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.

He seems to have found a new and more sincere voice, less bullish than we have heard him before, whilst using a fantastic roster of contributors to push the mood and narrative.

Record’s producer Ewan Pearson pushes her back, fruitfully, into an electronic setting. This creates quite a retro, Eighties sound, linear and stratified, with pulsing bass synths and tidy drum machine patterns. But it lends Thorn’s wry, sharp lyrics a welcome sparkle.

Kehalni’s lubricious vocals and tender slow jams are not for the faint-hearted, but there is a real core of emotional truth burning through these X-rated grooves.

In a mood of nostalgia, Albarn is looking back at his life as it unspools over some of his most subtle, beautiful and melancholy melodies, rendered in a slightly hung-over, low-fi tone, occasionally pepped up by samples from producer Richard Russell.

Thematically tight, thought-provoking and packed with tunes, it is, once again, far in advance of most pop in 2011. What a way to go.

While it is less commercially focused, there is no discernible drop of quality on the expanded Anthology, crammed to bursting with beautifully worked songs that add different shades and angles to her essential premise of a woman working out why her love life has left her in such emotional tatters.

As an art experience, Honeymoon is gorgeous, and needs to be heard in context with her atmospheric home-made videos. But as pop music, it can fall a bit flat.

This is a classy debut, from a sophisticated talent who takes things at her own sweet pace. She may not turn out to be the next big thing, but Celeste sounds like she is in it for the long haul.

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.

The album never quite catches fire like their live performance but it gets close.

You can hear the ghostly outline of OK Computer looming amid the gloom and distortion. Also palpable is a growing ambivalence. ... For every scratchy, hissing road to nowhere, there’s a sublime bit when Jonny Greenwood’s guitar cuts through and York starts to howl like a sad but vaguely vengeful pop demon. And suddenly all your misgivings tumble away, and it’s a privilege to be lost in the labyrinth of Radiohead’s collective subconscious.

The album sounds like something knocked out almost live in a spirit of excitement, rather than with objective vision or commercial muscle. I’d be hard pressed to assert that this (unlike CS&N) amounts to more than the sum of its parts, rather than a celebration of great parts. But it is impossible to argue that as a group, Boygenius are pretty super.

The melodies are lovely, if conservative: as elegant and classically tailored as her gowns.

If you can look beyond the occasional ham-fisted blip – the command to “stop tap dancing around the conversation” that closes out the otherwise-astounding We Cry Together is the most egregious example here – then there’s so much reward.

Easily the best thing she has done since her album of Muscle Shoals sessions, New Routes, which she made in the early Seventies.

There is, as Bush intended, much more air around the songs, which can reduce their original, raw intensity but also gives them a more mature, lingering potency.

More than half a century later, those youthful ambitions are herein fulfilled, in 10 tracks of maturity and majesty.

Despite what the polished sonics might suggest, Twelve Carat Toothache is an ambitious record with real range, proving that Post has found his groove as America’s kaleidoscopic king of new-era pop.

Adopting a very domestic lyrical setting whilst grappling bravely with big issues, Shortly After Takeoff offers ideal lockdown listening, a touching black comedy of emotional isolation.

The Car feels warmer and more soulful than its predecessor, in its orchestral sweep not dissimilar to Turner’s first side project as The Last Shadow Puppets, 2008’s The Age of the Understatement. As such, it may be more a solo album than an Arctic Monkeys record, but it’s a very good one nonetheless.

It may be billed as a tribute to a lost star, but this Winter wonderland serves as a reminder that the blues is still very much alive and kicking.

As a follow-up to What’s Your Pleasure?, it’s inevitably a little doomed, lacking that record’s magical conditions: the unexpectedly fresh energy amid the lethargy of lockdown. Still, after Pleasure’s anticipatory teasing, That! Feels Good! offers a perfectly competent climax.

No tracks are particularly surprising from a production point of view, but it’s the affecting lyrics which have always been Carner’s strength. ... The newfound sharpness in Carner’s delivery has brought a much-needed grit to this album – it’s exciting.

Inspired by his hometown of Torquay and musically taking a leaf from Steely Dan and Fleetwood Mac, swapping his computer for the studio seems to have paid off with these brilliant, sunset funk songs.

At a time when hip hop has become the default music of choice for the masses, it’s a reminder of the genre’s subserve roots--and evidence that, deep into middle age, Slim Shady’s power to shock, offend and amuse endures.

Here, in the company of his oldest colleagues, he [Damon Albarn] takes stock of his past in the most finely crafted songs of his later career. It is the sound of Britpop all grown up.

The guitar playing throughout is fantastic, rhythm and lead entwining around Williams’s beautiful, ruined voice, rising to a fury on tough rockers. ... It is an angry record but one that can make you shake your fist into the void and feel that, at least, no matter how bad things might look, you are not alone.

This sprawling, tender lucid dream of an album morphs into various shapes: angular and jagged, lush and distorted, Twin Peaks-esque surrealism, wistful and surrendering. Whether Shaw is proposing friendship or not, Stumpwork offers us more than enough.

