There have been many great sci-fi concept albums before, but Coldplay’s offering is not so much about exploring the outer limits as continued world domination. It's Zippy Starburst and the Earworms from Marketing.

This album continues the striptease of Britney’s career. But behind each discarded veil there is just another veil, an insubstantial gauze masking teams of (presumably unphotogenic) producers, writers, stylists and sloganeers.

Raul Malo, the Cuban-American singer, has a wonderful voice but it's unlikely that his new album Sinners & Saints will bring him a host of new converts.

It is a testament to just how utterly robust these songs are that the results are, inescapably, joyous. The recordings have been given a bit of digital oomph, with all the sounds polished and honed, and levels kicked up a notch, so the result is dense and shiny, with a relentlessly modern attack.

To have four songs over 10 minutes on your debut is brave; when the record recalls Neil Young's sadder moments and explores the anguish of a break-up, it is foolhardy.

There are interesting multi-part song structures and deft modern production quirks, with touches of autotune and sampling that don’t overwhelm the more classic guitar and keyboard arrangements. Melodies are big and bright and everything is encased in walls of harmonies.

An English one-off, in fine voice.

When the harmonies blend and Andersson’s piano rings out, it sounds enough like Abba to have hardcore fans tossing their feather boas in the air. But the dancing queens have lost the spring in their step, and the result is out-of-time rather than timeless.

Inevitably, the singer’s less appealing views do invade the material.

For every perfectly observed vignette of English life (Sunny Afternoon, Autumn Almanac) and pithily satirical narrative (Village Green Preservation Society, Dead End Kids) there's a clunking, unwieldy, elaborate novelty song (Supersonic Rocket Ship, Skin & Bone).

Unfortunately, most of Guts sounds like a simple continuation of Sour – there is little musical growth or thematic change, with Making the Bed and Pretty Isn’t Pretty seeming like mere overhangs from her debut

On Out of Heart, Flohio deserves credit for bridging the worlds of rap and electronica, but you’re still left wondering: who is the human being behind this aesthetic? If she’s to truly level up artistically, Flohio needs to give us a clearer idea of what the reflection in the mirror looks like.

The best of the album is so fantastic it makes me want more from the rest.... Yet there is something tepid about the overall emotional temperature.

This is smart, relatable break-up music for Gen Z listeners. But a more moot question, and one to which this reviewer suspects he knows the answer, is whether we need our own Taylor Swift when the real one seems to be doing a pretty good job as things are.

Failing to commandeer some stormy rockers, Faithfull proves most evocative on a couple of tender, stripped back ballads, Love More Or Less (written with Tom McRae) and Nick Cave collaboration Deep Water.

The atmosphere is ultimately so paranoid and competitive, he makes being a rap star sound exhausting. Ignorance Is Bliss is at its most interesting when Skepta's volatile emotional state pushes to the surface of his combative persona.

Holy Fvck sounds like a genuine attempt to deal with a troubled adulthood and leave the past behind.

On the pulsing, electronic slither of Vendetta X, on which Astbury speaks menacingly of “sucking on a dirty blade”, it’s closer to his work with Unkle than stadium rock. In these moments, and on the glorious, closing title-track, Under The Midnight Sun is brilliant. For much of its second half, however, its magic doesn’t catch quite so well.

It is hard to get overheated about something so determinedly tepid. And yet, dropped amid the frenzy of pop radio, Horan’s songs are immediately distinctive.

The production feels sturdy and busy. But there are no instant hits other than Manchild, and though the songs are dense with hooks and melodies, none of them are particularly memorable.

The result is both silkily seductive and moodily narcissistic.

There’s a lot of great stuff on here, but it doesn’t hold together and doesn’t come close to being one of Springsteen’s great albums.

Whilst Paramore's music tends to be all rage and release, solo Williams offers something much more quirky and cerebral, delving poetically and occasionally combatively into her insecurities. The elaborate intricacy of writing and production may be a lot to take in for all but devoted fans.

Even at its most ambitious, everything is swept up in a blizzard of overcharged guitars and stylised snarling that would have sounded old-fashioned in 1981, let alone 2024.

Her gorgeous 1960’s Dusty Springfield style version of World of a String could be a pop hit in any era.

There are songs about baseball, weather and enduring domestic love, acutely observed and delivered in tones so smooth they slip past in a soft blur.

The songs themselves may not be complex but the simple and sincere emotions expressed on anthems such as the chiming indie epic Forever, the rip-roaring AC/DC-style rocker Running Round My Brain and the Rod-Stewart-flavoured piano ballad Every Dog Has Its Day carry a potent weight of feeling and offer euphoric release.

Seven-minute mantra There Must Be More Than Blood is the standout, where Toledo’s vocals are absorbed into a motorik groove, his quest for meaning somehow dissolving into an act of musical surrender. Not all the songs reach these heights, however; too many run out of ideas very quickly. But at their very best, Car Seat Headrest are reminiscent of such fantastic bands as The The, LCD Soundsystem and Talking Heads.