The result is a consistently uplifting set that feels like Minogue’s best album since 2010’s ‘Aphrodite’.

For the converts there’s enough familiarity and boundary pushing to justify continuing to invest in this band, right as they begin playing their first headline arena shows on their upcoming spring tour. But for the doubters and sceptics still on the fence, this album might prove even more enjoyable and surprising. Only a fool would deny themselves this collection of big pop bangers.

Succeeds as a standalone work, regardless of its authors’ statuses in the indie-folk world.

For the most part, Rodrigo has passed the bar she set on that single [‘drivers license’], sharing with us an almost-masterpiece that’s equal parts confident, cool and exhilaratingly real. This is no flash-in-the-pan artist, but one we’ll be living with for years to come.

Confidence is channelled in compelling directions, as The Chats come for everyone and anyone trying to ruin the feel-good party vibes. Poking fun at ticket inspectors, beach racists and boy racers, this record finds them fighting jobsworths and ignorance with laughter.

Mostly Ghettoville is an exciting new landscape to get lost in and explore, even if it does spell the end for Actress.

Beautifully recorded strings and piano occasionally break the intimidating, sustained reverie, and the stark, rolling drums of 'Prime' suggest that Wexler could take this somewhere far darker.

It reasserts Benson's standing as one of America's greatest songwriters.

It may have taken over a decade for Doves to pour their souls into ‘The Universal Want’ but if it turns out to be their final transmission, it will be a worthy closing chapter to their epic legacy.

Bejar creates an astonishing world in just nine songs; it's his finest work to date, and excessive, but irresistibly so.

Vocodered, stretched, distorted, warped, deliberately upstaged by beats so showy they belong in a strip joint - quite simply, she's almost managed to make herself disappear. That bluntly explicit title isn't just pointless irony. This record is about the music, not Madonna; about the sounds, not the image.

By the time ‘Axis of Evil’ rolls around to close things out, you feel as though you’ve been given the fullest scope yet of what the band are capable of.

It's great.

These two rap entrepreneurs have proven that it was worth the wait for another studio album. The years between ‘Revenge Is Sweet’ and their debut ‘Long Way Home’ have been fruitful for the duo, but – for all their dabbling – this is a welcome return to their roots.

Everything pushed to the limit, it becomes abundantly clear they’ve made an album that sounds as at home on the dust-stained subway as it does at the peak of the Empire State Building.

Impressive debut. Somehow, he manages to tame the album’s kinks into a cohesive if not beguiling whole that’s eminently challenging and comforting to listen to.

With the help of former Coral man Bill Ryder-Jones, Liverpool's We Are Catchers (aka Peter Jackson) has captured the melancholy essence of Beach Boy Dennis Wilson's solo album 'Pacific Ocean Blue' and distilled it in the murky Mersey to produce this confident debut.

While Saint Etienne will always sound like Saint Etienne, these songs are their sharpest in over a decade.

Picking us up where the laptop prof's 'Los Angeles' debut dropped us for another nocturnal journey through LA that serves as a moody, widescreen, be-bopping riposte to UK dubstep. Only this time it's a flashier ride.

Starsailor have produced a debut album of real emotional depth.

Against the odds, 'Think Tank' is a success, a record which might not mean much to Strokes fans but which shows Blur's creative spark is undimmed even while their stomach for the pop fight fades.

There's light, shade and careful nuance throughout.

Confident, relevant and full of gorgeous instrumentation, Ella Mai’s debut proves that she is more than worth the hype.

But while 'Dear Catastrophe Waitress' delivered an aural punch above B&S's usual weight, it wasn't quite the return to form many claimed. That return is delivered here, on 'The Life Pursuit', Belle And Sebastian's seventh album and their best since '...Sinister'.

You’re Dead is a madly inventive record, one that takes hip-hop and jazz as starting points, beats them both to death and then brings them back to life in an almost unrecognisable form.

Spiky and cool where 'Songs For The Deaf' was smooth and tanned, tense and alien where that record was baked and ready to party, 'Era Vulgaris' is a record that feels like rust and stings like battery acid.

This is often quite brilliant genre-busting music from a girl who makes a mockery of Lily Allen’s status as the voice of ‘ordinary’ Britain.

Here, Simz is stripped to the root, healing in real time. Raw, flawed and deeply human – this is what blooming really sounds like.