Although there’s no hit to rival the Selma soundtrack epic, Glory, and a reunion with its vocalist John Legend is the worst of furrowed-brow, gluten-free beat poetry, this is intelligent, impressive work.

It’s an aural through line as she dazzles us with her range: unexpected dancefloor bangers (Prove It to You), pellucid vintage soul and exultant funk.

Each of the tracks released from Designer so far has been engrossing – The Barrel, with its opaque lyricism (“show the ferret to the egg”), the equally gnomic Fixture Pixture, with its Air bassline.

Magdalene is a much starker, more emotionally direct album than 2014’s LP1, most noticeably in twigs’s voice, which moves with sleek power from delicate operatic acrobatics to muscular intimacy. It’s also bracingly frank.

In truth, Letter to You is cheesier than a Monterey Jack, shameless in its embrace of cliche. ... Conversely, then, Letter to You is exactly the album some people could use right now, a sledgehammer of succour and uplift, a heroic E Street pile-on of the kind fans and guitarist Steve Van Zandt have been lobbying for, for years.

It's a downer, but timely and affecting, with moments of beauty.

Almost everything else, however, is a treat, the successive iterations of Communication Breakdown and Dazed… showcasing the evolving chemistry of one of Britain’s greatest ever bands.

It’s pretty special too. ... If a sense of discomfiture has run through all Sault’s albums – they challenge, seethe and weep, confound expectation, change tack abruptly – there is never a sense of a misstep.

On this sequel, Gibbs mostly sounds bored, aggressively bored or boringly aggressive. The ever creative Madlib chucks in everything he can find to dazzle the listener. When this coheres--in the vicious swamp-beat of Massage Seats, for example--it’s sensational. Often his work sounds too dense to compete with mass-market trap, and struggles to support Gibbs’s gruff rhymes.

Crown and Treaty is at times wonderful, particularly on "Blue Sky Falls", "Joyful Reunion" and "Brugada".

The Unthanks don’t falter on what is their first “proper” album in seven years, though the nine minutes of the Sandgate Dandling Song, a Victorian ballad about domestic violence, inclines to the ponderous. They are better when airborne, as on The Old News or Royal Blackbird, a Jacobite song given a lively violin arrangement.

The record’s dreamlike atmosphere is seductive and disquieting; a moving tribute to Albion’s troubled soul.

Orquídeas’s variegation means it’s not quite the no-skip concept album that was Red Moon. But in a rapidly decompartmentalising pop landscape, where Spanglish is increasingly a lingua franca, Uchis’s flair and depth cuts across whatever notional cultural barriers might remain.

Packed as it is with all this goodness, Art Angels fails to comprehensively blow your mind. Ultimately, Grimes has not reinvented the pop wheel, she’s just driven it off road a little.

Musically, Dawn FM mirrors Tesfaye’s disquiet, its buffed electronic sheen ruptured by moments of discord, as when ballad Starry Eyes teeters on the brink of implosion. It’s a state that Tesfaye seems to relish, with often stunning results.

There are words of love for suicidal addicts (Alibi) and a sense of the distance travelled, while remaining constant: an outlier whose solidarity with the runaways and the marginalised endures.

The result is their most varied and expansive record to date.

Comparisons with such late-career highlights as Johnny Cash’s American Recordings albums and Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker are inevitable, but Negative Capability really does belong in such exalted company.

This is a carnival of imagination with an intricate balance to its sequencing and a cohesion of sound and concept to die for.

Separate Ways and Try are wounded but tender breakup songs, Kansas a gentle reflection on a one-night stand. An unremarkable band blues and an unlistenable finger-on-wineglass affair contribute little to an album that’s well-found but, like much of Young’s recent output, for the committed.

Here, straightforward prettiness often abounds, particularly on the country-leaning tracks, some with the odd female backing coo.

Filthy Underneath feels like an intelligently calibrated vehicle in which musical and emotional progress is made, even as suffering laps at the running boards like flood water.

Recorded quickly, with most of the 10 songs featuring Anohni’s original vocal takes, it’s an album that manages to wear its heaviness lightly and quickly buries its way under your skin.

Fever Ray’s first new music in eight years finds Karin Dreijer (she seems to have lost the Andersson) in fierce form.

Some moments fall flat – Lonely is cloying, paint-by-numbers EDM-pop that doesn’t fully land. Still, Indigo is a polished collection that spans both pop and rap with confidence.

The magnificently eerie Four Kinds of Horses is the record’s peak, while maternal elegy And Still feels like the most open, vulnerable song he has ever sung.

An ambitious triumph.

It is a juicy, genre-crossing pop record ripe with the funk, which somehow combines Beyoncé’s Lemonade and St Vincent’s Masseduction with lashings of Lauryn Hill.