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.

Their soundtrack for supernatural French drama The Returned is just as good [Mogwai's music for the extraordinary football movie Zidane]; no less absorbing whether you encounter it through headphones or on TV.

[On Election Special] the first world is in dire straits and it's all the fault of Republicans – architects of Guantánamo and unfeeling people who tie their dogs to the roofs of their cars then drive off (Mutt Romney's Blues).

This 20th-anniversary set fills a bootlegger’s jug with 21 outtakes and demos of Orphan Girl, Annabelle and the rest. The pick of its eight previously unreleased songs are the caustic I Don’t Want to Go Downtown and the homely Wichita, but every drop is delicious.

Acoustic or not, the killer grooves remain (try Lover or the title track), though downbeat pieces like Hear the Rain Come may need warmer weather to appreciate.

There is much to distinguish Moriondo, whose sense of mischief is as strong as her pop-punk desire to tell it like it is.

It all adds up to a highly pleasing change of direction.

EMA makes sure these are songs, first and foremost. And they are still personal.

Too bad Williams doesn’t sing on the plaintive Ballad of the Sad Young Men. Otherwise, this unexpected collaboration doesn’t miss a trick.

Deadweight is an ominous-sounding opener sugared by some lovely falsetto, while the lilting, reggae-tinged Won’t Follow deals with loss but ends with Gallab sweetly crooning “I feel new”. A compelling reminder of the uplifting power of music.

It's perhaps not as immediate as 2007's Aman Iman, but no less pleasing.

They not only shake but also rattle, roll and do everything else to ears and body that the most rumbustious soul-rock and roots music can.

A tight, cohesive record bathed in a hazy West Coast glow.

Wedding ramshackle rant-punk to deadpan, slackerish tunes is a positively Jurassic move for a new band. But this five-piece nail the absurdity of contemporary life with that surprisingly evergreen formula.

Ultimately, it is Titanic Rising’s fusion of ancient and contemporary, 70s singer-songwriter tropes and electronic burbles, that convinces; the beauty Weyes Blood offers has its eyes wide open.

It’s an album that exudes warmth and no little sonic familiarity, while reflecting what is a radically altered set-up.

It may be post-punk in the way that the Fonz was proto-punk, but Musa’s tail-thumping ambition to construct the perfect chorus lifts even the lesser songs.

Gold and Albarn have done great work on Lindé, mixing Bocoum’s desert bluesology with fuller accompaniments and adding a clutch of interesting guests. ... While the album cruises easily along, Bocoum’s subject matter is serious. Facing turmoil from poverty and jihad, Mali is, as Bocoum puts it, “on the ropes”. His response, calling for unity and hope, proves captivating.

There's a good deal to enjoy here.

Soil has contributions from sound-makers as diverse as Katie Gately, digital hip-hop hand Clams Casino, and even Paul Epworth (Adele), taking Wise’s vision into glorious sonic HD.

These tunes relish their flutes and organs, horns and strings. Crucially, hope plays off against the bleakness.

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

This is a record full of brilliance and charm, but is front-loaded; the second half loses the soulful, melancholic quality of the first.

Full of subtle charm, it’s an album of deceptive depths in which to immerse yourself.

Each of these nine pieces has its own character – playful, mysterious, rhythmically compelling or folkishly tuneful – each one exquisitely performed and uniquely absorbing.

Refined and subtle, but with the right amount of bite (see the darkly hued True Story), Eternal Sunshine feels like a clearing of the emotional decks.

Paul’s soft voice, washed by reverb, recalls the dreamscapes of Beach House, and there are reminders of Sharon Van Etten in the enveloping swells of drums, grungy guitars and spacey shifts of rhythm.

The first half, particularly, is very good indeed, the best tracks (Talking in Tones, Come Home Baby) both wistful and gloriously alive.

The subject matter may not be as harrowing as the real-life inspiration for some of his earlier work (most notably Electro-Shock Blues), but this is still a powerful and emotionally coherent set.

An entertainingly diverse set.

It’s scene-stealing stuff.

It all culminates in Lesley, a staggering, 11-minute exploration of toxic masculinity and domestic abuse. “Tell a yout’, if you got a brain then use it,” he raps, early on; Dave’s doing that, but has much more in his armoury than just brains.

Overall this excellent album’s clarion-clear narratives about knife crime and the importance of good times – exemplified on Can’t Hold We Down – are delivered not just with anger and pathos, but humour.

