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.

Throughout it all, Trash Kit continue to find new ways to help you to shrug off the bullshit and dance.

While there’s nothing here that quite matches the highest highs of their first pass, this is a welcome return for a singular and important band.

This Tasmanian band’s debut is end-to-end faultless.

Recorded straight to tape with no overdubs, Still Moving proves a thrilling, spontaneous affair, switching between the laments and love songs of southern Italy and the gritty blues of North Africa and North America.

As an album, it never comes close to Guided By Voices at their mid-90s peak; it isn’t even the best one by this incarnation of the band (that’s possibly 2019’s Warp and Woof). But this is yet another solid addition to one of the most impressive canons in US indie rock.

The only slight misstep is Mother Earth, which swaps the original version’s distorted guitar for pump organ – but as it’s Young’s voice that still takes centre stage, that feels more of a cosmetic change than the imaginative reworkings elsewhere.

This is, simultaneously, a very Albarn-forward, state-of-the-world Gorillaz record, and one packed with guests channelling different energies.

Yes, some people will say they rarely change, that there isn’t enough variety across this or any Dinosaur album. Only Take It Back’s funky mellotron truly surprises. Elsewhere I Ain’t, To Be Waiting and I Ran Away stick fruitfully to the script. Yet that’s what good work is. Showing up, hitting your marks, doing what you do best. Some people are staring at the bricks, not noticing the palace they built.

You would fully expect to find strings and piano on an Elbow track, but these can be any scoundrel's knee-jerk shortcut to gravitas. Much better are Guy Garvey's sloshed 40-nothing aperçus, playing off beautifully against a slinky organ melody.

Charli, her third official album, finally hits a noisy, sweet spot. It is, hands down, the best iteration of XCX yet, the one where Aitchison’s pop capabilities line up most persuasively with her avant garde ear.

This Canadian trio dispense a slow, seductive blend of blues and country that skulks in the shadows, whispering sweet nothings before baring its fangs.

The dark nights of the soul only get darker with time, and Night Thoughts proves an unexpectedly congenial companion volume.

Easier Than Lying is shouty and electronic, while You Asked for This finds Halsey fronting a Smashing Pumpkins pastiche. Amid all the Sturm und Drang and sludgy oompah (The Lighthouse) there is some high-quality writing, chiefly in the pizzicato niggles and Jesus analogies of Bells in Santa Fe (“it’s not a happy ending”) and Whispers.

Harmonious one minute, turbulent the next, Club Meds is an album rich in sounds and moods.

Gnomic titles, introverted lyrics directed at a vaguely defined “you”, and yearning vocals rippling through an extravagantly brutish soup of sound: this band’s 30-year narrative arc is a straight line.

The Dubliner's follow-up, though no less literate, is more adventurous and electronic.

Though life has its shadows still (the motorik psych-country epic Round the Horn, the vocoder lament Christmas Down Under), the core of C’est La Vie is radiant happiness, Houck’s familiar sounds buffed to a transcendent shine.

There’s also great ingenuity in the shorter interludes comprising little more than random chatter over a simple melody (Can’t Stop). An album with this much flair and originality is hard to fault.

The strangest thing about the album, however, is the nagging sense of try-hard: Sleater-Kinney have always felt effortless.

While not quite a return to form, the album’s sleek yet plaintive production is a welcome reminder of what Blake does best.

Snaith’s joy at intermingling delicate melodies with steroidal rhythms and scything hi-hats persists, and he delivers several moments of handbag-dropping euphoria that will thrill whether you’re listening on a laptop or in Fabric’s room one.

Everything he does is good: melodic, enervated and loud. Twins, though, is a record that goes out of its way to court the floating rock vote, upping the melodies and toning down Segall's more wayward psychedelic digressions.

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

Serfs Up! feels like a giant leap forward.

As the album warms up and moves from the personal to the politicalit grows teeth, building to MC Mystro's rap about the 2011 riots on More Money, More Fire.

Best listened to as discrete tracks rather than as a whole, and never quite scaling the heights of Paradise or 2014’s Deep Fantasy, this album is a pleasing but flawed swansong.

Each song is coloured with a knowing intelligence and it all comes from her voice.

