Black Terry Cat makes confident use of R&B grooves as a base from which to explore more exotic sounds.

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.

For an album that brings together so many threads of Weller’s career, there is not much in the way of rocky guitar drive or punk energy. Yet there is an open-minded spirit in the way Weller mixes songcraft with ear-catching sonic details and structural adventure.

Gifted keeps giving: Koffee achieves a brilliantly confident debut with the promise of more good things to come.

Stunning. ... With slick, tasteful production from Jack Antanoff built around shining guitars and perfectly balanced vocal arrangements, this is a powerful addition to the genre.

Grant brilliantly skewers his own depression, addiction, bitchiness and heartbreak throughout a record which finds him mixing his penchant for corduroy, laid-back melodies with a new, rawly exposed synth-pop that feels like it's seeped up from an underground carpark, all hard concrete and cold, flickering fluorescents.

A straight-ahead album of gorgeous, elaborate, amusing and affecting songs.

Backed by his father's old orchestra, Fela Kuti's son Seun shows how afrobeat should be played: its irrepressible funky surge offset by truly scorching brass fanfares.

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.

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.

It's a journey in which you don't need to know the words: this music is a licence to feel without prejudice. Like prayers or poetry, the potency is in the cadence, the rhythms, and the stirring of memory and imagination.

The album is both consistently breezy and emotionally upfront, going to-and-fro between galvanising dance anthems and gentle, psychedelic country ballads à la Kacey Musgrave’s Golden Hour.

If this was a debut, we would be hailing Andrews as a precocious young genius. But perhaps, in this age of acceleration, amid a pop blizzard of viral memes and instant digital fame, the slow maturing of a truly substantial talent is something to really celebrate.

It's simply a great album from start to finish - wonderful tunes, superb musicianship, star guests and a unity of purpose about delivering a fitting tribute to the music he loves that raises this album to such a high level.

Lasting a little over 30 minutes, See You In The Stars is almost cocky in its brevity. There’s not an ounce of fat on it, and it’s all the more satisfying for it.

From exquisitely tender, elegaic ballad Only Children (“‘Heaven’s wasted on the dead’ is what your mama said / When the hearse was idling in the parking lot”) to self-questioning anthem What I’ve Done To Help, Isbell and his band are firing on all cylinders. Honestly, if you like this kind of thing, the guitar sounds and solos on burning rocker Overseas are worth the price of entry alone.

At times, Koenig is reminiscent of Paul McCartney in nursery rhyme mode--tunefully sweet and silly. Yet Koenig’s pithily epigrammatic lyrics throw a bit of intellectual grit in the mix, even if they possess all the clarity of a cryptic crossword.

Twenty-six years after their last album, 58-year-old Rowland and his roughly reassembled crew have made a record that manages to combine fresh new stories with the heart and nervous energy of classic Dexys.

Furnaces is an album of bold and brutal self-examination of masculinity’s darkest aspects, in which Harcourt seductively acknowledges the appeal of giving vent to selfish impulses while implicitly acknowledging their devastating effect on others, and indeed the world.

It is music of emotion and imagination, shifting perspectives in ways that are deliciously intangible, intent on moving the heart rather than the feet.

While they make no claims to be a wildly original band--they listen to Black Sabbath and they have been described as the all-female Joy Division--what makes them so compelling is their fierce focus.

Although something of a melting pot, this is an original and accessible album, blending world influences with old time American music.

Blending hi-tech and lo-fi, modern synthesised sound and old-fashioned song writing, her work plumbs torrid emotional depths, similar to alt-rock stars such as Lou Barlow.

Hegarty has mastered the art of turning performance into a kind of ritual ceremony and the magic of these symphonic concert recordings blows their previously released versions out of the water.

This is a laidback album, drawing on the dreamy Seventies milieu of Laurel Canyon with a touch of the easy listening sumptuousness of Burt Bacharach. It is about the ways lovers drift apart, evoking the fall of Autumnal leaves rather than blood on the tracks.

Del Amitri’s bracing feel-bad pop-rock won’t be for everyone, but for those of us who appreciate sweet melodies set off with sour sentiments, it is perversely good to have the old curmudgeons back.

An English one-off, in fine voice.

It’s a rarity to have an album in which every song could genuinely be a single, but they’ve managed it here.

Death Cab are back with a bang and a new-found self-assurance.

