There is no right way to grieve, but it feels as though shock and sorrow have only made Sleater-Kinney seize their day and prioritise.

This third solo album is her most accessible yet.

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.

Maisha are no mere copyists, however; this is above all a celebration of young, eclectic Britain.

It’s made all the more thrilling by the fact that while Moctar is busy conjuring extraordinary sounds from his guitar, the rest of his band keep upping the song’s tempo. Pleasingly, he is no less affecting on his more gentle, acoustic material, as on stripped-back recent single Tala Tannam.

Frontman Brandon Flowers channels his Utah childhood on this lush, uncharacteristically reflective album.

It’s one of the year’s most riveting musical self-portraits, in which trap beats alternate with string sections, and demi-monde specifics with universal needs.

At first, newcomers to Yo La Tengo’s work might find the results irredeemably--even unconscionably--pleasant. Yet over this album’s full running time, there is something magnetically insidious about the way James McNew’s standup bass and Georgia Hubley’s percussion knit together material from sources as diverse as George Clinton and Hank Williams.

It’s a brave and successful reinvention.

An album whose title suggests razzmatazz but delivers Wagner’s customary laid-back profundity with well placed digital embellishments.

Not Everything That Counts Can Be Counted is a finely judged attack on Brexiters’ lies and their hidden agenda, while the mournful piano ballad Full English Brexit finds Bragg looking through the eyes of an elderly Leave voter.

Using samples for the first time, they have tweaked their sound in myriad ways, while still retaining the sense of proximity within spaciousness for which they are famous.

Amid the homespun (often leaden) renditions of Hank Williams, Ian & Sylvia et al is a clutch of nuggets, among them the bluesy Silent Weekend and the country moan Wild Wolf. A still mysterious, wondrous chapter in Dylanology.

The songs come with sharp parables about the corrupt state of Congo, or, like Le temps passé, with low-key charm. A winner.

Even more intriguing are the songs that go beyond quietly epic reportage into a kind of otherworldly state, in which Power’s own selfhood comes under attack--something of an occupational hazard in intense relationships, not least motherhood.

If he’s capable of writing stuff like this at 21 – and indeed of taking on the influences of the past without just regurgitating them – McKenna’s future looks intriguing. For the time being, though, he’s making the tricky business of shape-shifting and growing up in public seem painless.

Maturity suits the ever-articulate rapper, and his recollections of his early years as a Queensbridge hustler... have added resonance here.

Every track on We Are King putters and glides by quite smoothly. It’s only gradually you notice how complex this dream state actually is.

There is some slightly rote production: the Viva La Vida ripoff of Coping and the already passé tropical house of Missin’. But there’s still a masterly emotional range.

ATLWB feels like a step up, detailing an emotional journey that refreshes tired tropes with hard-won insight and musical self-assurance.

Throughout, there’s a disarming warmth and thoughtfulness, making for a pleasantly surprising late-career highlight.

Their third album has less of a home-produced feel though offers the same mainstream mash-up of indie-pop and dance, the beats and synth lines slightly more souped up.

It’s testament to the structure and variety of Once Twice Melody that it never lags over 18 tracks, its gradual release paradoxically validating the album format as one still worth surrendering to, totally.

This is arena-moulded rock-rave, rather than the unhinged, roofless futurism of their 90s albums, and it’s glorious, dumb fun.

The bull horn power of Odetta and Bessie Smith’s sly blues are other touchstones on an agile, emotional record.

The best surprise of all, in an autumn in which Beyoncé's closest competitors--Gaga, Katy Perry and Miley Cyrus--made underperforming bids for the throne, is how thoroughly assured, immersive and substantial this album is.

As a whole, the album could do with slightly more counterbalance to the several anthemic tracks, but the delicate final song, Stillness in Woe, is a welcome, dreamy reprieve.

This diverse, engaging and immensely likable collection plays at least as well on headphones as on the dancefloor.

Wild Flag sees Brownstein reunited with S-K drummer Janet Weiss, plus Helium's Mary Timony and keyboard player Rebecca Cole in an effervescent celebration of the fun of being in a band.

Not to Disappear adds strong new strings to Daughter’s bow.

While it is excellent in places, Sideways to New Italy doesn’t quite rise to the same heights as its predecessor.

It all adds up to yet another winning set from a band still to release a subpar album in a 25-year career.

