The urban electronica of 2014’s In Each and Every One is sidelined for a spacier, more minimalist sound.

Anyone pining for the arch twig-insect dandy of old, preening over driving beats and gyrating to wayward early electronics, will find much to love on this album.

What’s new, though, are the traces of Talking Heads-style funk and a wistfulness prompted by parenthood’s demands. “I’m sorry if I’m ever short with you,” sings David to his wife on the closer, Stay Awake, while the touching The Morning Is Waiting possesses a depth hitherto absent from their work.

There remains a palpable feeling that with Coriky, one of American music’s foremost consciences is very much back in business.

The more you listen, the more Planetarium recalls Stevens’s glitchy, Auto-Tuned The Age of Adz album. Myth and science, astrology and astronomy, the personal and the political, religion and the profane commingle.

Where WIMPIII’s songs don’t cleave as closely to any of the album’s declared narratives, there is still much of interest going on.

Multi-Love is a squelchy, seductive update of UMO’s nagging groove, now with added whoa-factor.

Lazaretto, named after a place of quarantine for sailors, hurtles between moods and tempos, often within the same song.

The whole thing makes you want to punch the air--or maybe even strip off.

The melodies are simple but lovely, often spelled out on tumbling acoustic guitar, as on Like Water, before being taken up by the group. It’s wonderful to have them back.

It's his strongest album since Love and Theft in 2001, and still there's no pinning him down.

Overall there’s an abundance of grade-A pop on offer--just keep a tissue handy.

More thrilling are the metallic scrape of Swill and Wildeye, the skittish robotic choir on Hold, and Salt Licorice, which features Robyn, synth melodies that appear to be disassembling themselves and lyrics about “Scandinavian pain”. More of this, please: Jónsi suits the shock of the new.

Powerful and affecting, this is as good as anything Gahan has done in the last 25 years.

Coexist is yet another masterpiece of lush asceticism.

Biophilia is no clever-clever cacophony. Like the natural world from which it draws inspiration, the album has structure and convention. And there is always the anchor of Björk's voice and her words, which conjoin emotional forces and elemental processes.

A collection whose understatement allows different facets of Lamar’s talent to shine.

Each song on this engaged but accessible record memorialises a figure from the African diaspora--often lesser-known poets, or figures like Miles and Basquiat.

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.

As engaging as these songs are on multiple levels, 3.15.20 really excels when Glover experiments with form, texture and sensory overload.

An elegant, luminous album.

Everything just gets better and better with Marling.

Seventy-two not out: a great record.

With its silky delicacy, percussion that plays with everything from trip-hop to neosoul, and that deft voice gliding through sublime imagery, this is a quietly enriching and powerful first album.

Many of Fontaines’ key traits remain: the ability of this young Dublin outfit to retread familiar post-punk ground but with a tensile urgency all their own; and the sardonic Irish tones of Grian Chatten, whose affected blankness speaks volumes.

Ones and Sixes is an ear-pricking listen, particularly on headphones.

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.

Across 80 sprawling minutes, Vile does lose his focus occasionally, most notably on the 10-minute title track, which fails to gain much in the way of traction, and the similarly unremarkable Cold Was the Wind. Still, this is an album to savour.

Throughout, Grant is still angry, still purging, but with a heightened sense of mischief, both musical and lyrical.

The result is a lean, compact summary of the joys of Newsom, still an acquired taste to some, but to others, one of the undisputed greats working in our lifetime.

It is an engaging antidote to all the frantic maximalism that the future keeps springing.

Central City bears the hallmarks of all this success, in its own vintage guest list (Ciara, Faith Evans, Lil Wayne), high production values and songcraft.

Throughout, Mitski’s voice has never sounded sweeter or more exquisitely measured, even as she sings of protagonists vomiting cake, alcoholism (Bug Like an Angel), men, dogs, God and the devil.

Empowerment, unity and joy combine to catchy effect, with the exceptional Kidjo now leader of a new generation.

This 2004 acoustic show is an entrancing showcase of their respective talents.

Their third album is another impressive set.

Dig deep, stick to your guns, “be a lot less guarded”, runs the message of this nourishing dose of laser-sharp country-pop boosterism.

