Despite the emotional content here, Mahalia exudes a breezy mellowness, with thoroughly 2019 themes rubbing up against retro stylings.

Davis completists will grab this, but others may find there’s just not enough meat in the sandwich.

True to quixotic form, Free doesn’t build on the success of that record [2016’s Post Pop Depression], Iggy veering off at yet another tangent, courtesy of avant garde guitarist Noveller, aka Sarah Lipstate, and jazz trumpeter Leron Thomas.

While there’s nothing here that quite matches the highest highs of their first pass, this is a welcome return for a singular and important band.

Overall this excellent album’s clarion-clear narratives about knife crime and the importance of good times – exemplified on Can’t Hold We Down – are delivered not just with anger and pathos, but humour.

Paul’s soft voice, washed by reverb, recalls the dreamscapes of Beach House, and there are reminders of Sharon Van Etten in the enveloping swells of drums, grungy guitars and spacey shifts of rhythm.

It’s hard for any artist on their fifth album to cause you to sit up and pay attention as much as Del Rey’s Norman Fucking Rockwell does, let alone for an artist who is such a past master of the disengaged, dissolute swoon.

At 11 songs (yes, the title is a trick) and just over 25 minutes, it all makes for a short, sharp, exhilarating blast, closing with the question we’re all asking as things fall apart: What Can You Do But Rock’n’Roll?

Like previous Jay Som records, Anak Ko might seem slight at first listen, particularly Duterte’s winsome coo, but the payoff for lingering in her evolving dreamspace is hefty.

It feels like he’s aiming for a 21st-century version of classic albums such as Sign ‘O’ the Times and What’s Going On and, on astonishing, soul-scraping laments This World Is Drunk and Kings Fall, he almost gets there.

There are blank pages for fans to fill in. At nearly 30, the singer-songwriter remains an intriguing mixture of industry power-broker and giddy cat-obsessive. Lover is fine with that, but the real battle is where she goes after this.

The strangest thing about the album, however, is the nagging sense of try-hard: Sleater-Kinney have always felt effortless.

Not surprisingly, many of the highlights of his fourth solo album – a treatise on capitalism and loss – nod to Power’s better-known band.

The English songwriter’s spacey, super-melodic, immaculately produced pop casts a wonderful spell when it works, particularly on lead single Religion (U Can Lay Your Hands on Me) or the swooning, filtered coda to The Stage, as endless as summer seems in early July.

Fifteen tracks stretches them too far, though, and on the likes of Fog, their woahs sound tired, and it becomes apparent that these are pretty empty musical calories.

Hackman flits between self-reflection and self-loathing with ease (“You’re such an attention whore”), starkly unpicking her anxieties over fuzzy guitar on her most accomplished record to date.

Bon Iver have imperceptibly moved from requesting close listening to requiring it, and i,i spins a mesmerising web of superficially insubstantial yet intensely majestic music. Listen closely and you can hear the language of pop being redrafted in real time.

With the exception of OK (Anxiety Anthem), produced unmemorably by the usually excellent MNEK, these 14 tunes could have been made by anyone with a well-oiled larynx. Even as Mabel’s voice stands proudly without Auto-Tune, High Expectations is just disappointingly all right, lacking any playfulness, or top spin, or a sense of who Mabel is.

Magnificently, songs like Taste or The Fall are only energised by these diverse sonic signatures. The double-drummers are key, too: Segall’s in the left-hand channel, while frequent collaborator and multi-instrumentalist Charles Moothart is in the right.

For all the variety, no single track stands out; Nérija rarely stray from the comfortable territory of mid-tempo, mid-dynamic improvisation.

North feels like early Beck, grungy guitar with an old-school hip-hop bump, while Sofia pairs Strokes guitar with Stereolab-style ironic Eurodisco and Impossible offers intimate confessions over baroque-pop harpsichord and shunting beats.

