Killer Mike and El-P bring typically sharp, visceral observations, chugging beats and superb guest artists onto their most successful studio effort to date.

Big Time is a rich, uplifting album that shakes off sorrow, having stared it squarely in the face.

The first line of the first song encapsulates the adolescent angst which blossomed over and over throughout the band's career, with varying degrees of wit, empathy, contempt and self-pity.

A record that whispers its way through a marvellous maze of music to deliver some big emotional wallops.

It’s a record that sucks in all of the band’s best-known sounds and blows them out in a wild confetti blast of twisty-indie-anxious-punk-jazzy-joy.

At an age where the pressure is on to have everything worked out, Harding sounds delightfully free.

The follow-up to 2014’s LP1 is the sound of a woman teetering on the brink of collapse, gathering herself, and then erupting into a kind of defiance.

The live recording of this record really helps deliver that communal feeling. They feel so present and close that listeners might feel they’re violating the pandemic rules.

The Roots' 13th album may be their best.

Traverses Eighties-indebted dance, swirling alt-pop and homespun lo-fi across a tight 10-song track list. There are reprieves – where the energy quietens to syrupy, fluid ballads on which Zauner’s voice lolls as opposed to skips – but the emotional journey is always upward.

There’s no track on Jaime that is likely to make waves – not in the same way as some of the better-known Alabama Shakes tracks, such as “Hold On” or “This Feeling” (the latter of which was recently used to remarkable effect in the final scene of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag). But what lovely ripples it makes.

Songwriter Tim Elsenburg makes great strides forward with an ambitious cycle of songs about identity and history.

Over a visceral torrent of motorik punk-pop pummels recalling prime Pixies or McLusky, Joe hails his “beautiful immigrant” blood brother “Danny Nedelko” and celebrates his “mongrel” upbringing on “I’m Scum”--in a world run by bullish right-wing sex pests, his aggressive compassion is a potent antidote.

It’s not so much that she’s changed direction completely, as that she’s drained her art of the obfuscating sonic blabber to leave her pop aesthetic.

New record is a self-knowing contradiction to The Weeknd’s past celebrations of impermanence via one-night stands and sleazy affairs. Now he understands, even regrets, his flighty behaviour.

I’m pretty sure that Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You is going to be one of my albums of the year. Because few records managed to be this soothing, and interesting too.

Homegrown is his most personal. Intended for release in 1975, Homegrown retains Harvest’s country-rock sound, but has more of an intimate feel.

The tracks on i/o grow both on and in a listener like seeds germinating. Those who like their song structures neat and tidy may struggle with the jazz odysseys, but Gabriel asks very little of his fans – just time. Give him that, and you will find this album gently becoming part of you on a cellular level.

There’s prodigious ambition here, and moments of great pleasure.

A record that will go down as a milestone not just as a work of art in its own right, but as the perfect celebration of queerness, female power, and self-worth.

David Bowie releases the most extreme album of his entire career: Blackstar is as far as he's strayed from pop.

[The first three] tracks follow fairly seamlessly on from MBV's previous work, but thereafter subtle changes are applied that tug the album into pastures new.

This deathly intrigue is drawn from Lenker’s own personal traumas, which she successfully spins into something that feels universal. But you don’t come away from this record feeling downcast. It’s more a reminder of how fleeting yet beautiful life is, and an appeal to make the most of it.

It doesn’t pack quite the same melancholy, melodic punch as Carrie and Lowell. But it’s lovely to feel all the heavy stuff just breeze past you.

The band may have achieved Ivor Novello and Mercury Prize nominations, as well as their highest chart position, with 2016’s Curve of the Earth, but A Billion Heartbeats aims higher, and doesn’t miss.

Less structured and song-oriented than Channel Orange, it’s a long, meandering ramble through Ocean’s passing interests and attitudes, hopes and memories, alighted upon like scenes briefly glimpsed from a train window and then dropped into tracks that aren’t so much sung as delivered in an undulating sprechstimme that seems to be avoiding the difficult choice of a compelling melody.

There are more hooks here than on Lenker’s previous albums, 2020’s great but ethereal Songs, and its companion album, the lyricless Instrumentals. Tracks like the gentle, mellifluous “Cell Phone Says” showcase Lenker’s skill with a soulful folk guitar riff, while the lively and finger-picked “Fool” is a standout.

Southeastern finds him working in a more stripped-down manner which focuses attention firmly on his songs. Fortunately, they're brilliant: vivid, multi-faceted tales of souls adrift.

With the hindsight afforded by this monumental 17-disc career retrospective, he seems somewhat less than The One, an idiosyncratic talent undermined by MOR inclinations.

There’s a little electronic noodling going on to remind us that, though Mering sounds supremely grounded, a part of her is still in exiled orbit around a damaged world. It’s soulful, and a little spooky.

The chief virtue is the immediacy that courses through tracks like “The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton” and “Fall of the Star High School Running Back”.

Bjork’s Vulnicura represents a return of sorts to standard song form after the experimental Biophilia, its nine long tracks evoking the emotional confusion following a break-up.... But throughout, Bjork’s own vocals are the stumbling-block.

