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.

Paul Griffith (drums); Amanda Shires (violins/vocals and a gifted songwriter with her own album Lightning Strikes just out); Chad Staehly (keyboards); Jason Isbell (guitars) and Mick Utley (vocals) add the expertly jaunty sound to Snider's ironic and enjoyably dark lyrics.

Indeed, for all the slick but formulaic pleasures of the album’s mainstream pop push, it is arguably that Cyrus is at her most compelling when she dances like no one is watching.

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

At times she strives too hard for Tom Waitsian wonky Americana. But more often she makes the Canadian wilderness her own.

Producer Jacquire King, who worked on Tom Waits’s Mule Variations and Norah Jones’s The Fall, allows Della's gutsy sound to soar.

If Twice As Tall is Burna’s bid for global superstardom, then the music is polished to befit his aims.

The Dream is sensuous and seductive, but it often lingers on the borderline of turning into a nightmare.

N.K-Pop will be a treat for Heaton’s fans. But it could probably use a little K-Pop power if he harbours any desire to reach and preach to the unconverted.

When you are as talented as Fousheé, the temptation to show you're a jack of all trades must be intoxicating, and it's one of the reasons softCORE is such an unpredictable thrill ride.

As big and bold as any fan could hope for.

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.

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.

Her vocals remain powerful: from soaring operatic drama to persuasive pop melody and an ominous snarl; it doesn’t sound like she’ll take “nein” for an answer on the spacey synths of Gib Mir Deine Liebe. On the English-language tracks, her lyrics sometimes sound gauche, but the sentiments ring true, and her guest-list is enjoyably far-ranging.

This is What I Mean completely abandons the often very macho bullishness at the heart of hip hop, to show rap at its most sensitive.

What meets at this particular crossroads is good old-fashioned blues, soul-stirring gospel and a funky, Hammond-organ-soaked sound.

The all-female indie-rock quartet, have returned after a six year hiatus with fourth album Radiate Like This, and it feels more intimate than ever.

Above all, Joy’All seems like the work of an artist content with floating through life, just having fun – and she’s brought us along for the ride.

It is a testament to just how utterly robust these songs are that the results are, inescapably, joyous. The recordings have been given a bit of digital oomph, with all the sounds polished and honed, and levels kicked up a notch, so the result is dense and shiny, with a relentlessly modern attack.

E3 AF marks his growth into an elder statesman of rap. Perhaps he sounds so assured because he’s embedding himself again in the sound that he helped to pioneer.

It can get a bit messy at times, but if you like the sound of The National channeling Bruce Springsteen at a rowdy barroom hoedown then this could be one for you.

As so many are today, it’s a lockdown special, and this shows both in its more ambitious production and its slight air of self-indulgence.

His latest offering is powered by some lovely, liquid bass playing that offers a silvery thread through the textured mélange of disjointed electronic noises, splintered guitars and ghostly traces of strings. It is certainly not for everyone. But Ejimiwe’s relentlessly downbeat delivery may have finally found its moment.

The album is a beauty, none the less, the care put into it confirming Williams's exalted position in the tower of song.

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

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.

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.

Formentera is a gratifying record stuffed with perfectly crafted songs by a band completely at ease in their own skin.

The atmosphere is ultimately so paranoid and competitive, he makes being a rap star sound exhausting. Ignorance Is Bliss is at its most interesting when Skepta's volatile emotional state pushes to the surface of his combative persona.

Every Loser is a great, energising opening blast for 2023, a loud and lairy rock album jam-packed with the lust for life that has characterised Iggy’s whole wayward career.

Neither lets down an album that features songs by some of country music's finest lyricists.

All 12 are of a consistently high standard and sung with feeling.

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.

Entering Heaven Alive may not be his most ground-breaking album and won’t entirely satisfy those who come for the great White guitar wail. But this master musician really sounds like he’s enjoying himself with results that are pretty heavenly.

They are peppered with witty lines but, like an over-repeated punchline, the humour wears thin. For all its gorgeous highlights and overall brilliance, Love Is Magic is an album that is hard to love.

The result is both silkily seductive and moodily narcissistic.

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.

