Tthe magnificent Sugar weighs up the power of cliche while seeking its sweet reward; and America recoils in horror from, well, America. But the rest of the album returns to the spiritual and physical passions of previous, myth-heavy Stevens works; his penchant for classical and biblical allusions recalls Bob Dylan’s.

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

Two 10-minute pieces relegate song and vocals to second place behind ambitious but lumbering orchestration--producer Adrian McNally is, alas, no Gil Evans.

The atmosphere is one of glacial sultriness laced with small surprises (Creep’s horns; childhood self-recordings), but Tei Shi’s lyrics interrogate love and its permutations with elegance, and her South American heritage emerges on the Spanish-language Como Si.

Telling of new beginnings and lost love, the breeze in her voice and her easy-going melodies act as a smokescreen: these are often direct takes on pain.

A timely, arresting album.

The more direct songs work best – most notably the simmering Shadowbanned and the contrastingly carefree bonus track Juliefuckingette – but there is just as much to enjoy in the album’s hinterlands too.

This is an encouraging partial return to form from an underrated talent.

The quality tails off quite dramatically, with a string of unremarkable ballads closing the album, but this is still a pleasing return to something approaching their best.

Compared to the live versions you’ll find on YouTube, these studio takes lack the undersong of the concert hall, the beating pulse of the audience’s internal clocks, the blood-in-the-ballet-shoes of performance.

Bailey’s refusal to be pigeonholed artistically is admirable, but frustrating.

Gone are the meandering, proggy excesses of 2008's Real Emotional Trash, and in their place are sharper, melody-driven tracks that foreground Malkmus's distinctive oblique wit.

Tracks like Maker or Ndimakukonda boast compelling African instrumentation and cadences, putting significant stylistic space between Anjimile and Stevens. Throughout, the production – also by relative unknowns – is pin-sharp and generous.

At a time of such division, it’s a startlingly brave record and all the more necessary for it.

The record does what gospel should--lift you up.

Coyne’s quivering voice still captures the frailty of the human spirit, and his band have made songs that will draw tears from frazzled audiences until the Earth slides into the sea. Yet too many of his death-obsessed drug lyrics are lamely predictable and uninvolving, and swaddling his vocals in effects until he sounds like Rob Brydon’s “man in a box” doesn’t help.

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

Bleeds opens with a tirade against the free market labels pretty much everybody as bastards. That bitterness resurfaces elsewhere on the album but the urgency, so bracingly misanthropic on Hard Bastards, starts flagging halfway through.

This, their [Carroll and producer James McMillan] fourth album together, displays a characteristic mixture of deceptive simplicity and emotional depth.

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

These songs about maturity and internal toughness often move in mysterious ways, leaving plenty of space for Feist’s probing guitar work and an atmosphere that really breathes.

The slower songs are this album’s great strengths: the magnificent Czech One, Lonely Blue and Logos all deal rivetingly with relationships (“her solvent’s dissolved”), while more guitar-oriented tunes such as Dum Surfer recall Jamie T.

Standout tracks such as Special Girl, with its intricate percussion, offer an insight into the intriguing, playful sonic flavours Clark could be exploring more thoroughly.

Perpetual Motion People confirms Furman as no mere white male navel-gazer, but flammable phosphorus.

Lemon Glow is particularly engrossing, a curdled night sky of a tune whose constituent parts weave in and out of focus. Black Car provides even more enthralling unease, where the various elements become unexpectedly off-kilter and 3D. ... Elsewhere, though, it’s business as usual.

Sonically this is, unsurprisingly, a masterful album: echoey, soulful and old-school. What’s more, it finally feels as if Black Milk’s rapping is catching up.

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).

Every song possesses passion and gravitas, making Hallelujah Anyhow a spiritual descendant of Van Morrison’s Veedon Fleece.

A few tracks can pass by in a pleasant period fug. Stay with him, though, and the curveballs become more obvious.

Ultimately, Heaven Knows needed to move beyond PinkPantheress’s TikTok formula to break new ground, but is still stuck in the sounds of the past.

Their fifth album sidesteps the rolling, electric style that's made them world-conquerors for a return to acoustic campfire camaraderie.

It isn’t quite as good as 1979’s extraordinary Broken English, but the likes of Falling Back and Sparrows Will Sing are the equal of anything she’s done since.

