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.

World Music Radio proves that Jon Batiste is capable of coming up with [new ideas]. They seem to arrive when he sounds most like himself: an artist with jazz background, a deep knowledge of musical history and an iconoclastic streak. It also proves he is capable of sublimating his own individuality to fit in; when it tries too hard, it simply adds to the slush pile of nondescript pop.

What Comes Will Come, a skronking synth-pop-rap song, finds Owusu-Ansah sinking himself into production that strikes an interesting midpoint between goth-rock and shimmering synth-funk, one of the rare moments on the album that feels musically akin to the disorienting genre mashup of Smiling With No Teeth. These passages offer welcome electricity on an album that too often plays it safe and plays it vague – capitalising on an algorithm-breaking debut with more of the same.

He's a canny grounding force, and has a sharp ear for bringing together seemingly disparate ingredients. Utopia could have used more of that sure hand.

I’m not so daft as to believe that a Barbie soundtrack album should have made for groundbreaking or era-defining art – but on a level of pure enjoyment, listening to a concept album about Barbie does wear thin very quickly.

Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) dilutes some of the original’s acid. One issue with Swift revisiting her older work is that her voice has changed with age. Now 33, she’s a much richer and more skilled singer than she was then, but their piercing, youthful twang was what made these songs kick harder in all their dressing-downs and rabid desires, emphasising the sense of a girl wading into adult waters.

Among the hackneyed British soul tropes, the 24-year-old clearly has a distinct vision of off-kilter pop.

If only the music on her major label debut album was as interesting and innovative as its author is, or even as diverting as Unholy.

It’s an album about hedonistic abandon that occasionally makes hedonistic abandon sound like something challenging a therapist has tasked you to do before next week’s session. Then again, the album’s brevity means those moments pass quickly, to be supplanted by moments when Monáe sounds as light and warm as the music behind her.

Despite a handful of the elder Gallagher’s irresistible everyman anthems, much of Council Skies is unambitious and generic to the point of tedium.

There are gorgeous songs here about Clark’s Pacific north-west home and her family – but it often feels as if she has mistaken seriousness for honesty. Aside from a few lovely ballads, such as the sparse Buried and plaintive maybe-breakup song Come Back to Me, most of these songs feel anonymous.

The effect is gorgeous, atmospheric – at times spine-tinglingly so – and undeniably cool. Yet she doesn’t distinguish herself from the glut of similarly minded artists from Greentea Peng to KeiyaA.

His voice is undeniably powerful; moreover it adds some grit and heft that’s lacking among sappier balladeers. So, occasionally, do the lyrics.

It’s horribly revealing of both men’s weaknesses. Eno’s contributions are witlessly unimaginative.

There’s enough worthwhile stuff to ensure that fans will be happy – you can overlook its shortcomings while the title track rages – and that touring won’t seem entirely like an exercise in running through the back catalogue. Equally, no one hoping to convince a non-believer of Metallica’s greatness will reach for it over the classics.

You will find little robust melody or Piano Man finesse in these strange symphonies. But rummaging through Gately’s mazy, beautiful disorder is a beguiling adventure in its own right.

Neither a disaster on the level of their iTunes launch, nor a triumph to match Zoo TV, Songs of Surrender sits somewhere in the middle of that sliding scale of success.

Past//Present//Future suffers from a sense of sameness – compact or not, the songs eventually blur into one mass of pop hooks and distorted guitars.

An eclectic grab-bag of ideas that achieve varying degrees of success. When it hits the mark, you can understand why pop stars and left-field figures alike have been drawn into Skrillex’s orbit. But taken in one dose, it’s alternately exhilarating, frustrating and a little exhausting.

Luxury and gratitude are fine motifs, but without enough sonic distinction between tracks it gets boring fast.

You wish you got a bit more of the Sam Smith who was recently photographed for a magazine wearing goth-y platform boots, sock suspenders, tight blue satin shorts and an Abba T-shirt. They looked as if they didn’t care what anyone thought. It’s hard not to long for music with that attitude.

He’s abundantly talented, a singular and austerely powerful voice. But as Rap Game Awful proves, abundance can be a problem.

What Rush! lacks in heft – a couple of glancing lyrical references to sexuality and gender notwithstanding, not even Måneskin’s loudest cheerleader is going to claim it as a weighty album – it makes up for in enthusiasm. If that enthusiasm occasionally tips over into a cloying eagerness to please (Supermodel is a little too desperate to remind listeners of Smells Like Teen Spirit), more often it’s infectious.

Although Space Man’s co-writers contributed to several other tracks, that song’s elegance is nowhere to be found among a litany of cliches and self-help guff so toothless it makes Ed Sheeran look like Nick Cave.

The record ends just as the party’s getting loose, with Londoner Josh Caffé commanding us to “Work! Serve!” over a deranged synth – more in this late-night ballroom house vein would be welcome.

He may have landed on a sound, but as an artist Tomlinson is still directionless.

There’s no song as straightforwardly appealing as Girlfriend or Tilted. That said, there are moments when his innate songwriting ability is very much in evidence. ... But the album is peppered with tracks that feel formless and sketchy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The issue is that none of the songs that all this gorgeous production whirls around are actually any good.

18 is a peculiar and hugely uneven record.

Beatopia is an enjoyable sojourn down a well-travelled sonic avenue, but not the most memorable of trips.

It’s noisy, jolting and filled with gruesome imagery, but somehow arid and remote, music presented with a self-satisfied smirk (“idiots are infinite, thinking men numbered”, drawls Greep at one point) that prevents wholehearted commitment. Maybe it takes on a different, more direct power live.

