Pet Shop Boys are never shy of producing stylishly conceived fan mementos. Coming not long after Faber & Faber’s hardback collection of Neil Tennant’s lyrics, this four-disc set is just such a slice of lovingly rendered memorabilia. After well over three decades in the game – but one since they had a Top 20 hit song – the duo retain a devoted following, ever eager to invest in whatever they’re up to.

Bananarama are one of the most successful girl groups of all time. Consisting of Sara Dallin and Keren Woodward, the band’s third original member Siobhan Fahey left in 1988 to form Shakespears Sister. The trio reunited in 2017 for a tour but new album, In Stereo, sees them back as the long-standing duo. The pair have been friends since their school days.

The French have developed an international reputation for a certain smooth style of electronic music. It’s the place where disco and house collide with something more urbane and far less sweaty. Daft Punk provided a defining moment with their 2013 album Random Access Memories, but the sound referred to is touched upon all the way from the louche downtempo of Air to more recent yacht rock sumptuousness from Papooz.

The Chemical Brothers just keep on coming. No Geography could as well be called No Surrender. It’s the sound of two men approaching 50 but still keenly attuned to making feet move on the dancefloor.

Everything about this mixtape oozes confidence. It crams 12 tracks plus interludes – all produced by Andre “Shy FX” Williams – into barely more than half an hour. It happily leaves “Roll the Dice”, the single which conquered club and radio and featured Lily Allen, until last.

Over the last decade or so, there have been a couple of noticeable trends in broad-based, popular music that have segued from mild irritation to disfiguring infection. The first is the fey cover version, the awful balladification of perfectly good songs with the sole purpose of shifting units of plastic crap come Christmas. 

The cliché of hard times making for good culture is a distinctly dodgy, even dangerous, one.

My Baby are one of the most exciting live acts currently in existence. They’re a three-piece consisting of Dutch frontwoman guitarist/bassist Cato van Dijk, her brother, drummer Joost, and New Zealand blues rock guitar virtuoso Daniel Johnston.

Recent years have seen a boom in music documentaries. They are, after all, relatively cheap to make and have a readymade audience. Their narratives are usually similar, and so it is with The Man From Mo’Wax: fame and glory, followed by a fall from grace, followed by self-reflection, absolution and a glimmer of fresh success. What many of them also offer is a sense of wild passion, of the raw, unfettered power of music. This film has little of that.

Disc of the Day reviews new albums, week in, week out, all year. Below are the albums to which our writers awarded five stars. Click on any one of them to find out why.

Baxter Dury, Etienne de Crécy and Delilah Holliday - B.E.D. ★★★★★ A small but perfectly sleazy work of sweary, cynical brilliance