Lordy, how much marijuana did we smoke in the 1990s? When people arrived home from the endless dance, jack-frazzled, 6.00 AM or later, pupils the size of 7” singles, legs twitching to invisible percussion, the time arrived for doobies, chillums, bongs, an eternal blissed NOW in foggy, curtained living rooms. The accompanying music was my generation’s unlikely conceptual fusion of prog rock and easy listening.

Little Mix, currently at another profile peak with their TV talent show The Search, are one of the most successful female groups ever, their tours amongst the highest earning of recent times.

The cast list for Song Machine…, the seventh album from virtual virtuosos Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett, is the size of some festival line-ups: Beck, Fatoumata Diawara, Imagination’s Leee John, Peter Hook, Robert Smith, Slaves, Slowthai, St Vincent, Joan As Police Woman, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Skepta and long-time collaborator Tony Allen are just some of the artists featured here and, while impressive, the roll call poses a question.

The big news is that this is Faithless’s first album without longterm frontman Maxi Jazz. Instead, remaining members Rollo and Sister Bliss work with a cross section of vocal talent. A multi-million selling, festival-headlining act, Faithless are one of Britain’s surviving 1990s dance music juggernauts.

The term electro-pop has kind of lost its meaning, The Top 20 has, for many years, been full of music created on computers, from Charli XCX to BTS to Clean Bandit. Yet still, as a genre header, it's often used to refer to music that riffs on the sound of the 1980s synthesizer pioneers.

Today is World Mental Health Day and of course that means an awful lot of hugs and homilies, thoughts and prayers, deep-breathing exercises and it’s-good-to-talk platitudes from people speaking from positions of immense privilege – ranging from the well-meaning to outright grifters.

Alongside Basement Jaxx, Groove Armada were one of the last big acts to blossom from the 1990s boom in clubland and DJ culture. They are responsible for bona fide classics in “Superstylin’”, “At the River” and “I See You Baby”, and also founded the Lovebox Festival, which was named after their fourth album.

This is a musical homecoming for Róisín Murphy, both geographically and figuratively. She may have been raised in Dublin and spent her gig-going adolescence in Manchester, but Sheffield is where she began her life as a clubber and performer – and it’s with Sheffield scene mainstay of almost four decades, and Murphy’s friend of quarter of a century, Richard “Parrot” Barratt that she’s collaborated here.

Sufjan Stevens is an artist of remarkable ambition. His 80-minute long new album, with 15 beautiful and poetic songs, belongs to a long line of pop experimentation that runs through from The Beatles and George Martin’s Stg Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band to Björk’s own highly literate and endlessly inventive mix of dance music and daredevil sonic exploration.

If Doves have a “thing”, it’s that they do “big” with impeccable intimacy. Over ten years and four albums, they consistently displayed exactly the sort of connection that bands like Coldplay and Keane pretend to have. Huge, sweeping scores and broad emotional swells that feel like an old friend putting their arm around you and telling you you're not on your own.