The Car is an enormously tactile record, full of strange textures – a lint-roller runs over velveteen, body paint clings to legs, arms, face, and tears are cried in a tanning booth.

Crutchfield’s [voice is] full of elasticity and billow, Williamson’s offering a sweetness and a trill. When they meet, as on the warmly unapologetic Hurricane, something magical is sprung.

While the technology-shy, primarily guitar-based Funny in a Foreign Language doesn’t exactly represent 33-year-old Healy mellowing out, it does highlight a shift in purpose. ... Thankfully, it’s not all about painstakingly peeling the lyrical onion. I’m in Love With You is the band at their most joyously straightforward.

Accompanying him for the hour that Reality lasts makes for an endlessly fascinating journey.

On their fourth album, Tableau, the exploratory, ambitious side of the band’s music has never been more clear. Many of the songs pick through various genres, magpie-style, subverting expectations.

Crucially, it doesn’t sound cynical: it's too idiosyncratic and eclectic. Instead, it sounds confident: the work of someone who knows their seemingly impulsive approach to rock and pop fits the current landscape and who’s taken that as carte blanche to do what they want. It's a confidence that never feels misplaced.

In the end, everything from the softest improvised ballads to the most exuberantly hard-stomping blues draw grateful accolades – the sound of an audience’s thanks for a one-off music that belonged only to their presence with Jarrett, in that space, on that unique evening.

It sounds like comfort, sometimes fun, even as you miss the dark fire they once summoned.

At only eight tracks, intensely focused, it crackles with furious energy, a slow-motion film of combusting fireworks.

Ocean is at times a quiet, almost private interchange, but a rich one.

Burgess says that he “fell in love with the world again” after Covid, and you can hear that across Typical Music: After This and the sublime The Centre of Me (Is a Symphony Of You) hurtle forth with all the lust for life and seemingly boundless joie de vivre of their creator.

It’s the gospel-charged 12-minute live take, Rejoice, that stuns: a collective jam opened on a beckoning bass hook and driven to a rampant finale with the band locked into an almost choral unified voice, it really tells you why, after all these years, this group can still sell out the world’s concert halls in a blink.

A solid country-pop record. It’s a celebration of endings: a fortifying, bridging album that guides its author towards, hopefully, happier times.

It’s a relentless, wilfully sugary bombardment that stands or falls by the quality of the songwriting. When the tunes are strong, it’s cheerily flimsy fun. ... When the tunes aren’t strong, listening to Demon Time feels like standing within earshot of a tween who is frantically scrolling through TikTok without earbuds, which either makes it a brilliantly constructed mirror of our times, or an album-length public nuisance, or perhaps both.

Tied together by a desire for authenticity and marked by a ferocious culmination of frustration and self-actualisation, As Above So Below is Tembo’s most cohesive body of work yet.

The songs are tightly written even when their structure tends to the episodic or their tempos shift gear. They’re also finely balanced, the choruses big and bold enough to attract attention but not overshadow the main attraction’s essential essence. Osbourne’s bleakly desperate wail is front and centre, his lyrical preoccupations intact.

If Älskar can occasionally feel identikit, there’s a refreshing honesty in its compromise between raw confessionals and acknowledging the pressure to “make it through the bullshit flying at me, write something catchy and turn it into money”.

His latest album’s confident sonic step forward – Yungblud is still very much a work in progress.

Amid some formulaic tracks, Your Life Is Mine is a welcome and superb curveball, Grogan’s darker tale of “an ocean of tears, the fury of the years” delivered over Cocteau Twins-type shimmering guitars.

Flood is an album that requires patient and careful listening, peeling back the layers in each song to find the pulsing heart beneath. There’s nothing as immediate as the songs on Donnelly’s debut, but that’s not a bad thing – these 11 tracks ebb and flow like water, washing into and over one another to create a sense of something pure and boundless.

Smith’s music often sounds like a dozen mobile phone ringtones going off in a video games arcade while a west African drum circle rehearse on the street outside. Occasionally, this cacophony sounds sublime.

The Chats are treading a fine line between stupid and clever, but there’s no meanness of spirit here.

The result is an album that’s alternately charming and cliched, that involves boilerplate beats and sparky musical invention. That said, nothing about it is going to turn off the teens that constitute Aitch’s fanbase.

For the power of revenge as a notion, it’s a limited emotional palette for a writer as gifted as Darnielle to work with. It feels more like a brilliantly conceived and executed exercise than something to return to.

Just succumb to its unique invention, curious shifts in tone and plethora of weird juxtapositions: something that’s easy enough to do.

An ebullient record brimming with sheer love of the craft.

Traumazine is an album that leaves you reeling slightly, both impressed and strangely grateful – convinced of Megan Thee Stallion’s brilliance, and glad you’re not on the receiving end of it.

The Alchemist’s Euphoria is rarely dull, and often hugely entertaining. But one still longs for Pizzorno to make the album that is as great as the breadth of his imagination suggests.