Delivers what most Sparks fans want from them most – a barrage of the kind of eccentric yet immediately connective synth-pop bangers, which only Chaplin-moustached keyboard maestro Ron Mael, now 79, seems capable of writing, and which Russell, 76, his sky-scraping high notes miraculously uneroded by passing time, delivers with characteristic theatrical gusto.

Sheeran sounds like a supercharged David Gray. Grown-up. Energised. Forget Autumn, this feels like an album of bright new dawns.

Scintillating and confident. ... This is music to bop to on the streets, to listen to in church with a big congregation, or to soak up alone in a room.

This album is a musical gumbo: a rich, surprising and ultimately satisfying stew of Simon's folk, rock and pop influences from all over the world.

On this album he is in especially playful and inventive form, perhaps because at a high school gig with no critics around he could afford to take risks. The numbers are nearly all those Monk standards familiar from numerous well-known recordings and endlessly replayed by later pianists, but they are reimagined in ways that make them seem utterly fresh.

It is no surprise that the sound is full of all the kind of clanking noises and sci-fi effects that have long steered Charli just left of the mainstream. Yet somehow this set of 11 short songs has a directness, immediacy and intimacy that has eluded her before. ... This album showcases the least mannered performances of her career. She makes you feel these songs.

I am blown away by this album, which will reward a lot of listening.

Deeply infused with rich, subtle hooks, Modern Nature is a patient album that warms the bones with a steady fusion of mid-tempo Curtis Mayfield soul (muzzy organ, bongos and funk guitar), with memories of Madchester club nights (baggy beats, chunky chords, shoegazer vocals) and tasteful string arrangements.

Once I Was An Eagle is a masterpiece, and, at 23, she’s still only getting started.

Jones’s voice has weathered better than most, taking on an oaken quality, with rich low notes and just a patina of tiny cracks adding some antique class. There’s no false tooth sibilance, and every lyric on Surrounded by Time is crisply enunciated and delivered with conviction and thought.

In lesser hands, an album that at times sounds like R2D2 breakdancing in an industrial spin-dryer might make for trying company. Yet, for all their Day-Glo stridency, Nova Twins not only know how to write songs, but how to arrange them too.

With Home, Before and After, Spektor surely proves she is a songwriter for the ages.

Sleaford Mods have lost none of their political bite, humour, and astute observational skill. UK Grim will cement their place as one of Britain’s most influential – and successful – UK bands.

Eminen’s 11th album offers over an hour of the world’s greatest rapper blasting away on all cylinders. It is the first great album of 2020, so lethally brilliant it should be a crime.

There are plenty of artists who make music occupying the same space as Mitski – reflective, weepy, introspective – but she stands alone in her lyricism and heart; on this album, she also seems less frightened by the potential fruits of her own talent.

Beautifully nuanced collage of soulfully rocking flavours.

Charli has crafted a perfect pop album (with the help of the most in-demand producer in the business, AG Cook). Brat is authentic, sensitive, and you’ll be raring to go out once you’ve finished listening.

What a wild and wonderful listening experience this is: bristling with ideas, constantly shooting off at different angles but always replete with earworm melodies, plush with glittering sounds, charged with intelligent and emotional lyrics and underpinned by a syncopated rhythm section that shifts gears effortlessly from tightly coiled to blazingly expansive.

Art Angels is made of the same dark candy, with even more weird and wonderful flavour combinations. I began to think of songs as three-minute gobstoppers in which layers dissolved unexpectedly.

Relentless might just be one of the most thrilling things you’ll hear all year. It’s a slow-burning triumph, its 12 tracks oscillating between squalling and shimmering rockers and richly-realised ballads thanks in large part to Hynde’s masterly co-writer and guitarist James Walbourne.

This album is the two-and-a-half-hour soundtrack. And it is an absolute performance masterclass.

High Flying Birds is the best collection of Gallagher tunes since his Morning Glory days.

From its raucous, raw-edged opening salvo to the softer, weirder, ruminative closing tracks, Blunderbuss crackles with life and energy, hauling roots rock out of the dusty museum and into the dazzling light of the modern day.

It's simply a great album from start to finish - wonderful tunes, superb musicianship, star guests and a unity of purpose about delivering a fitting tribute to the music he loves that raises this album to such a high level.

This is an album of rare truth and grace.

If (oh dear) you haven't got a Richard Thompson album in your collection, then this is a great way to get to know a truly inspired songwriter. But even if you know his work inside out, then you will still find much to enjoy listening to a master re-touch some of his best works.

Recorded partly in Senegal with contributions from Youssou N'Dour and Orchestra Baobab, the good hearted energy of this second album announces him as a potentially major figure to watch.

He brings his expressive voice and interesting lyric-writing to traditional-minded Irish ballads.... Class.

At times you might wish for a bit more sonic edge to match some of the biting lyrics, but this is a solid debut from exciting young talent – there’s little evidence of any teething problems here.

