This ninth outing is Pierce’s most assured in some time, doling out extra helpings of heady patisserie.

Pilbeam’s second album feels like a logical progression from her 2019 debut, Keepsake, a minor success in her home country. Where Giving the World Away sees a great leap forward, however, is with its lyrics.

Although it doesn’t quite touch the consistency of 2021’s Made in the Pyrex, this third mixtape’s moody volatility is utterly compelling.

His records aren’t hard to love, but this one just throws itself at you. ... Even the bad vibes – lysergic imagery, a cover of Bruce Springsteen’s Wages of Sin – can’t harsh the fundamental loveliness of Vile’s offering.

At its worst, Paradise Again is derivative and dated. Tracks play like pastiches. ... In its livelier moments, the album tries to revive sounds in new contexts. ... Most of the record is palatable but unremarkable – an algorithmic play for radio airtime.

Bennett’s voice is ultimately too thin to carry the emotive heft of her heartbreak material, and Broken Hearts Club works best when she facilitates others to take up its mantle.

Sensitive and punchy as always.

The result crackles with a wired energy that doubles down on his core creative tenets, while still sounding like no other White record released previously.

Uptempo numbers such as the Pharrell-produced Tamagotchi and the chugging Talk, meanwhile, feel shoehorned in for radio play, removing breathing space for Apollo’s vibrato-laden voice and overstuffing the record to 16 tracks. Apollo’s aptitude for unexpected genres can provide beautiful results, as on the yearning En El Olvido, but it can equally speak of a jarring restlessness.

A handful more tracks and now, the full monty, reveals that there seem to be two Wet Legs high-kicking for supremacy: the knockabout, sly, absurdist outfit and a band that turn out to be quite like a lot of other bands.

Peel’s intentions are sound, the results are very pretty and the live shows will be great, but what ensues is still a modern classical-electronic crossover that relies too much on orthodox musicality to truly do its subjects justice.

Bloated and self-indulgent, it plods along, with barely a memorable melody or thought-provoking lyric among its 17 tracks.

A class act.

Doherty’s weak, watery quiver of a voice is over-exposed on Lo’s parodic pop fantasias, which veer from syrupy and insincere fluff to low-stakes Smiths tributes.

With its atmospheric melody and operatic harmonies, it’s a truly evocative listen.

Unfortunately, there’s often this vast emotional chasm in his music, a feeling that nothing ever means anything, until the final two tracks, The States and The Last Song, which prove that he can write a lovely, affecting lyric after all.

Clearly Harding is still having fun, and while it can make for a somewhat jarring listening experience, her playfulness adds depth to this charming record.

The album’s feminist slant is “implicit” and reggaeton – the Latin American style heavily influenced by Caribbean sounds – powers a handful of sassy party flexes, a first for this artist, better known for her flamenco background. Staccato rhythms figure heavily, maintaining this unconventional pop artist’s edge. All that energy is balanced out by heartbreak on quieter ballads such as Como Un G and a handful of tracks where Rosalía’s first-class voice is allowed to take more traditional flight.

Reason to Smile brings to mind Ms Dynamite’s 2002 Mercury-winning A Little Deeper : era-defining works that blend hip-hop with neo-soul and jazz, and storytelling that paints the Black British experience with the finest of brushes.

Taken as a whole, though, Who Cares? is so unvarying in its sentimental melodies that it begins to fade into the background, so unobtrusive that it becomes unremarkable.

There’s nothing here that’s particularly immediate, the likes of Cemetery of Splendour only gradually yielding their delights. Instead, Classic Objects is unceasingly intriguing.

Their debut album, co-written and co-produced with Soulwax, is a treasure chest of funk, French house, sweaty techno and all kinds of dirty electronic weirdness to rival Moloko at their freakiest. But their takes on the fraught subject of wokeness on Esperanto (“Don’t say: I would like a black Americano/ Say: I’ll have an African American, please”), or sexual agency on the Timbaland-flavoured dark R&B of Reappropriate err on the side of basic.

It’s keyboards that take centre stage here on a set of energetic, electro-indie cuts that are as dancefloor-friendly as anything he has been involved with since Electronic.

