The best albums of 2024 so far

Future Utopia

Django’s High
70hz
★★★★☆
Britain’s Fraser T Smith is a producer to the stars, having worked with everyone from Adele to Stormzy. His collaborative Future Utopia project is very much a producer’s vision: plenty of cool ideas, not so much an outpouring of his very soul. Nonetheless, this is a cohesive work with real groove and style, typified by funky breaks, Sixties spaghetti western-style guitars and a touch of modern pop psychedelia à la Tame Impala. There is personal revelation too. Stars Align is a dreamlike ode to Smith’s wife and Interplanetary Signs deals with having a father he never knew — to an Anatolian disco beat. WH

Donovan Woods

Things Were Never Good if They’re Not Good Now
End Times
★★★★☆
Finding the sweet spot between the cabin-dwelling solitude of Bon Iver and the people-pleasing sadness of Noah Kahan is this modern folkie from Ontario. But what stops his album from falling into heritage brand pastiche is the quality of the songs. On 116 West Main, Durham, NC Woods shares Paul Simon’s ability to evoke landscape within narrative, while Back for the Funeral finds Woods yearning for the simplicity of childhood before remembering: “Your home town’s just the first place you don’t understand.” This is all familiar, heartfelt, acoustic guitar-led stuff but Woods’s unvarnished yet poetic way of dealing with the challenges of the everyday is appealing. WH

The best albums of 2024 so far

Berwyn’s new album Who Am I goes deep into the big questions

JACK HALL/GETTY IMAGES

Berwyn

Who Am I
Columbia
This Trinidad-born, Romford-raised singer goes deep into faith, soul-searching and questions of identity on his first proper album, which puts such heavy themes against skittering jazz rhythms, elegant piano chords and other musically rich elements. I Am Black is the standout, a letter to God on racial inequality, while the title track explores the hidden complexities of the immigrant experience with deep feeling. The earnest, Ed Sheeran-like acoustic sentimentality of All She Ever Wanted rubs uneasily against such hard-hitting material, in particular Berwyn’s spoken-word life story Dear Immigration. But at its best this is brutally honest and totally arresting. WH

Ani DiFranco

Unprecedented Shit
Righteous Babe
Starting her career in New York aged 15 as an emancipated minor, Ani DiFranco has spent the subsequent four decades going down her own odd path, combining acoustic guitar-led folk with genres ranging from classical minimalism to glitchy noise. She also takes on some unusual subjects. More or Less Free aims for a universal understanding of humanity in the face of cancel culture, while Spinning Room ponders the wisdom of taking sleeping pills when all else fails. And she has a way with a rhyming couplet. “Don’t know which of my habits will be my demise / But there’s more ways every day to betray what is wise,” she confesses on New Bible. So true. WH

The Congolese band Kokoko! have released their much-awaited album, Butu

SVEN DE ALMEIDA

Kokoko!

Butu
Transgressive
The heat and noise of their native Kinshasa at night is the inspiration for the new album by this Congolese band, who combine basic electronics with instruments made from scrap metal. The result is something of an onslaught; industrial rock mixed with African genres such as kuduro and kwaito, aligned to a feeling that everything is being pushed to its limit and might fall apart at any minute. A lot of these songs are protests against an increasingly dictatorial government in the Democratic Republic of Congo, to such an extent that even making the record carries a risk of imprisonment, which may be why it sounds so urgent — and exciting. WH

Zach Bryan

The Great American Bar Scene
Warner Records
The spiritual home of country music is the bar, the honky tonk, the place where people go to forget their troubles — at least until someone starts singing about those very troubles from a stage in the corner. Perhaps it is this understanding that is key to the phenomenal success of Zach Bryan: an everyday dude who has become one of the biggest stars in contemporary country. He really does seem like an anomaly: a guy with an acoustic guitar, singing tales centred around the kind of places that last had a makeover in 1973 and filling stadiums with them. His superb new album contains music that is all very familiar, very simple and yet there is something about his way that gets under your skin. WH

Various artists

Psych! British Prog, Rock, Folk & Blues 1966-73
Decca
In 1966, five years after their catastrophic passing on the Beatles, Decca tried to get hip with Deram, a subsidiary label designed to appeal to the emerging hippy underground. This superb compilation collects its varied fruits: everything from the acoustic guitar wizard Davy Graham tackling Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now to a very early offering from the prog overlords Genesis — the suitably titled In The Beginning. So much of this stuff has been consigned for so long to obscurity: the Principal Edwards Magic Theatre collective, anyone? Hearing doomed attempts at major success by otherwise unemployable freaks of yore proves a lot of fun. WH

Daphne Guinness: “sophisticated, fun, imbued with a touch of the absurd”

STEPHANE CARDINALE /CORBIS/GETTY IMAGES

Daphne Guinness

Sleep
Agent Anonyme
Alongside being a glamorous figure who inspired and advised the late designers Alexander McQueen and Karl Lagerfeld, and an aristocrat who spent childhood summers in a crumbling pile in Cadaqués with Salvador Dalí as a next-door neighbour, Daphne Guinness has developed into a unique musical artist. Her fourth album finds her cut-glass tones gliding over symphonic disco on Hip Neck Spine, while Mishima is an impressionistic Japanese-English poem set to dreamlike Eighties pop and Dark Night of the Soul goes for maximum drama in a Gallic fashion. File alongside Grace Jones, Amanda Lear and other one-of-a-kind disco diva aesthetes: this is sophisticated, fun, imbued with a touch of the absurd, and terribly, wonderfully British. WH

Madeleine Peyroux

Let’s Walk
Thirty Tigers
There’s something appealingly unhurried about this Georgia-born jazz singer’s approach, both professionally and creatively. She started out 20 years ago, doing languid Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen covers. Then she waited six years to get round to this, an earthy, folksy collection of reveries on peace, love, understanding and, on Take Care, advice for living the righteous life. “Food is good if its organically grown, without pesticides, plastic wrap or styrofoam,” she lectures us against a cod-reggae beat. That’s a step towards liberal, goody two-shoes philosophising too far, but the breezy, seductive Blues For Heaven more than makes up for it. WH

Johnny Cash

Songwriter
Mercury Nashville
In the early Nineties, his flagging career yet to be revived by Rick Rubin, Johnny Cash recorded a handful of songs, some with fellow ageing outlaw country star Waylon Jennings on backing harmonies, before forgetting about them. Unearthed by his son John, who added arrangements courtesy of a handful of top Nashville musicians, the recordings display a man faltering in late middle age: lacking the wired brilliance of his early years or the doomed weightiness of his final ones, but still in fine voice and exhibiting that bruised, sensitive, rugged country spirit for which he is so beloved.

There are no real hidden gems, in other words, but it is interesting to hear material by a now revered songwriter from a time when self-doubt and changing fashions were doing their damage. “Don’t let anybody see deep within the soul of me, or they’ll see that something there is not quite right,” he sings over a loose country groove on Spotlight, an argument for the benefits of private life. If this album had come out at its intended time, it would not have changed Cash’s fortunes in the way the Rubin-produced albums did. All these years later, it proves to be a minor addition to his canon — one tainted by a hint of posthumous Cashing in, albeit not an unwelcome one. WH

Linda Thompson’s Proxy Music is a gloriously idiosyncratic record

TOM OLDHAM

Linda Thompson

Proxy Music
StorySound
No longer able to sing due to a condition called spasmodic dysphonia, the British folk-rock queen Linda Thompson has taken a lemons-into-lemonade approach, outsourcing the performance of her new songs to vocal “proxies”. Rounding up friends, fans and the scions of modern-folk dynasties — Eliza Carthy; Rufus and Martha Wainwright; Kami and Teddy, her children with Richard Thompson, her former husband — she sets them on these sharp, sweet songs.

