Radical Optimism lacks a unique personality as a result – particularly compared with the vivid writing of her peers. It’s a well-made album with mass appeal and, of course, there’s no law that pop music has to be deep. But the adjective in its title certainly doesn’t belong.

Self Hell doesn’t always successfully navigate the difficult terrain between pleasing a hardcore following and broadening a sound, but the band certainly aren’t standing still.

You Should Know Me is ingratiating simply by virtue of having a full, sinewy bass line; Gutter Punch, although borrowing liberally from Billie Eilish’s Bad Guy in its second verse, is destabilising and magnetic. For the most part, though, Porij can’t help but feel warmed over.

I’m Doing It Again Baby! takes big, bold swings. Some of them miss.

The duo also make room for classy experimentation, adroitly merging jangly blues with languid hip-hop on Paper Crown. The gaps are filled with a series of sunny Beatlesque numbers that feel lightweight and often rather inane. It’s an all-bases approach that doesn’t feel so much like an identity crisis as a slightly underwhelming diffusion of the band’s once heady magic.

The majority of Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran settles for gliding in one ear and out the other without leaving much impression, but without actively driving you up the wall either: the state of sublime mediocrity in which a lot of current pop chooses to operate.

It’s rare to hear an album that scales such songwriting peaks with the spectacular one-two of Cardinal and Deeper Well before flopping back into total blah-ness. This album proves the line between sublime simplicity and vacant banality can be surprisingly thin.

If the album were 10 tracks rather than 18 – many of which could in turn lose two minutes from their runtime – Timberlake’s musical redemption might be more of a home run. Invariably it sags.

The music is similarly unbothered by what anyone who isn’t already onboard thinks, resting almost entirely on a push-and-pull between the sound of Gallagher and Squire’s former bands.

As per usual, the actual music is hard to hear over the accompanying clamour, but if you strain your ears you can make out an album that’s an improvement on 2021’s Donda. It’s still uneven in a way that occasionally makes you wonder what on earth Volumes 2 and 3 of Vultures are going to sound like.

It’s all very pleasant if familiar – not as thrilling or groundbreaking as, say, 1976’s Super Ape: Jesus Life all but mirrors Max Romeo’s reggae classic Chase the Devil (recorded with Perry’s band the Upsetters and later sampled by the Prodigy). Still, it’s hard not to be moved by the atypical and lovely Goodbye, which features piano and strings by classical composer Hugo Bechstein.

The band’s wash of guitars and vocals tap into the renewed interest in shoegaze while also channelling Pixies/Breeders grungy pop and mournful Cure/New Order basslines; their youthful energy and production gloss gives 30-year-old sounds and styles a more contemporary reboot.

What An Enormous Room doesn’t yet fulfil Torres’s stadium-sized promises, but form and ambition align on album highlight I Got the Fear.

No wheels are being reinvented here but it’s another tune-filled, uplifting, solid winner.

McRae is still fitting a lot of currently popular boxes without escaping them. There are highlights, but the overwhelming impression is of placeholder pop, filling space until something different comes along.

There’s not nearly enough of that bullish intensity on The First Time, and far too many songs like Too Much, an A&R-by-numbers team-up with the BTS member Jung Kook and the behemoth UK drill rapper Central Cee.

There’s no obvious storyline to Clarke’s cinematic adventure, just the same note of dread ringing throughout. But the righteous Blackleg provides an emotional hinge to this largely wordless album, setting a scab-bashing miners’ song from 19th-century Northumberland to a pitch-dark chasm of drones.

Rockstar might have got away with the obviousness of its material if it had opted to do something interesting with it, but virtually every cover here seems to have been made as close to the original version as possible.

The trouble with using simple riffs is that they can easily skew naive or simply dull; too often in the quieter sections, the duo opt for ponderous arpeggiated runs of notes that make their songs feel pedestrian rather than merely slow. But when they bring in groove (as on Woe), or let noise fill up the space – be it shredded or screamed – they carry the listener aloft to a hard-won clarity.

It’s well-made, hooky – but nevertheless, Golden is an album bound to leave more agnostic listeners pondering what the fuss is about.

Of course, there are still jokes about masturbating, having sex in a church and how to pronounce the word turpentine – but there’s an existential bent to the whole ordeal, too. As their younger selves sang in 1997: I guess this is growing up.

This tension leaves For All the Dogs in a strange limbo: its highs are higher than many recent Drake records, and its lows are far lower.

It is crammed with weepy ballads that skew painfully boilerplate.

AI is poignantly used to mutate vocals and interpret composition, as opposed to the track Memories of Music, where it seems to be given freer rein to write – the result is slapstick played extremely straight. Despite such misfires, Again features some of Lopatin’s most touching music, where the disastrous and the sublime are always second-guessing each other.

Yet despite this genre-hopping, most songs eventually end up in the same realm: that of a bland, plodding vaguely sentimental ballad boasting at least one instantly memorable hook.

The desire to offload and flaunt her current relationship at length means Scarlet loses the snappy brevity that was Planet Her’s calling-card. After a while, you feel that points that have already been made are being reiterated, and a long album is made to seem longer still by its weird structure, a glut of slower and more abstract tracks taking up most of its second half.

It all adds up to an oddly dissatisfying return, albeit one that suggests the Top 40 would be a lot more interesting with Diddy producing it.

The first half of Everyone Else begins as you’d expect – heady, fast-building, glamorous – but in the latter half, Lindstrøm pulls away from crowd-pleasing into thornier territory.