A hazy collection of groove-driven vocal tracks featuring singers and rappers.

The central weakness is that, no matter how good the songs, you don't get swept away with the emotion of great (hit) lyrics.

Most tracks here aim to be an anthem, but none has the requisite melodic clout. It's hard to see them entering the super league on this visit.

The New Yorker's music has become less urgent and original ... This album sounds the musical equivalent of being chauffeur driven around Jay-Z's kingdom in an air conditioned, bullet-proofed executive limo while the man himself reclines his plush leisure seat beside you, casually pointing out the scenes of his former glories.

Throughout, the band’s big, bittersweet sound is, as ever, wonderfully immersive: whalesong cycles of electric guitar echoing through a buoyant soup of synths that sound both pleasant and forgettable.

Low in High School, his 11th solo album, is as dazzling and infuriating as anything in his canon, full of the stuff that has made the 58-year-old former Smiths frontman one of the most provocative and adored stars of our time.

At least half of The Heavy Entertainment Show is made up of amusing dance tracks that never quite hit the spot.

Wilson’s vocals are endearingly shaky, as if he is too proud to submit to the autotune and chorus effects that make every modern pop star sound the same. But if, at times, it sounds like a band trying too hard, it is surely better than not trying at all.

Wilson has nothing wildly original to say about the state of modern Britain, but sounds authentically angry on behalf of people on minimum wage or zero-hours jobs.

Delta is their best album yet, spiritual solace wrapped in secular anthems.

This feels more like a palette cleanser, a statement of intent that Stone has ditched the commercial gloss.

The most devoted of devotees will get a kick out of this album, but even they will struggle to ignore its flaws, or how genuinely fed up – rather than his usual showboating – Morrissey sounds at times.

It is all so swaggeringly confident and honed to a perfect point, it is hard not to be caught up in its own sense of conviction.

To some tastes, Sheeran will be corny and trite. Yet what he does well is essentially inarguable: provide songs that fulfil the emotional needs of universal moments.

She just needs to read more self-help than she spouts, and show us that she has more depth than bass.

You can hear his love and enthusiasm bursting out of these grooves, not just in the way he roars over the top of melody lines but in the spaces he creates for other musicians to shine.

This is an album that underlines the greatness of Dark Side, rather than challenges it.

This is the closest he has ever got to recreating the mesmeric intensity and emotional release of Urban Hymns. He has thankfully ditched the electronic effects that tried to lend 2016's These People a vestige of pop modernity.

Coated with a West Coast varnish and filled with radio-friendly melodies Hope St will provide great background music for warm evenings in the garden. With continued listening, however, it's liable to leave you cold.

It is a lovely Valentine record, if you favour melancholic songs about missed chances. The set feels overfamiliar, though, drawing heavily on classic Seventies ballads by the Carpenters, Eagles, Elton John and 10CC.

Making music by numbers shouldn’t be this tiring.

I worry about where they can go next with such a restrictive musical template, but here they have managed subtle refinement without sacrificing the essence of their primitive appeal.

Although the 18 tracks (12 of which are co-credited to Wright) are short on catchy tunes, it’s still an effective 53-minute trip.

Love Frequency only occasionally sets the pulse racing.

There's also something a little too contained, cling-filmed and... Keane-ey about it's measured percussion and guitar swells. Which leaves you feeling that although this is a very good record by a very talented young artist, it's probably not a patch on catching him live.

You don’t come to Katy Perry for depth. What’s made her special in the past is that lightning jolt of emotion that rushes through the layers of sugary-sweet pop; that’s what made lusty adolescent hormones surge as you listen to Teenage Dream, what made donning a leopard print two-piece seem like an empowering move on Roar. It’s there on Smile but you have to work for it.

Any hint of Coldplay ever having had rock inclinations has been blasted away in a blaze of pop hooks. There is little of the fragile intimacy of 2000 debut Parachutes, none of the rock angst of 2002’s Rush of Blood to the Head or the epic grandeur of 2005’s X&Y. It is the upbeat, poppy Coldplay honed to a gleaming EDM point.

Their sixth album, however, sticks too rigidly to the formula.