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.

If the grain of this album is purposely rougher-hewn, with boxy acoustics trading off with the odd sub-bass boom, the songwriting remains complex and elevated.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Yet another dial-shifting record.

Here, beautiful songs are played with discretion and near-telepathy; a luminosity hovers above the slow miniatures.

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.

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

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.

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

Skeleton Tree shares sonic DNA with its predecessor, 2013’s Push the Sky Away, but there is something inward-facing here, something of the solo, piano Nick Cave, or of The Boatman’s Call.

The song structures of the demos here don’t differ radically from those on the finished album, but shorn of the string section and piano that embellished the final versions there is a more intimate feel.

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.

If Disc 1 has more room for unreleased fun – a terrifically roiling live take on the sprawling Last Trip to Tulsa, a standout from Young’s self-titled debut album - Disc 6 doubles down on introspection.

Given that these songs are really, really good, you pity the competition when Griff: The Opus finally lands.

Combining the sounds and textures of jazz quartet and string quartet is a tricky business, and there are moments here when the two seem about to come unstuck.

It certainly gets close to chaos at times, but these live shows often did. From that point of view at least, it's truly authentic.

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.

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

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

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.

Over eight CDs (or a big download) is the story of one of the most intriguing partnerships in British music: the silvery folk-rock duo Richard and Linda Thompson. It is a tale worth retelling – and shelling out for.

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.

Only at two or three points in the album does it feel like Ocean is actively courting heavy radio play.... The rest of the album, however, feels too offbeat and diffuse to trouble the top end of the charts. Is this a bad thing? Not at all.

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

Dave’s Mercury prize- and Brit award-winning debut, Psychodrama, became a classic overnight; now it has a rival for introspection, operatic quality and wordplay. Tender piano arrangements, unadulterated storytelling and sermon-like verses flood this topical album that is part confessional poetry, part social commentary.

There’s no shortage of killer hooks deeper into the album – a commitment to bangers matched by BLK’s wise words about personal damage and heartbreak on songs such as the excellent title track.

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.

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.

This resulting work is hefty enough to tick industry boxes, and just weird enough to intrigue; a qualified success.

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.

Lamar's major-label debut, probably the year's most significant hip-hop release, proves his talent to be as prodigious as his online output.

The rapport among the five of them, especially between Miles and Shorter, is beyond belief. The sound quality is excellent throughout.

Dazzling.

These sour notes aside [Energy and Heated], Renaissance is the feelgood manifesto that puts all the other post-pandemic party albums in the shade, a song cycle crammed full of homages to the historic continuum of Black dancefloor therapy.

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.

Arcade Fire producer Markus Dravs brings depth and heft, whether spotlighting each player or drowning everything in a deluge of guitars. Singer Ellie Rowsell steps up with some wonderfully shapeshifting vocals.

Overall, Guts is perhaps missing Sour’s big pop moments, but as a snapshot of an upturned life it’s consistently fascinating.

The reversals in the lives of African Americans are front and centre; this most conscious of hip-hop crews remain exemplary bellwethers.

It treads a fine line between swashbuckling versatility and a lack of cohesion. Versatility largely wins out.

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.

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.

It feels like he’s aiming for a 21st-century version of classic albums such as Sign ‘O’ the Times and What’s Going On and, on astonishing, soul-scraping laments This World Is Drunk and Kings Fall, he almost gets there.

Bleak but compelling.

Corin Tucker’s yelp remains a thing of wonder, Brownstein’s lead guitar never takes the easy option and Janet Weiss’s drums anchor all the thrilling unease.

Bridgers’s second album under her own name, Punisher moves forward confidently from her 2017 debut, Stranger in the Alps.

Frontline and My Family are among the best singles of the year, and there are three more just as good here.

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.

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.

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

Even when battering his piano strings with a toilet brush, Frahm creates something mesmerising.

Equal parts funky electro throwback and prog chanson monster, St Vincent's fourth album feels like the culmination of a trajectory from the margins to centre stage with a minimum of intellectual loss.

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.

The only downside is that Kiwanuka could have been even braver.

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.

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.

Even though these arrangements are not gratuitous, and All Mirrors is beautifully wrought, it never quite devastates. More weirdness would have helped, and less default goth-pop. Strangely, Olsen’s voice gets a bit lost in the mix, a little too ill-defined, atmospheric and understated to stand up to the operatics surrounding her.