These songs about love and existential sorrow feel purposely airy and unanchored – there’s no percussion – mirroring the psychological freefall of recent times. Ironically, though, they firm up the parallels between Lindeman and fellow complex Canadian, Joni Mitchell.

This is, ultimately, an album that has a spectacularly strong sense of place – London, NW1 and NW3 – and some very definitive British musical reference points, which nonetheless wonders, eloquently, where home is.

The end result finds elegance trumping excitement.

Because Because ends this gutsy, ambience-heavy record with joyous, Middle Eastern birdlike calls from Golding, calls that appear to answer themselves, thanks to Luthert.

The uncharitable take would be that a 37-year-old still writing lyrics in txt spk is quite cringe, but the truth is that Love Sux – three-minute banger after three-minute banger, complete with classic Lavigne “woah-oh-ohs” – is exuberant enough to have you slipping on a pair of Vans and partying like it’s 2002.

All last year’s singles plus a dozen new drops here add up to an excellent, if exhausting, mixtape. Sensibly, songs confine themselves to three minutes or less, and there’s a wild joy to their commitment to entertainment.

A brace of great tunes make the case: Rhododendron nods at Jonathan Richman’s Roadrunner, somehow making wildflowers sound gloriously disreputable. Saga, meanwhile, is a traumatised ballad that channels David Bowie, but with acoustic guitars and horns.

It’s testament to the structure and variety of Once Twice Melody that it never lags over 18 tracks, its gradual release paradoxically validating the album format as one still worth surrendering to, totally.

With Prey/IV, Glass seizes control of the sequence, and the narrative, for herself.

The Dream is another enjoyable stroll around the band’s latest curiosity shop.

The result is their most varied and expansive record to date.

Every so often, the disparate parts coalesce into something enjoyable: We Go Back and Dragon Slayer both exhibit a lovely playfulness. Stretched over 48 minutes, though, there’s the sense that for all its undoubted cleverness, Time Skiffs is not terribly easy to warm to.

To get the full effect, listen to the album from start to finish, over and over again. It’s a blast.

This is an album that wrestles with the sisyphean slog of remaining engaged – with love, with work, with life. And you can dance to it.

Mø’s new-era singles thus far have been earworms – the euphoric Live to Survive, the Ed Sheeran-like Kindness, the more recent electronic ballad Goosebumps. The remainder of Motordrome mostly maintains this hit rate.

Even when the tempo drops, the quality doesn’t, the rich imagery of Trick Out the Truth being a case in point. Effortlessly classy.

The decade this outfit have spent in other bands pays off in a record that’s raucous and fun, incisive and – as it winds to a close – profoundly heartfelt, as vocalist James Smith apologises disgustedly for the sins of British foreign policy.

Alexander is better channelling any introspection into songs that reflect the morning after, with late album highlight Make It Out Alive giving Night Call a narrative arc via a post-big-night-out soother.

Sick! emerges with musicality enhanced, full of strings, soul samples, arpeggiating pianos and vinyl crackle – sometimes, as on the immersive Vision and Tabula Rasa, all at once.

Musically, Dawn FM mirrors Tesfaye’s disquiet, its buffed electronic sheen ruptured by moments of discord, as when ballad Starry Eyes teeters on the brink of implosion. It’s a state that Tesfaye seems to relish, with often stunning results.

With less dissonance and psychedelic experimentation than Jon Hopkins or Four Tet, Fragments may be too care-home comfort for some, but it’s brilliant, wondrous work.

Caprisongs collates a set of more ephemeral pop tunes in which twigs broadcasts selfhood 17 ways, finding unexpected common sonic ground with artists such as Grimes, Charli XCX and Self Esteem.

Parker’s third solo album for the International Anthem label is a meditative gem that breaks with the more fully fleshed out style of his two previous outings.

The best tracks were released last year: Ready for the High is a deliciously weird cut-and-shut, and Method to the Madness has a lovely collapsed feeling. Mostly the album settles for sprightly mediocrity, and is often quite pleasurable, if you define pleasure as the absence of pain.

Recorded straight to tape with no overdubs, Still Moving proves a thrilling, spontaneous affair, switching between the laments and love songs of southern Italy and the gritty blues of North Africa and North America.

