No genre has had such a stellar 2018 as jazz. Divorced from an uncool reputation that has dogged it for decades, the myriad facets of this unwieldy style have blossomed this year, often with the swing replaced by hard funk rhythms and revolutionary zeal taking the place of romantic schmaltz: Sons Of Kemet’s Your Queen Is A Reptile has been one highlight, Kamaal Williams’ The Return another – hey, even John Coltrane returned to release a new album (well, one unreleased at the time, anyway).

The most striking jazz album of 2018, however, is undoubtedly Heaven & Earth, the second proper full-length from LA’s Kamasi Washington. A 144-minute opus, it’s split into two halves, each of which would work as their own standalone album, and makes jazz accessible and inviting again even while it dishes out 12-minute detours into interstellar psychedelia.

There are many influences at work: the massed percussion of Afro-Latin music, the clipped funk of early ’70s Miles, the spacey synth experimentation of Weather Report, the lush choirs and strings of vintage Hollywood and the pioneering sound of classic bebop. All these are threaded together by Washington and his crack band to create a new, decade-straddling sound, ecstatic on Can You Hear Him and Tiffakonkae, hard-hitting on One Of One and The Psalmnist, and sweetly soulful on Testify and Journey, the latter boasting lovely devotional vocals.

As if the original record wasn’t long enough, EP The Choice was secretly packaged with the album, boasting an ace 10-minute take on Will You Love Me Tomorrow among its five tracks. Just one more reason, if needed, to pick up Washington’s masterpiece, the most ambitious and transcendent album of the year.

Bristol has surfaced as a post-punk/noise-rock Babylon in recent years, with Spectres, Lice and Idles all crafting strong, uncompromising records recently. Idles’ debut, last year’s Brutalism, was especially raging and angry, and, inspired by vocalist Joe Talbot’s grief over the death of his mother, a supremely powerful listen.

The band’s swift follow-up is inspired in part by a very different, but no less painful event: the passing of Talbot’s daughter. Such trauma and sadness, however, has inspired the singer and his group, as the album title suggests, to find every scrap of solace in the storm.

Colossus opens the album with a repeated, monotonous fuzz bassline and simple percussion – very Swans – with Talbot taking on problem drinking and the weight of a father’s legacy in his lyrics: “I am my father’s son,” he chants, “his shadow weighs a ton.” Much of Joy As An Act Of Resistance is even faster and fiercer, though, such as the first single, the Oi!-inspired Danny Nedelko, and the hardcore motorik of Television. “I’m sorry your grandad’s dead… ah, lovely spread,” sings Talbot on the Fall rampage of Gram Rock, imagining attending a wake, before guitarists Mark Bowen and Lee Kiernan power the song to a cacophonous Sonic Youth-style ending.

Across all of Joy As An Act Of Resistance, Idles have created something touching, uplifting and euphoric from some of life’s worst experiences. There’s no sense of cool detachment here, no hanging back emotionally – Joe Talbot especially is right there in the middle of the detritus and pain of existence, showing us the pearls he’s found in the mud. While Brutalism was strong, with Joy… Idles have proved themselves to be one of the most important groups around today.

Tom Pinnock

In 2018, Low turn twenty-five. Since 1993, Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker – the married couple whose heaven-and-earth harmonies have always held the band’s centre-have pioneered a subgenre, shrugged off its strictures, recorded a Christmas classic, become a magnetic onstage force, and emerged as one of music’s most steadfast and vital vehicles for pulling light from our darkest emotional recesses. But Low will not commemorate its first quarter-century with mawkish nostalgia or safe runs through songbook favourites. Instead, in faithfully defiant fashion, Low release its most brazen, abrasive (and, paradoxically, most empowering) album ever: Double Negative, an unflinching eleven-song quest through snarling static and shattering beats that somehow culminates in the brightest pop songs of Low’s career. Double Negative is a record perfectly and painfully suited for our time. Loud, contentious and commanding; Low fights for the world by fighting against it.

Since stumbling fully formed from Melbourne five years ago, Courtney Barnett has proved to be a singular artist, mixing rambling Pavement-esque rock with her own cutting and poetic lyrics. After an EP compilation, her 2015 debut LP and last year’s collaborative record with Kurt Vile, she’s back with her second record proper, and things have changed a little. Compared to the snappy pop smarts of her debut, Sometimes I Sit And Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit, Tell Me How You Really Feel is a slow-burner, deeper and more serious. Hopefulessness is a stoned, gloomy opener, its guitars uncoiling slowly like a wounded rattler, but it blossoms into a powerful, feedback-strewn finale. Meanwhile, first side highlight Charity evokes Stephen Malkmus’ most accessible pop, while City Looks Pretty begins like Bowie’s Heroes and ends as a waltzing lullaby that recalls her debut’s Small Poppies.