While Guesswork starts promisingly, with the honourable exception of the sparkling Moments and Whatnot the second half of this front-loaded album is a little underwhelming, its songs needlessly extended when a more succinct execution might have worked better.

Duck crashlands in as confused a space as that might suggest; it’s a very mainstream record, but doesn’t sound sure that it wants to be.

Burna Boy’s fourth album lands in this powerful spotlight, continuing the singer’s boundary-hopping mixture of laid-back Caribbean swagger, Fela Kuti swing and multilingual communiques on a range of concerns.

It’s immersive, but bar a couple of songs and features (Southern rap don Project Pat and enigmatic MC BennY RevivaL are both standouts) it lacks the urgency or vitality of its two predecessors. Instead, this is a lounge-y mixtape that drifts comfortably within Hynes’s beautiful sonic realm.

These 11 songs ping confidently around the post-genre electro-pop landscape.

A cynic would call this hotchpotch of genres and guests a laser-guided exercise in streaming monopoly, a credibility-by-osmosis playlist primed for summer dominance. And that person would be 100% correct.

At best, it’s dreamily creative; at worst, overwrought.

As with all the best sets, it’s coherent but not repetitive, the ghostly Auto-Tune choir, which features on most tracks, sighing and whispering encouragement behind Banks’s increasingly empowered words. There are shades of Bon Iver and Billie Eilish in her layered, subtle sound, but also a rare, steely delicacy all her own.

Egoli is a party album almost end to end, an update on Buraka Som Sistema’s Angolan-Portuguese rave dynamics and more like a Gorillaz record than anything you might normally file under “world music”.

The voice has weathered like timber, but his timing is impeccable, his Tex-Mex guitar flurries thrilling. The cowboy sage (and Beto Democrat) remains unique.

Throughout it all, Trash Kit continue to find new ways to help you to shrug off the bullshit and dance.

There’s plenty of promise here.

In Stonechild, Hoop has streamlined her sound. It’s hard not to feel her sentiments could benefit from some similar pruning.

It’s a Rorschach blot of a record: you can find whatever you’re looking for here, from loose stoner ambience to shamanic virtuosity, with album closer WZN3 turning into a loose, swinging, Tuareg-derived rock out.

Although Yorke sounds refreshed, the results here don’t vary wildly from the Radiohead frontman’s instantly recognisable musical signatures, evolved over 20 years.

It all adds up to an album that’s solid rather than spectacular.

On this sequel, Gibbs mostly sounds bored, aggressively bored or boringly aggressive. The ever creative Madlib chucks in everything he can find to dazzle the listener. When this coheres--in the vicious swamp-beat of Massage Seats, for example--it’s sensational. Often his work sounds too dense to compete with mass-market trap, and struggles to support Gibbs’s gruff rhymes.

These nine new songs see the band’s gift for melody and grasp of pop’s dynamics tweaked into transcendent shapes by the late house master Philippe Zdar and xx producer Rodaidh McDonald.

Prince’s tightly controlled production style, down to his proteges’ smallest inflections – the Time’s Gigolos Get Lonely Too is a spot-the-difference exercise – also means there’s little that differs substantially from its more polished released version, delicious as it is to hear him sing Martika’s blissful Love… Thy Will Be Done.

How thrilling these good-natured, thigh-rubbing party tunes are depends on your interest in the interplay of stereotypical “mamacitas” and “papi”s. But songs like No Puedo Olvidarte nail the sweet spot between hunky smouldering and wavy club music, and recent single HP sees things from a female perspective.

An always thought-provoking record.

Springsteen sings brilliantly throughout, gritty on Hitch Hikin’, Orbison-operatic on the more elaborate pieces, and though the high notes can prove elusive, he retains the cadence of a born narrator. Brave and intriguing.

Here, straightforward prettiness often abounds, particularly on the country-leaning tracks, some with the odd female backing coo.

