None of the songs here are particularly lengthy, but the way ideas evaporate almost instantaneously makes it a slog of an album. It doesn’t help that one-third of the tracklisting is made up of befuddling interludes, with only one (a reprise of another, no less) offering any intrigue thanks to some well-rendered telephone rings.

Her debut is in fact very well crafted despite wearing a lot of influences on its shining sleeves. It succeeds though in combining those influences into a very enjoyable album that mixes retro and contemporary genres.

You can hear the band's fearlessness in every fun-soaked note on Where We Were Together.

The main take away from The Straight Hits! is that Josh T. Pearson has a lot more facets to his music than he may have previously let on.

The songwriting is on point and the production subtly augments without obfuscating or distracting.

Sex & Food gives the audience a closer look at the chaos-wrapped disco frenzy inside Ruban’s mind.

I Don’t Run can be misread as an album of fun alternative rock songs, but under the surface, it is so much more. Every instrument feels perfectly in place to create a wide range of songs. Varying emotions and a distinctly more mature Hinds.

Ephorize signals the true genesis of a fully realized, ambitious voice in hip hop.

Standout tracks, melancholic interludes and stylistic jumpiness add elements of unpredictability to Everett and co. that they’ve sorely missed. But these same things also make it an overarching mess.

Overall, the EP is decent, its production hearkening back to Abel’s pre-pop efforts. It brings in a range of genres and collaborators into The Weeknd’s canon but fails to truly cover new ground in the lyrics and vocal threads. My Dear Melancholy is a promising output but here’s hoping these stylistic ideas can be explored more originally on a full-length EP.

Here, Cardi’s explosive personality translates flawlessly into confidence-saturated rhymes about hardships, love and success.

It’s an album that flatters to deceive in its use of string arrangements throughout, and may leave some long-time Hop Along fans shrugging a little on their first few times through. However, as with most densely made albums, the more time and effort you spend on it, the more you will get out of it.

It’s a thoughtful, considered progression by one of the UK’s most thoughtful, considerate producers.

It’s a culmination of just about every texture they’ve explored before, fostered through unmistakable maturity.

While the group’s mutual wit and sense of lyrical structure could elevate the flattest of records, the kineticism and gleeful weirdness of their individual work is bafflingly absent. Czarface Meets Metal Face is polished but never makes good on the thrills promised by their teasing enterprise ‘Ka-Bang’ off Czarface’s 2015 record Every Hero Needs A Villain.

McMahon’s record here is a more challenging listen than most, but you won’t know it at first. You’ll be enamored with the sunshine atop the themes of pain and love. Returning to reveal the darker elements is not a prerequisite for enjoyment, but keeps Freedom engaging long after the first listen.

Cohesively, Prhyme 2 serves as a pivotal point in the connection between old school and emerging rappers.

The Detroit quartet's debut album for Woodsist is at times striking and catchy, but also finds itself digging up the same nostalgia-seeking melodies that showed some promise from Bonny Doon to begin with.

None of these influences are worn on Young Fathers' sleeves and Cocoa Sugar is further proof that when the band puts something out that you can prepare for a unique, engaging listen.

None of the tracks on New Material could fit any such textbook definition of "bad". It’s stylistically inconsistent and at times bafflingly chaotic, but each track has a certain quality that defines Preoccupations as a willingly evolutionary band.

Whether the waves will have died down enough for him to return to other topics on the next Mount Eerie album is yet to be heard. But, if he does make another album in honour of his deceased wife, he’s proven here that he still has enough love and poetry in him to make it a deeply resonant and worthwhile listen.

The imperfections and the what-ifs are exactly what make it so intriguing as a glimpse of where Holley could take things. It’s an album which poses more questions than it answers. It gets under your skin like a tick. It leads you to the river but never forces to drink. It leaves you wondering what Black Foxxes are trying to say, but never gives you the answers. The scab of the question itches, and you’re left wanting nothing but to scratch it.

This album, short in track numbers but long in duration, fluctuates intensities, whirlpooling on its own without losing its path, logic and coherence.

On I’ll Be Your Girl, The Decemberists do a few things well, a few things poorly, and most of them acceptably and nothing more. The fact that it never goes completely off the rails is almost as disappointing as the fact that it never finds its footing or seems interested in doing so.

While this is also an explicitly more cathartic album than past releases, Schrader’s words sometimes are either difficult to fully parse or don’t pack the oomph they could. These flaws aside, Riddles required Schrader and Rice to take a gamble, and it’s one that paid off.

Felt is a surprising addition to their canon of work, which 2016’s Hold/Still deftly hinted they were capable of. While it may not be what long time Suuns fans are after, it’s sure to gain them some new listeners, who shall no longer feel alienated by their intense grooves.

He is constantly blowing up what’s good about his work, adding extraneous parts, going on wild tangents, obfuscating emotional truth with impenetrable verbosity, veering from good taste to bad in the blink of an eye, or reinventing his band’s sound wholesale. While this impulse doesn’t always translate to an enjoyable experience for the listener, and can be especially trying for longtime fans, who can become overly attached to what they would consider to be Of Montreal’s definitive sound, there’s no denying that Barnes takes your ears to places they’ve likely never been before. There won’t be another album that comes out this year that sounds like White is Relic/Irrealis Mood.

While American Utopia has its missteps it is, on the whole, a joyous record that only Byrne could make. American Utopia is an album that is inquisitive not just about the world of today but of music’s power to transport and uplift us.