Fenian is an immensely enjoyable record. Chara and Bap have a great natural sense of flow, able to syncopate phrases in a way to ensure the punchlines hit.

It’s a tremendous return, and all the more gratifying for its honesty.

A playful record that pushes in different directions without straying too far from the Seventies dancefloor brief.

This is a solid, saloon-door-slammer of a country classic.

There’s a sway to the melodies that slip around you, supportive but unassuming, like an old friend’s arm around the waist.

The Swedish pop innovator take charge over nine expertly produced tracks, exploring matters of sexuality, relationships and desire with playful candour. It’s brilliant, too; Robyn’s voice is commanding but also curious, enveloped by tremendous salvos of house and electronic sounds.

Her appetite for the heart-on-sleeve razzle dazzle of it all is glorious. This Music May Contain Hope is a pure audio spectacle that will have you screaming for an encore.

She tries her hand at new instruments and darts boldly between genres. As a consequence, Girlfriend can be a hard record to get a grip on. But it’s the ideal album for anyone else on the comedown from 2025’s Brat summer who now yearns, with Ives, to be “drinking up the day”.

Trying Times falters slightly in its final third – “Obsession” registers more as a sketch than a song – but these are minor frictions in a record whose emotional logic is otherwise unerring.

There are some pretty decent tunes on his 14th album, Make-Up is a Lie. .... But instead of falling face-first into music as we once did and enjoying a good old wallow in self-pity, we must now approach it as a minefield.

By stepping away for a minute, allowing any fears of getting left behind to cease, Styles has been able to return with newfound clarity and, more importantly, music that actually sounds like him. He let the light in, and it shows.

Over 15 tracks, a giddy mix of moods, genres, cultures, languages and time periods is woven together with virtuosic ease by Anoushka Shankar’s liquid sitar, Johnny Marr’s shimmering guitar and Ajay Prasanna’s gliding bamboo flute.

Gracie Abrams’s light graze of a croon skates elegantly over the sweet, piano-driven “Badlands”. Guest-free highlights include the delicately plucked “Alleycat”, resonant “Stay” and “Conversations with My Son”, which skips along its gorgeous acoustic guitar solo while Mumford’s lyrics pledge enduring love and support.

Charli proves herself much more in tune with the terrible complexity of Brontë’s original vision than Fennell: there are no inverted commas around the emotion expressed on this record. A windswept, gothic triumph.

Listening to Piss in the Wind can be a pretty gloomy experience, as it piles futility on futility. Ideas and tunes go unfinished. Yet its graceful, open ended melodies and raw emotions also tune into a very human ghost in the machine.

I doubt many listeners would be able to identify these as Tomlinson songs. But this is a likable, grounded collection of sunny-side-up pop from a likeable, grounded guy.

At times Locket’s sheen can flow rather frictionlessly over your ears, pretty but perhaps a little mass-produced. Yet it’s an album that reveals deeper, more enduring layers and real emotional skin beneath all the shiny fabric and pouty poses.

A record like this should go out with a bang. Instead, it’s a bit of a limp finish to an otherwise fun record from one of our most charismatic pop stars.

Celeste sings like a woman striding in confident slow motion away from a massive explosion. Shaken, but determined to be heard.

Music purists can entertain themselves all they like by debating whether this is “true” classical music. The rest of us can revel in what is possibly the best album of the year.

Everything on this record feels more focused than anything she’s done before.

This intense story-driven format lets her sound sharper, smarter, and more clear-eyed than before. .... Allen sounds newly alive in the contradictions we loved her for: acid-tongued and soft-hearted, ironic and sincere, broken again but alright, still.

There’s a lot of human heart pumping beneath the bangers here. Be prepared for your mascara/fire-pit kohl to get smudgy. Because It’s Not That Deep actually sounds like the work of a woman who’s done some serious digging in order to party this hard.

Deadbeat starts intimate and confessional, with what might be the best opening track of the year. .... From there, the tracks flow and blend hypnotically, tied together by the piano. Sometimes a song’s coherence is sacrificed to tranceyness, but hooks keep bobbing to the surface like lava lamp bubbles.

At the height of his powers on this long-awaited follow-up to 2022’s Reason to Smile. .... Don't Look Down is a superb album, his best to date.

The Life of a Showgirl might be one of her most uneven records, but she’s as compelling as she’s ever been – the showgirl, the ringmaster and the circus all in one.

It’s rare for music to be both deep and breezy, isn’t it? Minnie Riperton does it on “Lovin’ You” (1974) – all those casual la-la-la-las sinking into something profound. Corinne Bailey Rae did it too, with “Put Your Records On” (2006), flagging the nourishment of some much-needed downtime. Olivia Dean’s second album, The Art of Loving, manages the same feat.

Sprints are smarter, and louder, than ever before.