Some, this writer included, will miss the fascinating long-form stories of resourceful improvisers on these barely two-minutes-plus tracks. But McCraven is balancing jazz’s precious tradition and its present and future here, and that’s a priceless contribution.

At the other extreme, you could bill kiCK iiiii as Arca’s take on ambient music, although it follows Aphex Twin’s interpretation of the genre, where moments of blissed-out loveliness coexist with disquiet.

Boquifloja sets Arca’s voice over a downtuned guitar riff that feels faintly grungy: its chorus is simultaneously beautiful and unnerving, the music slurring in and out of tune, the vocals glitching and stammering. Xenomorphgirl takes another familiar sound, Auto-Tuned sprechgesang vocals, and maroons them in an alien electronic landscape that keeps shifting from calming to threatening.

It’s a restless, challenging listen – beats that sound like gunfire, churning and gibbering electronic noise. She distorts her vocals in ways that sometimes remind you of Prince as his female alter-ego Camille, or the helium samples of old hardcore, though they generally sound quite nightmarish.

It’s a brilliant reimagining of 21st-century pop as a space in which the traditional and experimental can cohabit.

In the 70s and 80s, you were never far from a new release repackaging Bowie’s pre-fame 60s material, usually with a cover photograph that deceptively implied the contents were contemporary rather than archival. Toy offers a more tasteful sampling of that era. It includes the two best songs Bowie wrote before Space Oddity.

Bloodmoon: I never feels like a compromise. Rather, it does exactly what a crossover should, excelling in ways that would have been impossible had either party gone it alone.

You couldn’t blame Adele for declining to even tinker with a formula that clearly ain’t broke. But she does, and it makes for 30’s highlights.

Red (Taylor’s Version) adds satisfying hues of deep, gothic black.

For all its exhausted, preoccupied darkness, The Nearer the Fountain is a genuinely beautiful album.

Rather than reflecting poignantly on the past, much of the rest of Voyage feels terminally stuck there.

[Let’s Do It] feels like proof that Diana Ross could still make a great album if she wanted to, if she was steered more carefully, or partnered more sympathetically. But she hasn’t been, and this is the result: Thank You, but no thank you.

= settles for gently nudging at the boundaries of what he’s known for, most notably on the opening Tides, which thunders along, driven by distorted guitars and double-time drums, and closer Be Right Now, which arrives unexpectedly welded to a Giorgio Moroder-ish synth line. As a result, whatever you already think about Sheeran, = isn’t going to alter it, and neither will a critic’s review.

The LP’s stunning centrepiece is the 10-minute Cruising, where Giske plays fast, florid, extended arpeggios, sometimes adding or subtracting notes, like Philip Glass’s additive process, while his fingers tap out a machine-like rhythm. All the time, Bratten is manipulating sympathetic drones and harmonics, creating a spectral shroud around Giske’s ecstatic burbles.

The culmination is a collection of quietly shimmering songs that demand to be played loud.

Despite the wavering quality, Blue Banisters is an important addition to Lana lore. That she can still manage to be this perplexing after a decade in the game is a massive achievement.

It’s a powerfully intense record that some may recoil from; confrontational and liable to catch you off-guard as Taylor crisply extracts gutting truths from the general murk of self-loathing, never sugarcoating grimness nor over-egging her attempts at self-affirmation. ... It’s remarkable.

Elvin Jones’s elemental muscularity is thunderously upfront in the mix, and Tyner often sounds like the man heading for the exit that he soon turned out to be – but this is a unique document of a landmark 20th-century band at a pivotal moment.

The guitar-led Kingdom pokes at Brexit and the messiness of our government but lacks personal touches, as does by-numbers ballad To Lose Someone. But these are mild complaints amid otherwise distinctive songwriting.

That tension between sweetness and distortion lurches across the album, coming together best in Chaeri, a gothic house devotional to a destitute friend. Tenenbaum seems to writhe through her agonies as she wonders whether she could have done more.

In fairness, Coldplay have pivoted towards pop before – on their Stargate-produced, EDM-infused 2015 album A Head Full of Dreams – but it has rarely sounded as deliberate or as non-organic as this.

Seventeen Going Under is an album rooted in 2021 that, in spirit at least, seems to look back 40-something years, to the brief early 80s period when Top of the Pops played host to the Specials and the Jam. The result is really powerful.

Beyond sympathy and sentiment, Love for Sale disarms cynicism simply by being infectiously good fun.

The mood never feels trite on And Then Life Was Beautiful, but oddly infectious instead, perhaps because the songs are really strong, the lyrics admirably uncliched.

Its retro sensibility and guileless tone means How Beautiful Life Can Be is the guitar music equivalent of comfort food: undemanding, slightly stupefying, but immensely cheering all the same.

Here Employed to Serve prove past masters – Conquering is a gut-churning thrill ride of an album, mercilessly designed for maximal sonic motion sickness.

It hits an impressively eclectic sweet spot between hip-hop and pop, leaping confidently from trap beats and martial horns to grinding, distorted hard rock; from music that recalls early 00s R&B to stadium ballads. The genre-hopping is unified by melodies. Song for song, Montero has more hooks – and stickier ones – than any other big rap album thus far released in 2021.

The most freely spontaneous playing boils up on Ornette Coleman’s irresistibly grooving Turnaround, to the rapturous roars of the New York crowd.