Daddy’s Home is further proof that St Vincent deserves to be considered in their [Nina Simone, Joni Mitchell and Tori Amos] stellar ranks.

This is a very good project and will cement Digga D as a force on the pop charts, but if the 21-year-old wants to reach the next level and avoid becoming a pastiche like 50 Cent did, he will need to do more of the unexpected and dig a little deeper into his subconscious when it's time to drop that studio album.

Pop music has become saturated with soft, emotional ballads (the songs of Billie Eilish and Gracie Abrams spring to mind). McRae offers a welcome change – if you want tunes packed with snappy, catchy choruses and racy lyrics that make you feel powerful and sexy, then look no further.

Smith sings rings around themselves and the material, elevating both the banal and the sublime with smokey curlicues of tremulous falsetto.

Ten years ago, Icona Pop were electropop trailblazers: for the most part, this second album is a promising next step in their recording career.

It [TV Dinners] is one of a handful of exceptional songs that raise this album above Fender’s base level tendency towards passionate but undistinguished rocking. The most exquisite is the clipped guitar and synth mesh of the downbeat Crumbling Empire, that brushes against Springsteen’s Philadelphia with hints of Don Henley’s The Boys of Summer in a song about returning to the ruined scenes of his misspent youth.

If progress is their aim, then this is fine proof of how a softly-softly approach is often best.

The pair tracked down musicians who worked on Sixties spaghetti westerns, then added Jack White and Norah Jones as singers, resulting in a delicious album, redolent of easy listening but with all flabbiness removed and replaced by a modern warmth and elegance.

This is not jazz for the purist but it is a heartfelt and entertaining tribute to one of the musical greats.

This is some kind of triumph for Blige and for Britain.

Epic and intimate, serious and playful, Okkervil River's third album is genuinely awe inspiring, growing with each replaying.

I mean it as a compliment when I say I didn’t immediately recognise Green Day the first time I heard their new album. There is something positively gleeful about the American multimillion-selling stadium punk trio’s reavowal of the fundamentals. They exhibit the swagger of a hot young band discovering rock’n’roll for the first time, allied to the abilities of old pros who know exactly how to do it right.

Nike, a skeletal hip-hop number that hears Shygirl compare the joy of a fling to ordering a Big Mac, is one of a few dud moments. Otherwise, Nymph is a distinctive, sensual and striking debut.

It’s effectively atmospheric, giving a raw, insomniac groove to the gritty notes draining from electric guitars and a twitch of dirty old fluorescent bulbs in the glitchy drum beats.

The album’s inability to communicate with itself – each song an island – does bring some drag to the album’s runtime. Nevertheless, elegiac and anthemic, each song has spark.

Parping away beneath her synthesised fantasies and hypnotic dance floor dramas, you can also hear the unlikely stirrings of an Eighties sax-solo revival.

Beck has always been hip. Even on his 12th album, he manages to make the dawn sound like where it’s at.

It's a gloriously mellow record, the sound of an artist remembering there’s a life beyond her touring schedule and daring to enjoy it.

There is a joyful exuberance to Revival, which has U2 and Coldplay arranger Rupert Christie at the helm.

As a package, Angels & Queens Part I is a soothing and soulful antidote to life’s slings and arrows, of which there are many right now.

Lover does not sound like the work of someone desperate to command the pop zeitgeist and yet is all the more likely to do so. Instead of trying to be all things to all audiences, it plays to the strengths of a witty songwriter in love, eager to tell anyone who will listen exactly how she feels.

Crash is clever and fun, as her admirers have come to expect from XCX, but until Charli scores a bona fide smash it is going to feel like an art project commenting on the state of pop rather than the real thing.

Every tiny detail is in aesthetic congruence with the initial feelings that birthed these songs – all of which you’re made privy to in violently vivid detail. Broken Hearts Club is an expertly sequenced, perfectly packaged ode to a lost love.

[Houghton's] first album of idiosyncratic banjo pop has been worth the wait.

Alpha Zulu is a robust addition to their already acclaimed catalogue.

There is ultimately something sketchy about Boarding House Reach, pulling in so many directions that it suggests rough drafts for more fully formed work to come. But for all that, there are so many rich ingredients in the mix, even misophones should find something to soothe their troubled ears.

You don’t need to be in an altered state to become overwhelmed by his mastery of controlled cacophony. It is a pleasure to report that everything is still beautiful in Pierce’s strange sonic world.

Their ambitious double may aspire to the eclecticism of The Beatles’ White Album, but it remains resolutely, if sweetly, sepia-toned.