What emerges from their empathy is a thoroughly great record that adds punch and groove to Rebennack's humid party music.

Juvenile shock tactics persist, but he’s now channelling his puckish energy into some thrilling experiments and the more time-honoured hip-hop touchstones Tyler brings into the mix.

With Liberation, Aguilera is at her most artistically emancipated since Stripped (2002).

There is a depth--a willingness to experiment, a refusal to be pigeonholed--that rewards repeated listens and makes this their most coherent, most satisfying album since their debut. Where they go next is anybody's guess.

When they lock into a winning riff, as on Confusion and Atlas, Rise!, there are still few better bands around.

The album’s mix of soul, R&B, grime and trippy, jazz-tinged interludes is at times a little muddled, but Simz’s lyrical agility and deft rapping sit comfortably with a variety of production styles.

Over 12 tracks there are break-up cliches Parker can’t help but stumble into--“I’ve been blue over you” is the revolutionary gist of a song called Blue--but there is enough viscera on show here to make up for these well-worn sentiments.

Together [Radio Music Society and Chamber Music Society] they reveal the impressive range of this multi-talented young bassist/composer/singer.

Call the Comet is a resounding success, the first of Marr’s three solo albums to feel properly crafted. The loose thread it follows is that, in turbulent times, even the simple act of picking up a guitar and making music is political.

Even if the sex-angst of millennials is not your thing, FKA Twigs can still satisfy, and that is why LP1 (the title oozes confidence) is so special.

Pleasingly, it’s Morrison’s new songs that impress most. ... Of the covers, Hooker’s Dimples is the standout, but in truth there isn’t a weak link here. Excellent songs, expertly rendered--what is there to dislike?

Kouyate’s playing remains at its heart, pulsing, ingenious and spellbinding.

There's an unmannered honesty to Watt's singing and lyrics.

Innovative and imaginative, IV overflows with ideas throughout.

Lush and exploratory, April / 月音 swirls Cantonese vocals, singing bowls, and samples of Hong Kong traffic lights into Moss’s folk-pop, and is all the more stirring for never really finding a safe resting place.

Opener The Vain Jackdaw, based on an Aesop fable, recorded unaccompanied on a rooftop, is delightful, but elsewhere the mood remains relentlessly forlorn.

The arrangements on Dream River are almost as eloquent as his lyrics.

Nothing builds to a blank, frazzled catharsis, while Sell It Back is an eerie, epic closer: these are torch songs written with petrol and a flamethrower.

The English songwriter’s spacey, super-melodic, immaculately produced pop casts a wonderful spell when it works, particularly on lead single Religion (U Can Lay Your Hands on Me) or the swooning, filtered coda to The Stage, as endless as summer seems in early July.

At times, its tonal shifts cause whiplash, but the real magic appears when Cook manages to coalesce these two sides in the same song.

The album’s feminist slant is “implicit” and reggaeton – the Latin American style heavily influenced by Caribbean sounds – powers a handful of sassy party flexes, a first for this artist, better known for her flamenco background. Staccato rhythms figure heavily, maintaining this unconventional pop artist’s edge. All that energy is balanced out by heartbreak on quieter ballads such as Como Un G and a handful of tracks where Rosalía’s first-class voice is allowed to take more traditional flight.

Her sixth studio album shows her versatility at its best, its songs not so much genre experiments as joyful costume changes.

It's an ambitious step forward for the band (who hail from Oxford, not the Outer Hebrides) and, though only 44 minutes long, it feels like a bit of an epic.

The 27-year-old Scot had taken five years to unleash this third album, an ambitious stab at morphing into a mature soul man. And it's worked.

[Their collaboration] makes for a consistently delicious contrast between the unruliness of sound... and the cool affectlessness of both their voices as every song bursts with the interplay of these two eccentrics' ideas.

Key to it all is intoner Aidan Moffat – “singer” would be pushing it. ... Indispensable, too, is Malcolm Middleton, who supplies musical raw material that he and Moffat work into oxymoronic excellence – cheap, tinny beats and thousand-yard-stare guitars, elevated by strings and saxophone.

