The lyrics are at best perfunctory, at worst an insult to anyone who isn’t a total nork.

There’s often a disconnect between the production and what’s going on vocally, the two elements at times even working at cross purposes.

Plenty of new producers are doing interesting things on the outer fringes of the style--Filter Dread is probably Runge’s closest contemporary--but nobody sounds quite like this.

By and large, this is a downbeat record, one suggesting maybe Albarn recently had a listen to ‘Mr Robinson’s Quango’ and decided never to do ‘whimsical’ again. Still, there’s a couple of more upbeat numbers that work in neat counterpoint.

I Shall Die Here is a bracing listen, certainly no easier than The Body’s conventional albums, and in its application of intense studio treatment, at times perhaps even more intense. But it is also a whole lot better than The Body’s 2013 album for Thrill Jockey, Christ, Redeemers.

Z is billed as an EP, but that undersells the completion and cohesion of these 10 songs. Her voice may be gentle, the songs just left-of-center, but SZA’s lyrics demand attention.

Future’s lyrical sensitivity wouldn’t work without the album’s pitch-perfect production.

Weird Drift is a little laid back, lacking the vertiginous drama that you find in the best synth-pop, and I’m more inclined to stick with another recent Planet Mu foray into the form, Miracle’s overlooked Mercury.

Love Letters proves to have all the pop addictivenss that Riviera did.

The result is a strange paradox in typical Animal Collective style: a suite of songs that’s at times alien, other times sentimental; often cutesy, but a little too bristly to curl up with under a blanket.

It’s Album Time is an impressively balanced and varied record.

More of a step sideways, then, but one which keeps us very much interested in what comes next.

There are moments of dynamism, like the excellent quivering steppers’ bassline in ‘Time’, or ‘In’’s disemboweled grime-pulse sounds. But even these tracks feel weighed down by a relentless paranoiac mood that soon begins to tire, their gestures sparse and restrained in a manner that’s presumably meant to be evocative, but often just feels unadventurous.

On Mess, surface is meaning, with the album’s vacuous hedonism merely another expression of the theme of spiritual oblivion that Liars have explored ever since their debut.

The Soul of All Natural Things realises her intent wonderfully, its gorgeously crafted pastoral songs a gentle invocation to inner peace.

This may be Carla Bozulich’s take on pop music, but Boy is rarely anything short of cathartic.

Say Yes To Love feels like a purging, 20-odd minutes of urgent expulsion that leaves you feeling exhausted, elated and renewed.

Unfidelity stands out as a keeper.

If you dislike fidgetty edits and squealing high frequencies fine--go and listen to Eleh--but if you like dance music crashing into the most mainstream of the mainstream on a skateboard, being cheeky, rude, funny and giving you a massive rush when you listen to it, then here it is. Recess. Enjoy.

There’s more than enough in this album to keep her in that position--so, come for the gay brostep, stay for the songcraft and character.

While My Krazy Life is YG’s debut, it feels more like an album-length celebration of Mustard’s ratchet revolution, a sound distilled from LA G-Funk, Atlanta snap and Bay Area hyphy.

While Oxymoron is never dull, thanks to Q’s indisputable skills as a rapper and beat selector, by its conclusion you’ll wish he’d given less of its runtime over to his gangsta persona and more to exploring his own identity.

Yes, fine songs. But in part, though, a little of the success of July should be attributed to producer Randall Dunn.

It’s a very puzzling record, but the last thing you should do is try and puzzle it out: just go with it and you’ll find its strange charms working much more quickly than you might have thought at first.

The whole EP is terrifyingly accomplished, there is sick genius at work in every nanosecond of detail, and it definitely makes you feel like the 21st century as per 20th century sci-fi principles is finally well underway.

There are runs of tunes that are almost entirely textural, which might be part of the reason it’s so easy to drift into, but are not really ones you’d chuck on a playlist.

A delicate thing, and for all its studied complexity sometimes comes off a touch insubstantial.

The album’s electronic feel sharpens the idea of sterility and a frictionless modern life, while providing, as British electronica has done since the days of John Foxx, a lexicon for existential nothingness.