On bravura cuts like EVP or the electronic ballad But You, Hynes has both funk and gossamer production skills, the better to unify this sprawling project. Elsewhere the patchwork of sounds don’t quite gel as heroically as you would have hoped.

Átta feels surprisingly unengaging.

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.

His first album in nine years contains decent orchestral tear-jerkers, such as She Chose Me and On the Beach, a vignette of an ageing surf bum, but its lead items fall flat.

On first listen it’s a little difficult but lopsided melodies emerge, the best of which call to mind the blues as played by PiL.

From Prologue, with its deep drone, wash of waves and circling, priestessly choral voices to the closing Adan no Shima no Tanjyosai and its sparsely plucked guitar and elegiac strings and flute, the album casts a still, soothing spell.

Stand for Myself remains attuned to these country-soul stylings, but the full ingredients list is long: old-timey doo-wop on Great Divide, Brandi Carlile backing vocals, plus subtle British inflections.

The band are less assured on the quieter numbers, however. The likes of Milk at McDonald’s and the dreamlike Sue’s are pleasant enough (and the former includes the arresting line “I don’t regret a single drop of alcohol”), but unlike their best work there is precious little in the way of nagging hooks to lodge in one’s head.

Too many songs start engagingly, become slightly less interesting then peter out. And as ever, Tucek’s lyrics fall between pleasingly quotidian and blandly banal, derailing promising tracks such as The Tunnel.

Her follow-up seems brasher, more memorable yet less substantial, lacking the eeriness that made her last work so compelling.

The just-so production and mastery of the American songbook is pure Rostam, while Leithauser anchors these story-songs with a plethora of vocal moods: gargles, croons and yelling.

Another challenging but ultimately rewarding listen.

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.

Pity there's still too much syrup to wade through on other tracks.

Unfortunately, there’s often this vast emotional chasm in his music, a feeling that nothing ever means anything, until the final two tracks, The States and The Last Song, which prove that he can write a lovely, affecting lyric after all.

It's an uneven departure.

There’s still a degree of inconsistency: I Was Just Here is unpleasantly jarring, the wilfully flat vocal delivery not adding to its charm. But there are enough highs to make this worthy of a listen.

While masterfully engineered as always, the album is too polite, lacking the monstrous, alien menace of the band’s bassier efforts. It’s an album that could do with a dub treatment.

He sounds like Bob Dylan or Tom Petty when he sings – laconic, nasal, matter of fact – but his songs thrum and drone and hum like, well, loose ambient rock.

An album that ultimately sounds curiously disengaged.

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.

The questioning Adore is a slow Left Bank skulk, the Savages equivalent to a torch song, but Savages work best at speed.

There are more reflective moments, like Time Is Never on Our Side and If I Could See Your Face Again, where fiddler Eleanor Whitmore sings a widow’s part. Numbers such as Black Lung complete the evocation of thankless blue-collar toil, though Earle has done as much before on 1999’s The Mountain, when no one was voting for Trump.

The title track and single Tantor are decent, and Shakedown a warm beachside strut, with Brown’s lyrical ice shards speared through. Bass Jam is lovely nostalgia, shimmering harmonies surrounding him like ghosts of his former selves. Otherwise, the beats feel slightly tired, casting a pall greater than any of Brown’s recent misfortunes.

This album is crammed with tweeting electronics, hydraulic rhythms, sleights of hand and Smith’s own backseat vocals; she hints at non-western forms and systems music, but never so you are not charmed.

Only Rowland's female foil, Madeleine Hyland, overacts.

Recorded at the same time as Oxnard, Ventura distinguishes itself from its predecessor by being looser and warmer.

The London producer with the voice like a bruise remains perennially inconsolable here.