While recognisably a John Grant album, Boy From Michigan brings on board something new and unprecedented – an outside producer. Welcome, Cate Le Bon. Among her previous production credits are Deerhoof and Tim Presley, whom she’s collaborated with on an album. As these and her own releases attest, she’s not going to steer anyone towards the mainstream.

Rounding out a decade of personal success – beginning with his Cannes Jury Prize-winning The Puppetmaster (1993), followed by a best director award for Good Men, Good Women (1995) – the Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien travelled to the Japanese harbour city of Hirado as part of his research for Flowers of Shanghai (1998).

Hailing from Benin and based in Paris since she was 23, Angélique Kidjo can sing in five languages, has collaborated with an A-list festival line-up of global stars ranging from Alicia Keys and Philip Glass to Herbie Hancock and Peter Gabriel, and had her first albums released by Island, after being spotted by label head Chris Blackwell.

The first release that brought folk-pop duo Kings of Convenience to prominence outside of their native Norway was their Live in a Room EP, released in 2000.

Broken Hearts and Beauty Sleep has been five years coming. It’s only a mini-album but is spiced with a range of guests, and offers an array of musical styles, the whole sound ably built with alt-tronic producer FaltyDL. The press release tells us Blanco has recently come out of a calming three year relationship, but the album is neither morose nor studiedly reflective. It feels more like a sequel to the playful 2016 debut Mykki.

After listening to Miracle on repeat, the impression which lingers is that its creator has assimilated a lot of music. First and third album Big Star, Magnetic Fields, The Left Banke, the non-rock side of Abbey Road, Nilsson, Lloyd Cole, Plush, Emitt Rhodes, the poppy side of Field Music, a smidge of Elliott Smith, the swoon of Brian Wilson. Yet the result is a coherent song cycle with its own flavour. Classic, yet fresh. Familiar, but different.

Lake Mungo (2008) is a dread-laden Australian Gothic thriller that masquerades as a straight-faced documentary.

Back in dark days of the first lockdown when she was birthing her new album, Joan Armatrading was the subject of a TV documentary called, not surprisingly, Me, Myself, I, a fascinating look at a career now almost 50 years old. It was a powerful story of a woman who has always known her own mind, musically and otherwise, and who has always engaged with the media on her own terms and who has never ceded control of her music or her career to others.

The German director Robert Wiene is best known for The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1920), perhaps the most influential piece of expressionist cinema. He's not as well known as F. W. Murnau or Fritz Lang, but he deserves to be in the same league. The Hands of Orlac (1924), made in Austria rather than Germany, is a very fine example of a cinema haunted by the violence and death of the First World War, and containing within it both seeds of fascist aesthetics and the darkness that characterises film noir.

Well this is bleak. Seven studio albums, three live albums, two compilation albums, one remix album, three EPs, 33 singles, 23 music videos, 120 million sales and streams well into the tens of billions seem to have completely erased what personality Maroon 5 might ever have had.