Lullaby and… The Ceaseless Roar by Robert Plant

Lullaby and… The Ceaseless Roar, Robert Plant's tenth solo studio album, came out on Nonesuch and Warner Bros. on 8 September 2014, and it's the first time he took his band the Sensational Space Shifters into the studio, even if their name never made it onto the front cover. Plant produced it himself, which fits: this is a record by a man who long ago stopped playing the Led Zeppelin singer on demand.

After the bluegrass-tinged Raising Sand with Alison Krauss and a revived Band of Joy, the Space Shifters, the group he put together in 2012, hand him a wider, stranger palette: hypnotic grooves, drones and textures well outside the blues-rock box, with that famous voice pulled back to a croon more often than a wail. "Rainbow" is the easy way in, warm and rolling, proof that he can still make a melody glow.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.