Some sound like trad relics, mudlarked along with belt buckles and pipe bowls — the Richard co-write Three Shaky Ships, for example, performed with candlelit drama by the Unthanks. Yet Thompson also understands modern meta trickery: John Grant gamely sings a wonderful song about their friendship called John Grant, while Teddy performs Those Damn Roches, a self-referential salute to famed folk families “bound together in blood and song”. There’s a sadness Thompson can’t lead the chorus, but this gloriously idiosyncratic record is a joyful way to ensure she is heard. WH

Kate Nash

9 Sad Symphonies
Kill Rock Stars
“Misery, it’s out to get you,” Kate Nash announces on her fifth album, 9 Sad Symphonies. The Harrow-born singer-songwriter knows what she’s talking about. Her 2007 major label debut, Made of Bricks, made her a quirky star before she hit her twenties, but her third record, 2013’s Riot Grrl-influenced Girl Talk, was self-released and she was dogged by issues with management, money and mental health. “Making music keeps me alive,” Nash said in 2017, “but being in the music industry has almost killed me.” On this album, her first since 2018, there’s a touching disconnect between the dramatic arrangements and her conversational voice, her occasionally gauche honesty. Whether she’s railing against the music industry (My Bile), frankly describing depression (Ray) or detailing a rom-com affair, Nash’s songwriting comes with built-in fragility. VS

Rich Ruth

Water Still Flows
Third Man
Spiritual jazz, trance-inducing minimalism, horizon-expanding krautrock: Rich Ruth has never met a cosmically inclined genre he didn’t like. If there’s a portal to a higher consciousness, the Nashville-based multi-instrumentalist is committed to finding it, using guitar, synthesizers, samples and players such as the saxophonist Sam Que and the harpist Mikaela Davis to help him tunnel through to enlightenment.

His third album is a heavier prospect than 2022’s excellent I Survived, It’s Over, the tracks Aspiring to the Sky and Crying in the Trees betraying Ruth’s love of geologically weighty doom-metal, but it retains the sense of somebody on a hectic existential quest. No Muscle, No Memory draws deep from the wells of King Crimson, Terry Riley and Alice Coltrane; God Won’t Speak, meanwhile, is ambient only if you live in a black hole. It’s a beautiful record, but don’t expect to leave it blissed out and meditative. Water Still Flows shows transcendence is hard work. VS

John Grant

John Grant

The Art of the Lie
Bella Union
John Grant has come up with an album that, he says, sounds like the Carpenters if the horror director John Carpenter were a member. This has led to the ominous electro-funk of Meek AF, but also Daddy, a rumination on Grant’s conflicted relationship with his father, where the emotion of the delivery is contrasted by a glacial synth backing. Father, featuring a space-age lounge sound reminiscent of Air’s Moon Safari, comes from the paternal perspective, while Mother and Son is a dreamlike rumination on breaking away enriched by some angelic singing from the Scottish folkie Rachel Sermanni. There are heavy themes here, but Grant’s playfulness brings them alive. WH

Kneecap

Fine Art
Heavenly Recordings
This superb debut by the West Belfast rappers Móglaí Bap and Mo Chara and the balaclava-clad DJ Próvaí is a concept album shaped around a night in a fictional pub. This means songs on getting a round in (I’m Flush), one-night stands (Love Making) and feeling awful the morning after (Better Way to Live), delivered in Irish and English and infused with commentary on the controversy Kneecap caused after painting a mural, just off the Falls Road in Belfast, of a police Land Rover on fire. Guests including Grian Chatten of the postpunks Fontaines DC and Radie Peat of the folkies Lankum keep the styles varied. The result is a social realist gem and a game-changer in Irish music. WH

• Read our interview with Kneecap

Sam Morton

Daffodils & Dirt
XL
Albums by actors offer a world of their own, and often it is not a world anybody wants to be stuck inside. Samantha Morton, however, is a different proposition entirely. PJ Harvey at her most intimate, the Velvet Underground in their quieter moments, even a psychologically disturbed individual reciting nursery rhymes before being taken away for medication time all come to mind on an eerie, unnerving album on which Morton tackles personal issues in an oddly detached fashion. Not since William “Captain Kirk” Shatner’s 1968 classic The Transformed Man (a misunderstood masterpiece) has an actor so fully dedicated themselves to a singular musical cause. WH

Goat Girl

Below the Waste
Rough Trade
Goat Girl jumped out of the south London band scene a little under a decade ago with maximum energy and minimum virtuosity. Since then they have not only learnt to play but also developed into a fascinating, original proposition. Their latest work combines minimalist experimentation with a febrile emotional core. Lottie Pendlebury’s detached tones on Ride Around float over an arrangement that builds from noisy abrasion to melodic beauty, while Motorway takes a leaf out of Kraftwerk’s metronomic book, but with added harmonies. There are touches of tenderness amid the art rock cool, on Sleep Talk in particular. This is an album that wears its sophistication lightly and pulls you in accordingly. WH

Charli XCX runs wild with Brat

Charli XCX

Brat
Atlantic
Charli XCX, aka Charlotte Aitchison, 31, from Start Hill in Essex, has been straddling the line between clubby underground cult figure and sparkly pop sensation since her teens. Free from a five-album deal, she can run wild — which is what she has done here. There is something liberating about the way Aitchison is prepared to be totally obnoxious in the name of pop — even when she’s sincere she cannot help but slather a layer of thoroughly British irony over the whole thing. Charli XCX is the smartest not-quite superstar Britain has got, and long may she remain that way. WH

• Read our full review of Charli XCX’s Brat

Judith Owen

Comes Alive
Twanky Records
Don’t you wish you’d been there? Judith Owen’s effervescent live show, recorded at a club in Bern, captures the freewheeling spirit of a singer-pianist who has marked out her own territory on the cusp of jazz and blues. Like her last release, Come On & Get It, this session is, in part, a homage to sassy female singers of the Forties and Fifties. There’s a nod to Peggy Lee, a joyful tribute to Nellie Lutcher and an unabashed round of sexual innuendo à la Julia Lee on The Spinach Song. Owen’s voice, which has a raspier edge than usual, is simply irresistible. If you’re looking for a touch of Diana Krall, albeit with a sassier sense of humour, she’s your woman. She can be soulful too: I Put a Spell on You vamps it up with the help of the guitarist David Blenkhorn. CD

Richard Hawley

DEAN CHALKLEY

Richard Hawley

In This City They Call You Love
BMG
For his best album since 2005’s Cole’s Corner, Hawley leans deep into the lush balladry and spartan rockabilly that has always been close to his heart. People, a tribute to his native Sheffield, evokes deep sentiment from nothing more than a simple guitar line, a beat, and poetic visions of factory life. The Elvis Presley-like Deep Space combines a plea for solitude with a critique of interstellar adventures by billionaires in the face of environmental catastrophe. Lamenting country rock and 1940s-style popular song feature elsewhere on an album in which Hawley inhabits these styles so fully and unselfconsciously, he goes beyond pastiche and into expression. And he has a way with a romantic tune. “Even at the ending of the world, you know I’m always thinking of you, girl,” he sings on Heavy Rain, a string-laden love ballad for the end times if ever there was one. WH

Arooj Aftab

Night Reign
Verve
A crepuscular mood runs through this elegant, jazz-tinged album by a Pakistani singer transplanted to New York, whose dark caramel tones, set against piano from Vijay Iyer and stringed instruments from Shahzad Ismaily, bring a similar sense of calm and mystery as dawn and dusk. At best it is astonishing: Na Gul, Urdu poetry set to American jazz, is stunning. Sometimes the commitment to tasteful restraint deadens the emotional impact — an oddly flat rendition of the standard Autumn Leaves is stripped of all sentiment — but for the most part, Aftab’s delivery and invention of a new genre (Urdu nightclub jazz) is compelling. WH

