There is no real attempt to deliver definitive readings, with the vocal interplay between Mitchell, Carlile and Mumford on A Case of You shifting from the original’s romantic intensity to loose and cheerful celebration. Nonetheless, there are moments that cut to the core, particularly when guest vocalists back off to allow Mitchell space to possess the song in a voice that may be lower and grittier than of yore, but remains supple, powerful and resonant.

It’s a remarkably polished debut.

Morrison outshines everyone, with a quality of relaxed joyousness, riffing all over lush, lively new arrangements with his band.

There is a lot to take in on this big, bold, madly ambitious album, but Rocky has made a frequently dazzling spectacle, another reminder that hip hop is currently setting the bar very high indeed.

The album stands as a triumphant poke in the eye to modern listening mores. It sounds like a leisurely road trip around the hazy fringes of the most intense summer of your life, back in the days when summers – like this album – comprised segueing chapters.

Daddy’s Home is further proof that St Vincent deserves to be considered in their [Nina Simone, Joni Mitchell and Tori Amos] stellar ranks.

This is a very good project and will cement Digga D as a force on the pop charts, but if the 21-year-old wants to reach the next level and avoid becoming a pastiche like 50 Cent did, he will need to do more of the unexpected and dig a little deeper into his subconscious when it's time to drop that studio album.

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

Ten years ago, Icona Pop were electropop trailblazers: for the most part, this second album is a promising next step in their recording career.

If progress is their aim, then this is fine proof of how a softly-softly approach is often best.

The pair tracked down musicians who worked on Sixties spaghetti westerns, then added Jack White and Norah Jones as singers, resulting in a delicious album, redolent of easy listening but with all flabbiness removed and replaced by a modern warmth and elegance.

This is not jazz for the purist but it is a heartfelt and entertaining tribute to one of the musical greats.

This is some kind of triumph for Blige and for Britain.

Epic and intimate, serious and playful, Okkervil River's third album is genuinely awe inspiring, growing with each replaying.

I mean it as a compliment when I say I didn’t immediately recognise Green Day the first time I heard their new album. There is something positively gleeful about the American multimillion-selling stadium punk trio’s reavowal of the fundamentals. They exhibit the swagger of a hot young band discovering rock’n’roll for the first time, allied to the abilities of old pros who know exactly how to do it right.

Nike, a skeletal hip-hop number that hears Shygirl compare the joy of a fling to ordering a Big Mac, is one of a few dud moments. Otherwise, Nymph is a distinctive, sensual and striking debut.

It’s effectively atmospheric, giving a raw, insomniac groove to the gritty notes draining from electric guitars and a twitch of dirty old fluorescent bulbs in the glitchy drum beats.

The album’s inability to communicate with itself – each song an island – does bring some drag to the album’s runtime. Nevertheless, elegiac and anthemic, each song has spark.

Parping away beneath her synthesised fantasies and hypnotic dance floor dramas, you can also hear the unlikely stirrings of an Eighties sax-solo revival.

Beck has always been hip. Even on his 12th album, he manages to make the dawn sound like where it’s at.

It's a gloriously mellow record, the sound of an artist remembering there’s a life beyond her touring schedule and daring to enjoy it.

There is a joyful exuberance to Revival, which has U2 and Coldplay arranger Rupert Christie at the helm.

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.

Lover does not sound like the work of someone desperate to command the pop zeitgeist and yet is all the more likely to do so. Instead of trying to be all things to all audiences, it plays to the strengths of a witty songwriter in love, eager to tell anyone who will listen exactly how she feels.

Crash is clever and fun, as her admirers have come to expect from XCX, but until Charli scores a bona fide smash it is going to feel like an art project commenting on the state of pop rather than the real thing.

Every tiny detail is in aesthetic congruence with the initial feelings that birthed these songs – all of which you’re made privy to in violently vivid detail. Broken Hearts Club is an expertly sequenced, perfectly packaged ode to a lost love.

[Houghton's] first album of idiosyncratic banjo pop has been worth the wait.

Alpha Zulu is a robust addition to their already acclaimed catalogue.

There is ultimately something sketchy about Boarding House Reach, pulling in so many directions that it suggests rough drafts for more fully formed work to come. But for all that, there are so many rich ingredients in the mix, even misophones should find something to soothe their troubled ears.