N’Dour sings with accustomed majesty throughout; sometimes commanding, sometimes anguished, an always urgent force of nature.

For all the Tarantino growl and spaghetti western shlock of opener Til the Moment of Death, this second album carries itself with more assurance than last year’s eponymous debut, with songcraft and witty wordplay coming to the forefront.

The follow-up is even better, delivered with a greater confidence and urgency, and featuring a handful of songs that almost match up to his late-70s output.

Fussell is alive to the fantastical edge to a fishmonger’s sales pitch, the extraordinariness of these ordinary songs. Subtle left-field touches take these pieces somewhere special, not least the instrumental 16-20.

Madame X is certainly a fluid album, but one tempered by Madonna’s solid confidence in her own aesthetic decisions.

There’s some of The Upsetter’s fever dreams in African Starship, and Kill Them Dreams Money Worshippers has a fiery strut, but sometimes Rainford sounds like a posthumous tribute, with Perry a wraithlike absence haunting the spaces of his exhumed past.

If there are no huge surprises here, Further offers a punchy synthesis of country croon, psych-rock riffs and snappy songwriting that proves South Yorkshire’s stoic son has plenty of miles left to run.

Ignorance Is Bliss handles the MC’s next steps with authority and, crucially, popping production.

On this sprawling, often horizontal record, Lacy’s default setting is a blissful Los Angeles funk that bleeds easily into punchier hip-hop passages. Occasionally, he’ll show off his Prince 2.0 soloing skills on songs like Love 2 Fast.

Flamagra is too considered, burdened, and what were once cosmic, mind-expanding polyrhythms come over as inconsequential and annoying.

Atlanta Millionaires Club nails the perfect balance of the singer-songwriter’s sleepy, intimate balladry with the rich musical history of her home city.

This is an accomplished full-length that, while not a game-changer, certainly slots neatly into the burgeoning UK canon.

It’s a curious mixture, but by no means a job lot. They all have something new to reveal.

What lingers is the beguiling honesty beneath the fury, and the thrill that he’ll get even better, given time.

A strangely flat album.

Full of morphing grooves and moods of imminent revelation, it’s a quicksilver delight.

It’s beautifully played and engineered, with DeMarco’s nimble vocals softly caressing your speakers from inside, but it cossets where it could challenge.

Each song on this engaged but accessible record memorialises a figure from the African diaspora--often lesser-known poets, or figures like Miles and Basquiat.

The continuity stressed between body and tool, folk history and future, like the work of Meredith Monk or Björk, lures the listener away from the twin traps of techno-evangelist complacency and technophobic retreat with sweet inspiration.

Full of subtle charm, it’s an album of deceptive depths in which to immerse yourself.

It’s an album that exudes warmth and no little sonic familiarity, while reflecting what is a radically altered set-up.

The record is a joyous listen, which will only be enhanced on their forthcoming tour, and a confident assertion of Ezra Collective breaking out of the once-restrictive jazz enclave.

A non-religious religious album might seem like a conceptual dead end, but this is another accomplished set from a master songwriter.

Each of the tracks released from Designer so far has been engrossing – The Barrel, with its opaque lyricism (“show the ferret to the egg”), the equally gnomic Fixture Pixture, with its Air bassline.

Lu seems intent to immerse us fully, deeply, intimately into her gossamer creative vision--and she succeeds. An astonishing first album.

For his second album, the 24-year-old’s flow remains defiantly old-school, concerned with language and jazzy storytelling rather than the Autotuned postures that get the streams.

Serfs Up! feels like a giant leap forward.

LSD underwhelms, even if you accept that three of the world’s most interesting musicians would always struggle to create something greater than the sum of its parts.

Recorded at the same time as Oxnard, Ventura distinguishes itself from its predecessor by being looser and warmer.

In choosing lower-key collaborators, however, Rowlands and Simons seem to want these more-banging-than-average tunes to speak for themselves.

