The songs are sad but considered, their melancholia held at bay by Habel’s strength of character and touching lyrics.

Their four quite different flows still work reasonably well together, from $hort’s lubricious bars to Cube’s truculent pugilism, over comfort-zone beats of electro, P-funk and other familiar 1980s grooves. Yet harmless nostalgia predictably succumbs to charmless bluster.

It really says something when the desolate ballads (Morning Show) and spoken-word interludes on an Iggy Pop record are the tracks you want to go back to. It feels like elsewhere, Pop is impersonating himself.

It treads a fine line between swashbuckling versatility and a lack of cohesion. Versatility largely wins out.

Best listened to as discrete tracks rather than as a whole, and never quite scaling the heights of Paradise or 2014’s Deep Fantasy, this album is a pleasing but flawed swansong.

Some moments fall flat – Lonely is cloying, paint-by-numbers EDM-pop that doesn’t fully land. Still, Indigo is a polished collection that spans both pop and rap with confidence.

There’s enough good material here for this to have been an excellent 40-minute album; as it is, it’s a flawed 80-minute one.

Springsteen is looking back on looking back; nostalgia, squared. If there is a criticism to be made of this big-hearted wallow, it’s not only that the mood here is galvanising, rather than anything more subtle or bruised.

It is a brave experimentation through unexpected sounds, including Depeche Mode-style new wave on Sainted, but Big Joanie are on more stable and satisfying ground when they put the glittering melodies aside.

Even on the album’s softer moments – delicate strummer All I Wanted, the lovely mid-tempo Yellow – the mood is still resolute in its heaviness. There’s relatable catharsis here, but it can be a lot to carry all at once.

Little sparks surprise and delight, such as producer FaltyDL’s creative use of unpredictable backing vocals, and Anohni’s gossamer hook on French Lessons. On the other hand, Ketamine proffers a disorientating rhythm and queasy vibe – presumably designed to recreate a K trip – that is oddly not that enjoyable to listen to. However, the main problem is a constellation of guests.

Out of Heart may not be a home run, but Flohio still scores with her acrobatic rhyme patterns and experimental sonics.

Part of the pleasure of covers albums is comparing the original with the nuanced update; this album misses that moment when the three Horsepeople wrap their dulcet pipes and jazzy arrangements around an ancient, oaky institution. The past, though, is still very much present.

This is an album that perfectly reflects Burgess’s guileless, up-for-anything, good-egg nature.

Crossan never strays from the formula. Each track is a verse-chorus sugar rush, giving the listener a three-minute hit of predictable entertainment across radio-friendly styles.

Respite comes with the atmospheric closer, Gaia – a nicely understated duet with Elissa Lauper that also features the Blue Nile’s Paul Buchanan – but it doesn’t make up for the pedestrianism elsewhere.

This may be billed as his serious opus, but clearly growing up is boring.

This adds welcome colour to the xx cinematic universe, but it’s no blockbuster.

It’s slightly overlong and unnecessarily repetitive, but clearly made with great care and affection.

It’s all consistently inventive rather than dull, but also endearingly daft rather than chilling. Still, that makes for Muse’s most enjoyable album since the 00s.

These are easy wins – a sonic sugar rush that crashes once each three-minute track is over. Yet when Armstrong gives us a glimpse of life away from the party-rapping – exploring his anxieties on Belgrave Road and his relationship with his sister on My G – he showcases a newfound vulnerability.

Holy Fvck has its flaws – Lovato’s powerful voice is unnecessarily finessed and Auto-Tuned, and 16 tracks is too long. But its gutsy ambition is a thing of substance in and of itself.

They continue to live and die by the watercolour synth wash. It’s a good job they’re masters of the form – as Broken, this album’s crystalline ballad, proves.

The eerie indelibility of Days are Forgotten, or Fire’s lumpen power, are missing, leaving the strings of lyrical cliches that Pizzorno ladles up horribly exposed. Alygatyr, Rocket Fuel and Chemicals are all right, but this feels like a coda, not a new movement.

While All 4 Nothing marks a partial progression for Leff, he still has some way to go to make his records memorable – whether they stand at 21 tracks or a baker’s dozen.

There’s an easy-going beauty to this music that is more redolent of succour than anger. Some might find this record a little too pretty.

There’s something irresistibly joyous about the low-stakes funky feel Harris summons at will, no matter who’s at the mic.

Much of it is pretty dispensable, with new songs Smiley and Acid Horse generic and lacklustre, offering little of the gift for transcendent melody twined around tough beats that made Orbital so iconic. Fortunately, the tour-ready updates of Chime, Impact (The Earth Is Burning) and Halcyon + On + On are much more engaging, and a trippy, strung-out Belfast rivals the original for quality.