This certainly isn’t an indie-sleaze revivalist album, nor is it an effort to prove their relevance. Cool It Down puts words and music to fears and concerns while shaking you into feelings of some radical hope.

Technically Gibbs is a flawless emcee and it’s great to see more of his melodic range on SSS, something that will deservedly bring in new fans. But for his next album, it would be interesting to see Gibbs explore the roots of his “hustler mentality” even further, and start to subvert some of gangster rap’s more impish clichés.

If I may make up a word of my own, it is utterly bjorkers, and all you can do is dig it.

With soulful vocals, delicate stories and vulnerable lyrics, Moss makes for a delightful listen.

Orton digs so deeply into her own personal spaces and memories that what she finds there is unique. Middle-aged discontent has rarely sounded so lovely.

Nothing you’re hearing here is particularly cutting-edge, but it’s delivered with such ebullience and pomposity that you almost forget that this isn’t the first time you’ve heard an 808 beat.

The 12 tracks that make up Expert in a Dying Field are lean and propulsive, with hooks that get under the skin.

It’s a fresh, raw and intentionally scruffy album.

Death Cab are back with a bang and a new-found self-assurance.

This is an album in which Mumford embraces and forgives his own, to deeply moving effect.

The more conventional songs radiate power too, from straightforward pop-rock anthem Hurricanes to the electronic thud of Holy — her It’s A Sin moment. The album’s final three tracks feel superfluous, but Sawayama ultimately succeeds where Dr Frankenstein failed: her creation greater than the sum of its parts.

The Hardest Part doesn’t reinvent the wheel. It knows what it is: undisguised, accessible songwriting pulsing with country lifeblood which manages to avoid being swallowed by its own ennui.

Spirituals is tonally consistent despite its range of distinctive influences and talents. Just when Santigold threatens to lean into the corny, as on the SBTRKT-produced Shake, she pulls back, adding a whimsical, purposefully on-the-nose rattle sound at the end of each wedding disco-like “shake, shake, shake it” hook. It’s a joy to hear her back in her creative swing.

Hideous Creature doesn’t possess the same pop immediacy of Sim’s day job, but it does feel like a record that needed to be made: vital and beautiful.

A defiantly bravura set of melodic metal on which the 73-year-old genuinely sounds as though he’s having the time of his life.

Scintillating and confident. ... This is music to bop to on the streets, to listen to in church with a big congregation, or to soak up alone in a room.

While this album invigorates and intrigues, in future I would hope to hear her expand lyrically, while exploring the hauntingly melancholic sounds her violin can produce. For now, at least, the defiant joy her work evokes is a stimulating jolt to the senses.

Ellery and Skye have managed cohesion amid the cacophony. I Love You Jennifer B is a dramatic outing that combines the modern, the classical and everything else in between.

They capture Reed’s early processes, fragments of ideas that would morph into his definitive work. ... We sense that all that remained for Reed to do was to become Lou.

The Painter harks back to the producer’s woozy, worldly chill out beginnings. It even features Orton on two tracks. This is ambient music for grown-ups.

This is Jacklin’s most personal offering yet and while the pain of mining her soul for such material is clear, through these diary-like confessionals, so too is her catharsis.

Muse are a blockbuster band, and this is another box-office-demolishing spectacular – it would feel like self-denial not to surrender. Honestly, the end of the world has rarely sounded like so much fun.

There are duds, mostly when Aitch is chasing LA acclaim and aping US trap rappers on tracks like Cheque or Fuego. But when he leans into the silky, bumpy ’90s-era smooth-licking RnB that he raised himself on – see Sunshine or R Kid – he’s hard to beat.

The great joy of this late period album is that it doesn’t take itself too seriously. Lifetime Achievement is not so much a last will and testament as a bravura insistence on Wainwright’s intention to carry on living and loving for as long as he can.

It’s surely fair to deduce that the intended ‘reset’ is all about returning pop to its early years’ sense of wonder, both sonically and emotionally. On that level, its nine tracks resoundingly succeed.

What Kasabian have lost in aggression they have gained in depth and sensitivity, and the result is a vivid, adventurous album set at the outer limits of rock and techno.

This is highly advanced rap filtered through easily digestible hooks and musical choices. The beat variety on display is exquisite. Almost every shade of Megan Thee Stallion is here.

In all it’s a fascinating mix, which should attract new recruits to Kokoroko’s ever-growing legion of fans.