She dazzlingly updates the genre she has dominated for a half a century while restating her sassy, feminist persona.

These are punchy pop songs with immediate, uncomplicated appeal.

A late 2016 highlight.

A keeper, a goodie.

At its most compelling, Shaking the Habitual is racked with lust, anger and urgent, quaking rhythms.

Storytelling and suffering remain at the heart of this rich, gauzy and lush record, which, like Gaslighter, expands the borders of country while strengthening its core tenets.

It’s an album that revels in its creative freedom.

Hollow Meadows, written while Hawley was at home recovering from a slipped disc and a broken leg, finds the crooner at his most affecting and fragile.

A worthy homage.

It often feels more like a particularly ambitious performance art project than a collection of songs. But persevere and you'll be well rewarded.

It all makes for their most coherent album since 2004’s American Idiot.

Her incisive storytelling is at the fore on Heads Gonna Roll, which describes a road movie with “a narcoleptic poet from Duluth”. Ringo Starr plays drums on it, such is Lewis’s back-channel clout. More gripping vignettes follow.

The subtle, unfurling I Quit, meanwhile, marries guitar, piano and percussion to create an arpeggiating Doppler effect strafed by electronics. “This is my stop, this is the end of the trip,” sings Yorke. In the same breath he’s ruminating on “conscience” and “brotherhood” and “a new path out of the madness, to wherever it goes”. That path may well be shaped like a smile.

It’s keyboards that take centre stage here on a set of energetic, electro-indie cuts that are as dancefloor-friendly as anything he has been involved with since Electronic.

A class act.

Lennox still sounds unmistakably like his peaceable bear self, despite having acquired some new carnivorous companions whose firepower, critically, he doesn’t need.

The years have added grain and intimacy to Baez’s magisterial voice, especially on songs centred on retrospection, regret and mortality.

Lambert is a consistently thoughtful songwriter and this is an exhilarating blast of ideas as well as heady Alpine air.

Over 10 tunes, Regal and Petralli fashion taut, soulful pop nuggets out of jazz fusion licks, a sound not a million miles from Tame Impala meeting Thundercat, but gnarlier and different at every turn.

Two Hands is more earthbound than UFOF – in that there’s nothing here that quite matches that album’s astonishing peaks.

His ninth album as Thee Oh Sees has its fair share of songs that resemble long-lost Nuggets-era gems (Withered Hand and Rogue Planet are particularly bracing). But there is light and shade amid the trademark distortion.

A Love and Let the Sun Come In recall the jangle of their early-80s imperial phase. The ballads are equally well executed, most notably the closing I Think About You Daily, with Jonny Greenwood’s hypnotic string arrangement imbuing Hynde’s uncharacteristically swagger-free vocals with a powerful sense of regret and vulnerability.

Harmonious one minute, turbulent the next, Club Meds is an album rich in sounds and moods.

This is an accomplished full-length that, while not a game-changer, certainly slots neatly into the burgeoning UK canon.

At times it’s reminiscent of Zach Condon’s band Beirut, but Haiku Salut never stay still for too long, nuzzling up to folk one minute and slow drum’n’bass the next.

Giants of All Sizes is not an album to be filleted and squashed into playlists; it’s the sort of deeply serious and carefully crafted work that would sprout a beard and a cable-knit jumper if you turned your back on it for a second.

The arrangements are sharp and witty, the singing deceptively easygoing, and the guitar playing just terrific.

Marshall now has a manager, but Wanderer has that spooked strangeness of old. The grim reaper looms large. ... But there are tunes, too--pretty things like Horizon, which pays tribute to her family, while Marshall simultaneously eyes the exit.

The pleasure, and it’s considerable, is in the detail.

Their formative years in the underground have always supplied this trio with a sharp and occasionally dark edge. It is an edge no more, but the defining feature of this pugilistic album.

Sprinter combines the raw energy of Torres’s 90s forebears with modern minimalism; the result is captivating.

A few songs here--best of all, Shady Lady--are full of the kind of 60s harmonic whimsy associated with the Beatles, locating the album in the 20th century, but The Scarecrow remains timeless and terrifying.

The mood is austere, studded by encounters with mortality, but the accompaniments from Oysterband’s Ian Kearey are full of subtlety and surprise, with delicate guitars and blasts of squeezebox. A late-flowering triumph.

