[The record] takes the idea of a stopgap album full of odds and ends and reimagines it as something much more satisfying.

There’s an easy-going beauty to this music that is more redolent of succour than anger. Some might find this record a little too pretty.

His honeyed voice and ear for a gratifying hook combine with a tricksy musical intelligence so that, although the quality's a bit uneven on his debut, the best bits rouse and wrongfoot you in equal measure.

Nothing as pretty as 2019’s Debold, but it feels like his most accessible project so far – far more engaging than Headache, his recent AI-performed side hustle.

He is all messed up about a girl on Love Is Not a Four Letter Word and the keyboard fantasia of Her; songs about the planet and his mother also figure.

This is pop by committee, with half-a-dozen writers' credits per song; some identikit urban pop cuts such as Another One ill suit a kid from Brighton.

While All 4 Nothing marks a partial progression for Leff, he still has some way to go to make his records memorable – whether they stand at 21 tracks or a baker’s dozen.

While it starts thrillingly--the title track and Lights Out as good as anything they’ve ever done and reminiscent of Queens of the Stone Age at their most imperious--they fail to sustain their momentum, the middle of the album suffering from a surfeit of unremarkable filler.

Despite plenty of clever ideas, too much of Sunlit Youth sounds so polished it becomes oddly disengaging.

Uptempo numbers such as the Pharrell-produced Tamagotchi and the chugging Talk, meanwhile, feel shoehorned in for radio play, removing breathing space for Apollo’s vibrato-laden voice and overstuffing the record to 16 tracks. Apollo’s aptitude for unexpected genres can provide beautiful results, as on the yearning En El Olvido, but it can equally speak of a jarring restlessness.

The jumps between genres barely jar once you realise how good Doyle is at all of them.

At least there is a handful of genuinely winning tunes--See Through, in particular, is sunny indie that recalls Pavement at their least obtuse--amid the more formulaic fare.

There’s little in the way of surprises but this is a solidly enjoyable collection.

With this album, you'll be scrabbling for a lyric sheet because Homme seems so uncharacteristically unmoored.

The album has a tentative quality which is sometimes beguiling – the gently grooving "Lights Out, Words Gone", effete and insistent all at once, is a delight – but often they sound in need of more conviction.

Pony meanders, seemingly uncertain of its purpose, but Rex Orange County retains enough charm and honesty to remain engaging while he figures himself out.

They've pushed unconvincing edginess with clubbier sounds, including the title track, an overloaded mess of dubstep breaks and house beats.

There are hints of experimentation, such as Nice to Meet Ya’s swaggering hybrid of Arctic Monkeys and Kasabian, but it’s the excellent title track’s flirtation with glossy, synth-tinged MOR that suggests where Horan might be headed next. Proof that it’s often the quiet ones you need to keep an eye on.

The record feels disjointed, but a few productions stand out as some of their most inventive yet, particularly the intricate weave of synth and organic sounds on James Blake collaborations We Go Home Together and How We Got By.

They're at their best when they do a little less, as on the surprisingly melancholy and lovely Henrietta.

Too often, though, style triumphs over substance, and too many songs flail in their own restrained elegance. Worse, the hidden track featuring a child mangling the alphabet is painfully self-indulgent rather than cute.

Their songs are surprisingly melodic; sweet, even--well, with the possible exception of Whore.

Looser, grungier, fuzzier and yet more abrupt, perhaps, than latter-day Wilco offerings, Star Wars is proof that you can get considerably more than you pay for.

Their debut album is shadowed by tragedy, lead singer Dan Klein having succumbed to neurological disease shortly after its completion. His keening falsetto is at the heart of the record, a set of elegant, tortured love songs that occasionally betray Klein’s anguish.

Dunis's flat tones can let the side down, but otherwise, the swoon is in the details.

As always, the emotions lie in the spaces between the pellucid notes.

These arrangements are never overloaded, the brass remains stately and discreet. If Reid never quite poleaxes you with her insights, this remains a thoroughly lovely record.

Best listened to as discrete tracks rather than as a whole, and never quite scaling the heights of Paradise or 2014’s Deep Fantasy, this album is a pleasing but flawed swansong.

It’s not a bad album by any stretch, just disappointing compared to past glories.

The ensuing drama is as subtle as a bludgeon to the head, but the interplay between its main personages – including AZ and Kool G Rap--proves these old-timers have fight in them yet.

These songs work a gentle charm, reflecting on life and mortality with an unhurried grace.

The quality tails off quite dramatically, with a string of unremarkable ballads closing the album, but this is still a pleasing return to something approaching their best.

It's the band's refusal to sound older, or wiser, that's integral to their charm.

Broadly speaking, After You succeeds as a rich, expansive set of sophisticated classic pop – but, unlike Peñate’s early work, it feels somewhat irrelevant to 2019.