The record is beautiful but brief at 26 minutes; roll on Vol II.

KiCk I offers up an even broader palette than previously, while keeping up a steady diet of trademark dissonance alongside those slightly more overground ambitions.

Apocalypse, Girl is at once plaintive, savagely ironic and disconcertingly funny.

Not surprisingly, many of the highlights of his fourth solo album – a treatise on capitalism and loss – nod to Power’s better-known band.

On the band's gorgeous sixth album, there's a new directness to the songs.

Although there’s no hit to rival the Selma soundtrack epic, Glory, and a reunion with its vocalist John Legend is the worst of furrowed-brow, gluten-free beat poetry, this is intelligent, impressive work.

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.

Indeed, this is one of those rare albums that reveals a little more with every play.

Flotus is a calm, cumulative album about lasting love, unfussily filtering ancient through modern.

A well-polished gem – welcome back.

Nick Zinner of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs lends guitar touches and a clean, accessible production. A triumph.

Bird conducts his experiments with the lightest of touches: his ingenuity matched by a gift for simple, lilting melodies.

The meandering midsection of Warm Hands is a slight misstep, but this is another impressive addition to Segall’s canon.

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.

A voice for the times.

Heady and rooted in lustful disco, this album proves that the singer is a cornerstone of contemporary pop.

A certain blank-faced cool remains a part of their appeal, but it’s combined with some terrific songwriting.

A hoot.

The result, improbably, is their best set in years.

Having parked her dystopian allegories, it follows that Monáe now feels a little more like an artist in a crowded partying field. But she has earned this mainstream place. Moreover, she remains distinctive.

Musically we're in familiar folky, country territory, with long-time collaborator Mitchell Froom on production duties; the bluesy Snake Road and the ethereal string and French horn arrangement on Blind Eye are particularly good.

There are sturdy melodies on the quietly charming Cosoco or Cálculos Y Oráculos, but even an apparently conventional song is soon transformed by her edgy and intriguing off-kilter soundscapes.

Kitchen Sink is an album that slowly charms its way into your conscience, and is all the more pleasing for that.

Partygoers collapse or embarrass themselves; strings, clarinets and lush Harry Nilsson-style moments all add to the snapshot of an accomplished new voice.

It’s clear the fierce, weird and wonderful Biffy still have plenty of ambition.

His terrific second album is influenced by dawn motorbike rides rather than nocturnal regrets.

Fascinatingly ambitious, and often extremely fun, this debut finds pop in safe and thrilling hands.

An affecting album of depth and beauty.

One of the most exciting, assured hip-hop releases of the year, on which Princess Nokia asserts her claim to the throne.

She's irrepressible and the record sparkles with personality and elan, sealing her as a pop star worthy of the illustrious company she keeps.

Second Love is a benchmark smashed and an affecting portrait of a millennial lost soul.

It is a juicy, genre-crossing pop record ripe with the funk, which somehow combines Beyoncé’s Lemonade and St Vincent’s Masseduction with lashings of Lauryn Hill.

There’s a lovely lightness of touch to each of these 10 songs and a real lushness to Auerbach’s production. Malibu Man and Stand By My Girl are the standouts, but really you’d be hard pressed to find a weak link here.

If it’s revealing to find the Dead rendered succinctly, this collection’s sonic ambition is also exemplary.

In his songs, Ocean is not in control. In fact, he is attractively lost.

At its worst this understated quality [astral rambling] produces the drear muzak of "Gar", but at its best ... it's sublime.

We already know she’s good--but Sometimes… moves Barnett’s own story along with the easy percolation of one of her own songs, better produced and more varied than its predecessor.

Occasionally it sounds like the worst sort of shallow, awfully English electronic funk, but mostly the seductive cradle-rock rhythms drag you in deeper, like quicksand for the ears.

Because Because ends this gutsy, ambience-heavy record with joyous, Middle Eastern birdlike calls from Golding, calls that appear to answer themselves, thanks to Luthert.

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

Here, we have Hadreas’s desire to transcend his body and self--the no shape of the title--and glorious, inventive, shape-shifting music to match.