Pecknold enthusiastically revealed how the album was a direct result of his indulgence in MP3 piracy, as he tracked back to discover Fairport Convention, Roy Harper, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, Bob Dylan and all the heroes of the Sixties folk boom.

First Two Pages of Frankenstein is up there with Boxer, the band’s 2007 album on which they thrillingly found their musical feet. This is the sound of a band who’ve honed their sound to such an extent that they’re now towing a whole new generation in their wake.

As a record, Time isn’t just a sonic heart-swell for listeners, it’s the latest shift for a singer-songwriter who seems as if she’s constantly stretching toward the most whole version of herself.

Sonically adventurous and genre hopping.

Suddenly is a work of slow-burning beauty from one of the brightest sparks in the electronic firmament.

At best, its familiarity is warm and inviting for seasoned fans; for some it will feel lazily identical and lacking in ambition. But it’s an overwhelmingly powerful and energetic musing on the never-ending anxieties and strain of life that don’t leave just because you enter adulthood – exactly what keeps their fans coming back.

While its modernity is expressed by mixing and matching genres or adding digital zing to familiar tropes, for all its bravura exuberance and pop slickness it is old fashioned to its core.

The result is more urgent, less reassuringly structured than your typical Elbow record.

While these songs are like discarded pub furniture, Bramwell sounds like a wiley old alley cat, sat on top of it and looking up.

Thirty years on, Albarn sounds just as dissatisfied with the state of the modern world, yet he still appears to have at least a cartoon finger on its pulse.

Low in High School, his 11th solo album, is as dazzling and infuriating as anything in his canon, full of the stuff that has made the 58-year-old former Smiths frontman one of the most provocative and adored stars of our time.

It's surprisingly exhilarating stuff.

It sounds gimmicky, but far from it: Raw Data Feel is a thought-provoking experiment that aims to reshape the dissociation and damage caused by endless scrolling into fodder for the dance floor.

At times it does sound like it is trying a bit too hard to please. But it's more pop than Pop ever was, and it certainly does the job it apparently sets out to do, delivering addictive pop rock with hooks, energy, substance and ideas that linger in the mind after you’ve heard them.

A slight tone of weariness may have crept into 1D’s lyrics with songs about break-ups and yearning for home but musically it remains anthemic, up-tempo, superior pop, with elegant song structure, ear worm hooks and radio busting choruses.

There’s real genius at work here – but it’s so effortlessly delivered, you might almost take it for granted.

All [songs on Ashes & Roses] command attention because of Chapin Carpenter's warm, weathered, unshowily authentic voice which has a kind of peace at its core.

The timeless appeal of Carnival is echoed in Keep Your Courage, which speaks volumes for the cohesive, eternal quality of Merchant's ability to weave romantic, folk-rock ballads rich with organ, brass, and tidal waves of strings all anchored to simple piano melodies.

Weird! is his most crunchy and sonically streamlined work to date, replete with catchy earworm hooks and meaty singalong choruses.

What comes forth is disarmingly honest music that indicates a newly mature era for UK rap.

Bieber’s offering is less of a mainstream crowd pleaser and all the more interesting for it, a quirky, atmospheric electro R’n’B concoction with sci-fi sounds and offbeat vocal samples that focus attention on the star’s soft, supple and seductive singing.

All 11 original songs spiral out from a strong, controlled core of patience.

Sparks, Fun., Norah Jones and Jarvis Cocker imbue pithy vignettes with their own personalities, Jack White and Jack Black play with chirpy nonsense songs and Swamp Dogg’s soulful take on America, Here’s My Boy is heartbreaking. This is certainly more than an academic exercise.

Though certain tracks like In My Head leave you wishing she’d cut through the glistening sounds and breathy choruses with some power vocals, Mahalia’s pen is sharp, and her raw take on relationships and self-development is delivered with the diva attitude of Mariah Carey and the raspy cool of Erykah Badu.

The Gift is a quixotic compilation of tracks. ... One of the things that comes across most impressively in this afro-futurist mix of hip hop and R’n’B is that it all sounds fresh and exciting but not remotely alien or intimidating.

After the wild beach party of 2007’s Volta and the shiny wonders of 2011’s Biophilia, Vulnicura is a windswept trek of a record. But one which gradually repays its difficulties with the raw exhilaration of survival.

Badass has been criticised for failing to take his retro stylings anywhere new, but he lovingly recreates the Nineties vibe with an appealing low-slung swagger and infuses it all with a thoughtful, pavement-pounding philosophy.

The album that emerges from all this is both busy to the point of overload and proof of a complex, inspirational figure in full command of his many gifts.

Her new album is a successful repetition of the formula: sweet, crisp country licks with witty twists of live-and-let-live philosophy.

Track for track, it’s the equal of anything Petty has released in a long and righteously distinguished career.

The Cutting Edge allows fans to bear witness to perhaps the most astonishing explosion of language and sound in rock history, a new approach to song being forged before our very ears.

Even the simplest songs here are studded with magic moments that shift the centre of gravity.

Heartfelt, spirited, lyrical, moody and mostly magnificent pop rock.

Food for Worms is all the more exciting for its contrasts in brutality and beauty. It’s challenging, consummately constructed, and thrilling throughout.