At 66 Raitt’s warm graze of a voice is better than ever, balancing the confidence of experienced with a more nuanced perspective. Inspirational.

While Touré acquits himself imaginatively in a variety of settings, the whirring, jangling opener Sokosondou, with just his own musicians, feels the most compelling track.

This record is rammed full of fantastically fresh and challenging beats and bears the hallmarks of Cherry's streetwise style.

While the Stones may not have struck oil with these songs, their energy remains undimmed, their back catalogue endlessly renewable.

Fifth time around, The 1975 get the equation right: pop first, art later.

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.

Arrangements are simple and sparse, everything lightly touched, with only swells of strings and brushes of horn, harmonium and other instrumental colours buoying up her guitar and clear voice.

For every perfectly observed vignette of English life (Sunny Afternoon, Autumn Almanac) and pithily satirical narrative (Village Green Preservation Society, Dead End Kids) there's a clunking, unwieldy, elaborate novelty song (Supersonic Rocket Ship, Skin & Bone).

It is an enormous pleasure to report that the new David Bowie album is an absolute wonder: urgent, sharp-edged, bold, beautiful and baffling, an intellectually stimulating, emotionally charged, musically jagged, electric bolt through his own mythos and the mixed-up, celebrity-obsessed, war-torn world of the 21st century.

100 gecs can also be (perhaps willfully) irritating. ... At their strongest, though – as on punky standout Doritos And Fritos – 10,000 gecs is a wonderful exercise in letting creativity run amok with no rules at all and carefully catching the resultant gold.

Amid all the delightful nostalgia comes one glaring disappointment. When Swift committed to the re-recordings, she promised they wouldn’t lose the heart of the original – and the lyrics would stay the same. But on Better Than Revenge, a bitter rebuke to a love rival, she’s done just that.

Despite the subject matter, this is an invigorating celebration of the joys of great songwriting and proof of the power of one man and his piano.

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.

The toughness of Weller's art remains fully present here. An album of beauty and depth, True Meanings is further affirmation of a particularly sincere and probing talent, for whom music is a vocation rather than a career.

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.

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.

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

They take a sombre aspect of their native Northumbrian traditional music, regional accent and dialect intact, and, sprinkling in a few intriguing covers along the way, build something string-laden and luscious but also delicate, wistful and melancholy.

It's a cleverly constructed, well-written and cohesive piece of work - albeit possibly, at 13 tracks, two songs too long.

There’s nothing very new about the sound, but there’s a freshness and intelligence in the Lawrence brothers’ discovery of it.

He brings real feeling to his own compositions such as Let Me Sleep (At the end of a Dream).

There are a few moments here that feel like major label fodder, sure, but on the whole Kojey Radical deserves enormous credit for putting out an album that remains thoughtful and spiky despite its clear intention to get people dancing.

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

It may be resolutely old-fashioned and, for sure, we’ve heard it all before, but the sheer pleasure in Porter’s singing is all but impossible to resist.

Sleaford Mods have lost none of their political bite, humour, and astute observational skill. UK Grim will cement their place as one of Britain’s most influential – and successful – UK bands.

She brings excellent phrasing to Haggard's powerful lyrics and there are two standout songs [Sing Me Back Home and Someday When Things are Good].

Comparisons with Nilsson and early solo McCartney are high praise, but at his softer side it all threatens to go a bit Gilbert O’Sullivan. Yet this is a lovely debut and its innocence is a big part of its charm.

Freighted deep with lugubrious rolls of oily bass, sandy inhalations of desert strings, holy intonations and salty lust, Push the Sky Away is the audio equivalent of bathing in the Dead Sea.

The production by Jack Antonoff is stunning, with a huge amount happening beneath the surface of what first manifests as a scratchily intimate acoustic-flavoured unplugged band. There is not a weak song or throwaway performance here, amidst many that only reveal their secrets on repeated listening.

Her uncompromising, June Taboresque alto and imaginative, original material--from ye olde narrative ballads to modern love songs--are enduringly seductive.

An enjoyable and soulful album, the highlight of which is the title track Indian Ocean.

There is plenty of passion in songs about Tennessee striking miners in the Thirties, or about the English Civil War.

No doubts about this: Short Movie is a masterpiece.

Rod Picott achieves his aim of making an authentic studio version of his live shows in his new album Fortune. The material is sometimes contemporary.

