Once I Was an Eagle is a work that demands to be taken as a whole, another reminder of the peculiar power of the album form, despite frequent premature declarations of its redundancy.

As a tribute, and a farewell, it could hardly be better.

Merritt’s refracted reminiscences frequently offer thoughtful and incisive insights into bigger issues, and with deceptive sleight of story.

The appetite for Washington’s old-school jazz utopia is a miracle in itself, renewed here.

It’s a mature mix of reflection and assertion--albeit corralled this time into just ten tracks--in which Weller’s musings on life, love and society are channelled through a diverse series of musical modes, most of them constantly seeking to seep into other styles.

Elwan (Elephants), perhaps their most powerful album since Amassakoul, confronts their situation head-on, in songs musing on the values of ancestry, unity and fellowship, driven by the infectiously hypnotic cyclical guitar grooves that wind like creepers around their poetic imagery.

It’s all delivered with welcoming warmth and humility, over impeccably buttoned-down soul-funk grooves.

Every Bad is a relinquishing of whatever it is that keeps us from baring our souls, and an unleashing of frustration at how, like children riding a carousel, we’re all just going round in circles.

Off Off On stakes out the Winchester-born, Paris-based Stables as one of the most original and musically gifted artists of today.

FKA Twigs emerges the high priestess of R&B's latest corruption, and the world will kneel at the altar.

With Stone Rollin', he broadens his outlook to take in various other R&B styles, without shifting more than a few years either way.

Musically progressive, it’s Shires most ambitious work to date; nasty, stomping Southern rock sits next to poppier fare and several moments of quiet introspection.

The result is a dark, steamy sound that comes crawling from the Louisiana swamp like a mean-tempered 'gator.

Throughout, Jones’s characteristic optimism holds true, in songs such as Binky Griptite’s latter-day civil rights anthem “Matter Of Time” (“It’s a matter of time before justice will come”) and especially Crispiano’s “Come And Be A Winner”, whose light country-soul stylings and rhythm guitar seem to channel Curtis Mayfield.

“Wanderlust” establishes the overall thematic impulse to live culturally beyond one’s means, but in practice this can lead to the preference for smarts over suitability that spoils a track like “A Dog’s Life”. But there are moments of greatness here and there.

Over 15 tracks, a giddy mix of moods, genres, cultures, languages and time periods is woven together with virtuosic ease by Anoushka Shankar’s liquid sitar, Johnny Marr’s shimmering guitar and Ajay Prasanna’s gliding bamboo flute.

Inspiration Information [is] repackaged with an extra disc of pieces recorded since then, which show his abilities undiminished by age.

Popular Problems--note the drolly contradictory title--finds his agreeable baritone growl applied as usual to romantic disappointment and political venality with vivid, jolting metaphors (“I see the ghost of culture, with numbers on his wrist”) cutting to the quick.

Too many tracks, however, suffer from a shortfall of melodic potency, and a lack of lateral development, especially in longer pieces such as the 12-minute sci-fi musings of “Black Screen” and the declamatory nine minutes of “How Do You Sleep?”.

Reflective, immersive and, in a more subtle way, euphoric, this is the record to put the art into The Avalanches’ party.

So even if this is an elegy for FJM, it’s a rather wonderful one.

It retains their signature blend of folk-rock songcraft and miasmic guitar-drone textures, but in a more purposive manner.

With strong, clear-eyed subtext, overlaid by compositions that touch on every influence from TV on the Radio to Prince, Childish Gambino and Radiohead, Smiling With No Teeth is not so much an album as it is a memoir – a story both unique to Owusu and universal to anyone who has ever felt “othered”.

For the most part Gold Record is a deftly woven and cosily feathered little nest of songs. Settle in.

Happier Than Ever is full of things most of us don’t have to deal with – NDAs, interviews, paparazzi – and yet Eilish weaves them around universal woes, with such a knack for sharp, insightful lyrics that it never comes across like her diamond shoes are too tight.

A debut this assured is rare but, then, Tems evidently is an all-or-nothing kind of artist. Just as her lyrics show her turning away from romantic distractions (she craves real connection), so, too, do her songs make it clear that she’s in it for the long haul.

It’s always been their melding of sounds that has singled them out. That glorious, flagrant disregard of genre is on full display here, a merging of sensibilities smooth as a rich, dark rum.

It's long (nearly 100 minutes), strange, disturbing, uncomfortable, challenging. But it never fails to fascinate.