Of course, there are still jokes about masturbating, having sex in a church and how to pronounce the word turpentine – but there’s an existential bent to the whole ordeal, too. As their younger selves sang in 1997: I guess this is growing up.

Intriguing and affecting.

What Hackney Diamonds has in profusion is really good songs.

This is an album from an artist who refuses to sugarcoat human experience. That Woods is able to set her unflinching insight to hook-filled, restlessly genre-blending tunes makes her a talent not to be sniffed at.

This is one of the year’s best and most distinctive pop albums, and it’s to Sivan’s credit that even as the genre speeds up around him, he’s keeping pace while making sure to feel the breeze rush by.

This tension leaves For All the Dogs in a strange limbo: its highs are higher than many recent Drake records, and its lows are far lower.

Perhaps no album could tie together all the diverse strands of Stevens’ musical career but, as it ranges from lo-fi singer-songwriter to baroque orchestration to opaque electronics to warped pop, Javelin comes surprisingly close: a remarkable achievement in itself. That it sounds like a holisitic album, one that flows rather than fractures, is remarkable, too – but it does, carrying the listener along with it as it goes.

It is crammed with weepy ballads that skew painfully boilerplate.

AI is poignantly used to mutate vocals and interpret composition, as opposed to the track Memories of Music, where it seems to be given freer rein to write – the result is slapstick played extremely straight. Despite such misfires, Again features some of Lopatin’s most touching music, where the disastrous and the sublime are always second-guessing each other.

Yet despite this genre-hopping, most songs eventually end up in the same realm: that of a bland, plodding vaguely sentimental ballad boasting at least one instantly memorable hook.

Cousin isn’t a completely unprecedented left turn but nor is it a straightforward reanimation of past glories. It’s something else; an album that feels simultaneously familiar and different, satisfying and disquieting.

An extraordinary album.

The desire to offload and flaunt her current relationship at length means Scarlet loses the snappy brevity that was Planet Her’s calling-card. After a while, you feel that points that have already been made are being reiterated, and a long album is made to seem longer still by its weird structure, a glut of slower and more abstract tracks taking up most of its second half.

Laugh Track, the National’s surprise 10th album, is billed as the second half of Frankenstein, with all but one song written at the same time. But the link feels surface-level: Laugh Track does away with the airy atmosphere and hand-wringing solipsism of Frankenstein, instead adopting a more grownup take on the existential conundrums of earlier National records.

It all adds up to an oddly dissatisfying return, albeit one that suggests the Top 40 would be a lot more interesting with Diddy producing it.

There are an awful lot of singer-songwriters around exploring the kind of subjects Mitski touches on here: disillusionment, isolation, broken relationships, overindulgence. But it is questionable whether anyone else is doing it with this much skill, this lightness of touch or indeed, straightforward melodic power: in the best possible sense, Mitski feels out on her own.

The Best Thing in the World is a wonderful piece of creaky minimalism, a kind of steampunk techno created on double basses, massed guitars and a vintage synth. Best of all is Naked Like Water, a gently pulsating West African funk groove, featuring interlocking basslines, scratchy guitars and gospel singer Donna Thompson’s wordless voice rising above the aqueous vocal harmonies. Sublime.

It all adds up to quite a voyage: the Merseysiders’ most fully realised set of songs since their debut.

The other striking thing is how sharp her lyrics are, behind their unassuming conversational veneer: only Pretty Isn’t Pretty’s assault on beauty standards feels a little boilerplate. Elsewhere, she’s witty.

A really masterful album.

It’s a variation on the old disco trick of marrying elated music to despondent lyrics, but it really packs a punch, partly because the elated music is incredibly well done, and partly because the vulnerability on display here feels genuine and convincing.

For That Beautiful Feeling doesn’t deliver hits such as Go and Galvanize, but like each of the pair’s previous nine albums it contains moments that will claw into your lizard brain and refuse to leave, whether you last went clubbing yesterday or three decades ago, when their debut single, Song to the Siren, dropped.

This second album of their second phase continues to do pretty much the same as they’ve ever done, but is all the lovelier for it.

Its production hones Burna Boy’s sprawling influences into music that feels punchy, inimitable and impressively streamlined.

After a decade apart, Be Your Own Pet are a far better band: explicit, tight, even more inventive.

The first half of Everyone Else begins as you’d expect – heady, fast-building, glamorous – but in the latter half, Lindstrøm pulls away from crowd-pleasing into thornier territory.

World Music Radio proves that Jon Batiste is capable of coming up with [new ideas]. They seem to arrive when he sounds most like himself: an artist with jazz background, a deep knowledge of musical history and an iconoclastic streak. It also proves he is capable of sublimating his own individuality to fit in; when it tries too hard, it simply adds to the slush pile of nondescript pop.

What Comes Will Come, a skronking synth-pop-rap song, finds Owusu-Ansah sinking himself into production that strikes an interesting midpoint between goth-rock and shimmering synth-funk, one of the rare moments on the album that feels musically akin to the disorienting genre mashup of Smiling With No Teeth. These passages offer welcome electricity on an album that too often plays it safe and plays it vague – capitalising on an algorithm-breaking debut with more of the same.