Dana Gillespie

First Love
Fretsore Records
Gillespie is a bohemian of the old school, a 75-year-old blues singer who counted among her early boyfriends/admirers Bob Dylan, David Bowie and Mick Jagger and whose appearance as Mary Magdalene in the original Jesus Christ Superstar musical turned her into a national obsession. Now she has teamed up with Marc Almond for a characterful album of covers. Morrissey’s ode to idleness Spent the Day in Bed is better than the original — even Morrissey agrees — while Lana Del Rey’s erotic reverie Gods and Monsters is turned into a lament for lost innocence. Gillespie’s experience proves a boon — her reflective, piano-led rendition of Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams is overflowing with pathos, while she approaches all the material with a tone of acceptance. The result is a classy album and an example of the transformative power of interpretation. WH

Crowded House

Gravity Stairs
BMG
The latest by the New Zealander Neil Finn’s revived pop-rock stalwarts, now featuring Finn’s two sons and coming after his stint as a replacement for Lindsey Buckingham in Fleetwood Mac, goes back to the sweet-natured, Beatles-indebted songwriting that made them such critical favourites in their late Eighties/early Nineties glory days. Beach Boys harmonies shape The Howl and All That I Can Ever Own puts Zen philosophy to a pretty tune, while the aligning of simple positivity to sophisticated, disciplined songwriting shines throughout. Even when they get psychedelic, like on Magic Piano, they do it in a way that makes you think of lovely picnics in the park, not drug hell. “Let the melody reign again,” Finn sings, and it does — delightfully. WH

Paul Weller

NICOLE NODLAND

Paul Weller

66
Polydor
Has Britain’s favourite angry young mod finally mellowed? While not exactly smoking the pipe of peace and wafting about in a kaftan, Paul Weller has, having reached the age flagged in the title, taken a meandering walk down all manner of musical diversions for his latest. Nothing is a reflective lament on the loss of innocence that comes inevitably with age, while Suggs contributes to Ship of Fools, which harks back to an early-Seventies, chirpy novelty pop sound; you can even hear shades of Clive Dunn’s Grandad in its primary-coloured melody. Not that Weller has abandoned the jagged energy of old. The Noel Gallagher co-write Jumble Queen bears a strong Who influence, but there is a feeling that he is taking stock and slipping into a lower gear. WH

Vince Staples

Dark Times
Def Jam
Alongside starring as a fictionalised version of himself in The Vince Staples Show on Netflix, this Long Beach rapper has gone back to hip-hop traditions — obscure funk and soul samples, a rhythmic flow, a social conscience — for downbeat vignettes that capture a state of mind as much as anything. On Nothing Matters he faces up to heartbreak with bleak acceptance while Government Cheese finds him suffering survivor’s guilt at escaping hard times — a rare thing in the rags-to-riches fantasy world of contemporary rap. He even goes towards new age dreaming in These Are the Dark Times, adding to the impression of Staples as a true original and one who has more in common with Portishead than Puff Daddy. WH

La Luz

News of the Universe
Sub Pop
A cursory listen to La Luz, formed by the singer Shana Cleveland in Seattle in 2012, would suggest a fun band with a Sixties psychedelic/surf rock influence. Within this candy-coloured world, however, are some dark shades. Cleveland wrote La Luz’s latest shortly after being diagnosed with breast cancer, two years after the birth of her son. “Change is the only law, don’t be afraid,” she reasons on the title track. The heavy fuzz guitar of Strange World leads to a song of harmony-rich menace, and the baroque, xylophone-laden Poppies is so pretty, it would be easy to miss its words about disappearing under the weight of troubles. This is an intriguing album, unsettling in its sweet and surrealistic approach to tackling heavy issues. WH

Billie Eilish tackles coming out, body issues and the pressures of being a role model

Billie Eilish

Hit Me Hard and Soft
Interscope
What is it like to be a home-schooled kid from Los Angeles who started writing songs with her elder brother, Finneas, at 13, only to witness those songs, with their unlikely blend of bossa nova, musical theatre, Beatles-esque pop and gothic drama, becoming huge global hits? On her third album Billie Eilish covers all this, while also tackling coming out, body issues and the pressures of being a role model to millions of people she has never met. The maturity of Eilish’s vision is on display: her refusal to take the easy route towards conventional, brightly coloured pop. It’s an album that builds an impressionistic world, which is entirely her own. WH

Beth Gibbons

Lives Outgrown
Domino
There is a sense throughout this beautiful album, which brings in touches of pastoral woodwind, flinty folk and brassy high drama, that Gibbons has only made it because she has something to say. And what she has to say is not exactly laugh-a-minute. Death, divorce, disaster and the futility of it all feature heavily, but in such a poetic fashion that what might have been depressing comes across as refreshingly honest, even hopeful. This is a thoughtful, deeply personal, ten-song gem of an album. WH

Leyla McCalla

Sun Without the Heat
Anti-
Leyla McCalla’s music comes freighted with messages about liberation, but McCalla is too gifted an artist to allow lyrics to become slogans. The title song of her latest set is a case in point. Its point of departure, it transpires, are lines from a speech that the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass gave in the 1850s, decrying those “those who profess to favour freedom and yet deprecate agitation”. McCalla turns those sentiments into a simple yet touching ballad: “You want the crops without the plough/ You want the rain without the thunder …” That track possesses the starkness of a classic folk song. Other numbers find a supple band blending everything from psychedelic rock textures to west African rhythms. Perhaps because it was recorded in a studio near McCalla’s adopted home, the historic melting pot of New Orleans, the transitions seem utterly unforced. Her appearance at Womad this July should be one of the events of the summer. Clive Davis

Michael Head and the Red Elastic Band

Loophole
Modern Sky
Quiet, please: genius at work. Mick Head is a beloved figure in his native Liverpool, a songwriter finally building up considerable cult status after four decades in the game, and the appeal of his latest album is in its unadorned quality. Head doesn’t always sing perfectly in tune but that adds to the impression that we’re getting his honest outpourings, from hazy memories of constant drinking (Ambrosia) to Eighties days in his old band the Pale Fountains (Merry Go-Round). Psychedelic pop, bossa nova and even Dixieland jazz all come into an album by a man who has survived everything (severe depression, heroin addiction, backing up Arthur Lee of the legendary Sixties band Love shortly before Lee went to jail for shooting at his neighbour) and come out singing. WH

Shaznay Lewis

Pages
1.9.7.5
Shaznay Lewis was the talented one in All Saints — she wrote the Nineties girl band’s Never Ever, a tearjerker for the ages — so it isn’t a huge surprise that her returning album is such a rich, well-seasoned stew. Kiss of Life recalls the symphonic soul of Seventies greats such as Minnie Riperton and Gloria Gaynor, while Supposed to Be is reminiscent of Prince at his most upbeat and Bruises has a touch of Bacharach and David’s easy listening sophistication. Lyrically, it covers the gamut from being a mum (Got to Let Go) to the weight of slavery in America (Peaches), and the whole album rings out with a sense of solidity and classicism. A welcome return, then. WH

Southern rock spirit: Kings of Leon

Kings of Leon

Can We Please Have Fun
Polydor
Looking like the swamp-dwelling children of Creedence Clearwater, the Nashville band Kings of Leon blinked into view as a young, ornery southern wing of the early Noughties garage rock boom. That they were made up of the three sons of a disgraced preacher and their cousin only added to the strangeness of it all. They developed into a much less interesting arena rock proposition soon after, however, and it was beginning to seem like that early look and sound was a total contrivance. Finally, their latest marks something of a return to their raucous roots. A hot producer has come on board to lick the Followill clan into shape — thankfully, Kid Harpoon hasn’t tried to make a bunch of hairy middle-aged men go pop. Mustang has febrile energy, while Ballerina Radio and Nowhere to Run have the muscle-bound charm of 1980s rock complete with choruses made for punching the air to. And in Nothing To Do there is something of the rough, swaggering, southern rock spirit that made the Kings of Leon so exciting in the first place. WH

