Tracey Thorn’s solo career in the 21^st century has veered between contemplative adult music and the pop dancefloor. With her latest, we’re definitely on the pop dancefloor, but, despite delicious synth-led production from Ewan Pearson, ignore the lyrics at your peril. It’s unlikely the likes of Dua Lipa or Rita Ora would start a song with the lines “Every morning of the month you push a little tablet through the foil/Cleverest of all inventions, better than a condom or a coil” as Thorn does on the pithily crafted motherhood-themed “Babies”. Her smart, sharp lyrics give these nine numbers a rich added dimension to engage with.

Like Beyoncé’s Lemonade, Record plays with listeners’ knowledge of the singer’s personal life. Thorn has, famously, been together with her Everything But The Girl partner Ben Watt for decades. The songs “Go” and “Face”, however, are both heartfelt lost love numbers, the latter about late nights looking at social media, asking, “Do you scroll through my photos just to check that I’m fine?” She’s almost certainly playing with us, as spirited artists do, but because she delivers the whole thing so plaintively, only those with hearts of stone won’t wonder just a little. In any case, alternatively, “Guitar” is a nostalgic celebration of her original meeting with Watt.

Never mind who she’s hooked up with, though, the album fizzes with her wit and intelligence and, in the eight-and-a-half minute “Sister”, featuring grooving percussion from Warpaint and backing vocals from Corinne Bailey Rae, she’s created an electro-disco corker honouring woman power. Elsewhere she proclaims her love for London on the folk-tronic “Smoke” and later concludes proceedings with the sheer joyful abandon of “Dancefloor” (“Where I want to be is on a dancefloor with some drinks inside of me”).

Apart from the almost Sinéad O'Conner-like vocals she adopts on “Go”, Thorn revels in the deeper timbres of her mature voice, giving her an authority that sits well amid synth pop styled mostly somewhere between Erasure and Pet Shop Boys. It’s a feisty, appealing album, never wallowing, showcasing its maker as an original to be treasured, although she’d undoubtedly scoff at such a suggestion.

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Overleaf: Watch the video for "Queen" by Tracey Thorn

After two albums of battle anthems for Trump-addled times, raging against the machine with his “Void Pacific Choir”, Moby’s fifteenth long-player is ostensibly a return to his millennial purple patch, when Play conquered the world and was bought by millions. The tune especially touted thus is the single “Motherless Child”, a spiritual standard revisited, but soul singer Raquel Rodriguez, accompanied by Moby rapping, over bass-propelled electro-funk sounds nothing like that old stuff. And so it is with the rest of the album.

This is a good thing, because that would be boring. That period of his career has already been mined by enough imitators, without the originator adding to them. Instead, he takes us on a melancholic journey that seems loosely informed by WB Yeats extraordinary, apocalyptic poem “The Second Coming”. Musically, meanwhile, it’s closer in tone to the haunting “Sleep Alone” from his 2002 album 18, a spooked tune that was written pre-9/11 but contains haunting lines about how “At least we were together/Holding hands/Flying through the sky” amid a desolate ruined city.

This time the ruin is wider, and Everything was Beautiful… has lots of Moby MCing in a whispery, broken voice, firing out lines such as “The darkness closed like a mouth on a wild night/I’ll never be free” (on the gospel/beats epic “The Wild Darkness”), and how, in the face of a “criminal soul”, “criminal silence” and “criminal violence”, “I can’t see, I can’t speak, I can’t walk, I can’t talk/I can see how it’s falling”.

It’s all accompanied by Moby’s trademark brilliance at classically choreographed synths, riven with old soul's penchant for wrenching, reaching harmonics. This occasionally gives the impression of euphoria. Indeed, the massive “Falling Rain and Night” is hopeful and upbeat but, really, as is made clear on blues guitar-laden closer, “A Dark Cloud is Coming”, all is not well. While he remains as accessible as ever, stadium-vast in sonic scope, clearly Moby is vexed in his musically luscious way at “what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born”.

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Overleaf: Watch the video for "Mere Anarchy" by Moby

This album has been about in virtual form since last autumn but now receives physical release. In more ways than one. Since theartsdesk didn’t review it back then, its reappearance on CD and vinyl gives us an excuse to now. After all, Swedish musician Karin Dreijer – once of The Knife – is fascinating, an artist who pushes at the boundaries. She revived her Fever Ray persona last year amidst videos revelling in sci-fi weirdness and orgiastic BDSM imagery. Plunge is the musical life statement that follows.

Five years ago Dreijer divorced, shaking off the “Andersson” that once double-barrelled her name. She has since been exploring her mostly gay sexuality in an untrammelled physical manner, according to both interviews she’s given and the lyrics here. Where Fever Ray’s eponymous debut album, nine years ago, was morose, the sound of a woman trapped, depressed even, by parenthood, Plunge is an explosive liberation. With it comes a twisted electro-pop that upon occasion, as on the celebratory “To the Moon and Back”, is even light and accessibly melodic.

