A sense of sisterhood is a huge part of Haim’s appeal, yet the humorous camaraderie and rocky swagger they present on stage all but vanishes in the studio.

Chopped and diced from a variety of sources, it packs a lyrical punch, but nothing here transcends his internet hit.

Views genuinely makes for mesmerising listening, even if much of the album seems to consists of lazy meanders through Drake's psyche.

Variably groovy and often catchy, Hyperdrama represents a marked improvement in Justice’s output. It’s easy to see why the band have had such a hard time topping Cross, however: Generator, the album’s strongest track, proves they’re still at their best when they stick to the sound that put them on the map 17 years ago.

It can be a little underwhelming but it is music with its heart in the right place.

The result is a quirky and poignant little time capsule.

Mildly soulful, rarely unpalatable, the Chili Peppers keep delivering American fast-food for the ears, even as they enter their sixties.

It's an album marinated in sadness, so much so that in places it veers into the maudlin, but Harris's poetic steel usually saves the day.

When they're playing to their strengths, the 1975 provide a robust platform for Healey’s witty, romantic, confused yet always committed interrogation of the essential artifice of his role as reluctant rock star with a conscience, shouting into a void already filled with the echoes of other voices. Like many double albums, there is a fine single album here fighting to get out. If only.

There are 11 songs on When You See Yourself, filled with pretty words and lovely tunes, but I would struggle to tell you what any of them are about. Although blessed with a raw, raspy tone that could make a shopping list sound sexy, Followill’s vocals are buried in a bass-heavy mix.

Her worthier sentiments are balanced by maturing wit, self-awareness and the distinctive snap'n'slap of her funky guitar grooves.

The songs themselves may not be complex but the simple and sincere emotions expressed on anthems such as the chiming indie epic Forever, the rip-roaring AC/DC-style rocker Running Round My Brain and the Rod-Stewart-flavoured piano ballad Every Dog Has Its Day carry a potent weight of feeling and offer euphoric release.

The songs are catchy, the emotions are sincere, and it is all driven by an intense desire to connect. But somehow Yungblud always sounds as if he’s trying too hard.

It sounds utterly gorgeous, and perhaps this laid-back, stripped-down folksy bent is part of a generational pop shift, echoing the intimate minimalism of Billie Eilish – but I have my doubts. ... Lorde’s lyrics are still acute, her singing superb, her songs beguiling, but her perspective has shifted from every-girl outsider to over-privileged solipsist. Solar Power is underpowered and unlikely to set the world on fire.

Styles’s curveball is more eccentric but more appealing, with an endearing quality of relish in its musical adventures. It is so old-fashioned it may actually come across as something new to its target audience.

Given that it's for dancing, Butler's production tends toward the cool--even plodding--but his polishing up of 20-year-old stylistic tics still entertains.

The first half's vocal tracks woefully resemble standard-issue chart fodder. There's some better instrumental stuff later on, but, overall, it's ordinary.

The lyrics cleverly incorporate words and ideas from each programme. But a soundtrack featuring all the oddball artists from the series would have been more interesting.

Even if Years & Years aren’t taking any risks with the sound of the moment, they use it to good effect.

If you're already a Biffy Clyro fan, Opposites might be your idea of a masterpiece. If you're new to Biffy, it'll just give you a headache.

While You & I doesn’t break any new ground, it’s a spirited and smartly produced – if brief – album.

The country singer turns 80 at the end of the month and although much of the album saunters along, Nelson can still fill a song with emotion, as he shows on his own composition The Better Part of Me.

Archive seem strangely restricted, dulling their more inventive edges with a black-and-white quality of mood, texture, rhythm and melody, that leaves you craving emotional colour.

More solid, stadium stompers bulk out this second album.

Whilst it is purposefully lacking in intention, the experimental album has its moments of whimsy but feels noticeably devoid of humour, surprising for a musician known for his zaniness. Still a cohesive affair, it’s an apt depiction of transience and Mac DeMarco is taking us all along for the ride.

The fifth album by Great Lake Swimmers, called New Wild Everywhere, is melodic and graceful.

There are things going on here that will, in all likelihood, percolate through to stadium pop in due course but Hyde lacks the vocal presence or structural songcraft to shape the material into something greater than its parts.

All 4 Nothing ultimately fails to expand his sound.

Sing In My Meadow is unsettling, interesting and, when it works, very affecting.

There’s a lot of great stuff on here, but it doesn’t hold together and doesn’t come close to being one of Springsteen’s great albums.

It's not an album that takes itself too seriously (one song is called I'm No Elvis Presley) but it's an upbeat romp of a CD with some fine song songs such as Black Fly.

