Smoking in Heaven is hugely enjoyable.

It seems churlish to complain about songwriting and production as madly ambitious as this – filled with nuance and detail, sweeping and dizzy in its self-absorption, it builds at moments to an operatic grandeur.

Division is by far Sheeran’s smoothest collection.

There are motivational numbers such as Get Things Done, with its great elastic-bass hook. But more often Hesketh is in the trenches.

The quality wanes a little in the album’s second half, but there are four or five bangers, all told – ample firepower to win fresh converts while supporting both Harry Styles and Arctic Monkeys on the stadium circuit this summer.

It is an absolute blast, a crunchy, punchy, smart, deliciously goofy charge through new wave pop rock. It bursts with earworm hooks, snappy choruses and the delightful sense that the duo at its heart are having such a hoot they don’t really care what anyone else thinks.

Not every track is a solid smash of that wit, brio and sheer quality, but even minor tracks such as Cool and Hallucinate keep up the melody and movement with a spirit of sensual fun that would make Kylie Minogue weak with envy, whilst monsters such as Physical and the slinky Pretty Please are going to have Gaga pulling her pop socks up.

Wall of Eyes comprises just eight tracks but it’s far from slight. String arrangements by the London Contemporary Orchestra add a lush cinematic quality to the album.

Relaxer dazzles and delights the ears yet still feels like the work of a band who might have something to say, if they weren’t too precious to actually come out and say it.

These exquisitely voiced musings on love, healing and mortality really hit the spot.

What makes it so compelling is a classic rock Americana set up deftly interweaving lazy twin guitars and splashes of Hammond organ over steady rolling chord progressions that gather power with each repetition.

Those who loved The King Is Dead should certainly enjoy the EP--a sort of CD extras from a fine main production.

Eyeye may be more of the same from Li, but as a distillation of her music to date, and a final confrontation with heartbreak, it’s flawless.

He genuinely tries not to romanticise his despairing condition and is unforgiving about his own flaws, although the sheer gravity of his voice and dark appeal of his loner stance can’t help but exert their own seductive pull.

In Coping Mechanism, we see the singer becoming bolder and braver as she departs from mystic R&B and soul roots. In just 11 full-throttle tracks, Coping Mechanism gives us a glimpse at the future of rock.

This album is a belter, a shout-it-to-the-rooftops, punch-the-sky, yell-along-at-the-top-of-your-voice storm. It is crammed top to bottom with monster riffs, anthemic choruses and the sheer exuberant thrill of being young, in love, and armed with a fuzzbox.

Tomorrow... deepens on repeated listening, with Yorke locating moments of beauty and calm in the eye of his anxiety.

Safe hands, then, when it comes to glossy, catchy hooks and tight structure: almost every track on It’s Nothing feels like it could be a single, as much 1980s synth pop as 1970s soft rock, with an undeniable glimmer of Haim on songs like Rotten Peaches.

The album, which was funded by producer Jeffrey Gaskill through Kickstarter, is full of treats; and Johnson deserves 21st-century acknowledgement.

If a great cover version should reveal new dimensions in both song and singer, then this album is filled with them.

The air is predictably valedictory, freighted with reflections on love, faith and intimations of mortality. 'Don't go to any trouble/You know I won't be here long . . . ' he sings in Westerberg's Any Trouble - in a voice as strong and clear as a bell.

Tempest’s turn of phrase is constantly arresting.

The most compelling tracks take drastic liberties with the original material, deconstructing Kinshasa sound systems into industrial-tropical hoedowns that reflect postmodern London more than Africa's teeming townships.

The songs on What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World, produced by long-time collaborator Tucker Martine, are more intimate and personal than some of the early Decemberists narrative songs.

The album, produced by the celebrated Béla Fleck, has treats galore.

If you enjoy the dark imaginings of PJ Harvey and Nick Cave, this is worth immersing yourself in.

As always, his technical control is astounding.

His voice has that ability to spring from soulful growl to angelic falsetto that always gets TV talent show chairs spinning.

