The London Sessions Review

Handing a singer of her stature to a room of younger British producers could have been a marketing exercise and it turned into a genuine collaboration. Disclosure give her Right Now, a house track she attacks with obvious delight, and Follow is another. Sam Smith and Emeli Sande contribute writing that is plainer and more direct than the inspirational filler she had been handed for years.

Whole Damn Year is the standout, a slow, weary accounting of a bad twelve months that sits properly alongside her best ballads because it says something specific instead of something encouraging. Not all of it lands. A couple of the gospel leaning tracks default to uplift, and the album has no strong ending. But the tempo range is wider than anything since the nineties, the arrangements have air in them, and she sounds engaged in a way that had gone missing. Proof that the problem was never the voice, it was the room.