Underneath the almost soporifically smooth old-soul and country polish, Adams's ear for a delicate melody and feel for the shadowy nuances of emotion give this latest chapter beautiful depth.

The weirder moments--the molten strings and xylophones--redefine the band as a powerful and original force.

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.

Her most measured and mature work, and perhaps the most accessible to those as yet

It is, rather, an hour of wonderfully immersive music, which moves from dancefloor physicality to spiritual meditation with the dexterity – we can confirm – of a true master.

Women In Music Part III just hits it from top to bottom. It is the album in which Haim at last fulfil their potential, a summery California pop rock treat in which the blissful ambience is backed up with emotional grit and substance.

At its heart, this is a serious work, with an underlying somberness. ... Almost 60 years since we first heard from him, the old protest singer is still composing extraordinary anthems for our changing times.

[Giles] Martin and co-engineer Sam Okell have done a loving job, getting away from some of the oddities of the familiar stereo mix done by Abbey Road engineers. ... It is like seeing a favourite movie again in high definition. It doesn't replace the original, it enhances it.

On a production level, this album is cutting-edge, on a lyrical level it is brutally brilliant. It will melt your ears and your heart.

Scrub away reputations and this album is so much stronger than the latter-day works of many of Fay's contemporaries.

Bridgers’s modernity is actually a kind of timelessness, yet delivered in an emotional and lyrical lexicon that speaks directly to this moment.

It’s bleakness on a stick. But Anima is also a dystopian rhapsody that will stay with you long after the moment and rates as one of the purest expressions yet of Yorke’s devastated world view.

Cuz I Love You is absolutely splendid, a joyous album to put a smile on your face, a song in your heart and your booty on the dance floor.

This irresistible album is yet more evidence that London’s musical scene might just be the liveliest in the world.

The song kick-starts the album's powerful sense of forward motion, of a woman struggling to wrestle free from expectations, relationships and religious convention.

Creating a 21st-century album that is still able to deal in an original and touching way with the big and interesting subjects of love and death is a trick that many folk and country musicians try to pull off and few achieve, especially in the impressive way that Gretchen Peters does with her 2015 album Blackbirds.

Her approach is confident and challenging, but not arch – several direct, haunting love songs are as delicate and affecting as any Adele tear-jerker.

Welch's singing throughout is extraordinary, shifting gears effortlessly from melancholic softness to high-powered exultation, even ululation. Every gasp, growl and fluttery trill seems perfectly placed.

Welch’s self-mythologising is extravagant, her poetic language overloaded, yet her lush music binds it all into something magical on songs that exploit explicitly female archetypes to examine her own psyche.

A tone of urgent honesty pulses through the album, a visceral need to connect that shatters the production's glittering surfaces.

Whatever Big Time’s genre, it is a mature and accomplished album; a requiem yet also a quiet celebration. It’s probably the most honest album you’ll hear all year.

The new Rolling Stones album is the best thing they have made since their Seventies glory days. Which, it might reasonably be argued, de facto makes it the best rock’n’ roll album of the past four decades at least.

The Magic Whip turns out to be a triumphant comeback that retains the band's core identity while allowing ideas they'd fermented separately over the past decade to infuse their sound with mature and peculiar new flavour combinations.

The results are fantastic: an album of world-beating standard yet still intimate and friendly, an epic of the everyday, a romance of the real.

Clever, sexy, angry, soulful, witty and fantastically bold, Beyoncé stirs up the western and puts the you know what into country. I think it’s a masterpiece, but don’t expect to hear it at the Grand Ole’ Opry any time soon.

The lads have given this album everything, everything and then some.

From DNA’s punchy electro mantra about identity to LOVE’s tender sing-song reggae pop meditation on fickle emotions, DAMN is an album of surface sheen and hidden depths, where words and music operate in beautiful synchronicity, a constantly unfolding dance that lends each new approach a sense of investigation and revelation. It is dazzling.

Now he inhabits classic lines by songwriters like Johnny Mercer with weathered ease.