Whatever primness remains, Good Woman proves the Staves now slot effortlessly into that roster of intelligent, interesting artists, interrogating life, love and womanhood on their own distinctive terms.

The band have smartly instituted enough changes to the process of making albums to stop them feeling as if they’re merely going through the motions, but their contents are there to fill in the gaps between the big hits on stage without suggesting a drastic drop in quality. By those criteria alone, Medicine at Midnight – like its immediate predecessors, a solid but unspectacular album – is a success.

Madlib channels a deep, intertwining lineage of Black music through Sound Ancestors like folklore oration, storytelling with the sorcery of a beatmaker who knows how to make an instrumental really sing.

It’s a long way from the psychedelic odysseys and ambient drones of his Porcupine Tree days: not prog, but always progress.

Right now, Collapsed in Sunbeams feels like a warm breeze in the depths of a miserable winter.

Bicep pull it off with considerable aplomb. Isles’s melodies are lush or wistfully melancholic, but the beats are too tough and driving for its contents to be mistaken for something you’d play at a dinner party.

When emotions warm, Charles loses command of her musical touchstones, the potential for nostalgia and poignancy smothered by sentimental pastiche.

Drunk Tank Pink is best when it shifts towards something more soft-focused.

The issue here isn’t intent; it’s execution. But when Viagra Boys are completely focused, they’re still fantastic.

Titling this album Volume 1 suggests Greenfields represents more than a one-off experiment: for all its strengths, there’s scope for Barry Gibb to develop this unlikely late-period diversion further.

Intriguingly, the record manages to wield this extended 90s palette without becoming encumbered by nostalgia, and its uptempo passages enter warp speed without slamming into undue intensity. But it’s held back by the moments in between – the troughs, where bluesy pads plod in unmemorable cadences and obscure the clarity of vision elsewhere.

Age has not withered the rapper’s astonishing level of technical skill. If you’ve heard most of what he says before, it’s still possible to be awestruck by the way he says it. ... The music is less interesting than on its predecessor.

The studio set’s sound balance is warm and spacious, the live takes less so (Bennink’s irrepressible energy sometimes overdominates). These tracks catch the saxophone colossus in gale-force form with partners right on his case, and the accompanying essays and images expand on that fascinating story.

Not everything here works, but taken together Folklore and Evermore make a convincing case for Swift’s ability to shift shape and for her songs’ ability to travel between genres: as lockdown overachievements go, it’s pretty impressive.

There are moments of filler – Deep Down’s vaguely R&B-ish groove rambles a little – but this is the most straightforwardly enjoyable and certainly the most personal McCartney album since 2005’s haunted, twilit Chaos and Creation in the Backyard.

That spluttering yet charming Rico from 2018 is still there, but overall this debut doesn’t feel like progression, but stagnation.

Listening to Plastic Heart, it’s hard not to suspect a sense of compromise: attempting to corral Cyrus’s diverse interests into something with obvious commercial appeal to avoid the muted sales of 2017’s Younger Now, which failed to convince pop fans or lure in the traditional country crowd. It isn’t a bad album but it’s far less interesting and more straightforward than the artist who made it.

Megan Thee Stallion’s talents are a moveable feast – she sounds as at home snarling over the minimal 80s gangsta rap of Girls in the Hood as she does with Beyoncé’s voice weaving around hers on Savage Remix.

The music on Shadow of Fear is frequently so forceful and alive that it precludes the sensation that plagues a lot of new music by rebooted “classic” artists: you never feel like you’d be better off listening to one of their old albums.

Raymond’s similarly fearsome precision often feels both portentous and perfect.

Minus the blandly pretty chimes of an instrumental entitled ---, this is a magical record, one that instils a mindful awareness of your body while also taking you utterly outside of it.

If one criticism of Diesel and Dust was that it was a bunch of white blokes telling Aboriginal people’s stories for them, The Makarrata Project looks to tell these stories with them, giving at least equal time to Indigenous voices, language and music. ... Yes, there are a lot of “other” voices on this Midnight Oil set. It’s sure not 1987. Good.

Send Them to Coventry sounds like it would have been successful at any time, regardless of extraneous circumstances: it’s too fresh and inventive to ignore.

