THE ALBUM listening session can be a surreal experience. You gather a bunch of media, frisk them, throw them in a room and play an album, writes BRIAN BOYD

The whole thing soon becomes a weird anthropological study. You notice how many people present stare at the place where the music is coming from – as if that will offer up some clues to the album’s worth. Some people hurriedly write entire essays about each track and if you glance at their notes you’ll see lots of exclamation marks, question marks and certain words underlined five times. Others draw vases of flowers or boats out at sea. The really dreadful ones clap after a particular florid passage of music. One person started crying during a Michael Jackson spoken-word section a number of years ago; another walked out before the first song made it to the bridge.

Most just sit there awkwardly, writing the odd word down every few minutes or so just to give the appearance that they’re actually paying attention.

All make frequent trips to the “hospitality” table to partake of plastic cups of tepid white wine and curled-up sandwiches that have turned a funny colour.

The listening session has changed a lot over the years. During the good old pre-Napster days everyone would get roundly trashed, talk very loudly and occasionally say, “I wish they’d turn that racket down, I can’t hear a word I’m saying”, safe in the knowledge that they could pick up a white-label version of the album on the way out the door.

But thanks to those pesky downloaders, the listening session now has airport-tight security. At a (band’s name withheld) listening session a few years back, two people patted me down for a suspiciously long amount of time and then asked me to sign a 54-page legal document that in effect said I was to deny all knowledge of the album’s existence, that I wasn’t even there in the first place, and would never talk about not hearing the album, or not having been there, to anyone, anywhere, ever. I said “I think I’ve left the oven on” and walked briskly to a nearby hostelry.

The best one I was ever at was this week. We pitched up at an anonymous big house in a city centre. Nothing on the door revealed what goes on in the big house (it’s actually a venue of sorts). After handing over our mobile devices, we were whisked upstairs to a very large room where we mixed with a bunch of Australian media who had flown over to Europe for the session. If you fly from Australia to Europe just for a listening session, you know the album is a very important one.

The first song comes on. It's marvellous – like Arcade Fire playing Cajun music as if their career depended on it. And it just gets better from there: different moments remind you of bits of Love's Forever Changes, The Flying Burrito Brothers version of Wild Horses, Hamburg-era Beatles, Tom Petty, Bill Hailey, crooner-era Elvis. Bits of David Sylvian and Tim Buckley in there.

It’s a stunning piece of work – one of the best things I’ve heard in the past five years. It’s by a big-name star – one of the biggest – but sorry, we’ve been asked not to say just yet. It’s not that there’s a veil of secrecy around the album, it’s more that nobody still really knows who played what or who wrote what on the album. News of the album’s later-this-year release date is out there, but details are weirdly scant. It will be top of many people’s album-of-the-year list, though.

When the last track ends, the man behind the album steps forward from the back of the room and says casually “I was just passing by and thought I’d come in for a few words”. He, too, realises how artificial and stilted these listening sessions can be, and he says something along the lines of having had many surreal moments in his career but this being possibly the biggest. Which is really saying something if you knew his back story.

He tells us the album was recorded in just two weeks (“fucking phenomenal”, as he says himself) and was played by a bunch of people who had “nothing to lose”. A tip of his hat, and he’s gone. So beautifully mysterious.