Opener You & I setting the tone, all unhurried melancholia topped by Kelcey Ayer's soaring vocal. Elsewhere, they show they're equally adept at the euphoria in which Arcade Fire deal.

Dig deep and there's powerful drama and enigmatic subtlety in equal measure as the Cumbrian four-piece once again embrace understated electronica and invite favourable comparisons with Talk Talk.

While there’s nothing here that quite matches the highest highs of their first pass, this is a welcome return for a singular and important band.

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.

There is a lot of heartbreak on Burn Your Fire For No Witness, as well as a lot of pleasing anachronism; a lot of hard-won resignation and what you might call stern vulnerability, a quality that Olsen shares with Joni Mitchell without sounding at all like Mitchell.

Carrie & Lowell is so dark and deep, those of a sensitive disposition might need to rehydrate once they remove their headphones. But light pierces the murk.

Despite its sunny origins, there’s a shard of ice speared through Kidsticks, a frost that burns fierce as fire.

The result is their most varied and expansive record to date.

Future’s eerily Auto-Tuned sing-song vocal style, suspended somewhere between Lil Wayne’s salacious croak and the spiritual suspended animation of a Gregorian chant, seems to energise him.... Drake is sounding as dynamic and engaged as at any time since 2009’s stellar So Far Gone.

The tracklist could stand a little pruning, but Thundercat’s virtuoso bass playing and impressive cast of collaborators make it an early standout of 2017.

[A] startling debut... As his tremulous whisper of a voice travels over deftly plucked, quietly rippling guitar lines, it feels like trespassing on a very small space, filled with enormous private sorrows.

Why Make Sense? finds the London indie house outfit more or less as they always have been, with only minor aesthetic variations disrupting the dulcet flow of their electronic pop. Those variations, though, are beguiling.

Engaging and adventurous.

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

It all makes for a multi-textured, multi-hued portrait of an artist who playfully seeks out the primary colours but remains very frank about the shade.

The ageless 32-year-old arrived at a languid sound, a detached authorial voice and a set of obsessions on her 2012 debut Born to Die, and her fourth album remains true to them all.

Expertly tweaked synths sit on a bed of complex beats mixing house and techno with subtle nods to sundry other genres.

Their second album once again combines the muscularity of 80s post-hardcore types Hüsker Dü and Dinosaur Jr with the dynamics of breezily sunny three-minute pop songs, this time to even better effect.

Outrage is very much grime’s default mode, but Stormzy is particularly good at it.

The trio’s appetite for drugs, women and money never wavers from first to last track. Yet the more introspective songs, such as the spectral Traumatised and thoughtful High Road, tell powerful stories about their journey to success, and prove that D-Block Europe’s imperial phase is far from its end.

It’s all crowned by the confidence of I Got This, which reconciles Charlatans-esque country-soul Hammond to classy baroque-pop ba-ba-bas in a way that is unabashedly uplifting.

There’s hardly a dull moment on this album.

You relish every syllable as their dizzying flow piles dazzling images, metaphors and puns on top of each other.

The Dream is another enjoyable stroll around the band’s latest curiosity shop.

Virile is the undisputed centrepiece of this stunning first section of græ, a sumptuous track in which Sumney’s falsetto, allied with waves of lavish instrumentation and pugnacious rhythms, breaks down ideas of masculinity.

Suave in its mastery of its chosen style, it still teems with ideas and smuggles in lyrical barbs among the sumptuous melodies.

Compton has replaced the abandoned Detox project with a surprisingly vivid soundtrack of frustration inspired by the forthcoming NWA biopic.

Cocker and Gonzales aren’t so mesmerised by Chateau lore (John Belushi overdosing, etc) as they are by the semi-famous marinating in glamorous desperation, the old-school Hollywood lifers ordering “ice cream as main course”.

The pace of Shadows doesn’t vary from a stately waltz time, even on the 4/4 tracks. The treatments are of a piece: Dylan’s lived-in croon to the fore, breathing close to the mic as his heroically discreet band swoon and groan around him.

Lay’s voice may often be sun-dazzled and multitracked, but it is also confident, privileging harmonics and atmosphere over DIY spit and sawdust. The instrumentation swirling around her is both lush and reserved.

Beautifully crafted, Crush unsettles with its quiet, fervent chaos bubbling beneath its surface.

The writing here is bleak, self-excoriating and largely excellent.