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

Nelson co-writes many of Gaga’s songs too, which essay a slightly awkward journey from rock balladry to slickly superficial pop. In one sense, there is a tangible jump in standards as Gaga comes to the fore on the second half of the album--she is a major musical talent. But there is also a weird disconnect as the soundtrack shifts gear to anodyne modern pop.

ADespite occasionally drawing blood, The Haunted Man doesn't live up to its stripped and dangerous cover, often retreating to gambol about in the backwaters of Khan's imagination.

Spirituals is tonally consistent despite its range of distinctive influences and talents. Just when Santigold threatens to lean into the corny, as on the SBTRKT-produced Shake, she pulls back, adding a whimsical, purposefully on-the-nose rattle sound at the end of each wedding disco-like “shake, shake, shake it” hook. It’s a joy to hear her back in her creative swing.

The Dreamer is occasionally powerful and moving as James ranges across memorable songs including Otis Redding's Champagne & Wine.

Prine is extraordinary, one of the most eloquent artists of modern times and seeing where it all started, in this super CD, really is something very special.

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.

There are striking contributions from an eclectic range of guests, including veteran British rapper Skepta, sound wizard James Blake and singer-songwriter Deb Never, and it all sounds intriguingly modern, with a pleasingly discombobulating bent. Yet, when stripped of political context, it exposes the emptiness of Slowthai’s wordplay, all sound and fury, signifying nothing much at all.

Ultimately, this is a brilliant record about clearing out the emotional crap and stripping things back to their essence – the perfect soundtrack to lull us out of our collective wintering and into some mental spring cleaning.

Playing piano and acoustic guitar, the 44-year-old takes listeners on a bittersweet journey balancing the melancholy of the medium with a healing message. Stand out songs Closer and Lose My Way have a meditative sadness but there is real warmth in choral backing vocals, subtle grooves and Brun’s melodic instincts.

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.

Accessorised with Staxy horns and handclaps, the resulting album has a genuine groove and glow.

Its low-budget weirdness will have you laughing into the new year.

The new Rolling Stones album is the best thing they have made since their Seventies glory days. Which, it might reasonably be argued, de facto makes it the best rock’n’ roll album of the past four decades at least.

There are many absolutely gorgeous moments, including a reconfiguring of Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major as a ballad of gender fluid love, melancholy dance song Tears Are Soft, the lovely piano ballad Flowery Days and delicate electropop True Love (featuring 070 Shake). But the overwhelming mood is oppressive as it proceeds at a relentlessly mid tempo pace like a kind of stately march towards ecstatic sexual release.

This is an uplifting concert--and here's to the next 50 years of The Preservation Hall Jazz Band.

Her command over that mass of bodies remains.

Wild Beasts have shed a lot of excess, offering a stripped-back amalgamation of analogue Eighties synths, snappy machine rhythms and industrial rock guitar buzz, coloured with great swathes of harmonic panache, that is lean and mean enough to pass for modern pop. This newfound purpose is the real revelation of Wild Beasts’ strongest album to date.

They don’t quite sound like the finished article, but there is a virtuous sense of their trying to make music in service of something profound.

A brew of sinister synth waves nearly stagnates where we want it to cascade, and harmonies twine around one another where we want them to soar into anthems. In short, a potential blaze delivers a fizzle.

The focus is always on the smart, economical, classically constructed songs, boasting memorable verses, catchy choruses, intriguing lyrics and peppered with tremendous instrumental breaks. This is an album of conviction and purpose, from a band you can believe in.

As if set free from seriousness, they knock out some polished, off-kilter pop gems about inadequate individuals.

Lisa Hannigan is on confident form in her second solo release since the split from Damien Rice.

Beautifully nuanced collage of soulfully rocking flavours.

With dreamy lullabies, hypnotic love songs and pointed politics all delivered with emotional stridency, Saint-Marie blends rich musicality with the force of righteous conviction.

Inspired playing by Sam Sweeney (fiddle), Rob Harbron (concertina), Roger Wilson (guitar, fiddle), Ben Nicholson (bass), Toby Kearney (percussion), and guests appearances from Jon Boden (guitar, fiddle) and Martin Simpson (guitar) add to a delightful album.

