Deforming Lobes is unpredictable and invigorating--the best representation of Segall’s restless creativity to date, not to mention the most fun to listen to.

Like its predecessor, Blunderbuss, it’s a mixed bag, roughly split between heavy blues-rock and country, many songs supposedly drawing on teenage writings White unearthed in a drawer.

The meringue-light and snow-bright Visions is a sort of cut-up, laptronica take on the kind of sugary, girly electro-pop confections Prince produced for a succession of female starlets in the late 1980s.

Her own third album suggests she’s every bit [Damien Rice's] equal in tracking the heart’s mysterious emotional undercurrents.

Boys These Days – in step with recent records by fellow leading alt-rock lights Fontaines DC and Wolf Alice – is blind to restraints of era or genre, a work of invigorating emancipation rock.

Del Rey’s claims that this is her most personal album yet are not quite true – it is far more elliptical and mysterious than it first appears.

There's a world-weariness to some of his songs that's as attractive now as ever.

With its classical and avant-garde stylings and Clementine’s sometimes queasily operatic delivery, I Tell A Fly won’t be to everyone’s taste--which in this era of increasing conformity may be its most valuable asset.

There’s little here that Coombes doesn’t test the waters of. And though in lesser hands such eclecticism may have felt forced and disjointed, here it’s nothing short of excellent.

This throws most of one's attention on the vocals, always the most engagingly evanescent aspect of their sound.

The band seem guided more by instinct than any sense of formula, but there are some superb embellishments – a fearsome guitar solo on “Take the Long Way”, eerie synth ripples on “Retrograde” – that build to the surprising final track, “River Cross”.

Unlike their earlier tyro works, the simplicity is rarely matched by killer tunes on this album, which yokes together the first-ever stereo mix of Wild Honey with a tranche of outtakes and fragments, and an extra CD of efficient but uninspiring live performances.

At times this [spent two years sitting with these songs] makes for a more considered output; other songs run the risk of overthinking themselves.

There’s some filler. But melody-lite tracks such as “Sicily” and “Negative Space” bob by on their bass line grooves.

As with many great albums, successive hearings reveal more clearly the elliptical tunes at the heart of these eight quietly intense pieces, climaxing with the eight-minute “Age Old Tale”, a masterly band performance.

Powerful and personal, it’s a persuasive protest tribute straight from the heart.

The Weeknd weasels his way queasily into unprotected affections under cover of arrangements whose dark, miasmic synth tones and itchy, sludgy rhythms blend the apparently conflicting worlds of R&B and industrial new-wave.

“Windows”, with its eerie synths and squawking delivery, recalls the dark psychedelia of Cypress Hills’ 2018 record, Elephants on Acid. But that then jumps to skittery R&B with “I’ll Take You On”. Nothing joins together. Brockhampton don’t sound self-aware as much as self-conscious.

Their mega beats endure on No Geography, but this is also a stupendously successful splicing of past and present.

Pleasingly, two of the best [guests] are British, Sampha capping “4422” with an emotive outburst, and Skepta getting an entire “Skepta Interlude” to himself to muse about how he “died and came back as Fela Kuti”. Elsewhere, the likes of Giggs, Young Thug and 2 Chainz add furtive but menacing sketches of thug life to tracks like “No Long Talk” and “Sacrifices”, the latter offering Drake’s most elegant mea culpa for past transgressions.

It’s pure rock and roll: sleazy, slick and lots of fun. Sound & Fury marks another milestone for a remarkable artist.

Smith’s new record does feel like her most personal. Her lyrics have a stream-of-consciousness style, as though she’s in the middle of composing a message to a friend or partner. The delight she takes in performing these songs is palpable.

The music is fine, if aimless.

The Ship is a strange amalgam of Eno’s familiar ambient approach with poetry--the latter delivered in a sonorous basso profundothat resonates with a sort of looming, warning warmth.

An album which focuses their stadium-alt-punk sound to its sharpest edge yet.

It’s an engrossing set throughout, leading one through the subdued swirls of “Dawn Chorus” to the climax of “The Uncertainty Principle”, another work whose throbbing organ and cavernous twang owe a distinct debt to Can.

The results are spiritually exhausting.

Best of all is "The Day That We Die", Rufus Wainwright oozing mournfully with his dad about the way that familial potholes prove so difficult to repair.