The voices of Callahan and Oldham provide a through line in what can occasionally be unexpected stylistic forays. Least best is a version of Billie Eilish’s Wish You Were Gay: High Llama Sean O’Hagan’s flippant, tinny beats point to a grave generational misunderstanding of digital pop. But almost everything else succeeds in having revelatory fun with old favourites or hitting the listener hard– or both.

A surprising trip to an altogether other time and place.

If Wanderer promised more bold artistic statements, Covers pivots on sorely needed understanding. That feeling is relayed in turn to the listener: hugs galore.

This is a Crazy Horse record that is both raucous and highly tuneful, saturated with in-band bonhomie.

From Prologue, with its deep drone, wash of waves and circling, priestessly choral voices to the closing Adan no Shima no Tanjyosai and its sparsely plucked guitar and elegiac strings and flute, the album casts a still, soothing spell.

There’s enough across both albums to keep fans happy, and that soulful voice is still a thing of wonder, but Keys has a strange hotchpotch feel to it.

His choice is to foreground his thin, trebly voice and treat it with endless effects, which owes more to hyperpop than anything else and is one of the many problems that make this album an exhausting listen.

Recalling her early experimental work, while hoovering up dance genres at will, KicK iii is imbued with a joyous sense of freedom.

Telling of new beginnings and lost love, the breeze in her voice and her easy-going melodies act as a smokescreen: these are often direct takes on pain.

Throughout, there is so much going on that it takes many listens to absorb everything. But persevere and a tour de force of botanical rock takes form.

The Algorithm’s concept is too boring to explain, but thankfully the music isn’t.

What worked a treat then continues to work now.

This is an album that (once again) quietly demands to be heard, and enjoyed, as an inseparable whole.

30 overreaches for the rafters a little too often. But the sophisticated interplay of Adele’s nuanced vocal and the Garner piano sample here lingers long in the mind.

Songs such as The Wheel and Stockholm Syndrome offer thrills that can’t be denied, a preposterously exciting scrapyard soul.

In among all this pervasive beauty (which tends towards expansive prettiness and resonant succour rather than the sterner, more austere end of the ambience spectrum), it feels like only the eight-minute apex track Deep in the Glowing Heart rearranges the listener’s molecules in a transformational way.

While her pure, clear voice is as expressive and engaging as ever, Valentine is more accessible and less interesting.

[The two previously unreleased songs] comprise a fascinating companion piece for two classic albums.

There are songs here with a cinematographic grasp of gesture allied to countermelodies of aching prettiness, almost casually thrown away. In the very same breath, though, Voyage packs in a surfeit of hokey oompah and two Christmas tunes too many.

The Solution Is Restless is an album that worms its way under your skin, reminding you of half a dozen records you love while sounding unlike anything else around.

All in all, it’s a rich, absorbing work that rewards immersive listening.

Equals tilts heavily into contentment and maturity, including an obligatory lullaby – Sandman – for his little one. Nice Ed gains the upper hand, with a commensurate loss in musical interest.

Bleak but compelling.

It’s all fun, though a little disjointed – and the less said about Elton’s trap song, Always Love You, with Nicki Minaj and Young Thug, the better.

Blue Banisters could do with a sharper focus – some of these 15 songs are outtakes dating back years – and a hip-hopped-Morricone instrumental interlude feels like an incongruous eruption from her “gangster Nancy Sinatra” era. But it offers glimpses of vistas to be explored beyond Lana’s customary LA backdrops and a legacy already secure.

Lay’s voice may often be sun-dazzled and multitracked, but it is also confident, privileging harmonics and atmosphere over DIY spit and sawdust. The instrumentation swirling around her is both lush and reserved.

There’s hardly a dull moment on this album.

An entertainingly diverse set.

The album is meandering in places, evoking a sense of the unknown that’s become so familiar in 2021, but there’s a sense that the trio want to bring their growing fanbase with them into a new dimension. It will reward those who come along for the ride.

It’s an impressive display of ambition and reinvention, all the more dramatic because singer-songwriters in Lala Lala’s previous, Liz Phair-ish incarnation are 10-a-penny.

Many affecting tracks detail the sharknado of outrage and bewilderment in Blake’s trademark delicate soprano, offset occasionally by well-chosen collaborators (SZA, or rappers JID and SwaVay) or startlingly pitch-shifted vocals.