The result is a fearless and powerful debut.

Bondy gives his songs plenty of room to breathe, the results being quite often spellbinding.

What rescues Oshin from being a set of aqueous dream-pop search engine tags is the band's latent Krautrock bent. Past Lives and Human really could go on for another couple of minutes, such is the lock of their grooves.

This second album finds them in incendiary form.

A welcome time warp.

If anything, the interplay between Jarrett, bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Jack DeJohnette is freer and more beguiling than ever.

For all their wiggy sonics, Thee Oh Sees rarely lose their way, and these nine tracks scamper along, unfettered by genre hang-ups and aided by guest guitarist Mikal Cronin.

Newly recruited producer Jeff Tweedy brings fresh textures to a mix of bluesy rock, delicate acoustica and skirling electric folk, but mostly he stands back and lets a master do his stuff.

While this seventh album continues the band’s slow move away from the anthemic drama of The Seldom Seen Kid, there’s a richness of ideas here that rewards repeated listening.

Omar brings an elegant touch to Herbie Hancock’s Butterfly, and snappy vitality to opener Rules. Robert Mitchell’s piano shines among a supporting trio, and Pine, whether in contemplation or post-bop flurry, shows why he’s still top dog.

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

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

Noticeably more cheerful than on 2018’s heartbroken Ruins. ... Best of all, though, is Angel, a gorgeously upbeat lament to lost love (“I love you, even if you don’t love me”) that recalls Fleetwood Mac at their most radio-friendly.

It doesn’t quite match the standard of late-career high point The Liberty of Norton Folgate (2009), but the album is not without its moments.

But where its predecessor was louche and hook-driven, this fourth studio album skulks deeper into her psyche, its occasional moments of catharsis upended by sombre piano interludes and bleak lyricism.

It’s a wisely curated selection--despite these not being Dylan’s lyrics, it’s impossible to listen to the likes of September of My Years and not hear the resonance of autobiography.

Easy-going vintage soul that rolls magnificently on the ear.

Too often, though, style triumphs over substance, and too many songs flail in their own restrained elegance. Worse, the hidden track featuring a child mangling the alphabet is painfully self-indulgent rather than cute.

Throughout, there are echoes of the rootsier moments from Give Out But Don’t Give Up, but with the earlier swagger replaced by vulnerability. It’s as pleasing as it is unexpected.

Yet beneath the noise, the songs seem more fully realised, more memorable, than on their at times fragmentary debut.

Country-rocking backing band the Jayhawks are on top form, and the duet with Karen Grotberg, A Place in Your Heart, is affecting. The cod-Native American field holler of Change for Change and the shuffling, jazzy I’ve Heard That Beat Before are highlights.

Part of the pleasure of covers albums is comparing the original with the nuanced update; this album misses that moment when the three Horsepeople wrap their dulcet pipes and jazzy arrangements around an ancient, oaky institution. The past, though, is still very much present.

Flamagra is too considered, burdened, and what were once cosmic, mind-expanding polyrhythms come over as inconsequential and annoying.

Bradley makes more like Al Green than Brown, mobilising a kind of weary, vintage warmth as he repeatedly tackles heartbreak in the company of the Daptone Horns.

Apart from the more contemporary dystopian digitals of Golden, the feel throughout is ancient and enigmatic. But these lute tones and classical Arabic music figures are rendered digitally; the cloister garden is an interior dream-space.

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 welcome return to form.

There’s some of The Upsetter’s fever dreams in African Starship, and Kill Them Dreams Money Worshippers has a fiery strut, but sometimes Rainford sounds like a posthumous tribute, with Perry a wraithlike absence haunting the spaces of his exhumed past.

Peacemaker balances its polished Nashville musicianship with uncanny textures, resulting in a record so atmospheric you’d swear you could hear the rustle of her white prairie dress in the breeze.

They are far more interesting when they let in some light, most notably on The Hum’s standout, the simmering Retreat.

Burna Boy’s fourth album lands in this powerful spotlight, continuing the singer’s boundary-hopping mixture of laid-back Caribbean swagger, Fela Kuti swing and multilingual communiques on a range of concerns.

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

There’s no filler among these 10 songs, from the summer-breezily defiant Silver, via the grungy swing and swagger of Brass Beam, to the rueful Belly-ish balladry of A Little More.