AG Cook

Britpop
New Alias
AG Cook, the founder of the PC Music collective, godfather of hyper pop and producer to superstars like Beyoncé and Charli XCX, comes from the art-school tradition of taking a mainstream form and turning it on its head. Now Cook has come up with an album that, while excessive and, you suspect, deliberately annoying, is also compelling, like a scab you can’t help but pick at until the pain becomes unbearable. Britpop turns pop music into digital content, divorced from humanity yet emerging from it too. It adds up to a head-swirling mass of stimulation: disorientating, involving and, in its own twisted way, quite brilliant. WH

St Vincent

ALEX DA CORTE

St Vincent

All Born Screaming
Total Pleasure/Virgin
After the deeply divisive Daddy’s Home, with its heavily stylised early Seventies singer-songwriter mannerisms, Annie Clark returns to the menacing music with which she first made her name. All Born Screaming is a mostly pitch-black affair, with Nine Inch Nails and PJ Harvey among its touchstones. The Texan’s ability to spring sonic surprises is gloriously evident on Reckless, which morphs from brooding blues to fire and brimstone. The carnal and brutal Broken Man is a track Trent Reznor would be proud to call his own. The blowsy Violent Times is the Bond song that got away. And the wonderful Sweetest Fruit pairs high-pitched vocals with a woozy Sino synth motif and Clark’s trademark slasher-pic guitar. The clouds threaten to part at the end with the closing one-two of the bracingly odd So Many Planets and the sprawling title track, which has a Vampire Weekend-like lilt that chivvies along lyrics that stare into the abyss but step back just in time. Dan Cairns

Arab Strap

I’m Totally Fine with It; I Don’t Give a F*** Anymore
Rock Action
The Falkirk friends Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton formed Arab Strap as a way to provide sordid vignettes on young lives shaped by alcoholic dependency and sexual inadequacy in 1990s Britain. As it turns out, the formula can be applied rather too well to middle-aged lives in 2020s Britain. Dealing with social interaction after the lockdown, something neither Moffat and Middleton were brilliant at in the first place, is addressed on Summer Season, while Safe and Well finds Moffat contemplating the increasingly likely scenario of dying a lonely and miserable death. It’s not exactly a barrel of laughs, yet there is bleak Celtic humour throughout, alongside a tenderness that is quite poetic. WH

Taylor Swift

ASHOK KUMAR/TAS24/GETTY IMAGES

Taylor Swift

Tortured Poets Department
Republic
Taylor Swift’s track record since the divisive Reputation in 2017 has been phenomenal. Lover, Midnights and the lockdown albums Folklore and Evermore boasted a consistency and inventiveness that went against every rule in the pop music book. Usually, songwriters have a finite creative shelf life before repetition and ever-more-elusive inspiration tarnish their legacy. Turns out Swift was singing from a different hymn sheet. To judge by The Tortured Poets Department, a song sequence based around the five stages of grief, she still is. Again and again the songs hit the mark, as rich and concise as a great short story collection and, as ever with Swift, conjuring a scene in an instant. Tortured? Yes, by the sounds of it. For all the scars, though, the album’s message is this: healing, wisdom and art come at a price. DC

• Read the full review here

The Lemon Twigs

A Dream Is All We Know
Captured Tracks
The look, sound and almost everything else about Long Island brothers Michael and Brian D’Addario suggests a late Sixties sunshine pop band who ended up in the modern age by mistake. A closer listen, however, reveals more than mere historical re-enactment. My Golden Years turns nostalgia on its head against a melody that would do Paul McCartney proud. Though the ultra gentle Ember Days is a perfect encapsulation of Sixties Bossa nova and easy listening, the lyrics about people whose spiritual home is a dark alleyway make it quite sinister. The playing is off the scale, meaning the Lemon Twigs transcend their Beatles / Big Star influences and embody their own peculiar world. It is delightful. WH

Jessica Pratt

Here in the Pitch
City Slang
This enigmatic Californian emerged in 2012 with a dreamlike take on folk rock, and has been heading increasingly toward Twin Peaks-like languid reverie ever since. With her fourth album she arrives at a totally unique approach to the torch song, with shades of Shirley Bassey, Dusty Springfield and some long forgotten nightclub singer coming into Pratt’s laid-back delivery as she sings about wanting to be “the sunshine of the century” while sounding like she’s perennially trapped in a dark, desolate cabaret bar. With unobtrusive string arrangements and shuffling drums sitting behind Pratt’s glacial delivery, this is a seductive album made for losing yourself in, accompanied ideally by a dry martini and a serious case of ennui. WH

Beyoncé

Cowboy Carter
Parkwood/Columbia
After the conversation comes the music. When news came that Beyoncé was releasing a country album it raised all kinds of debate over the genre’s African-American roots, and her co-opting of patriotic American imagery on the cover. And she seems to have guessed it would when she came up with the songs in the first place. “There’s a lot of talking going on while I sing my song,” she sings on American Requiem, an epic that falls somewhere between country lament, psychedelic ballad and modern pop. “Can we stand for something?” she asks. So begins an album that, though overlong at 27 songs and stylistically all over the place, broadens Beyoncé’s reach, has a refreshing sense of fun and adventure, and generally makes all prior conversations about who does and doesn’t have bona fide country credentials irrelevant because if the music is good, it doesn’t matter who makes it or where they’re from. WH

Lucy Rose

CHALK PRESS

Lucy Rose

This Ain’t the Way You Go Out
Communion
The English singer’s fifth album was written in the shadow of her diagnosis with post-pregnancy osteoporosis. Piano-based and jazz-tinged, it conveys a sense of both despair and renewed hope. Whatever You Want contains a chord change that’s shattering. DC

Justice

Hyperdrama
Domino
Having emerged as part of the early 2000s French Touch wave of Gallic electronic music after pioneers like Daft Punk and Air, Parisian duo Justice have been taking their sweet time in returning to the fray: eight years, in fact. But what a return. This is a bombastic stew of space-age funk, orchestral grandiosity, thumping house and sickly sweet R&B, all wrapped up in a maximalist approach with scant regard for such conventions as consistency and structure. Guests come and go, like bit-part actors in a ridiculous but captivating disaster movie, and the whole thing makes for a great exercise in sonic world-building. WH

English Teacher

This Could Be Texas
Island
The Leeds band’s debut album is every bit as brilliant as their singles to date suggested it would be. Lily Fontaine, equal parts Poly Styrene and Pauline Murray, has the timing of a stand-up and the phrasing of an actor, and is this country’s most compelling new singer and songwriter, blessed with bandmates who join her in soundtracking the vocals and lyrics with music of thrilling complexity and inventiveness. The widescreen experimental rock of The World’s Biggest Paving Slab, the forlorn pastoralia of Mastermind Specialism and Albert Road, the way the title track bursts from Sondheimesque pointillist piano and arpeggiating guitar into brass-flecked grandeur before scurrying down a prog rabbit hole. Throughout, the kitchen-sink narratives deal allusively and directly — and always arrestingly — with issues including race, class, agency, poverty, arts funding and political chicanery. One of the great debut albums of the 21st century. DC

Brian Eno

ENO OST
Universal Recordings
Collected here are various highlights from Eno’s post-Roxy Music solo career to the present day. It isn’t a greatest hits album — he didn’t have any hits, greatest or otherwise — but rather an illustration of how witty and colourful his output is. This soundtrack shines a light on the rarely celebrated fact that Brian Eno is much better at the traditional elements that make music great — melody, hooks, fun, invention — than perhaps even he likes to admit. WH

