This is not so much pop music, as music that might make your ears pop.

The tone switches dramatically between dynamic contemporary electro groove adventures, singalong pop and lush synthetic ballads, while veering emotionally between introspective vulnerability and strident defiance. Yet every track adheres to robust, classic songwriting principles, a kind of melodious elegance of structure gleaming through no matter how inventively deconstructed the arrangement.

Alison Krauss and Union Station have a marvellous chemistry as a band - and it's as impressive as ever on Paper Airplane, their first album together since 2004.

Gifted keeps giving: Koffee achieves a brilliantly confident debut with the promise of more good things to come.

Van Etten evokes Eighties electro pop. You can almost see the dry ice and excessive mascara. The atmosphere is doomy and gothic, creating an underlying tension that casts her lyrics of devotion and self-forgiveness in a shadowy light. It’s as if she can’t quite commit to her own happiness.

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

This is a set of funny, twisted, sharp-edged vignettes about the choices women face in the gritty, down-to-earth setting of daily working life – feminist pop as kitchen sink drama.

Theirs is a music of doomed melancholy –- plaintive, dark, and uneasy.

This record is undoubtedly their strongest offering since 2006’s Meds, strengthened by the inclusion of the sort of furious social commentary that made them such heroes to countless kohl-eyeliner-wielding teenagers in the late 90s.

What’s Your Pleasure has a sleek and sensual disco glamour replete with fantastic pop hooks, taking a spin around the dance floor worthy of Studio 54 in its glitterball glory days.

The Gabriels are making thunderous, thoughtful music with commercial snap.

It’s a big, angry, pile-driving, end-times heavy rock workout with frontman Eddie Vedder alternately spewing fury and despair at the state of the world.

They’ve always been more about energy than songs and old fans will certainly pick up on a few recycled ideas. But they’ll still find this the band’s most spirited release since 1997’s The Fat of the Land.

Jazzy, soulful, philosophical and intimate, Jones seems to have found a poetic lyrical voice to match her sensuous voice and sensitive piano phrasing.

Giles Martin (son of George) has created an immaculate remix but all it really does is separate and boost sounds so that they can punch their weight alongside modern recordings on digital streaming platforms. It sounds good, but then it always did. ... What this painstakingly assembled 50th anniversary release demonstrates is that you can’t improve on perfection.

The Overload is a very fine debut from a group that sound like they think they are smarter, funnier and fiercer than all of their peers, and just might prove to be.

The mix of trap grooves and synth balladry is perfectly of the moment, lacking the boldness of a truly original talent. Yet there is something appealing in the sweet melodies and sour attitude of a singer who sounds like she might actually be starting to enjoy herself.

Her uncompromising, June Taboresque alto and imaginative, original material--from ye olde narrative ballads to modern love songs--are enduringly seductive.

For all Byrne’s other endeavours, music is the forum where his quirky, zany, challenging ideas achieve emotionally satisfying expression. American Utopia is another glittering offering from an old master.

A genuine treat, probably the best thing he has made since his debut.

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 songs Memphis Women And Chicken, Tuscaloosa, 1962 and Foolish Heart are highly enjoyable, but the highlight is the complex and moving Errol Flynn.

It’s certainly delightful and delicious – as they croon on opening track De-Lovely – although also decidedly undemanding.

Playing piano and acoustic guitar, the 44-year-old takes listeners on a bittersweet journey balancing the melancholy of the medium with a healing message. Stand out songs Closer and Lose My Way have a meditative sadness but there is real warmth in choral backing vocals, subtle grooves and Brun’s melodic instincts.

There is a clutch of fine songs here written for Nelson by some of Nashville’s leading contemporary tunesmiths, including the title track (a celebration of life on the road) and elegiac ballad Dusty Bottles that are surely destined for classic status.

Hypnotically compelling.

This is a vast superclub of an album. But for all its inventiveness, its flavours exist within fairly narrow parameters. Still, these songs will be blasted out of cars, at house parties, in hotel rooms and on dance floors for years to come.

It is a little daunting at first approach, but stylistic breadth and dynamic shifts make up for the stark brutality of their sound.