Through the past darkly with Primal Scream as the (mostly) Scottish band revisit three albums they recorded between the (as they saw it) dingy fag-end of the swingin’ Nineties and the grave new world of an allegedly fresh millennium. The Bunker Trilogy is the title they’re now giving to Vanishing Point (1997), XTRMNTR (2000) and Evil Heat (2002), named after the nickname they gave their North London studio and now grouped together in a set of expanded reissues being released between now and October.

First up, this week, Vanishing Point. Its predecessors were 1991’s Screamadelica, the epochal rock/rave/dub crossover album on which DJ/producer/remixer Andrew Weatherall helped them reinvent what rock music – and Primal Scream – could be. Then came 1994’s Give Out But Don’t Give Up, the sound of a gang of pasty, leather-clad Brits who were in thrall to the rock’n’roll dream, immersing themselves in American blues, country, gospel and clobber previously inhabited by The Rolling Stones.

Then, after another three-year gestation, another seismic shift. The Scream let fans know that everything we knew was (again) wrong when they released as Vanishing Point’s lead track ‘Kowalski’, a song co-written with new member Gary ‘Mani’ Mounfield, former bass player with The Stone Roses. Titled after Barry Newman’s single-monikered anti-hero from nihilist 1971 road-movie Vanishing Point, this was a mantric, dubby, grubby, Can-sampling, twisted electro-rock track that was lite on tune and even more lite on chorus. Despite a video featuring supermodels Kate Moss and Devon Aoki (and scripted by Irvine Welsh), it was also no one’s idea of a lead single. Which was exactly, presumably, the point.

The album opener drove that point home, too. ‘Burning Wheel’ was an unstintingly low-slung seven minutes, an extended blues jam with space-rock atmospherics. Ploughing a similar groove was the dubby ‘Star’, albeit this time with a remarkably pretty melody and an unusually affecting vocal from Gillespie, a singer not normally known for his, well, sweetness. Case in point: their pounding synths’n’riffs cover of ‘Motorhead’ by Motorhead, which Gillespie allegedly part-sang through a Darth Vader mask before going full sneer.

The connection with author Welsh, very much part of the dissolute Scream team back then, was further underlined in the track ‘Trainspotting’. Unlike Danny Boyle’s film, on the soundtrack of which it had originally appeared 18 months previously, the instrumental is far from propulsive. Rather it’s a stoned groove pitched somewhere between blissed out and zonked out.

The album tracks, then, are the sound of a band not so much choosing life as choosing to opt out of everything around them in that heady/headless era of Cool Britannia.

As for the extra tracks on this reissue: ‘Kowalski’ b-side ’96 Tears’ is a hammering, Suicide-influenced cover of the ? [Question Mark] and the Mysterians 1966 garage-rock anti-classic. ‘Star’ b-side ‘Jesus’ is a Velvet Underground-esque narco-ballad. Second ‘Star’ b-side ‘How Does It Feel to Belong’ is another Velvets-coded streak of ennui. Third 'Star' b-side ‘Rebel Dub’ is a remix of ‘Star’ that does what it says on the tin (with extra bongos). And ‘Hammond Connection’, the b-side to ‘Burning Wheel’, is a further triumph of nominative determinism, a contrarily energetic bit of Hammond organ-powered R&B.

All of which sounds like what Primal Scream fully intended: disruptive music made in the dark, in the shadows, as frequently claustrophobic as a bunker. As contrarian-in-chief Gillespie puts it now: “The albums constituting The Bunker Trilogy were the complete antithesis of everything that was going on in UK music in the 1990s. We were making uncompromising, aggressive, experimental pop and rock music with lyrics about psychic dislocation, addiction, alienation, depression, questioning our very existence and documenting the dark, sleazy underbelly of UK youth culture…”

While that is mostly true, Vanishing Point the album is perhaps best summed up by the tag-line on the poster of Vanishing Point the movie: “Tighten your seatbelt. You never had a trip like this before.” Certainly in the context of a band who, five years previously, had won the inaugural Mercury Music Prize for Screamadelica and refashioned British “indie” in their own image, their fifth album was indeed a wild detour.

Pint-sized powerhouse Ariana Grande is never – usually – knowingly understated. With a four-octave vocal range barely contained by a five-foot (and change) frame, the Florida native’s ability to scale the giddy pop-culture heights is (almost literally) unparalleled. Over the last decade and a half, a brace of songs comfortably in the billion streams club – ‘we can’t be friends (wait for your love)’, ‘Into You’, ‘Love Me Harder’, ‘One Last Time’, ‘7 Rings’, ‘Side to Side’, ‘Dangerous Woman’, ‘thank u, next’ – have powered her coolly, comfortably, emphatically far, far beyond her child actor origins on Nickelodeon.

And that’s pop-culture, not just pop. Nineteen years on from making her Broadway debut in the musical 13, 33-year-old Grande is a true triple-threat: she can sing, and then some. She can act, most recently in the two, $1.2 billion-grossing Wicked movies and, next up, in November’s hotly anticipated, um, “quad-quel” Focker-in-Law, her name already #icon enough for the movie poster to simply say “De Niro. Stiller. Grande”. And she can do, on Saturday Night Live or whatever chatshow, hilarious, tone-perfect impersonations of any other diva you throw her way, from Britney to Maria to Celine to the diva-est diva, Jennifer (Coolidge).

Grande, then, punches way above her height. Which is why the feeling of underwhelm on this eighth album hits harder. On petal, Grande’s ongoing and dedicated preference for lower-case titles is matched by equally committed lower-key energy. The overall mood is mid-tempo and middling, the sound burbling synthpop that rarely breaks a sweat. On an allegedly angry break-up album she's advertised as “a little feral”, its protagonist sounds unfocused and underpowered. Oh for some sonic rage.