He’s a smart, self-assured lyricist--confident enough to end with a 14-minute thank-you track--but not as interesting in his contradictions as the likes of Drake or Kanye West.

The standout is Suicide's Dream Baby Dream, which, much like Cherry's version of the Stooges' Dirt, is turned into a masterclass in controlled chaos.

Every so often, Gibson's evil Elvis bent can become a little comedic but the pitch-black pitch suits his material down to the ground.

This trim nine-song set is packed with tuneful love songs that never outstay their welcome--knick-knacks to a haiku, maybe, more than monuments to an elegy, and all the better for it.

Their debut album muses woozily on sleep, memory and psychoanalysis. For all that, they are no more mind-bending than scores of recent shoegaze revivalists.

It may not rank among Wilco's boldest works. It could have done with more wig-outs. But it captures the art of the almost with both hands.

Full of defiant brio and what you might charitably call unreconstructed Stonesiness – the Sydney Sweeney-starring video for Angry is a case in point; the LP’s Bill Wyman cameo is another – Hackney Diamonds is packed with convincing echoes of the band in its pomp.

Rich with on-point retro-futurist sounds, such as the gem-like, sultry neo-soul of Green Aphrodisiac. ... But there’s some unwelcome pandering to all markets in ghastly guitar ballad Stop Where You Are, a misstep looking for a Coldplay album, and a couple of tracks where smoothness wins out over personality.

Two of these cuts have already graced the top 10; the rest of Disclosure's debut album showcases a sound in which the echoes of two-step, UK funky and older house records recombine into a surprisingly timely and moreish soundtrack.

There are occasional missteps – the closing two minutes of Dvergmál veer worryingly close to windswept arena rock, and elsewhere there’s a ponderousness in places – but this is a good document of a bold artistic move.

These moves are still tentative, and talk of artistic progression is often the kiss of death, but Girl Ray have moved out of a place of limitations into more kaleidoscopic musicality.

This duo's assured, accessible third album builds upon their reputation as omnivorous digital stylists

End of World is frustratingly hit and miss – the staccato glam-rock stylings of The Do That are particularly annoying – but then you suspect that the arch contrarian Lydon wouldn’t have it any other way.

The first three songs are superb, especially the blissfully silly acrostic Magic (“G for the girl that got me good/ I C the world the way I should”), but it’s a glossily one-note album, an uncomplicated toast to desire sated, friendship reciprocated and love requited.

Nothing else on Home Video can match this intensity [on "Thumbs"], but Dacus’s writing retains its forthrightness throughout.

Azalea's flow is both playful and authoritative, and above-par surprises unfurl on the productions.

On this persuasive second outing, the endless beach seems a grey and loveless place without the object of La Roux's desire.

Having mastered the vocals, Rationale still needs to work on consistency in his songwriting.

The result is an invigorating if disorientating listen, as Nasty hurtles from a seductive trap tête-à-tête with Aminé (Back and Fourth) into songs resembling Korn (Girl Scouts, Let It Out). To some this will sound like a gimmick; to others it’s the future.

Bleeds opens with a tirade against the free market labels pretty much everybody as bastards. That bitterness resurfaces elsewhere on the album but the urgency, so bracingly misanthropic on Hard Bastards, starts flagging halfway through.

At its best this is earthy, experimental pop, but the unusual sounds that pique the interest come too inconsistently.

Never shy of delivering an electro cri de coeur where a simple chord progression will do, Anthony "M83" Gonzalez fully indulges his fondness for the grand gesture on his sixth record.

Easy-going vintage soul that rolls magnificently on the ear.

Come-hither pop does not loom large on Harry Styles, the long-longed-for debut solo venture from the 1D heartthrob. Strummed ballads are the order of the day, as is rock, and MOR cuts that sound a tad too Gary Barlow, too soon--prematurely matured, perhaps.

It's all slick and tuneful but, bar the shoegaze-indebted Felt, feels like business as usual.

Her fourthcorrect, country-tinged album is no mere musical mope, but features writerly vignettes and restrained introspection.

Such drama [as on Full Circle or Unofferable], though, is absent from Dark Eyes' second half, most of which could have been crafted in the 90s and, for all Portielje's efforts, is too sterile to excite.

There’s always a gooey pleasure to hearing her sing, but you’d hope someone launched through gospel to the American Idol finals and an Oscar win might find better material in an R&B world thundering with great songwriters.

You do wonder what he would sound like with a less self-consciously hidebound band, but once again Langley veers between the mundane (Dead Tree! Dead Tree!) and the captivating (Poetland) with Puckish – and punkish – inconstancy. Ranting here, muttering there.

There are gestures towards something deeper – rapper Roots Manuva rattling his baritone at the end of You Ain’t No Celebrity, or the harsh, thumping bass of Holding On – but largely, Volcano trades on Jungle’s same, safe formula. There is little new in the nostalgia of these 14 tracks.

