Weeks’ haunting lilt is perfect for embodying the magic and fear of creating a life, whether writing letters to his unborn son on “Takes A Village”, mooning over 20-week scans on “Blood Sugar” or finally tucking the nipper in on “Milk Breath”. It’s gorgeous, but expect more gin and screaming on the follow-up.

Though it could stand to sound more consistent throughout (at times The Staves sound like they’re throwing that proverbial spaghetti against the wall), Good Woman successfully demonstrates that even through life’s lessons and uncomfortable liminal states, family is the most stabilising force.

This is by no means an easy record to fathom, but it does show – even after so many years – you’ll never catch Albarn resting on his laurels.

Lone soul genius Cody ChesnuTT's in dazzling form on Landing on a Hundred, which must be the most impressive crowd-funded album ever.

He's keen to please, but what's remarkable about The Lady Killer is that he manages to avoid all the bubblebath boudoir-soul cliches that litter most R&B albums.

While the songs here lack the scuzzy charm of her debut, Tell Me How You Really Feel is a weightier, more direct record.

["A Little Bit Of Everything"] is a thoughtful, mature conclusion to an album that seems to summarise one of the more welcoming trends in American rock

Americana is the kind of concept album that Bernie Taupin might have written for Elton John; but being Ray Davies, it’s not so much comprised of fond, mythopoeic imaginings as the more specific (non-political) relationship that still subsists between Britain and America.

Flamagra--a playful yet melancholic, skittish yet meditative 67 minutes of cosmic genius--is one of Flying Lotus’s most accessible releases.

It’s an enjoyable, occasionally virtuosic romp, fronted by Thundercat’s smooth soul harmonies, which lend proceedings the lustrous sheen of Earth, Wind & Fire.

With Golding’s expansive, questing lines riding Boyd’s rolling, polyrhythmic funk, the duo set displays a focused musical intimacy, while the band set is immediately more incendiary, thanks to Parker wailing wild over Golding’s more rooted part in “Valley Of The Ultra Blacks”.

Vessel is a return to form for Kline: bringing the sincerity that was threaded throughout her Bandcamp releases to the forefront once again.

The result is an engaging, youthful and thoughtful folk-rock.

It's a brave and sometimes baffling album, broaching difficult themes; though faced with a series of such unforgiving electro-sonic maelstroms, one may hanker for the touches of folksy pastoralism that lightened earlier AF albums.

The Long Sleep is more concerned with the lifecycle, the existential, and, in parts, is more sonically expansive.

It seems like they just ran out of interest, and gave up.

Although their go-for-broke approach furnishes ideas to spare, the unwitting effect is a set of lurches from impressive to hopelessly ill-integrated, often over the course of a single song.

There's a consistency and homogeneity about the 11 tracks (seven from The Red Shoes, four from The Sensual World) which echoes her work on Aerial, and which lends the project a character entirely its own.

It's Wagner's mix of the enigmatic and the demotic that dominates, his songs fill of understated apothegms and startling lines.

No Home Record’s lack of cohesion is unlikely to pull you deep into its disjointed soundworld. What does unite the tracks, though, is the restlessly questing, non-conformist spirit of their creator. It’s great to have her back.

Despite Andrews’ occasionally overwrought attempts to conjure up a mood of malevolent fate by channelling his inner Nick Cave, it’s an absorbing journey.

With Warp and Weft, Laura Veirs delivers her most satisfying set of songs since Carbon Glacier, but here, the arrangements devised by Veirs and her partner/producer Tucker Martine are so much more expansive and illuminating, creating a rich tapestry of ideas and idioms.

Her sweeping, layered ninth album is more ruminative than reactive: questions of family and legacy, memory and death swirl around one another until they’re one in the same.

For fans who first became acquainted with Jordan’s music around her debut EP Habit, Lush is a continuation of Jordan’s coming of age tale--nostalgia for lost love, the overwhelming sensation of being a rising, young musician and the chaos of getting older. Jordan’s 10-track record parallels the beautiful plain-spoken lyrics and catharsis echoed by artists like Soccer Mommy and Julien Baker.

In just eight songs, BTS have accomplished the same genre-bending they usually do in double that runtime. And for the most part, the album avoids the pitfall of sounding like a checklist. With BE, BTS keep their foot on the pedal.

The braggadocio heard on this track and throughout is like an extension of that confidence in “Formation” from Lemonade. ... Closing with “LOVEHAPPY”, Beyonce and Hov are at their most transparent about the moment that almost broke their marriage.

The good news is that the perma-brilliant James Blake has flooded his fourth album--Assume Form--with euphoric sepia soul and loved-up doo-wop. His trademark intelligence, honesty and pin-drop production remain intact.

He offers up beautifully crafted country that uses rock, gospel and blues influences to push gently at the genre’s boundaries: sweet guitar licks, thrashing drums and Church’s voice straining at the top end of his range.