While this partner set doesn’t have quite the sustained quality of the preceding album released six months ago, it still affirms the value of spiking country music with a strong shot of rhythm & blues.

The great thing about this album is that you can choose to fall down a nerdy rabbit hole with its creators and dissect all the movie themes. Or, you can just let it wash over you while you catch the odd breeze of reference here and there. And though it lacks the direct gut-punch of one of Stevens’ best solo records, it’s infused with the warmth of real friendship.

The skirling electric guitars have been replaced by acoustic instruments which, allied to the ageless, weary but unbowed character of Ibrahim Ag Alhabib's voice, enhances further the bluesy nature of their music.

Like Starboy, there’s a hefty Eighties influence here, although for the most part, After Hours abandons the danceability of its predecessor in favour of moody introspection. This is the music you listen to when the party’s over.

Mutual Friends, a loose song-cycle, is entirely winning.

Mark Lanegan's darkly knowing interpretation is one of the highlights of this compilation tribute.

Fascinating, enjoyable and original.

It’s a break-up album that’s perhaps a touch too unremittingly bleak for the closing resolution of “Another Train” (“I’m moving on, through the past, through the pain, waiting on another train”) to completely convince.

A brilliant, nigh-on faultless work from an acknowledged master.

Norwegian musician Thom Hell’s eighth album is an inventive meditation on growing up.

In a career spanning more than two decades, Elbow have always taken things at their own pace, and this shows in Little Fictions’ pleasing rhythms.

Weeks’ haunting lilt is perfect for embodying the magic and fear of creating a life, whether writing letters to his unborn son on “Takes A Village”, mooning over 20-week scans on “Blood Sugar” or finally tucking the nipper in on “Milk Breath”. It’s gorgeous, but expect more gin and screaming on the follow-up.

Though it could stand to sound more consistent throughout (at times The Staves sound like they’re throwing that proverbial spaghetti against the wall), Good Woman successfully demonstrates that even through life’s lessons and uncomfortable liminal states, family is the most stabilising force.

This is by no means an easy record to fathom, but it does show – even after so many years – you’ll never catch Albarn resting on his laurels.

Lone soul genius Cody ChesnuTT's in dazzling form on Landing on a Hundred, which must be the most impressive crowd-funded album ever.

He's keen to please, but what's remarkable about The Lady Killer is that he manages to avoid all the bubblebath boudoir-soul cliches that litter most R&B albums.

While the songs here lack the scuzzy charm of her debut, Tell Me How You Really Feel is a weightier, more direct record.

["A Little Bit Of Everything"] is a thoughtful, mature conclusion to an album that seems to summarise one of the more welcoming trends in American rock

Americana is the kind of concept album that Bernie Taupin might have written for Elton John; but being Ray Davies, it’s not so much comprised of fond, mythopoeic imaginings as the more specific (non-political) relationship that still subsists between Britain and America.

Flamagra--a playful yet melancholic, skittish yet meditative 67 minutes of cosmic genius--is one of Flying Lotus’s most accessible releases.

It’s an enjoyable, occasionally virtuosic romp, fronted by Thundercat’s smooth soul harmonies, which lend proceedings the lustrous sheen of Earth, Wind & Fire.

With Golding’s expansive, questing lines riding Boyd’s rolling, polyrhythmic funk, the duo set displays a focused musical intimacy, while the band set is immediately more incendiary, thanks to Parker wailing wild over Golding’s more rooted part in “Valley Of The Ultra Blacks”.

Vessel is a return to form for Kline: bringing the sincerity that was threaded throughout her Bandcamp releases to the forefront once again.

The result is an engaging, youthful and thoughtful folk-rock.

It's a brave and sometimes baffling album, broaching difficult themes; though faced with a series of such unforgiving electro-sonic maelstroms, one may hanker for the touches of folksy pastoralism that lightened earlier AF albums.

The Long Sleep is more concerned with the lifecycle, the existential, and, in parts, is more sonically expansive.

It seems like they just ran out of interest, and gave up.

Although their go-for-broke approach furnishes ideas to spare, the unwitting effect is a set of lurches from impressive to hopelessly ill-integrated, often over the course of a single song.

There's a consistency and homogeneity about the 11 tracks (seven from The Red Shoes, four from The Sensual World) which echoes her work on Aerial, and which lends the project a character entirely its own.

It's Wagner's mix of the enigmatic and the demotic that dominates, his songs fill of understated apothegms and startling lines.

No Home Record’s lack of cohesion is unlikely to pull you deep into its disjointed soundworld. What does unite the tracks, though, is the restlessly questing, non-conformist spirit of their creator. It’s great to have her back.

Despite Andrews’ occasionally overwrought attempts to conjure up a mood of malevolent fate by channelling his inner Nick Cave, it’s an absorbing journey.

With Warp and Weft, Laura Veirs delivers her most satisfying set of songs since Carbon Glacier, but here, the arrangements devised by Veirs and her partner/producer Tucker Martine are so much more expansive and illuminating, creating a rich tapestry of ideas and idioms.

