Ryan Tedder wrote Bleeding Love for Leona Lewis and his band OneRepublic consists of friends from his church in Denver making music for people who think Coldplay are a bit too experimental. They are about as uncool as it’s possible to be without actually being David Hasselhoff.

I love their new album, Waking Up. It’s track after track of big, beautiful pop. (I use the word “pop” in its original sense of “music that is popular”, rather than in the music journalist sense of “landfill indie that’s slighty less rubbish than usual”.) Tedder has an ear for melody you can only acquire through years as a hack songsmith, lashed to a piano by The Man and made to compose for legions of dead-eyed melisma-crazed popstresses. And he himself has an extraordinary vocal range of the sort that is probably being lied about in a press release right now as extending “over five octaves”.

One Republic / All The Right Places