Just six months after winning the Mercury Prize for their debut album, Dead, Glasgow hip-hop trio Young Fathers were back with their second album. 2015’s White Men Are Black Men Too just missed out on the UK Top 40, but it was another political, adept and supremely British record.

While their second LP came perhaps a little too quickly, one couldn’t level that accusation at their long-awaited third, now long-awaited for three years. Alloysious Massaquoi, Kayus Bankole and Graham ‘G’ Hastings seem to have used the time wisely, however, recording a large number of songs and then distilling them down to a snappy, high-quality set of 12 tracks.

“The album we’ve been trying to make since we were 14,” as G described it on Radio Scotland recently, is a sparser, hard-hitting record, but with a more infectious, diverse feel – more of a greatest hits than a collection of deep cuts. Lord, for example, features the Leith Congregational Choir over an out-of-tune piano, before loud synth notes obnoxiously, thrillingly intrude; Fee Fi’s sampled tribal drums recall Joni Mitchell’s The Jungle Line, here laid under pitch-shifted vocals and illbient drones.

The tracks spin by, some of them recalling punk in their paciness and brevity: Wire mixes a happy hardcore bounce with gang vocals, and is all over in 100 seconds; two-minute opener See How, meanwhile, is dubby electro with wonky production, as weird as it is soulful.

As a whole, Cocoa Sugar is hard to pin down; such is its mix of influences and approaches. Its long gestation seems to have paid off, though, with its impact strong, and its message clear. As the final, murmured lines of Lord have it: “While the government wants to control/The culture will set you free…”

While continental artists were once seen as something of a joke in English-speaking territories, today France’s Héloïse Letissier is one of the biggest pop stars in the world. Chris is her new incarnation, with her hair cut short and her image defiantly androgynous. The sound on Chris is also defiant – defiantly ’80s. Not ’80s-inspired even, more as if the textures were actually from a Michael or Janet Jackson LP, with swathes of glassy DX7s and glossy digital reverb. The highlights are many: Girlfriend is a shimmering R&B delight, and one of the finest pop singles of 2018, while Doesn’t Matter takes the beat of Toni Basil’s Mickey and perverts it with some existential lyrics on the existence of God. In the second half of the album, there’s the moody funk of Damn (What Must A Woman Do) and the new Jacko swing of Feel So Good, its melody strangely reminiscent of Suzanne Vega’s Luka.

In 2007, Janelle Monáe arrived here from another world. A self-proclaimed android dressed in black and white, she could emulate Prince‘s rubbery funk, Stevie Wonder‘s synth-laden soul and the Jackson 5‘s sugary R&B, while somehow retaining the festive Southern bounce of her Atlanta base. Monáe has forged a distinct path in music, fashion and film. After the release of Make Me Feel, the lead track from Dirty Computer, Monáe revealed that Prince had worked with her on the single, as well as the entire album, before he passed away. In an interview with Radio 1 she stated that: “Prince was actually working on the album with me before he passed on to another frequency, and helped me come up with some sounds. And I really miss him, you know, it’s hard for me to talk about him. But I do miss him, and his spirit will never leave me.”

If you’re selling out two nights at London’s Roundhouse, you’re officially big news – and so it is with Johanna and Klara Söderberg, the two Stockholm sisters who have been weaving an Americana-tinged spell for almost a decade now. On Ruins, their fourth album, the wheel hasn’t been reinvented since 2014’s Stay Gold, it’s safe to say, but the ride has been refined. Over these 10 tracks, the Söderberg sisters craft grand, open-sky country, rock and folk, borne along by the kind of beautiful, totally natural harmony singing that sibling musicians excel at. Their experiences of the last four years, breakups, relocations and all, have given an added depth to these rich songs, with Postcard a boozy C&W weepie (“I wasn’t looking for trouble but trouble came…”) and the elegiac, addictive Distant Star comparing songs to the dying light of faraway suns over a waltzing shuffle that mixes pedal steel with spangled mandolins.