This is Jacklin’s most personal offering yet and while the pain of mining her soul for such material is clear, through these diary-like confessionals, so too is her catharsis.

This record is rammed full of fantastically fresh and challenging beats and bears the hallmarks of Cherry's streetwise style.

Protest albums don’t come more subtle and moving than this.

While there is room for improvement, I Hear You is an impressive debut album, tackling a multitude of genres with remarkable confidence. It’s yet another step in the right direction for Peggy Gou.

Ugly makes for difficult listening in places, but that’s not to say it isn’t often brilliant. Experimental, disarmingly honest and conceptually tight, blending rap, alt-rock and electronica, there’s no denying that Frampton is putting in the work.

Automatic is a lovely thing, made with understated soul and humour.

In weaker moments he veers into mawkish troubadour territory, but Blake's musical alchemy can be capable of matching the urban, nocturnal beauty of vintage Massive Attack.

To some tastes, Sheeran will be corny and trite. Yet what he does well is essentially inarguable: provide songs that fulfil the emotional needs of universal moments.

From the opening chimes and birdsong to her sultry vocals, the album cocoons you entirely in its plush, sensuous world.

Here’s what I Inside the Old Year Dying is: beguilingly atmospheric, beautifully crafted, and yet more proof that PJ Harvey is one of our most idiosyncratic artists. It’s wyrd, for sure. But it’s also lwovely.

Avonmore is classic, if not quite vintage, Ferry, lacking the distinctive songcraft of his finest work.

Always Ascending is every bit as smart and dynamic as their acclaimed debut, but familiarity has dampened its dramatic impact.

Trio The Bad Plus are joined by saxophonist Joshua Redman, and the intricate compositions challenge and inspire the soloists.

It's great to have Lee Ann Womack back with such a sad and lovely album.

If sensuous, whip smart R’n’B rocks your boat, Victoria Monét’s debut album, Jaguar II, is a luxurious treat.

Its low-budget weirdness will have you laughing into the new year.

Above all, Joy’All seems like the work of an artist content with floating through life, just having fun – and she’s brought us along for the ride.

Like his misogynistic streak, his sound is stuck in the past. What keeps our attention is his exuberant delight in language itself, such as his geometry pun in River: “this love triangle / left us in a wrecked tangle”. (Say it aloud).

The music is astounding, threading erudite raps through ghetto soul jams and panoramic orchestral interludes.

An album that ultimately serves as both an emancipation and a proclamation, Grande fully bending her collaborators to her will instead of merely playing in their sandboxes, and creating a blissful fusion of pop and R&B that is entirely her own.

Pound for pound and hook for hook, Duck is as strong an album as they have ever made: a bright, giddy, colourful collection of pop anthems to raise the spirits.

There's a real grace about The Longest River, the debut album from self-taught multi-instrumentalist Olivia Chaney.

Inevitably, 51 minutes of melodrama becomes draining. But it captures Del Rey's mystique perfectly.

At its best, it’s like a movie soundtrack. String interludes behave like camera pans between scenes; fuzzy production gives everything a dream-like quality.

Hall’s deadpan tones offer the same strangely reassuring grounded presence on the opening track, a bullish political anthem Black Skin Blue Eyed Boys. Yet with its slick funk and soul groove, I can’t remember the Specials ever sounding quite so smooth.

There are inevitable misses as well as hits (House of the Rising Sun is a bit flat) but there is enough variety from musicians such as The Secret Sisters, The Milk Carton Kids, the Punch Brothers and Marcus Mumford (also the associate producer) to keep things rolling along.

Like the best rap albums, Home? is infused with musicality, drawing on reggae, afrobeat, garage and R’n’B, punctuated by horns, guitars and a swimmy dubby sensuality. Wretch is a sharp wordsmith who also sings with a raw sweetness reminiscent of Bob Marley.

This is not so much pop music, as music that might make your ears pop.

The tone switches dramatically between dynamic contemporary electro groove adventures, singalong pop and lush synthetic ballads, while veering emotionally between introspective vulnerability and strident defiance. Yet every track adheres to robust, classic songwriting principles, a kind of melodious elegance of structure gleaming through no matter how inventively deconstructed the arrangement.

Alison Krauss and Union Station have a marvellous chemistry as a band - and it's as impressive as ever on Paper Airplane, their first album together since 2004.

Gifted keeps giving: Koffee achieves a brilliantly confident debut with the promise of more good things to come.

Van Etten evokes Eighties electro pop. You can almost see the dry ice and excessive mascara. The atmosphere is doomy and gothic, creating an underlying tension that casts her lyrics of devotion and self-forgiveness in a shadowy light. It’s as if she can’t quite commit to her own happiness.

If I may make up a word of my own, it is utterly bjorkers, and all you can do is dig it.

