She has drawn comparison with Kate Bush and Bjork, not because she sounds like them, but because she has a similar blend of extraordinary vocal ability, florid imagination, and genre-bending boldness. Desire is the album where it all comes together for this late blooming art-pop siren.

The quality wanes a little in the album’s second half, but there are four or five bangers, all told – ample firepower to win fresh converts while supporting both Harry Styles and Arctic Monkeys on the stadium circuit this summer.

Quest for Fire is still visceral EDM designed to get the pulse racing, but the whole thing has been given an ambitious refresh. The second coming of Skrillex starts here.

Vocalist, guitarist and songwriter Ira Kaplan, percussionist and pianist Georgia Hubley, and bassist James McNew sound as fresh and relevant now as they ever have.

Williams’s song C’est Comme Ça perfectly sums up the album: a reckoning with change, a refusal to deliver the same-old tricks even when it’s the easier option.

Months from her 40th birthday, Ethiopian-American artist Kelela Mizanekristos has blessed us with a sexy, sultry masterclass in RnB.

Forster all too humbly paints himself as a modest talent next to his late foil’s melodic genius, yet this eighth solo outing is packed as ever with minimal, carefully chiselled, acoustic-thrumming arrangements, topped by extraordinary lyric writing.

The songs are sufficiently sophisticated and winning that The Waeve keeps sweeping the listener along on its intoxicating journey.

Like FKA Twigs’s Caprisongs, Beyoncé's Renaissance, and SZA’s SOS, Raye’s My 21st Century Blues deserves to be listened to from start to finish, then again, and again.

This album proves Lewis can master the mainstream, too, with earworms to soundtrack parties from Brooklyn to Brixton. So much more than “just a DJ”, one suspects that within a few short years, Lewis will be selling out stadiums.

The joy here is in basking in the creative process, how Dylan chipped away at differing tempos, alternate arrangements and revised lyrics for each composition, ultimately to arrive at the final 11 tracks.

Smith sings rings around themselves and the material, elevating both the banal and the sublime with smokey curlicues of tremulous falsetto.

This is Måneskin’s big strength. The songs on RUSH! may not be particularly original, reading heavily from a well-thumbed big-riffs-and-god-times playbook, but they write a very good one, and play them with an energy that frequently boils over with exuberance.

It’s a rarity to have an album in which every song could genuinely be a single, but they’ve managed it here.

This is a softer, more introspective approach than her barn-storming debut, but this 12-track album doesn’t lack the punch and bite of its debut in spite of this.

Coombes, a quite masterful musical auteur after three decades in the game, skillfully navigates the record away from one long mid-life nightmare. ... it’s another hugely satisfying listen.

Price’s fantastic fourth album, Strays, advances boldly into terrain occupied by such exalted US rock craftsmen as Jackson Browne and Tom Petty, with soulful vocal swagger, a widescreen band sound and a poetic lyrical depth that should leave most of her Nashville peers prostrate at her feet.

There is nothing particularly original or surprising here, yet in a pop market that is all interesting edges, self-enclosed scenes and leftfield genres, Ryder offers a hearty return to the reassuringly obvious, pitched straight into the mainstream. A star is born.

Every Loser is a great, energising opening blast for 2023, a loud and lairy rock album jam-packed with the lust for life that has characterised Iggy’s whole wayward career.

Protest albums don’t come more subtle and moving than this.

The brilliance of No Thank You is how Simz uses her brazenly unapologetic narrative to spin out larger points about institutional and generational racism, the danger of business practices indifferent to their human impact, and links all of that to contemporary mental health crises.

[Wizkid's] finest body of work so far, showcasing a maturity and an artistic vision that cements his status as one of the most influential people in pop music today.

It’s an expansion of her wonderfully experimental R&B, with all the candour listeners expect from this masterful songwriter. ... SOS is well worth the wait.

Behind its rather mundane title, This is What We Do contains multitudes of grooves, with both a positive spirit and a physical imperative that are nigh-on impossible to resist.

Premonition is a finely wrought, searing career-coda, determined to take a sledgehammer to the cliché that growing older must result in complacency.

Divine Symmetry shows that this metamorphosis didn’t happen without a good deal of huffing and puffing. Therein lies its intrigue, as the groundwork is revealed. ... It’s a fascinating journey.

This is What I Mean completely abandons the often very macho bullishness at the heart of hip hop, to show rap at its most sensitive.

This live album by The Jimi Hendrix Experience is a compelling and beautiful tribute.