You don’t need to be in an altered state to become overwhelmed by his mastery of controlled cacophony. It is a pleasure to report that everything is still beautiful in Pierce’s strange sonic world.

Their ambitious double may aspire to the eclecticism of The Beatles’ White Album, but it remains resolutely, if sweetly, sepia-toned.

[Even] if Alabama Shakes do nothing original, they strike classic poses with real guts.

Put simply, the album blends gospel, blues and rock but with some exciting interpretations of interesting old records.

This is the darkest Fontaines DC album to date. But what drives it forward isn’t morbidity or anger, but a search for connection. It’s this that makes it not a dirge, but an oddly bright snapshot of life’s confusions from a band capable of capturing them brilliantly.

This is one of the most incendiary British records of 2022.

She wants to deliver good, solid, heartfelt slabs of it. And on those terms, her fifth studio album is her best record in years.

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

While this is in one sense African music like they don't make it any more, there's nothing precious or retro about it: its energy feels entirely modern.

Using entirely analogue tape, Vig, together with top mixer Alan Moulder, brings a deliciously lump-free production consistency to the Foos, who have often erred between the indigestible extremes of thrash-metal and acoustic angst.

Utopian Ashes, then, is a marriage made in musical heaven, conjuring marital hell.

Coming Home is a hugely impressive reminder of Usher's pop skills, and another testament to the enduring appeal of high class RnB.

Songs maintain a facade of well-mannered, old-fashioned structures (waltz times and Fats Domino-style “swamp pop” piano bass) that gradually reveal murkier interiors restlessly inhabited by Jones’s unique, meandering ghost-child of a voice.

On a set of compact, meaningful songs about surviving in the age of anxiety, the sympathetic weave of the reunited band embodies the very spirit of empathy and togetherness for which Steadman seems to be reaching.

As protest music goes, it is not particularly uplifting. Yet despair is kept at bay by the sheer majesty of the lush, dense, beautifully sculpted, wonderfully alien sound.

A very fine debut album from Californian singer-songwriter, who has a wonderfully rich and mournful country voice.

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.

Come for the drama, but stay and swoon for Lambert’s intoxicating, heartfelt closer: Dinah Washington’s Mad About the Boy.

While this pastiche is obviously intentional, it never really feels like one. It also creates a much more romantic and intriguing world to fall into than the closed-curtains one of its predecessor. Josh Tillman remains a curious cat, but here he also sounds like a much more contented one.

O'Donovan knows how to sing perfectly with sparse and delicate arrangements and the album, which also features Tucker Martine (the Decemberists), shows she can create some magic of her own on this her second solo album.

She's made her best, most accessible record for years.

What’s new is the subtly layered sound, which embraces a string quartet as naturally as street sounds, and has an intriguing unpredictability. Sometimes a number will launch off with a call-and-response simplicity and then take an unexpected turn.

Arrangements are marked by clarity, one thing easing into another in a beautifully measured fashion.

Songs And Stories is plenty good enough to be going on with.

The result is as swaggeringly confident, brash and modern as any mainstream hip hop being produced anywhere in the world right now.

A treat.

These severely abstract inventions require so much brain power and digital dexterity that Jarrett often groans and growls like a tennis player returning a difficult shot. Fortunately, in amongst them are reflective lyrical numbers which radiate a moving sense of solitude, in which you can sense him relax.

Smoking in Heaven is hugely enjoyable.

It seems churlish to complain about songwriting and production as madly ambitious as this – filled with nuance and detail, sweeping and dizzy in its self-absorption, it builds at moments to an operatic grandeur.

Division is by far Sheeran’s smoothest collection.

There are motivational numbers such as Get Things Done, with its great elastic-bass hook. But more often Hesketh is in the trenches.

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.

It is an absolute blast, a crunchy, punchy, smart, deliciously goofy charge through new wave pop rock. It bursts with earworm hooks, snappy choruses and the delightful sense that the duo at its heart are having such a hoot they don’t really care what anyone else thinks.

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.

Wall of Eyes comprises just eight tracks but it’s far from slight. String arrangements by the London Contemporary Orchestra add a lush cinematic quality to the album.

Relaxer dazzles and delights the ears yet still feels like the work of a band who might have something to say, if they weren’t too precious to actually come out and say it.

These exquisitely voiced musings on love, healing and mortality really hit the spot.

