As befits an album preceded by lofty claims and vaulting ambition, A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships is long. Very, very long. Last year, Matt Healy stated that the next album The 1975 produced had to be an OK Computer or The Queen Is Dead for our times, and gave journalists up and down the country a convenient strapline in waiting. The truth is that it’s more like their Sandinista!

There was barely a black-clothed, white-faced Numanoid in sight in the packed auditorium of the Royal Albert Hall as Gary Numan made his first ever appearance at the Victorian concert hall. His fans appear to have left that kohl-eyed look behind them as they’ve aged over the four decades since he first broke into the charts with Tubeway Army, but their love for him seems undimmed.

Disc of the Day reviews new albums, week in, week out, all year. Below are the albums to which our writers awarded five stars. Click on any one of them to find out why.

Baxter Dury, Etienne de Crécy and Delilah Holliday - B.E.D. ★★★★★ A small but perfectly sleazy work of sweary, cynical brilliance

Eight long years, Robyn fans have been waiting. Crazed tweets screamed #releasehoneydammit into the ether for weeks as the Swedish songwriter teased her new music.

It’s been a tough few years for Sŵn Festival. Once a genuine rival to fellow urban festivals Great Escape and Sound City, recent events have fluctuated between one-dayers and a string of ticketed gigs. 2018 marked the biggest change yet, but also a return to the multi-day, multi-venue format. Founders Huw Stephens and John Rostron announced they were handing over the reigns to Clwb Ifor Bach, Cardiff’s leading music venue.

“Caustic motherfucker”. There it is, right up in the first few lines of Baxter Dury's spoken narration over the sleazy, spanky electro beats of Etienne de Crecy. There it is: a statement of intent, a phrase to relish in the mouth, that show's he's going to make full use of the English language.

The first release from Jess Glynne’s new album, “I’ll Be There” confirmed the North London singer as the first ever British female artist to have seven no.1 singles in the UK Chart.

There are people who do and say awful things in the name of honesty. It can be used as a cover for rigorous appeasement of our own worst impulses, or as a thin veil to disguise needless personal attacks on those around us. With singer-sonwriter John Grant, however, it’s impossible to see it as anything other than a colossal strength. 

Throughout his career (Love Is Magic is his fourth album) Grant has marked himself out as one of the foremost lyricists of his generation. His literate approach, peppered with laugh-out-loud humour and a predilection for the dark underbelly of human emotion – and its myriad contradictions. 

So, yes, love is magic – but with considerable caveats. On one hand we have the gorgeous, elegantly evocative ode “Is He Strange” with a simple, piano-led form that mirrors the beautiful fragility of the lyrical sentiment: “He was just standing there/He was on an island/In the North Atlantic Ocean/Just minding his own/He was just doing his thing/And in that moment/Everything changed.” The other hand, however, is raised as if to slap a face in “Diet Gum”, an electronically thrumming track in which Grant acts out one side of a lover’s tiff. 

Musically, this is the most coherently electronic offering that Grant has yet given us, and quite possibly the funnest and funniest. “He’s Got His Mother’s Hips” is a case in point, “I think Colonel Mustard did it in the billiard room/They say his salsa workshops/Are a harbinger of doom” may well be the best opening to pretty much anything I’ll hear all year. 

Never afraid of a good, old-fashioned swear to grab the listener’s attention and convey huge emotion in just a few words, Grant’s crowning achievement comes in the song “Smug Cunt”, which addresses the classless, grandiose ambition of arseholes. “And now you’re just a smug cunt/Who doesn’t even do his own stunts.” How’s that for economy of words? 

Only opener “Metamorphosis” sits oddly, but even then, its jarring sense of dislocation could also be taken as the perfect way to introduce a collection of songs so accurately depicting the schizophrenic nature of love – passion’s two sides. Love Is Magic is an album full of questions like this and it takes more than a cursory listen to grasp the answers. Thankfully, it’s research that is hugely rewarding.

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@jahshabby 

Overleaf for the video to "His Mother's Hips"