The determination to include generous dollops of each member’s solo output means that the acoustic set sags badly. But the obscure material is welcome.

Despite a few obvious omissions (Sun Ra, Marvin, Curtis and others), it’s an endless source of sonically challenging, mind-freeing ambition.

An intriguing addition to the band’s canon.

The proof is in the pudding; that pudding being a deliciously prickly collection of songs as lyrically bawdy as ever.

Like their Discovery LP which laid fresh pathways for pop and dance in 2001, Random Access Memories breathes life into the safe music that dominates today’s charts, with its sheer ambition.

The album is sultry and soporific, sitting somewhere between the minimalist trip-hop of Del Rey’s early days, and the scuzzy desert rock she has toyed with over the years.

It all adds up to a fascinating, multifaceted work which strives to find its own unique space in a crowded musical world, forever mindful of its limitations, but soldiering on with good humour.

McCartney gives Lennon’s vocals space and prominence, blending his own voice sensitively into that wondrous brotherly harmony we thought we’d never hear afresh again. The lyrics – while reading like a typical holding-pattern Lennon love song until greater inspiration stuck – resonate now after 40 years of loss. .... “Now and Then” is the musical event of the year and one of the greatest tear-jerkers in history.

She can do all sorts with those pipes and Hit Parade finds Murphy celebrating her many textures.

Bouger Le Monde offers a celebration of life.

It’s playful and elaborate.

Isolation represents the different facets of Uchis: the survivor, romantic and the rebel. But she still manages to keep herself a mystery through moody metaphors and Uchis--who grew up in between Colombia and Virginia--has been largely underrated the past few years, but Isolation might just finally give her the attention she deserves.

Everything about the album is fragmented, and dizzying in the vein of Samuel Beckett’s Not I or T.S. Elliot’s The Waste Land. Even the lyric sheet is a glorious mess.

Not only did they change the course of rock music; they also sustained an inspired creativity for almost two decades, something that the career arc of this retrospective brings into focus, right down to the Bacharach-esque touches of the final unreleased tracks, which pleasingly bring things full-circle in certain ways.

Live albums, never quite being able to replicate the atmosphere of a show or the cleanness of a record, can be hard work--but Springsteen on Broadway is an enthralling listen.

On what may be her best album, Polly Harvey offers a portrait of her homeland as a country built on bloodshed and battle, not so much a police state as a nation in thrall to military endeavour, however impotent and wasteful that has become.

“Seventeen” winks at the inevitable, then celebrates it. Remind Me Tomorrow is best in thrall to this untouchable energy, when Van Etten and her band sound ecstatic despite their worldly wisdom.

So thank you, “Ari”, for a lovely listen. I have to confess, I’d like a bit more vocal grit. Maybe that’s up next.

Prass confirms her unique, tremulous contralto mining depths of despairing devotion on songs clearly triggered by romantic crisis.

A skilled interpreter, Simpson’s bruised baritone murmur morphs to fit the contours of each song.

That’s what listening to Tension feels like: 100 per cent “Whheeeeeee!”

“Cold Little Heart” builds from piano and the merest shiver of strings to a Morricone-esque pitch of intensity, before Kiwanuka himself arrives five minutes in. It’s a big, powerful statement of intent that the rest of the album doesn’t quite live up to.

Save for three traditional songs, Strange Country comprises brilliantly-wrought original material haunted by themes of uncertainty, lassitude, jealousy and spite.

It’s a revelatory affair, bringing a fresh, raw focus to brilliant songs steeped in lust, death and loss with a blend of sly rockabilly and blues-tinged country-rock.

Roth fits Hunter like a glove, bringing out the warmth of his brass section and framing his raw voice in perfectly judged R&B arrangements that spark and bounce.

Overall, it’s a collection primarily concerned with the somatic rather than cerebral sides of Richard James’s music, overdosing somewhat on staccato, bouncing synth twangs and jittery drum’n’bass beats.

Truly, the album of a lifetime.

A record that captures nostalgia without devolving into anachronism or retrograde – a fine line that Nas is well-versed in toeing. As ever, Nas is his own lynchpin. Tracks including “Store Run” and “Moments” demonstrate the rapper’s gift as a lucid narrator of his own experience.

The British producer/singer, already a low-key presence on albums by Solange, Kanye and Frank Ocean, not only employs a fresh palette of sounds--from the harp-like pluckings of “Plastic 100ºC” to the beguiling Celtic-flavoured organ of “Timmy’s Prayer”--but also applies them to matters beyond romance: notably here, the process of bereavement.

A stunning celebration of Black, gay love. ... It is also a groundbreaking proclamation of personal acceptance.

Big Conspiracy is Hus’s second chance – an album that proves he’s just as essential a part of UK music today as he was three years ago.

It’s a masterful set, stuffed with brooding, industrial-synth beats.

Once I Was an Eagle is a work that demands to be taken as a whole, another reminder of the peculiar power of the album form, despite frequent premature declarations of its redundancy.

As a tribute, and a farewell, it could hardly be better.

Merritt’s refracted reminiscences frequently offer thoughtful and incisive insights into bigger issues, and with deceptive sleight of story.