Her sweeping, layered ninth album is more ruminative than reactive: questions of family and legacy, memory and death swirl around one another until they’re one in the same.

For fans who first became acquainted with Jordan’s music around her debut EP Habit, Lush is a continuation of Jordan’s coming of age tale--nostalgia for lost love, the overwhelming sensation of being a rising, young musician and the chaos of getting older. Jordan’s 10-track record parallels the beautiful plain-spoken lyrics and catharsis echoed by artists like Soccer Mommy and Julien Baker.

In just eight songs, BTS have accomplished the same genre-bending they usually do in double that runtime. And for the most part, the album avoids the pitfall of sounding like a checklist. With BE, BTS keep their foot on the pedal.

The braggadocio heard on this track and throughout is like an extension of that confidence in “Formation” from Lemonade. ... Closing with “LOVEHAPPY”, Beyonce and Hov are at their most transparent about the moment that almost broke their marriage.

The good news is that the perma-brilliant James Blake has flooded his fourth album--Assume Form--with euphoric sepia soul and loved-up doo-wop. His trademark intelligence, honesty and pin-drop production remain intact.

He offers up beautifully crafted country that uses rock, gospel and blues influences to push gently at the genre’s boundaries: sweet guitar licks, thrashing drums and Church’s voice straining at the top end of his range.

It’s an album that makes a church of its elegant electronica: all vaulting arcs of yearning melody and glimmers of stained glass that dance upwards, to the familiar urban spire of Thorn’s beautiful, hangdog voice.

Eight albums in, and some of that edgy math-rock experimentalism has been lost, along with two original members of Leon Bridges’ band. But what they now lack in raw, ferocious edginess, they make up for glorious driving riff on Performance.

You can let i,i overwhelm you or sink into its currents of drift and despondency – either way, it is immersive and rich. Yet it’s hard not to anticipate certain peaks (the unimpeachable climax of “Holyfields,” the joyfully silly “Sh’Diah” chorus) as if waiting for the school bell to ring.

[Jones'] natural ebullience still drives the splendid Give the People What They Want, a hook-laden affair keeping up the high standard set by I Learned the Hard Way and 2011’s punchy Soul Time!, as good an R&B album as any in recent years.

The lyrics dwell on age, family and endurance, but the backporch party vibe imparts a warm glow to proceedings.

The most pungent aroma rising from Juju's avant-jazz dub-trance grooves is that of a funkier Mahavishnu Orchestra.

An artful yet unschooled prospect to reckon with.

It’s really interesting seeing how much chemistry Dubz and Giggs still have; it feels like there’s still some space for Ard Bodied 2.

Oddly, there’s nothing here from Echo & The Bunnymen, despite the inclusion of borderline cases like The Damned, The Mission and Adam And The Ants, and a host of lesser bands creating the musical equivalent of smeared mascara. But there’s a broad range of tangential directions sheltering under the otherwise welcoming umbrella of Silhouettes & Statues.

As ever on Welch & Rawlings records, their harmonies are sublime, warmed by guitarist Willie Watson’s third part; but there are fewer dark shadows here than usual, with songs like “Good God A Woman” and “Yup” offering light-hearted fables of God’s and Satan’s dealings with women.

Signs that Cracker Island is designed to be a summer album sizzle though the heat-haze synths of “Silent Running” (featuring soulful contributions from Adeleye Omotayo) and the hip-sloshing dancefloor pulse of “New Gold” (feat Tame Impala and Bootie Brown).

Despite being written by different combinations of the line-up, it’s possibly their most homogenous album, most songs riding gentle pulses of percussion, organ and piano, guitars circling the action.

The artwork for Charli XCX’s third studio album finds her clad only in a steely squiggle of computer-generated ribbon. It’s a great visual metaphor for a collection of 15 pop songs that – at their most thrilling – wear their raw, metallic beats and synths on the outside, like scaffolding.

A bleak but alluring album.

“How long will it take to break the plans that I never make?” It’s a question that was inevitably begged by those previous celebrations of low-rent outlaw glamour, and, in attempting to answer it, Suede may have made their best album.

More sonic and lyrical experimentation could allow the songs to make a deeper mark. But this record is a definite power-up from an artist who carries, as promised, “a knife with the heart on my sleeve”.

The results are quirkily, unexpectedly appealing.

Though inspired by Grace Jones's new-wave disco torch-songs, the results are markedly dissimilar.

With results both as pleasurable, as inventive and as absorbing as these, there seems no danger that the impact of {Awayland} will be merely momentary.

Quietly Blowing It feels like the first steps into bold new territory.

Sleater-Kinney are as potent now as they ever were – their music spiky and confrontational, melding the personal and political to striking effect.

The King of Limbs sounds like the bastard offspring of dubstep and Nico Muhly, the brilliant composer whose string and choral arrangements inhabit the open spaces between contemporary classical and art-rock.

Blake clearly revels in the invention and freedom of the exploit. “Fall Back” comes across as a very organic, found-sound kind of ambient concoction, as if someone has worked out how to recycle DJ software out of firewood and hemp.

It reveals a broader musical and emotional palette than they've exposed before.

Wonderfully unsettling.

