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.