At moments, certainly, there are Grande achievements. ‘hate that i made you love me’, co-written with Scandi hit-machine Max Martin, is a bittersweet kiss-off sung by a woman who was until recently dating actor Ethan Slater, the Wicked co-star who filed for divorce from his ex-wife during production on the first film. The glacially chilly title track – another Martin co-write – hits equally hard, its synth-goth keyboard stabs plunging as forcefully as the lyrics: “tryna feel something real / to cry again / they say the artist needs tears / to write again / all my favourite stories / end in some kind of catastrophe / but i don’t need someone to save me / cause this music and I will never die / it's such a fucked situation”.

There’s more lyrical punch where that came from. ‘big feelings’ is a biting clapback, but if only the no-holds-barred sentiments (“pussy so sweet a tear fell from his eye”) were matched by no-punches-pulled songcraft on a lacklustre, R&B-lite dirge. On the minimal electro of ‘like i do’ there is, again, a yawning gap between the screw-you sentiment (“no one fucks you like i do”) and the will-this-do? absence of melodic hooks.

There are the occasional uptempo moments. ‘oh well’ has a skippy, drum’n’bass beat, but not much in the way of chorus or vocal excitement. It takes the penultimate ‘bad thing (bunny hop)’, a zooming, Eighties synth-rock bop of the kind perfected by The Weeknd, to offer a flash of Grande the arena-filling, pop-bossing, Boca Raton bottle-rocket.

But overall, the feeling is of a woman all in her feels, but muffled in them. Or, in the words of a friend who’s a seasoned Ari-watcher and keeper-of-the-flame: “It feels like someone has been holding her at gunpoint in the studio, banning her from belting.”

As she sings on the opening ‘kiss me’, “Gimme something to love, gimme something overwhelming”. To which the only response after listening to these 12 tracks is: same, babes.

“I think the dancefloor is dead (it’s totally dead) / So now we’re making r-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-c-k music” – album eight, track one: ‘Rock Music’

And so, with a stuttering, raised-fist, blank-eyed manifesto, Charli xcx proclaims that she’s bringing the curtain down on an everything-everywhere-all-at-once era. Starting two intense years ago, the world of Brat – the Cambridge-born artist’s sixth album – gifted us a brace of club-igniting, world-wowing, electro-pop anthems (‘Von Dutch’, ‘360’, ‘Apple’). A “new”, 31-year-old pop star. A triple-Grammy-winning record that became a cultural juggernaut. One-woman-and-her-microphone festival headline slots. A fresh kind of rockumentary (this year’s underappreciated satire The Moment). A Wuthering Heights soundtrack collab that became a very different kind of moment. A handful of forgettable acting gigs. And a whole new colourway for cool.

Now, though, it’s time to move on from those Olympian triumphs. We’re leaving the club for the moshpit, woot! Having bossed one genre, we’re hopping onto and reinventing another. We’re gonna wash that slime-green right out of our hair.

Well, kinda. Music, Fashion, Film might attempt to proclaim its genre-trashing, lane-switching, game-changing credentials with cover art featuring John Cale, Martin Scorsese and Marc Jacobs, not to mention a closing track that features David Cronenberg. But over its short 11 songs and concise 30 minutes, while it still brings the fun, it's a good bit less revelational than Charli would have us believe.

Rather than evoking the disparate, kaleidoscopic worlds of its title, Music, Fashion, Film cycles through eras of indie, indie, indie, notably in its five-song middle section. ‘Card Declined’ is the pale-faced New Wave of The Passions’ 1981 one-hit-wonder ‘I’m in Love with a German Film Star’, as filtered through the sludgy grunge of Dinosaur Jr. ‘Camera’ is a conflicted post-mortem on the face-eating mask of acting (“when the camera’s on… I can finally be totally honest… it’s like I’m looking down the barrel of a gun… fucking shoot me”). Evoking the bright, sparkling guitars and keyboards of Orange Juice, Aztec Camera or one of their peers on ground-zero Eighties Glasgow label Postcard, it thereby manages to yoke The Sound of Young Scotland to The Angst of Millennial East London.

With its jittery guitars, stabbing synths and burnt-out ennui, ‘2007’ could be a Franz Ferdinand b-side from the Difficult Third Album sessions they were embarking on in that very year. ‘I’m Afraid’ – breathy and breathless vocals over sawing, squalling guitars – is a My Bloody Valentine c-side, which is still a great thing. ‘Yeah’ is Klaxons on a particularly harsh comedown.

In that middle chunk, in careering from New Wave to New Rave and all indie points in between, Charli xcx is less making r-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-c-k music than spinning around, self-referentially tweaking the nose of her own success. Elsewhere, though, she’s more on-brand/on-marketing. ‘Rock Music’ has a raw, buzzsaw-riff swagger that means it pretty much does what it says on the tin. Glorious sad banger ‘SS26’ is Fleetwood Mac’s California rock for the doom generation (“spring/summer ’26 / when the world is gonna end no hope for anything / we’re walking on a runway that goes straight to hell / nothing’s gonna save us, not music, fashion or film”).

‘Wink Wink’ offers up the thrilling sound of a synthpop Strokes fronted by sulky and knowingly hilarious woman-child pop star cancelling-not-cancelling her two-year Brat omniscience: “I used to say scream if you wanna faster but then I sold my Porsche / my friend Rostam told me I dress like a slut / so now I shop at APC / I don’t know why you don’t believe me”.

‘Persona’ is equally exciting, its discordant keyboards and buzzsaw riffs so old-school, gnarly and basic they sound like they took 50p and five minutes to record – but, brilliantly, they’re topped with a gorgeous melody. ‘Magic Metal Montana’ is, again, The Strokes at their most skinny-tied and amphetamined, with Charli proclaiming her autotuned love for her friend and collaborator, the producer/songwriter AG Cook.

