The Gabriels are making thunderous, thoughtful music with commercial snap.

Here’s what I Inside the Old Year Dying is: beguilingly atmospheric, beautifully crafted, and yet more proof that PJ Harvey is one of our most idiosyncratic artists. It’s wyrd, for sure. But it’s also lwovely.

Amid all the delightful nostalgia comes one glaring disappointment. When Swift committed to the re-recordings, she promised they wouldn’t lose the heart of the original – and the lyrics would stay the same. But on Better Than Revenge, a bitter rebuke to a love rival, she’s done just that.

Now 70 years old, she is back on form with her 15th album.

This is smart, relatable break-up music for Gen Z listeners. But a more moot question, and one to which this reviewer suspects he knows the answer, is whether we need our own Taylor Swift when the real one seems to be doing a pretty good job as things are.

King of a Land is unlikely to bring in legions of new fans – Yusuf’s Pyramid appearance will hopefully do that. But it’s a lushly beautiful album from one of pop’s master songwriters. Indeed, the medium is perfect – it’s just the message that is a little monothematic.

QOTSA now know what is expected of them after a decade of commercial appeal: rock ‘n’ roll that’s not too heavy, lyrics that aren’t too vicious. Then they decide to stick their middle fingers up and make what they want regardless.

Amaarae – real name Ama Serwah Genfi – has crafted and compiled 14 captivating and refreshing tunes, touching on topics from sensuality to spirituality.

Above all, Joy’All seems like the work of an artist content with floating through life, just having fun – and she’s brought us along for the ride.

Horan’s sound of choice is much more understated, typically revolving around folky, acoustic strings and soft vocals. The Show, his third solo offering, is more of the same.

There are many absolutely gorgeous moments, including a reconfiguring of Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major as a ballad of gender fluid love, melancholy dance song Tears Are Soft, the lovely piano ballad Flowery Days and delicate electropop True Love (featuring 070 Shake). But the overwhelming mood is oppressive as it proceeds at a relentlessly mid tempo pace like a kind of stately march towards ecstatic sexual release.

If I have a caveat, it is that it is all so single minded, it lacks the dizzying splendour of Monae’s earlier epics. But on its own down and dirty terms, The Age of Pleasure is sheer pleasure.

What comes forth is disarmingly honest music that indicates a newly mature era for UK rap.

Its 10 tracks offer a timely reminder of just why Oasis resonated so widely, empowered by a melodious and snappy songwriter with plenty of heart and soul.

What an absolute joy it is, in which the grand old man of songcraft flips through his own back pages with genuine relish, a man in his 80’s revisiting the words of his firebrand youth and finding entirely new meanings there.

Her songs may be about growing pains, but they’ve got timeless appeal.

On the whole, My Soft Machine lacks the clarity of Parks’s exceptional debut, and can veer too often into repetition; there’s a lack of journey in the individual songs, meaning you end in much the same place as you started. Her lyrics are, as ever, expertly crafted, but they deserve much more musical supporting oomph.

Unsurprisingly, loss and grief lie at the core of the Foo Fighters’ most succinct and intense album.

It feels remarkably intimate: a half-shuttered window into the world of the man behind some of the world’s most famous songs. If only Simon were to pry open said window slightly wider, one would feel more fulfilled – but there’s always future albums for that.

His overdue follow up is absolutely stuffed to the rafters with another round of big, weepie ballads about how miserable his love life is.

It's a journey in which you don't need to know the words: this music is a licence to feel without prejudice. Like prayers or poetry, the potency is in the cadence, the rhythms, and the stirring of memory and imagination.

Her command over that mass of bodies remains.

Subtract still sounds like an Ed Sheeran album, just one that is not trying so hard to be everything to everyone all at once. Sometimes less really is more.

By the time Roderick closes out with a fully orchestrated baroque dismissal of a former associate (“I’d like nothing more than you darken my doorstep nevermore,” Vanian politely croons), there can be no doubt that Darkadelia lives up to its foreboding title. It also represents one of Britain’s most idiosyncratic and enduringly excellent rock bands, in thrilling form.

First Two Pages of Frankenstein is up there with Boxer, the band’s 2007 album on which they thrillingly found their musical feet. This is the sound of a band who’ve honed their sound to such an extent that they’re now towing a whole new generation in their wake.

As a follow-up to What’s Your Pleasure?, it’s inevitably a little doomed, lacking that record’s magical conditions: the unexpectedly fresh energy amid the lethargy of lockdown. Still, after Pleasure’s anticipatory teasing, That! Feels Good! offers a perfectly competent climax.

While the tricksy chord changes upon which most tracks are founded may be clever, or possibly ground-breaking, these recordings seriously lack oomph.

These are songs rich in detail, soul deep, often burdened with worry and a lifetime’s baggage, yet it’s the hazy sense of a drifter’s freedom in New Magic II which wins through, lifting your spirits time and again.