It is lovely stuff, replete with bucolic images of sheepdogs leathering around autumnal hillsides. As Pet Shop Boys enter their heritage years, they are still taking dance music into unexpected places.

On a set of compact, meaningful songs about surviving in the age of anxiety, the sympathetic weave of the reunited band embodies the very spirit of empathy and togetherness for which Steadman seems to be reaching.

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.

The results may be a bit odd and unfashionable, but one of the great pleasures of Walking Like We Do is that it simply could not have been made by anyone other than The Big Moon.

His songs are charming but inconsequential, resolutely old-fashioned, drawing influences from offbeat singer-songwriters of a certain vintage.

The result wittily, emotionally and triumphantly affirms his position at the head of the British rap pack. Like many of our most fascinating pop stars, from John Lennon to Robbie Williams, Stormzy lies on a knife-edge between ego and insecurity, self-confidence and self-doubt.

That Cabello is clearly a fine singer hasn’t stopped producers smoothing her with Auto-Tune. Romance is state-of-the-art pop yet it lacks the real romance of music made from the heart. If you feel like you’ve heard it before, it may be because you literally have.

As big and bold as any fan could hope for.

It is, as ever, heart-on-sleeve stuff, with all of Coldplay’s musical diversions bound together by Martin’s golden gift for melody, almost simplistically direct lyrics and emotive crooning. But, oh my goodness, you’d have to be made of sterner stuff than I to resist.

Leonard Cohen is back with a posthumous album as great as any from the late period of his considerable canon. And that is very great indeed.

Magdalene is a magnificently twisted sci-fi torch album, an enthralling account of love, loss, heartbreak and recovery. It is erotic and neurotic, confounding and revelatory, summoning the spirits of such iconoclastic talents as David Bowie, Kate Bush and Björk while affirming its own unique personality.

From Out of Nowhere could be an ELO album from 40 years ago, albeit with a bit of added digital polish.

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.

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.

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.

Ultimately, this is an album in which a troubled spirit seeks the relief of music to mesmerising and charged effect. And that is timeless.

Thoughts on suicide, homelessness, injustice, heartbreak and mortality are framed with supple grooves, melodious chords, gorgeous harmonies and lushly detailed arrangements.

A long, sad, brooding mediation on grief, the 17th album from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds is simultaneously their loveliest and most terrible.

The real deal, untampered with, apart from a slight cleaning up of the 1964 sound. .... This album won’t change the history books, but it’s certainly a welcome addition to the Coltrane canon.

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.

They’ve tried to update the quintessentially Eighties sound of the original to make it fit for a modern audience. The result is often a strange hybrid, which is enjoyable only as long as one doesn’t expect to hear too much Miles Davis.

This is an album of mature, accessible pop-rock. The singing is beautiful, the playing immaculate, the sound warm and rounded, with nothing to scare the horses.

Fender is young enough to be immersed in the life he documents, not writing at a nostalgic remove. When he rises to longing high notes on weekend anthem Saturday, you can really feel him straining at the leash. I think Springsteen would approve.

The sexy android cover and star-studded collaborations (including alternative icons Lizzo, Haim and Christine and the Queens) on her third album, Charli, suggest an all-guns-blazing pitch for blockbuster status. But the contents are far weirder than that implies. ... Come the century's end, you can almost imagine future critics scratching their AI-augmented brains and still touting Charli XCX as the next big thing.

Yet the over-riding sense of her almost unremittingly sombre sixth album, Norman F______ Rockwell!, is of Del Rey shedding veils of production mystery at the risk of being revealed as just another over sensitive and particularly self-absorbed singer-songwriter.

Hoodies All Summer is the album that grime has been crying out for, an audacious state-of-the-nation address from one of its most articulate lyricists.

Lover does not sound like the work of someone desperate to command the pop zeitgeist and yet is all the more likely to do so. Instead of trying to be all things to all audiences, it plays to the strengths of a witty songwriter in love, eager to tell anyone who will listen exactly how she feels.

There is a tangible sense of joy in performance, although with no greater clarity of lyrical expression. ... His own work remains wilfully obscurantist, emotionally open and lyrically closed, as deep and meaningless as listeners are prepared to let it become.