A brace of great tunes make the case: Rhododendron nods at Jonathan Richman’s Roadrunner, somehow making wildflowers sound gloriously disreputable. Saga, meanwhile, is a traumatised ballad that channels David Bowie, but with acoustic guitars and horns.

I Love You, Honeybear is actually an album that reaffirms your faith in the transformative powers of love.

This follow-up, an intoxicated, stylistically varied stretch of rigid drum beats, repeated riffs and odes to melancholy, doesn't hide its influences either.

Reason to Smile brings to mind Ms Dynamite’s 2002 Mercury-winning A Little Deeper : era-defining works that blend hip-hop with neo-soul and jazz, and storytelling that paints the Black British experience with the finest of brushes.

As on Power’s previous albums, there is a delicious tension between the ethereal succour offered by her voice and the turmoil these thrumming songs are processing. Often, wordless emoting is the only solution; Power’s tones flow like starlings above her mantric guitar and that of her partner and collaborator Peter Broderick.

It is fractured, offbeat, at times grating, yet contains some of the most achingly beautiful music recorded this year.

Her lyrics can be oblique and occasionally ungainly. But her voice--soaring, delicate--brings vulnerability and heat to this vision of a post-human world.

Only the uncharacteristically bitter Better Than That feels out of place on a set steeped in introspection.

This fifth album is arguably his most measured, setting his supple vocals to acoustic, subtly innovative arrangements.

His first album as Neon Indian was sun-struck and woozy; the mood, on the follow-up, has grown a little darker and on "Future Sick" the wooziness veers into nausea. Which makes the sunnier moments, when they come, all the more heightened.

The tunes attest that she’s not spreading her talents too far and wide.

It swings. It grooves. It’s not bogged down by a self-consciously poetic concept. And it feels like a record rather than a showcase, anchored by the production work of Simz’s childhood friend Inflo.

The album pulses with nervy energy. None of the new tracks outshine those we’ve already heard, though Numbers, produced by Pharrell Williams, comes exuberantly close.

Impossible not to like.

Pilbeam’s second album feels like a logical progression from her 2019 debut, Keepsake, a minor success in her home country. Where Giving the World Away sees a great leap forward, however, is with its lyrics.

Radiohead have long trafficked in existential dread and political anger, and in a wider sense of twitchy bereftness that bends to fit any number of scenarios – their very own aural shade of Yves Klein blue, maybe, just a little more bruised. This arresting ninth album is bathed in it.

Yet another reliably great outing, full of intriguing plot developments, yet in faithful keeping with White's previous output.

Hive Mind--their mainstream-facing fourth outing--offers up another set of come-hither sounds whose confidence has taken another leap.

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

Only woolly lyrics stop the album achieving the sharp quality of its influences.

It is, of course, too long. But its peripatetic nature means you can easily assemble your own collection from its 21 tracks. Tense, urgent Broad Day, eerie Night Vision, or feisty duets Fine As Can Be and Princess Cut should all make that list.

At times, the whirl of ideas threatens to spin out of control, but more often, as on CIRCLONT6A, they cohere thrillingly. A welcome return.

Swift’s fifth record is a bold, gossipy confection that plays to her strengths--strengths which pretty much define modern pop, with its obsession with the private lives of celebrities and its premium on heightened emotion.

Menace and rapture are beautifully balanced in Cross’s minimalist alt rock.

Nashville-based duo Joy Williams and John Paul White have crafted a bewitching debut album of sparse, spectral Americana.

Held together by Grande’s skyscraping voice, Dangerous Woman throws a lot at the wall and, brilliantly, most of it sticks.

Alexander is better channelling any introspection into songs that reflect the morning after, with late album highlight Make It Out Alive giving Night Call a narrative arc via a post-big-night-out soother.

If some of Young’s ballads feel more conventional, the jazz-tinged Pretty in Pink reveals an artist who questions, but ultimately knows who she is.

If Swimming felt contemplative, Circles feels even more like a singer-songwriter album than a hip-hop joint – a tendency most likely amplified by Brion’s treatments.

Carner’s scuffed, wry flows grab you by the feels from the get-go and do not relinquish their grip.

Ultimately, Goon is a very good album, one further elevated by its terrific tale of redemption. Here, victory is belatedly extracted from the digestive tract of defeat.

The decade this outfit have spent in other bands pays off in a record that’s raucous and fun, incisive and – as it winds to a close – profoundly heartfelt, as vocalist James Smith apologises disgustedly for the sins of British foreign policy.

