III is Banks’s most cohesive album to date because she’s no longer restricting herself to exploring one feeling at a time.

As a listener you want the artist to sound comfortable in their own skin. But by the end of Case Study 01, it’s hard to be convinced that this is really him.

A slow-burning triumph.

He drifts like a spectre through a labyrinth, exploring his favourite themes of sleep, reality and the subconscious. The tones here are stark and bleak, compared to the claustrophobia of 2014’s Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes. ... By the end of ANIMA, you’re left wondering about those dreams that are just out of reach, but also what we risk losing when we look back.

A viscerally entertaining album that never lingers for more than four minutes per song. Rock’n’roll isn’t dead: it’s just been sleeping.

On False Alarm, though, they offer something that proves they’re still worth paying attention to.

For all its glimmering synths and the robotic pathos of Taylor’s idiosyncratic vocals, this is a record with both heart and soul.

This is music that sounds as fun to make as it is to listen to. The energy here is thrilling, the strong rhythm section provided by former Detroit garage band The Greenhornes’ bassist Jack Lawrence and drummer Patrick Keeler. ... Help Us Stranger has been a long time coming, but it was worth the wait.

The emotional cohesion the record loses in its shifting cast of singers/songwriters/genres it makes up in DJ-savvy textural variety.

On this album, you find yourself drifting in and out. She tackles trolls, racism, overpopulation and the internet age. You crave solutions as each track closes, or perhaps more of those sublime, witty character studies she offered on Let Them Eat Chaos.

Where most rock superstars sink into trad tedium by 69, Springsteen is still crafting sophisticated paeans of depth and illumination, a rock grandmaster worthy of the accolade. A must-have for anyone who has a heart.

It is an intriguing, often brilliant, though occasionally awful record.

This is an album that shows a band who’ve grown stronger and unafraid to flex their muscle.

There’s a focus on tribal percussion and a multitude of vocal techniques you don’t expect on a pop album: folky vocables, angular melodies, overdubbing, a male choir. This is more enthralling on some tracks than others.

The album loses some momentum around the more generic “Strangers”. But even with that song, the harmonies are hard to resist. It’s the best pop comeback – and likely one of the best pop albums – of the year.

Kind Heaven is an ambitious, engaging record by an artist who clearly still has plenty of fire in his belly.

It’s their most poppy and psychedelic-leaning work to date, bursting with colour and fuelled by a multicultural band featuring Elenna Canlas on keys and backing vocals, and Ish Montgomery on bass.

The result is a quintessentially London record, as dark and moody as it is brash and innovative.

The arrangements are suitably bombastic: there’s a theremin camping up the pub piano on his cover of Laura Nyro’s ”Wedding Bell Blues”. His version of Bruce Wayne Campbell’s (aka Jobriath) 1973 glam stomp “Morning Starship” really sells the wry/cosmic lyrics about a girl picking a rocket’s lock with her hairpin. ... Morrissey’s take on Joni Mitchell’s “Don’t Interrupt the Sorrow” is leaden jazz karaoke, stripping the original of all its haze and drift. The electro-stomp/harp, fading to reflective piano fade-out of his reworking of Melanie Safka’s ”Some Say I Got Devil”, makes a joke of his lifelong self-pity.

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

The production here is superb. Tyler has never been one for traditional song structure, but on IGOR he’s like the Minotaur luring you through a maze that twists and turns around seemingly impossible corners, drawing you into the thrilling unknown. ... This is Tyler’s best work to date.

An album of polished pop. Perhaps this will put her at the top where she belongs.

I Am Easy to Find feels like an old friend you’re pleased to keep around--even if, had you been introduced today, you wonder if you’d have been compelled to make the effort.

Always exquisitely unbothered, the indie-rock poster boy now sounds like he can’t be bothered.

We have to wait for the final, title track for the end of suffering. That Carter’s young daughter Mercy is on the recording ramps up the emotion and hopeful vibe of this acoustic ballad. It’s a much-needed resolution to an album of full-throttle catharsis.

This deathly intrigue is drawn from Lenker’s own personal traumas, which she successfully spins into something that feels universal. But you don’t come away from this record feeling downcast. It’s more a reminder of how fleeting yet beautiful life is, and an appeal to make the most of it.

An unfashionable record, then, and that may be its best asset. With such low stakes and barely any emotional intensity, Father of the Bride won’t cement Vampire Weekend’s legacy. But after a highly strung decade on the indie-rock A-list, it gives them room to breathe.

Love is a pleasant although occasionally overly earnest capsule collection of pop sounds where Diamantis proves herself to be the master of the “brief pause... and gentle drop” technique. ... Her voice skitters across songs with a frostiness reminiscent of Madonna’s Ray of Light era, and sometimes it feels like a lecture being delivered into the mirror: everyone’s just like you, no one’s happy, enjoy your life.