Don’t pretend you didn’t see this coming. It’s been an excellent – if not outstanding – year for music worldwide, with a few stellar releases and a steady stream of more-than-adequate followers. As our top 20 albums list indicates, 2008 was a year marked by old bands finding new voice, and a clutch of stunning debuts. By Hamish McKenzie, Paul Kay, and Michael Nuñez.

Recorded in a log cabin while in exile in the Wisconsin hinterland, For Emma, Forever Ago has brought the name Justin Vernon to the forefront of music-lovers’ minds and is the year’s best musical achievement. Spacious, meditative and oh-so beautiful, the album is full of yearning, with Vernon’s sometimes haunting, sometimes delicate falsetto channeling his cathartic isolation with quiet force.

This year’s Arcade Fire, New York’s TVOTR have proven that the searing Return to Cookie Mountain was only the beginning of great things (for evidence of the opposite effect see: The Killers, Bloc Party). Dear Science is inventive, psychedelic, fun and deliciously fuzzy. Not as frenetic as Return, the songs on this album are allowed more room to breathe, lending the whole work a sense of maturity and restraint that signals an art-rock group at the height of their powers.

Elbow – The Seldom Seen Kid

The Seldom Seen Kid matches intricately-arranged song structures with strings and Guy Gurvey’s smoky vocals to incredibly powerful effect. Veering from the extraordinary anthemic love song On a Day Like This to the noir-ish jaunt The Fix and the riff-heavy Grounds For Divorce, this is a memorable album indisputably worthy of the Mercury prize it reaped in September.

Santogold – Santogold

Sick of producing formulaic hits for pretenders such as Ashley Simpson, erstwhile A&R girl Santogold put her own voice and attitude on a collection of tracks that ran the gamut from perfect melodic pop creations (Lights Out) to fire-spitting clarion calls with a punk appeal (L.E.S. Artistes, Shove It). Eclectic, fresh, fantastic.

Hot Chip – Made in the Dark

Ancient synths and battered keyboards stand at the heart of this sometimes minimalist and often-glitchy drive through dance-pop. Instant classic Ready for the Floor is at once pop parody and lip-smackingly catchy, while the title track is a sleepy exercise in moderation and the bumping Hold On has a multitude of sonic layers just waiting to be unpicked and dribbled over by the patient listener.

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Dig! Lazarus! Dig!

If there’s one thing you must know about Nick Cave, it’s this: he can’t be stopped. The 51-year-old Australian still barrels through bone-chillingly brooding rock, exemplified in such stunners as Midnight Man and Hold On To Yourself. Wry and sly, Cave continues to create cold and creepy masterpieces.

Fuck Buttons – Street Horrrsing

Ever wondered what kind of music Sigur Ros might make if you stripped them of their instruments, loaded them up to their eyeballs with crystal meth, and locked them in an underground bunker crammed with laptops and synthesizers possessed by demons from the future? No, neither had we until we heard this 49mins 38sec-long sonic assault from the wonderfully named Bristol electronic duo Fuck Buttons. A complex blend of distortion, psychedelia, tribal rhythms, and pulsating electronica, Street Horrrsing somehow manages to be melodic, hypnotic and cathartic too. One thing’s for sure: nothing else this year sounded quite like this.

My Morning Jacket – Evil Urges

One of the few contemporary rock acts that deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as Radiohead. Ability to reinvent, sheer talent, and song-writing supremacy – it’s all exhibited in the Kentucky quintet’s latest. While not as good as the almost-unsurpassable Z (2005) or even It Still Moves (2003), the country-heavy Evil Urges still represents an important addition to the band’s oeuvre and is an easy cut above 99 per cent of 2008’s alt-rock offerings.

Capitalising on his extravagant output of unofficial mix tapes and guest appearances over the last two years, Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter III is the punctuation mark to an era dominated by the 26-year-old rapper. The album’s first single Lollipop has seen massive success worldwide – but more important than Wayne’s endless string of club-friendly anthems is his ability to say “I’m the best” in numerous, unimaginable ways throughout this record.

Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes

This heavily-bearded, Seattle five-piece brought us a perfect package of what they call “baroque harmonic pop jams” in their debut album, which combines elements of Neil Young, the Beach Boys and Arcade Fire. At times quiet and contemplative, and at others almost worship-like in its celebratory choruses, Fleet Foxes is a sure-fire marking post of cool in any discerning indie fan’s collection.

Portishead – Third

Eleven years since their last gloomy work, Portishead, the English trip-hop trio of Beth Gibbons, Adrian Utley and Geoff Barrow have produced a supremely creepy album that represents an artistic devolution reaching further into the abyss. The lyrics are darker, the chopped-up synths more threatening, the overall import bleaker. Make sure you’re in the right head-space before listening.

Retrochine

Epoch-defining ballads and Mandarin folk songs from the classic Shaw Brothers films of the late 1950s and early ‘60s get a heartily-deserved modern revival, remixed and built upon in brilliant style by the Hong Kong/Vancouver duo Morton Wilson and Ian Widgery. Retrochine is a soundtrack for Hong Kong nightlife: of yesterday and today.

Shades of The Smiths, a Kate Bush cover, and a string section combine forces in this debut from exciting Syracuse, New York act Ra Ra Riot. Though partially riding on the same hype wave as Vampire Weekend (the musical similarity is most evident on the track St Peter’s Day Fest), the five-piece demonstrate in The Rhumb Line that they are less gimmicky than their Afro-pop-loving counterparts.

The Whip – X Marks Destination

Manchester’s The Whip seemingly came from nowhere to offer a UK dance-punk equivalent to LCD Soundsystem with their first album X Marks Destination. Creators of bass-thumping riots such as Trash and Throw It In The Fire, The Whip also produced an emotive masterpiece in the slow-building Frustration. Perfect for pre-party hype-ups.

Q-Tip – The Renaissance

With 20 years of experience in the industry, Q-Tip’s latest album was a sure bet for most music fans. The Renaissance carries all the proper grooves of a well-constructed hip-hop album – plenty of soul, funk, and dance rhythms topped with thought-provoking lyrics. The former A Tribe Called Quest rapper has served up a truly refreshing album to counter hip-hop’s current dry spell – and it’s an energizing alternative to the work of his bravado-driven commercial brethren.

This Toronto duo were beneficiaries of ‘THE HYPE’ this year, which, although at times overstated, at least had a grounding in an album that exhibited creative, synth-bending warpy-ness and abrasive vocals built over some serious hooks. The challenge will be in the follow-up: where can Crystal Castles go from here?

An unpredictable and diverse album, Skeletal Lamping throws together 15 freak-pop tunes in a sexed-up-to-the-hilt, sometimes tawdry, hour of music that is so weird and indefinable that it demands several long, involved listens. It won’t be the most critically successful album ever for Of Montreal, but it’s a curious insight into the delightfully warped mind of creator Kevin Barnes.

The lords of down-tempo electronica (at least until Kruder & Dorfmeister get back in the game) delivered their best work to date in this politically-minded record. Influenced by a melting pot of world music – from West African to Arabic through Caribbean and Indian – and lyrically tackling issues such as the forced displacement of cultures and African genocide, Radio Retaliation represents a significant step forward for chill-out specialists Rob Garza and Eric Hilton. Guest appearances from the likes of Chuck Brown, Seu Jorge, Anoushka Shankar and Femi Kuti add to the potent mix.

It seemed like a long wait for an electronic album that really blew our dancing shoes off this year, but just when it seemed we’d have to replay Justice and Boys Noize for the billionth time, Brighton duo Tom Beaufoy and Pat Pardy dropped this blitzkrieg of electro, techno, hip-hop, and breakbeat bombs. Gorgeous hooks allied to relentless beats and menacing synths made this album harder to get off our iPods than DRM restrictions. By the time you read this, the boys should have torn the roof off of Zaza (Saturday 13); if only they were our resident Evil.

Few albums this year had more heart than former Rilo Kiley vocalist Jenny Lewis’ follow-up to 2006’s Rabbit Fur Coat. You’ll likely find it filed under country, but it’s one of those rare albums that transcends genre thanks to its charm and honesty. It also shines with the timelessness of honest-to-goodness great song-writing, ranging from the darkly confessional, to the seductive, to the joyous. All this and she’s also a cute redhead. Jenny, will you marry us?