What makes it so compelling is a classic rock Americana set up deftly interweaving lazy twin guitars and splashes of Hammond organ over steady rolling chord progressions that gather power with each repetition.

Those who loved The King Is Dead should certainly enjoy the EP--a sort of CD extras from a fine main production.

Eyeye may be more of the same from Li, but as a distillation of her music to date, and a final confrontation with heartbreak, it’s flawless.

He genuinely tries not to romanticise his despairing condition and is unforgiving about his own flaws, although the sheer gravity of his voice and dark appeal of his loner stance can’t help but exert their own seductive pull.

In Coping Mechanism, we see the singer becoming bolder and braver as she departs from mystic R&B and soul roots. In just 11 full-throttle tracks, Coping Mechanism gives us a glimpse at the future of rock.

This album is a belter, a shout-it-to-the-rooftops, punch-the-sky, yell-along-at-the-top-of-your-voice storm. It is crammed top to bottom with monster riffs, anthemic choruses and the sheer exuberant thrill of being young, in love, and armed with a fuzzbox.

Tomorrow... deepens on repeated listening, with Yorke locating moments of beauty and calm in the eye of his anxiety.

The album, which was funded by producer Jeffrey Gaskill through Kickstarter, is full of treats; and Johnson deserves 21st-century acknowledgement.

If a great cover version should reveal new dimensions in both song and singer, then this album is filled with them.

The air is predictably valedictory, freighted with reflections on love, faith and intimations of mortality. 'Don't go to any trouble/You know I won't be here long . . . ' he sings in Westerberg's Any Trouble - in a voice as strong and clear as a bell.

Tempest’s turn of phrase is constantly arresting.

The most compelling tracks take drastic liberties with the original material, deconstructing Kinshasa sound systems into industrial-tropical hoedowns that reflect postmodern London more than Africa's teeming townships.

The songs on What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World, produced by long-time collaborator Tucker Martine, are more intimate and personal than some of the early Decemberists narrative songs.

The album, produced by the celebrated Béla Fleck, has treats galore.

If you enjoy the dark imaginings of PJ Harvey and Nick Cave, this is worth immersing yourself in.

As always, his technical control is astounding.

His voice has that ability to spring from soulful growl to angelic falsetto that always gets TV talent show chairs spinning.

Despite its relentlessly downbeat content, then, Moby’s music is just too satisfying to be depressing.

There’s plenty here to suggest Chloe X Halle have the chops to rival their superstar mentor [Beyoncé].

QOTSA now know what is expected of them after a decade of commercial appeal: rock ‘n’ roll that’s not too heavy, lyrics that aren’t too vicious. Then they decide to stick their middle fingers up and make what they want regardless.

Wrecking Ball may be his angriest and most overtly political collection, yet the fury is contained in some of his most uplifting and celebratory music, so you can never be quite sure if he has come to raise the flag or to burn it.

Made up of 11 taut tracks, the highlights come thick and fast.

It showcases U2 at their most mature and assured, playing songs of passion and purpose, shot through and enlivened with a piercing bolt of desperation.

It's a fine album--and well done the conciliatory middle son for bringing the family together. Well, musically, at least.

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.

Young offers up rough and ready songs about the state of the environment, slightly mollified by dreamy ballads for his third wife, Daryl Hannah (the Splash star is characterised as “a mermaid in the Milky Way”), sung in a tender, trembling falsetto.

Still Woman Enough makes it clear that she is still up for a lively session.

There was a time when Morrison created elaborate, adventurous arrangements, but for decades now he has fallen back on standard tropes of rhythm and blues, accompanied by virtuoso musicians trading tasteful licks. Yet Morrison can still clamber inside a song and punch through, as if battling for emotional release, until that gorgeously modulated voice soars somewhere unexpected.

Self Made Man is a further confirmation that these are women of substance.

Will loyal Snarky Puppy fans be disappointed? Not likely. They’ll be delighted by the band’s continued scale and grandeur; for its music that is as unclassifiable as it is virtuosic.

Individual songs don’t matter quite so much as the overriding mood. Compared with the brash appeal of Uptown Funk, I’m not sure you could really describe these as bangers. They are more like Catherine wheels spitting flames into the night before burning out. And all the lovelier for it.

The resulting guitar pop sound is more professional and commercial than the Alabama duo's formerly more playful style, but thanks to a wealth of well-written songs, fans of old and new should be equally entertained.