While some of the songs slip into genericity, such as the forgettable There’s a First Time For Everything, others are 80s-inspired, synth-led earworms. Smells Like Me stands out as one of the album’s highlights, a masterclass in pop writing with an ultra-memorable hook.

The New Faith is hymnal, rich with chants and layered, organic instrumentation. It is deeply and spiritually moving, vibrant and celebratory. Revelatory, even.

These severely abstract inventions require so much brain power and digital dexterity that Jarrett often groans and growls like a tennis player returning a difficult shot. Fortunately, in amongst them are reflective lyrical numbers which radiate a moving sense of solitude, in which you can sense him relax.

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.

Will loyal Snarky Puppy fans be disappointed? Not likely. They’ll be delighted by the band’s continued scale and grandeur; for its music that is as unclassifiable as it is virtuosic.

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.

This certainly isn’t an indie-sleaze revivalist album, nor is it an effort to prove their relevance. Cool It Down puts words and music to fears and concerns while shaking you into feelings of some radical hope.

Technically Gibbs is a flawless emcee and it’s great to see more of his melodic range on SSS, something that will deservedly bring in new fans. But for his next album, it would be interesting to see Gibbs explore the roots of his “hustler mentality” even further, and start to subvert some of gangster rap’s more impish clichés.

If I may make up a word of my own, it is utterly bjorkers, and all you can do is dig it.

With soulful vocals, delicate stories and vulnerable lyrics, Moss makes for a delightful listen.

Unfortunately, this time around, the lyrics tend to be too opaque to pack quite the same punch. ... That said, there are plenty of songs sure to please diehard Sports Team fans.

Orton digs so deeply into her own personal spaces and memories that what she finds there is unique. Middle-aged discontent has rarely sounded so lovely.

Nothing you’re hearing here is particularly cutting-edge, but it’s delivered with such ebullience and pomposity that you almost forget that this isn’t the first time you’ve heard an 808 beat.

The 12 tracks that make up Expert in a Dying Field are lean and propulsive, with hooks that get under the skin.

Creative but by no means cohesive, Crossan has clearly enjoyed himself with this album.

It’s a fresh, raw and intentionally scruffy album.

Death Cab are back with a bang and a new-found self-assurance.

This is an album in which Mumford embraces and forgives his own, to deeply moving effect.

The more conventional songs radiate power too, from straightforward pop-rock anthem Hurricanes to the electronic thud of Holy — her It’s A Sin moment. The album’s final three tracks feel superfluous, but Sawayama ultimately succeeds where Dr Frankenstein failed: her creation greater than the sum of its parts.

The Hardest Part doesn’t reinvent the wheel. It knows what it is: undisguised, accessible songwriting pulsing with country lifeblood which manages to avoid being swallowed by its own ennui.

Spirituals is tonally consistent despite its range of distinctive influences and talents. Just when Santigold threatens to lean into the corny, as on the SBTRKT-produced Shake, she pulls back, adding a whimsical, purposefully on-the-nose rattle sound at the end of each wedding disco-like “shake, shake, shake it” hook. It’s a joy to hear her back in her creative swing.

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.

A defiantly bravura set of melodic metal on which the 73-year-old genuinely sounds as though he’s having the time of his life.

Scintillating and confident. ... This is music to bop to on the streets, to listen to in church with a big congregation, or to soak up alone in a room.

While this album invigorates and intrigues, in future I would hope to hear her expand lyrically, while exploring the hauntingly melancholic sounds her violin can produce. For now, at least, the defiant joy her work evokes is a stimulating jolt to the senses.

Ellery and Skye have managed cohesion amid the cacophony. I Love You Jennifer B is a dramatic outing that combines the modern, the classical and everything else in between.

There are songs where it feels like there’s been a huge step-change in Nesbitt’s writing, as on When You Lose Someone. ... Some songs, however, fall right back into the clumsy patterns of Nesbitt’s earlier work

Throughout, the arrangements are as relentlessly upbeat and playfully retro as the album’s Alan Fears-designed artwork, stuffed with vocoders, peacocking basslines and laser-beam synth sounds. They’re also wildly referential, and largely fail to add anything either fresh or memorable to the conversation.