Rather than try to top her peerless pop peaks, Robyn has instead uncovered a new warmth, and the effect, on the lofty, dark techno of Human Being and the trippy tempo dips of Baby Forgive Me--redolent of lost small hours and fleeting epiphanies during dancefloor marathons--is sweet indeed.

Rare Birds is sprawling, rich and, by and large, a triumph, its cosmic mindset and focus on detail breathing drama into songs that in lesser hands might sound stale.

Here, as with Grimes, percussion is used as a weapon; none of the lyrics are clichéd top 40 pap. Unlike Grimes, however, Letissier has a bold, synthetic funk payload to commend her, and her lyrics are more obviously personal.

Like its parent film, T2 Trainspotting’s soundtrack eschews cosy Cool Britannia nostalgia for something weirder and better.

The influence of shambly 1990s indie such as Pavement and, most obviously, Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci is clear on their winningly gauche debut, but it stands in a longer line of British faux-naifs stretching back through Postcard Records and the Raincoats.

You struggle to comprehend how the extraordinary sounds near its inception are coming out of a tuba (via a wah-wah effect). On The Offerings and Radiation, Cross’s prowling tone is slung so low as to sound filthy. One can only hope his lips and lungs are insured.

Once you ditch the notion that AM’s successor should rock like it, and give yourself up to rolling around in the psyche of one of our very greatest songwriters like an olive in a martini, then it’s a riveting and immersive listen--an album-bomb dropped without preceding singles, re-emphasising the importance of a cohesive work, rather than a shuffled, Spotified deconstruction.

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

In truth, Letter to You is cheesier than a Monterey Jack, shameless in its embrace of cliche. ... Conversely, then, Letter to You is exactly the album some people could use right now, a sledgehammer of succour and uplift, a heroic E Street pile-on of the kind fans and guitarist Steve Van Zandt have been lobbying for, for years.

These punishing, three-dimensional soundscapes connect 70s No Wave with the mischievous end of contemporary digital production: quite a feat.

The closing Ragtime offers a happy ending of sorts, but this is too honest a record about unhappiness and grief to deliver a neat, redemptive conclusion.

Old-school Africa at its finest.

There are thrills galore for fans of the Knife and Róisín Murphy (like Murphy’s Hairless Toys, Tempo is inspired by ball culture documentary Paris Is Burning), and nagging hooks too.

It makes for their most cohesive album yet.

It’s an intensely intimate experience, appropriately voyeuristic and transgressive for a songwriter who wrote about both things so well. The versions of Prince’s better-known songs may disappoint some--Purple Rain is a meandering snippet--but what stays with you is the sense of talent, hardening to genius.

A lush, teak-panelled Nashville soul record.

I'm Ready, on which that familiar sprechgesang delivery is somehow both metronomic and distended, is exemplary, but the whole record--dosed with menace --sounds hungry.

It makes for a record that's heroically uncommercial, but hypnotic nonetheless.

Fever Ray’s first new music in eight years finds Karin Dreijer (she seems to have lost the Andersson) in fierce form.

Aware that any language barrier can be overcome by a plethora of hooks and a prevailing atmosphere, Balvin adds a playful embellishment to each of the album’s 10 tracks, be it Amarillo’s kazoo-assisted beat, or the twinkling glacial percussion that tickles closer Blanco. A riot not just of colour, but of ideas too.

An enchanting, stately creation.

Sumney has described the album as “a sonic dreamscape” and if Aromanticism has a tiny drawback, it is an over-reliance on beauty.

It’s to Yorke’s credit that the sense of foreboding he conjures, whether in the discordant Volk or the more elegant Olga’s Destruction (Volk Tape), manages to be so evocative even without Guadagnino’s visuals.

By turns eerie and starkly beautiful, Replica rewards repeated listening.

Live albums often undersell their artist, but this proves an inviting, well-judged showcase.

A captivating, low-key set from a singular talent.

Songs instantly familiar yet utterly unknowable.

Wide Awake! might be too scattershot to appeal to a much wider audience, but it does cement Parquet Courts’ position as one of US indie’s more intriguing outliers.