Sigrid has delivered a suite of tracks that explore a theme without becoming tiresome, with slick songwriting and polished production to help the message hit home.

Unlike those other Radiohead solo and side projects, you can easily imagine The Smile appealing to more than those aforementioned obsessives. As a soundtrack to these unsettling, rather terrifying times, you won’t find many better composers than Yorke and Greenwood.

While some may find the almost gossamer light touch a bit insubstantial, repeated plays will find Radiate Like This weaving its way into your heart. Despite it being a long time in the making, it almost feels like Warpaint have never been away.

Over the last few years, she’s become one of America’s finest songwriters, and this album shows her continuing that trajectory.

They’ve had their day doing one thing, they now need to do another, and while further albums are even less likely than this one, Happiness Not Included feels like something of a missed opportunity.

While there are no surprises to be found on A Bit Of Previous – it’s pretty much a textbook example of how a Belle and Sebastian album should sound after 20 years – it’s a warm, comforting return for a band who do what they do extremely well.

It’s an album that crystallises just what makes Arcade Fire so great, and when they hit the mark, as they do several times on this record, there’s nobody to touch them. It’s good to have them back on form.

Scalping have produced 35 minutes of vehemence and vigour that has enough depth to repay repeat listens. If Slavestate was an industrial-dance crossover, this is more like a metal-techno crucifixion.

The more instrumentally talented Eno has struck gold with these pretty arrangements, providing a worthy reminder of why his career hasn’t fallen victim to the passing of time.

The broadening of their musical palette here has offered up multiple directions for the duo, but they still retain the distinct Girlpool vibe on their most accomplished album yet, one augmented by a rare magic.

This isn’t their strongest album – that’s a dead heat between Sehnsucht and Mutter – but it’s at least as good as the three albums preceding it, and that means it’s a very good album indeed. ... This is also – you’ll see – an endlessly replayable album.

For all the sonic invention which they usually display, it’s the raw emotion and sadness on Two Ribbons which make this Let’s Eat Grandma’s finest album yet.

Forced to do something different out of circumstances, Owens searched deep within her musical soul and tapped into her deepest creative touchstones to record a remarkable record, one that’s a product of a distinct time and place in history.

At times, Alpha Games does hark back to the glorious early days of Bloc Party, and while this doesn’t quite measure up to Silent Alarm, there’s enough evidence that the band’s line-up changes have reinvigorated them.

The music is uniformly simple but beautifully effective. It sounds like what it is, one man telling you stories and weaving beguiling tales of distinct and not too distant lands through a carefully intricate and delicate soft rock tapestry.

There was always a risk that Heart Tax may feel a bit stitched together. Fortunately, the opposite is the case – this is an album to dive into and luxuriate in.

Invisible Forces is a deliberately minimal affair, as even formal notation is eschewed in favour of an intuitive musical journey, and if this makes the album repetitive it will surely still be put on repeat by fans of this sort of thing.

Part catharsis, confession, panacea, exhumation and confrontation, these are mantras for healing, hurting and helping. Their elliptical nature leaves room for interpretation, and offers a way in for those who may be suffering unawares, without losing any of the passion behind their delivery.

If nothing on Everything Was Beautiful feels truly essential to anyone with the Spiritualized back catalogue, it’s also a glowing example of their aesthetic.

It all adds up to a magnificent third album which serves as the crowning point of a career that is, excitingly, still in its infancy.

There is little filter on the creativity here as White’s legacy allows him to explore and indulge odd ideas, but it could do with some productive channelling. Hence Fear Of The Dawn ends up a partially enjoyable but partially frustrating listen.

Horace Andy is clearly an artist not content to rest on his laurels, and with this album he strengthens his position as a bona fide reggae legend.

The album could have been a niche critical favourite that marked them out as just curious oddities. Instead every preconception has been firmly smashed. Firmly on track to become the biggest band in the country, Wet Leg are here to shake the post pandemic culture out of its slumber.

El Mirador is up there with their strongest albums, certainly rivalling the likes of 2003’s acclaimed Feast Of Wire as possibly their best.

This album at its best can be genuinely explosive – see Holding Back with its booming trap beats and chipmunk-soul hook – but Banks’ central problem on Serpentina is how to channel emotion without straying into musical indulgence, and how to evoke situations without wallowing in them.

You Belong There is a genuinely transporting, multi-dimensional song cycle and a glimpse into a fascinating musical mind that demands repeated plays. It’s destined to appear on album of the year lists but its depth and sense of ambition will ensure its treasures last well beyond 2022.

In their second album Confidence Man provide us with the feel good music we desperately need right now, taking the weight from our shoulders and offering more than a semblance of hope in difficult times.

There’s the occasional curveball, such as the Latin shuffle of Olvidado (Otro Momento), but for most part the music hovers on an astral plane between speakeasy jazz and the later nexus of Dylan, Nilsson and Newman. The result is strangely timeless.