Singularity begins and ends on the same note: a universe beginning, expanding, and contracting towards the same infinitesimal point. Where Immunity – his hypnotic breakthrough LP – charted the dark alternative reality of an epic night out, Singularity explores the dissonance between dystopian urbanity and the green forest. It is a journey that returns to where it began – from the opening note of foreboding to the final sound of acceptance. Shaped by his experiences with meditation and trance states, the album flows seamlessly from rugged techno to transcendent choral music, from solo acoustic piano to psychedelic ambient. Its epic musical palette is visceral and emotionally honest: with a destructive opener full of industrial electronics and sonic claustrophobia and a redemptive, pure end on solo piano. Exploring the connectivity of the mind, sonics and the natural world, Singularity reflects the different psychological states Hopkins experienced while writing and recording.

Legend has it that The Beatles spent 24 hours without a break deciding on the tracklisting for the White Album – true story or not, it shows how important the art of sequencing is when you’re dealing with a long, diverse record.

So it is with Nils Frahm’s long-awaited, painstakingly sculpted All Melody, his first album since 2016’s Solo. It’s a sprawling epic that finds the Berlin-based pianist and composer – still only 35 years old – looking back on all of his previous work and stretching out into pastures new as well.

The centrepiece here is the excellent 20-minute electronic suite of All Melody and its arpeggiated relative #2, which sounds like LCD Soundsystem’s Pulse (v.1) after a relaxing course of yoga. Around this, Frahm takes the listener on a safari tour of his many musical interests: for starters, there’s Harm Hymn’s churchy harmonium drones, the jazzy, transparent ambience of My Friend The Forest, and the trumpet and piano meditation of Fundamental Values.

Most interesting, perhaps, are the true hybrid tracks, such as Sunson, which moves from pipe organ grandeur to tropical electronica, before embracing the kind of rural, twilit atmospherics that GAS do so well; yet Frahm can still impress when it’s just him and a piano, as on the perfect miniature Forever Changeless, when the mechanical clanks of the instrument are as loud as the pure tones emanating from its strings.

74 minutes long, and also bursting with heavenly choir arrangements, All Melody is the perfect summation of what Frahm can do as a musician, as a composer and as a producer. He’s given us succinct, cohesive albums before, such as Felt or Solo, but here he’s taking 2013’s varied Spaces on even further, and giving us everything he can do, in one package. The result is often dazzling.

Tom Pinnock

You certainly get value for money with Kurt Vile – this, his seventh solo album, is almost 79 minutes long. Not that the sheer volume of music is the only plus to Bottle It In, of course: across 13 songs, the listener discovers the Philadelphia singer-songwriter at his most relaxed and intuitive. On his last record, 2015’s B’lieve I’m Goin Down, Vile experimented with working in different studios, and Bottle It In was similarly constructed in casual sessions during or after tours. The results find him relaxing – more than usual, even – and expanding his songs. Tracks like Bassackwards, then, an acoustic folk song, are daubed with metronomic drums, harp and layers of backwards electric guitar, to create a hallucinatory, hypnotic feel, as if you’re “buried deep in the psyche of [Vile’s] soul”, as he puts it in the song.

Reunions can bring all kinds of recorded treats: Blur’s The Magic Whip, The Dream Syndicate’s How Did I Find Myself Here?, LCD Soundsystem’s American Dream. Yet few of these albums match up to All Nerve, the first album by The Breeders’ ‘classic’ lineup since 1993’s Last Splash. Only the fifth Breeders album since their 1990 debut, Pod, All Nerve is as compelling and strange as any of Kim Deal’s finest work. Nervous Mary is a dark opener, full of irregular bar lengths and doomy, descending chords, yet it’s supremely addictive in the way that Deal’s songs often are. Singles Wait In The Car and the title track are especially pared down to their essences, as thrilling as rock music can be in 2018, while the group – Kim, lead guitarist Kelley Deal, bassist Josephine Wiggs and drummer Jim Macpherson – stretch out on the meditative Spacewoman and the hovering, crepuscular Dawn: Making An Effort.

Parquet Courts have made some stellar music over the last few years, but it’s been hard to shake the feeling that they’ve failed to develop on the sound of their excellent 2012 LP, Light Up Gold.

Unlike 2014’s Sunbathing Animal or 2016’s Human Performance, however, Wide Awake! finds the band dramatically altering their modus operandi. To shake things up, they’ve enlisted Danger Mouse to produce them, as perverse an act as Mark Ronsonproducing Queens Of The Stone Age on last year’s Villains, and sucked in funkier, syncopated rhythms into their propulsive, Strokes-y garage.

Wide Awake! itself features cowbell, whistles, funk bass and chanted vocals, and sounds shockingly like !!! – but it works, with the band’s guitars still scratchy and high in the mix and their vocals raw around the edges. Violence is carried by a ’60s funk groove centred around electric piano, synth and vintage organ, the perfect backing for Andrew Savage to chant a monologue on America today: “Sad is how I feel when the radio wakes me up with the words ‘suspected gunman’,” he spits, before the band chorus “Violence is daily life.”