In Colour might have been more ambitious in its production, but In Waves is a no-nonsense, euphoric work, perfect for a sunny day or a dance inside a club.

Despite its relentlessly downbeat content, then, Moby’s music is just too satisfying to be depressing.

There’s plenty here to suggest Chloe X Halle have the chops to rival their superstar mentor [Beyoncé].

It reminds me how much I miss the devilish Old Nick, but it’s a privilege to bear witness to such a beautifully realised artistic, emotional and philosophical journey by one of the greatest singer-songwriters of our time.

QOTSA now know what is expected of them after a decade of commercial appeal: rock ‘n’ roll that’s not too heavy, lyrics that aren’t too vicious. Then they decide to stick their middle fingers up and make what they want regardless.

Wrecking Ball may be his angriest and most overtly political collection, yet the fury is contained in some of his most uplifting and celebratory music, so you can never be quite sure if he has come to raise the flag or to burn it.

Made up of 11 taut tracks, the highlights come thick and fast.

It showcases U2 at their most mature and assured, playing songs of passion and purpose, shot through and enlivened with a piercing bolt of desperation.

It's a fine album--and well done the conciliatory middle son for bringing the family together. Well, musically, at least.

Five of the 12 songs have been previously released in various versions over the years. Collected together with seven previously unheard songs, the effect is to compound the sadness at their core. There a couple of pleasantly throwaway druggy jams to lighten the mood, including the title song and the amusing We Don’t Smoke It. ... I have little doubt it would have been acclaimed in 1975, but it rings just as sweet and true in 2020. Heartbreak never gets old.

Young offers up rough and ready songs about the state of the environment, slightly mollified by dreamy ballads for his third wife, Daryl Hannah (the Splash star is characterised as “a mermaid in the Milky Way”), sung in a tender, trembling falsetto.

Still Woman Enough makes it clear that she is still up for a lively session.

There was a time when Morrison created elaborate, adventurous arrangements, but for decades now he has fallen back on standard tropes of rhythm and blues, accompanied by virtuoso musicians trading tasteful licks. Yet Morrison can still clamber inside a song and punch through, as if battling for emotional release, until that gorgeously modulated voice soars somewhere unexpected.

Self Made Man is a further confirmation that these are women of substance.

Will loyal Snarky Puppy fans be disappointed? Not likely. They’ll be delighted by the band’s continued scale and grandeur; for its music that is as unclassifiable as it is virtuosic.

Individual songs don’t matter quite so much as the overriding mood. Compared with the brash appeal of Uptown Funk, I’m not sure you could really describe these as bangers. They are more like Catherine wheels spitting flames into the night before burning out. And all the lovelier for it.

The resulting guitar pop sound is more professional and commercial than the Alabama duo's formerly more playful style, but thanks to a wealth of well-written songs, fans of old and new should be equally entertained.

Don’t go into this record expecting grand revelations or the sort of ferocious rock swagger that characterises the work of other artists who have worked with Rubin in the past; its softness is wholly responsible for its charm.

Anyone expecting a stroboscopic hoedown may be disappointed, but if it’s great performances of great songs you’re after, then fill your boots.

A gorgeous noirish set of cinematic songs with a bittersweet emotional core.

This is Måneskin’s big strength. The songs on RUSH! may not be particularly original, reading heavily from a well-thumbed big-riffs-and-god-times playbook, but they write a very good one, and play them with an energy that frequently boils over with exuberance.

He seems to have found a new and more sincere voice, less bullish than we have heard him before, whilst using a fantastic roster of contributors to push the mood and narrative.

Record’s producer Ewan Pearson pushes her back, fruitfully, into an electronic setting. This creates quite a retro, Eighties sound, linear and stratified, with pulsing bass synths and tidy drum machine patterns. But it lends Thorn’s wry, sharp lyrics a welcome sparkle.

Kehalni’s lubricious vocals and tender slow jams are not for the faint-hearted, but there is a real core of emotional truth burning through these X-rated grooves.

