If sensuous, whip smart R’n’B rocks your boat, Victoria Monét’s debut album, Jaguar II, is a luxurious treat.

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.

Their return should be heralded from on high, because it is the boldest, smartest, most colourful and purely pleasurable dance album of this decade.

You feel each artist shares your yearning to hear Dalton sing each song herself. Haunted and haunting.

Yet the over-riding sense of her almost unremittingly sombre sixth album, Norman F______ Rockwell!, is of Del Rey shedding veils of production mystery at the risk of being revealed as just another over sensitive and particularly self-absorbed singer-songwriter.

There are lovely instrumental passages, lustrous strings, and it has all been crafted with love and care, but it doesn’t hit the heights we expect from a great Beatles ballad, ending up sounding like a poor imitation of genius, the kind of soft rock whimsy you’d find on thousands of second-rate Beatle influenced albums in the Seventies.

The album is peppered with playful uses of samples. It’s deeply sophisticated music – an astute melting pot of genres bound together by the latest production techniques.

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.

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.

This is stand-up-and-listen music, commanding attention in surprising ways. Being suggests that far from mellowing with age, Maal – who turns 70 in June – remains as eager and excited to explore new frontiers as he ever was.

This would all be simply infuriating were it not for the melodiousness that binds these strange sounds and images together, the feeling stirred up by Vernon’s voice, and his gift for chord progressions that sweep you along almost against your will.

This album is the two-and-a-half-hour soundtrack. And it is an absolute performance masterclass.

For all its despair at the cost of war, this is not a protest record, rather a consideration of our place in the greater scheme of things.

11 songs of such staggering clarity that I found myself breathing a sigh of relief halfway through that bands like this still exist in Britain.

This is the Stones’ 12th live album. Do we need another one? Not really. Live at the El Mocambo is one for dedicated fans and completists, but it’s a fascinating snapshot of a band in transition – and great fun.

Van Etten evokes Eighties electro pop. You can almost see the dry ice and excessive mascara. The atmosphere is doomy and gothic, creating an underlying tension that casts her lyrics of devotion and self-forgiveness in a shadowy light. It’s as if she can’t quite commit to her own happiness.

An album that ultimately serves as both an emancipation and a proclamation, Grande fully bending her collaborators to her will instead of merely playing in their sandboxes, and creating a blissful fusion of pop and R&B that is entirely her own.

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.

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

This is an album that sounds like a world of music in itself.

There's a real grace about The Longest River, the debut album from self-taught multi-instrumentalist Olivia Chaney.

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.

You have to be in the mood for Young Man In America but, when you are, you'll be rewarded by an absorbing album.

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

Process seems unlikely to make Sampha a household name in his own right. Yet it has a drama and intensity that should increase his influence on those who already are.

He continues the good work with sixth album The Night Chancers, a set of seductive, atmospheric late-night grooves on which Dury conjures sinister vignettes of insomniac dwellers of the wee small hours.

What Volume 16 really demonstrates is that Dylan has a certain rock and folk comfort zone, and it was a mistake to ever push himself out of it. The most surprising treat is the sound of Dylan in fine voice warming up with cover versions of old favourites, including a soulful take of The Temptations’ I Wish It Would Rain, a steamy run through Elvis Presley’s Mystery Train with Ringo Starr on drums, and a slowed-down and heartfelt version of Neil Diamond’s Sweet Caroline.

Once I Was An Eagle is a masterpiece, and, at 23, she’s still only getting started.

Unsurprisingly, loss and grief lie at the core of the Foo Fighters’ most succinct and intense album.

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.

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

A resounding comeback. ... The best thing Cocker has done since Pulp, and that is very good indeed.

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.

This is a set of funny, twisted, sharp-edged vignettes about the choices women face in the gritty, down-to-earth setting of daily working life – feminist pop as kitchen sink drama.

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.

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.

Cohen’s triumphant return to the live arena is reflected in the growling assuredness of his vocals. An absolute treat.

The lyrics are fantastic, the grooves irresistible, the ideas constantly entertaining. His sense of fun is infectious. It’s good to have James Murphy back doing what he does best.

It is a dream of an album. I’m just not sure it will make any sense when you wake up.

After The Ball, a classic waltz in 3/4 time and a song of heartbreak as powerful today as it was more than 120 year's ago, is just one highlight on this super musical history lesson.

Any vocalist might thrill to engage with such sleek backing tracks, yet Shaw’s cool delivery and off-kilter lyricism occupies unusual spaces in the band’s arrangements, pushing the whole project into edgily discombobulating territory.

The 16-song set flows beautifully, carrying listeners on an emotional journey in which surprising musical twists and glittering barbs of lyrical empowerment cast optimistic light on a long dark night of Billie’s tortured soul.

His harmonies have a louche charm, his trumpet sound has a fascinating vocal intimacy, and he makes lightning-fast interplay with the quintet, especially sax player Walter Smith III.

It’s an adventure.

