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.

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.

This sixth album is well judged, treating eight old songs to varied arrangements and adding a brace of originals.

It’s the warmth and personality of her voice that rings particularly true.

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

Slighter songs such as the Britpoppy My Gruesome Loving Friend or the trip-hoppy Barefoot aren’t as arresting, and the new-agey lyrics coupled with Isabel Munoz-Newsome’s impassioned, highly mannered vocals can grate. But overall, producer Dan Carey smooths their varied styles into a surprisingly magnetic debut.

They hit a James Brown groove on Bamako, use fiddle on the Ali Farka-style Hometown, and let loose a children’s choir on One Colour, a delightful closer to a joyous, eclectic album.

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

This encounter with three outstanding Malian musicians dazzles, however, partly because the quartet hush their chamber strings and let the African trio strut their formidable stuff.

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

His second solo outing since quitting the Old Crow Medicine Show brings vivacity to some well-worn standards--The Cuckoo Bird, When My Baby Left Me, John Henry – thanks to a voice that’s young but weathered, strong but eerie, and comes backed by intricate banjo and guitar picking.

Revisiting her childhood terror of nuclear war (“Protect and Survive” et al) is perhaps fighting yesterday’s battles; otherwise, a flawless outing.

Streisand’s powerful delivery of simple, pointed lyrics (“Facts are fake and friends are foes / And how the story ends nobody knows”) convinces, even on the gamiest heart-tuggers.

The follow-up is even better, delivered with a greater confidence and urgency, and featuring a handful of songs that almost match up to his late-70s output.

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

Pick of the bunch is Obongjayar, whose ode to the ongoing cataclysm befalling black youths, Dancing in the Dark, gives Dark Matter its moral high ground. Best of all is 2 Far Gone, where Ezra Collective’s Joe Armon-Jones arpeggiates magnificently on keys while Boyd shakes the rafters.

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.

Flu Game’s bouncy productions tread a nimble line between trap beats, international party music and London forms. If these 16 tracks sound like end-to-end bangers (three have been hits already), the slight downsides are also familiar.

A special evening, but one containing both chasms and confluences.

An ambitious, accomplished piece of work.

A well-polished gem – welcome back.

The result is an exceptional album that centres joy and community, radiates positivity and youthful abandon, and could well be the one to cross over to the big league.

While the scattered poetics of Anna Mieke’s lyrics are indeed dreamlike, the mesmeric artistry of her second album, Theatre, means that Mieke’s images, her sense memories, start to feel like your own.

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.

Integrated Tech Solutions is another assured slam dunk: a loose concept album about our dystopian tech consumerism with bouncy retro production that crackles with vim.

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.

Sometimes it feels more like an oral history project, with first-hand spoken-word accounts by Liam Bailey (the title track), or Brown’s appreciation of her family on Just Be. Mostly, though, she succeeds in channelling her anger, sadness and defiance, all the while conveying gratitude for the richness of her Caribbean roots.

An innovative homage to tradition.

The restlessness is counterweighted by wit and songwriting power.

An overarching concern on Petals… is how Williams constructs a workable new femininity free from her old tomboy identity in Paramore. The blooming metaphor is, as a result, slightly overplayed throughout. ... Although there are a couple of low-key co-writes, Williams and York remain the organising creatives, and Williams sounds both free and in control.

The end result finds elegance trumping excitement.

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

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

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

More immediate songs such as In the Same Room are ineffably breezy, while other tracks illustrate her handle on ancient Greece (This is Ekstasis) and the uncommon control she has over textures and motifs, atmospheres and vocoders.

Pleasingly, it’s well worth the long wait, in large part because the realisation of these songs feels more expansive than her earlier, more pared-back work, with Mellotron, synths – even drums – appearing alongside the more familiar acoustic guitar.

The songs often lean more towards the arty end of the mainstream, losing touch slightly with the startling radicalism of Sudan Archives’ early sound.

Frontwoman Tina Halladay’s voice appears to have only one setting: overblown, lung-bursting holler.

There are beautiful moments.

There are moments, as on Every Child Begins the World Again, so musically numinous and epochally sad that Lambchop approaches Nick Cave’s recent work.

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.

Brown’s storytelling is as witty as ever, with pungent bars that pop like pimples, spattering tracks with quotable filth. His best work by a distance.

The most country thing about this body of work is the hard-lived wisdom it offers up. The love songs are very grown-up.

Ultimately Styles is more concerned with mood than minutiae. On Harry’s House he’s created a welcoming place to stay.

The album’s title speaks of urgency; its nearest song, Don’t Look Now, details the unwanted advances that bedevil a model. But the episode twinkles a little too prettily for the subject matter.

The Navigator might be full of site-specific anger and yearning, but like its predecessors, it is incredibly easy on the ear. The songs just flow--slinky, sad or elegant in their own ways.

Dose Your Dreams is a dizzying mix of styles, often within the same song.

This is hardcore music for a generation weaned on rave and grime, jazz’s cutting edge. The comet isn’t coming, it’s arrived.

