Andrzej Lukowski

The Delta Sweete Revisited probably isn’t destined to be anything more than an interesting footnote in the career of anybody involved. But it certainly has something to it: a mood, an ambience, an ethereal sultriness, chilly northern mists turning to hot southern steam.

Springsteen on Broadway is a show about a man who dreamed of escape who never escaped.

This is not the best Marissa Nadler record, but it kind of feels like her most perfect, potentially the resolution of a subtle identity crisis that’s run through her music over the years.

Ultimately it feels like one beautifully-realised idea, when even their Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada EP featured two. It would have been cool if it was a double with another movement of music, I guess. But frankly it still feels pretty incredible to only have such trivial criticisms to make of the band in 2017: now deep into middle age, perhaps Godspeed are slowing down a little, but their music and their rage remain undimmed and beautiful.

Planetarium only occasionally feels absolutely essential, but it never dips below ‘pretty good’.

Humanz is good, because Gorillaz are good, and it distinguishes itself by probably being the band’s most party-orientated record, which is great. But ultimately it feel like Gorillaz are now more curators than provocateurs, locked into a classy, comfortable groove.

Where Marissa Nadler missed the mark by stripping away both the darkness and the interesting musical experiments of its predecessor Little Hells, Strangers fills the space left by doom and gloom with heady sonic experimentation.

It is a formidably layered, beautiful record that largely lacks big hooks or aggressive bite, and yet conspires to be endlessly satisfying on a micro level, a clutch of ballads that represent the band's most intricate musical trip.

It takes real bravery to write an album so honest and exposed, and it takes something more than bravery to do so in way that sounds like you’d batter everyone in the room if they took the piss.

Asunder, Sweet is Godspeed at their most conciliatory, most bloody-minded and most untouchable.

The idea of Madonna as an indestructible spirit of pop runs rampant through her mostly excellent thirteenth studio album Rebel Heart, a record whose strengths are timeless and whose faults are somewhat more modern.

If you have a tolerance for drums that go ‘fzzz’, Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes is a lovely, lovely record, easily Yorke’s best non-Radiohead effort.

Raw Exit is not a big statement record and I’m not sure there’s much point in trying to read the runes with regards to what it spells for the band’s future. It’s a little on the slight side, a little throwaway, and the odds are that by the time the next Poliça album comes out, we’ll have all kind of forgotten that there was a kind of EP out.

You can feel the thought and polish that has gone into everything, and though Ghost Stories is almost unprecedentedly pared down and shorn of ego for a sixth album by an act of this stature, the music never has the ragged quality to put it in sync with Martin's voice. 

It is a literally awesome record, huge, stark songs that explode with tectonic immensity. But its immensity is such that it never quite gets its hooks in the way ‘The Seer’ did

July is a grown up album – but it’s not a cleaned up one: Marissa Nadler may flirt with the sun now, but still articulates the dark like no one else.

It’s a jaw-dropping accomplishment, one of those records that’s almost pointless to listen to as a series of individual songs – tracks are mini symphonies in themselves, and to break Loud City Song down into tracks would be missing the point.

The Next Day is only a little better than its two predecessors and probably only Bowie’s best album since Outside, but that’s not to knock what is easily the best mainstream art pop record of recent times.

For now, though, they’ve made a modestly magnificent record that entirely validates this reformation.

This is a record of adventure and texture, an attempt, musically, to conjure up a future we may never actually have. 

The sheer energy pouring from this record is breathtaking: not until the very final song (‘Continuous Thunder’) does Celebration Rock’s sense of acceleration cease.

If it’s not a masterwork it’s an evocative accompaniment to a summer’s day, a sporadic but persuasive reminder of how spine-tingling Albarn’s voice can be

This is a hard, dark, inventive record that strongly suggests that give or take an imaginary sister and some fiddles, Jack White is pretty much the same boy we've always known.

As it is, I can’t help but feel Wrecking Ball fritters something of itself away via its unsteady musical palette.