For a man showing signs of slowing down, Paul Weller can seem remarkably like an artist still in the thick of it.

A dispatch from the darker moments of middle age, Lives Outgrown is occasionally challenging, frequently beautiful and invariably gripping.

Hit Me Hard and Soft is clearly intended as something to gradually unpick: a bold move in a pop world where audiences are usually depicted as suffering from an attention deficit that requires instant gratification. Hit Me Hard and Soft isn’t in the business of providing that. In its place, it offers evidence that, among the ranks of mega-selling pop stars, Billie Eilish remains a fascinating law unto herself.

While the band can’t quite maintain the heady momentum of the album’s first half – it does eventually peter out into samey, mid-tempo indie – Poetry still provides ample proof that its makers are experts at wringing entertainment and emotion from archly resurrected rock history.

An indulgently rich record that keeps revealing more on double-digit listens. And at various moments, just when you thought it couldn’t get any heavier, it does. .... Being crushed underneath this album is one of the great musical experiences of the year.

Her fourth album feels like an unjustly forgotten classic.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

relude to Ecstasy is a delight, filled with enough ideas to suggest that they’ll come up with just as many more the next time around: the Last Dinner Party’s confidence may stem less from the hype they’ve provoked than the fact they know how good they are.

It makes for an album that’s too involving and engaging and powerful to count as merely more of the same: you leave the turmoil of People Who Aren’t There Anymore feeling moved, rather than jaded.

[Bending Hectic is] one of the best things Yorke and Greenwood have put their names to in at least a decade. Like the rest of Wall of Eyes, it really doesn’t feel interstitial, like a placeholder until the definite article reappears. What that portends for Radiohead’s future – if anything – is arguable; the album’s quality is not.