We get a campy take on I Get a Kick Out of You, a sashaying Night and Day, and yet another outing for swing album mainstay I’ve Got You Under My Skin. It’s on the less ubiquitous songs, however, that the pair seem to have the most fun. ... This ebullient album feels like a fond farewell rather than a solemn goodbye.

The music is pleasantly accessible, rather than daring.

It’s definitely an album served best by headphones and solitude, and one that won’t draw you back as much as it draws you in.

There’s no shortage of killer hooks deeper into the album – a commitment to bangers matched by BLK’s wise words about personal damage and heartbreak on songs such as the excellent title track.

ATLWB feels like a step up, detailing an emotional journey that refreshes tired tropes with hard-won insight and musical self-assurance.

Bright Magic feels like a logical next step, with fewer samples, and the likes of Blixa Bargeld, Nina Hoss and Eera much more foregrounded. The downside is that, for all the invention on display here, J Willgoose Esq and Wrigglesworth have lost some of their USP with this shift in focus.

Despite the turbulent backstory, at first listen these songs sound effortlessly sunny.

For every guitar-driven bop such as That’s What I Want, there are times when Hill resorts to mainstream genre cliches rather than razing convention as he did on Old Town Road.

Although the dominant mood is bedroom-dreamy, the effect of her staccato choruses and slapping beats is hammeringly percussive, allying her with the hyper-pop of Charli XCX. Depending on the listener’s ear, Hye Jin’s work can also come across as repetitive and facile.

The result is an artfully realised exercise in melancholic, grown-up pop with textures that owe much to the Swedes’ later work. It’s also a welcome return to form, after 2018’s water-treading Resistance Is Futile.

Things start promisingly with the undulating Champagne Poetry dextrously reflecting on loneliness (“career is going great, but now the rest of me is fading slowly”), while Papi’s Home recalls early Kanye, of all people, with its sped-up samples and laid-back flow. Later, however, that playfulness calcifies into headline-grabbing stunts. ... This is an album destined to be filleted for various #mood playlists, anchored only by its creator’s untouchable fame.

All of this grandeur is punctuated by shimmering orchestral interludes, the plummy voice of Emma Corrin (AKA The Crown’s Princess Diana) as Simz’s life coach, and hard-hitting tracks of another kind, where the artist examines her motivations (Ovation) and her relationship with her absent father on the heart-wrenching I Love You, I Hate You.

Their formative years in the underground have always supplied this trio with a sharp and occasionally dark edge. It is an edge no more, but the defining feature of this pugilistic album.

Easier Than Lying is shouty and electronic, while You Asked for This finds Halsey fronting a Smashing Pumpkins pastiche. Amid all the Sturm und Drang and sludgy oompah (The Lighthouse) there is some high-quality writing, chiefly in the pizzicato niggles and Jesus analogies of Bells in Santa Fe (“it’s not a happy ending”) and Whispers.

As elegantly crafted as it all is, it does become a little homogeneous, and well before Other You’s 50 minutes are up, you do find yourself craving a gear change somewhere.

She tips the listener headlong into the scrum that is your 20s, when self-doubt and growing self-assurance wrestle one another to the mat. The emotional wrangle is skilfully handled, knife-sharp, funny lyrics carving out beautifully structured songs – co-produced by Gartland – with never a note wasted, dancing nimbly across styles.

The album’s pace never really recaptures the Primal Scream vibes of the single. But the album is not much poorer for this equanimity, with its former teen star, elevated to instant mega-fame in the 2010s, pondering past lives, present happiness and future uncertainty with some deft writing, a gauzy feel and the odd Beatles melody.

If these collaborations occasionally rely on comfortable nostalgia, the prowling, Usher-assisted Do It Yourself – all splintering electronics and heaving beats – is a welcome reminder that Jam and Lewis can still conjure up something fresh-sounding. ... Overall, however, this is an immaculately produced debut that makes you instantly long for Volume Two.

Itchy, blistering boogies such as She’s Gone and Let’s Get Funky epitomise their visceral approach, amid a smattering of slower outings. Antique maybe, but a reminder that the blues retain their odd, primal power.