The Other Side of Make-Believe has its longueurs – the lumbering Mr Credit among them – but it also has its pleasures: it doesn’t sound phoned in, which is much to its credit. Long past the point where they’re in the business of attracting new fans, they nevertheless keep moving, albeit subtly.

Progressive to the very soles of its nine-minute songs, and characterised by a level of instrumental proficiency that is, occasionally, emotionally detached.

Honestly, Nevermind therefore offers a weird combination of the unexpected and business as usual. ... There is something really admirable about Drake’s desire to reach beyond the music his audience expects, and to do it well. You just wish he would apply the same restlessness to his persona.

Magic Pony Ride excels when it is carefree and cantering, losing its allure when it stops to let reality sink in.

Gold Rush Kid gets better the further it moves away from the standard blueprint, into emotional territory that, if it isn’t exactly dark (happily for him, Ezra seems to inhabit a world where every problem comes with a resolution) is certainly more overcast.

You would struggle to describe The Versions as anything other than a mixed bag. The weird thing is that it somehow works as a tribute to Neneh Cherry regardless of the contributions’ quality: the good tracks emphasise what a fantastic songwriter she is, and the less successful ones make you feel her absence and underline her uniqueness as a performer.

When it reaches its most pumping, Baby, We’re Ascending tends to sag; these songs feel slightly untethered, or even half-hearted, next to their spirited, amorphous cousins. Occasionally, Throssell finds a balance to the two warring halves of Baby, We’re Ascending.

There are nice sonic touches here and there: the off-key slide guitar that opens Folding Mountains; the filtered house squelch of Best Feeling. So on its own terms, Mellow Moon succeeds. Even so, you wonder if it might not reflect a young artist pulling his punches.

By the end it's impossible to ignore the fact that this is a long record with flagging momentum. But it's also impossible to ignore this intriguing debut's promise. Preacher's Daughter has lyrical richness and atmospheric potency to spare.

If We isn’t a return to the standards Arcade Fire reached on their debut album Funeral or 2010’s The Suburbs, it’s an improvement on its predecessor, and quite possibly enough to avert a slow slide down the festival bills.

On their eighth album, the lyrics are again in German, the riffs again pound and all you might expect is present and correct. At times it’s so on the nose you all but roll your eyes.

If you’re willing to meet Bob Vylan on their rough-and-ready terms, The Price of Life offers a decent return on investment.

Pillow Queens add a few more extended shredding sessions to the template, but they largely stick within the bounds of this classy, serious style. It’s not one that gives the group a particularly distinctive flavour, but it is at least able to contain all the feelings of confusion, fury, outsized desire and whatever else the listener wants to extrapolate from this evocative if slightly nebulous record.

It’s all well-trodden stuff, and Kelly adds nothing new, but Mainstream Sellout is so much fun that – as the title suggests – it’s easy to leave your integrity behind and mosh along.

They’re past their best nowadays, but this is a decent effort after a quarter of a century.

In/Out/In isn’t a “new” album by any means so much as tracks that remained underdeveloped or unfinished at the time. ... [Basement Contender is] easily the gem here and provides a tantalising glimpse of what might have been still to come.

Crash is at its best in its subtler moments.

At his best O’Connor seems to be part of a lineage of pop craftsmen for whom melody trumps everything – you don’t need edge, experimentation or lyrical fireworks if you can come up with a tune as strong as Open the Window or as cute as Making Time. But at his worst, it sounds limp and insubstantial, compounded by the thin production (a sonic link to the days when O’Connor was uploading his bedroom-recorded songs to Soundcloud) and his voice, which can tend to the nasal and whiny.

Some of the arrangements are too middle of the road, but her piano runs are glorious, her voice still as pure as mountain air and – with a second collection apparently following – she is far from done.

It occasionally feels demo-like, half-finished: the corroded electronics on Louie Bags are intriguing, but the song features what sounds like a placeholder vocal. Great lines are few and far between.

Few Good Things sees Saba resurface, moving beyond the acceptance stage on an album that sounds and feels like one long exhale.

As it is, it feels like an act of quiet consolidation rather than a breakthrough, aimed squarely at existing fans, unbothered by grabbing anyone else’s attention.

Pompeii is noticeably more subdued than much of her earlier work. Where once there was a playfulness in the arrangements, the slow and austere songs here sound as if they’re carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders.

Fix Yourself, Not the World isn’t going to change the face of music, but nor is it going to do anything to impede the Wombats’ latter-day progress.

There’s a lot that’s laudable about Caprisongs. Not least its desire to keep moving and changing – enough that complaining about something as straightforward as a paucity of memorable tunes almost feels miserly. But equally, it’s something that ultimately impedes your enjoyment of the album. As a soundtrack for the start of a night, it doesn’t quite pan out as you might hope.

Not so much fresh takes on old favourites, Covers is more like watered-down versions of semi-hidden gems.

Barn highlights both the strengths and weaknesses of this set-up: They Might Be Lost barely feels like a song, just the same chords Young has been strumming all his adult life, yet it manages to be eternal and deeply moving. Equally – and this is a little like complaining fire is too hot – one can’t help but feel some of these songs sound as though they were being written as they were recorded.

Unlocked is definitely a better album than Originals, but not an amazing album in its own right. Undeniable, sucker-punch songs are still notable by their absence.

In the 70s and 80s, you were never far from a new release repackaging Bowie’s pre-fame 60s material, usually with a cover photograph that deceptively implied the contents were contemporary rather than archival. Toy offers a more tasteful sampling of that era. It includes the two best songs Bowie wrote before Space Oddity.

You couldn’t blame Adele for declining to even tinker with a formula that clearly ain’t broke. But she does, and it makes for 30’s highlights.

Rather than reflecting poignantly on the past, much of the rest of Voyage feels terminally stuck there.