All too often, tracks feel like connectors – carriages to transport listeners between the singles. There’s little narrative, few definitive themes, but there are lots of guests.

The more experimental side of the record is where things get really challenging.

That’s Your Lot isn’t the instant-classic debut they might have hoped for, but it delivers on their early promise, and offers tantalising hints at where they might go from here.

This is an album that delivers both mood and melody, thanks in no small part to Nagano.

Largely, this is a set of songs that seep, creep and grow in strength, like opener ‘Aladdin’, ‘Time On Her Side’ and ‘Cave’.

A powerful piece of work, but one that will leave you with as many questions as it does answers.

Classically trained, the breadth of Ainsworth’s talent is laid bare on Darling Of The Afterglow.

Mastodon have written the most personal album of their career, and in doing so perhaps their most pertinent too.

The blurred lines are kinda the point and half the fun. But now The Moonlandingz have turned fiction into semi-reality by making their debut album... and it’s brilliant.

Their jaunty Americana morphs from something lovely into something utterly essential.

Overall Mercer’s songwriting creds are well in tact.

There are some dull ballads towards the end, and the title track’s flimsy R&B isn’t even redeemed by its righteous opening line: “My love is more potent than anything in the cup you’re holding”. But like all the best pop stars, Larsson shines bright even when her material lets her down. And when it matches her, she’s basically irresistible.

The five-piece’s debut album is a mini manifesto on harnessing your own power, pooling it with your mates’ and taking on anything the world throws at you.

Every day is Halloween with Creeper, in the very best way.

It doesn’t always work, not least in ‘Shotgun’’s iffy mix of Nashville-ready instrumentals and a chugging house beat. On the flipside, ‘Do I Have To Talk You Into It’ sticks so stubbornly to the Spoon template it could be a discarded number from any of their previous records.

Sadly, towards the close the balance is lost and the fine-but-inessential ‘Summer Moon’, ‘Weeds Through The Rind’ and ‘Schlager’ end things on a weak note.

Heavier, harder and with a lot more clout about them, Circa Waves’ return is finally something you can believe in.

It all adds up to the most serene, stylistically varied album Marling has ever created.

His latest album is as likeable as he seems in interviews: assured but unassuming and sometimes hard to fathom.

Volcano may rank as more of a technical progression than an artistic one, but it’s no less impressive for that.

Their stark sound might not be for everyone, but Williamson’s sideways swipes at pop culture and his own big nights out are as hypnotic as Fearn’s punked-up electronica which, despite its simplicity, is nigh impossible not to move to.

The south London grime don delivers a knockout debut that’s brash and pensive in equal measure.

Drunk, as out-there as it can be, is an album totally high on its own unique ideas.

Prisoner isn’t quite up to the career-best standards of its predecessors, but it’s a remarkably focused and effective successor nonetheless.

If the band suffer from anything, it’s being too serious for their own good, but the sheer propulsive nature of the majority of the record makes it undeniably attractive.

When it comes to big, belting choruses backed with equally sizeable orchestration, Graham doesn’t muck about.

Like the film it accompanies, the T2 Trainspotting is nostalgic but new, paying homage to its heritage while saluting brilliant new British music. In other words: choose T2.

Process might not be as bold or as inventive or as life-changing as some of the other records Sampha’s had a hand in during his career, but it does have a quiet, dignified impact that suits its maker. He hasn’t stepped out of his shadowy, background world; instead, he’s invited us to join him there.