The overall impression is of a super-slick exercise in generic, glossy, team-built, uber-commercial RnB-pop. Still, Anne-Marie has the kind of voice and presence that could make anybody’s day better.

It’s fervid, feverish and never less than ferociously funky. And far from unnerving the listener with a haunting voice from beyond the grave, Welcome 2 America serves as a call to arms for Prince fans. For all its lyrical and sonic contortions, the ultimate message is simple: even as twilight descended, his genius endured.

Mayer’s songs about bruised male egos, damaged hearts and hard-earned life lessons conjure up slow motion sequences from a long-lost John Hughes movie. It really is Some Kind of Wonderful.

It Won’t Always Be Like This amply demonstrates that there is more to Inhaler than family resemblances.

Utopian Ashes, then, is a marriage made in musical heaven, conjuring marital hell.

There’s real genius at work here – but it’s so effortlessly delivered, you might almost take it for granted.

Wilson unpacks her heart with poetically intimate lyrics about relationship troubles in a blur of downtempo RnB grooves and hip-hop flow, showcasing Wilson’s sensational multi-octave soul singing and masterful instrumental playing, all filtered through atmospheric digital effects that lend her old-fashioned analogue skills a contemporary sheen.

Blue Weekend both refines that sound and takes it in dizzying new directions. Rowsell’s lyrics have never been more absorbing in their examination of friendship, heartache, anxiety, acceptance and self-confidence.

Del Amitri’s bracing feel-bad pop-rock won’t be for everyone, but for those of us who appreciate sweet melodies set off with sour sentiments, it is perversely good to have the old curmudgeons back.

Whatever philosophical conundrums are addressed, the gorgeously staggered harmonies on the chorus of Dares My Heart Be Free offer profound answers in the music itself, a tangible spirit of human connection that warms the cockles of Skellig’s querulous heart.

Sour is a melodramatic pop opera of broken teen dreams: right now, it puts Rodrigo in the driver’s seat, and woe betide anyone who gets in her way.

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

The infuriating thing is that there is a great album lurking here, one that a disciplined editor and more sonically adventurous producer might have uncorked.

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

Jones’s voice has weathered better than most, taking on an oaken quality, with rich low notes and just a patina of tiny cracks adding some antique class. There’s no false tooth sibilance, and every lyric on Surrounded by Time is crisply enunciated and delivered with conviction and thought.

Hypnotically compelling.

Freed from the constrictions of slavish imitation, with production from her new and more experimentally inclined collaborators, Aaron Dessner and Jack Antonoff, these six songs offer an intriguing lens through which to view this more innocent version of the savvy star, imbued with the dreamily nostalgic ambience of an adult remembering her bright-eyed youth.

For an album drawing on despair and recovery, Dancing with the Devil… The Art of Starting Over is a life-affirming pleasure from top to bottom.

Any vocalist might thrill to engage with such sleek backing tracks, yet Shaw’s cool delivery and off-kilter lyricism occupies unusual spaces in the band’s arrangements, pushing the whole project into edgily discombobulating territory.

Her crisis of faith provides a sharp edge to Evanescence’s formulaic grandstanding.

The production by Jack Antonoff is stunning, with a huge amount happening beneath the surface of what first manifests as a scratchily intimate acoustic-flavoured unplugged band. There is not a weak song or throwaway performance here, amidst many that only reveal their secrets on repeated listening.

The problem with Justice is that Bieber thinks his music is more powerful than it actually is.

Still Woman Enough makes it clear that she is still up for a lively session.

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.

There are 11 songs on When You See Yourself, filled with pretty words and lovely tunes, but I would struggle to tell you what any of them are about. Although blessed with a raw, raspy tone that could make a shopping list sound sexy, Followill’s vocals are buried in a bass-heavy mix.

Nelson’s bravura title track had a defiant vigour when Sinatra delivered it as a mid-life crisis anthem in 1966, but it takes on a different pathos when gently sung in the weathered tones of an octogenarian. ... Nelson’s jazzy combo and luscious string arrangements are more faithful to the old swing style. These versions are not intended to replace, reinvent or even rival the originals, simply to bring them back into the light.

Carnage is infused with profound and almost inescapable grief. But as this particularly audacious singer-songwriter grapples with isolation, loneliness, loss and the hard emotional graft of endurance, all set against a backdrop of apocalyptic threat, the personal becomes universal. Carnage may just be the greatest lockdown album yet.

There are striking contributions from an eclectic range of guests, including veteran British rapper Skepta, sound wizard James Blake and singer-songwriter Deb Never, and it all sounds intriguingly modern, with a pleasingly discombobulating bent. Yet, when stripped of political context, it exposes the emptiness of Slowthai’s wordplay, all sound and fury, signifying nothing much at all.