I discovered a few new favourites while compiling the spreadsheet of results.
Hopefully you’ll discover something to love too.
When her muse returned, she delivered the album of her career.
Jazz legend Pharoah Sanders was sitting in a car when he first heard Elaenia, the alluring debut album by British electronic musician Sam Shepherd, aka Floating Points.
Sanders’ playing is almost spiritual, hovering over Shepherd’s contemplative piano lines with a tender intimacy.
Olivia Rodrigo seemingly appeared from nowhere in the first week of January with an all-time classic pop ballad, Drivers License.
Jubilee is the sound of catharsis, full of sunlit synths and soaring melodies.
In one six-minute sequence, he pivots from the blue-eyed soul of Wusyaname to the abrasive beats of Lumberjack, before pairing up with Lil Wayne and a jazz flute on Hot Wind Blows.
Brimming with pop hooks and big, inventive choruses, it’s also suffused with dark humour.
“Confrontational”, “devastating”, “visceral”, “frazzled”, “guttural, volcanic crescendos of industrial gnarl”.
The Minnesota duo – a married, practising Mormon couple – started off in the 90s, making quiet, if intense, guitar music.
He followed it up with an EP, 7, that did very little to dispel the idea he’d be a one-gimmick wonder.
On the album’s flamenco-tinged title track, he sheds those demons, with a frank and joyful exploration of his sexual desires.
But raw numbers don’t tell the whole story… this is Adele’s best work since her breakthrough album, 21, a decade ago.
The songs are grand in scale, but intimate in delivery, and Adele avoids the trap of wallowing in self-pity.
More than 200 songs were in contention for the best single list; with Wizkid emerging as the first Nigerian artist to make the countdown.