When unaccompanied, it’s clear that her 12 years in the industry have given the singer ample voice and a formidable ear. On IRL, there was little need for big names, since Mahalia is star enough to hold her own.

While masterfully engineered as always, the album is too polite, lacking the monstrous, alien menace of the band’s bassier efforts. It’s an album that could do with a dub treatment.

Every song is a wonder. It is unlikely Angels & Queens will inspire many imitators of its retro-future soul, its damaged doo-wop. It’s simply too good to be copied.

This might not be Harvey’s most immediate collection, but it’s as fascinating and rewarding as ever.

Recorded quickly, with most of the 10 songs featuring Anohni’s original vocal takes, it’s an album that manages to wear its heaviness lightly and quickly buries its way under your skin.

Chatten’s vocals and writerly voice are instantly recognisable – declamatory on the three-legged wooze of Last Time Every Time Forever, or folk-adjacent on The Score. All of the People, meanwhile, is a bitter broadside against the kind of false friends the singer in a successful rock band might have to contend with.

It’s a relief to find Williams as thought-provoking and moving as ever.

The group maintain control throughout, making this a flawless and packed debut – one that has been worth the wait.

Throughout, he remains prickly and eloquent.

As a whole, it’s a confident imagining of her infectious future funk sound.

Átta feels surprisingly unengaging.

Its songs, by southerner Randall Bramlett, don’t have the heft of Dylan or Simone, but prove a good fit for Lavette’s heart-on-sleeve vocals.

Having parked her dystopian allegories, it follows that Monáe now feels a little more like an artist in a crowded partying field. But she has earned this mainstream place. Moreover, she remains distinctive.

This is a sexy, sparkling snapshot of borderless youth in 2023, with Amaarae emerging as an ascendant star.

The less good news is that although every pairing has juice in it – the inclusion of a Nicole Scherzinger-paired Hawaiian traditional is a great curveball – many of these songs feel like over-pretty drawing room star turns. Nothing here is slick, exactly, but much tends towards mellifluous pleasantness – even the songs about protest and murder.

It’s a shame, then, that the songs accompanying Grohl’s most powerfully affecting set of lyrics so often fail to reach the same standard [as the Foo Fighters’ 1995 debut].

The third album since Shirley Collins’s renaissance at 81 turns out to be the finest.

Clark’s falsetto, reminiscent of Caribou’s Dan Snaith or executive producer Thom Yorke, is used carefully as a texture that neither distracts nor dominates, counterbalancing the occasionally abrasive electronics.

There’s not a weak song here. A genuine pleasure to listen to.

If some of Young’s ballads feel more conventional, the jazz-tinged Pretty in Pink reveals an artist who questions, but ultimately knows who she is.

It’s a sprawling, chequered affair, with six of its 14 tracks co-written with Albarn (she on guitar, he on synths), while the rest co-opt a stellar cast of collaborators. There’s much to admire.

Animals continues seamlessly, using a raft of guest musicians and rappers, its rhythms shuttling between drum kit and electronica.

Starring his voice and nimble guitar, with subtly dramatic instrumentation adding texture throughout, this is less a record than a dream state designed to wash over the listener in one sitting.

Though interludes from the late guru Ram Dass feel a little hokey, overall Gag Order is polished, powerful and affirming.

Too many songs start engagingly, become slightly less interesting then peter out. And as ever, Tucek’s lyrics fall between pleasingly quotidian and blandly banal, derailing promising tracks such as The Tunnel.

This is an album full of emotional ambushes.

What’s lacking is a standout floor-filler. There’s nothing here that comes close to Ooh La La, and some of these slight but elegant songs just fade too far into the background.

Perhaps Money Plant is overlong, but the mournful coda of Ladder more than makes up for it. Yes, it’s a little one-dimensional, but it’s a lovely dimension.