Arcade Fire's fourth album is pure death disco: a pulsating, electronic work, heavy of theme but light on its feet.

Subtlety is, of course, the first casualty in the stampede for the folk mosh pit, and singer Jon Boden sometimes strains too hard for drama, lapsing into hamminess on murder ballad Greenwood Side.

As this bold magpie of an album flies past, its swagger falters occasionally as genre pastiches gain the upper hand.

As with their previous work, it transcends easy genre-pigeonholing, but imagine a Radiohead you can dance to and you’re getting close.

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

This adds welcome colour to the xx cinematic universe, but it’s no blockbuster.

If there are no huge surprises here, Further offers a punchy synthesis of country croon, psych-rock riffs and snappy songwriting that proves South Yorkshire’s stoic son has plenty of miles left to run.

These punishing, three-dimensional soundscapes connect 70s No Wave with the mischievous end of contemporary digital production: quite a feat.

A certain wooziness has always been the point of the Baltimore duo’s music but at times its gauzy aimlessness drifts dangerously close to torpor. More often, though, it is subtly tethered to some elegant, insidious hooks.

All these highs and lows pass in an unvarying, mid-paced indie-rock fug, with little to hold the attention outside her gossamer delivery of candour and insight.

Sprawling. ... Engrossing, audacious record.

This is Wagner's second album, and that was the backstory of her 2012 self-titled debut. This follow-up is no less enigmatic.

This is a kaleidoscopic, hard-hitting record designed for the feet as much as the synapses, healing by frequencies.

This is a well-crafted collection that could maybe do with a couple more heaters, but will keep the wider audience he picked up with Conflict of Interest happy.

There's enough crunch to their hooky electropop to dispel accusations of unwarranted hype.

Things feel all the sweeter knowing how hard they fought to get here: through relationship troubles and against the systemic racism Jay alludes to throughout. It might lack urgency, but it’s an accomplished, glossy finale.

This album is, without a doubt, a big, glitchy, swooning, hyper-modern declaration of love.

Fresh Blood refines the Spacebomb MO, darkening themes and expanding their range.

There are few genres White Denim won’t disrupt, and this wide-ranging record touches upon many of them.

Lush, cavernous record.

Borderline silly at times, it is nonetheless a carefully crafted piece of work with a distinctive sound.

Standouts such as Run a Red Light and No One Knows We’re Dancing provide clubland demimonde vignettes, while a number of expansive, impressionistic sound-beds allow for more matter-of-fact lyrics about loss (Lost) and cutting oneself some slack (When You Mess Up). Less memorable are the songs – like Caution to the Wind - where the two coast pellucidly along.

Halsey is less a pop chameleon than a musical magpie and Manic is a pristinely produced album that sounds a bit like everything you know, but better (Still Learning is a banger, like Evanescence with steelpan).

Bon Iver have imperceptibly moved from requesting close listening to requiring it, and i,i spins a mesmerising web of superficially insubstantial yet intensely majestic music. Listen closely and you can hear the language of pop being redrafted in real time.

Even the weaker moments are elevated by a raw vocal that growls with bubbling emotion. Love’s trials and tribulations never sounded so exquisite.

The 50-something from Brooklyn is her own diva and sounds at once wounded, defiant and exuberant. Producer-bassist Bosco Mann runs a tight band with its own tricks and which purrs along so joyously the influences fade to leave a core of unadulterated soul.

Every rhythmic lurch and stylistic shift, though, remains in the service of the band's greater groove, giving these 10 tracks an ease that belies their ferocious complexity.

Small Town Heroes may mourn victims of violence but it is emphatically a record stuffed with good times.

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

Georgia turns everyday emotions into exotic and enticing vignettes.

Moments such as the opening melody of This Belongs to You or the gradual unfolding of Born are just plain elegant. There’s a similar quality about saxophonist Chris Potter’s playing, and all four are so relaxed in each other’s company that everything flows beautifully.

Landlord is fantastic, crafted, big-stage trap with the lissom, conversational feel of a mixtape.

It is, ultimately, unfair to parse a Rawlings album looking for traces of Welch. It’s wisest to thrill to an Americana record you can howl along to in the car until your heart feels replenished, to guitar work that stands among the finest.