It’s not all a departure, however. Normalization could have fitted on any Parquet Courts album to date, while Extinction continues Austin Brown’s catalogue of excellent staccato riffs.

The moments that stick in the mind after Wide Awake! finishes revolving, though, are the braver ones: the penultimate Death Will Bring Change, a slow ballad featuring a children’s choir and Mellotron, or Tenderness, a Curtis Mayfield-esque disco track with chicken-scratch guitar and playful piano. The success of Wide Awake!, however, is in the fact that whatever Parquet Courts try, they come out with their previous identity intact. A surprising and exciting progression, then, and better late than never.

Tom Pinnock 

Back in the ’90s, there wasn’t much in common between Supergrass and Radiohead, aside from their Oxford roots. As Gaz Coombes has matured, however, his music has morphed closer to that of Thom Yorke and co. World’s Strongest Man is Coombes’ third album away from his former group, and it continues his voyage towards a more soulful, experimental and serious sound.

Supergrass always took inspiration from Bowie, but there are some wonderfully warped electronic soul cuts here, a little like something from Station To Station or Heroes – Deep Pockets’ motorik funk, say, or Walk The Walk’s grooving drones, with Coombes trying out his best lip-curling falsetto a la Josh Homme.

Elsewhere, there are a host of ballads that evoke Radiohead’s slower, more mournful moments: Slow Motion Life suggests the singer has been listening to Pyramid Song, his voice thin and keening like Yorke’s, while Weird Dreams mixes atmospheric drum machines and electronics, a chorus of Coombes’ and, finally, a stately, plodding piano.

That’s not to suggest that World’s Strongest Man is just a faux-In Rainbows. With glockenspiel, sampled vocals and warped strings, Shit (I’ve Done It Again) sounds like nothing Coombes has ever attempted, and is reminiscent of the slow, vocoder-led groove of prime Air, with Coombes singing: “Anyone can be the star…” In Waves suggests what Supergrass might have sounded like if they were still together, with a garagey guitar riff, fragmented bass, off-kilter drums and massed harmonies in constant movement throughout. The title track, meanwhile, is a circling delight, with Coombes examining the nature of masculinity over a rising, distorted crescendo of slow, guitar-led funk.

As a whole, World’s Strongest Man may not quite have the effervescent pop chops of Supergrass’ best work, but it’s Coombes’ finest effort so far as a solo artist, and comes with its own austere, but no less powerful, charm.

Tom Pinnock 

Four-piece Teleman are something of a strange proposition in 2018: an English art-pop band, formed in their early thirties, who have built up a keen fanbase and substantial critical acclaim across their last two albums without any gimmicks, just great songs.

After rising from the ashes of Reading’s underrated Pete & The Pirates in 2012, the quartet of vocalist Thomas Sanders, bassist Pete Cattermoul, synth/keys player Jonny Sanders and drummer Hiro Amamiya added metronomic Krautrock rhythms and cosmic synths to the indie-garage of their former work. Bernard Butler produced their debut, Breakfast, so it was naturally a glossy, sleek thing – yet Family Of Aliens, their third album, produced by Boxed In’s Oli Bayston, is, if anything, even more electronic. Submarine Life is driven by aquatic Vocodered vocals, while the synth-pop of Cactussounds like prime Ladytron or Hot Chip at their most relaxed. Starlight, conversely, is a loping six-minute ballad driven by woozy synths, like something from Gorillaz’s debut album, while Sea Of Winesprings from rippling piano and a vocal melody that recalls Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci or Robert Wyatt.

The band’s musical progression works throughout, though, highlighting Thomas Sanders’ wry, subdued vocals and enigmatic lyrics. “Use your imagination,” he mutters in the opening title track, and it’s almost a key to understanding his bookish lyrics. Family Of Aliens itself is a propulsive delight with an almost motorik beat, but this isn’t the Autobahn – instead Sanders is “driving along the M1… I saw the lights calling me onwards…”

Somebody’s Island looks at love and support: “I could have just left you dancing on your own/I could have just run but I didn’t know where to go…” Teleman clearly have no such problem – for those who haven’t heard them yet, it may be time to turn on and tune in.

Tom Pinnock 

11 years ago, The White Stripes had just recorded their final album, Icky Thump. It was the most lavish record the group created, recorded at Blackbird Studios in Nashville over three weeks, the longest time Jack and Meg had then taken on an album.

