It’s not Amyl and the Sniffers’ fault they get treated like a second coming--more a reflection on how little great rock’n’roll there is right now--but it’s done them no favours. With no fanfare, this would have been a really decent record. With the praise they’ve had, they’d have had to make a new Powerage not to disappoint.

Despite its charismatic Tierra Whack verse, Yellow Belly plays more like a gag than an epiphany, and the clanks and warbles of Fire Is Coming fill Lynch’s eerie tale with dread but little replay value. Still, the quagmire draws you in.

It’s is no bad thing that Igor downplays Tyler’s indomitable personality – but the writing and execution do not quite replace what has been lost. What’s left is a fine showcase of ingenuity that too rarely burrows very far into your consciousness.

There’s a hushed stillness to the way Lowe’s words glide over the stripped-down, becalmed grooves, before gentle soul gives way to more uptempo beats and sentiments. With that template, it’s a varied mix.

Here Comes the Cowboy may retain some of the disarming simplicity and emotional universality that has become DeMarco’s trademark, but it is ultimately an album that fails to welcome the listener warmly into its world.

Hurts 2B Human treads familiar ground. With the brass-assisted, stomping opening track Hustle, and the EDM juggernaut Can We Pretend, the listener is provided with the underdog me-against-the-world anthems that Pink does so well. But the album’s most affecting points are its most tender.

A collection of smooth, soft-centred rap that verges on the sickly, with Carner’s genial charisma floating adrift in a sea of sentimentality and nostalgia.

The album’s polished like a glass table, which sometimes works – when the keyboards come in on Ruins, it’s glorious – but the sparkle gets a bit wearing after a while.

Lizzo has something to say, and a smart way of saying it ... but the potency of what’s here would seem more potent still if it had been allowed a little room to breathe ... Instead, Cuz I Love You keeps its foot pressed down hard on the accelerator for half an hour in an attempt to ram-raid the charts.

Whether they lean closer towards her old traditionalist ways or evince greater ambition, each of these seven songs betrays that sense of ease: the recording close, the playing soft, her voice’s chalky edge and warm-blooded intimacy drawing you in.

It’s all extremely radio-ready and sung with a breathy, close-miked intensity that gives the curious illusion of intimacy even when BTS are belting it out – a smart trick to pull off. Those charged with rapping, meanwhile, are more convincing than your average boyband denizen chancing his arm at the old lyrical flow. Nevertheless, anyone outside of the BTS Army might struggle to grasp what differentiates them from the rest of 2019’s pop landscape.

For such an intellectually fearless band, the production is sometimes frustratingly reserved: you can never seem to turn the volume loud enough to give the more biting songs the impact they deserve.

It’s hard to escape the feeling that something of his originality has been lost en route.

With too many dirge-like instrumentals, the album is overlong, under-focused and, like the Brexit process, hard work.

You couldn’t call Badbea wildly original; it’s filled with references to Collins’s musical touchstones (northern soul; the Velvet Underground) and an explicit melodic link to Big Star’s Feel in I’m OK Jack. But Collins is in fine voice, and it’s always a pleasure to have him back.

A fascinating jumble of ideas, some of them fantastic. Too confused to be a great lost album, or indeed a coherent collection, as a snapshot of both its creator and soul music in turmoil, it’s perfect.

This is an album that feels accomplished but unremarkable, neither possessing the kind of experimentalism that might push things forward nor idiosyncratic enough to stand out in a newly crowded marketplace.

Lounge-pop numbers reminiscent of Air or early Goldfrapp aren’t quite as arresting, but the whole album casts a lingering spell.

As it is, the sense that absolutely nothing here has been left to chance--and that What a Time to Be Alive might have been a more interesting album if it had--is a tough one to avoid.

It’s slim on features (only Young Thug, Clever and Brent Faiyaz) but big on misanthropic head-nodders that put Juice’s Fall Out Boy-style whine or raspy flow to the fore: he is more versatile than his peers and also more gifted. ... But ultimately, the suicide references of songs such as Empty and casual misogyny in the tauntingly violent Syphilis leave an uncomfortable taste.

[Business Dinners is] a moment of offbeat delight on an album otherwise characterised by earworm-centric efficiency--and the kind of gratifyingly idiosyncratic move a supposed pop renegade would benefit from making more often.

For all the biographical sincerity, Morris’s songs about unfettered good times feel unconvincing. Morris has a compellingly hardbitten voice that’s wasted on the boozy camaraderie of All My Favourite People and the blown-out Flavour, not to mention the twee, plinky-plonky A Song for Everything, which strings together nostalgic tropes to push cheap emotional buttons.

There are lots of intriguing ideas here, and it might be better thought of as one long fragmentary track than a collection of songs. But it’s an album that feels like it’s hovering rather than actually heading anywhere, diverting rather than impactful.

If they could bring a little more of their noise-based disruption into the mix, their prophetic horns would be worth heeding.

The irresistible funk of lead single Like Sugar cleverly creates pockets of space for Khan’s rip-roaring vocal interjections to fade in and out, as if she’s having so much fun dancing she forgot to step up to the mic. The album sags, however, when the production starts to encroach on the star.

For all the shopping-mall feel of their songs, they can be industrially catchy. ... If only their lyrics weren’t so cringey.

Webb is capable of nimble vocals, but he often opts for a deliberately strained tone, as if trying to push his woes through his colon. His gift for hooks means that even this peculiarity will find fans.

The problem with the album’s dabblings in chart pop à la Taylor Swift (Souvenir, Goddess, Bigger Wow) and post-Amy Winehouse retro-soul (Tell Me It’s Over) isn’t that the songs are poor, or that Lavigne can’t manage the stylistic shifts. It’s more that she doesn’t impose herself on them--they could be by anyone.