With more ups than downs, Was I The Wave? is a pleasant diversion with a small handful of truly inspired moments.

While it's an album prime for some excellent live renditions, it's the tendency to brood too much or even approach tedium at some points leaves further room for the development of this sound.

The narrative arc – so expertly disguised when the album started – yields a release with surprising character and soul.

Slow Pulp capture what shoegaze and dreampop do best: offering reassurance not that your decisions are right, but that questioning them is what life is about.

It’s a surprising record, and another good example of what makes Mann such an indispensable songwriter, but it’s hard for most of these songs to stand alone – we’re left wondering what’s really going on between these melancholy ruminations.

Sure, it's nice to hear such a talented songwriter working with ease and precision, but it's just not always that interesting.

There are good ideas scattered about on the record, but when you have to pass through several minutes of cacophonous effects and layers of sound, it can get a little exhausting.

Worship [is] an occasionally solid, but ultimately forgettable affair.

Throughout, she marches from truly great lyricism that is on par with the very best of her contemporary idols and peers to unfiltered writing that leads to more ridicule on TikTok than engagement with the listener. Musically, the project is also split between deeply engaging material that is her best yet, while the main album at times just seems too homogenous for its own good in locked in mid-tempo and synth-pop.

Their order within the EP works together to create a new mood, and the listener easily comprehends why Copycat Killer is worth attention after having experienced Punisher. These new versions are not worlds apart from the originals, but the value is in the very small things such as subtle melody changes and different track ordering – working beautifully with Moose’s orchestral talents.

It’s clear that OH NO will not be remembered as one of Xiu Xiu’s most stellar records. Yet, as usual with collaborations, it’s likely that each listener is likely to find their own tracks they ditch, just like different ones will stand out, given the varying degrees of artistic touches these additional musicians bring with their own aesthetics and histories.

Mostly, the listener will leave Kiss Each Other Clean craving something lyrically to hold onto, to become affected beyond the immediate emotional stirs that the pure prettiness of songs like Godless Brother In Love.

While Smiling spreaded itself thin at times, Owusu sounds more settled on Struggler and contorts his voice less.

This may not be a step upwards, but it is a step forward in the overall right direction.

So while it displays a more mature and focused sound for The Drums, the album eventually crumbles beneath the weight of its influential stilts.

Ultimately, Colourgrade feels like staying up all night on the couch alongside Tirzah, but rather than chatting away, you exchange the occasional warm remarks, getting no nearer to knowing what’s really going on inside her head.

It's fun, accessible, at times completely unique, but ultimately it would have nice to hear Jr. Jr. challenge their own sound a little more on their debut album.

Once again Dunn creates slow, careful, and judicious pieces that mirror the sound between the memories in your head, often lulling the listener into an introspective calm.

They’re at their most eclectic, striving for a “greatest aspects” project. The set highlights the band’s multifacetedness, offering moments of transcendent rage, but also feels cumulatively scattered, lacking an emotional axis or sense of sonic continuity.

McCombs would be better served rediscovering wit, rather than abandoning it, thus leaving the listener feeling abandoned as well. But, again, I guess that is the point.

ME REX have taken a leap and tried something fresh, and depending on how much the thought of an album with instructions thrills or annoys you, you’ll get varying degrees of enjoyment from it. Equally though, that’s kind of the point.

Even though Supermigration is constructed as a whole, it doesn’t always work best in one sitting.

A sweet elegy to small group jazz, Sunday Morning Put-On almost demands you lay back and just let the standards do their thing. Without a doubt, they are in good, careful hands here.

There’s just something slightly underdeveloped about the thing as a whole, as if Lorde was excited to excise these meditations and get them into some interesting musical passages.

For all its gorgeous expansiveness and new perspectives, it never comes together to be incisive or essential.

Tricolore is enjoyable, but it’s a sum of two different parts; together it comes off as strangely disjointed, like shifting from speaking German to speaking Japanese.

Most of Cooler Returns is an extension of what their last album was – that’s intentional. These aren’t meant to be revelations, or even to be taken as on-point analysis of a time or place. This is music for the soul, if your soul is literally craving a beer and a nap.

They’ve built up enough good will at this point that they’re able to maintain a massive fanbase by coasting through comfortable records – and they could probably continue to do that for a few more years at least. But, if Berninger and co really want to rediscover purpose in their lives and work, perhaps it’s time to push themselves somewhere a little riskier.