Home recordings, small group experiments and the spoken credo of I Am an Instrument make for a rich, eventful ride.

[Thile’s] vocal style may verge on the eccentric, but it’s perfectly in tune, and it soon becomes obvious that he and Mehldau are well matched in their musicality.

Here, short sharp songs such as Get It Right could be about love or the perfectionist’s creative process; likewise Fokus, another deliriously pacey romp.

While Cerebral Hemispheres won’t win him new fans, it makes clear that, at 57, house’s great survivor still has much to give.

Even when the tempo drops, the quality doesn’t, the rich imagery of Trick Out the Truth being a case in point. Effortlessly classy.

At 20 tracks and 71 minutes, it’s perhaps a little long, but until the next Wilco album comes along, this will do just fine.

Clark’s falsetto, reminiscent of Caribou’s Dan Snaith or executive producer Thom Yorke, is used carefully as a texture that neither distracts nor dominates, counterbalancing the occasionally abrasive electronics.

A triumphant excursion.

Their debut album is a delight, from the uncomplicated bluesy strut of Tickin' Bomb to the brass inflections on the knowingly tongue-in-cheek Hail Hail.

Grande laid bare may well be seen as a stopgap in her canon, using taboo to checkmate her past trauma, but it does pull off the rare feat of at least sounding effortless.

Mostly, Popular Problems presents Cohen’s wry, wracked recitations against almost ascetic backings overseen by Patrick Leonard, famed for his work with Madonna.

Its [The second track's] eerily distorted saxophone, a nod to Low, takes six minutes to surface, but then takes centre stage, a mournful motif subtly evolving over the next quarter of an hour. The multilayered title track, meanwhile, is a less immediate drone, but proves hypnotic well within its 17-minute timeframe.

Staples’s new album is much more personal and accessible than anything he’s put out before.

Unhitched from a major label, he has opted for a starker, more contemplative approach and sounds the better for it.

A deceptively sweet-sounding set which, once you cotton on to the pianist’s way of treating a few mainly well-known tunes, is absolutely absorbing.

The emphatic playing of Hutchings’ more exhortatory bands (chiefly Sons of Kemet) has given way to a more impressionistic delicacy.

Röyksopp are on top form here, and when Robyn returns to her exuberant self on the title track, expressing mixed feelings about having insatiable appetites, the effect is electrifying.

Confetti is more potent than 2018’s spread-betting LM5.

Their fifth album is rich and intoxicating: billows of brass, sinuous guitar hooks and squiggles of hammond organ bubble up pungently from the stew.

Here On In, which with its motorik rhythm sounds most like the Horrors, is the only weak link on a gorgeously immersive album.

You get the feeling that Goat could just keep this sinuous groove going forever.

The third album since Shirley Collins’s renaissance at 81 turns out to be the finest.

From the Sea comprises new versions of old songs, most of which sound just as powerful without Woolcock's arresting images.

A welcome return to form.

This latest iteration is above par, as tongue-in-cheek and wise as it is acerbic and frill-free.

This, finally, is the stuff people have been waiting a young lifetime to hear. It more than passes muster.

It’s far more satisfying musically, however, working as a good showcase for Jason Williamson’s stream-of-consciousness rants and Andrew Fearn’s unshowy but effective beats, from the frantic spleen-venting of 2014’s Jolly Fucker to the menace of last year’s OBCT.

No longer just parochial rabble rousers, Idles are moving on up.

Many affecting tracks detail the sharknado of outrage and bewilderment in Blake’s trademark delicate soprano, offset occasionally by well-chosen collaborators (SZA, or rappers JID and SwaVay) or startlingly pitch-shifted vocals.

There are no cathartic singalongs in the album’s downbeat cello or swelling drones. Its relatability stems from somehow managing to recreate the specific texture of loneliness.

Located somewhere between a TED talk, an episode of VH1’s Storytellers and a confessional, it’s a hugely nourishing listen – not least because Springsteen, the boss of righteous stadium bluster, unveils a self-deprecating sense of humour.

Miss Anthropocene is a deep, dark trip – shame the climate crisis bit isn’t also part of Grimes’s wild imagination.

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

Alive and Concert Pitch are deliriously upbeat confections, but a whole album in that vein could be capable of inducing dental caries at 50 paces. Thankfully, the second half finds them in more restrained--but no less winning--mood.