On his most rewarding release since The Beta Band, Steve Mason grapples with politics both public and personal, but in a warm, engaging manner that draws the listener in.

Their latest EP, Lout, is only three songs long, but even in under 15 minutes, the short-player packs a wallop.

Butler performs miracles as producer, sprinkling flute like pollen over “An Angel’s Wing Brushed The Penny Slots”, and haunting “Nothing And Everything” with spectral backing vocals. Eitzel’s glass-half-empty attitude, however, grips the songs too tightly.

On her second album, Anna Calvi has lost much of the distinctive guitar work that helped make her debut so intriguing, but gained a deeper breadth of texture and structure to carry her emotional excursions.

He remains a more psychedelic soul, as witness psych-rockers like “Mad Shelley’s Letterbox” and “Detective Mindhorn”. With a sort of repressed power anchoring its drive.

New album The Universal Want manages to feel relevant, but not preachy.

Deforming Lobes is unpredictable and invigorating--the best representation of Segall’s restless creativity to date, not to mention the most fun to listen to.

Like its predecessor, Blunderbuss, it’s a mixed bag, roughly split between heavy blues-rock and country, many songs supposedly drawing on teenage writings White unearthed in a drawer.

The meringue-light and snow-bright Visions is a sort of cut-up, laptronica take on the kind of sugary, girly electro-pop confections Prince produced for a succession of female starlets in the late 1980s.

Her own third album suggests she’s every bit [Damien Rice's] equal in tracking the heart’s mysterious emotional undercurrents.

Del Rey’s claims that this is her most personal album yet are not quite true – it is far more elliptical and mysterious than it first appears.

There's a world-weariness to some of his songs that's as attractive now as ever.

With its classical and avant-garde stylings and Clementine’s sometimes queasily operatic delivery, I Tell A Fly won’t be to everyone’s taste--which in this era of increasing conformity may be its most valuable asset.

There’s little here that Coombes doesn’t test the waters of. And though in lesser hands such eclecticism may have felt forced and disjointed, here it’s nothing short of excellent.

This throws most of one's attention on the vocals, always the most engagingly evanescent aspect of their sound.

The band seem guided more by instinct than any sense of formula, but there are some superb embellishments – a fearsome guitar solo on “Take the Long Way”, eerie synth ripples on “Retrograde” – that build to the surprising final track, “River Cross”.

Unlike their earlier tyro works, the simplicity is rarely matched by killer tunes on this album, which yokes together the first-ever stereo mix of Wild Honey with a tranche of outtakes and fragments, and an extra CD of efficient but uninspiring live performances.

At times this [spent two years sitting with these songs] makes for a more considered output; other songs run the risk of overthinking themselves.

There’s some filler. But melody-lite tracks such as “Sicily” and “Negative Space” bob by on their bass line grooves.

As with many great albums, successive hearings reveal more clearly the elliptical tunes at the heart of these eight quietly intense pieces, climaxing with the eight-minute “Age Old Tale”, a masterly band performance.

Powerful and personal, it’s a persuasive protest tribute straight from the heart.

The Weeknd weasels his way queasily into unprotected affections under cover of arrangements whose dark, miasmic synth tones and itchy, sludgy rhythms blend the apparently conflicting worlds of R&B and industrial new-wave.

“Windows”, with its eerie synths and squawking delivery, recalls the dark psychedelia of Cypress Hills’ 2018 record, Elephants on Acid. But that then jumps to skittery R&B with “I’ll Take You On”. Nothing joins together. Brockhampton don’t sound self-aware as much as self-conscious.

Their mega beats endure on No Geography, but this is also a stupendously successful splicing of past and present.

Pleasingly, two of the best [guests] are British, Sampha capping “4422” with an emotive outburst, and Skepta getting an entire “Skepta Interlude” to himself to muse about how he “died and came back as Fela Kuti”. Elsewhere, the likes of Giggs, Young Thug and 2 Chainz add furtive but menacing sketches of thug life to tracks like “No Long Talk” and “Sacrifices”, the latter offering Drake’s most elegant mea culpa for past transgressions.

It’s pure rock and roll: sleazy, slick and lots of fun. Sound & Fury marks another milestone for a remarkable artist.

Smith’s new record does feel like her most personal. Her lyrics have a stream-of-consciousness style, as though she’s in the middle of composing a message to a friend or partner. The delight she takes in performing these songs is palpable.

The music is fine, if aimless.

The Ship is a strange amalgam of Eno’s familiar ambient approach with poetry--the latter delivered in a sonorous basso profundothat resonates with a sort of looming, warning warmth.

An album which focuses their stadium-alt-punk sound to its sharpest edge yet.

It’s an engrossing set throughout, leading one through the subdued swirls of “Dawn Chorus” to the climax of “The Uncertainty Principle”, another work whose throbbing organ and cavernous twang owe a distinct debt to Can.

The results are spiritually exhausting.

Best of all is "The Day That We Die", Rufus Wainwright oozing mournfully with his dad about the way that familial potholes prove so difficult to repair.

Lux Prima is an accomplished record--proof that two wildly different minds can work seamlessly together.