Vampire Weekend

MICHAEL SCHMELLING

Vampire Weekend

Only God Was Above Us
Columbia
Allusion, metaphor, war, betrayal, truth, lies, the past, the present and an eternal-return doom loop of repeated failures and mistakes — these are some of the recurring characteristics of the New York trio’s fifth album. If that makes Only God Was Above Us sound intellectually chewy and knotty, well, it really isn’t. Ezra Koenig’s heaven-sent melodies and faux-naif vocals help the songs go down with ease, as familiar sonic tics — calypso guitar, cascading piano, stuttering beats — burrow their way into your brain. There is a deep-dive, Paul Simon-like engagement with the band’s home town here, with its cruelty and romance. Classical is quintessential VW: airy soundscapes — loping double bass, a break into free jazz — quite at odds with the lyrics. Capricorn is similarly beautiful and bleak. I’m not entirely convinced by some of it, but I’m entirely engrossed by all of it. Genuinely, thank God for Vampire Weekend. A band that takes us seriously. DC

Pearl Jam

Dark Matter
Republic
The twelfth album by the Seattle giants blasts off with a monster riff just a few overdriven notes away from The Who’s The Seeker; a clear case of the band, forever associated with Nineties grunge, paying homage to their classic rock heroes. After that Pearl Jam stick to what they do best: reducing heavy rock to its core elements while adding touches of melody, pop immediacy and, in the Trump-bashing Wreckage, political urgency. Producer of the hour Andrew Watt injects the same taut immediacy he brought to recent albums by Iggy Pop and the Rolling Stones, helping make this sound like Pearl Jam, the last grunge band standing, at their dynamic best. WH

Ed Harcourt

El Magnifico
Deathless
What a curious career Ed Harcourt has had. A darling of the critics — and a Mercury music prize nominee — for his debut album, Here Be Monsters (2001), he has never quite achieved the breakthrough his rich Bacharachian music deserves. A certain restlessness — and, it could be argued, a degree of songwriterly indiscipline — may be part of the explanation for that. But when Harcourt knuckles down, the results can still be breathtaking. El Magnifico attests to that: songs such as Anvils & Hammers, with its cascading piano and heartwarming melody, and the jingle-jangling My Heart Can’t Keep Up with My Mind are stunners. On Strange Beauty, Harcourt recalls his early releases: a vocal of the utmost tenderness, questioning lyrics and a melody that weaves its way to the summit. The Chopin-like At the Dead End of the World is mesmerising. DC

Shabaka

Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace
Impulse!
Imagine being celebrated as one of the greatest saxophonists of your generation, helping to spearhead a British jazz revival by placing the sax in all manner of innovative scenarios, only to announce you are giving it all up to concentrate on the Japanese flute, an instrument you have never even played. That’s what Shabaka Hutchings, who left Barbados, where he was raised, to study at Guildhall School of Music and Drama before leading Sons of Kemet, The Comet Is Coming and Shabaka and the Ancestors — Afro-Caribbean fusion, cosmic space rock and South African jazz respectively — did last year. The album is a triumph of creativity: no particular message to ram home, no stab at commercial appeal, just a transcendentally involving collection that feels like a balm against the chaos of modernity. You’re almost glad Hutchings gave up the saxophone to make it happen. WH

Lynks

Abomination
Hijinxx
Anyone familiar with Leigh Bowery, that pioneering and rather scary Australian performance artist who stalked late Eighties/early Nineties London clubland in a variety of body and face transforming outfits, will spot the influence on Lynks. This 24-year-old masked performer is also a very funny writer of ultra synthetic songs about the trials of gay life in the modern age. Tennis Song finds Lynks taking up the sport on the strength of seeing some guy “standing there in your tennis whites”, while the squelchy techno of I Feel Like Shit backs up the immortal line: “On a scale of one to nine, I’m a zero out of ten.” Smart, witty and knowingly self obsessed, this is up there with Soft Cell’s Non Stop Erotic Cabaret as a camp, subversive album with that rare thing in contemporary pop: a sense of humour. WH

Nia Archives

Silence Is Loud
Hijinxx
Being of the generation that has grown up with access to the world’s music, this 24-year-old from Bradford has made a nerve-inducing panoply of an album that crams in as much as humanly possible. Every dance style imaginable is here — rave, drum’n’bass, house — but so is cheery pop, a splash of Brit pop, the observational noughties indie of Lily Allen and the Arctic Monkeys, the tortured jazz balladry of Amy Winehouse… What’s really impressive is the way Nia Archives has taken all this and fashioned something original. There are great songs about everything from arguing with her family to feeling awkward in social situations; Cards on the Table, a sweet love song in which she declares her intentions to someone, is particularly fantastic. WH

Elbow

Elbow

Audio Vertigo
Polydor
If you were feeling uncharitable, you might describe Elbow’s career trajectory as a classic case of diminishing returns: early sparks followed by a slow descent into pipe-and-slippers comfort and familiarity. Like their musical kindred spirits the National, the Bury band turn out pretty, pleasant and lyrically clever music that, in the right circumstances, suffuses you with a warm glow. Flying Dream 1 (2021) typified this aspect of Elbow: lovely, but slightly predictable. Audio Vertigo is a vast improvement, reeling in the years to when the band seemed novel and capable of surprises. As ever with Guy Garvey, his careworn croon and arresting lyrics elevate the songs. “I’m the dashboard hooligan of nodding self-deception,” he sings on Things I’ve Been Telling Myself for Years. Her to the Earth is as beautifully textured as anything Elbow have done. The ruminative Very Heaven, galloping The Picture and the electro sugar rush of Balu are other standouts. DC

Dog Unit

At Home
Brace Yourself
Where can you go in 2024 with purely instrumental music? If you are Dog Unit, a boiler suit-clad four piece from London, you can go off on an endless journey of David Gilmour-like guitar melodies, space-age keyboard reverberations and the odd jazz workout, all held down by tight, propulsive rhythms from drummer Lucy Jamieson. Stereolab, Kraftwerk and, yes, Pink Floyd come to mind, while there is a nicely unfussy synergy to the music. Perhaps that is because it is made by late four thirtysomethings with proper jobs who only started their band because, according to guitarist Sam Walton, they needed to cheer themselves up on one particularly dark and rainy afternoon. It must have worked: this playful, fluid album is a balm for grey days everywhere. WH

Adrianne Lenker

Bright Future
4AD
The American’s new album is a thing of wonder, spare and spacious, its vocals close, its lyrics hitting you straight in the heart. Real House, a memory-lane affair that builds to a shattering payoff, is one of the most haunting songs I’ve heard in years. DC

Sheryl Crow

Evolution
Big Machine
At 62, Sheryl Crow didn’t think she would be making another album. In 2019 she called up her friends Neil Young, Bob Dylan and Stevie Nicks to help out on Threads, which she intended as something of a goodbye to the music industry. However, never believe a rock or pop star when they say they are quitting the game; they rarely do, unless the game quits them. They can’t help themselves. Crow has survived for all these years — and she still sounds much the same as she did back in the late Nineties, singing in a conversational drawl about everyday life against simple, loose-limbed roots rock — simply by being herself. WH

Chastity Belt

Live Laugh Love
Suicide Squeeze
As the title of their new album suggests, Seattle’s Chastity Belt have a sense of humour; after all this female/non-binary four piece got going a decade ago with a song called Pussy Weed Beer. They also have a nice line in cool, unhurried indie rock, with singer Julia Shapiro drawling her way through describing nagging feelings of emptiness on Hollow and confessing to making it up as she goes along on Blue, singing, “Faking it big time so I can hit my stride.” The mix of emotional sincerity, laissez-faire irony and deadpan wit makes for a smart take on modern problems, reminiscent of Beck at his Nineties slacker best. WH