That’s not to say this is all easy stuff. On “Falling” she seems to be exploring her sexual identity via a chugging Gary Numan-esque machine rhythm, while the techno pulsing “IDK About You”, with its occasional orgasmic yelp samples, may be about Tinder hook-ups and trust. The true centrepiece and manifesto, though, is “This Country”, which stridently identifies sexual repression with political will. Many will turn to the line “The perverts define my fuck history” but, perhaps, it’s true core lies in the couplet “Free abortions and clean water/Destroy nuclear, destroy boring”.

Plunge is less art-obtuse than much Dreijer has been involved in, closer in tone to Björk and, musically, Santigold’s underheard 2016 album 99¢. She remains her own creature, not releasing this through commercial imperative but as a necessary proclamation, yet it’s as pop as anything she’s done since The Knife’s second album 12 years ago.

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Overleaf: Watch the video for "To the Moon and Back" by Fever Ray

Rae Morris, a singer from Blackpool, has shinned up the slippery pop biz tree the modern, major label, mainstream way; ultra-managed, co-writes with Clean Bandit, support slots with George Ezra and Tom Odell, vocal collaborations with Bombay Bicycle Club, slow careful “development”. It’s plain old vocational training, really. In terms of raw, gutter-to-the-stars excitement, her career emanates the dizzy appeal of a dentist’s apprenticeship in Dorking. It is to her credit, then, that a good helping of actual character escapes onto her second album, alongside a few decent songs and one absolute peach.

Of course, as is de rigeur for 90 per cent of girl-pop stars, rising or full-blown, she’s assisted by an armada of technician-songwriter sorts – Fryars, Ariel Rechtshaid, My Riot, Fred Gibson, Buddy Ross and Starsmith. Who knows how much of the act of creation is hers? At a guess, quite a bit, for the lyrics seem to come from the heart, at their best, pithy and pragmatic but also – and this is great in 2018 – romantically inclined rather than merely going on and on about the physical act of sex as her main desire and selling point.

“Someone Out There”, for instance, is a cute piano ballad, with a heart-warming old-fashioned Hollywood quality, but she’s equally capable of snappy modern wordage, such as on the marching love song “Wait For The Rain” where she announces, “Buy me a drink, man/Bring it over here/I don’t want no ice/I’m already cold enough now”. There’s some jolly calypso pop aboard in “Atletico” and “Dip My Toe”, and closing number “Dancing With Character” is a lush likeable thing, but the outstanding cut is the single “Do It” which is cool, catchy, joyful, hopeful pop with a video that's pleasingly down-to-earth. After a couple of listens, it takes permanent residence in the brain.

Someone Out There is more electronic than Morris’s 2015 Top 10 debut album, Unguarded, yet she usually pierces any plasticity and injects a thoughtful, fizzing dose of individuality into it. When she has total control of the means of production, she'll be force to be reckoned with.

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On paper Django Django seem a perfect band. The four-piece, half Scottish, quarter English, quarter Northern Irish, boast an indie songwriting sensibility, but filtered through a natural pop suss, an engaging sense of psychedelia, a desire to rave it up, and a ripe capacity for harmonisation. Their third album is fat with melody and interest, right from its ballistic opening title track, yet in the end, why is it eminently likeable rather than loveable?

See, I keep trying to have a love affair with Django Django’s music. Their last album, Born Under Saturn (2015), sounds luscious but in the end the only tune I kept returning to is the peerless “First Light”. Their new one, their third, is gorgeous too, imaginatively constructed and may yet grow into something that makes me regret the angle I write from here (the constant bane of anyone assessing new music), but at present it seems admirable, not adorable.

Never mind such negative quibbles, though, and instead revel in what Marble Skies has to offer; the quirky Talking Heads-ish pop of closing slowie “Fountains”, the four-to-the-floor alt-electro-pop bouncers “In Your Beat” and “Real Gone”, the Afro-skittering, tune-rich “Surface to Air”, featuring guest vocalist Rebecca Taylor, the drum tattoo-led “Further”, which sounds like the Beach Boys having a techno-tribal moment.

Indeed, Brian Wilson’s oeuvre is rarely too far away, notably on the piano-led “Sundials” which, crudely assessed, once it gets going, is Wilson jumping in the sack with The Go! Team, albeit not in with the latter band’s penchant for deliberate cacophony. Django Django keep their palette full, Polyfilla-ing every sonic crack, maximising use of the multitrack, never slack in keeping things compelling. So there’s plenty to enjoy here. Yet somehow I was expecting more. What more was I expecting? Bloody music journalists, eh.

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Overleaf: Watch the video for Django Django "In Your Beat"

There are albums that reveal themselves to you, their hidden depths become apparent over time as familiarity helps one to acclimatize to the terrain. David Crosby’s Sky Trails was one such release and has stayed with me since its release.

