Despite the varying shifts of the album, nothing feels bloated or outstays its welcome and that in itself is quite an achievement on a record like this. Direct when it needs to be, ethereal and gorgeously distant at other times, May You Be Held is not for the casual listener seeking instant gratification.

While there are some issues with the feeling of déjà vu, Unknown Rooms doesn't really do anything noticeably off the mark.

In the end Black Girl Magic accomplishes two very important goals of any record: reminding you Honey Dijon is an artist to watch, and being quite a fun listen.

While it has quite a few tracks that stand out, besides the glamorous opener, due to their use of pathos-laden synthesizer hooks (“Ben Franklin”, “Headlock”) and moody refrains (“Glory”, “Automate”), the gentle ballads and groovy mid-tempo tracks that make up the album’s second act don’t seem as stylized or aggressively emotional musically as their lyrics demand.

This is a generous, compulsively enjoyable statement, unburdened of commercial pressure in a way that’s all too rare in this numbers game.

As a stepping stone forward and backward, No Elephants preserves her musical legacy while subtly altering her own approach to these sounds.

the rest can be defined by its most insecure and self-deprecating moments. “Black Hole” opens the EP with what is probably the lightest of the four tracks, but rest assured, the other three deliver the depth and emotional resonance that boygenius fans have come to expect.

Minks' devotion to mood and texture may seem redolent of My Bloody Valentine's foggy experiments, but By The Hedge isn't nearly as sonically challenging or heady as Kevin Shields's work. No, Minks have more modest goals as it turns out, their greatest inspiration comes not from the music of others but rather from within.

The guest list occasionally weighs the project down. “Sweet Nuthins”, featuring Leon Thomas, suffers from a cluttered mix that distracts from a vocal performance that deserved more space. But whenever the album threatens to capsize under its own ambition, Kehlani rights the ship by isolating their voice.

Voyageur is a very fine record and only a couple of songs short of a great one, with Edwards' vocals and songs plus the warm-yet-crisp production being the main attractions.

It avoids sounding too similar to their debut, but retains the likeable elements of that record with added gusto.

While there are some tracks that could have been expended, that just wouldn’t be Rina’s style. She’s here to express her excessive, melodramatic, fun-loving, pain-harbouring persona in every single different way she can, without holding anything back – and SAWAYAMA should be celebrated for that.

Life, and Another expands her palette tenfold with different hues and tones that would typically go unnoticed on an experimental record. The result is her most engaging work yet.

It’s a rewarding and fun listen – but it also magnifies the inescapable fact that Pulp, just like their audience, have matured.

Haiti lacks a clear narrative. Still, this hardly harms the project. It simply constrains it to being particularly strong rather than transcendent.

New Epoch, Goth-Trad has adopted a patience, openness and attention to detail that feels indebted to the more intricacy-focused realms of bass music and techno, but retains the sweaty, oxidized exhalations of muscled jungle rhythms.

Keys to the Kuffs is nothing groundbreaking, but it certainly warrants a few thorough listens.

Even if the highs aren't as high, like the rest of the reunited lineup's work, there really aren't any noticeable lows.

We can chalk these relatively minor missteps up to inexperience or over-excitement at finally releasing an album, and when you consider the heights that Sorry reach at points on 925 then it’s entirely forgivable. Overall, it would be hard to call 925 anything other than a great success, and one that should see Sorry’s star rise even higher – that’s if the public can get on board with their slightly unhinged view of things.

The lack of "slower" numbers doesn't really feel like a valid criticism, though, especially when the band really are at their best when they're riding a burst energy.

While making this album worth the wait was a tall task, Between The Times & The Tides comes about as close as we could have hoped to accomplishing just that.

The record touches on new tonal and structural territories, however incremental, while maneuvering within the same basic framework laid out in Ital's debut.

Clocking in at a hair over half an hour in length, Driver is similarly brief in nature as the albums which preceded it, but it stands apart from Adult Mom’s first two records in that it’s a more polished, bigger and brighter collection of songs, in spite of how its lyrical content may seem.

Sun’s Signature is a wonderful record whose core themes of hope, splendour and faith in nature are something we could all do with right about now.

These songs show that Rodrigo isn’t done after GUTS.

Though Mr. Impossible is their most accessible work to date, it's still unmistakably Black Dice.

People Who Aren’t There Anymore was not written as a reflection but a documentary of the emotional processes the band members were going through at the time. The meaning of the songs will continue to change for the band over time, just as they will for listeners.

Superbloom proves another ace in Jessie Ware’s hand, albeit one that for the most part stays within the dance-disco territory of her 2020s output.