Album round up: Tell Me It's Real by Seafret; Hold On Dreamer by Frøkedal; Lost Property by Turin Brakes; Night Thoughts by Suede; Hidden City by The Cult; Off The Wall by Michael Jackson

Musically Jack Sedman and Harry Draper have a fair bit in common with last year’s biggest British breakthrough artist James Bay, for whom they’ve opened on tour, as well as Kodaline, who they are due to support in London next month.

Sedman’s emotive vocals combine with sweeping tunes that pluck at the heart strings.

Oceans itself is a sweet and subtle romantic ballad; Over ventures into rollicking Mumford and Sons territory. A polished debut.

Anne Lise Frøkedal was previously frontwoman with the Norwegian outfits Harrys Gym and I Was a King. Her first solo album contains a likeable collection of poetically-inclined pop-folk songs.

Mostly they are pared back to guitar and violin drones but occasionally, as with The Sign, there are simple piano chords and thumping drums.

“Big, busy songs don’t touch me emotionally any more,” Frøkedal reasons. “I hoped to go the other way – to remove as much as I could and be left with a beating heart.” Hold On Dreamer achieves its goal.

Frøkedal plays at The Basement in York on Friday February 26.

The pick of recent acoustic releases is the seventh album by south London’s Turin Brakes.

Once leading lights of the ‘quiet is the new loud’ movement at the turn of the Millennium, their songs such as Underdog and Painkiller blazed the way for the current generation of acoustic artists such Max Jury, Aquilo and Benjamin Francis Leftwich.

Lost Property plays to the strengths of songwriters Olly Knights and Gale Paridjanian, with its emphasis on elegantly crafted tunes.

Particularly notable are the deft lead guitar touches in 96 and the instantly hummable Keep Me Around which has propelled the band back on to the BBC Radio 2 playlist.

Equally impressive are the huge bursts of melody and the sumptuousstring arrangement in Brighter Than The Dark. A strong return to form.

It’s a brave band these days that makes an album that’s designed to be listened to as ‘a piece’, from beginning to end. In the pick and mix age of iTunes and Spotify it seems few listeners have the patience to stick with the same record for 40 minutes or more.

Suede throw caution to the wind on their second album since they reconvened five years ago. Night Thoughts, it is said, was inspired by Frank Sinatra’s magnificent In The Wee Small Hours and the encroaching shadows of middle age; “that waking nightmare of real life” as singer Brett Anderson puts it.

“I don’t know the meaning of much, I don’t know the right expressions/I don’t have too much intuition or too many credentials” he sings, addressing his young son, in the key track What I’m Trying To Tell You. With its soaring guitar line, it’s classic Suede, wracked with self-doubt yet stirring at the same time.