There are albums that burn with incandescent light from the get-go, albums that leave you smiling with glee as they bring warmth to your world and add light to your day. Indeed, in this category were two that, in any other year, would have been shoe-ins for my album of the year slot. The sparse, electronic experiments of Autarkic’s I Love You, Go Away contained beautiful, haunted emotion, while Red Axes’ Beach Goths contained just about everything else: from surf guitar and house beats, to spaghetti Western hoops rolling with extended drum loops, it had the lot. 

Then there are albums that smack you around the head and face and leave you dazed, but richer for the experience – like a benevolent mugger who can’t quite get the hang of the job spec. Here we find Jin Cromanyon, hanging out on a vinyl only release on a small label, Macadam Mambo, that has quietly been releasing some extraordinary stuff this year.

Written, arranged and produced by Hidetaka Horie, 逆襲のスポンジ is a masterpiece full of frenetic energy and pop bounce, and as unashamedly ‘up’ as a children’s birthday party. It sounds like a J-Pop musical of Depeche Mode’s early years, but filtered through the fizzing imagination and very singular vision of a young man with a penchant for Chicago house and Italo disco. In short, it’s startlingly original, like nothing I’ve heard before and yet the songs resonate with such force, they may as well be Platonic forms.

At present, there’s no CD or digital release, but lobbying the record label seems like a good way to right this particular oversight. Whatever, I suspect you’ll be hearing a lot more from Mr Horie very soon.

Two More Essential Albums from 2017

Lucky Soul – Hard Lines

Abschaum – Moon Tango

Gig of the Year

Jane Weaver at Ramsgate Music Hall

Track of the Year

Vibration Black Finger – "Get Up and Do It"

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@jahshabby

Overleaf: Listen to Jin Cromanyon's "Zombie Pop"

In the seven years since N.E.R.D last had an album out, Pharrell Williams’ profile, which was already massive, has achieved some sort of pop supernova. “Happy”, “Get Lucky” and the less loveable “Blurred Lines” have made him a megastar. He now returns with Chad Hugo, his childhood pal and production partner in one of hip hop’s defining production units, The Neptunes, and their reclusive associate Shay Haley. N.E.R.D’s original remit, when they began a decade-and-a-half ago, was to make their own R&B-marinated version of rock, but their fifth album sees raw electronic funk to the fore

A truckload of special guests adds to the sense of occasion. Rihanna kicks things off with opener and first single “Lemon”, a propulsive electro-percussive banger which sets the tone, but the best collaboration is with Kendrick Lamar and M.I.A. on the album’s most exciting track, “Kites”, an Afro-chanting, whooping, bass-built thing, both stark and busy. Elsewhere Gucci Mane and Wale boost the Outkast-style groove of “Voila”, which has a fantastically bizarre steel band mid-section, while, by contrast, Andre 3000 of Outkast drops in on the robotised hammerings of “Rollinem 7’s”.

Even Ed Sheeran doesn’t disgrace himself, with his cameo on closer “Lifting You” only aiding a likeable digital dancehall bubbler that celebrates nightworld hedonism. However, N.E.R.D don’t need guests to thrill, as they prove on the sampledelic electro-rave pulse of “Secret Life of Tigers” and the Prince-flavoured epic “Don’t Don’t Do It”, as well as much else. Lyrically it’s all a bit opaque. Perhaps, for instance, they are opining obliquely on the state of the US on “1000”. But, equally, perhaps not. It doesn’t matter because No_One Ever Really Dies is primarily a sonic, felt experience.

N.E.R.D have moved on from even hints of organic funkiness, such as “Hot-n-Fun” from their last album, replacing it with crunchy, poppy, clubland experimentalism, deeply indebted to hip hop, placing them beside Gorillaz, with a touch of Gnarls Barkley’s more outré output. It’s no bad place to be and the new album is a feisty, exciting creature, full of wriggle and body-movement.

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Overleaf: watch the video for "Lemon" by N.E.R.D featuring Rihanna

If I found it acceptable to swear at my children, I would serenade them with Björk's "Tabula Rasa". It goes: "My deepest wish, Is that you’re immersed in grace and dignity, But you will have to deal with shit soon enough, I hoped to give you the least amount of luggage, Got the right to make your own fresh mistakes, And not repeat others' failures." It's my own personal vision of utopia, in a nutshell.

For a band as big as Depeche Mode, in a venue as big the 21,000-capacity Manchester Arena, on a tour as big as their current Spirit tour, it almost doesn’t need saying that the pre-gig atmosphere is buzzing.

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.

SIMPLY THE BEST: THEARTSDESK'S FIVE-STAR REVIEWS OF 2017

Alan Broadbent: Developing Story ★★★★★  The pianist's orchestral magnum opus is packed with extraordinary things