauty.

A generous 21-track double mixtape, divided between grime (Days) and R&B raps (Nights). Both playlists have plenty of the wit, grit and authenticity that made them famous.

By and large it’s an understated affair but unmistakably the Floyd, divided into four sides (and available on double vinyl), each with a different mood from the next. It also packs a great deal into 53 minutes--not least because some of the tracks are barely more than a minute and a half long. Nothing is dragged out.

It does nothing but enhance her reputation.

It is eminently danceable, but not braindead. Funk bubbles away down below, but the lyrics are well worth tuning into.

There’s a mixtape energy in Smith’s relentless invention.

Endless Arcade dwells on the end of love, as hymned on multiple TFC albums; on stoicism in the face of this emotional catastrophe, or – on Raymond McGinley’s songs – our tiny place in the cosmos and the importance of eking joy out of everything.

It gets better with every play, mixing punk with glam with fuzz guitar, recalling everything from the Rolling Stones to Jack White. It is just heavy enough, and it is also meta.

With archaic language updated by transatlantic twang, it's a winning addition to the canon.

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.

Hazy and mellifluous, theyesandeye possesses a Nick Drake-like attention to detail.

A bravura showcase.