The sound frequently feels like a box-ticking exercise in current pop trends: 80s-inspired, Boys of Summer synths on Break-Up Song; reggaeton beat on Sweet Melody; post-Daft Punk house on Holiday; gospel-ish piano balladry on My Love Won’t Let You Down; vocals cling-filmed in Auto-Tune throughout. It’s all very well done without ever quite reaching the heights of their best singles.

Positions deals in polished professionalism, not pulse-quickening excitement.

An album that exists to waft sadly, but unobtrusively, in the background.

The record shares messages of self-love and resistance which, integrated in its DIY approach, punch through with real resonance.

From its title down, it’s clearly intended as a message to longstanding Springsteen fans, the sound of an artist hunkering down in troubled times. That also represents a scaling down of ambition, but judged by its own criteria, Letter to You is a success.

The songwriting is sharp, and the melodies uniformly great.

There are times when Sign truly soars, though it never manages to eclipse what’s now a crowded sonic milieu.

It manages to be as lyrically unflinching as the music is compelling – not the easiest balance to achieve, as acres of terrible protest songs historically attest. You’d call it the album of the year if its predecessor wasn’t just as good.

The various elements are glued together by Minsky-Sargeant’s striking vocals. He doesn’t so much sing the songs as impose a persona on them in the manner of Jarvis Cocker, Grace Jones or Mark E Smith.

Brevity works in The Album’s favour. There’s no time for longueurs, no padding, no ponderous ballads. ... Striking, glittery, depthless and rather impressive.

By streamlining their sound, Deftones have made an album that proves that ferocity is not a diminishing resource.

Róisín Machine is a sharper, more focused album than 2016’s Take Her Up to Monto; one which reins in some, but not all, of its author’s eccentricities.

Cantus, Descant is an album that functions as meditative background music, but turn it up and it becomes an unignorable study in sound.

Baudelaire & Piano is low key, but it is cool and clear and a perfect welcome to autumn.

It’s all heartfelt, well done and audibly the work of a band more interested in consolidating their original audience than attempting to lure the teenagers away from Joel Corry and TikTok. The music follows suit.

Spell My Name shows Braxton hasn’t lost her broad vocal range or her ability to slot into multiple mood playlists. It has everything you want from a full-bodied R&B record: songs to cry to, vibe to, and make babies to.

The small fragments of setup and sense are missing altogether from some tracks, relying on a fragmented internal monologue that doesn’t travel far beyond Georgas’ own psyche. Luckily, the mood music of All That Emotion is moving and compelling enough on its own terms. Georgas won’t get a fraction of the attention enjoyed by her producer’s previous client, but she deserves at least some of the same kudos.

If he’s capable of writing stuff like this at 21 – and indeed of taking on the influences of the past without just regurgitating them – McKenna’s future looks intriguing. For the time being, though, he’s making the tricky business of shape-shifting and growing up in public seem painless.

Disclosure seem largely content to stick to their lane. It should keep their career ticking over commercially until normal clubland service is resumed, and their lyrics seem less wistful.

What prevents Sugaregg – Bully’s third album, and Bognanno’s first as a totally solo entity – from feeling like a period piece is that the retro approach isn’t exclusively put to the service of buoyant, indelible tunes. Instead, Bognanno uses this mercurial mode to record her experiences with bipolar disorder. The theme leads to another set of opposites surfacing in the lyrics, a series of starkly frank psychological insights that are at once coldly analytical and wildly evocative.

If none of the songs here has the undeniable hit quality of Mr Brightside et al, they certainly work in suitably anthemic style, with catchy, simplistic hooks, air-punch-inducing dynamics and lyrics designed to bond vast crowds together. ... But the feeling that Imploding the Mirage is less than the sum of its parts persists long after it’s left you exhausted.

The inner tensions behind this compelling session promise a revealing new phase in Schneider’s remarkable work.

The result is songs that are intricate but still tricky, in the way African rhythms can be, but there’s a comforting palm wine-y warmth – regardless of his almost perpetual fury or often tedious boasting, Twice as Tall is usually more urbane than urban. And crucially, the singer is totally in tune with what his fellow millennials expect from their music and their cultural experiences.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong whiplashes between genres in a way that is sometimes messy and mismatched. Yet Fike’s versatility deserves credit – it’s hard not to enjoy the grungy, knotted production of Come Here, as well as the California pop rock of Double Negative (Skeleton Milkshake).