Kacey Musgraves

Deeper Well
Polydor
The Grammy-winning Texan country singer’s sixth album glories in vocals that are equal parts caress and sigh. Singing this beautiful burrows deep in the heart. One of Deeper Well’s best qualities is that the musical settings are so minimal, allowing Musgraves’s voice to dominate. Another is that her phrasing is so immaculate and conversational. On the title track, a heart-wrenching break-up song set to contrasting music that is as comforting as a summer breeze, it is as if the thoughts are coming to her in real time — you feel like you are eavesdropping on an inner monologue. And gosh does Musgraves love a killer chord. Deeper Well abounds in them, with The Architect, Nothing to Be Scared Of, Cardinal — which draws on Fleetwood Mac and Scarborough Fair — and Anime Eyes the most devastating examples. Killer lyrics too: “Bubble wrap around your heart, like someone’s going to break it” is a corker, on an album full of them. DC

The Jesus and Mary Chain

Glasgow Eyes
Cooking Vinyl
As disturbing as some might find it to hear a 62-year-old Scotsman detail in graphic terms his plans for lustful adventure, Jim Reid’s declaration of erotic intent on Venal Joy does serve as a fitting metaphor for this most unlikely of survival stories. “No, I won’t give up and die,” he sings after suggesting a quick one on the kitchen table on this hypnotic, noise-driven forward charge of a song, which opens the Jesus and Mary Chain’s first album in seven years. Here they are, after all these years, still sounding as if the whole thing might fall apart at any minute and still as exciting as ever. WH

Waxahatchee

Tigers Blood
Anti-
A decade ago Katie Crutchfield left her native Birmingham, Alabama, to forge a singular yet traditional take on Americana: seemingly straightforward songs played out on acoustic and electric guitar, drums and the odd bit of piano, banjo and harmonica. Her latest album as Waxahatchee rings out with a simple kind of familiarity but, within that, Crutchfield hides a whole other level of lyrical and melodic intention. The effect is like that of a Flannery O’Connor novel: an evocation of a place where nothing is quite as it seems, where an edge of dissolution taints even the most apparently pleasant scenario. It is both charming and unsettling. WH

Kim Gordon

NOAM KLAR

Kim Gordon

The Collective
Matador
Working again with the producer Justin Raisen (John Cale, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Charli XCX et al), the Californian musician, artist and designer returns to the blistering, jagged sound world of her 2019 solo debut, No Home Record. Entering that world is a multisensory experience, with Gordon’s deadpan delivery and menacingly matter-of-fact lyrics breathing in your ear as the music explodes around you. She’s no stranger to abrasiveness, of course, having co-founded Sonic Youth. What’s so engrossing about her second musical act is the Yoko Ono-like way she co-opts everything in her viewfinder — societal fracture, avarice, alienation and historically repeated forms of oppression and malfunction — in the service of her art. In this respect The Collective, an intensely visual album, is arguably as much a piece of design as it is composition. Trappy, dubby tracks such as Shelf Warmer and Bye Bye rattle your bones and mess with your mind. DC

Sam Lee

Songdreaming
Cooking Vinyl
Sam Lee has been exploring the romance between folk music and the English countryside ever since he was sent off on wilderness-themed Forest School Camps as a boy, and for his fourth album he has made that romance the focus of some beautiful interpretations of ancient ballads. Bushes and Briars is traditionally a country lad-meets-fair maid tale, but Lee turns it into a warning of reaching environmental tipping point with a suitably ominous arrangement from producer Bernard Butler. Elsewhere there is the simple beauty of Sweet Girl McRee, a reflective lament for times gone, delivered with tenderness, and the stark, neoclassical elegance of Green Mossy Banks. Lee has a deep feeling for this material alongside a way of breathing new life into it: just what you want from a modern folk singer. WH

Yard Act

PHOEBE FOX

Yard Act

Where’s My Utopia
Island
This follow-up to The Overload cements the Leeds quartet’s status as one of Britain’s most compelling bands. The Clash, Pulp and Arctic Monkeys are the touchstones on caustic and compassionate standouts such as Dream Job and Blackpool Illuminations. DC

Dion

Girlfriends
KTBA Records
Dion DiMucci is the former New York teenage doo wop sensation who struck gold with early 60s gems like The Wanderer and Runaround Sue, experienced a religious transformation after getting clean from heroin in the late 60s, and went on to make the reflective 1975 masterpiece album Born To Be With You. Still sounding cool at 84, Dion tackles a bunch of self-penned blues songs with a plethora of female vocalists: Maggie Rose wrings the pain out of the lachrymose ballad I Got Wise, Shemekia Copeland brings seductive power to Mama Said, and the whole thing is infused with a vibrancy that’s infectious. It makes for a late-career high by a man who was a key influence on Bob Dylan, Pete Townshend and countless other future legends. WH

Ghetts

Ghetts

On Purpose, with Purpose
Warner
Justin Clarke, aka Ghetts, may not hog the headlines as much as his fellow rapper and occasional collaborator Stormzy, but his music is just as weighty. This follow-up to the brilliant Conflict of Interest (2021) slightly runs out of steam, as lengthy albums often do (it has 18 tracks across just over an hour). But its first seven songs and final four are sensational. Running a slide rule over the black British experience, Mount Rushmore (a fiery face-off with Kano and Wretch 32), the jazz-rap of Double Standards (featuring Sampha), Laps (with Moonchild Sanelly), Street Politics (with Tiggs Da Author), the lulling acoustica of Jonah’s Safety (with Pip Millett) and the unblinking, unfiltered Expiry Date (Outro) take in politics, chicanery, child protection, policing, healthcare, death, love and survival, and demand attention. The lewd Twin Sisters is a serious lapse, but for the most part On Purpose, with Purpose crackles with lyrical creativity, dexterity and naked fury. DC

Killerstar

Killerstar
High Wire
Where did the Bowie alumni go after the Thin White Duke left this realm? Quite a few have got together for this glam-tinged, riff-heavy debut from a new band set up by singer/guitarist Rob Fleming and drummer James Sedge. Bassist Gail Ann Dorsey, guitarist Earl Slick and pianist Mike Garson are among the former Bowie backing band members channelling their old boss’s spirit. There’s something of Ashes to Ashes in Go (Hold On Tight) and a touch of Aladdin Sane on Everybody Loves A Hero, but the songs have enough of their own, dark-edged character to take the whole thing beyond pastiche. “I am sure David would have loved this album,” says singer Emm Gryner, who sang with Bowie from 1999 onwards, and there is no reason to disagree with her. WH

Grandaddy

Blu Wav
Dangerbird
Jason Lytle could sing his way through an instruction manual and still pull at your heartstrings. The Californian’s bruised and careworn voice gives the songs on the first Grandaddy album since the band’s co-founder Kevin Garcia died in 2017 a depth and extraordinary emotional heft. Country meets electronica, with lashings of pedal steel and analogue synths; break-up songs have rarely sounded so sweet and sad. Watercooler and Cabin in My Mind could be lost Nashville classics. On Jukebox App, the lovelorn narrator sits in his car outside a bar in which his ex is forced to endure their favourite songs over and over again as he cues up the jukebox remotely — a scene whose themes of connection and disconnection are typical of an album abounding in missed opportunities and wistful regret. It’s not all (doomed) affairs of the heart — Ducky, Boris and Dart is a eulogy to two cats and a bird — but Blu Wav is fundamentally a woebegone weepie, infused with loss. DC

Liam Gallagher and John Squire

Liam Gallagher and John Squire
Warner Music
What do you get when you cross the singer of Oasis with the guitarist of the Stone Roses? Pretty much exactly what you would expect, on an album that won’t be winning any prizes for innovation but has such a positive spirit, such an uncomplicated celebration of its own familiar world, that it makes you want to be mad for it all over again, like the 90s never ended. Gallagher and Squire have gone exactly where their legions have fans would want them to go. The only surprise is how enjoyable it turns out to be. WH