Orton digs so deeply into her own personal spaces and memories that what she finds there is unique. Middle-aged discontent has rarely sounded so lovely.

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.

Bush is still making music that intrudes and abducts.

This album is a musical gumbo: a rich, surprising and ultimately satisfying stew of Simon's folk, rock and pop influences from all over the world.

Here’s what I Inside the Old Year Dying is: beguilingly atmospheric, beautifully crafted, and yet more proof that PJ Harvey is one of our most idiosyncratic artists. It’s wyrd, for sure. But it’s also lwovely.

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

The Overload is a very fine debut from a group that sound like they think they are smarter, funnier and fiercer than all of their peers, and just might prove to be.

This set is a fine reminder of his magnificent legacy of film work.

Full of safe risks, Gigi’s Recovery is very much a transitional album as The Murder Capital look to evolve without alienating their fanbase. Doors are left wide open for subsequent reinventions but for now, the five-piece are comfortable sticking close-by what they know.

Relentless might just be one of the most thrilling things you’ll hear all year. It’s a slow-burning triumph, its 12 tracks oscillating between squalling and shimmering rockers and richly-realised ballads thanks in large part to Hynde’s masterly co-writer and guitarist James Walbourne.

Splashes of new musical colour correspond with a growing confidence and maturity in the songs themselves, but the overall mood remains intensely vulnerable.

Midnights represents Swift at a turning point. I am not sure if it is the sign of a curtain falling on her imperial phase or a new pop dawn.

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.

On Over and Even, which was produced by Daniel Martin Moore, she also sings harmony with Will Oldham and Glen Dettinger and allied to riveting guitar work, as it is on My Only Trouble, the result is terrific.

It is another gem in an already glittering canon.

This is music that is following its own agenda, whose funky energy is innate. It’s been absorbing external influences for centuries and is keeping on doing so in today’s crazy, accelerated postmodern world.

It’s a fresh, raw and intentionally scruffy album.

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.

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.

American Kid is a triumph of songwriting and expressive singing.

It is the 12 songs he wrote and co-wrote that sparkle.

It’s fair to say there is nothing groundbreaking on offer, just another set of beautifully constructed and performed songs of soul and meaning.

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.

It is, in short, and as we might have expected, a work of genius.

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

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

If I may make up a word of my own, it is utterly bjorkers, and all you can do is dig it.

Multitudes is a perfect assertion of that power, by turns reflective and commanding.

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.

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

There cannot be another musical duet around at the moment who are able to make two acoustic guitars and two voices produce a sound that is so subtle and yet powerful.

For all its length (16 tracks) and elaborate staging (with videos for every song), the album has a focus and intensity unusual in multi-writer ensemble productions, a sense of purposefulness that holds the attention even when the songs sometimes drift off in search of a chorus.

As a direct follow up, Evermore may lack the impactful frisson of Folklore, but is nevertheless another treat of classy, emotional songcraft.

They have conjured a collection of really strong songs about big subjects, delivered with sensitivity and conviction. Memento Mori stands with the best of their career.

If you like quality songwriting delivered with panache, On The Line is on the money.

As a body of work, Crushing feels small, intimate and inward. But these are big songs, full of big ideas, from a big talent.

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.

From the arresting cover (a comically unsalacious shot of a semi-naked Hackman holding a piglet to her breasts) to the startling contents, Any Human Friend signals Hackman’s coming of age as an artist with real purpose and 
star power.

The result is the gorgeous Tomorrow is My Turn, which shows off the full singing range and power of the frontwoman for innovative string-band trio the Carolina Chocolate Drops.

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 great to have Lee Ann Womack back with such a sad and lovely album.

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 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.

Thoughts on suicide, homelessness, injustice, heartbreak and mortality are framed with supple grooves, melodious chords, gorgeous harmonies and lushly detailed arrangements.

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.

From the opening chimes and birdsong to her sultry vocals, the album cocoons you entirely in its plush, sensuous world.

The real deal, untampered with, apart from a slight cleaning up of the 1964 sound. .... This album won’t change the history books, but it’s certainly a welcome addition to the Coltrane canon.

There is a neat cover of Creedence’s Have You Ever Seen the Rain but the best songs are her own heartfelt and brooding country ones.

What an absolute joy it is, in which the grand old man of songcraft flips through his own back pages with genuine relish, a man in his 80’s revisiting the words of his firebrand youth and finding entirely new meanings there.

Springsteen drives proceedings with acoustic strumming, the rough tones of his voice rooting the symphonic gorgeousness in gritty reality. It stands comparison with his very best solo albums. Lyrics offer character sketches, lives caught with a few deft lines and evocative melodies.

At first listen it sounds messy, but the more you play it, the more inspired and essential each brutal interruption becomes.

A record with moments of pure, solar heat.

What’s Your Pleasure has a sleek and sensual disco glamour replete with fantastic pop hooks, taking a spin around the dance floor worthy of Studio 54 in its glitterball glory days.