Riderless Horse is far from an easy listen for obvious reasons. But hearing the 56-year-old Nastasia describe and attempt to understand these stark events is never less than compelling.

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.

These are beautifully turned songs filled with empathy for downtrodden characters battered by life but always ready to fight back, bridging social distance with langorous melodies and deep emotion. The lockdown may have been a terrible moment for music and musicians, but it has resulted in Taylor’s Swift’s most powerful and mature album to date.

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

Not every track is a solid smash of that wit, brio and sheer quality, but even minor tracks such as Cool and Hallucinate keep up the melody and movement with a spirit of sensual fun that would make Kylie Minogue weak with envy, whilst monsters such as Physical and the slinky Pretty Please are going to have Gaga pulling her pop socks up.

For the most part Divers is a magic carpet ride that finds Newsom still spinning wild (and generally impenetrable) interwoven yarns with the jaw-dropping dexterity of a modern-day Scheherazade.

This is certainly her strongest album yet, a work of catharsis, therapy and succour. It does what pop music is greatest at: gathering up emotions, focusing them and pouring them out to songs that everybody can sing, but few can sing quite as well as Adele.

The New Faith is hymnal, rich with chants and layered, organic instrumentation. It is deeply and spiritually moving, vibrant and celebratory. Revelatory, even.

The wild, rattling bawlers are each distinctively turbocharged with reckless and richly textured energy, while the ballads run poignantly on their rims, leaking emotion.

Radiohead's most melodically accessible collection, almost meditative in its ethereal mid-tempo loveliness, yet shot through with the kind of edgy details that never quite let a listener relax. It is chill-out music to put your nerves on edge.

Her magnificent fourth album demonstrates that she is one of the best rappers in the world, period.

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.

Creating songs for female artists, he fully (if somewhat licentiously) inhabits their personas, deadpanning about greeting a lover in his camisole over the electro pulse of Apollonia’s Make-Up. The highest compliment that could be paid to Originals is that if Prince had released it in the Eighties, no one would have batted an eyelid.

As a package, Angels & Queens Part I is a soothing and soulful antidote to life’s slings and arrows, of which there are many right now.

Magdalene is a magnificently twisted sci-fi torch album, an enthralling account of love, loss, heartbreak and recovery. It is erotic and neurotic, confounding and revelatory, summoning the spirits of such iconoclastic talents as David Bowie, Kate Bush and Björk while affirming its own unique personality.

Its beauty lies in the intuitive simpatico of the playing, with different elements rising to the surface at just the right moment. It used to take them months in the studio to achieve this blend. Now these old road warriors can conjure it in a single take.

The music is astounding, threading erudite raps through ghetto soul jams and panoramic orchestral interludes.

Although King’s Disease III might have some tonal missteps, Nas and Hit-Boy should be applauded for bringing warm soul samples back into hip hop culture at a time of such darkness and uncertainty. This is Godfather: Part III if Michael Corleone retired without all the treachery; music about being comfortable with your place and making it to the other side.

Art Angels is made of the same dark candy, with even more weird and wonderful flavour combinations. I began to think of songs as three-minute gobstoppers in which layers dissolved unexpectedly.

Dawn FM is his most ambitious album to date, and one that shows welcome signs of emotional and psychological growth.

The Hardest Part doesn’t reinvent the wheel. It knows what it is: undisguised, accessible songwriting pulsing with country lifeblood which manages to avoid being swallowed by its own ennui.

Five of the 12 songs have been previously released in various versions over the years. Collected together with seven previously unheard songs, the effect is to compound the sadness at their core. There a couple of pleasantly throwaway druggy jams to lighten the mood, including the title song and the amusing We Don’t Smoke It. ... I have little doubt it would have been acclaimed in 1975, but it rings just as sweet and true in 2020. Heartbreak never gets old.

This ranks with the very best of Gabriel’s work, which means it is very great indeed. Peter Gabriel is a genius. i/o is a masterpiece. That is all ye need know.

Dirty Computer establishes itself as a contender for album of the year, in more ways than one. The witty, interlinked songs tackle subjects that have fuelled much of the discourse around “woke” social consciousness in the age of #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter.

It feels as bold and weird as anything in Bowie’s back catalogue, sure to delight some and infuriate others.

Happily, the words are wonderful and Something More Than Free is an album that grows and grows on you. Producer Dave Cobb is in fine action again and gets the best from the settings behind Isbell's effecting voice. Some of the songs are simply splendid.

Those same multilayered textures [in Loveless] are all here, and if anything there are more finely chiselled planes of fresh variation: there is a discipline as well as wildness behind the distortion.

The album offers a rousing, belligerently upbeat response to global crisis, albeit at the time of composition they were addressing climate change, environmental activism, the impact of austerity and rise of fascism. ... This is the sound of a group breaking out of their shell and demanding to be heard.