If it’s hard to avoid a certain deja vu in the urban Manchester feel or Johnson’s signature drum fills, there are more bubbling electronics this time and the songs span a spectrum from introspection to euphoria.

If you wanted to pick holes, The Tortured Poets Department is a shade too long.

David Kennedy’s drumming is riveting, both finicky and louche as he sways through Dilla-time funkiness and math-rock detail. Guitarist Finlay Clark is in some ways a minimalist, repeating pretty riffs or expertly chosen chords, but there’s nothing minimal about his generous playing. .... Most astonishing of all is Jessica Hickie-Kallenbach, singing with more power and confidence than ever before. Her luminously soulful voice is a distinctive instrument, with vibrato that makes whole songs shudder with life.

Devoid of weak tracks or ideas that don’t gel, it’s an album that sounds as if it was made by someone who knows exactly what she’s doing. .... An original pop voice: Fabiana Palladino might well be one of 2024’s best debut albums.

If the results don’t quite hold together, Cowboy Carter still proves Beyoncé is impressively capable of doing whatever she wants.

This set’s beautiful opener Defiant, Tender Warrior builds a bewitching trance from soft piano wavelets, growling bass accents and snare-pattern whispers before Lloyd’s breathy tenor long-tones and enraptured top-end warbles even begin.

He experiments with texture and even puts it through a vocoder but, for all Elbow’s adventures, the foundations are still classy songwriting, heart and soul.

On Tigers Blood, she returns clear-eyed and spirited with a twisting country album of anthemic earworms that evoke long summer evenings, intimate chats and misty-eyed regret.

Putting Grande on a pedestal helps no one, and the beatific, mature Eternal Sunshine brings her safely back down to earth.

Centrepiece Turning the Prism slackens the narrative tension, but there’s still something gripping about sitting with its pure affect: arrhythmic beats landing like red-mist punches, Kubacki’s guitar rearing up with an equine whinny. That violence reverberates even through the more placid ambient tracks, resulting in a grim, magnificent record that trades in real horror.

Y’Y finds Freitas at his most wide-ranging, embodying soft natural ambience as well as dramatic action on the piano. It is an album of mood music that refuses to settle, leaving the listener moved and invigorated.

Even at its most melodious, Playing Favorites still sounds fierce and raw, an object lesson in altering your sound without losing your essence.

MGMT seemed deeply nonplussed by the celebrity Oracular Spectacular conferred on them. But while you wait and see, Loss of Life is a delightful thing to immerse yourself in.

Stevie Wonder’s Overjoyed (a fittingly ecstatic Iyer homage to Chick Corea’s interpretation) is unfolded over a rocking left hand and Tyshawn Sorey’s crackling polyrhythms, sparking one of several breathtakingly headlong Iyer solos on the set, coolly placing fragments and twists of the original theme into the onrush despite its scorching pace.

In truth, Lytle’s crestfallen songs – sung in plaintive sigh suggesting Brian Wilson channelling Charlie Brown’s existential angst – are a seductive joy, and getting lost in his soft-focus happy-sadness is an addictive pleasure all its own.

Not everything on Tangk works, but the vast majority of it does, with an urgency that draws you into its message of positivity: reason enough to break out the freudenfreude.

Dissociative, distinctive album.

On paper, All Life Long looks like hard work for anyone whose musical tastes don’t usually dwell on the avant garde fringes. The reality is that it requires virtually no effort on the part of the listener: you just have to let yourself succumb.

relude to Ecstasy is a delight, filled with enough ideas to suggest that they’ll come up with just as many more the next time around: the Last Dinner Party’s confidence may stem less from the hype they’ve provoked than the fact they know how good they are.

It makes for an album that’s too involving and engaging and powerful to count as merely more of the same: you leave the turmoil of People Who Aren’t There Anymore feeling moved, rather than jaded.

[Bending Hectic is] one of the best things Yorke and Greenwood have put their names to in at least a decade. Like the rest of Wall of Eyes, it really doesn’t feel interstitial, like a placeholder until the definite article reappears. What that portends for Radiohead’s future – if anything – is arguable; the album’s quality is not.

Halvorson’s fusions of written and spontaneous music reach an entrancing new seamlessness and seductive warmth with this terrific set.

So it’s dreamy and fuzzy but sharp, witty and danceable with it; varied but coherent, consistently enjoyable. It’s an album on which Kali Uchis sounds not just like an artist who is now doing exactly what she wants, but one who also knows exactly what she’s doing.

It is a slow-burning piece that encourages us to view time in geological rather than human terms – the rapturous, otherworldly sounds that the planet might continue to make long after humanity’s extinction.

Musically, the album isn’t dark at all. It’s overwhelmingly lovely, with classy hooks and rousing choruses.

I Get Into Trouble is a generous and deeply emotional record that embodies what Zietsch does so well: offering the listener a window into her most vulnerable thoughts, while also holding a mirror to the social structures that have led her there. Through this album, Zietsch bears witness to both herself and the world.

There’s a lovely intimacy and openness to songs such as When I Hold You in My Arms and while his voice has lost some of the old youthful power, it has gained in tenderness, nuance, humanity and warmth.

It may be as imperfect as Pink Friday was, but Pink Friday 2 offers more than enough supporting evidence to make the latter claims sound like anything but hollow boasts.