In a mood of nostalgia, Albarn is looking back at his life as it unspools over some of his most subtle, beautiful and melancholy melodies, rendered in a slightly hung-over, low-fi tone, occasionally pepped up by samples from producer Richard Russell.

Thematically tight, thought-provoking and packed with tunes, it is, once again, far in advance of most pop in 2011. What a way to go.

While it is less commercially focused, there is no discernible drop of quality on the expanded Anthology, crammed to bursting with beautifully worked songs that add different shades and angles to her essential premise of a woman working out why her love life has left her in such emotional tatters.

As an art experience, Honeymoon is gorgeous, and needs to be heard in context with her atmospheric home-made videos. But as pop music, it can fall a bit flat.

The songs are cerebrally bold but really get going when Gilmour finishes singing and launches into ambitious codas that remind us what an extraordinarily gifted guitarist he is, with impeccable touch and tone that can shift sublimely from tender melodiousness to flaming rock-outs.

This is a classy debut, from a sophisticated talent who takes things at her own sweet pace. She may not turn out to be the next big thing, but Celeste sounds like she is in it for the long haul.

Creating songs for female artists, he fully (if somewhat licentiously) inhabits their personas, deadpanning about greeting a lover in his camisole over the electro pulse of Apollonia’s Make-Up. The highest compliment that could be paid to Originals is that if Prince had released it in the Eighties, no one would have batted an eyelid.

The album never quite catches fire like their live performance but it gets close.

You can hear the ghostly outline of OK Computer looming amid the gloom and distortion. Also palpable is a growing ambivalence. ... For every scratchy, hissing road to nowhere, there’s a sublime bit when Jonny Greenwood’s guitar cuts through and York starts to howl like a sad but vaguely vengeful pop demon. And suddenly all your misgivings tumble away, and it’s a privilege to be lost in the labyrinth of Radiohead’s collective subconscious.

The album sounds like something knocked out almost live in a spirit of excitement, rather than with objective vision or commercial muscle. I’d be hard pressed to assert that this (unlike CS&N) amounts to more than the sum of its parts, rather than a celebration of great parts. But it is impossible to argue that as a group, Boygenius are pretty super.

The melodies are lovely, if conservative: as elegant and classically tailored as her gowns.

If you can look beyond the occasional ham-fisted blip – the command to “stop tap dancing around the conversation” that closes out the otherwise-astounding We Cry Together is the most egregious example here – then there’s so much reward.

Easily the best thing she has done since her album of Muscle Shoals sessions, New Routes, which she made in the early Seventies.

There is, as Bush intended, much more air around the songs, which can reduce their original, raw intensity but also gives them a more mature, lingering potency.

More than half a century later, those youthful ambitions are herein fulfilled, in 10 tracks of maturity and majesty.

Despite what the polished sonics might suggest, Twelve Carat Toothache is an ambitious record with real range, proving that Post has found his groove as America’s kaleidoscopic king of new-era pop.

Adopting a very domestic lyrical setting whilst grappling bravely with big issues, Shortly After Takeoff offers ideal lockdown listening, a touching black comedy of emotional isolation.

The Car feels warmer and more soulful than its predecessor, in its orchestral sweep not dissimilar to Turner’s first side project as The Last Shadow Puppets, 2008’s The Age of the Understatement. As such, it may be more a solo album than an Arctic Monkeys record, but it’s a very good one nonetheless.

It may be billed as a tribute to a lost star, but this Winter wonderland serves as a reminder that the blues is still very much alive and kicking.

As a follow-up to What’s Your Pleasure?, it’s inevitably a little doomed, lacking that record’s magical conditions: the unexpectedly fresh energy amid the lethargy of lockdown. Still, after Pleasure’s anticipatory teasing, That! Feels Good! offers a perfectly competent climax.

No tracks are particularly surprising from a production point of view, but it’s the affecting lyrics which have always been Carner’s strength. ... The newfound sharpness in Carner’s delivery has brought a much-needed grit to this album – it’s exciting.

