I returned to Cambridge one January morning to the sad news of David Bowie’s passing after an 18 month battle with liver cancer. This was to be the first in a series of untimely deaths; cherished figures including Maurice White (Earth, Wind and Fire), George Martin (The Beatles’ producer) and Prince have all passed in the last year.

To make matters worse, the melancholic mood was not lifted by the quality of music that those dark early months offered. Pop offered no solace as formulaic, predictable and underwhelming releases from Bloc Party, Fat White Family and Future represented an inauspicious start to the year. By Valentine’s day I was beginning to become deeply concerned that, with the big summer releases months away, 2016 was going to fail to hit the heady heights of the previous year.

Fortunately, the next fortnight saw the release of two diametrically opposed albums which largely put paid to my fears. The first was Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo; ostentatiously released on Valentine’s day, Kanye’s seventh was a real labour of love. Pablo simultaneously managed to showcase the best and worst of Kanye as the skillful production was only matched by the offensiveness of certain lyrics. The second, Kendrick Lamar’s untitled unmastered embodies a very different approach to the craft of making and releasing music. Despite effectively being a compilation of discarded demos from the sessions for To Pimp a Butterfly, the album plays as a political firestorm, replete with all the skillful wordplay and avant-garde influences that make Kendrick one of the most exciting artists, in any genre, of the current generation.

By March then, the green shoots of renewal were beginning to show and keen to capitalise on this buzz were a cadre of young upstarts. Hitherto unknowns such as Zara Larsson and the Future-aping Desiigner grabbed the mainstream by the throat with ‘Lush Life’ and ‘Panda’ respectively. One of the most exciting prospects for the latter half of the year is whether or not these artists will be able to deliver on their early promise with more substantial offerings.

However, nowhere was the rude health of the music industry clearer than in the fact that the year saw two of the most maligned figures of years past, Justin Bieber and Zayn Malik slip into critical respectability. Both Bieber and Zayn’s bids for credibility saw them embrace “laptop music” and produce edgy dance-pop. This is not the only way in which straightahead rock & roll continues to remain firmly unrevived. The grim regularity with which guitar bands continue to produce lacklustre, nostalgia-driven albums has really begun to grate. While it’s one thing for a modern band to hark back to the glory days of CBGB or The Haçienda, Catfish and the Bottlemen (and they are by no means the only offenders) seem determined to slip into self-parody. It’s 2016, not 1976, and wearing a leather jacket and not-giving-a-fuck just isn’t what it used to be.

A year that started with a whimper ended with a bang as exam term saw the release of a trio of huge albums from some of music’s biggest beasts. While Drake’s Views veered into self-indulgence and was consequently met with mixed reviews, Beyoncé and Radiohead consolidated their reputations with albums of creative majesty. In my opinion, it is a huge positive that albums as aesthetically diverse as Lemonade and A Moon Shaped Pool shared a willingness to wrestle with some of the big philosophical issues of modern life. In particular, Beyoncé’s exploration of the tribulations of womanhood present a blueprint for how artists can continue to be politically engaged without compromising on the quality of their music.

That Skepta sat comfortably atop the charts above such huge names was a source of great satisfaction; Konnichiwa’s success not only reflects his own personal redemption but also the manner in which Grime has long-since transcended the risky roadz of inner london. In a year with more than its fair share of bad news, it has been a true delight to see this year’s biggest names continue to innovate in the same vein as David Bowie generations ago.