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.

Written on keyboards rather than guitar, Pre Pleasure was recorded in Montreal with Marcus Paquin of the Weather Station; you can hear the uptick in arrangement and production in the painterly thrum of the instruments.

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.

Album of knotty nuance bathed in melodic succour.

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.

You could dismiss Cheat Codes as dad rap, but this record is absolute joy from end to end.

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.

It brims with the sense of release and joy that comes from the tiniest escape from confinement.

These sour notes aside [Energy and Heated], Renaissance is the feelgood manifesto that puts all the other post-pandemic party albums in the shade, a song cycle crammed full of homages to the historic continuum of Black dancefloor therapy.

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.

Where Expectations saw Kiyoko taking space to explore her own voice, Panorama feels like a leap backwards, trading personality for affectless tracks that fade into the background.

Occasionally this can leave you longing for something less overblown, but this is Rogers 2.0: dancing sweatily in NYC karaoke bars and singing lines such as “sucking nicotine down my throat/ thinking of you giving head” (on new track Horses) and rocking out. Letting rip suits her.

Thankfully, The Theory of Whatever takes a gentler, more mature tack; no longer the mouthy street poet of the people, Treays is simply singing his heart out about his muted memories of love, nostalgia and hangovers. It’s a joy to perch alongside and listen to him reminisce.

Musically, Special’s a bit of a retread. Lead single About Damn Time, with its Saturday-night, last-song-before-we-leave-the-house vibe, bounces on a similar podium to 2019’s Juice, and the title track boasts imperious orchestration, just as it did on Cuz I Love You. But it works.

It’s an unsettlingly raw album, the sparse instrumentation – Nastasia’s soft voice and acoustic guitar, recorded, as ever, by Steve Albini – making her lyrics all the more stark and powerful. ... An astonishingly moving record.

Overall, About Last Night… manages to keep the party going – it’s just more convincing when tears mix with the prosecco.

A sumptuous listen that glows like a freaky summer love.

Best listened to as a whole, Hellfire is as challenging and unsettling as it is exhilarating. About as sui generis as it’s possible to get in 2022.

A well-polished gem – welcome back.

Pearson wears her talents lightly on an album that allows space for them to breathe. Sound of the Morning is a remarkably mature record; hopefully, future releases will be just as absorbing.

Though Burna has always subtly weaved elements of pop into his music, it feels too omnipresent in the second half of the album.

You could, just about, call these psalms remixes, in that the thematic stems hold true. But there is respite, too, in the gentler notes and oscillations of Splendour, Glorious Splendour.

An ambitious album (it comes with an 8mm film and several quirky videos) from a unique artist.

As an album, it never comes close to Guided By Voices at their mid-90s peak; it isn’t even the best one by this incarnation of the band (that’s possibly 2019’s Warp and Woof). But this is yet another solid addition to one of the most impressive canons in US indie rock.