When bands move to the US, some find themselves drawn into the commercial machine; when Scottish band Chvrches crossed the Atlantic, they were targeting direct assimilation from the start. Recorded with mega-producer Greg Kurstin, the band are aiming to be more direct than ever; perhaps a wise move considering they’ve always leaned heavily on the pop side of electro.

Loner’s opening track “More of the Same” lyrically tracks being at a party where “everyone’s well dressed with a perfect body and they all have alternative haircuts and straight white teeth.” It triggers a flashback to schooldays when it was, indeed, the same thing. “Cry!” looks a life in the limelight, “Money” is about doing everything for money and “Bikini” is about becoming a celebrity. The price of entry? Putting on a bikini and dancing.

Caroline Rose’s third album is a smart, sardonic 11-track  romp through how she sees aspects of the modern condition. A sadness-tinged cynicism is never far. In its stand-out song “Jeannie Becomes a Mom”, the protagonist dreams of buying a big house, having her hair done and finding a father-figure/keeper hybrid. Such aspirations are out of reach.

The thematic sharpness is not enough. For all its boldness and up-tempo, sassy delivery Loner comes across as a deliberate intellectual exercise rather than an album driven by impulse. When she sings “I got a credit card and I use it all the time, I got that goochi goochi [sic] gooey oozy icky oozy style” on “Soul No. 5”, Rose pushes proceedings a little too close to condescension for comfort.

Previously, Rose drew from country and rockabilly. Now, she’s adopted a new wave/electropop amalgam which mashes-up the very early Beck, The Go! Team and Britney Spears. Taken individually, songs work  a treat. “Talk” is atmospheric and yearning, while album closer “Animal” sets the fun-poking aside and consequently feels like the most personal song with its delineation of an overheated love affair. Overall though, Loner – released in the UK three months after it the shops in America – is the aural equivalent of eating too many sweets in one sitting.

• More new music reviews on theartsdesk

Overleaf: watch the video for “Bikini” from Caroline Rose’s Loner

There have been reports that as many as 50% of vinyl-buyers don’t actually listen to it. They keep records as a token of affection for the artist in question. This seems curious but, then again, most young people don’t own turntables and the idea is anathema to the way they consume music. However, while there’s a healthy market in reissues and older artists, the most cutting edge music imaginable is appearing on plastic. Check out our Vinyl of the Month! All musical life is reviewed below.

Pinkshinyultrablast might be a long way from their hometown of St Petersburg, but in recent years they’ve built themselves up in England as one of the more bizarre and original bands in today’s psych/shoegaze revival, and on the day their third album Miserable Miracles is released, they hit the north for a night of fuzz and electronic trickery.

Jon Hopkins navigates the territory between avant-garde electronic and beat-driven dance music with brilliance. There’s plenty here to make you want to get up and move, but as much to persuade you lie down and let the symphony of textures and timbres open you ears and take you on an inner adventure.

Blossoms are the latest inheritors of the massive-in-Manchester mantle that has, so often in the past, translated into massive-almost-everywhere ubiquity. That their eponymous 2016 debut album was a chart-topper shows they’re on the way, although they’ve not yet mustered a single that’s thrown them to the next level. The surprise when they first appeared was that, although they look indie and have fans such as Ian Brown of The Stone Roses, their sound was a blend of polished yacht-rock and electro-pop, more The Killers than New Order. With Cool Like You, the rock aspect is almost gone. This is a synth-pop album, and in places a juicy one.

As the album starts, “There’s A Reason Why (I Never Returned Your Calls)” brings to mind Future Islands’ emotionally calibrated quirkiness, albeit without Samuel T Herring’s unique vocal stylings. Instead, and throughout, Tom Ogden’s voice is an ebullient, quivering fusion of Brandon Flowers, Paul Heaton (once of The Beautiful South) and, of course, his own native Stockport writ large. It’s a lead instrument that sets these songs apart: we’re not used to hearing this sort of voice with such synth-pop sounds.

There are catchy stompers, gig-slaying hi-NRG Euro-disco such as “Unfaithful” which absolutely bangs along in the manner of Moby’s Void Pacific Choir albums, or “Lying Again” which builds and shimmers in a way that makes the listener want to power-grab the sky. The synths on both are redolent of Pet Shop Boys at their most gigantic and stadium-friendly.

Elsewhere they chuck in a few slowies, “Stranger Still” and the Yazoo-alike “Love Talk”, and there’s almost a modern prog feel to the rhythmic changes and heaviness of “Giving Up the Ghost” (think Porcupine Tree at their most accessible). Overall, though, this is electro-pop, owing a debt to the past but with its eyes very much on slaying crowds during 2018’s summer festival season.

