The fact that TANGK captures a band boldly going out of their own depth doesn’t take away that IDLES come on a little too strong too often, compelling you to swipe left more often than right.

Considering this is her first album since 2014, it’s unfortunate that it can feel a little one-note. A Romeo and Juliet-esque yearning wasn’t necessarily expected or desired, and it doesn’t always serve her best across this effort.

Weird Faith is an honest and well-written record by one of underground pop’s sharpest and most empathetic artists.

At times, Malone’s “magic eye” seems elusive. Other times, it comes gloriously into focus, shimmering like an elegant mirage.

People Who Aren’t There Anymore was not written as a reflection but a documentary of the emotional processes the band members were going through at the time. The meaning of the songs will continue to change for the band over time, just as they will for listeners.

What we do know is that What Happened to the Beach? is a musical ride. While it does not hand out aces on all fronts, it remarkably returns to classically flamboyant roots that urge the importance of enjoying life.

With Phasor, Lange navigates an important rite of passage, testifying to life’s glories and anticlimaxes. He’s become an unflinching realist without sacrificing his curiosity, his capacity for wonder.

Prelude To Ecstasy, for all intents and purposes, is a really enjoyable pop record, but they are not burning down the mansion with this collection of songs anytime soon.

What an enormous room strikes as a means for Scott to prove to no one but herself that she can build her temple from scratch, embracing her inner non-conformist with steadfast spirit. Even within the sound of settling, Torres has plenty of charming things to say.

To his credit, he once again proves why he’s esteemed at the former via the blunt insights of “TMVTL”, but the “run that verse back” Benny is all but absent on Everybody Can’t Go. Once more, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, but he doesn’t seem sure how to replace that energy with conviction. Even The Alchemist gets dragged down by the pursuit of safe material.

It sits comfortably in the middle of the vast catalogue of albums released by Radiohead and its members. It’s reassuring to hear that, 35 years after the start of their artistic journey, these musicians can still come up with compositions this elegant and exciting.

Blue Raspberry is Kirby’s most pointed, honest, and resonant self. There’s heaviness everywhere, and it should be excavated in doses. Still, her voice remains in bloom, providing a levity that yet again makes a Katy Kirby listening experience a comforting one.

With pop music gradually crumbling under the heel of the algorithm-driven technocracy, their grotesque bricolage of styles isn’t so easily replicated or defined. ILION finds SLIFT banging at the walls, and at the very least, leaving some serious dents in the process.

The artistic flair of The Center Won’t Hold and the tightness of Path of Wellness are still present, but they find a comfortable position between the two that feels somewhat familiar and certainly natural for Sleater-Kinney.

And though the second half Orquídeas breaks stylistically with the first – sometimes a bit too abrasively to stay fully engaged – it nevertheless makes sense for an artist like Uchis, who is trying to break industry conventions one project at a time.

The project as a whole, despite its unabashed expressiveness, is characterized by subtle restraint, particularly on the part of Chubb. Flirting with histrionics while employing a semi-confessional MO, she largely avoids collapsing into hackneyed postures or melodrama.

Quaranta is an incredibly brave work of art. It eludes navel gazing and the self-flagellation that comes with substance abuse. It is varied enough to provide entertainment, but never submits to commodification.

Even if Hard Light is more homogenous than Delaware, it retains the group’s interest in always finding a different tonality, skipping from one genre or influence to another and conceiving genuine hit material.

Based loosely around a theme of karma and betrayal, it’s possible that the attempt to tie everything together lyrically came at expense elsewhere. The sequencing doesn’t help: following the Lykke Li-ish opener “Love And Other Drugs” and nuclear trap of “WUACV” (which stands for “woke up and chose violence”) comes a Barbie pink, seven-song sampler of other peoples’ sounds. We don’t get to see Maidza again until the three bangers crammed into the back half, which is very late.

She reaches through your speakers and pulls you into her fold where you ride buoyantly through her musical world, just as Peter Vajkoczy became part of her life of movement and dance.

The terror and helplessness that define the song’s first half takes a revelatory turn in its final leg, as the demons respond again to her cries for freedom.

Hackney Diamonds is a really great late Stones album, albeit just a pretty good rock album in the canon of history. That’s a compliment.

This is the return that so many of us have been waiting for, and his ability to come through on nearly all levels establishes Bolted as one of the very best albums of this year, electronic or otherwise.

the rest can be defined by its most insecure and self-deprecating moments. “Black Hole” opens the EP with what is probably the lightest of the four tracks, but rest assured, the other three deliver the depth and emotional resonance that boygenius fans have come to expect.

Duelling forces are wonderfully rendered in the sound palette that Sampha has pulled together here, with production assistance from El Guincho on a number of tracks. The presence of myriad other talents including Yussef Dayes, Yaeji, Laura Groves, black midi’s Morgan Simpson – to name just a few – emphasises the album’s underlying theme of communality.

Slow Pulp capture what shoegaze and dreampop do best: offering reassurance not that your decisions are right, but that questioning them is what life is about.

Sanguivore might not be as precisely balanced and pop-pitched as Sex, but there’s craft and talent here, and the album is punctuated with sublime and sublimely entertaining moments.

It’s a wild and hugely ambitious concept that could fail spectacularly in less talented hands. Miraculously it works, thanks in no small part to the outsized force of personality of Thompson’s alter ego CMAT.