How things change: now, in 2018, Jack White is about to release his third solo album, Boarding House Reach. His previous two had featured a host of musicians and a sound expanding into country, funk and soul, but here, White’s ambitions shoot out of orbit. Featuring almost 20 additional musicians, the record finds the singer, guitarist, keyboardist and songwriter leaving the confines of the past, and the blues, for a sleek, modern take on hip-hop, funk and rock.

This is no calculated attempt to reinvent himself for contemporary charts, though – Boarding House Reach is much stranger than that. There are spoken-word interludes such as Abulia And Akrasia, lengthy, sketchy funk workouts such as Corporation, and strange synth noises that rudely interrupt the likes of Hypermisophoniac. Get In The Mind Shaft, meanwhile, is a wild mix of all the above, and surely the weirdest, bravest song White has ever made.

As a whole, it contains some of White’s most exciting music in years, and outlines a large number of directions he could pursue in the future. Best of all are the gonzo garage-rock of Over And Over And Over, and the pair of songs that close the album: What’s Done Is Done is a kind of electronic country ballad, while Humoresque is a mutant jazz ballad, done surprisingly straight.

Boarding House Reach is never boring, it’s an exciting, diverse splurge of promising ideas that delights as much as it baffles.

“The chicken imagines a heaven, full of roosters and plenty of corn,” sang David Byrne on Everyday Is A Miracle, an avian highlight from this, his first solo album since 2004. Though it isn’t quite the accessible treat some were anticipating, for others, American Utopia is one of Byrne’s best; heavily electronic, the record boasts production by Thomas Bartlett, Daniel Lopatin and Rodaidh McDonald, among others, and there are pleasing touches of the global, electronic funk Byrne has regularly released on his Luaka Bop label. The likes of Gasoline And Dirty Sheets might bounce along on a sturdy dancehall beat, but much of American Utopia is a wry reflection of the times we live in: Bullet is a joyous song about a brutal shooting, for example, while I Dance Like This moves suddenly between pretty piano verses and industrial choruses. More than poultry thrills here, it turns out.

Tom Pinnock

“Each record I make is more of an amalgamation of who I truly am,” says John Grant. “The more I do this, the more I trust in myself, and the further along I go.” Even when the Michigan-born man released his debut solo album Queen Of Denmark in 2010, Grant laced sumptuous soft-rock ballads with an array of spacey, wistful synthesiser sounds, increasingly adding taut, fizzing sequencers, nu-synth-disco settings and icy soundscapes to the mix on 2013’s Pale Green Ghosts and 2015’s Grey Tickles, Black Pressure, the latter The Guardian described as, “variously agonising, hilarious, uplifting and moving: another bravura display from a unique song writing talent.” With his fourth solo album, Love Is Magic, Grant has continued evolving, creating his most electronic record yet, in collaboration with Benge (Ben Edwards), analogue synth expert/collector and a member of electronic trio Wrangler.

Tracey Thorn’s first solo album of entirely original material for seven years. On Record, the synth-driven tracks arrive and leave with a punchy sub-three-minute directness. “I wanted it to be a record you’d listen to in the daytime,” Tracey says. “On your headphones or on the move. Not necessarily in the evening or in your bedroom.” For all its no-fuss pop brevity, the album rotates around Sister, a dubby nine-minute Compass Point-style disco jam where Tracey is joined again by Warpaint’s rhythm section and glorious backing vocals from Corinne Bailey Rae. Across four decades Tracey’s songs and writing have offered up a clear-eyed woman’s view of the immediate world around her; from the acerbic teen love songs of her first early-eighties band Marine Girls, through sixteen years as one half of Everything But The Girl to her recent acclaimed memoirs and journalism.”

Genre lines are to some extent a thing of the past, with artists free to move into any areas they fancy – take post-classical artists’ electronic work, say, or the way garage-rockers are taking inspiration from metal. Daniel Avery, ostensibly an electronic musician and renowned DJ, is doing the same with his excellent second album, Song For Alpha, drafting in a host of sophisticated ambient, drone and noise influences alongside the acidic techno he pursued on 2013’s Drone Logic. That album, his debut, was long enough ago that Song For Alpha feels like a huge progression. Gone, or buried, are the vocals that peppered Drone Logic, replaced by ambient washes of hiss, field recordings and more subtle, pulsing beats. This is something of an experience, a long album to be immersed in: lengthy songs, such as the seven-and-a-half-minute techno of Sensation are often separated with shorter, beatless synth pieces, such as Days From Now, which recalls Eno’s work on 1992’s The Shutov Assembly.