Finally, as is very well known by an artist who only became a Proper International Success after six albums, comes a meditation on the fact that nothing in pop, in art, is a given. So, on the glitchy electro of the closing ‘No One Lasts Forever’, she pre-empts her own demise, albeit blessed with the heft of being able to use a speech from Cronenberg – a soliloquy on the film director’s near-death experience – to drive home the message. “They are dead, they are gone, no one lasts forever,” the Canadian auteur intones, repeatedly, to fade, the sound of Charli xcx having her obsolescence and eating it.

Brat summer is dead, long live Brat summer.

Talking to me earlier this year, Tricky explained the thinking behind the title of his new album.

“I was doing a photo shoot for Acne, the Swedish clothing company,” he began. “And when we were doing photos, everybody was talking. There was about 10 people in the room. I was smoking a spliff and that, and they were totally cool with me.

“Then we had to film. So everybody had to be quiet. And the atmosphere just changed. And I just said: ‘Oh, it's different when it's silent.’ My late manager, Nigel Templeman, was there. And I said: ‘You know what? That's a great name for an album.’ And Nigel wrote it down in his phone. That's why the album is called that.”

It is, then, a nod to his late manager and their work together, “because he was there and he was enthusiastic. It was a moment.”

There are moments like that – powerful, moving, devastating, uplifting – all over this record, and it’s all the more brilliant and impactful for it. His 15^th album overall, it’s the first Tricky has released under his own name in six years, the last being Fall to Pieces. Since then, the artist born Adrian Thaws has purposefully avoided leading with his name, releasing music as Lonely Guest, Theis Thaws and in collaboration with Polish singer Marta Złakowska, who goes by Marta and is signed to his label False Idols.

The reason for that blurring, that avoiding of having to front a project, was the sudden death in 2019 of his daughter. He managed to make Fall to Pieces, “but I was in pieces when I made that album. I had to get that out of me.” Now, though, he’s stepping into the light, alchemising the darkest of feelings into a sense of life continuing, with purpose and passion, against the odds. The result: his best album since his groundbreaking debut album, 1995’s Maxinquaye.

Here are songs of love and loss and hope. The aching, sparse blues of the opening ‘I Still See Me There’, Tricky whispering in the shadows (“don’t leave me here”) while Mitch Sanders, the young fellow Bristolian who appears on many of these tracks, sings in a keening falsetto. The jagged riffs and jagged anger of ‘I’m Yours’. ‘Be Still in the Pain’, all sinuous hip hop-soul, Sanders’ remarkable, swooping voice weaving in and out of bassy raps from another Bristolian associate, Run Red Rambo. ‘I Tried’, a tight, concise, two minutes-and-15 seconds that evokes the masterclass in production that was Maxinquaye and its fellow mid-Nineties exemplars of “the Bristol sound”.

Touring Different When It’s Silent in spring, Tricky and Sanders performed on barely lit stages, a (lack of) lighting choice in keeping with the heavier themes and intensity of emotion of Tricky’s new songs. But on the album that doesn’t come off as claustrophobic. And that’s testament to the songcraft and melodicism on display here, both Tricky’s and Sanders’.

A 27-year-old singer-songwriter signed to Island, he’s clearly a fantastic foil and creative sparring partner for Tricky. Having worked with myriad female vocalists over the years, this is “the first time I've ever done a full album with a male singer,” Tricky pointed out to me. It’s a great hook-up, with Sanders supplying, as well as multiple killer vocal performances, ‘Paris Maybe’, an unashamed pop song, albeit filtered through Tricky’s ice-cool, Joy Division-go-electronic production.

It isn’t quite a full album featuring entirely male vocals. Marta appears on the closing 'Out of Place', a punky, hammering song of release in which co-vocalist Tricky tells it like it is: “I sing for my daughter”. A testament of everlasting love, helping spark to life an album that’s a true, defiant triumph.

Sir Mick Jagger, who turns 83 this month, has collaborated with old friend Keith Richards, who reaches the same age at the end of the year, and “new boy” Ronnie Wood, who doesn’t hit 80 for another 11 months, on the (checks notes) 25^th studio album by The Rolling Stones. And by any metric – by their own peerless catalogue, by the work of any other extant octogenarian artists in any field (Martin Scorsese? Anthony Hopkins? The recently departed David Hockney?), by the energy of a band a quarter their age – it’s a triumph that is both all-ages and age-defying.

Foreign Tongues is a riotously good rock’n’roll record of the type they really don’t make any more. Unless “they” are the Stones. It opens with ‘Rough and Twisted’, a low-slung boogie propelled by a slide-guitar blues riff from Richards that’s so instantly classic you might find be compelled to reacquaint yourself with Exile on Main St., just to make sure Keef isn’t ripping himself off. See also: the alley-cat harmonica from Jagger that will take the roof off whatever stadium they next perform in (no mean feat in a stadium).

‘In the Stars’ is similarly (yes) skyscraping, powered by a killer chorus, organ from the maestro Benmont Tench and unashamedly POP backing vocals from wunderkind producer Andrew Watt, the 35-year-old oldie-whisperer who’s worked similar wonders with Paul McCartney and Ozzy Osbourne.

Even leaner, even faster, even raunchier are the breakneck ‘Hit Me in the End’ (rhythm courtesy of late drummer Charlie Watts, involved in initial recordings prior to his death five years ago) and ‘Divine Intervention’, the latter featuring Jagger breaking out his still-mighty falsetto and The Cure’s Robert Smith on guitar. He switches up his voice again on ‘Ringing Hollow’, finding invigorating fresh corners in the sleazy country-rock template they minted with producer Jimmy Miller as they oozed from the ’60s to the ’70s, while also offering a wearied if glancing takedown on Trump’s America in the lines “there’s always a scoundrel trying to whip up the crowd” and “Lady Liberty don’t look so good when there’s a tear in her gown”.

They do soul, too, in both the Curtis Mayfield-channelling ‘Jealous Lover’, replete with more falsetto and Fender Rhodes piano from Steve Winwood, and in a tribute to an equally iconoclastic talent: the Stones’ take on Amy Winehouse’s 'You Know I’m No Good' manages to shackle the Deep South to the Near North, i.e. Camden. It shouldn’t work; it does, fantastically.

