Hideous Creature doesn’t possess the same pop immediacy of Sim’s day job, but it does feel like a record that needed to be made: vital and beautiful.

It is either the sound of someone who has begun to believe her own publicity, or who has stopped caring what anyone else thinks and is determined to follow her muse wherever it wanders. There’s a fine album lurking amidst the indulgence but listeners have their work cut out trying to locate it.

Beyoncé impressively matches her superstar rapper husband in terms of lyrical swagger, rhythmic flow and verbal bounce. That she does it to a backdrop of samples constructed around her own extraordinary singing lends the record's mantric grooves the luxurious sheen of high-end pop.

[James Blake's] most fully-realised album to date. ... Dizzyingly romantic.

A Dream Is All We Know is that rare thing: a perfectly crafted, concise collection of 12 songs that brim over with good-will and optimism.

The 60-year-old producer has clearly been keeping an aficionado’s ear on developments in digital electronica, and there is nothing particularly retro or dated about this comeback. Thorn’s voice has a timelessness that will always sound contemporary. She never strains or overemotes but lets her instinct for elegant melody and the understated intelligence of her lyrics carry the dramatic weight.

There is a tangible sense of joy in performance, although with no greater clarity of lyrical expression. ... His own work remains wilfully obscurantist, emotionally open and lyrically closed, as deep and meaningless as listeners are prepared to let it become.

The two make a fine vocal duo, but even more astonishing is their instrumental virtuosity.

The result is furiously syncopated, no-holds-barred rock made marvellously strange by Camara's squawking fiddle and invocatory singing.

She elegantly smudges the borders of a brass and banjo-driven sound with sophisticated little experiments in rhythm, production and arrangement.

It teases and satisfies at once, which is why, unless you’re allergic to Snarky Puppy’s special charm, you’ll want to play this album over and over.

The Secret of Us marks her move into a more anthemic sound – one that sounds remarkably Swiftian, ready to be blasted out in larger venues. .... The album also features Close to You, a track Abrams teased seven whole years ago but never released – and it’s the clear highlight, all deliciously retro-synths and introspective lyrics that refrain from taking themselves too seriously.

Thirty years on, Albarn sounds just as dissatisfied with the state of the modern world, yet he still appears to have at least a cartoon finger on its pulse.

The results are fantastic: an album of world-beating standard yet still intimate and friendly, an epic of the everyday, a romance of the real.

Barnett’s fourth record Creature of Habit sees her replace rip-roaring rock with earnest self-reflection, all while leaning into a softer sonic palette.

The sexy android cover and star-studded collaborations (including alternative icons Lizzo, Haim and Christine and the Queens) on her third album, Charli, suggest an all-guns-blazing pitch for blockbuster status. But the contents are far weirder than that implies. ... Come the century's end, you can almost imagine future critics scratching their AI-augmented brains and still touting Charli XCX as the next big thing.

The effect is classic Suede, with mature moments of recollection in tranquillity.

Don’t go into this record expecting grand revelations or the sort of ferocious rock swagger that characterises the work of other artists who have worked with Rubin in the past; its softness is wholly responsible for its charm.

The songs are sufficiently sophisticated and winning that The Waeve keeps sweeping the listener along on its intoxicating journey.

This is highly advanced rap filtered through easily digestible hooks and musical choices. The beat variety on display is exquisite. Almost every shade of Megan Thee Stallion is here.

This album won’t be for everyone, but it’s quite the trip.

It’s the sound of a band subverting expectations in the most dramatic fashion possible. And it confirms The Horrors as one of Britain’s most intriguing bands.

Premonition is a finely wrought, searing career-coda, determined to take a sledgehammer to the cliché that growing older must result in complacency.

One Breath may not be a masterpiece but it does enough to suggest she has a chance of making one someday.

On The End, So Far, the nihilistic furnace still glows hot, but amongst the fuming metal riffs, Slipknot also fume in a more creative way.

There is something about the tension and balance afforded by Doves’ lyrical and melodic heaviness, the pounding thrill of their hard-driven grooves, and the glittering psychedelic detail of cinemascopic arrangements, that is mesmeric and compelling.

An album for the ages, as well as being an awards season shoo-in, it is sure to succeed in doing precisely what Burna told Billboard his music is all about – “bringing people who don’t even speak the same language together to dance.”

You suspect that getting on the wrong side of White would be inadvisable. Thankfully, he has channelled his demons in Lazaretto to create one of the great break-up albums of recent years.