Another Sky

Beach Day
Fiction
Being in a struggling band is one thing. Being actually homeless is another. That’s the situation singer Catrin Vincent and guitarist Jack Gilbert found themselves in while making Another Sky’s second album, an arresting blend of soaring folk rock, hypnotic dance music and Echo and the Bunnymen-style post-punk that surely get its energy and dynamism from the dire straits the band found themselves in. Hardship fuelled lyrical themes too: Death of the Author finds Vincent questioning her life choices, Psychopath launches full throttle at, well, a psychopath, and with Vincent’s sonorous vocals recalling an angry Sandy Denny the whole thing blasts along with captivating power. It may not solve Another’s Sky’s housing crisis, but it is at the very least an artistic triumph rising from the ashes of economic disaster. WH

Brittany Howard

What Now
EMI
Opening with a splash of multipart harmonies, the former Alabama Shakes singer’s second album is instantly ensnaring. The liveness of the recording gives the sense that this is music bursting from the chest of its creator. There were clearly issues that Brittany Howard needed to air. The title track is a blistering funk takedown that makes you feel for its target. Power to Undo builds to a frenetic Prince-style wig-out that will be sensational live. Red Flags has Howard bemoaning her inability to spot relationship warning signs to a film-noir soundscape over which she intones lyrics of self-doubt before the chorus explodes into colour. Prove It to You combines drums, synths and declarations of love to euphoric effect. The closing Every Colour in Blue documents depression, but, thanks to the dazzling trumpet playing of Rod McGaha, manages to convey faint optimism. If What Now is less focused than the stunning Jaime (2019), it eventually yields comparable riches. DC

Hurray for the Riff Raff

The Past Is Still Alive
Nonesuch
Alynda Segarra, the leader of Hurray for the Riff Raff, is an example of how the most unwise life decisions can lead to great things. There is an end-times mood to this record but the music and vocal delivery are so accomplished, so clean, melodic and catchy, that a suggestion of hope and ambition runs through it too. It’s an evocative ode to America’s dispossessed, rooted in the present but, as the title suggests, also steeped in its past. WH

MGMT

Loss of Life
Mom & Pop
Invigorated by becoming Tik Tok favourites during the lockdown, and featuring in a scene where everybody takes their clothes off in movie hit of recent times Saltburn, the American psychedelic pop duo have returned with their best album since that 2008 masterpiece of indie sleaze, Oracular Spectacular. This time round the irony of old has been replaced by thoughtfulness, however, as Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser tackle the challenges of everyday life. Nothing To Declare is a sweet, catchy love song in the vein of Simon & Garfunkel, the Christine and the Queens duet Dancing In Babylon goes for big-haired 80s pop-rock, Bubblegum Dog is a glam rocker about facing reality and the whole thing fizzes along with inventiveness and character; a reminder that MGMT remain one of the great bands of modern times. WH

Nadine Shah

Filthy Underneath
EMI North
Blessed with a voice that bridges the gap between Shirley Bassey and Siouxsie Sioux, Tyneside’s Shah looked all set for the big time a few years ago. Then life got in the way: terminally ill parents, divorce, suicide attempts. She has come back from the brink with this intense slice of clattering industrial/gothic rock on which she deals with it all in impressively straightforward fashion. French Exit addresses her own near-death with a total lack of sentiment — “A quiet little way out, nothing explicit” — while Sad Lads Anonymous finds her roaming around her hometown, “a chequered board of vape shops and nail bars,” wondering what to do with her life. She has made a bold and original album about her crisis years, free of self pity and oddly uplifting. WH

John Bramwell

The Light Fantastic
Townsend
Formerly of Manchester’s I Am Kloot, Bramwell goes for the kind of classic melody-rich songwriting reminiscent of Tim Hardin, Neil Young and other introspective types on his second solo album. There is some fantastic material here: A World Full of Flowers is reminiscent of George Harrison at his most melancholic, while Nobody Left But You puts a poetic rap against simple finger-picked guitar and piano. Bramwell wrote the songs first thing in the morning, when he was yet to fully emerge from the tangled web of whatever dreams and nightmares he had just been sleeping through, and it shows: this is hazy music with purpose, and very pretty with it. WH

The Last Dinner Party

Prelude to Ecstasy
Island
From 0-60 in a flash, the Last Dinner Party bowled into 2024 doing what looked like a victory lap, before they’d even released their debut album: crowned the Brits Rising Stars, winners of the BBC’s sound of 2024 poll, the name on everyone’s lips. Doubters cry “over-hyped” and “industry plants”, but the truth is more mundane. They met at uni, gigged tirelessly, picked up word-of-mouth momentum. And — no minor detail — they write fantastic retro pop songs full of startling imagery and fearless interrogation, with clear debts to Kate Bush, Queen, Sparks, Alex Harvey, Siouxsie, Florence and others. Equally arrestingly, like a riot in a dressing-up box, they look extraordinary, all gothic frocks and Interview With a Vampire cosplay. Some of the musical gear shifts are gauche, but when the writing gels the results are incredible, mixing anger, irony, pathos and deadly seriousness. How anyone could listen to songs such as The Feminine Urge, Nothing Matters and the shattering Portrait of a Dead Girl and dismiss this band as a cynical marketing ploy defeats me. DC

Idles

Tangk
Partisan
Tangk begins with the most subdued of beats, a twinkling piano refrain, some atmospheric hums and Talbot singing lightly about all kinds of unpleasant childhood memories; the kind of thing you expect from a serious band like Radiohead. The result is a dynamic, unusual album, filled with originality and passion and quite unlike anything else out there. WH

JB Dunckel

Paranormal Musicality
Warner Classics
As the Parisian duo Air prepare to perform live their 1998 space age easy listening masterpiece Moon Safari for the first time ever, one half of them has released an album of solo piano that serves as a reminder of the deep musicality at the heart of the band. Pieces like Woods On Fire and Ballad Oiseau are arpeggiated piano improvisations, brimming with evocation and character. Some are florid and romantic, some are tense and dramatic, all are fashioned by Dunckel’s virtuosic, understated playing style. Dunckel, who was working as a maths teacher before Air took off, has been playing classical piano every day since he was a child and it shows. This is expressive, free-flowing music; contemplative, gentle and a pleasure to lose yourself in. WH

Little Simz

Drop 7
Forever Living Originals
Mercury Prize winner Little Simz is one of the best British rappers out there, her signature deadpan flow typified by sharp, complex wordplay. On this seven-track EP she takes a detour into icy dance music, although not the kind you would necessarily dance to; more admire as a futuristic encapsulation of pure attitude. “Know some people waiting on the day for me to fail. Never going back to being broke, man, can’t you tell?” she whispers on I Ain’t Feelin It, which manages to be boastful and funny, a rare combination. Sometimes she gives up the rapping for light, breezy singing, such as on the sweet Far Away, sometimes she aligns it to the frantic but subdued percussion of amapiano, a house music variant to emerge from South Africa, such as on Mood Swings. The whole thing zips along with apparent effortlessness. WH

Tom Odell

Black Friday
Urok
Freed from his major-label shackles, Odell’s career is soaring. His tours are sellouts and his 2012 single Another Love is in Spotify’s 40 most streamed songs. Black Friday captures the singer at his best — stripped down, confiding, candid and vulnerable. DC

