As the new year begins, and reflecting on the past 12 months gives way to anticipating what the next 12 have in store for us, it’s noticeable that the usual record-industry and music-press red flags – CD sales are declining! Streaming is homogenising pop! Bring back tribalism! – seem just a little less alarming than they have in the past. Yes, the charts are still weighed down with collaborations, many of them hook-ups so unlikely and unconvincing, you detect the hand of management or record label in bringing them about. And, yes, the new chart rules do mean that songs hang around long, long after they should. Ignore the Cassandra-like cries of doom, though, for it’s clear that pop, or whatever you want to call the particular genre that is your bag, is in rude health. Artists continue to make era-defining, life-soundtracking songs, and to tour. We continue to listen to their music (a little differently these days, for sure) and flock to their shows. That doesn’t call for red flags, but bunting. Here are eight artists doing things in 2019 that are a cause for celebration.

Ms Rey signalled a change of gear for her sixth studio album, the splendidly titled Norman Fucking Rockwell (due to be released in the spring), with two preview tracks that saw the singer move away from the heavily stylised femme fatale goth-pop with which she made her name. Both “Mariners Apartment Complex” and “Venice Bitch” suggest a new direction, taking LDR into impressionistic folk-rock territory. It suits her.

Two years ago, the wheels came off Mr Ronson’s golden chariot, after years of uninterrupted progress. Divorce, depression and self-doubt forced the man who started a million parties with “Uptown Funk” to pause for reflection, and you can hear the results of on his new album Late Night Feelings, which will be released in March. “Nothing Breaks Like A Heart”, Mr Ronson’s recent hit with Ms Miley Cyrus, is an accurate guide to the album as a whole: to paraphrase Ultravox, you’ll be dancing with tears in your eyes.

When the curtain came down for the final time on Mr Bruce Springsteen’s intimate Broadway show of songs, anecdotes and dug-up memories, the singer could be forgiven for longing for a well-earned rest. In its 14-month run, Springsteen On Broadway clocked up 236 performances – in a theatre with only 975 seats. Perhaps the New Jersey troubadour simply isn’t ready yet for the shock of looking out at a packed stadium again. With touring on hold, he’s heading back to the recording studio, putting the finishing touches, rumour has it, to a long-gestating new album of songs he has described as being inspired by “Southern California pop music of the 1970s: Glen Campbell, Jimmy Webb, Burt Bacharach.”

From an artist who recorded her third album during a lengthy period alone in her Montreal apartment, without sleep and reportedly fuelled solely by cigarettes and amphetamines, Grimes’ appearance at last May’s Met Gala beside Mr Elon Musk should not, perhaps, have been such a surprise. The singer, born Ms Claire Boucher, is nothing if not unpredictable. The Canadian’s on-off-on relationship with the Tesla tycoon has been vying for space in her compulsively creative brain with the task of completing a new album, the follow-up to her big commercial breakthrough, 2015’s Art Angels. A taster track, the brutal, synth-driven, “La Isla Bonita”-meets-Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) single “We Appreciate Power”, suggests we’re in for an eventful ride.

If, as is strongly rumoured, Rihanna does release a new record in 2019, it will be three years on from ANTI – a creative triumph, but not so much a commercial one. Not that the Bajan singer has been idle: her hugely successful cosmetics and clothing lines, and her burgeoning acting career, have kept her busy. But she has her work cut out in terms of pop, and the talk about her recording two stylistically contrasting albums, one, as a source put it, “full of chart-friendly songs, and another made up of moody and experimental tracks”, rings true. Musically, she wants to continue branching out – but she needs those hits.

As if soundtracking a generation’s negotiations with social media, mental health, toxic celebrity, fake news and political dysfunction wasn’t enough to be taking on, Mr Matty Healy, lead singer of the chart-topping Cheshire band The 1975, is also busy prepping what will be their second album release in the space of just six months. Notes On a Conditional Form, the follow-up to the recent A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships, should follow its predecessor to the number one spot. Miraculously, Mr Healy also has time to tour: the band hit the road next month, kicking things off in Belfast on 9 January.

Her stunning 2016 album A Seat At The Table bagged a Grammy and topped many end-of-year polls. Two years on, a follow-up is apparently ready, and due to drop any moment now. What can we expect? “There is a lot of jazz at the core,” the younger Ms Knowles told an interviewer recently, “but with electronic and hip-hop drum and bass because I want it to bang and make your trunk rattle.”

It’s a scary 18 years since The Strokes introduced a whole new generation to black leather jackets, louche, Velvet Underground-aping indie rock and artfully dishevelled tonsorial cool. From the summit of their game-changing debut album Is This It in 2001, the New Yorkers have steadily lost their lustre, but recent years have seen a revival of sorts, helped no doubt by the fact that they seem able to be in the same room again without bickering. Rumours of new music are just that, says guitarist Mr Albert Hammond Jr. But a tour, billed as their “global comeback”, is definitely on, with the Bilbao BBK festival in Spain confirmed for July, and many more dates promised.