Kendrick Lamar is so breathlessly revered it’s sometimes hard to pull apart what’s going on in his records. It’s sometimes felt like he might become the rap game Radiohead: exploratory, aware, hugely technically accomplished, endlessly thematically “important” – but not actually that interesting to listen to.

Returning with their first new music in almost a decade, EDM supergroup Swedish House Mafia (the producer-DJ trio Steve Angello, Axwell and Sebastian Ingros) deliver their debut album with a sense of vaulting ambition and anything-is-possible belief. In their own words, Paradise Again is a “sonic adventure” to a “new world, a world of free thoughts, limitless ideas and space for progression.”

As the year starts to rev up, theartsdesk on Vinyl returns with over 7000 words on new music on plastic, a smörgåsbord of the kind you will find nowhere else. This month we also have a competition for the dance music lovers among you, a chance to win a £50 gift card for the new app Recycle Vinyl (online stock of 10,000 records + 25,000 in their warehouse + 500 more added every week).

Virtual “mixtapes” are not proper albums. Their purpose is often to whet the appetite. Nowhere is this more so than in US hip hop and right now Lady London’s new teaser is much-vaunted.

It was two female artists who mainly soundtracked 2021 for me. And they couldn’t be more different. Although Off Off One by Kate Stables (aka This is the Kit) was recorded just before Covid changed everything, there are some ominous mentions in the lyrics of infection, coughing and hospital. But we’re not dealing with something maudlin or doom laden here, far from it. There’s a sly wit and quietly surreal joy to  Stables’ gorgeously melodic pop songs. Yes, ‘pop’ not ‘alt folk’ or whatever the critics call it.

According to local press, Yungblud’s fans had been queuing up outside the Barrowland throughout the day before each gig in his two-night Glasgow stint. If that was one indication of the reverence his following hold him in, another came early in this performance, when he briefly delayed “I Love You, Will You Marry Me” to allow an actual proposal to go ahead down at the front. If your songs are considered suitable for popping the question to, then you know you are connecting with people.

The Californian label Stones Throw has long specialised in inseparably folding together the most profound and most wilfully foolish Black American music. And that is truer than ever on these 17 tracks from Virginian singer / songwriter / producer / multi-instrumentalist DJ Harrison.

“Flashbacks / driving in your car volume pushed right up to max / all those late nights I’d try to drink them back” These are almost the first words you hear on this record, coming in as South London Afrobeats producer P2J’s bass tones roll in on the opener “Under my Skin”. And they’re a perfect introduction to the theme and mood of the record too.

George Evelyn is one of British music’s more interesting characters. With equal parts Yorkshire bluntness, hip hop swagger and cosmic dreams, he has filled Nightmares On Wax’s beat collages and soul grooves with soundsystem heft and endless inventiveness for over three decades now. Ever since the N.O.W.

As the summer folds away on itself, theartsdesk on Vinyl returns. Beset by backlogs at pressing plants and delayed by COVID, it's finally here, jammed to the gunwales with commentary on a grand cross section of the finest music on plastic. Dive in!

VINYL OF THE MONTH

God Damn Raw Coward (One Little Independent)