In 2011, she competed on Series 8 of The X Factor, making the finals and gaining a place on the live arena tour. Having followed her career from the very beginning, that realisation suddenly makes me feel incredibly old, as both milestones seem like forever ago.

Take ‘Cinema Screen’; on the surface it is a well written and perfectly enjoyable break-up song, but without digging deeper you’d struggle to pick up on the fact that it’s a metaphor for her struggle with anorexia. This sets the tone for an album that does not shy away; or attempt to dilute some of the darkest, most vulnerable moments in life; this album faces these uncomfortable periods head on, with unrelenting ferociousness.She explores the more grand and bombastic with ‘Saint of the Sinners’ and ‘Away With The Fairies’, and dabbles in electronics with ‘Sweet Sacred Friend’. Here lyeth my confessional of the sins I want so much to be free from and to finally forgive myself for. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

A real bonus was working with Christian Wright once again - he has worked on so much of my catalogue over the years, so it was fitting that he mastered Confessional. The highly anticipated sophomore album is fueled by pop songs that wear not only their hearts, but their scars on their sleeves, sharing Janet’s extraordinary personal journey. This song she wrote about learning how to live with an experience with sexual assault is equally heartbreaking and empowering, as she ends the song saying she is ‘ready to speak’.Here lyeth my confessional of the sins I want so much to be free from - and to finally forgive myself for. The purest confessions of a young life lived less ordinary, twelve true-to-life tales, each as candid and powerful as the next. A real highlight however must be cutting my vinyl at the studio - I had never seen the technique before and had the best time immersed in the process, and even got Christian to engrave a personal quote from me onto the lacquer. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

Janet worked closely with producer Jonathan Quarmby to create this concept album (Lewis Capaldi, Mika and member of Boy George’s Jesus Loves You) alongside highly acclaimed session musicians. Then thrown to the lions, the ensuing years would see this young woman battling alcoholism, mental health issues, hitting highs, and plummeting to terrible lows. The sound works perfectly for Janet’s unique vocal style and gives her a singular identity as a pop artist too.

In The Irish Times Tony Clayton-Lea said that sometimes the music did not match the lyrical themes of independence and survival, with "the assertiveness of one undermined by the ineffectiveness of the other", but that overall "Devlin delivers a stinging riposte to the music business as an entity and to some people in particular".

We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Yet while the narrative throughout is survival and independence at all times, some of the music doesn’t match, with the assertiveness of one undermined by the ineffectiveness of the other. For all that, Devlin delivers a stinging riposte to the music business as an entity and to some people in particular. But rather than this steering her towards greater musical success, Janet faced numerous challenges which almost cost her her career.Tanis Smither of Hot Press stated that Devlin and Quarmby had found "that happy marriage between pop and traditional" and that the album was "an emotional look into an interesting artist".