The appetite for Washington’s old-school jazz utopia is a miracle in itself, renewed here.

It’s a mature mix of reflection and assertion--albeit corralled this time into just ten tracks--in which Weller’s musings on life, love and society are channelled through a diverse series of musical modes, most of them constantly seeking to seep into other styles.

Elwan (Elephants), perhaps their most powerful album since Amassakoul, confronts their situation head-on, in songs musing on the values of ancestry, unity and fellowship, driven by the infectiously hypnotic cyclical guitar grooves that wind like creepers around their poetic imagery.

It’s all delivered with welcoming warmth and humility, over impeccably buttoned-down soul-funk grooves.

Every Bad is a relinquishing of whatever it is that keeps us from baring our souls, and an unleashing of frustration at how, like children riding a carousel, we’re all just going round in circles.

Off Off On stakes out the Winchester-born, Paris-based Stables as one of the most original and musically gifted artists of today.

FKA Twigs emerges the high priestess of R&B's latest corruption, and the world will kneel at the altar.

With Stone Rollin', he broadens his outlook to take in various other R&B styles, without shifting more than a few years either way.

Musically progressive, it’s Shires most ambitious work to date; nasty, stomping Southern rock sits next to poppier fare and several moments of quiet introspection.

The result is a dark, steamy sound that comes crawling from the Louisiana swamp like a mean-tempered 'gator.

Throughout, Jones’s characteristic optimism holds true, in songs such as Binky Griptite’s latter-day civil rights anthem “Matter Of Time” (“It’s a matter of time before justice will come”) and especially Crispiano’s “Come And Be A Winner”, whose light country-soul stylings and rhythm guitar seem to channel Curtis Mayfield.

“Wanderlust” establishes the overall thematic impulse to live culturally beyond one’s means, but in practice this can lead to the preference for smarts over suitability that spoils a track like “A Dog’s Life”. But there are moments of greatness here and there.

Inspiration Information [is] repackaged with an extra disc of pieces recorded since then, which show his abilities undiminished by age.

Popular Problems--note the drolly contradictory title--finds his agreeable baritone growl applied as usual to romantic disappointment and political venality with vivid, jolting metaphors (“I see the ghost of culture, with numbers on his wrist”) cutting to the quick.

Too many tracks, however, suffer from a shortfall of melodic potency, and a lack of lateral development, especially in longer pieces such as the 12-minute sci-fi musings of “Black Screen” and the declamatory nine minutes of “How Do You Sleep?”.

Reflective, immersive and, in a more subtle way, euphoric, this is the record to put the art into The Avalanches’ party.

It retains their signature blend of folk-rock songcraft and miasmic guitar-drone textures, but in a more purposive manner.

With strong, clear-eyed subtext, overlaid by compositions that touch on every influence from TV on the Radio to Prince, Childish Gambino and Radiohead, Smiling With No Teeth is not so much an album as it is a memoir – a story both unique to Owusu and universal to anyone who has ever felt “othered”.

For the most part Gold Record is a deftly woven and cosily feathered little nest of songs. Settle in.

Happier Than Ever is full of things most of us don’t have to deal with – NDAs, interviews, paparazzi – and yet Eilish weaves them around universal woes, with such a knack for sharp, insightful lyrics that it never comes across like her diamond shoes are too tight.

It's long (nearly 100 minutes), strange, disturbing, uncomfortable, challenging. But it never fails to fascinate.

Here, deprived of Crazy Horse and Young’s tectonic lead guitar, “Powderfinger” assumes its natural form as an antique folk ballad, while the haunting “Pocahontas”, minus overdubs, is likewise more nakedly vulnerable.

It’s an album fuelled by southern heat, with plenty of grit to boot. Their best yet.

An album heralding a talent as intriguingly fully-formed and distinctive, in its own way, as Marling, Mitchell and Bush.

Few songwriters can juggle seriousness and whimsy as adeptly as Paul Simon on Stranger To Stranger, his best album in several years.

A surprising meditation on fatherhood, family and friendship. Kendrick Lamar’s work has always been introspective, but Mr Morale and the Big Steppers – with guest spots from artists including Florence Welch, Beth Gibbons, Summer Walker and Sampha – has a delicacy and tenderness to it that is unprecedented for the father of two from Compton, California. Because of this, Mr Morale and The Big Steppers is most redolent of Lamar’s second album good kid, m.A.A.d city.

The result is a lush, immersive work which is sonically more homogeneous than her earlier albums.

Paul Simon's ruminations here on love, age and encroaching mortality have a valedictory flavour about them.

I suspect that those who’ve always found Harvey a chore will find much to mock. But her fans will be all in for this mucky pagan whirl.

It sounds – for the first time in a decade – like Clark has slipped out of her high heels and found an equal strength in this barefooted soul.

Sleep Well Beast, like all The National’s albums, occupies troubled territory. These are songs about the fleeting impermanence of joy, compared to the lingering bruise of despair, and how hard it is to live in this unfairly weighted emotional space. It’s a struggle embodied in Matt Berninger’s enervated, murmurous baritone.