As woozy and restless as these multipart productions are, she packs in plenty of sticky stuff: melodies, hooks, insistent figures.

A wonderfully inventive creation.

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.

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.

Like its predecessors, Big Fish Theory is an album that grabs you by the lapels with its urgency while slapping you round the ears with its sound design.

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

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.

Crutchfield rides a middle road here. Same producer yet different band; same sprightly Americana vibe yet more emotionally placid than its predecessor, which recounted a troubled reckoning with her newfound sobriety.

It’s safe to say that though big sis Beyoncé has run her close recently, she’s once more the most intriguing Knowles sibling.

With all this shiny surface comes depth, too – the hard-won emotional content of these songs is all Mvula’s own.

There are “interludes” and “intermissions” aplenty; the blissed-out Beltway has shades of The Girl from Ipanema in its melody, and Binz is as catchy as a playground clapping game--but both are over before you know it. Exit Scott (referring to another street in Houston) uses a gospel sample that could--and would, in the past--have been stretched out to make a hit single, but here it is, just one minute and one second long.

Bright Green Field has a hurtling energy, each song shifting restlessly, repeatedly in style and pace. It’s a shame, then, that the vocals of drummer and lyricist Ollie Judge so often pull it back to earth.

From the noisy low end of lead track Broken Man, through Flea’s prowling industrial pop and the superlative goth jazz, Bond-like theme of Violent Times, it’s a loud and unapologetically varied work.

Every Head album is a gem, but Dear Scott – named after a note-to-self by F Scott Fitzgerald, down on his luck – has a particularly deep internal lustre.

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.

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.

These 16 tracks (17 on the deluxe version) play out quite pleasurably in their entirety, the joins between Swift, Dessner and Antonoff ultimately only of niche interest. But Swift’s powerful songs reach their climaxes with bittersweet orchestrations, rather than blows to the solar plexus or a ringing in the ears. Everything hovers; little truly lands.

While her pure, clear voice is as expressive and engaging as ever, Valentine is more accessible and less interesting.

Normally, you’d roll your eyes at such breathtaking derivations, but Marling’s record is so mellifluous and listenable, in part thanks to the unobtrusive string arrangements by Bob Moose.

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.

30 overreaches for the rafters a little too often. But the sophisticated interplay of Adele’s nuanced vocal and the Garner piano sample here lingers long in the mind.

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

Bad As Me's 13 tracks fairly rip along, alerting a new generation that there are few as fine as Waits.

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.

Accessible but challenging, Masseduction thumbs its nose at genre while Clark’s choice of producer--Jack Antonoff (Taylor Swift, Lorde)--roots it firmly in pop; it is, after all, an attempt to jump Clark from cult act to mass seductress. It’s working.

There’s a sharpness in these songs that still unsettles. It’s there in Crutchfield’s vocals, louder and fiercer than before, and on songs such as Fire, which is also difficult to love. Her lyrics, tackling subjects including addiction and self-hatred, often feel too verbose, but they become surprising and refreshing on closer listen.

All of this grandeur is punctuated by shimmering orchestral interludes, the plummy voice of Emma Corrin (AKA The Crown’s Princess Diana) as Simz’s life coach, and hard-hitting tracks of another kind, where the artist examines her motivations (Ovation) and her relationship with her absent father on the heart-wrenching I Love You, I Hate You.

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.

As several of her songs attest, music can be consolation in the most troubled times, and Big Time is a silky balm.

It’s unflinching stuff, though Taylor rings the changes musically.

Prince’s tightly controlled production style, down to his proteges’ smallest inflections – the Time’s Gigolos Get Lonely Too is a spot-the-difference exercise – also means there’s little that differs substantially from its more polished released version, delicious as it is to hear him sing Martika’s blissful Love… Thy Will Be Done.

What’s never in doubt is the authenticity of the “missteps and redemption” detailed in its songs, or their engaging, personal delivery.

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.

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.

Each of the tracks released from Designer so far has been engrossing – The Barrel, with its opaque lyricism (“show the ferret to the egg”), the equally gnomic Fixture Pixture, with its Air bassline.

Magdalene is a much starker, more emotionally direct album than 2014’s LP1, most noticeably in twigs’s voice, which moves with sleek power from delicate operatic acrobatics to muscular intimacy. It’s also bracingly frank.

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.

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