Inspired by his hometown of Torquay and musically taking a leaf from Steely Dan and Fleetwood Mac, swapping his computer for the studio seems to have paid off with these brilliant, sunset funk songs.

At a time when hip hop has become the default music of choice for the masses, it’s a reminder of the genre’s subserve roots--and evidence that, deep into middle age, Slim Shady’s power to shock, offend and amuse endures.

Here, in the company of his oldest colleagues, he [Damon Albarn] takes stock of his past in the most finely crafted songs of his later career. It is the sound of Britpop all grown up.

The guitar playing throughout is fantastic, rhythm and lead entwining around Williams’s beautiful, ruined voice, rising to a fury on tough rockers. ... It is an angry record but one that can make you shake your fist into the void and feel that, at least, no matter how bad things might look, you are not alone.

This sprawling, tender lucid dream of an album morphs into various shapes: angular and jagged, lush and distorted, Twin Peaks-esque surrealism, wistful and surrendering. Whether Shaw is proposing friendship or not, Stumpwork offers us more than enough.

Pecknold enthusiastically revealed how the album was a direct result of his indulgence in MP3 piracy, as he tracked back to discover Fairport Convention, Roy Harper, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, Bob Dylan and all the heroes of the Sixties folk boom.

First Two Pages of Frankenstein is up there with Boxer, the band’s 2007 album on which they thrillingly found their musical feet. This is the sound of a band who’ve honed their sound to such an extent that they’re now towing a whole new generation in their wake.

As a record, Time isn’t just a sonic heart-swell for listeners, it’s the latest shift for a singer-songwriter who seems as if she’s constantly stretching toward the most whole version of herself.

Sonically adventurous and genre hopping.

Suddenly is a work of slow-burning beauty from one of the brightest sparks in the electronic firmament.

At best, its familiarity is warm and inviting for seasoned fans; for some it will feel lazily identical and lacking in ambition. But it’s an overwhelmingly powerful and energetic musing on the never-ending anxieties and strain of life that don’t leave just because you enter adulthood – exactly what keeps their fans coming back.

While its modernity is expressed by mixing and matching genres or adding digital zing to familiar tropes, for all its bravura exuberance and pop slickness it is old fashioned to its core.

The result is more urgent, less reassuringly structured than your typical Elbow record.

While these songs are like discarded pub furniture, Bramwell sounds like a wiley old alley cat, sat on top of it and looking up.

Thirty years on, Albarn sounds just as dissatisfied with the state of the modern world, yet he still appears to have at least a cartoon finger on its pulse.

Low in High School, his 11th solo album, is as dazzling and infuriating as anything in his canon, full of the stuff that has made the 58-year-old former Smiths frontman one of the most provocative and adored stars of our time.

It's surprisingly exhilarating stuff.

It sounds gimmicky, but far from it: Raw Data Feel is a thought-provoking experiment that aims to reshape the dissociation and damage caused by endless scrolling into fodder for the dance floor.

At times it does sound like it is trying a bit too hard to please. But it's more pop than Pop ever was, and it certainly does the job it apparently sets out to do, delivering addictive pop rock with hooks, energy, substance and ideas that linger in the mind after you’ve heard them.

A slight tone of weariness may have crept into 1D’s lyrics with songs about break-ups and yearning for home but musically it remains anthemic, up-tempo, superior pop, with elegant song structure, ear worm hooks and radio busting choruses.

There’s real genius at work here – but it’s so effortlessly delivered, you might almost take it for granted.

All [songs on Ashes & Roses] command attention because of Chapin Carpenter's warm, weathered, unshowily authentic voice which has a kind of peace at its core.

The timeless appeal of Carnival is echoed in Keep Your Courage, which speaks volumes for the cohesive, eternal quality of Merchant's ability to weave romantic, folk-rock ballads rich with organ, brass, and tidal waves of strings all anchored to simple piano melodies.

Weird! is his most crunchy and sonically streamlined work to date, replete with catchy earworm hooks and meaty singalong choruses.

What comes forth is disarmingly honest music that indicates a newly mature era for UK rap.