Though Burna has always subtly weaved elements of pop into his music, it feels too omnipresent in the second half of the album.

Lazaretto, named after a place of quarantine for sailors, hurtles between moods and tempos, often within the same song.

A beguiling decoction of pretty much everything going on in hipster musical circles, sweet and savvy and scary at the same time.

Producer Aaron Dessner, of the National, takes few risks and overplays the solemn piano chords, but Hannigan’s soaring vocals never falter.

Sundfør wishes to pour oil on the choppy waters of a weary world, and the warm clarity of her voice offers beautiful moments of respite.

This is an album for frenziedly colouring outside the lines. But there is calm, too.

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

Like its parent film, T2 Trainspotting’s soundtrack eschews cosy Cool Britannia nostalgia for something weirder and better.

The result is an invigorating if disorientating listen, as Nasty hurtles from a seductive trap tête-à-tête with Aminé (Back and Fourth) into songs resembling Korn (Girl Scouts, Let It Out). To some this will sound like a gimmick; to others it’s the future.

Blue Banisters could do with a sharper focus – some of these 15 songs are outtakes dating back years – and a hip-hopped-Morricone instrumental interlude feels like an incongruous eruption from her “gangster Nancy Sinatra” era. But it offers glimpses of vistas to be explored beyond Lana’s customary LA backdrops and a legacy already secure.

He has a warm, wistful voice and keen observational eye, pitching his songs beautifully between youth and experience.

As ever, it's the gorgeous harmonies of husband and wife Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker that make these sparsely decorated songs take flight.

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

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

Variations within repetition is what distinguishes the best drone music, and Slow Focus soundtracks some unnamed disaster with time-lapse photography for the ears.

Sometimes the angst seems to overpower the song structure, as on The Apartment, where Plunkett describes the newly acquired habit of smoking as “performing my need”. ... Best of all is Swimmer, reminiscent of Glasser or Austra with its chilly, rippling arpeggios and pulsing, depth-charge beats.

The album is meandering in places, evoking a sense of the unknown that’s become so familiar in 2021, but there’s a sense that the trio want to bring their growing fanbase with them into a new dimension. It will reward those who come along for the ride.

Bubblegum Dog is more engaging for its muscular delivery and surreal lyrics, and there’s a sense of space to the soaring Nothing Changes. Ultimately, though, for all its gloss, Loss of Life feels a little disappointing.

Hackman’s new sound has a slackerish, sly swagger reminiscent of Courtney Barnett (or going back to the source, Liz Phair).

The production sounded great to start with, and the new material is unexceptional, but if you didn't pick up the mixtapes when they were going free, and can handle 160 minutes of beautifully crafted nihilism, this is an essential buy.

It's no straightforward confessional, but a paradigm shift from squalling electricity to intensity of a different sort.

Iglooghost’s formerly punishing BPMs give way to atmospheres and tracks – such as Light Gutter, featuring a female vocalist called Lola – that might be mistaken for actual songs.

The only fusion too far here is Paper Trails, a blues-funk digression from this otherwise elegant experiment: closing track Metatron marries blues and sci-fi much better.

The real stars here are the Rajasthan Express’s six-piece brass section, who come into their own on the joyous Julus and Junun Brass. Elsewhere, the hypnotic Hu locks into an almighty groove, while the excellent title track is built atop a pleasingly complex rhythm.

In choosing lower-key collaborators, however, Rowlands and Simons seem to want these more-banging-than-average tunes to speak for themselves.

By definition, More Life has sprawl in-built, so judicious use of the skip function is required, but this is high-quality filler.

Throughout, a commitment to heartfelt songcraft remains the most “country” thing about Sound & Fury.

It all makes for an absorbing performance and intriguing album.

This debut LP is lit up by an imagination as huge and outlandish as her onstage wigs and it makes for songs that bloom.

Happily for purists, Hebden doesn't tamper with the duo's mojo, allowing tracks such as the Kurdish Warni Warni to play themselves out in an organic frenzy.

In short, if you fell out of love with dance music at the end of the 1990s, this may be the record to get you back in front of the big speakers.

Not everything here is riveting: Gurnsey’s narrative arc is a little underdeveloped.