• More new music reviews on theartsdesk

Overleaf: Watch the video for "I Can't Stand It" by Blossoms

Exorcism begins with a track titled “Rapin’”. Its lyrics tell of a late night walk home during which the drunk protagonist is sexually assaulted. “Did you pick me because there’s no one else around?” asks Jenny Wilson in an account of her own experience. Two days later she goes to a doctor and, as she puts it, “I had to show my body again”.

The last we heard of US duo Daphne & Celeste was 18 years ago, when they made their name with three hits, notably the nursery-rhyme playground chant bitch-offs “U.G.L.Y.” and “Ohh Stick You”. They famously performed under a hail of bottles at Reading Festival in 2000, then disappeared, going on to peripheral film-acting careers. Max Tundra, an alt-tronic artist who is released on vanguard labels such as Warp and Domino, now engineers a comeback for this millennial, tween-pop pairing. On paper, this is a great, original idea. Upon listening, it’s partly successful.

Mostly gone is Daphne & Celeste’s bubbly juvenility, although they still emanate shiny glee and sweet harmonies. Instead, Tundra has created a meta-commentary on pop, conceptually similar to what artists such as Scritti Politti and The Associates were doing at the dawn of the 1980s. The music is modernist electro-pop, then, yet often awkwardly so, perhaps deliberately. Songs such as the one-minute title track, the bright-eyed “Sunny Day” and the pared-back “You and I Alone”, are straightforward and lovely, but elsewhere dense lyrics and production push into odder territory.

Having Daphne & Celeste sing lines such as “You extemporise/We’re too busy getting idolised” on the stompy robot-electro of “Taking Notes”, apparently a commentary on 21^st-century media, or meditate on the disappearance of a post-acid house pop star on “Whatever Happened to Yazz?”, is intriguing but doesn’t always work musically. Well, not as catchy pop, anyway. And the subject matter veers from the “vascular component” of plant-life on “Song to a Succulent” to an ace takedown of Ed Sheeran and his ilk on “BB” (“Three chords and a minor key/An exercise in mediocrity”!). On extended listening, it’s a surprisingly complex album.

Like Matthew Herbert’s production of Róisín Murphy's debut solo album, Save the World is often more cerebrally interesting than engaging. I was never in danger of falling in love with it, but at its best it boasts a post-modern novelty that’s both bemusing and fascinating.

• More album reviews on theartsdesk

Overleaf: Watch the video for "You & I Alone" by Daphne & Celeste

It’s difficult to dislike Kim Wilde, whatever you think of her music. Even more so after her pissed Christmas sing-along on a tube train a few years back became a massive YouTube hit. Or how about her appearance at Download Festival in 2016 with thrash metallers Lawnmower Death? There’s something boisterous and everyday about Kim Wilde. She has that early Spice Girls thing, whether she’s acting raunchy or silly, of being a human woman you might really meet, and who’d be fun, rather than a plastic, photo-shopped, faux-sexy lollipop-head. Her new album, despite its faults, makes her seem even more likeable.

Wilde has retained star status in mainland Europe, especially Germany, but Here Come the Aliens is her first proper crack at the UK market in a couple of decades. It was recorded at RAK studios, where she recorded many of enormous Eighties hits, and alongside her is long-term right-hand man and brother Ricky Wilde at the controls. The result is an ebullient outing, exploding with sugary kicks from the off. The opening cut “1969” is a belting electro-rocker which posits that extra-terrestrials may be our only chance to escape ecological cataclysm ("Maybe they’ll save us from the apocalypse when it comes/A revelation that will really blow our minds”) and things only grow more epic from there.

There are monster pop songs on board, notably the Ritalin rush of “Pop Don’t Stop”, the Duran-alike “Yours Til the End” and the bubblegum heavy rock of “Addicted to You” and “Birthday”. Thump-the-air stadium slowies are also present, notably "Solstice" about a real-life teenage suicide pact, and a preposterously portentous song about online trolling called “Cyber Nation War”. The latter showcases the album's lyrical heavy-handedness. The production falls somewhere between Def Leppard’s Hysteria, Pat Benatar and Wilde’s own early Eighties back catalogue. This power ballad sheen isn’t to my taste but beneath it the quantity of glittery, catchy unabashed pop songs is remarkably high (at least for the first two thirds of the album, after which it rapidly drops off). Kim Wilde is on tour shortly and this lot will make a zippy addition to her performance armoury.

• More album reviews on theartsdesk

Overleaf: Watch the video for "Pop Don't Stop" by Kim Wilde

That Erasure have stuck to the tonalities of electropop – and not just electropop, but the extra gay hi-NRG flavour thereof, with Andy Bell's theatrical voice cartwheeling off Vince Clarke's fizzing beats – for seventeeen albums now makes them a gloriously reassuring musical presence. It also means that they are often not treated with the seriousness which they absolutely deserve.