Borrowing 10 beats from inventive producer Soundtrakk’s vault, Lupe tries out different flows with varying success.

She can be puckish, yearning, impossibly weary, intimate – and that’s all on one track, 20 Years a Growing. The pair’s most engaging songs start spare, then meander with gathering intensity to an orchestral crescendo

This is an EP to fall into, as though in a swoon, its fine detail revealing itself over time.

Certainly, there’s an appealing directness to the maximalist likes of Wake Me Up, with its bellowed chorus seemingly precision-tooled for festival crowds. ... Unfortunately, the quality flags as the album goes on, and the undistinguished likes of Crest of the Wave only succeed in coming across like an ersatz Everything Everything.

O’Brien’s music, while often smart and sharply played, is rarely exciting as it skips from dusty funk to spiky electronica, and her poetry isn’t quite limber enough to enliven the bare scaffolding supplied by her band.

More introspective and contemplative than his previous two multi-platinum albums, Gold Rush Kid finds Ezra becoming a man for all seasons.

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.

Every Head album is a gem, but Dear Scott – named after a note-to-self by F Scott Fitzgerald, down on his luck – has a particularly deep internal lustre.

As several of her songs attest, music can be consolation in the most troubled times, and Big Time is a silky balm.

Gallagher still has a voice that can imbue even the most meaningless lyric with more feeling than it deserves. But the old adage about cooks and broth holds true, because for all the efforts of the crack team surrounding him, the results are largely unremarkable and at times, as in the case of Oh Sweet Children, downright cloying.

The most country thing about this body of work is the hard-lived wisdom it offers up. The love songs are very grown-up.

Two years on, this sequel is a similarly entrancing, sometimes frightening listen.

Ultimately Styles is more concerned with mood than minutiae. On Harry’s House he’s created a welcoming place to stay.

This electrifying, uneasy record stops, starts and turns, often within the confines of one track. The beats are restless; few comforting grooves are allowed to build for very long.

While there’s nothing as obviously stellar as Grammy-winning US Top 5 hit Boo’d Up or its even better sequel, Trip, Ella has always had a gift for parsing the everyday dramas of twentysomething relationships in relatable (and sometimes 18-rated) language.

Its first side certainly has its moments. ... Unfortunately, there is just as much pedestrian material that stubbornly fails to lodge in the memory.

Almost as good as a new Radiohead album.

The album takes a step back from the vast productions of Welch’s most famous work, with nods to the Rolling Stones (Dream Girl Evil) and plenty of unexpected chiaroscuro, the better to foreground her luxuriant voice.

A welcome return to form.

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.

An ambitious, accomplished piece of work.

Although this album was written at her new house in Baltimore, when Sangaré got stuck there during lockdown, many of these tracks look to her home region of Wassoulou, whose sung heritage and stringed instruments she has turned into an international world music phenomenon.

Mahal is ultimately too uneven to be an album to particularly cherish.

Though not as affecting as the original, if we’re talking about club bangers, Kehlani makes it their own.

This ninth outing is Pierce’s most assured in some time, doling out extra helpings of heady patisserie.

Pilbeam’s second album feels like a logical progression from her 2019 debut, Keepsake, a minor success in her home country. Where Giving the World Away sees a great leap forward, however, is with its lyrics.

Although it doesn’t quite touch the consistency of 2021’s Made in the Pyrex, this third mixtape’s moody volatility is utterly compelling.

His records aren’t hard to love, but this one just throws itself at you. ... Even the bad vibes – lysergic imagery, a cover of Bruce Springsteen’s Wages of Sin – can’t harsh the fundamental loveliness of Vile’s offering.