Their second album combines ballistic rave pop with tougher bass-laden sounds and is an effectively youthful update on the Prodigy's formula.

Recommended for the drive home from festivals.

Full of sparkling hooks, the results do a good job of melding Minogue’s effervescent pop grooves with the dense, heavily treated vocals and deep sub bass of modern electro dance trends.... Subject matter and delivery are strained by coquettish pandering.

Although rejected by the singer in his lifetime, this is pop, not high art, and it has been handled with considerable care, giving us a glimpse, however illusory, of what this extraordinary talent might actually sound like had he lived.

Only a couple of cumbersome yet oddly elegiac acoustic ballads push the Stooges outside of their comfort zone.

Creative but by no means cohesive, Crossan has clearly enjoyed himself with this album.

Highlights are all duets with strong women, notably Stevie Nicks.

Sutherland has absolutely earned the right to celebrate his success. It’s just a shame that, with 17 tracks to play with, Great is He doesn’t go a little deeper.

There's definitely real talent with LeBlanc but he needs to forget about having an image created for him and concentrate, as one of his musical heroes Townes Van Zandt might have put on, on writing for the sake of the song.

It may be nothing new but her punchy, uplifting set of pastiche Sixties and Seventies soul, r’n’b and disco is perfectly pitched with just an appealing hint of exaggeration.

She oversings to compensate, as if by keeping notes moving we won’t notice weaknesses, and there are moments of synthetic fluctuation that suggest recourse to autotune techniques routinely used to polish performances of lesser contemporary pop singers. The material does her no favours.

There are songs where it feels like there’s been a huge step-change in Nesbitt’s writing, as on When You Lose Someone. ... Some songs, however, fall right back into the clumsy patterns of Nesbitt’s earlier work

Sting sounds earnest and isolated: like a man singing bleakly out to sea. But he veers towards hammy at times, laying his Geordie accent on a little too thickly.

It's a pleasure to hear her scatting her way through moods and melodies, sketching vocals out, even when they don't work.

Alpha Games should please their established fanbase, but Bloc Party still sound strangely ambivalent, trapped between the visceral thrill of lean, modern guitar music and their doubts about its form and function.

The overall impression is of a super-slick exercise in generic, glossy, team-built, uber-commercial RnB-pop. Still, Anne-Marie has the kind of voice and presence that could make anybody’s day better.

Canadian band Great Lake Swimmers excel on I Was a Wayward Pastel Bay, a gentle song which shows off frontman Tony Dekker’s country music skills.

Crazy In Love aside, this generically pleasant and wafty album makes a better accompaniment to laundering sheets than rolling in (or being tied up with) them.

It is not unimpressive, with energy and attack and flashes of wit but there are too few of the kind of mad pop moments that make you stop in your tracks and not enough evidence that Williams is stretching and growing as a songwriting talent.

Lakeman again shows off his fine multi-instrumental skills--songs such as The Wanderer buzz--and there is a delightful slow lament called Portrait of My Wife.

The predictable result is an album that sounds far too reverent to the originals.

The good news is that, from its amusingly headlong title down, Different Gear, Still Speeding feels a good deal less lumpy than the last few Oasis albums.

There are songs about baseball, weather and enduring domestic love, acutely observed and delivered in tones so smooth they slip past in a soft blur.

Nine originals interspersed with the overfamiliar classics indicate a songwriter’s fascination with rock form, but only I Want You Back (sung with Steven Tyler) justifies its position nestled between so many inarguable classics.

It is quirkily appealing without quite being convincing. Lacking an emotional centre, it’s not really deep and dark enough to posit Ellis-Bextor as a sensitive singer-songwriter.

She attacks old soul numbers with gusto, turning them into cheery Stones-ish romps, but is at her best on pared-back material heavy with world-weary pathos.

Madonna's infinite varieties have certainly staled.

If you take this album in the spirit of throwaway fun in which it seems to have been concocted, it is harmlessly engaging, although all of these tracks have been delivered more persuasively before.

It is hard to get overheated about something so determinedly tepid. And yet, dropped amid the frenzy of pop radio, Horan’s songs are immediately distinctive.

Her smarter, odder lines (“Put your hand on my piano”) stand out amid the clubbing clichés, though her high, slightly strangled, often shouted vocals don’t.

Apart from the smattering of country inflections, there are no great surprises in store.

If this record feels like a triumph of style over substance, I still like its style.

The record could do with more tunes to make use of that talent, but it’s still nice to see him back.

14 songs over an hour's running time is a lot of nonsense to digest. For the Chili Peppers, songwriting is a medium without a message, unless it's just to let your inhibitions go and dance.