Equally revelatory is ‘Some of Us’ (“are on our knees”), sung with the timbre of ancient timbers by Richards, a rootsy ballad of both acceptance and defiance by an arthritic great-grandpa who can still command a “room” of 70,000, the capacity of the band’s last UK show, at BST Hyde Park in London, four years ago this week.

The only time the Stones sound their age – in a mostly good way – is on the penultimate 'Back in Your Life’. It’s a stoned, sprawling, six-minute elegy in which a torn and frayed Jagger surveys the span of his magisterial life and wonders “what would it take to get back in your life / I hate that I’m losing a friend / I’ve tried making you laugh / I’ve tried making you cry / is this how our story will end?”. With indefatigable energy like this, one suspects not.

Still, as he sings on the life-affirming elixir of 'Mr Charm' – a head-banging, maracas-blurring rocker in the vein of ‘Gimme Shelter’, complete with belting backing vocals worthy of that song’s vocal powerhouse Merry Clayton – “life’s too short, nothing lasts forever”. But on the strength of Foreign Tongues, the Stones just might.

Madge is back and – as you may have heard unless you’ve been sequestered on the International Space Station on the dark side of the moon – back on the dancefloor.

This she has made plain via a BPM-blaring promotional blitz artfully finessing the interface between everything and nothing. Hang-outs and performative fag-breaks with reigning club queen and new bestie Charli xcx at the Saint Lauren Men’s Spring-Summer 2027 show in Paris. A Gen Z-fluffing appearance with other new bestie Sabrina Carpenter at Coachella to sing their album collab ‘Bring Your Love’. A touchdown at North London super-venue KOKO (scene of her first UK club appearance, in 1983) with Madge-hag Graham Norton for a BBC fawn-off I mean interview, with Kylie on snacks. A much-socialled launch event and listening party, Club Confessions: London, with the 67-year-old bopping near – if not quite on – the decks with producer Stuart Price and daughter Lourdes Leon. And nothing very much in the way of Proper Interviews.

How very Madonna.

But hey, she’s letting the music do the talking! And, thankfully, for the first time in forever, the music is talking sense. Deliriously and exuberantly so on a 15^th album that’s an unashamedly on-the-nose sequel to 2005’s Price-produced Confessions on a Dance Floor, aka The One with ‘Hung Up’, aka The One That was Pretty Much a Cover of ‘Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)’.

On Confessions II there is, obvs, nothing as instant-earworm-gold as that ABBA-channelling forever-banger. But enough of these songs come deliciously close. Starting with throbbing five-minute opener ‘I Feel So Free’, Madonna and Price hitting the ground dancing and don’t let up – literally, with the tracks sequenced to have no gap in between.

On this wall-of-sound rave-up, ‘Everything’ and ‘Love Sensation’ are HUGE house stormers with choruses that will stay with you after you’ve staggered, shattered and drenched, back to your Balearic banquette. ‘Bizarre’, a hook-up with Martin Garrix, is an EDM-coded flaming sambuca that’ll light up many a Euro holiday resort this summer. In its favouring of an aerobics video-friendly synth-bop groove over, well, songwriting, the aforesaid ‘Bring Your Love’ isn’t quite the pop perfection this summit between two generational talents, 40 years apart, should have produced. But it’s close.

Best of all is ‘Danceteria’. It’s a distillation of both Madonna’s biggest dance tunes (notably ‘Vogue’) and of the New York that formed her, a giddy scene starring Basquiat and Byrne (David), Lou (Reed) and Nile (Rodgers). Madonna’s hymn to the Eighties New York nitespot where she did her 10,000 hours of pre-MTV practice – and that helped secure her record deal – is a brilliant, back-to-the-future evocation of time and place: “Get on the elevator / I run into Debi Mazar / take us to the third floor / walk us to the dance floor / then I see Mark Kamins is the DJ / He’s the DJ, hide the cocaine/ he played my tape ‘Everybody’ / this is how we start the party.”

But methinks she doth reset too much: there are 16 tracks here. Even for the staunchest Madge stan, or most athletic disco-jockey, that’s too much. The appearance of Lourdes on the trip-hop fluffery of ‘The Test’ can’t assuage the feeling that this penultimate tune – like a handful of others – would have been best kept for an extended edition of Confessions II.

To be fair, though, that could be me feeling my age. Thank God that, on this thrilling disco-Proustian rollercoaster, Madonna isn’t acting hers.

A good body cream shouldn’t just put a band-aid on dry skin, but provide enough hydration that skin remains soft long after application. With that in mind, we’ve selected the best creams to help reconstitute your skin into the greatest it’s ever been within only a few uses.

Up first is The Geranium Rose Body Cream from Augustinus Bader, which is formulated with the brand’s patented TFC8 blend of lipids, vitamins and peptides to support cell renewal while drastically improving the skin’s appearance. Specifically designed to target cellulite and stretch marks, it visibly transforms skin within 12 weeks and leaves behind a delicate rose and geranium scent after every use.

Similarly, La Mer’s The Body Crème is formulated with the brand’s signature anti-ageing formula to resurface skin within a few weeks of use. La Mer’s patented Miracle Broth undergoes three to four months of fermentation and exposure to light and sound waves to make it a powerful antidote to environmental stressors. In the body cream, this unique formula is combined with jojoba esters (organic compounds derived from jojoba oil), sesame seed oil and eucalyptus to rejuvenate skin as it moisturises it.

Equally luxurious is Chanel’s classic Fresh Body Cream, with a silky texture that leaves skin baby soft and perfumed with a subtle floral and musky scent.

But when it comes to perfumed lotions, none beat Byredo’s Black Saffron Body Cream, which leaves behind a rich amber-y scent, infused with notes of black violets, raspberry and blond woods.

