The album is peppered with playful uses of samples. It’s deeply sophisticated music – an astute melting pot of genres bound together by the latest production techniques.

He continues the good work with sixth album The Night Chancers, a set of seductive, atmospheric late-night grooves on which Dury conjures sinister vignettes of insomniac dwellers of the wee small hours.

Inspired playing by Sam Sweeney (fiddle), Rob Harbron (concertina), Roger Wilson (guitar, fiddle), Ben Nicholson (bass), Toby Kearney (percussion), and guests appearances from Jon Boden (guitar, fiddle) and Martin Simpson (guitar) add to a delightful album.

Still channelling Lynyrd Skynyrd, REM and the Band, the rest of the Crows keep the tyres on the tarmac like pros.

Sweary, punky and bilious, Spare Ribs is unlikely to win over new converts but it is as good as anything in Sleaford Mods extensive oeuvre.

The performances are superb.

The Third is a hot, sweet pancake stack of danceable tracks, drizzled with drama and swung by a terrific horn section.

What makes this a really exciting debut, however, is the Kanye West-style genre-bending on Grenade, The Other Side and Our First Time, which joins the dots between between Michael Jackson and Bob Marley.

Great pop music with its big heart in the right place.

Packed with gospel choirs, church organs and soulful ululations condensed into a typically bravura tableaux of obscure samples, warped synths and spooky slabs of vocoder harmonies, Jesus Is King sounds as scintillating as anything in West’s considerable canon.

Those same multilayered textures [in Loveless] are all here, and if anything there are more finely chiselled planes of fresh variation: there is a discipline as well as wildness behind the distortion.

It's certainly good to have West's unique talent back in music, but this ambitious behemoth may be easier to admire than to listen to.

This is music with a big, gleeful smile on its face. And it is accompanied by clever and compassionate lyrics.

Mayhem is exciting but exhausting, a battering ram sonic assault. In such bland pop times, it’s good to see her parking her tanks back on the dance floor.

At times, Koenig is reminiscent of Paul McCartney in nursery rhyme mode--tunefully sweet and silly. Yet Koenig’s pithily epigrammatic lyrics throw a bit of intellectual grit in the mix, even if they possess all the clarity of a cryptic crossword.

Like Barrett and Wilson, Teleman indulge a whimsy that can tip into tweeness. But the melodic repetitions and slightly eerie echo around the guitar line give it a weird edge that works.

E3 AF marks his growth into an elder statesman of rap. Perhaps he sounds so assured because he’s embedding himself again in the sound that he helped to pioneer.

While the Stones may not have struck oil with these songs, their energy remains undimmed, their back catalogue endlessly renewable.

Lasting a little over 30 minutes, See You In The Stars is almost cocky in its brevity. There’s not an ounce of fat on it, and it’s all the more satisfying for it.

Springsteen has charisma and conviction to match anyone who has ever picked up a microphone, allied to a dynamic grasp of exactly when to ramp up and when to hold back, and he delivers these songs like they mean the world to him. In other words, he’s got soul.

She certainly knows how to convey emotion.

Dreamy and digressive, Parker’s songs meander and drift as if going nowhere before suddenly switching track. It can be hard to get to grips with, but there is purpose to such apparent waywardness. Meditative lyrics grapple with the relentless passage of time, lending emotional grit to his woozily blissful jams.

Muse's rather absurd spaceship may be welded together from bits of other acts--but it still flies.

Eternal Sunshine is pop at its sexiest – 13 songs designed to lodge themselves in your head for eternity, whether you like it or not.

Williams’s song C’est Comme Ça perfectly sums up the album: a reckoning with change, a refusal to deliver the same-old tricks even when it’s the easier option.

The tension and ambiguity implicit in downbeat songs with upbeat choruses lies at the heart of an album that may not easily yield its secrets but will keep you singing as you try to work them out.

For Melancholy Brunettes is an odd, subtle, suffocating album essaying a complexity and ambiguity you don’t often hear in modern pop.

Fifth time around, The 1975 get the equation right: pop first, art later.