In any case, this debut packs some impressive punches--like the sparky Day Month Second and ambitious wobbler Friday Night Big Screen. Elsewhere, Girli’s rough-edged pop--if nothing else, a welcome respite from the prevailing chart sound--feels undermined by clumsy songwriting.

Ultimately, it is Titanic Rising’s fusion of ancient and contemporary, 70s singer-songwriter tropes and electronic burbles, that convinces; the beauty Weyes Blood offers has its eyes wide open.

Here are evergreen contemporary songs in which gratitude and fortitude are exercised in no facile fashion, but with spittle and swagger. The love songs are present and correct.

At 17 tracks, the album feels long, but at its best, Free Spirit finds Khalid soaring closer to becoming pop’s next big star.

There are few genres White Denim won’t disrupt, and this wide-ranging record touches upon many of them.

The resulting album--Collins’s ninth solo effort--is a joy, brimming with ideas, but light of touch.

Fascinatingly ambitious, and often extremely fun, this debut finds pop in safe and thrilling hands.

Even the mildly satirical skits, which don’t quite work, prove her desire to create a proper album, rewarding repeated listening.

ally fun. For a new band, this would be a perfectly serviceable debut, but with Ex Hex having flown so high previously, It’s Real is a disappointment.

Her incisive storytelling is at the fore on Heads Gonna Roll, which describes a road movie with “a narcoleptic poet from Duluth”. Ringo Starr plays drums on it, such is Lewis’s back-channel clout. More gripping vignettes follow.

To Believe is heartbreakingly brilliant: a collection of exquisitely assembled songs that appear delicate from a distance before revealing a close-quarters core strength. ... A triumph.

Curiously, this bold new direction isn’t sustained; the further into the album Malkmus gets, the more normal service resumes, as if he isn’t entirely convinced of his new direction.

This album’s default seltzer dynamics are superbly well appointed, but the aim of many of these songs is often occluded by Burton’s knee-jerk tastefulness.

This is hardcore music for a generation weaned on rave and grime, jazz’s cutting edge. The comet isn’t coming, it’s arrived.

It all culminates in Lesley, a staggering, 11-minute exploration of toxic masculinity and domestic abuse. “Tell a yout’, if you got a brain then use it,” he raps, early on; Dave’s doing that, but has much more in his armoury than just brains.

There are “interludes” and “intermissions” aplenty; the blissed-out Beltway has shades of The Girl from Ipanema in its melody, and Binz is as catchy as a playground clapping game--but both are over before you know it. Exit Scott (referring to another street in Houston) uses a gospel sample that could--and would, in the past--have been stretched out to make a hit single, but here it is, just one minute and one second long.

Sigrid is at her best when difficult emotions complicate her pop endorphins. ... Yet there’s a slight feeling, for all the quality here, that she could have maintained her momentum while taking a few more risks with her high-polish sound.

More boring and pointless than Brexit.

You struggle to comprehend how the extraordinary sounds near its inception are coming out of a tuba (via a wah-wah effect). On The Offerings and Radiation, Cross’s prowling tone is slung so low as to sound filthy. One can only hope his lips and lungs are insured.

It’s a lovely sound, but the songwriting veers more towards the serviceable than the inspired.

This is the band’s first self-produced album, and it’s stronger on detail than as a unified structure or statement. But there are plenty of ripe pickings, revealing a new depth to Teen, and intriguing potential for the future.

Hagerty’s guitar playing remains as unkempt as ever, but, touchingly, the duo’s vocals play tag throughout, augmenting one another’s frazzled joint vision as though no time had passed.

It swings. It grooves. It’s not bogged down by a self-consciously poetic concept. And it feels like a record rather than a showcase, anchored by the production work of Simz’s childhood friend Inflo.

It’s a perfect period production that only occasionally tempts the listener to wonder how much more affecting Yola’s songs might be if she turned her attention from “whip-poor-wills” and “the grocery store” to landscapes closer to home.