JJerome87 is the nomme de groove of Joe Newman, frontman with alt-J. Having got together while they were students at Leeds University, the brainiac band (then a quartet, now a trio) won the 2012 Mercury Music Prize for their debut album An Awesome Wave. Over succeeding albums – This Is All Yours (2014), Relaxer (2017), The Dream (2022) – this big-thinking outfit both refined and loosened their music. Art-electro, math-folk, hymnal-rock, alt-pop, call it what you will – none of it’s wholly wrong, all of it’s someway right.

On 2014’s ‘Hunger of the Pine’ they sampled their own remix for Miley Cyrus. On Relaxer, they covered ‘House of the Rising Sun’, but in a wholly alt-J way, stripping the varnish from The Animals’ take and finding the woody grain in Woody Guthrie’s version of the lyrics. Then, the following year, they released Reduxer: every track on the album redone, with inspired wing-people ranging from Little Simz to Pusha T to Rejjie Snow.

Now, two decades since their formation, Newman is going (hopefully temporarily) solo. And, wonky artist name notwithstanding, The Canyon is a top-to-bottom masterpiece of songcraft, production and accompanying visuals. Lead single ‘Brush Me Like a Horse’ is a magisterial, country-choral, spaghetti-western epic, with a chorus as breathtaking as Monument Valley. The accompanying video is appropriately widescreen, cinematic and surreal, the bastard offspring of John Ford and David Lynch.

The sprinting indie-guitar pop of second single ‘Track and Field’ is a celebration of athletics, specifically female competitors, with the inspiring video a feast of decades-spinning archive footage of warm-ups, races and sporting contests. Melody-wise, it could be a PB for Newman, which is saying something.

The Canyon opens with ‘Mr. Alligator’, a sun-baked blues that showcases both his remarkable singing range and this album’s masterful deployment of multiple (female) vocals. In the lyrical picture painted, it’s up there with the ripe Southern Gothic swirl of Nick Cave’s wondrous debut novel And the Ass Saw the Angel: “I'm a creature / Nice to meet yuh / I cooked quiche yeah / For the congregation / But I'm not to be trusted”.

‘Green Velvet’ is a feat of psych-pop engineering, interlayering glockenspiel, swinging organ, twanging guitar and another star-scraping chorus. In a nod to the city where the record was recorded, ‘Quaaludes’ evokes a soulful, wee hours drive across Los Angeles, albeit not while under the influence of the titular disco biscuits.

Aware that all that, only three tracks in, could be A Bit Much (but gloriously so), Newman serves up a pretty, 37-second piano palate-cleanser titled, yes, ‘Interlude’. Then it’s on with the show. The sleazy, shoulder-rolling ‘Juicy’ feels like either a frazzled day on a Californian beach or a fried night at an East London afters. Opening with the snorts and pounding of horses, ‘Walkaway Music’ is galloping surf-rock.

Then, coming immediately after the mighty ‘Brush Me Like a Horse’ on this boldly, brilliantly sequenced album, is ‘Two Hearts’. It is, in a wholly lovely way, cardiac arresting. A sweeping, strings-lifted ballad, it begins with the sound of Newman’s pregnant partner receiving an ultrasound scan and the sonographer saying, with an audible smile: “The lovely heart beating in the chest there… We’re dancing…” That baby, born in 2021, appears on the cover art (painted by Sally Dunne, also responsible for the artist-at-work visualiser for ‘Mr. Alligator’), standing at her daddy’s shoulder. It’s an image as moving as this wonderful ode to motherhood and parenthood.

It ends with ‘Pennine’, a swirling, jazzy, kaleidoscopic, brass-and-strings-and-kitchen-sink road-trip through Newman’s memories: “Slow motion heartache / compliments that landscape / on the train north to Leeds / painted over black night / slow motion landslide / street lights in towns I'll never see in day”.

A bittersweet, psychogeographic symphony? It’s the only way to close a truly exceptional album that manages to go out there while simultaneously hitting you in here.

When, for one of his first interviews, I talked to Myles Smith in early 2024, he was “just” a singer-songwriter whose viral TikTok covers (Amber Run’s ‘I Found’, Sweater Weather by ‘The Neighbourhood’) had recently landed him a major label record deal. The release of ‘Stargazing’, the global smash that would earn him the BRIT Rising Star Award a year later, was still four months away. But he explained to me the musical roots that had grown a songwriting skillset that had encouraged Sony to beat off 20 competing labels.

“I grew up as a young black boy in Luton, so I guess I wasn't an out and proud Coldplay fan!” he admitted with a laugh. “I definitely wasn't embarrassed about it. I just think that it wouldn't be the thing I'd mention first. But it would be the thing that I probably play first on my iPhone.”

Acknowledging the deep influence, too, of both Ed Sheeran and Labrinth, he added that he “was a fan of songs that connect to me. I was a huge Green Day fan growing up. That's a punk band from West Coast America and I'm in Luton screaming out 'American Idiot!' It was all about the music that moved me and spoke to me the most. And it wasn't always lyrical content. Sometimes it was just how it made me feel. Was it the guitars or the tones?"

Now, finally, after that huge success of ‘Stargazing’ and, also in '24, 'Nice to Meet You’ – both included here – comes his debut album. Kudos to Smith for taking his time. It’s certainly full of guitars and tones that will move his already staunch fanbase. And that, in his upfront discussions of his mental health challenges (see: 'Sertraline (Where Am I Now)’), will speak to them, too.

The rub with that is that the sad-boy-with-guitar confessional already feels overwhelmed – by the female power-pop of Rodrigo, Carpenter, Roan et al – and overdone. Overdone but not over, clearly: Lewis Capaldi is still packing them in, and Noah Kahan’s The Great Divide had blockbuster sales upon its release in April. But for all the undoubted accomplishment of Smith’s songwriting in My Mess, My Heart, My Life., it's hard to escape the feeling that this is a dated sound. Yes, already.