Declan McKenna

What Happened To The Beach?
Tomplicated
Unlike so many British, male singer-songwriters, Hertfordshire’s Declan McKenna has not built a career on moaning about his hurt feelings. Instead he got going in his teens in 2015 with Brazil, a protest at the corruption cases surrounding FIFA’s Sepp Blatter as that country hosted the World Cup. That’s not a typical way to announce your arrival, and now McKenna has taken another left turn with his third album. The default setting is simple acoustic music overlaid with all kinds of odd, woozy sounds, creating a sweet, rather dreamy setting for songs about losing your mojo (Nothing Works), feeling dissatisfied (Mulhollands Dinner and Wine), and doing the whole singer-songwriter schtick (It’s An Act). Shades of Beck’s kaleidoscopic approach come into an album that showcases McKenna as an unusual artist, going his own way and sounding all the better for it. WH

Gruff Rhys

Sadness Sets Me Free
Rough Trade
The Super Furry Animals singer’s new album is a delight. Featuring ten tracks of cosmic chamber-pop awash in strings and Beatlesy chord progressions, Sadness Sets Me Free evokes sun-dappled vistas where contentment is tinged with melancholy. DC

Wings

Band on the Run: 50th Anniversary Edition
Capitol
The 50th anniversary edition of Band on the Run, an elegant black-and-white package featuring the original album remastered by Giles Martin and a second “underdubbed” disc with the original rough mixes shorn of Tony Visconti’s arrangements, underlines the all-or-nothing spirit driving the album. The whole thing charges along with effervescent optimism, making it the ultimate McCartney album and an unquestionable masterpiece, ripe for rediscovery. WH

L Devine

Digital Heartifacts
AWAL
A new star singing about life as a young gay woman in 21st century Britain, it was all happening for Whitley Bay’s Olivia Devine a couple of years back — until, like the now hugely successful Raye, she found herself being dropped by her record label before her debut album even had a chance to come out. Now she’s put it out herself, and you wonder what went wrong because these are great songs, full of character and broad appeal. If I Don’t Laugh is a litany of disasters with the rocking immediacy of Stevie Nicks, while Laundry Day is a lesbian anthem for the ages containing the line, “My negativity has become unattractive, she wants to be with someone who is proactive.” As an unpretentious, unguarded collection of self-deprecating pop-rock, this hits the spot, song after song. WH

Marika Hackman

Big Sigh
Chrysalis
On her fifth album, the Hampshire singer further develops her ear for detail and dynamics. Meaty topics — sex and sexuality, autonomy v intimacy, openness v guardedness — are confronted or alluded to with sly humour and unapologetic savagery, the lyrics often leaping out at you from the swirling musical mists that Hackman and her longtime collaborator, Charlie Andrew (Alt-J, Wolf Alice et al), concoct. “My heart won’t grow with your fingers down my throat,” she sings on the somnolent, Elliott Smith-like Hanging, while Vitamins, whose up-close harmonies recall those on Hackman’s haunting early song Tongues, opens with a verse that stops you in your tracks. If layered folktronica and sonorous piano are the album’s sonic defaults, there are some lovely curveballs: the early Genesis prog-isms of The Ground; the title track’s perhaps unintentional echoing of Duran Duran’s Save a Prayer and Ordinary World. What a remarkable artist, and what a remarkable album. DC

Bill Ryder-Jones

Iechyd Da
Domino
Alternately lush and downbeat, with lyrics that both alleviate and deepen the gloom, the Coral co-founder’s new album arcs from heartbreak to recovery. Ryder-Jones infuses it with a wit and warmth that makes you root for him. DC

His Lordship

His Lordship
Psychonaut Sounds
Shades of the White Stripes and the Stooges filter into this wild debut by a garage rock duo made up of Pretenders alumni James Walbourne and Kris Sonne, which fizzes along with unhinged energy. Walbourne is a master guitarist but keeps things simple, employing the distorted riffing once trademarked by rockabilly pioneer Link Wray on Cat Call, while for the punk rock ode to a young chancer Joyboy, Sonne hammers the drums with total abandon. With the exception of spooky ballad The Repenter there is a sense of getting through everything as quickly as possible, meaning there’s no chance of getting bored here — no wonder there’s a frantic rocker called I’m So Bored of Being Bored. WH

Sleater-Kinney

Little Rope
Lorna Vista
From riot grrrl firebrands to beloved indie elders, Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker continue to enliven and challenge. On their 11th studio album, recorded in the aftermath of the deaths of Brownstein’s mother and stepfather in a car accident, the Washington state duo whip up a storm that can seem familiar at times but still has an almighty impact. “The thing you fear the most will hunt you down,” Tucker sings on Hunt You Down, one of many moments when song and sentiment combine to shattering effect. Produced by John Congleton (Phoebe Bridgers, Lana Del Rey, St Vincent et al), Little Rope both reels in the years and sounds thrillingly, viscerally “now”. Nowhere is there a sense of going through the motions; on the contrary, on songs such as Hell, Say It Like You Mean It and the closing Untidy Creature, Sleater-Kinney combine rawness, defiance, candour and attack to create a dizzying concoction. How many bands can you say that about, 30 years on? DC

Hannah Wicklund

The Prize
Flat Iron/Strawberry Moon
The South Carolinian is not of her time, and is more intriguing for that. Keening vocals, raw expression and squally blues-rock are Wicklund’s stock in trade, and they give her narratives of female agency power, without slipping into pastiche. DC

Brown Horse

Reservoir
Loose
Drawing on Crazy Horse, Uncle Tupelo, Lucinda Williams and the like, this Norwich-based six-piece deal in careworn narratives about hope, hopelessness, regret and heartache, and do so with extraordinary emotional heft. What a debut. DC

Lou Reed

Hudson River Wind Meditations
Light in the Attic
One of the great mysteries of rock is how Lou Reed could be such a profoundly empathetic writer, such a sensitive soul, yet take such apparent delight in being so horrible. Hudson River Wind Meditations, available on vinyl here for the first time, goes to the heart of the Lou Reed contradiction: an album of profoundly calming instrumental music named after the river that runs through the most hectic city in the world. WH

Green Day

Saviors
Warner
This year marks the 30th anniversary of Dookie and the 20th of the polemical Bush-era rock opera American Idiot — the two albums that cemented Green Day’s status as one of the world’s biggest bands. By way of celebration the Californian trio have made their best album in years. Saviors bristles with fury and self-laceration — “Everybody’s famous, stupid and contagious” — about the state of their nation, to music that joins the dots between the band’s greatest moments and the artists who influenced them. The Bowie-like 1981 is pure Dookie; The American Dream Is Killing Me channels the Clash’s Tommy Gun, with added Fab Four harmonies; on Dilemma Billie Joe Armstrong references his struggles with addiction and finds a succession of killer chords that simultaneously ratchet up the tension and pull at the heartstrings. Thirty-six years after they formed, Green Day are still setting the pace. DC

Nailah Hunter

Lovegaze
Fat Possum
The daughter of a pastor from Belize, LA’s Naila Hunter comes from a unique perspective: a classically trained harpist and pure-voiced singer who has embraced psychedelia, new age music, trip-hop and other things of a floaty and indistinct nature to forge her own gentle sound. The result is the missing link between Alice Coltrane and Enya, with cascading strings and lyrics about castles on hills and swords embedded in the vines conjuring up images of Arthurian fantasy. Needless to say, with a shimmering instrumental called Cloudbreath and a soulful Adam and Eve tale called Garden there is a strong sense of a tree-hugging hippie at work here, but not one averse to embracing the dark side. “I dream of beheadings and goose-feather beddings,” she sings on the otherwise lovely Into The Sun. To make matters even stranger, this vision of a sunlit utopia (with the odd moment of horrific violence) was conjured up in rainy old England. As a true original, Hunter is one to watch. WH

Future Islands

People Who Aren’t There Anymore
4AD
Few stake out synth-driven new wave as convincingly as Future Islands, partly thanks to the graininess and emotional power of Sam Herring’s voice. It’s put to great use here, with The Tower and Iris among the standouts. DC

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