April: 18 albums you need to hear this month

Booka Shade 'Galvany Street' (Blaufield Music)

You can’t blame Booka Shade for wanting to switch it up after more than a decade of relentlessly touring their cool electro-house. Here, they’ve recruited singer Craig Walker (plus a few other guests) and cut loose from four-to-the-floor to create a diverse kind of stadium pop. It often resembles 80s sounds such as INXS, Terence Trent D’Arby and Simple Minds, but turned hypermodern. Sometimes it works strikingly well (‘All Fall Down’) and sometimes it feels forced; it’s telling that the most immediate tracks are the recognisably Booka Shade-like groovers ‘Numb The Pain’ and ‘Babylon’. It feels like an experiment in progress: we’ll watch to see how it goes, and how these songs develop live. Joe Muggs

6/10