Again, to be clear, the songcraft is on point. The confessional ‘My Mess’ is a huge, emphatic opener, based around notes from his therapy sessions, that will surely raise the curtains on the 28-year-old’s increasingly large concerts. You can’t argue with ‘Stargazing’, nor the billion streams it achieved within 18 months. ‘Hold Me in the Dark’, Smith’s rich and resonant vocals buoyed by fleets of backing vocalists, has a chorus to balance your pints on. ‘Stay (If You Wanna Dance)’ hits the sweet spot between Coldplay and Kahan – and that is, for sure, commercially speaking, still hugely sweet. ‘Grandma’s Place’ is a lovely, hymnal blues that honours his childhood, familial safe place.

But elsewhere, overfamiliarity breeds meh. The boyband dance-lite of ‘Mary’s Song’ is less blues than Blue. ‘Drive Safe’, which features Niall Horan, and ‘Nice to Meet You’ are firmly in the tradition of the 2010s’ “Stomp Clap Hey” era, as Vice recently witheringly described it, those neo-folk singalongs embodied by Mumford & Sons, Of Monsters and Men etc. Altogether now: “woooaahhhh…”

The banjo-and-syncopated beats of the closing ‘Gold’ can’t escape that dread hand either. Worst of all, ‘Dublin Lights’ out-Sheerans Sheeran in its craven-ness, and is what happens when you instruct ChatGPT, “fiddly-diddly Guinness drinking song, but make it even more cringe”.

Say it again: great songwriting and great vocals make for a decent candidate for album of the year. But that year is 2024. Which, in these fleet-footed musical times, is an aeon ago.

Given its gift for gung-ho relationships – James Bond, the Olympic Games and even space itself – it’s easy to forget Omega’s history of creating supremely elegant dress watches. The launch of the 2026 Constellation Observatory is a timely reminder of this legacy. And it is certainly the dressiest timepiece Omega has produced for some time.

The Constellation was launched in 1952, inspired by the Centenary model created in 1948 to celebrate the company’s 100th anniversary. This limited-edition timepiece was so successful that it was chosen to form the basis of an entirely new collection. The result was an immediate hit and even young Elvis Presley was a fan.

The name was inspired by the engraved image on its caseback of an astronomical observatory surrounded by eight stars. The dome itself is based on the Observatoire de Besançon in France, site of a number of historically significant chronometry competitions. The stars represented the two chronometer records and six further awards Omega had received since 1933.

While paying homage to its heritage, the new 2026 model is no slouch when it comes to innovation. Boasting the latest Co-Axial Master Chronometer movement, it has a 15,000 gauss magnetic resistance, offering improved accuracy and reliability. Omega’s commitment to sustainability is apparent in the use of ethically sourced materials such as recycled gold and responsibly produced stainless steel.

The 39.4mm case comes in steel, gold or a platinum-gold alloy and the shape is a nod to the original with its distinctive dog-leg lugs. The Constellation also introduced the emblematic convex ‘pie-pan’ 12-facet dial, while the new dials come in an array of colours, from deep blues to vibrant golds, with kite-shaped indexes matched with dauphine hands. The sapphire crystal caseback reveals the new in-house movement and the original Observatory medallion integrated onto the rotor.

According to my niece – staying for the weekend and alarmed by my constant playing of this ultra-emoshe album – I seem pretty much like a heartbroken teen/twentysomething girl. From global chart-topping smash ‘drop dead’ (“one night I was bored in bed / and stalked you on the internet”) to ‘what’s wrong with me’ (“say I’m in love, so it’s hard to admit / I can’t eat, I can’t sleep / I think you’re what’s wrong with me”) via ‘honeybee’ (“baby boy, honeybee / God, I love the way you look at me”), this album is lower-case lyricism with higher-stakes, dizzying highs and end-of-the-world lows. I’m not crying, you’re crying!

If there’s an equation that sums up the third album by this graduate of the school of High School Musical, it’s: relationship arc + Gen Z indie nostalgia + big pop songwriting = Taylor Swift for (mildly) alternative kids. Or, more concisely, it’s the fifth track, which is titled ‘u + me = <3’. This is all the feels, and then some more of the feels – quite possibly built from the wreckage of her last relationship, with British actor Louis Partridge – and brilliant for it.

Over 13 songs and 51 minutes, Rodrigo doubles down on the musical passions that made 2021 single ‘Good For U’ such a modern rock anthem – but also made it so indebted to Paramore’s ‘Misery Business’ that she had to belatedly add that band’s singer Hayley Williams and ex-guitarist Josh Farro to the writing credits.

The love of this 23-year-old Californian who grew up in the Disney dream factory for wintry British post-punk and indie is apparent not just in The Cure references (“you know all the words to 'Just Like Heaven' / and I know why he wrote them”) in ‘drop dead’ – a glorious opener and the lead single which, incidentally, has had almost a quarter-of-a-billion plays on Spotify in only two months. It’s there in the Joy Division bassline of ‘maggots for brains’.

It’s there, too, obviously, on the ‘the cure’, a near-five-minute epic that starts as strummy goth-pop and builds to a strings-drenched tornado of defiance and going-solo empowerment. And even more obviously on ‘what’s wrong with me’, a winsome duet with Robert Smith that’s giving tear-smeared make-up and dog-eared copies of NME from 1983.

It’s not just four-decades-old Anglophilia. ‘u + me = <3’ represents Eighties and Nineties indie’s American wing, evoking the 4AD-friendly sound of Throwing Muses and Belly. A slightly earlier era is channelled in the New Wave synth-rock of ‘my way’ is a hammering yowl of frustration and wholly thrilling – unless, ofc, you’re the dufus ex- who “never get[s] the message”.

Rodrigo’s Disney-princess vocals are also given their space to shine. They’re front and centre on ‘begged’, a pretty, finger-picked, folky lament. They’re jazz standard-worthy on piano ballad ‘less’, another blast of nostalgia, this time all the way back to the Fifties.