It’s a beautiful piece of work by a singer with a rare interpretive gift, comparable to Emmylou Harris’s Wrecking Ball in its intent, execution and intimacy.

More often than not, this everything-goes approach cancels itself out, becoming a pleasant if unremarkable backdrop to frontman Henry Camamile’s easy charm and the band’s gratifyingly buoyant and soothingly predictable melodies.

It retains their hallucinogenic sound but injects it with more glimmers of autobiography than they’ve ever previously shared.

Jaguar is as sleek and refined as its namesake, the production luscious with live instrumentation and brass. By eschewing pop’s current see-what-sticks approach, Monét can build a luxury brand of her own design. She demonstrates her self-assurance by lacing Jaguar’s poppier moments with striking idiosyncrasies.

Fans had to wait eight years for Mogoya, while Sangaré expanded her business empire; but this unplugged sequel is better still.

With poetry suffusing both lyrics and music, Fontaines DC capture being young in all its excitement and challenges, its confidence and despair: those years where it feels like you’re trying to find a foothold with your hands. It’s not easy, but then what great album, or life, ever is?

A pleasing, if unremarkable, listen.

This strange summer of arrested development is steadily ending. Folklore will endure long beyond it: as fragmented as Swift is across her eighth album – and much as you hope it doesn’t mark the end of her pop ambitions – her emotional acuity has never been more assured.

Collins’ past, present and future come together to form a fascinating picture of her full, complex character.

All the Time is filled with tracks that get the delicate balance right between experimentation and a love of an uncomplicated pop tune; between nostalgia for the past and a dedication to sounding like the future.

While the sound itself is an upbeat blast of air, it lacks the freshness of new ideas; instead, Pins create a fun tribute to sounds that have gone before.

Rather than the sound of three middle-aged musicians straining to recapture their relevance, Gaslighter is pertinent on its own terms, more proof that the under-told stories of women make the perfect raw material for punchy, compelling and bracingly contemporary pop.

It’s music for uncertain times, something Protomartyr seem to be almost eerily skilled at producing.

Barely 21, Juice WRLD was only just coming into his own as a man and artist, his talent still taking shape as he matured. Legends Never Die reveals a glum ringleader still finding himself.

There are moments where None of Us Are Getting Out of This Life Alive feels more like a showcase for younger talent than a Streets comeback.

Here, the component parts of hip-hop, jazz, dub and protest music are pieced together, like the many languages of a diasporic conversation. If the call is for music, Keleketla!’s mutlilingual, effusive response is one worth hearing.

Electronic sound underpins the album – Too Close is defined by its technically impressive basslines, while on Turn Off the Radio, Moore’s ethereal words overlap each other in a chorus of distorted vocals.

That’s How Rumors Get Started underlines that she’s got the talent to take on whatever the future holds.

The set feels like the band’s more than the veteran master’s, and the magnificent Taye’s singing balances better with the music than Mr Monk’s delivery, but To Know Without Knowing nonetheless confirms how brightly Mulatu Astatke’s Ethio-jazz vision burns on.

They translate desolation into richly searching music, putting familiar sounds through their distinctive filter: fluttering G-funk (3am), homages to Walk on the Wild Side (Summer Girl) and Joni Mitchell at her most seething (Man from the Magazine, an acoustic riposte to a leering journalist), and Led Zep bounce (Up From a Dream).

While KiCk i is not as subversive as the work of Arca’s black contemporaries such as Zebra Katz, who don’t benefit from her level of exposure, it nonetheless offers a red pill to a more hopeful future.

The ironic thing is that he knows that a 16-track album of love songs for his wife is too much. As he puts it on Actions: “She don’t want it. She don’t need it.” Who, then, is it all for?

The superb What’s Your Pleasure? makes a case to reimagine so-called comfort zones as potential lanes of expertise: free pop’s women from the pointless commercial burden to reinvent, let them hone their craft, and you get assured marvels like this.

There’s a temptation with Young to concentrate on the big statement songs, but the joy of Homegrown is its lightness of touch.

For all its bleakness, Rough and Rowdy Ways might well be Bob Dylan’s most consistently brilliant set of songs in years: the die-hards can spend months unravelling the knottier lyrics, but you don’t need a PhD in Dylanology to appreciate its singular quality and power.