This is a set of funny, twisted, sharp-edged vignettes about the choices women face in the gritty, down-to-earth setting of daily working life – feminist pop as kitchen sink drama.

Theirs is a music of doomed melancholy –- plaintive, dark, and uneasy.

This record is undoubtedly their strongest offering since 2006’s Meds, strengthened by the inclusion of the sort of furious social commentary that made them such heroes to countless kohl-eyeliner-wielding teenagers in the late 90s.

Lotus is an absorbing and powerfully honest album.

What’s Your Pleasure has a sleek and sensual disco glamour replete with fantastic pop hooks, taking a spin around the dance floor worthy of Studio 54 in its glitterball glory days.

The Gabriels are making thunderous, thoughtful music with commercial snap.

It’s a big, angry, pile-driving, end-times heavy rock workout with frontman Eddie Vedder alternately spewing fury and despair at the state of the world.

They’ve always been more about energy than songs and old fans will certainly pick up on a few recycled ideas. But they’ll still find this the band’s most spirited release since 1997’s The Fat of the Land.

Jazzy, soulful, philosophical and intimate, Jones seems to have found a poetic lyrical voice to match her sensuous voice and sensitive piano phrasing.

Giles Martin (son of George) has created an immaculate remix but all it really does is separate and boost sounds so that they can punch their weight alongside modern recordings on digital streaming platforms. It sounds good, but then it always did. ... What this painstakingly assembled 50th anniversary release demonstrates is that you can’t improve on perfection.

The Overload is a very fine debut from a group that sound like they think they are smarter, funnier and fiercer than all of their peers, and just might prove to be.

The mix of trap grooves and synth balladry is perfectly of the moment, lacking the boldness of a truly original talent. Yet there is something appealing in the sweet melodies and sour attitude of a singer who sounds like she might actually be starting to enjoy herself.

Her uncompromising, June Taboresque alto and imaginative, original material--from ye olde narrative ballads to modern love songs--are enduringly seductive.

For all Byrne’s other endeavours, music is the forum where his quirky, zany, challenging ideas achieve emotionally satisfying expression. American Utopia is another glittering offering from an old master.

A genuine treat, probably the best thing he has made since his debut.

Nothing you’re hearing here is particularly cutting-edge, but it’s delivered with such ebullience and pomposity that you almost forget that this isn’t the first time you’ve heard an 808 beat.

The songs Memphis Women And Chicken, Tuscaloosa, 1962 and Foolish Heart are highly enjoyable, but the highlight is the complex and moving Errol Flynn.

It’s certainly delightful and delicious – as they croon on opening track De-Lovely – although also decidedly undemanding.

The Death of Slim Shady is funny, shocking, contradictory, utterly outrageous, offensive, sentimental, clever, dumb and occasionally even (whisper it) wise.

Playing piano and acoustic guitar, the 44-year-old takes listeners on a bittersweet journey balancing the melancholy of the medium with a healing message. Stand out songs Closer and Lose My Way have a meditative sadness but there is real warmth in choral backing vocals, subtle grooves and Brun’s melodic instincts.

There is a clutch of fine songs here written for Nelson by some of Nashville’s leading contemporary tunesmiths, including the title track (a celebration of life on the road) and elegiac ballad Dusty Bottles that are surely destined for classic status.

Hypnotically compelling.

This is a vast superclub of an album. But for all its inventiveness, its flavours exist within fairly narrow parameters. Still, these songs will be blasted out of cars, at house parties, in hotel rooms and on dance floors for years to come.

It is a little daunting at first approach, but stylistic breadth and dynamic shifts make up for the stark brutality of their sound.

It’s only once you can give this album a little time and space that you begin to realise that the low-slung 20/20 Experience is really a rather refreshing and assured kind of a sit-down.

Midnights represents Swift at a turning point. I am not sure if it is the sign of a curtain falling on her imperial phase or a new pop dawn.

It’s fair to say there is nothing groundbreaking on offer, just another set of beautifully constructed and performed songs of soul and meaning.

There’s a range, ambition, confidence and accomplishment on display.

This debut switches effortlessly from r&b ballads to punchy rap tunes. With her big voice and ballsy attitude, is she Ilford's very own Pink?

Ilo Veyou is a magnificent, kaleidoscopic oddity, unafraid to risk ridiculousness in pursuit of the sublime, fearlessly unlike anything else you'll hear this year.

What meets at this particular crossroads is good old-fashioned blues, soul-stirring gospel and a funky, Hammond-organ-soaked sound.

They have done Ray Charles proud.

From the arresting cover (a comically unsalacious shot of a semi-naked Hackman holding a piglet to her breasts) to the startling contents, Any Human Friend signals Hackman’s coming of age as an artist with real purpose and 
star power.

The range of the album is impressive.

They are beautifully crafted songs, sung with feeling and subtlety and with lyrics full of honesty.