While All Melody’s textures are magnificent, plick-plocking susurrations, his treatment of the human voice is like a gash in an otherwise beauteous canvas.

Great art doesn’t have to come from a place of great discomfort, but it often helps. Always Tomorrow always chooses cosseting its audience over confronting more painful truths.

Their longer songs at times dissolving into aimless jamming. The quieter ones, meanwhile, have a tendency to drift past prettily but inconsequentially.

It all adds up to an album that’s solid rather than spectacular.

You can have too much gauze and balm; if only Legrand and Scally could find a slightly different gear.

The quieter songs don’t always burn so brightly. Here, there can be a fine line between balladry and pedestrianism, but the listener is never far away from a killer lyric.

All their little watermarks reappear. We get irregular time signatures, birdsong and other found sounds; long, wordless passages and tricksy skits; and an intoxicating confidence in their arrangements.

The scrappy underdog bite of, say, their quarter-arsed, one-minute cover of the Bee Gees’ unimprovable Stayin’ Alive is swapped for a swathe of toothless tunes neither cool nor commercial enough to satisfy hardcore fans or find an entirely new audience. The band’s mayfly magic endures, though, particularly on The Way That You Do’s ragged clarity, the hypnotically repetitive Big Bad Want or live favourite Corner Store.

The X Factor contestant's first album is an exhausting, if lovable mess of cartoon-bright, turbo-charged grime-pop.

The exclusion of US hit Classic Man (which soundtracks a key scene in the Oscar-nominated Moonlight) leaves the album lacking a truly memorable moment, but the Afrobeat-inspired A Little Bit More and the carefree, soca-style Some Kind of Way showcase a versatile, genre-bending talent.

For all these derivations, however, Life After Defo convinces, its downcast, sweet-bleak beauty becoming more individual with every play.

Her wisp of a voice has found more weight and with it more feeling.

It's a classy, dialled-down performance in an American radio studio around the time of this year's Coachella festival.

The new styles don’t all gel.

By refusing to play it safe, they'll further diminish their original fanbase, but such boldness is to be applauded.

It’s not without its longueurs--Oily Boker is an unremarkable five minutes--but at least Doherty can once again show why anybody was bothered about him in the first place.

Busier tracks like Birdcage or Gaze--an actual incidence of dance music--confirm how nimble Actress can be when he takes off those lead boots.

Dodge the mountain range formed by all those raised eyebrows and there are some good songs in here.

Chewed Corners, though, finds Paradinas being neither abstruse, nor unsettling, nor minimal. Rather, it joins in the fashion for analogue retro-futurism.

The band fails to sustain the album's early momentum, but there's still much to enjoy here.

The songs often lean more towards the arty end of the mainstream, losing touch slightly with the startling radicalism of Sudan Archives’ early sound.

Tucker is on her second solo album, a return to rocking ways after 2010's quieter 1,000 Years.

Overall, there is rather less doo-wopping on Unorthodox Jukebox, an album that, despite its title, deserves your grudging respect, and a little more hooliganism.

The more direct songs work best – most notably the simmering Shadowbanned and the contrastingly carefree bonus track Juliefuckingette – but there is just as much to enjoy in the album’s hinterlands too.

Sigrid is at her best when difficult emotions complicate her pop endorphins. ... Yet there’s a slight feeling, for all the quality here, that she could have maintained her momentum while taking a few more risks with her high-polish sound.

True, her say-what-you-see lyrics are still too pedestrian; seas remain dark and stormy, lines between opposing things are thin. Yet the music often soars. Goulding should trust herself more: she might need more ego, but she doesn’t need EG.0.

Starting with their first single I Watch You, there's enough vim on this debut to excuse a mid-album lull, where their attempts at mantric insistence grow a little leaden.

The best tracks (Fol De Rol, Gibbus Gibson, Groundsboy) flirt with disaster yet retain their discipline but, as is so often the case with the Fall, the music is less interesting than the song titles.

Astronaut Meets Appleman doesn’t quite continue that run of form. It begins and ends beautifully. ... but a handful of songs, the poppy Love Life in particular, break the mood and the emotional connection.

Bennett’s voice is ultimately too thin to carry the emotive heft of her heartbreak material, and Broken Hearts Club works best when she facilitates others to take up its mantle.

Mostly the mood is personal and reflective, with Tilston’s guitar supported by deft touches of bass, autoharp and piano. Classy work.

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.

Sonic derangement figures on this accomplished, disjointed record.

There’s a decent amount of groove and swagger here too, not least in the low-slung funk of Smashed Pianos, and singer Tom Ogden’s vocals, are pitched engagingly between the rough-edged croon of Alex Turner and the florid yelp of Brett Anderson.