If you like Knopfler’s flavour, One Deep River will be a treat. Indeed, if you walked into a bar and caught this outfit in action, you’d surely stop and pay attention, nodding along in gentle pleasure at the veteran musicianship and easy-on-the ear ambience. Yet in the context of his own discography, it lacks the imagination, ambition and stratospheric guitar playing that made Dire Straits one of the most popular bands of all time.

This fourth may not reach those heights [of the first two albums], but it’s a solid effort from a band who, above all else, just sound grateful to have survived.

Everything I Thought I Was is certainly not the career defining masterwork Timberlake seems to think it is, but nevertheless it’s enough to get him over that mid-life bump.

Lopez’s voice is technically fine but has a thinness that doesn’t really suit the exposure of digitally clinical modern production settings. She jettisons all Latin flavouring, which might have been her superpower.

Even at its most ambitious, everything is swept up in a blizzard of overcharged guitars and stylised snarling that would have sounded old-fashioned in 1981, let alone 2024.

If you simply want to revel in the elemental pleasures of sleek, clever, catchy songs played with rough vigour by a band who love to rock, then the Vaccines deliver their usual payload. .... They lack the boldness of the bands that most influenced their sound (The Ramones, Jesus and the Mary Chain) or the flair and ambition of others still flying the pop-rock flag (The Killers, Arctic Monkeys, The Libertines). On this evidence, The Vaccines are approaching their expiry date.

Nine originals interspersed with the overfamiliar classics indicate a songwriter’s fascination with rock form, but only I Want You Back (sung with Steven Tyler) justifies its position nestled between so many inarguable classics.

Everybody sounds like they’re having fun, and listeners of a certain vintage probably will too. But it adds little of interest to Morrison’s incredible canon, which from Blowin’ Your Mind in 1967 to Irish Heartbeat in 1988 ranks with the greatest popular music ever made.

There are lovely instrumental passages, lustrous strings, and it has all been crafted with love and care, but it doesn’t hit the heights we expect from a great Beatles ballad, ending up sounding like a poor imitation of genius, the kind of soft rock whimsy you’d find on thousands of second-rate Beatle influenced albums in the Seventies.

She hits the mark with stripped-back Room Service, but the more mainstream, hook-laden numbers Antichrist and Into Your Room don’t measure up to her earlier anthems Scarlett and The Wall is Way Too Thin.

There are a few tracks that could be spicier (Envy the Leaves, At Your Worst), but overall, Silence Between Songs seems like the album Beer has been wanting – and waiting – to make for a long, long time.

Unfortunately, most of Guts sounds like a simple continuation of Sour – there is little musical growth or thematic change, with Making the Bed and Pretty Isn’t Pretty seeming like mere overhangs from her debut

Hardcore fans should be satisfied, but Road recycles outdated myths of rock machismo from a pantomime villain determined to go out in a blaze of clichés.

Soft strings and Rapp’s silky vocals prevent it from being too jarringly TikTok-ready (though one imagines her record label will be hoping for just that). Overall, Snow Angel is a confident, accomplished debut.

While You & I doesn’t break any new ground, it’s a spirited and smartly produced – if brief – 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.

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.

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.

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

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

With the jolly, moreish melodies in other songs including Danae there is much to enjoy in Mythologies. But it’s also a 23-track album that commands attention, sonically speaking, for only a fraction of its duration. A seat at the ballet itself is needed to best marry the music, stories and movement.

A confident, interesting and accomplished album. But Marten is operating in a crowded field. Weyes Blood, Nina Nastasia, Lana Del Rey and Marling all plough similar furrows.

When Fall Out Boy are in top gear, they’re timeless: if only this whole album had cut some of the filler, it could have been a stellar return to form.

It is either the sound of someone who has begun to believe her own publicity, or who has stopped caring what anyone else thinks and is determined to follow her muse wherever it wanders. There’s a fine album lurking amidst the indulgence but listeners have their work cut out trying to locate it.

Like Paramore Lite, the first half of this album bubbles and fizzes in a pleasing sugar-hit without delivering true satiety. ... If only the band had dared to follow this direction more consistently and thoroughly, it could have been stellar.

100 gecs can also be (perhaps willfully) irritating. ... At their strongest, though – as on punky standout Doritos And Fritos – 10,000 gecs is a wonderful exercise in letting creativity run amok with no rules at all and carefully catching the resultant gold.

Her vocals remain powerful: from soaring operatic drama to persuasive pop melody and an ominous snarl; it doesn’t sound like she’ll take “nein” for an answer on the spacey synths of Gib Mir Deine Liebe. On the English-language tracks, her lyrics sometimes sound gauche, but the sentiments ring true, and her guest-list is enjoyably far-ranging.