The only slight misstep is Mother Earth, which swaps the original version’s distorted guitar for pump organ – but as it’s Young’s voice that still takes centre stage, that feels more of a cosmetic change than the imaginative reworkings elsewhere.

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

Banks immerses herself in 90s nostalgia, spitting darkly and sharply over tracks full of elements of UK garage, deep house and trap (an aggressive strain of hip-hop).

Every note is perfectly placed, the sense of bygone breeziness lovingly accurate.

Cardy’s lyrics are still a slight disappointment, however, consisting too often of ill-defined “us v them” sentiments (witness So What’s “They don’t care about us so we don’t care about them”). Still, that’s a minor quibble--it’s hard not to enjoy an album as full of energy as this.

Overall, Salutations might be slightly sprawling and lack a little of the focus of Ruminations, but it makes for a highly enjoyable companion piece.

75 tracks from as many artists, ranging from the trad (Pete Townshend's "Corrina, Corrina", the upbeat old-time of Carolina Chocolate Drops' "Political World") to the rad (Sussan Deyhim's "All I Really Want to Do", Ke$ha's pleasingly pared "Don't Think Twice…").

At 14 songs, there are misfires that could have been pruned – Run for the Hills is generic, algorithmic trap-pop – but overall, Think Later feels like McRae’s ticket to the big leagues.

The mood only really dips on Chamber of Reflection, when jangly guitars are replaced by a discombobulating synth and his downer sentiments are matched by the music.

Stranger is especially striking for its beautiful production, drifting with dark synth glossiness that can feel a little meandering and aimless but just about avoids self-indulgence.

These are 10 skillful and meditative instrumental acoustic guitar renderings that bear the weight of Americana--of contemporary America--lightly, but consciously.

The spaciousness, punch and depth of these productions is telling, but it is a mark of the album’s artistic integrity that Stormzy manages to transcend genre (again) without sacrificing his core griminess, or losing too much in the way of accent, word choice, content or theme.

An exciting listen, but the group’s uplifting energy and brilliant instrumentalists (including renowned Ghanaian guitarist Alfred Bannerman) are probably best experienced live.

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.

Ultimately nothing here really out-pops last year’s dulcet hit, Hotline Bling, included as a bonus track. As ever, though, the detail--both lyrical and producerly--is pin-sharp.

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.

There are words of love for suicidal addicts (Alibi) and a sense of the distance travelled, while remaining constant: an outlier whose solidarity with the runaways and the marginalised endures.

It’s hardly a forward-looking album, but nonetheless highly enjoyable.

Summer Jam is as aimless as the name suggests--but overall this is almost a match for 2011’s wonderful English Riviera.

With its 12 hushed and intimate tracks stripped back to the bare essentials--often just Fullbright's voice and guitar--the emphasis is on the strength of the songwriting (and, on Write a Song, the process itself).

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

The more modish tracks are somehow less inventive than their titles, but there’s much southern-stewed, offbeat beauty elsewhere to compensate.

The production here is both crisp and sinuous; ethereal indeterminacy trades off with crackling attention to detail.

Unashamedly uplifting songs about working hard and loving music.

Veirs’s 10th solo album is perhaps her most satisfying yet, the deceptively simple songs sketched out on acoustic guitar or piano (the lovely The Meadow is particularly minimalist) and subtly embellished by her band and producer husband, Tucker Martine.

It feels a tad preachy at moments but the purity of Perhacs's talent still radiates beautifully.

Atlanta Millionaires Club nails the perfect balance of the singer-songwriter’s sleepy, intimate balladry with the rich musical history of her home city.

They’ve reunited in the studio for this succinct collection of gentle pop-rockers, familiar yet far more strange and beautiful than 2013’s brittle Fleetwood Mac EP.

At its best, The Magic Whip has all the charm of Blur at their most mysterious, and little of the laddish triumphalism of Blur in headline slot mode.

The Go! Team’s Semicircle may not be unbroken, but they’re definitely coming back around hard.

Grime is now a maturing genre, with room for a multiplicity of voices and subject matters. And in Novelist, grime now has an upstanding and versatile outlier.

Chinouriri is an accomplished songwriter. Ideas spill out of every crammed corner of this collection. Her often hushed husky voice, developed when trying to practise without annoying her Zimbabwean parents, isn’t for everyone. Yet there’s range to her delivery, whether dropping punchy barbs during Dumb Bitch Juice or self-excoriating on My Blood and I Hate Myself.