This is a record Guy Clark can surely be proud to have as a tribute.

Their return should be heralded from on high, because it is the boldest, smartest, most colourful and purely pleasurable dance album of this decade.

There’s not an ounce of fat on these eight, energised tracks. Everything is sharpened by the awareness of mortality and there is alchemy’s in Pop’s ability to infuse such resignation with real electricity.

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.

Bush is still making music that intrudes and abducts.

Does it succeed in his aim? Triumphantly. With bells on. Tinker bells, even.

The best thing about Real Power is the way three perfectly balanced musicians concoct a sound of such thrilling dynamism, wit and energy without ever getting in each other’s way.

Clark never makes the mistake of letting an instinct for experiment detract from her elegant pop songcraft. All Born Screaming is an art-rock classic for the ages.

Radiohead's most melodically accessible collection, almost meditative in its ethereal mid-tempo loveliness, yet shot through with the kind of edgy details that never quite let a listener relax. It is chill-out music to put your nerves on edge.

The album is a melancholic masterpiece not for the fainthearted.

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.

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.

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.