There are still a little too many US FM radio pop-metal vocals, but happily there's also plenty of fierce, melody-laced drum & bass action that will please festivals and dancefloors the world over.

Though the materials accompanying Nobody is Listening insist that it’s Zayn’s most personal record to date, and the one over which he’s had the most personal control, it’s hard to find much trace of him here.

The glossy results lack any particular character. Peppered with hooks and catchy melodies, everything sounds like something you might have heard somewhere before, which in the case of Ed Sheeran soundalike single No Judgement you almost certainly have.

They’ve tried to update the quintessentially Eighties sound of the original to make it fit for a modern audience. The result is often a strange hybrid, which is enjoyable only as long as one doesn’t expect to hear too much Miles Davis.

Most of the songs here do somewhat merge into one, long, party soundtrack that is enjoyable to listen to and yet entirely forgettable.

While the tricksy chord changes upon which most tracks are founded may be clever, or possibly ground-breaking, these recordings seriously lack oomph.

It may not be his most cohesive collection but when it comes to concocting sad bangers artfully combining bittersweet emotion with mesmeric dance grooves, Moby is too good to dismiss.

For Kings of Leon to remain interesting and relevant, they need to stop trying to be the band the music business seems to want them to be and start following Caleb Followill’s muse wherever it leads.

Throughout, the arrangements are as relentlessly upbeat and playfully retro as the album’s Alan Fears-designed artwork, stuffed with vocoders, peacocking basslines and laser-beam synth sounds. They’re also wildly referential, and largely fail to add anything either fresh or memorable to the conversation.

The results sound as if Lynch's old protégé Chris Isaak had taken a left turn into lyrical eccentricity, pulsing synths and sinister atmospherics.

It's wholly derivative, yet the tuneful, instantly gratifying choruses often trump one's desire to play spot the influence.

It contains Frankie Knuckles-era house music, hip-hop breaks and some interesting electronica. However, the band are not the genre-defying pioneers they think they are.

Although it's a bright and buoyant effort--with recognisable touches of ska and reggae--her new album lacks the left-field flourishes that make her special.

The problem with Justice is that Bieber thinks his music is more powerful than it actually is.

Agnetha: still as seductively normal, beautifully boring and enigmatically familiar as ever.

The result is not bad: though you miss the unpredictable blasts of raw hellfire from the cult classic Surfer Rosa era, the band find some gritty, grindy melodies in the bigger, slicker vein of 1991’s patchy Trompe Le Monde.

It’s a shame to see a talented guy rushed into making the wrong record.

Business as usual, then, with few new thrills.

The production doesn't always give Nicks's gothic imagery enough waft, but fans will love puzzling over which of her paramours she's recalling on Secret Love.

Lurking behind the sisterly triumphalism, though, is a conflicted message about being rescued from the shelf (“All before I lose my faith/ Just like magic, he came and saved my fall from grace”), and it has the unfortunate effect of turning a march of the Valkyries into a last stand of the spinsters. But sexual politics aside (and we will get to that), All Saints’ new album is pretty great, one you wished they had made back in 2001, when people might have cared.

An all-killer, no-filler approach ensures every track pulls its weight, yet the album never quite adds up to more than the sum of its pleasant parts.

There are big, generalised emotions: hurt, love, loss, transcendence. But none of the tiny, idiosyncratic observations that make and break relationships.

It's a mixed bag.

Pitched somewhere between his two most famous albums, Play and 18, it's hardly groundbreaking but is enjoyable none the less.

Too much of the record sounds like generic, Katy Perry-esque power-pop.

Lopez’s voice is technically fine but has a thinness that doesn’t really suit the exposure of digitally clinical modern production settings. She jettisons all Latin flavouring, which might have been her superpower.

For now Birdy remains a novelty. Her rich, malleable vocals suggest, however, that she won't be caged for long.

The foray ultimately fails because Laurie's voice is no more than adequate.

His overdue follow up is absolutely stuffed to the rafters with another round of big, weepie ballads about how miserable his love life is.

An over eagerness to keep up to date has resulted in making Twain sound less mature than her successor. On Queen of Me, Twain comes across as Swift’s over eager auntie, charging onto the dancefloor, determined to prove she still has the moves to cut it with the kids.

Their once-ebullient anthems have been replaced by a collection of mid-tempo, uninspiringly ponderous tracks.

For the Wu-Tang purists, twitchy for a return to the raw Only Built 4 Cuban Linx sonics, the music here isn’t exactly going to quench your thirst. But it’s further proof that what the RZA truly savours is stepping outside of his comfort zone, and it's a relief to once again hear a little weirdness in rap.

It’s a long way from the rocker's angry persona, but he’s always had a soppy side. Sometimes the lyrics are also sloppy.