Charli, her third official album, finally hits a noisy, sweet spot. It is, hands down, the best iteration of XCX yet, the one where Aitchison’s pop capabilities line up most persuasively with her avant garde ear.

It’s not a terrible album – it’s better than many bands that Pixies inspired – but it isn’t terribly good either.

Inspired by a wider 80s film nostalgia, these narrative songs conjure intimate, urgent dialogue and the eruption of the supernatural into the everyday.

Despite the emotional content here, Mahalia exudes a breezy mellowness, with thoroughly 2019 themes rubbing up against retro stylings.

Davis completists will grab this, but others may find there’s just not enough meat in the sandwich.

True to quixotic form, Free doesn’t build on the success of that record [2016’s Post Pop Depression], Iggy veering off at yet another tangent, courtesy of avant garde guitarist Noveller, aka Sarah Lipstate, and jazz trumpeter Leron Thomas.

While there’s nothing here that quite matches the highest highs of their first pass, this is a welcome return for a singular and important band.

Overall this excellent album’s clarion-clear narratives about knife crime and the importance of good times – exemplified on Can’t Hold We Down – are delivered not just with anger and pathos, but humour.

Paul’s soft voice, washed by reverb, recalls the dreamscapes of Beach House, and there are reminders of Sharon Van Etten in the enveloping swells of drums, grungy guitars and spacey shifts of rhythm.

It’s hard for any artist on their fifth album to cause you to sit up and pay attention as much as Del Rey’s Norman Fucking Rockwell does, let alone for an artist who is such a past master of the disengaged, dissolute swoon.

At 11 songs (yes, the title is a trick) and just over 25 minutes, it all makes for a short, sharp, exhilarating blast, closing with the question we’re all asking as things fall apart: What Can You Do But Rock’n’Roll?

Like previous Jay Som records, Anak Ko might seem slight at first listen, particularly Duterte’s winsome coo, but the payoff for lingering in her evolving dreamspace is hefty.

It feels like he’s aiming for a 21st-century version of classic albums such as Sign ‘O’ the Times and What’s Going On and, on astonishing, soul-scraping laments This World Is Drunk and Kings Fall, he almost gets there.

There are blank pages for fans to fill in. At nearly 30, the singer-songwriter remains an intriguing mixture of industry power-broker and giddy cat-obsessive. Lover is fine with that, but the real battle is where she goes after this.

The strangest thing about the album, however, is the nagging sense of try-hard: Sleater-Kinney have always felt effortless.

Not surprisingly, many of the highlights of his fourth solo album – a treatise on capitalism and loss – nod to Power’s better-known band.

The English songwriter’s spacey, super-melodic, immaculately produced pop casts a wonderful spell when it works, particularly on lead single Religion (U Can Lay Your Hands on Me) or the swooning, filtered coda to The Stage, as endless as summer seems in early July.

Fifteen tracks stretches them too far, though, and on the likes of Fog, their woahs sound tired, and it becomes apparent that these are pretty empty musical calories.

Hackman flits between self-reflection and self-loathing with ease (“You’re such an attention whore”), starkly unpicking her anxieties over fuzzy guitar on her most accomplished record to date.

Bon Iver have imperceptibly moved from requesting close listening to requiring it, and i,i spins a mesmerising web of superficially insubstantial yet intensely majestic music. Listen closely and you can hear the language of pop being redrafted in real time.

With the exception of OK (Anxiety Anthem), produced unmemorably by the usually excellent MNEK, these 14 tunes could have been made by anyone with a well-oiled larynx. Even as Mabel’s voice stands proudly without Auto-Tune, High Expectations is just disappointingly all right, lacking any playfulness, or top spin, or a sense of who Mabel is.

Magnificently, songs like Taste or The Fall are only energised by these diverse sonic signatures. The double-drummers are key, too: Segall’s in the left-hand channel, while frequent collaborator and multi-instrumentalist Charles Moothart is in the right.

For all the variety, no single track stands out; Nérija rarely stray from the comfortable territory of mid-tempo, mid-dynamic improvisation.

North feels like early Beck, grungy guitar with an old-school hip-hop bump, while Sofia pairs Strokes guitar with Stereolab-style ironic Eurodisco and Impossible offers intimate confessions over baroque-pop harpsichord and shunting beats.

While Guesswork starts promisingly, with the honourable exception of the sparkling Moments and Whatnot the second half of this front-loaded album is a little underwhelming, its songs needlessly extended when a more succinct execution might have worked better.

Duck crashlands in as confused a space as that might suggest; it’s a very mainstream record, but doesn’t sound sure that it wants to be.

Burna Boy’s fourth album lands in this powerful spotlight, continuing the singer’s boundary-hopping mixture of laid-back Caribbean swagger, Fela Kuti swing and multilingual communiques on a range of concerns.

It’s immersive, but bar a couple of songs and features (Southern rap don Project Pat and enigmatic MC BennY RevivaL are both standouts) it lacks the urgency or vitality of its two predecessors. Instead, this is a lounge-y mixtape that drifts comfortably within Hynes’s beautiful sonic realm.