By the time we’ve been through all the stages of this life-changing/heart-bruising relationship and get to the closing ‘cigarette smoke’, Rodrigo is leaning into the existential woe of a clothes-rending romantic poet, singing of how “it’s bone dry / bitter and hollow / you will never know my sorrow”. Over more building guitars and more swirling strings and more howling vocals, here are five minutes and 40 seconds that – after all the love-and-loss-and-loathing rollercoastering that has gone before – could be, well, a bit much.

But such is the strength of the songwriting, the conviction of Rodrigo’s delivery and the relatability of the romantic drama – even for those of us who seem pretty unlike a heartbroken teen/twentysomething girl – that you’re fully invested, fully moved and fully smitten.

“I hope it makes you happy, to hurt somebody else / and when you lose it all, I hope you find yourself… / And that you get what you deserve… / so here’s a toast to the ones that hurt me most…”

On ‘Toast’, the opening song on her fifth album, Lizzo comes out fighting, albeit in a Great American Song-style piano ballad. It’s a magnificent flex, one that demonstrates her way with a jazz-angel vocal, her mastery of genres and that revenge is a dish best-served ice-cool and classy. The haters might come for her, but that’s no sweat – for Lizzo, this is “just a day in the life of an aspirational bad bitch…”.

The reclaiming of “bitch”, from the album title onwards and across the lyrics of these 12 tracks, definitely gets a little wearing. But Lizzo, certainly, has some anger to burn.

Late last year the quadruple-Grammy-winner prevailed in a court case against three of her former dancers. In a 2023 lawsuit they had accused her of fat-shaming. But as Lizzo clapped back in a victory video on social media: "There was no evidence that I fired them because they gained weight. They were fired for taking a private recording of me without my consent and sending it off to ex-employees." Still outstanding and ongoing, though, are claims from the dancers that they were subject to sexual harassment, claims that Lizzo denies and has vowed to keep fighting.

And fight she does on this album. As this musical powerhouse – who, in her long slog to success, endured a period where her home was a mobile one – sings on the minimal funk of the title track, which samples ‘Bitch’, the 1997 hit by Meredith Brooks: “‘She’s a bitch’… uh, you mean boss / you been through what I been through, you know the cost / if lost some followers it ain’t a loss / ’cause I ain’t lost sleep since I slept in my car”.

Whether it’s the litigants who are wholly the subject of her ire at “the ones that hurt me most” isn’t clear. Certainly they’re not always – the beginning of ‘Like a Crime’ paints the memorable picture of “me and my period fighting to the death, she just might win if I don’t take another breath”.

But indubitably and unavoidably on Bitch, Lizzo is fired up and darkly funny. Her impulse for finding the humour in her clapbacks is evident up front and centre, in an album sleeve in which the middle finger she joyfully serves is in the form of her own body, rising womanfully from her own, giant manicured hand. The doo wop-style ‘Whose Hair Is This’ is another retro sashay, a full-blooded, take-no-prisoners accusation against a partner after she finds an incriminating hair in their bed. Lizzo goes for the jugular before abruptly remembering, “Oh shit, I did have red hair last week”.

Revenge is also a dish best served as a banger. ‘That Grrrl’ (“say you don’t like a big bitch… I know you want my body”) is a techno-disco empowerment anthem that, with a strategic remix, could become an Ibizan summer staple. ‘Don’t Make Me Love U’ twins flashes of body positivity (“I’m a big fine woman, don’t lose your place in line”) to a ‘Billie Jean’ beat and a gloriously soaring, ’80s synth-pop keyboard line evocative of 'The Best' by Tina Turner.

She switches lanes again on the brassy, sassy wee-hours jazz of ‘Too Nice’, before ending, somewhat anticlimactically, with the blandly bopping ‘Good Morning’. It’s all a bit scattershot. But whether she’s processing her recent public spats or other, private, personal challenges, kudos to Lizzo for doing so less with bitchy bitterness than with winking pizzazz.

Beatles archaeology, hagiography and lore: we, obviously, can’t get enough of it. From Sam Mendes’ in-production quadrilogy of interconnected Fab Four biopics, to the BBC’s also-in-production series Hamburg Days, about the band’s foundational, speed-fuelled, 10,000 hours in the rackety German port, via endless repackages and re-releases of their music, John, Paul, George and Ringo’s past is forever present. From next year, it will even be with us in bricks and mortar: their former Apple HQ at 3 Savile Row will become seven floors of “ticketed experience”.

No one knows that better than Paul McCartney. In 2013, I accompanied him to Japan, a leg of a huge and ongoing, arena-scale world tour that evidenced a fandom as staunch as ever. When I asked him to explain that ceaseless drive to perform, and perform heavily, still, he replied: “It’s something to do with the sort-of-legend being a kind of avalanche coming behind me. I’m running down the hill from this avalanche of fame.”

Well, now, for his 18^th solo album, Paul McCartney has decided to turn and face the strange; to let the avalanche wash over him and dig into the formative, rubble-strewn landscape it had covered and concealed.

So, on The Boys of Dungeon Lane he takes us back to Liverpool L24, to the post-war cityscape that formed him and his bandmates, to the terraced houses and birdwatching spots, to the memories of his three closest pals, to the “smoky bars and cheap guitars”.

He sings of the latter on ‘Days We Left Behind’, a simple, beautifully sketched elegy with a glorious melody that, boldly and brilliantly, lets us hear the years – and strains – in McCartney’s voice. There’s similar honest nakedness – of wear’n’tear, and of emotion – in ‘We Two’, a tale of partnership/kinship recorded on a four-track Studer tape machine McCartney rescued from Abbey Road. It revels in the memories, and in the creaky majesty of the basic tech – this is the gear with which they somehow made Sgt. Pepper’s – that The Beatles used to conjure magic: it ends with the squiggly sound of tape being rewound.

