You Should Know Me is ingratiating simply by virtue of having a full, sinewy bass line; Gutter Punch, although borrowing liberally from Billie Eilish’s Bad Guy in its second verse, is destabilising and magnetic. For the most part, though, Porij can’t help but feel warmed over.

What ties it all together is her beautifully honed skill as a songwriter. For all the sonic uproar, the melodies are impossible to miss, and so is the personality she imprints across the album: troubled but self-aware, wryly funny, the doubts and fears and worries she expresses completely at odds with the confidence of her approach to risk-taking, shape-shifting music.

If it’s hard to avoid a certain deja vu in the urban Manchester feel or Johnson’s signature drum fills, there are more bubbling electronics this time and the songs span a spectrum from introspection to euphoria.

If you wanted to pick holes, The Tortured Poets Department is a shade too long.

David Kennedy’s drumming is riveting, both finicky and louche as he sways through Dilla-time funkiness and math-rock detail. Guitarist Finlay Clark is in some ways a minimalist, repeating pretty riffs or expertly chosen chords, but there’s nothing minimal about his generous playing. .... Most astonishing of all is Jessica Hickie-Kallenbach, singing with more power and confidence than ever before. Her luminously soulful voice is a distinctive instrument, with vibrato that makes whole songs shudder with life.

I’m Doing It Again Baby! takes big, bold swings. Some of them miss.

Devoid of weak tracks or ideas that don’t gel, it’s an album that sounds as if it was made by someone who knows exactly what she’s doing. .... An original pop voice: Fabiana Palladino might well be one of 2024’s best debut albums.

The duo also make room for classy experimentation, adroitly merging jangly blues with languid hip-hop on Paper Crown. The gaps are filled with a series of sunny Beatlesque numbers that feel lightweight and often rather inane. It’s an all-bases approach that doesn’t feel so much like an identity crisis as a slightly underwhelming diffusion of the band’s once heady magic.

If the results don’t quite hold together, Cowboy Carter still proves Beyoncé is impressively capable of doing whatever she wants.

This set’s beautiful opener Defiant, Tender Warrior builds a bewitching trance from soft piano wavelets, growling bass accents and snare-pattern whispers before Lloyd’s breathy tenor long-tones and enraptured top-end warbles even begin.

He experiments with texture and even puts it through a vocoder but, for all Elbow’s adventures, the foundations are still classy songwriting, heart and soul.

On Tigers Blood, she returns clear-eyed and spirited with a twisting country album of anthemic earworms that evoke long summer evenings, intimate chats and misty-eyed regret.

The majority of Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran settles for gliding in one ear and out the other without leaving much impression, but without actively driving you up the wall either: the state of sublime mediocrity in which a lot of current pop chooses to operate.

It’s rare to hear an album that scales such songwriting peaks with the spectacular one-two of Cardinal and Deeper Well before flopping back into total blah-ness. This album proves the line between sublime simplicity and vacant banality can be surprisingly thin.

If the album were 10 tracks rather than 18 – many of which could in turn lose two minutes from their runtime – Timberlake’s musical redemption might be more of a home run. Invariably it sags.

Putting Grande on a pedestal helps no one, and the beatific, mature Eternal Sunshine brings her safely back down to earth.

Centrepiece Turning the Prism slackens the narrative tension, but there’s still something gripping about sitting with its pure affect: arrhythmic beats landing like red-mist punches, Kubacki’s guitar rearing up with an equine whinny. That violence reverberates even through the more placid ambient tracks, resulting in a grim, magnificent record that trades in real horror.

The music is similarly unbothered by what anyone who isn’t already onboard thinks, resting almost entirely on a push-and-pull between the sound of Gallagher and Squire’s former bands.

Y’Y finds Freitas at his most wide-ranging, embodying soft natural ambience as well as dramatic action on the piano. It is an album of mood music that refuses to settle, leaving the listener moved and invigorated.

Even at its most melodious, Playing Favorites still sounds fierce and raw, an object lesson in altering your sound without losing your essence.

MGMT seemed deeply nonplussed by the celebrity Oracular Spectacular conferred on them. But while you wait and see, Loss of Life is a delightful thing to immerse yourself in.

Stevie Wonder’s Overjoyed (a fittingly ecstatic Iyer homage to Chick Corea’s interpretation) is unfolded over a rocking left hand and Tyshawn Sorey’s crackling polyrhythms, sparking one of several breathtakingly headlong Iyer solos on the set, coolly placing fragments and twists of the original theme into the onrush despite its scorching pace.

In truth, Lytle’s crestfallen songs – sung in plaintive sigh suggesting Brian Wilson channelling Charlie Brown’s existential angst – are a seductive joy, and getting lost in his soft-focus happy-sadness is an addictive pleasure all its own.

Not everything on Tangk works, but the vast majority of it does, with an urgency that draws you into its message of positivity: reason enough to break out the freudenfreude.

As per usual, the actual music is hard to hear over the accompanying clamour, but if you strain your ears you can make out an album that’s an improvement on 2021’s Donda. It’s still uneven in a way that occasionally makes you wonder what on earth Volumes 2 and 3 of Vultures are going to sound like.

Dissociative, distinctive album.

On paper, All Life Long looks like hard work for anyone whose musical tastes don’t usually dwell on the avant garde fringes. The reality is that it requires virtually no effort on the part of the listener: you just have to let yourself succumb.

It’s all very pleasant if familiar – not as thrilling or groundbreaking as, say, 1976’s Super Ape: Jesus Life all but mirrors Max Romeo’s reggae classic Chase the Devil (recorded with Perry’s band the Upsetters and later sampled by the Prodigy). Still, it’s hard not to be moved by the atypical and lovely Goodbye, which features piano and strings by classical composer Hugo Bechstein.