It's more likely, though, that Shields is a grower.

The end result finds elegance trumping excitement.

There are moments here that are truly affecting, like the vignette anchoring Leaving LA, the album’s 13-minute centrepiece. The young Josh chokes on a sweet, as Fleetwood Mac’s Little Lies plays impassively in the background. You wish you could hear more from him.

In the Silence remains deeply pleasant, if a little polite.

Hackman’s new sound has a slackerish, sly swagger reminiscent of Courtney Barnett (or going back to the source, Liz Phair).

It's not a flab-free affair--Breathe Low & Deep is several minutes too long, for starters--but there are enough interesting touches here to make album number three something to look forward to.

Silence Yourself reveals Savages to be a cross between the Horrors (fondness for black, allegiance to art-rock, time spent in Dalston) and Sleater-Kinney (devotion to Wire, lack of male members, stentorian vibrato) with a soupcon of the Knife (fondness for manifestos, tribal beats, forbidding glee).

There are few genres White Denim won’t disrupt, and this wide-ranging record touches upon many of them.

Lyrically, the album finds Waters in pissed-off older man mode and is none the worse for it.

Foster may not be the subtlest lyricist ever to decry the excesses of western society, but his songwriting has filled out and, on the evidence of several tracks here, including Best Friend, he still knows how to craft a solid hook.

There are still moments of magic but it sounds like the work of a band in transition, and not necessarily for the better.

The moves here run the gamut from belligerently derivative to deft confidence.

A post-digital block party full of computer music whose Latinate rhythms and rolled Rs don't conform to grid or template.

Bradley makes more like Al Green than Brown, mobilising a kind of weary, vintage warmth as he repeatedly tackles heartbreak in the company of the Daptone Horns.

Fans may balk at the curveballs--Hit Me Like That Snare is a louche garage-rock foray--but they telegraph the self-assurance that doesn’t rely on overcomplication.

Unfortunately, there’s often this vast emotional chasm in his music, a feeling that nothing ever means anything, until the final two tracks, The States and The Last Song, which prove that he can write a lovely, affecting lyric after all.

Super’s first half euphorically lives up to the title, tossing out gem after gem, making you nostalgic for the days where erudition in pop wasn’t so rare.... The second half loses momentum slightly.

It's an understandably ad hoc collection that conjures up snatches of wonder from scraps of genius.

Del Rey’s poetry collection is punctuated by skilfully rendered moments such as these, pregnant freeze-frames in language that justify the singer calling herself a poet. But just as often, Del Rey can lapse into verbose descriptiveness, her wordplay flowery or overcooked.

Like that of some of his illustrious contemporaries from the 1960s, Paul McCartney's new music needs to perform a move of such complexity that it would be more at home in yoga: looking forward, while looking back, while remaining relevant. It's decidedly difficult to pull off, this move, and New, McCartney's 16th studio album, almost does it.

All these highs and lows pass in an unvarying, mid-paced indie-rock fug, with little to hold the attention outside her gossamer delivery of candour and insight.

Like their increasingly musical, but still weird, productions, Migos’s triplet-heavy, robotic non-flows have come on leaps and bounds, while retaining the group’s core starkness.

They peak with the surf-influenced Warts, which sounds like nothing so much as a riot grrrl take on Bossanova-era Pixies. Elsewhere, the meandering lack of focus can grate, as on forgettable instrumental Solar Gap.

The drawback here is not that Bruner hasn’t made the out-and-out pop album his narrative arc as an artist might demand. Nor is it that he is showcasing his conservatoire-grade talents. It is, perhaps, that he doesn’t sit with one emotion, be it high or low, for a sustained length of time.

How thrilling these good-natured, thigh-rubbing party tunes are depends on your interest in the interplay of stereotypical “mamacitas” and “papi”s. But songs like No Puedo Olvidarte nail the sweet spot between hunky smouldering and wavy club music, and recent single HP sees things from a female perspective.

It’s a good job that Rag’n’Bone Man has the kind of righteous roar that could breathe life into the phone book, because this album spools together a set of reliable tropes with little in the way of topspin.

They are at their best on their more epic material, particularly Broken Bells and eight-minute closer The Weight of Dreams, which moves up through the gears from an acoustic intro to a brilliantly overblown Jake Kiszka guitar solo. Elsewhere, however, the material is more pedestrian, and the quieter moments don’t always sit well with Josh’s vocals (default, indeed, only setting: a histrionic screech).

For all their wiggy sonics, Thee Oh Sees rarely lose their way, and these nine tracks scamper along, unfettered by genre hang-ups and aided by guest guitarist Mikal Cronin.