The Solution Is Restless is an album that worms its way under your skin, reminding you of half a dozen records you love while sounding unlike anything else around.

All in all, it’s a rich, absorbing work that rewards immersive listening.

Equals tilts heavily into contentment and maturity, including an obligatory lullaby – Sandman – for his little one. Nice Ed gains the upper hand, with a commensurate loss in musical interest.

Bleak but compelling.

It’s all fun, though a little disjointed – and the less said about Elton’s trap song, Always Love You, with Nicki Minaj and Young Thug, the better.

Blue Banisters could do with a sharper focus – some of these 15 songs are outtakes dating back years – and a hip-hopped-Morricone instrumental interlude feels like an incongruous eruption from her “gangster Nancy Sinatra” era. But it offers glimpses of vistas to be explored beyond Lana’s customary LA backdrops and a legacy already secure.

Lay’s voice may often be sun-dazzled and multitracked, but it is also confident, privileging harmonics and atmosphere over DIY spit and sawdust. The instrumentation swirling around her is both lush and reserved.

There’s hardly a dull moment on this album.

An entertainingly diverse set.

The album is meandering in places, evoking a sense of the unknown that’s become so familiar in 2021, but there’s a sense that the trio want to bring their growing fanbase with them into a new dimension. It will reward those who come along for the ride.

It’s an impressive display of ambition and reinvention, all the more dramatic because singer-songwriters in Lala Lala’s previous, Liz Phair-ish incarnation are 10-a-penny.

Many affecting tracks detail the sharknado of outrage and bewilderment in Blake’s trademark delicate soprano, offset occasionally by well-chosen collaborators (SZA, or rappers JID and SwaVay) or startlingly pitch-shifted vocals.

We get a campy take on I Get a Kick Out of You, a sashaying Night and Day, and yet another outing for swing album mainstay I’ve Got You Under My Skin. It’s on the less ubiquitous songs, however, that the pair seem to have the most fun. ... This ebullient album feels like a fond farewell rather than a solemn goodbye.

The music is pleasantly accessible, rather than daring.

It’s definitely an album served best by headphones and solitude, and one that won’t draw you back as much as it draws you in.

There’s no shortage of killer hooks deeper into the album – a commitment to bangers matched by BLK’s wise words about personal damage and heartbreak on songs such as the excellent title track.

ATLWB feels like a step up, detailing an emotional journey that refreshes tired tropes with hard-won insight and musical self-assurance.

Bright Magic feels like a logical next step, with fewer samples, and the likes of Blixa Bargeld, Nina Hoss and Eera much more foregrounded. The downside is that, for all the invention on display here, J Willgoose Esq and Wrigglesworth have lost some of their USP with this shift in focus.

Despite the turbulent backstory, at first listen these songs sound effortlessly sunny.

For every guitar-driven bop such as That’s What I Want, there are times when Hill resorts to mainstream genre cliches rather than razing convention as he did on Old Town Road.

Although the dominant mood is bedroom-dreamy, the effect of her staccato choruses and slapping beats is hammeringly percussive, allying her with the hyper-pop of Charli XCX. Depending on the listener’s ear, Hye Jin’s work can also come across as repetitive and facile.

The result is an artfully realised exercise in melancholic, grown-up pop with textures that owe much to the Swedes’ later work. It’s also a welcome return to form, after 2018’s water-treading Resistance Is Futile.

Things start promisingly with the undulating Champagne Poetry dextrously reflecting on loneliness (“career is going great, but now the rest of me is fading slowly”), while Papi’s Home recalls early Kanye, of all people, with its sped-up samples and laid-back flow. Later, however, that playfulness calcifies into headline-grabbing stunts. ... This is an album destined to be filleted for various #mood playlists, anchored only by its creator’s untouchable fame.

All of this grandeur is punctuated by shimmering orchestral interludes, the plummy voice of Emma Corrin (AKA The Crown’s Princess Diana) as Simz’s life coach, and hard-hitting tracks of another kind, where the artist examines her motivations (Ovation) and her relationship with her absent father on the heart-wrenching I Love You, I Hate You.

Their formative years in the underground have always supplied this trio with a sharp and occasionally dark edge. It is an edge no more, but the defining feature of this pugilistic album.

Easier Than Lying is shouty and electronic, while You Asked for This finds Halsey fronting a Smashing Pumpkins pastiche. Amid all the Sturm und Drang and sludgy oompah (The Lighthouse) there is some high-quality writing, chiefly in the pizzicato niggles and Jesus analogies of Bells in Santa Fe (“it’s not a happy ending”) and Whispers.

As elegantly crafted as it all is, it does become a little homogeneous, and well before Other You’s 50 minutes are up, you do find yourself craving a gear change somewhere.

She tips the listener headlong into the scrum that is your 20s, when self-doubt and growing self-assurance wrestle one another to the mat. The emotional wrangle is skilfully handled, knife-sharp, funny lyrics carving out beautifully structured songs – co-produced by Gartland – with never a note wasted, dancing nimbly across styles.