After the persuasive opening singles “Chained to the Rhythm”, “Bon Appétit” and “Swish Swish”, as well as all Katy Perry’s pre-release talk about “purposeful pop”, there was a feeling that Witness might push the boat out, taking Perry’s music into more intriguing terrain than previously. Perhaps it might even achieve the leaps forward made by Beyoncé with last year’s masterpiece, Lemonade, or Madonna’s transformations with producers William Orbit and Stuart Price, in 1998 and 2005 respectively. Unfortunately, while occasionally tasty, it cannot meet those comparisons, yet it’s still Perry’s most enjoyable and consistent album.

There’s a sideline in heartache – power ballad “Miss You More”, which includes lines such as “So strange you know all my secrets, keep them safe”, will have sleb-watchers pondering whether Perry’s ex, Russell Brand, is the subject. But, mostly, it’s full of self-empowerment epics that are her stock in trade, notably the enormous “Hey Hey Hey” which features couplets such as “’Cause I can be zen and I can be the storm, yeah!/Smell like a rose and I pierce like a thorn, yeah!”.

It’s a perfect slice of pop, lightly marinated in calypso

A tried and tested team of hit-spewing producer-songwriters, such as Max Martin, Sia, Jeff Bhasker and Duke Dumont (as well as Jack Garratt and Hot Chip's Alexis Taylor) make sure the whole thing sounds irresistibly gigantic. Happily, it has sonic depth, rather than Perry’s usual compressed earbud candy. “Roulette” is electro-pop for giant beings, while “Pendulum” sounds like a funky 1970s Elton John number inflated to 21^st century stadium vastness. The two housey numbers, “Swish Swish” (featuring Nicki Minaj) and “Déjà Vu” are warm and enjoyable, and the bouncy ode to oral sex, “Bon Appétit”, is suitably frisky and rude (“Got me spread like a buffet”).

The stand-out track, by far, however, is “Chained to the Rhythm”, co-written by Sia and featuring Bob Marley’s grandson, Skip. It’s a perfect slice of pop, lightly marinated in calypso with lyrics and a melody that brilliantly muster both existential hopelessness and remaining upbeat against bad odds. It seems to be about everything from political complacency to being blind-sided by hedonism. It’s a song that will deservedly have a long and well-loved life. The rest of the album sits in its shadow, but still has its moments.

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Overleaf: Watch the video for Katy Perry "Chained to the Rhythm"

“When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life,” said Samuel Johnson. It’s utter balls, of course. When someone’s tired of London, they’re probably just knackered and wouldn’t mind living somewhere with more trees, fewer people and in a house that isn’t partitioned off by papier-maché walls. For many, returning, like salmon to the counties that spawned them, is the obvious move.

Helmut Geir has been around the block multiple times but, like an electro-sonic Batman, always pops up just when he’s needed. Never much moved by fads, the Bavarian DJ-producer has always kept a foot in pre-house music styles, notably punk, Eighties synth-pop and Seventies electronica. His new album, only his fifth in a 25 year recording career, is, without doubt, his meisterwerk. Titled after the German for “Music of the Future”, a Wagnerian term, it’s actually retro-futurist in tone, yet so startlingly original and ambitious it posits directions for not only electronic music, but pop, rock, and anyone else listening.

If Kraftwerk were still in the business of creating music rather than laurel-resting, this might be where they'd choose to wander. Certainly “Car Car Car”, with its tick-tocking rhythm owes them a direct debt. “A car is a car/It drives you near or far/It transports us to all kinds of places,” run the heavily Vocodered lyrics. But that’s just the beginning of this tour de force. Two tunes later we hit “Army of Strangers” which comes on – convincingly - like an update of some offcut from one of Bowie’s Berlin albums. Then, later, “K House” appears to robot-channelling a film theme trapped in John Barry’s brainstem.

And what of the vocal sample-delic psychedelic Voodoo madness of “High Priestess of Hell”? Or the sitar techno with Albert Ayler-esque punk-bebop sax attack that is “Guede”? Or the ten minute bonus track, “Mantra”, which mutates the Buddhist “Om” into hypno-techno? Or "With u", a perfectly pared back electro-pop nugget featuring, of all people, The Stereo MCs? It’s an album that doesn’t quit for its 50 minutes-ish length, whether sleazing it up on the outright gay club whopper “I Want You” or recalling Bernard Herrmann’s “Taxi Driver” soundtrack on the slow, muzzy “2 Die 2 Sleep”.

Zukunftsmusik is utterly addictive. It does what a truly great album should: it astounds.

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Overleaf: Watch the Video for "Car Car Car" by DJ Hell

While the 36 records reviewed below run the gamut of Wreckless Eric to Democratic Republic of the Congo Afro-electronica, this month there’s also a special, one-off section for modern classical. This is due to an ear-pleasing haul of releases reaching theartsdesk on Vinyl lately.

For some of us Blur were an irritant during the 1990s rather than one of the decade’s premier bands. However, once Gorillaz arrived it was impossible to ignore Damon Albarn’s outrageous talent any longer. His golden touch ensured his cartoon group with artist Jamie Hewlett straddled not only multi-million-selling global success, but awed critical kudos. 2010’s The Fall album did not fare so well, but seemed to be a different kind of project, more experimental, cobbled together by Albarn on tour in the States, then fired out without extra polish.

The extent to which Gargoyle counts as a Mark Lanegan or Mark Lanegan Band album is debateable. The entire musical backings for six of its ten tracks were created in Tunbridge Wells by former Lanegan support band member Rob Marshall and made their way across the Atlantic via the internet. In Los Angeles, Lanegan then wrote lyrics and melody lines, and sang to what he had received. The other four tracks were recorded in California in a more traditional way with PJ Harvey/Queens of the Stone Age/Them Crooked Vultures associate Alain Johannes.

Fujiya & Miyagi are greater than the sum of their parts. Singer David Best recently explaned that he "sees it as an album rather than a compilation", but Fujiya & Miyagi’s sixth album is, essentially, a collection of three EPs, combining 2016’s EP1 and EP2 with three sparkling new tracks.

Un Voyage Á Travers Dans Le Paysage Électronique Français, the French subtitle, goes further. French Touch is the first exhibition to celebrate and dig into France’s electronic music heritage: exploring the lineage which laid the ground for the world-wide success of Daft Punk.

There is no band of the Eighties generation who've remained both as big, and as great, as Depeche Mode. Duran Duran? Lightweights. U2? Sunk into self-parody a long time ago. But the boys from Basildon are something else: they've come through all the pressures of fame, addiction, ageing and the rest with their mojo very much intact, sounding like themselves but still writing fresh songs and hitting new emotional spots.

The equipment pictured above is the Powertran 1024, one of the first digital sequencers to hit the market. According to the May 1981 issue of Electronics Today International magazine, which unveiled it to the public, the British-invented “1024 composer is a machine which will repeatedly cause a synthesiser to play a pre-determined series of notes either as short sequence or a large compositions of 1024 notes: i.e. several minutes long.” The article was headlined “Treat your synth to this sequencer/composer.”