Ungodly Hour’s draw lies in the detail; not only the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it strangeness – Busy Boy briefly opens with tremulous blues that could have been recorded in the 1930s, while the highly entertaining Tipsy mixes casually threatening lyrics with curious percussion sounds – but in the slow-burn appeal of the pair’s vocal melodies, which are habitually inventive, ornate and hauntingly beautiful.

Beth’s ability to glide between vulnerability and intimidation is unnerving, and adds more shades of grey to a performer who’s previously operated in black and white.

Garratt has clearly found time to strip away the more overbearing influences from his music. Instead of trying to distil a mass of currently modish styles into something resembling the flavour of the month, he has devised a take on modern pop idiosyncratic enough to call his own.

You’d have a hard time arguing that On Sunset doesn’t work as an album, held together not just by its overriding lyrical theme but uniformly strong melodies. As exercises in trying to have your cake and eat it go, it’s pretty impressive.

In many ways, the ballad-free, dancefloor-primed Chromatica represents not only Gaga’s most personal record, but her most straightforward.

It makes Notes on a Conditional Form a curious thing, an album whose flaws are inherent in what it sets out to do: music for the no-filter generation, with all the good and bad that entails.

The overriding impression of both modes is nostalgia, not least for the uplifting, utopian properties of dance music. Moby finds some traction on the first count – there is vitality here, if not novelty – but the forays into politics aren’t so convincing.

Whatever he’s doing, the results are uniformly fantastic: rich, fascinating and moving, packed with gorgeous melodies and arrangements that feel alive, constantly writhing into unexpected new shapes.

Alternating on lead, the pair’s vocals remain a model of sibling harmony, while the interplay between Sean’s intricate guitar picking and Sara’s elegant fiddle is similarly impressive – the breakneck bluegrass instrumental Bella and Ivan is a case in point. Mostly, however, the mood is reflective.

There are fleeting, faraway echoes of John Martyn at his wooziest, but Mills has crafted something very personal and individual.

Walking with impressive confidence along the line that separates commercialism from experimentation, It Was Good Until It Wasn’t doesn’t need an accompanying soap opera to sell it, but it’s got one anyway.

The songs are simple but sturdy – the hooks are strong and grip even when you think you’ve escaped them.

Sometimes it sounds atmospheric – on From Florida With Love, producer MexikoDro constructs a spectral, impressively abstract backing track out of tape hiss and distortion – but a lot of the time it just sounds like a noncommittal shrug: tracks come and go without leaving much of a sonic impression.

Neither balls-out, show-me-the-money capitulation to market forces, nor boldly experimental enough to count as a disruption to a mainstream form; neither disaster nor triumph. There’s something scattered and awkward about its grafting together of ideas that don’t gel; the sound of a band who have outgrown their initial incarnation but aren’t quite sure what they want now.

He uses his widest range of sound yet but maintains focus by resisting, as he always has done, the inclusion of vocals or drums. This is one of the great and joyous paradoxes of his music, which is still intensely percussive – synths are planed down and combined into hard bolts of sound that have the rhythmic strength of a drum machine – but freed from the shackles of looped drum patterns.

This album is a masterpiece.

Cohesive and seamless, Mas Amable reaches the heart of the rhythm and the soul of the drum, aspiring to a meditative quality and tranquility that almost feels sacred.

Earth, for all its ambition, will mainly be of interest to Radiohead completists, who are now just missing the bassist: over to you, Colin Greenwood.

The result is that this seems not so much an album as a sudden glorious eruption; after eight long years, an urgent desire to be heard.

Despite the stumbles, it’s this willingness to switch things up and the ambition of scale in The Don of Diamond Dreams that prove Shabazz Palaces to be such a fascinating and exciting project in the age of algorithms and formulae.

It is precisely this sometimes kitsch mix of genres that makes Mergia’s music so endearing and uplifting. His right hand on a melody is unmistakable, and on Yene Mircha he lives up to its title, carving out a thoroughly idiosyncratic perspective.

The New Abnormal proves that when they put their minds to it, that old magic is still well within the Strokes’s grasp.

It’s a highly polished piece of work, big on rich string arrangements and intricate harmony vocals.

This is a distinctive, sharp record that only these three UK voices could have made.

Mostly, though, Lee counterbalances her darker experiments with playfulness and hope. Her genre-fluidity creates moments of unexpected beauty.

Tops are now up there with Phoenix as the masters of modern soft rock – just don’t go changing.