This is a warm, bluesy album of country-fuelled rock ’n’ roll that oozes old-timer class.

The sound on this pivotal sixth album, however, is subdued, moody, even dark at times, the instrumentation stripped back to bare essentials.

Vega’s enduringly classy knack for quirky rhythm, sleek ideas and direct-but-detached delivery shines through much of this album, though it does suffer at times from the leaden, ye olde phrasing hinted at in the title.

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.

They may have been left in the band's boot for a while, but there's nothing dead about them.

An adrenalised behemoth of a record which reasserts her position as one of pop's most compulsive pleasures.

The great joy of this late period album is that it doesn’t take itself too seriously. Lifetime Achievement is not so much a last will and testament as a bravura insistence on Wainwright’s intention to carry on living and loving for as long as he can.

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.

King of a Land is unlikely to bring in legions of new fans – Yusuf’s Pyramid appearance will hopefully do that. But it’s a lushly beautiful album from one of pop’s master songwriters. Indeed, the medium is perfect – it’s just the message that is a little monothematic.

It’s not all perfect: every so often, the tracks swing from sounding like impossibly cool, experimental rock to, er, Coldplay. Overall, however, this is guitar music at its most thrilling.

It is the sound of an old rocker at full steam ahead, determined to keep on rolling for as long as he can.

There is a maturity and conviction to this album that makes it a step up.

This is an album that underlines the greatness of Dark Side, rather than challenges it.

Whatever philosophical conundrums are addressed, the gorgeously staggered harmonies on the chorus of Dares My Heart Be Free offer profound answers in the music itself, a tangible spirit of human connection that warms the cockles of Skellig’s querulous heart.

There is a tangible sense of joy in performance, although with no greater clarity of lyrical expression. ... His own work remains wilfully obscurantist, emotionally open and lyrically closed, as deep and meaningless as listeners are prepared to let it become.

Goulding’s spectacularly tremulous vibrato, raw mid-range and fluttery high notes imprint unique character on everything she sings. It’s a voice that can make even her “least personal” record sound very personal indeed.

It is an album bursting with epigrammatic phrases, ridiculous rhymes, huge melodies and provocative opinions. The sound is brash and arresting.

Sturgill Simpson has recorded an interesting album about the lure of home. Musically, it's a bold step away from the excellent Metamodern Sounds in Country Music (there's more soul and brass in A Sailor's Guide to Earth) but the songwriting remains strong and beguiling.

Brimming with both spiritual depth and astonishing musical dexterity, Shook feels contemporary and important, reflecting America’s present-day diversity and letting the disenfranchised speak.

Here, leading lights of electronic music remix King Midas Sound's underrated debut album to striking effect.

You and I lacks the depths and textures of Grace--the intoxicating communion with other musicians, the wild strangeness of his own nascent songwriting and the assuredness that came with locating his place in music. Yet, even without all that, Buckley’s raw talent alone remains an astonishing thing.

While Caustic Love is clearly the work of a maturing singer-songwriter (shedding jaunty charm for depth and ambition), it finds the 27-year-old still skittering around in search of an artistic identity.

Rather than pivoting to rockstar to play the part, Cyrus is shedding some previous layers of industry artifice to speak to a genre that has always unleashed her voice from any electropop or hip-hop audience-baiting cage. Not only that, the arena of rock enables Cyrus to indulge controversy in provocative stage performances that needn't alert the cultural appropriation police.

It's real music for grown-ups.

His weary regrets are cradled in a simple, swaying hammock of piano, violin and mournful horns. ... It’s a miserabilist masterpiece.

Tension is Minogue’s 16th album, and certainly ranks among her best.

Chromatica offers Gaga at her most energetic and forceful, and that is something to behold.

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

As a 40-minute listening experience, it’s equal parts eccentric and impassioned, thought-provoking and out-there – if not exactly fun, given the mental-health issues, then certainly liberating, nourishing and thoroughly memorable.

His smooth but expressionless voice can be a little bland for a frontman (and is always improved by Thorn’s occasional harmonies) and his carefully considered lyrics have a tidiness that sometimes verges on the prosaic. Yet the gentle mesh of flowing melody, woven instrumentation and mood of hard-earned contemplation adds up to something quite profound.

As a generation of UK rappers comes of age, Hus still leads the pack with his pitless charisma, linguistic inventiveness, and musical curiosity.

Her charismatic force keeps things afloat. Music destined for a group workout class or M&S Christmas advert, maybe, but executed to a high standard and providing precious confidence and joy to a lot of people – and really, who can argue with that.

She’s at her best channelling the mature, suburban melodrama of vintage Tammy Wynette on Stay at Home Mother and the all-out D.I.V.O.R.C.E.-style heartwrench of Waterproof Mascara, on which a little boy’s mother thanks God for a cosmetic that “won’t run like his daddy did”.

Foals’ fourth album is an exciting, immersive experience that picks up where 2013’s Mercury Prize-nominated Holy Fire left off, adding epic arena rock muscle and lustre to their previously rather winsome and overly-cerebral style.

The familiar is as classy as ever.