Covering Black Tie, White Noise, The Buddha of Suburbia, 1.Outside, Earthling and ‘hours…’, this box set is a welcome opportunity to re-evaluate that period with a more forgiving spirit and historic context. Because (as they say in sport) form is temporary, class is permanent. And Toy is further proof that Bowie was always a class act.

While some of the songs slip into genericity, such as the forgettable There’s a First Time For Everything, others are 80s-inspired, synth-led earworms. Smells Like Me stands out as one of the album’s highlights, a masterclass in pop writing with an ultra-memorable hook.

The kids might not understand, but rock fans should be delighted that Kerr and Thatcher are still in the ring, giving it everything they’ve got.

Like every previous Pet Shop Boys album, Nonetheless is clever, fun, and at times very touching.

A side project should be challenging and unusual; it should stretch the boundaries of the artists involved. Since that is what this characterful, strong, self-contained album does, you really have to like it or lump it.

I have no hesitation in saying that McCartney III is every bit the equal of its predecessors. It is unadulterated Macca, with a little bit of cheese on the side – the sound of one of the greatest songwriters of our time, having the time of his life.

It is not very hip, and it doesn't really hop, but Sleaford Mods have arguably come closer than anyone else to creating a uniquely British form of rap: rant music.

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

In weaker moments he veers into mawkish troubadour territory, but Blake's musical alchemy can be capable of matching the urban, nocturnal beauty of vintage Massive Attack.

Saturns Pattern is an album to wallow joyously in, even if the songs are as whimsical as Weller’s approach to punctuation.

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

At times the music feels more like a classical arrangement than a bluegrass record--but it works.

Some of it is boring and the two songs from his George Harrison session chug along forgettably. But I’d swap my unloved copy of Self Portrait for this box set any day.

There's a nourishing warmth in their bittersweet laments.

As always, his technical control is astounding.

His long gestating third album is every bit as fantastic as earlier offerings, stuffed with narratives of contemporary bohemian life; wordy, free-flowing verses giving way to singalong choruses, spiced up with perky, lateral hooks.

Oh My God is a spiritual album for a secular age, one that tries to distil a sense of the divine from the very act of making music.

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

This is an album of rare truth and grace.

Nothing on this, her fourth album, rivals that hit [1234] for toe-tapping immediacy, but it is rich in atmospheric beauty.

Strangers is his most measured and thoughtful album to date.

Some gripping songs of internal angst with rock touches set off by luscious strings and Harvieu’s timeless voice.

A genuine treat, probably the best thing he has made since his debut.

You can get lost in the whole EP, which possesses all the quality and thought of a full-formed album, but flickers by like the yellow windows of a train in the dark, travelling on to somewhere new.

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.

Distance Inbetween is by some distance the Coral's most muscular offering.

Its 10 tracks offer a timely reminder of just why Oasis resonated so widely, empowered by a melodious and snappy songwriter with plenty of heart and soul.

Fender is young enough to be immersed in the life he documents, not writing at a nostalgic remove. When he rises to longing high notes on weekend anthem Saturday, you can really feel him straining at the leash. I think Springsteen would approve.

It's a fully-acoustic affair (guitar, piano, upright bass, drums, etc), with a luxurious, live-combo presence and some gruff musings on time, humanity and music.

As you’d expect from one of Britain’s most cerebral and celebrated sonic adventurers, this isn’t the kind of music you can hum in the bath. It’s challenging, other-worldly and thought-provoking.

This is bold, weird, beautiful stuff, but the listener has their work cut out getting to it. Ironically, the core of I Am Easy to Find is not particularly easy to find. At all.

Mercy is not an easy listen, but it is nevertheless inspiring to hear an octogenarian artist declining the comforts of nostalgia, still forging his own wayward path, opening byways for others to explore at their leisure.

Grande can really sing, which is a treat in this Auto-Tuned era. Her four-octave range has been compared favourably to Mariah Carey’s, but her style is far more delicate and understated. She rarely unleashes full power blasts but her delight in singing is transparent and her producers take full advantage, layering her all over the tracks.

The collective’s strength lies in their snakelike energy: all coiled muscle, hypnotic sway and dangerous unpredictability. The flaw is that it can all get a bit lairy.

We are in the presence of mad, brilliant, soulful genius and there is no choice but to surrender.