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

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.

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

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 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.

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

While it’s a nice retro bagatelle, a regrettable lack of originality really hampers Foil Deer.

Previously unheard on any other archival release, these versions genuinely add to his already considerable myth.

Case/lang/veirs have hit upon a sound that is gentle yet resonant, and wrestled out of three fiercely independent careers, an alt-country record of depth and scope.

A bravura statement from an artist still sounding fresh three decades into his career.

A pastoral, wistful brand of psychedelia holds sway throughout this absorbing record.

A fierce polemic that impresses and frustrates in equal measure.

On first listen it’s a disparate amalgam of sounds, but a couple of plays in, what becomes more apparent is the mellow singing, the catchy melodies and a sense of playfulness.

Half wallow, half messy I-don’t-need-you self-care, Sour is the perfect first breakup soundtrack from a hugely promising new talent.

A voice for the times.

The music is set to do-not-disturb, but Jones has found a nuanced, emotive way to discuss loss, lies, regret, indecision and depression, along with the value of protest and defiance.

It’s by no means a comfortable listen, but it is their most intriguing and fully rounded album to date.

The balance between pop and experimentalism is very fine but Young Fathers strike it with exuberant ease.

These arrangements are never overloaded, the brass remains stately and discreet. If Reid never quite poleaxes you with her insights, this remains a thoroughly lovely record.

This is an album that (once again) quietly demands to be heard, and enjoyed, as an inseparable whole.

While All Melody’s textures are magnificent, plick-plocking susurrations, his treatment of the human voice is like a gash in an otherwise beauteous canvas.

At 12 tracks, though, Fear Fun could do with a good trim.

A bravura showcase.

Though not as affecting as the original, if we’re talking about club bangers, Kehlani makes it their own.

This is an album that wrestles with the sisyphean slog of remaining engaged – with love, with work, with life. And you can dance to it.

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

Though it’s all new, the weirdness of ancient folk is ever present; he’s a true original.

This harsh, noise-fuelled musical heartbeat is a thrilling new phase, cementing Ćmiel as a fearless creative voice.

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.

The subject matter, then, is unrelenting. But Anohni’s impassioned delivery succeeds in making ecstatic music out of it, carried along by propulsive soundbeds; music that is equal to the apocalypse.

The trio remain in a tradition of avant gardists such as Sun Ra, Alice Coltrane and Can, but totally of the now. One of 2019’s best.

This is an album full of emotional ambushes.

There are tunes aplenty, making this second Protomartyr album a surprisingly pleasurable dose of swaggering anomie.

While there’s little wrong with the songwriting, only Love Is the Key By the Sea and Beautiful Morning linger in the memory, the latter coming on like a nature lover’s remix of the Jam’s romantic English Rose.

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

These nine new songs see the band’s gift for melody and grasp of pop’s dynamics tweaked into transcendent shapes by the late house master Philippe Zdar and xx producer Rodaidh McDonald.

While it’s an emotional listen, I Came From Love is not a difficult record, musically.

If the interplay between the band’s instruments makes gleeful mincemeat of genre, singing guitarist Isaac Wood’s equally remarkable lyrics regularly float to the top of the mix. Half-spoken, half-sung, they riff on granular scene references (“I told you I loved you in front of Black Midi”) and Gen-Z witticisms, but pack in plenty of timeless tenderness and anomie.

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

Garbus's voice is jostled too much amid the hectic production to allow its personality to shine through and, with some notable exceptions (the call and response of Real Thing), hooks are hurried on before properly taking root.

The resulting album is rich in imagination, and--at times, most notably on Bull and Brando--surprisingly accessible

If these songs occasionally feel underwritten – many are brief, jazzy sketches that seem to wander in and meander back out again – they contrast pointedly with the overwritten, attention-deficit music crafted to punch out on today’s Spotify playlists. Sometimes all you need is a little tenderness.

Expectations are subverted, as when the opulence of the harpsichord is manipulated beyond recognition or a piercing shout infiltrates a rhythm. Since every composition holds this tension within its structure, it feels like an aesthetic choice rather than a gimmick. The more time you spend with Age Of, the more Lopatin’s instrumentations reveal depth.

Overall, it’s not as gleeful as their last one, but melodic light relief abounds, as on the Belinda Carlisle outtake that is It’s Not Living (If It’s Not With You). Those conclusions feel earned, not merely hashtagged.

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.

Every song is a wonder. It is unlikely Angels & Queens will inspire many imitators of its retro-future soul, its damaged doo-wop. It’s simply too good to be copied.

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.

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.

The Long Goodbye can feel heavy-handed: even those phoned-in messages from famous friends (Mindy Kaling, Asim Chaudhry) sound jarring. Ultimately, though, Ahmed delivers, offering up some clever writing on this powerful concept album.

No chance of paunchy homage here; lyrics cluttered with Munch, war and the Chartists and the tightly coiled energy of its best moments, such as Misguided Missile and instrumental closer Mayakovsky, suggest they are fronting up to middle age rather well.