I randomly stumbled across this video summing up Niall Horan's Grand Ole Opry debut, and it was so exciting! I've loved Horan's music but never really thought of it as leaning into country - however, when you hear it in the context of the iconic wood circle, it does make a certain sense. I'd also missed that Horan had teamed up with Thomas Rhett, ultimately the reason he got invited …

I've done it, I've decided, phew. It's taken my a week or two longer than it usually does to decide my top five albums of the year just gone but finally I'm ready to put pen to paper, or pixel to screen, and talk about my finalists. There were only eight albums in the shortlist anyway, which somehow made it harder. I narrowed it down to six but then deciding …

My seventh year of listening to albums has drawn to a close and it's that agonising time where I need to decide on a top five. Each year I listen to 100 albums, one new and one old each week for fifty weeks, and they each get two listens to make sure I really get a feel for the sound. Then, at the end of the year, I pull together …

Somehow another year of music has flown by, I've banked another 100 albums, both new and old, and now I have to decide which were the cream of the crop and which weren't worth the download speeds. Each week, for fifty weeks, I've listened to one new album (usually from this year, or 2020 at a push), and one older album (any time before that), and have listened to each …

Hooray for the dreaded time of year where I pick out the top five albums I've listened to over the past twelve months. Each week for 50 weeks, I listen to two albums. One is a new one (this year or the previous year) and one is an older one (from any time previous to that). So I can't promise to have listened to every album that was released last …