A little paunchiness suits the skanking bounce and wobble of their songs and a good time brassiness dominates even on the more meditative tracks.

The drama of Davies’s gothic Broadway stylings can grow suffocating, but her vengeful vision remains compelling.

This album’s default seltzer dynamics are superbly well appointed, but the aim of many of these songs is often occluded by Burton’s knee-jerk tastefulness.

Crystallised, in particular, kicks into a deeply satisfying psych-rock crunch halfway through - a reverb-heavy, robust foil for Prochet's feathery voice. But for much of the unfocused second half of the album, their sounds stray into Stereolab-lite.

It's not only Joel Little's minimalist production, all clicks, bass and empty space. The restraint lies also in Ella Yelich-O'Connor's treatment of orthodox pop themes.

A beguiling decoction of pretty much everything going on in hipster musical circles, sweet and savvy and scary at the same time.

A litany of icy threats, Break That (ft Suspect) doesn’t advance the genre much, but like much of this mixtape it does remind his original fanbase that Octavian is a threat as well as a hedonist street philosopher.

Very little of her pop is dull, even when she is trying to write for lowest common denominator mass appeal. The best tune here by some distance is the maddest.

A special evening, but one containing both chasms and confluences.

Curiously, this bold new direction isn’t sustained; the further into the album Malkmus gets, the more normal service resumes, as if he isn’t entirely convinced of his new direction.

Furler's lyrics do tend more towards generalities than specifics, but there are penetrating looks here at love's mind games (Fair Game), and being saved (Cellophane).

It's hard to tell whether this is Plant teasing, or connecting threads, or both. Whatever the truth, his bloody-minded refusal to countenance that Zeppelin reunion continues to yield beguiling new directions.

Apart from the more contemporary dystopian digitals of Golden, the feel throughout is ancient and enigmatic. But these lute tones and classical Arabic music figures are rendered digitally; the cloister garden is an interior dream-space.

By definition, More Life has sprawl in-built, so judicious use of the skip function is required, but this is high-quality filler.

This is an album for frenziedly colouring outside the lines. But there is calm, too.

A little more of the funk on How We Be might help stem the wafting, but there is loveliness here.

Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes doesn’t match up to In Rainbows--it’s closer in style to 2006’s introspective The Eraser--partly because, delivery method aside, there’s little in the way of surprises.

Hagerty’s guitar playing remains as unkempt as ever, but, touchingly, the duo’s vocals play tag throughout, augmenting one another’s frazzled joint vision as though no time had passed.

It broadly makes for a winning reboot, from the old-skool hip-hop stylings of The Sideshow and the urgency of Nobody Speak, a collaboration with Run the Jewels, to the more menacing atmosphere of Depth Charge and the jazz inflections of Ashes to Oceans. It’s not without its longueurs, however.

Joy fails to replicate the shock of the new and for all its effulgent harmonies, a certain gnarly swagger has been lost.

A handful more tracks and now, the full monty, reveals that there seem to be two Wet Legs high-kicking for supremacy: the knockabout, sly, absurdist outfit and a band that turn out to be quite like a lot of other bands.

Even for non-devotees, this is a less challenging listen than might be expected. There’s an abundance of hooks and twisted melodies buried within its pile-up of ideas.

If the songwriting isn’t always the match of the sheen, the best moments here--Panarchy, What You See, Autodrama--are dangerously seductive.

Musically, too, there are tempestuous moments (Missing Children; Sing Me a Song), but the quartet only soar when the lights are dimmed and ambience takes precedence over energy.

While there’s no shortage of dazzling playing from a group that have the intuition of a jazz combo, with odd changes of tempo, and a couple of instrumentals to let rip their bluegrass picking. A curious curate’s egg.

There are flashes of the full-throated musicality that made her an exciting prospect, but the album falls short. Perhaps hampered by a pressure to take her sound in a fresh direction, Balbuena loses the vitality that distinguished her in the first place.

Ultimately, the album is burdened by its own weight, striving to exorcise the group’s creative urges. Perhaps with more time together, Animal Collective could jam into a sense of consistency again.

Over 15 tracks, however, progress stalls. For all Gaika’s articulacy--he also writes for Dazed & Confused--the downbeat haze in which he operates privileges numbness over passion and ire, qualities his arresting music merely hints at, rather than weaponises.