The result is a record that is by turns lush and ethereal, a sonically cohesive venture into slightly unfamiliar territory.

Musically, Dark Matter is some of their catchiest and punchiest material in years. It’ll have you nodding your head – but it’ll never let you get comfortable.

The whole album is a terrific reminder of the intense, personal connection Swift can conjure in song.

Even if you don’t love This Could Be Texas, it’s a hard album not to respect. English Teacher have well and truly arrived: the class had better pay attention.

On Don’t Forget Me, she’s found a beguilingly relaxed momentum.

It’s a record that sucks in all of the band’s best-known sounds and blows them out in a wild confetti blast of twisty-indie-anxious-punk-jazzy-joy.

Variously embracing fado, jazzy whiskey-bar blues and tensile, grandiose strings, ... Eastern Esplanade is easily The Libertines’ most expansive and ambitious record.

Their rock’n’roll friends, from Beck to Noel Gallagher, are on hand to lend the album a rabble-rousing tone. Ohio Players sounds like a house party where the whiskey is flowing.

Across 27 tracks, almost all with compellingly muscular melodies, she whips and neigh-neighs through every conceivable form of classic and modern country, roping in elements of opera, rock and hip-hop at her commanding, virtuosic whim. .... Cowboy Carter keeps on dealing aces.

There are more hooks here than on Lenker’s previous albums, 2020’s great but ethereal Songs, and its companion album, the lyricless Instrumentals. Tracks like the gentle, mellifluous “Cell Phone Says” showcase Lenker’s skill with a soulful folk guitar riff, while the lively and finger-picked “Fool” is a standout.

The songs on Tigers Blood feel natural and unstudied.

The result is a mixed bag. “La Fuerte” (“The Strong”) would be a forgettable club banger were it not for Shakira’s lyrics, still raw with grief. “Tiempo Sin Verte” and “Como Donde Y Cuando” are more interesting thanks to their minor chord acoustic strums and angsty one-two punch of electric guitar.

Beyond these introductory tracks and a couple of others (“Give It Up for Love” struts to a Nile Rogers beat), the album chugs along at a pleasant mid-tempo pace.

The record’s sprawling R&B slow jams are more likely to inspire snoozing than shagging. Weighing in at a bloated 18 tracks, it’s got the soggy dead weight and wonky springs of a fly-tipped mattress.

Deeper Well is a revelation – as though Musgraves stumbled on an oasis after months in the desert.

While there’s a moreish quality to the off-key guitar of “Imperfect for You” and an unexpectedly golden flush of brass on “Ordinary Things”, Grande’s delicately conversational tone is often left having to compensate for her lack of strong melodic snags.

Bleachers occasionally lets Antonoff’s genius shine through, but more often it feels like an experiment gone awry.

You’ll hear the recycled riff from the Beatles’ Paperback Writer (“Rain”’s original A side) on their new song “I’m So Bored”; the hook of Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” smoking its way through “Love You Forever”; and the brooding melody from the Stones’ “Paint it Black” on “One Day at A Time”. The pair poke fun at their own slapdash songwriting process on “Make it Up as You Go Along”. But still, there’s fun to be had with the way Gallagher tows teenage ‘tude into middle age.

She’s still in her prime, as you can tell when she delivers a knockout vocal on the guitar-backed ballad “Broken Like Me”. .... But for all her promises to show us the “real her”, it’s a struggle to see it in the slick and sexy production of tracks such as “Mad in Love” or “Rebound”.

How you feel about that will depend on your threshold for Coming Home’s smooth-bossing seduction style. What Usher lacks by way of foreplay (“I wanna be inside ya/ I’ll be coming” is the album’s second line) he compensates for with stamina: smooching his way through 20 tracks of mostly silky-solid grooves. Coming Home is enlivened by a cool cast of collaborators sharing the mic.

Prelude to Ecstasy gleefully delivers.

It’s wonderful to find so many moreish layers in music that was, apparently, composed so quickly. Grab yourself a bean bag and settle in for the long haul with this one.

Tight and heartfelt if ploddingly unoriginal.

Pink Friday 2 shows flashes of the inventive brilliance that made Nicki such an undeniable superstar, but like so many legacy sequels, it mostly just makes you wish you were listening to the original.

The tracks on i/o grow both on and in a listener like seeds germinating. Those who like their song structures neat and tidy may struggle with the jazz odysseys, but Gabriel asks very little of his fans – just time. Give him that, and you will find this album gently becoming part of you on a cellular level.

His grievances on For All the Dogs seemed exclusively directed at women, causing some to wonder whether we’d ever see a return to his puppyish, boy-next-door type. Scary Hours 3 isn’t that, but it does even the playing field somewhat, not least by praising the women in his life and castigating the men.

Rockstar is so long that it can feel like a bit of a slog.

So many ideas have gone into I<3UQTINVU that it’s almost a new album in its own right. So while it’s not quite as brilliant as I Love You Jennifer B, it does suggest the restless duo are moving into more thrilling terrain.