These ten songs are the absolute cream of the crop. Pure emotion given musical form. Starting at number one…

God, where to begin? The 1975 were the spark who ignited the flame of my love for music. I spent much of my childhood just mindlessly listening to whatever was on Youtube or the radio — but when i first heard “The Sound”, from their extravagantly-titled sophomore album I like it when you sleep, for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it, that flipped the switch in my brain which turned me into a full-on audiophile.

Elbow are my mam’s favourite band, so, as you can imagine, they were tied up in a lot of my nearest and dearest childhood memories. I’ll save you the weepy commentary.

It’s a rare thing, really, to see a Geordie not named Ant or Dec to make it big in entertainment. But Sam Fender has, against all odds, managed it, even with a sound more reminiscent of ’70s Bruce Springsteen than anything on the charts today. Howay the lads!

Electropop for sad weebs. (I, uh, not me. I hate anime. Just, you know. For the record.)

I’ll confess, i’m not a big fan of Talking Heads’ weirder, brasher deep cuts — but when they’re good, they’re bloody brilliant.

For how influential and critically successful XTC have been, you don’t hear much about them these days, which is a bloody shame. Their lyrics are some of the best in the game.

Humanity has, of course, been making music long before the advent of the phonograph. I’ve been trying to get into folk music, but even as someone who values sincerity, i find much of it unbearably twee — plus, as a newcomer, i don’t know who the big names to look for are. Nevertheless, here are some of my favourite trad tunes.

At some point in the latter half of the 2010s, something clearly broke in the heads of music producers, and we got hyperpop — the distilled, distorted essence of pop music, EDM, internet memes, and LGBT culture, all thrown into a blender and coated with glitter.

Dutch people have such bad taste in music and film that we have a term for when something from the Netherlands is actually good: on-Nederlands goed — “un-Dutch-ly good”. In that spirit, here are some rather undutchly songs.

Not every song i love is by a band i’ve consistently looked out for — some might be quick flashes in the pan, or bits of gold from an artist whose discography i haven’t fully explored yet. These “singles” are a taster of the boundless ocean of music that exists out there.

Not every song i love is by a band i’ve consistently looked out for — some might be quick flashes in the pan, or bits of gold from an artist whose discography i haven’t fully explored yet. These “singles” are a taster of the boundless ocean of music that exists out there.