Squandered its potential. Maruja emerge from the studio with raucous rap-rock and meandering jam music in tow, resulting in an album full of the same songs several times over. By the end, listeners may feel they have deja vu. Fans may feel they have dementia.

A pleasing anachronism landing on a very different planet. Even though the band had reformed for some dates a decade ago, it’s a return that feels as unexpected as a reappearance from the ghost of Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra.

It feels almost too intimate for the world to hear.

Raymond tells timeless tales through her free-spirited performances. If, sometimes, it feels as if seventeen separate melodies are somehow being flung from six strings and two sets of five fingers at once, then know that all of nature, its blooming flowers, its swooping birds, appear in our ears because of her innate command of an explosive musical articulation.

Saint Etienne want you to remember them this way with not just the pop album of the year but with the pop album of all our lives.

If Autofiction was the first entry in a new triptych, considering the same themes at a more mature stage of life, then Antidepressants is a fine middle panel: a warp of the formula that is considered and progressive, if not as immediately thrilling. .... What a blessing that they’re using this renewed energy to keep complicating and interrogating their own artistry.

However dark the underlying motives are, The Collapse Of Everything gives a sense of hope, rising from ashes.

This album is more grounded than the last: $ilk and Khalil Blu’s arrays into progressive soul, as well as their Soulquarians-style samples and wavy melodies, counterbalance the former’s intensity with a sense of calm befitting introspection. Their refined production creates the kind of depth wherein $ilk’s more personal lyrics can come through.

Musically, Smith’s electronic extravaganza finds kinship with such auteurs as Fever Ray and Estonian producer Maria Minerva. From shimmering hypnagogic pop on ‘Both’ to playful 8-bit ‘What’s Between Us’, Gush is inventive and unpredictable.

Over time, I found the album to be stickier than its first impression. The pensiveness of its approach is, after all, an effective rendering of the sense of crippling stillness which awaits in grief; periods of deep paralysis stirred only by sudden anguish or unexpected joy. Essex Honey isn’t about England, it’s about the mourning Hynes experienced there.

The tracks are skeletal, repetitive and fuzzed-out to the point of abrasion; it could be an easy mistake to think they’re disjointed sketches. In truth, they cohere like a shattered mosaic of memory, pieced together into a triumphant chronicle of growth.

When a partnership between such bold artists can endure for decades in spite of individual prerogatives, you can be assured it’s deep and real, and as Mazurek and Taylor each continue to expand their own practices, Chicago Underground Duo only gets richer.

You can’t fault the album for its lofty ambitions, though at times it feels overly wedded to a sense of gravitas, like the pianos on ‘The Slipstream’, which have all the solemn sentimentality of a Lloyds Bank advert. Closer ‘Safety’ is a much more arresting cut.

Private Music Deftones sounds just like Deftones, but with something off about them: even compared to their most ethereal numbers, Private Music is blown all the way out. Everything echoes or is covered in fuzz. It sounds like the slowed-and-reverbed version of themselves. In a word, a memory.

The album sounds rich, even if the people Brown sings about (and for) are not. The songs themselves are brain-swirls of half-remembered fragments, dreams, bits of song, ephemera that repeats in your mind against the everyday wash of thought. You’re captured in its sticky, squelchy synth web from start to finish.

It’s A Beautiful Place is an amalgamation of directions, culminating in a product that is lyrically existential, sonically experimental and eerily extraterrestrial.

‘Bloom Baby Bloom’ had so much going for it. Why couldn’t Wolf Alice apply that level of vision, skill, invention and audaciousness to the rest of The Clearing? As radio friendly as Fleetwood Mac usually were, they didn’t win the world’s respect by holding back timidly for 80 per cent of each album, or being content to let only the vocals do the talking.

At times, it feels as if Marcloid has somehow found a way to give her DAW a nervous system. This, combined with White-Gluz’ organic melodic impulses, makes for a pop album that is both strikingly deft and consciously playful.

Lower one’s expectations from its rescuing of the planet and Babymetal’s latest, Metal Forth, is a full-on hoot. .... Polished and compressed to the maximum, the metallic elements do their primal job of instigating the headbanging and devil’s horns. Each successive pop chorus is catchier than Saint Peter’s fishing net. The electronic details add to the endorphin-triggering lushness.

Willoughby Tucker is the most complete, emotional and addictive Ethel Cain record to date.

I’ve not yet had the chance to hear this music in its natural setting, but perhaps more than any funk full length, Radio Libertadora! gives a real indication of what that might be like.

Even when the songs falter – the clunky ‘Dove Cameron’, or the over-filtered ‘Dream Scenario’ – they fail interestingly. This isn’t a pristine album. It mutates, glitches, repeats itself.

The proverbial mask might be off but The Armed still have us in a headlock, forcing us to look at the atrocities we’d rather turn away from or scroll past.

Blue Veil has a cinematic sense of tension that keeps the music from retreating into passive background music, but never feels overbearing. As much of a deviation as Blue Veil is from her previous work, Railton has lost none of the sense of control that sets her apart as a composer.

DJ Haram has delivered a debut worthy of an artist intent on tearing through the clichés that cling to both sound and identity – confronting the systems that colonise, both outwardly and within.

In keeping with its title, Trouble arrives as a more explosive record than its predecessor, Birch’s first solo album, I Play My Bass Loud. .... The smooth and cohesive production (with the help of Youth from Killing Joke and Michael Rendall) makes Trouble an appealing listen.

You could spend days mapping the landscape of My First Album, which is woven with enough references to flummox and delight any pop nerd. The trouble with this approach – artist as nostalgic fangirl – is that it leaves you wondering who Jessica Winter is, and what her sound might have to say other than “I really love the music of my youth”.

A fearlessness in operating in obscurity is Black Noise, demonstrated in its abstract nature. ‘Art of Survival’ brings forth a mass of overwhelming sounds before dulling into inaudible speech that is both numbing and ominous, in amongst defiant lyricism. ‘Black Orpheus’ bares mystical unease, dominated by streaky violin chords intriguingly met with rhythmic drum patterns that create fanatical theatre.