Thought-provoking words, lush instrumentation – what’s not to like?

The album’s pace never really recaptures the Primal Scream vibes of the single. But the album is not much poorer for this equanimity, with its former teen star, elevated to instant mega-fame in the 2010s, pondering past lives, present happiness and future uncertainty with some deft writing, a gauzy feel and the odd Beatles melody.

Ebbing and flowing with daydreams and a glossy but gritty pulse, Lost & Found is quietly, confidently remarkable.

Bradfield supplies his usual tender bombast. Some of it could be sketches for a musical, and there’s real intelligence and verve to the electronic, acoustic and orchestral arrangements, with surprising yet successful touches of prog and psychedelia.

The results are almost always convincing.

Clearly Harding is still having fun, and while it can make for a somewhat jarring listening experience, her playfulness adds depth to this charming record.

Here are grownup, weighty ruminations on devotion, sacrifice, separation and Covid, but The Tower and King of Sweden are also perfectly constructed pop.

It is deliriously easy to listen to, while hooking the mind, and never once taking the easy path through period pastiche.

Stith creates musical friction in a way that’s brilliantly compelling, and there are passages of calm here too. Summer Madness, in particular, shimmers with impressionistic beauty.

Sub-zero synths and crashing drums resound through this fine second album, while the powerful, tremulous voice of frontwoman Katie Stelmanis instils even minor sentiments with a sense of operatic foreboding.

Throughout, there is so much going on that it takes many listens to absorb everything. But persevere and a tour de force of botanical rock takes form.

Throughout, Nao balances some very aerated sulking about unsatisfactory relationships with defiantly old-school touches. You can hear everyone from Janet Jackson to Aaliyah in this confident artist’s deceptively dreamy tones.

She describes herself as a pianist who also sings, and when she’s doing both with her quartet there’s no one to touch her. For proof, listen here to Just You, Just Me, That’s All and Almost Like Being in Love.

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

Throughout, he remains the master of bluesy honky-tonking and surprising modulations that he always has been.

The backings are polished modern country, but Presley’s vocal and lyrical touch are exceptional on an impressive state-of-the-nation album.

If the concept might seem a bit Brexit, the execution is flawless and winningly witty.

She tips the listener headlong into the scrum that is your 20s, when self-doubt and growing self-assurance wrestle one another to the mat. The emotional wrangle is skilfully handled, knife-sharp, funny lyrics carving out beautifully structured songs – co-produced by Gartland – with never a note wasted, dancing nimbly across styles.

Peppered throughout with snippets of audio from old home videos, Nothing’s Real feels like a properly curated album, and one of the year’s best.

You have to assume Bowie is tackling myriad theatrical voices as Blackstar throws up one unsettling scenario after another, with little obvious connection other than unease and the outrageously good soundtrack in which they are set--weighty with percussion and genre fusions, saturated with instruments, bleak, and unexpectedly, towards the end, resolved.

Carry On sticks to familiar virtues; Mason's gravelly tones are set to rootsy guitars and Carey exercises a light touch.

The resulting album--Collins’s ninth solo effort--is a joy, brimming with ideas, but light of touch.

Still the most electrifying acoustic act around.

Sugar for the Pill is desolate in its gorgeousness, and Star Roving sounds anthemic, victorious, as it should.

The more he works dissonant elements into these songs, the more thrillingly unbalanced they feel.

Generally, these songs set out to strip away some of the artistry and leave Bird more exposed, and as the heart-swelling sentiments of the closing song Bellevue show, it suits him well.

It’s a curious mixture, but by no means a job lot. They all have something new to reveal.

Thanks to a propensity for insurrectionary non sequiturs that are big on abstract nouns but shakier on sense. But this is still their most exhilarating album since 2000's superlative Xtrmntr.

At its best this is the sound of a band rediscovering what made them so special in the first place.

This high-speed collision of apparent opposites works surprisingly well. Their second album is a relentless blur of ideas and rule-breaking.

With Lyme disease in abeyance, these 13 new songs fizz and rage with a mixture of girl-group sass (key track: Rather Not) and surf-garage buzz.