At 21 minutes long it could do with a trim, but the closing part, a cover of the Velvet Underground’s I’m Set Free, shows that Eno remains one of the great shape shifters.

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

Their 2014 comeback Do to the Beast--featuring just Dulli and bassist John Curley from the original line-up--was a little underwhelming, but its follow-up finds them rewinding the years more successfully.

This album’s default seltzer dynamics are superbly well appointed, but the aim of many of these songs is often occluded by Burton’s knee-jerk tastefulness.

Even for non-devotees, this is a less challenging listen than might be expected. There’s an abundance of hooks and twisted melodies buried within its pile-up of ideas.

Chromatica’s frank grappling with the vagaries of Gaga’s brain – and the way fame exacerbates them – ends up feeling much more real than touring dive bars with a guitar and a Stetson ever did.

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.

The melodies are familiar, but the stuttering guitar style and weathered, laid-back vocals are still unique, still oddly touching.

Biophilia is no clever-clever cacophony. Like the natural world from which it draws inspiration, the album has structure and convention. And there is always the anchor of Björk's voice and her words, which conjoin emotional forces and elemental processes.

The new record doesn’t really break any moulds but it is a masterpiece of texture.

This assured debut is largely about a doomed love affair, a curio you didn’t know you needed until it arrives.

A challenging yet satisfying listen.

The distance between the photograph and the viewer is sometimes too great.

The urban electronica of 2014’s In Each and Every One is sidelined for a spacier, more minimalist sound.

The Unseen in Between (what a title) kicks Gunn up a gear, redeploying his influences into a left-field but welcoming whole, pearlescent enough as a background listen, but sufficiently arresting to make you stop and appreciate Gunn’s chops.

Coexist is yet another masterpiece of lush asceticism.

There are lapses in quality control (Jen Cloher cover Fear Is Like a Forest is especially leaden) and they’re rather less sure-footed when they cover each other’s songs--or tackle Belly’s Untogether together. Not the triumph it could have been, then.

Old Poisons raises some of the 90s indie furies the band seems to have outgrown, but elsewhere music that’s supposedly sparse ends up feeling hollow.

Overall this excellent album’s clarion-clear narratives about knife crime and the importance of good times – exemplified on Can’t Hold We Down – are delivered not just with anger and pathos, but humour.

With archaic language updated by transatlantic twang, it's a winning addition to the canon.

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

An updated Dylan song, Dirty Lie, and the gospel-bound River Jordan add variety to an enjoyable if uneven set that's a big step forward.

Astronaut Meets Appleman doesn’t quite continue that run of form. It begins and ends beautifully. ... but a handful of songs, the poppy Love Life in particular, break the mood and the emotional connection.

Even though some of these songs are less than the sum of their parts, it’s hard not to warm to a collaboration that comes up with a track as funky and modal as Sunday.

It’s an album that draws you into Diamond’s world, full of real, 3D emotions.

Sometimes this feels a bit like being lectured in a pub car park on a Friday night.

Songs such as Maid Marian’s Toast are both clever, easy-going and gilded with just the right amount of feedback and mouth organ.

Best listened to as a whole, Hellfire is as challenging and unsettling as it is exhilarating. About as sui generis as it’s possible to get in 2022.

There is no attempt to sugar-coat his legacy. Unfiltered, melodic, cinematic and raw, this album has moments that feel a little cheesy, but that’s in keeping with how unconcerned he was with “coolness”.

Mustafa’s delivery hits a bruised place somewhere between 21st-century folk and bereft R&B.

Their 10th album is surprisingly straightforward, its 12 songs concise, uncomplicated, largely acoustic affairs. However, listen more carefully to Jeff Tweedy’s lyrics and there’s a bitterness that’s at odds with the gentle instrumentation.

No one could ever mistake this band for sonic outliers, even when they hit their distortion pedals, but Walking Like We Do sets the Big Moon up for much bigger, more mainstream things.

There's a very definite sag in the middle of the album--but this is another enjoyable set.

The result is an artfully realised exercise in melancholic, grown-up pop with textures that owe much to the Swedes’ later work. It’s also a welcome return to form, after 2018’s water-treading Resistance Is Futile.

Late Developers marks a real return to form, and is the band’s most rewarding album since 2006’s The Life Pursuit.

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.