Ed Sheeran
Galway Girl

Galway Girl is what happens when Ed Sheeran stays up too late reading the Corrs’ album sales data, remembers distantly how many Americans identify as Irish, has a massive Baileys session and writes the most pragmatic pop banger in history. Hard for me to talk about soul, seeing as I am a festering morass of nappies and grease without a heart or a brain, but it really does chime a particularly empty note within me.

Stormzy
Big for Your Boots

This is sort of the physical manifestation of a really well-timed mic drop, a greasy lump of braggadocio. Sadly, Stormzy’s byword-for-cool, easily-understood-by-lads-in-marketing appeal means the enamel of Big for Your Boots is slowly being worn off one advert at a time, starting and ending with Kevin Bacon playing it in that bad EE one about the aeroplanes. Great song, but they’ll have to wash the smell of marketing off it with litres of boiling water.

Luis Fonsi ft Daddy Yankee
Despacito

Spanish-language pop deserves better than a once-every-couple-of-years crossover hit – Las Ketchup, Macarena, that song Pitbull did for the World Cup – but then London’s sewage system deserves people to stop pouring chip fat into it, too, and that will never happen, either. Despacito is the ultimate party song/summer banger, ruined by the fact that it is both the sound of salty South America and of five PR girls from Balham trying to slutdrop while saying, “Dorito”.

Rag‘n’Bone Man
Human

Harsh for me, a grease monolith pulsing beneath the streets of London, to say, but Rag’n’Bone Man looks as if he sleeps on a mattress on the floor and operates a low-profit enterprise selling squidgy resin to schoolchildren from the comfort of his cherry-pitted sofa. Somehow, he is not any of those things but is your nan’s favourite singer. Thankfully, as his I’m-just-happy-to-be-here Brits appearance proves, he has a negative amount of charisma and so his career will wind down gracefully after this album cycle comes to a close.

Harry Styles
Sign of the Times

Listen, I’m just a 130-tonne wad of congealed fat, wet wipes and turds, so what would I know, but it was good when Harry Styles did that 1,000-minute-long song and then just fucked off for ever, wasn’t it? Sign of the Times was a strong start to a solo career but was then followed by No 58-charting Two Ghosts, and suddenly Styles’s PR blitz of appearing on every single American talkshow at once while wearing a floral shirt and looking lightly surprised felt like a massive waste of time. Even Liam’s done better than that this year, and he’s Liam.