It is the second half of the album that actually shows why country persists against all odds: at its best, it is unafraid of telling stories that dig deep into ordinary lives.

The full band arrangements are tastefully understated, and the 47-year-old sustains a mood of gentle sorrow and hard-earned wisdom that is easy on the ear. It is well trodden territory but Jurado is a class act.

Her crisis of faith provides a sharp edge to Evanescence’s formulaic grandstanding.

Unfortunately, this time around, the lyrics tend to be too opaque to pack quite the same punch. ... That said, there are plenty of songs sure to please diehard Sports Team fans.

Technically Gibbs is a flawless emcee and it’s great to see more of his melodic range on SSS, something that will deservedly bring in new fans. But for his next album, it would be interesting to see Gibbs explore the roots of his “hustler mentality” even further, and start to subvert some of gangster rap’s more impish clichés.

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.

If I have a caveat, it is that it is all so single minded, it lacks the dizzying splendour of Monae’s earlier epics. But on its own down and dirty terms, The Age of Pleasure is sheer pleasure.

This sounds like the work of an artist who knows he is at the head of the hip hop pack, laying down a gauntlet to the whole of rap music.

This confident and assured album surely ranks among his best.

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.

Little Rope is undoubtedly Sleater-Kinney’s most commercial album yet. Crusader, in particular, brings to mind the palatable grunginess of No Doubt, and lead single Say It Like You Mean It – with a video starring Succession’s J Smith-Cameron – echoes WH Auden’s Funeral Blues.

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

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

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

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.

Holy Fvck sounds like a genuine attempt to deal with a troubled adulthood and leave the past behind.

World Record is classic Young: passionate, direct, ragged and beautiful.

This record is undoubtedly their strongest offering since 2006’s Meds, strengthened by the inclusion of the sort of furious social commentary that made them such heroes to countless kohl-eyeliner-wielding teenagers in the late 90s.

This is not so much pop music, as music that might make your ears pop.

Ballads like Ripples and Lovesong barely make a dent, although the bossa nova lilt of The Perfect Pair and pop beat of Tinkerbell Is Overrated fare better. Matty Healy of prominent labelmates The 1975 co-writes a couple of tracks, but his influence overwhelms the album’s delicate palette.

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.

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

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.

To listen to Hold On Baby is to feel like you are really inside someone else’s world, their voice urgently delivering their most intimate feelings in your ear, transmuting them into pop gold.

This is a beautiful, beguiling, disturbing and rewarding album of love, loss, grief and recovery from one of the most intriguing singer-songwriters currently active in British music, of either gender.

Its 14 overloaded songs jostle awkwardly together in a cornucopia of conflicting impulses, shifting from beatboxing punk to beatnik poetry, ambient moodiness to sophisticated showtunes, peppered with snappy couplets and gilded with gorgeous melodies.

Four decades into their career, Soft Cell have rarely sounded more current.

The 58-year-old, who is writing his memoirs, is as busy as ever, and he's still got what it takes.

Despite having been layered and processed through Autotune, her voice conveys genuine intimacy. Cabello had a hand in the writing, and a few songs convey a charming honesty and vulnerability, perhaps a relic of the album’s original themes. But there remains a gulf between the craft of commercial pop and the artistry of confessional songwriting, and there is not much doubt about which has been prioritised on Camila.

Though consistently ground-breaking and lyrically challenging, Ritual Union never feels like hard work.

Knocking around for twenty years and now down to a duo, Cornershop are still coming up with brilliantly playful pop.

A treat.

Del Rey has sometimes been characterised as a modern day torch singer but on Lust For Life she sounds like she is finally ready to take that torch and burn down her ex’s house with it. Lust For Life lets a bit of light into the darkness of Del Rey’s moody past works, hinting at emotional recovery without drastically altering her sensuous musical palette.

There is nothing disappointing about the way he conjures art from emotional defeat. Toast deserves to be acclaimed amongst his finest works. Twenty-one years since the album was made, Young has reminded us once again why he stands tall amongst the greats of the rock era.

Some of the noisier blues are cheesy, but, in the main, this is a warm, authentic and durable record: the musical equivalent of a well-worn plaid shirt.