Magnificently, McCartney’s facility for the three-minute pop song is undimmed. These 14 songs – produced with hotshot 35-year-old American musician/writer/producer Andrew Watt (Miley Cyrus, Ozzy Osbourne, Lady Gaga) – run to 47 minutes, meaning few of them crest that totemic mark. And when they do, as on the near-five-minute “epic” opener ‘As You Lie There’, he stretches out into a rock’n’roll symphony that plays to the strengths of his own multi-instrumentalist musicianship – he’s listed as playing 22 instruments, although that does include "hand claps".

Yet even those short songs are crammed with detail (of course they are). The skiffley ‘Down South’ is a travelogue recalling he and George Harrison’s fondness for hitchhiking (“it was a good way to get to know you, a fine way to work it out… before we learned to twist and shout”). The stomping ‘Home to Us’, a collaboration with Ringo Starr (with backing vocals by Chrissie Hynde and Sharleen Spiteri), recalls a city scarred by war and poverty: “the world around us wasn’t safe, the place was falling down”. The mournful mariachi of ‘Salesman Saint’ is a tender tribute to hard-grafting parents in the Liverpool suburbs who, with their wartime baby, “couldn’t take any more, but they had to carry on”.

Here, for once, nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. The Boys of Dungeon Lane is a candid, emotional, forensically detailed reflection on McCartney's – and The Beatles’ – roots that makes for a vital record for here and now.

Will we still need him, will we still heed him, when he’s 84, the age he turns this month? Yes, indubitably, remarkably, gratefully, we will.

Leading into the release of his second solo album, Radiohead guitarist Ed O’Brien has been upfront about the darkness that prefigured the light.

After Radiohead’s last world tour (that is, not counting last autumn’s 20 shows in five European cities), in 2016/18, he felt done – burned out and bummed out with the life of the rock star member of a big band. As part-corrective he released, under the name EOB, solo debut Earth – a record inspired by him and his family’s time living in Brazil – in early 2020, right as the Covid pandemic hit. Then, during the lockdowns, at his home in Wales, he started falling. Emotionally, mentally, helplessly.

But in the Welsh countryside he eventually found healing, in nature and in music. It was a time of rebirth and ritual, a process documented in a lovely short film, Blue Morpho: The Three Act Play, directed by Kit Monteith.

“The midlife crisis, or whatever you wanna call it…” O’Brien, 58, began, searching for the words, as he launched the film at North London’s Screen on the Green cinema in March. “We as a society call it mental health… But mental health doesn’t feel like an adequate description. It’s something way fucking deeper than that. It really is. It’s a crisis in your soul.”

But he was one of the lucky ones.

“I’m very blessed, [with] my day-job. [In] the mothership, Radiohead, I don’t have a boss. I don’t have to go to work. So I don’t have to medicate to get through it. So I was able to really be in it. Then it’s like alchemy – as musicians or creators, we take this stuff, this darkness. And there’s a beauty in darkness.”

That beauty is now here in the seven songs that make up Blue Morpho. Named, as all we lepidopterists know, after the magnificent butterfly found in Central and South America, it’s 38 minutes of incantatory, rhythmic soul-seeking. A truth-chasing odyssey around the sun of O’Brien’s psyche, weaving a beguiling path between psych rock and prog rock, with the route plotted by producer Paul Epworth (Adele, Florence and the Machine) – the perfect space cowboy companion for O’Brien given the sky-high/soul-deep explorations of his own 2020 solo album Voyager.

It starts, appropriately enough, with ‘Incantations’, a seven-minute-plus indie-shamanic groove. The title track opens with birdsong, and with glorious strings and a winding, entwining melody that would hold their own on Nick Drake’s Five Leaves Left. On ‘Sweet Spot’ O’Brien’s voice, reliably in-the-pocket supplying harmonies stage-right with Thom Yorke, is a breathed, murmured, considered delight.

Then, with the hypnotic funk of ‘Teachers’, O’Brien circles back to how we, eventually, got here. “Midway through life I just lost my way, lost my way,” he intones, before the band – featuring fabulously limber guitarist Dave Okumu (Jessie Ware, Anna Calvi) – let rip with a cosmic, shape-throwing breakdown (the good kind). O’Brien may have lost himself but here, at least, he finds himself on the dancefloor.

O’Brien pushes out even further on the final ‘Obrigado’, a near-10-minute stretch of healing that suggests tropicália remixed by DJ Shadow. In an album that artfully mixes exquisite vibes, songwriting production and “feels”, this final epic is primus inter pares: a Floydian broadcast from the dark side of the moon that heralds a man coming back down to earth – back to himself – with a life-giving bump.

Maisie Peters was on BBC One’s The One Show when the boss called in to tell the nation what was good about her and why he’d signed her to his record label.

“[I] started off as a fan and then I met her and she’s a very, very fun girl. Very personable. But her songwriting ability was the first thing that was really striking to me, and how she portrays her emotions. She kind of reminds me a lot of myself at that age in what she writes about. I’m thrilled to be working with her.”

When the boss is Ed Sheeran, those words matter. As the singer-songwriter from smalltown Sussex, 21 at the time of the call, pithily pointed out, Sheeran – as well as running his own label, Gingerbread Man Records – is “obviously king of the radio and of England”.

Five years on from that chatshow moment, Peters recently announced her third record with another hefty co-sign: the Amelia Dimoldenberg-directed “album trailer” for Florescence. It features the musician scurrying around dressed as a daisy, tangling with a hen party and with a woman dressed as an olive. Naturally.

Florescence, as all we horticulturalists know, is “the process of flowering; the process of developing richly and fully”. Which is what Peters, now 25, has been doing for the past year. It’s a (re)growth that began after a whirlwind few years’ performing and touring – and supporting Taylor Swift, Coldplay and Noah Kahan – that washed her up, at the end of 2024, physically and mentally frazzled.

Cue reset, and cue trip to Nashville to work again with longtime collaborator and co-producer Ian Fitchuk (Kacey Musgraves, Chris Stapleton). Cue, too, luckily, the blossoming of a new relationship with her high school sweetheart. As she sings on the impossibly pretty, Paul Simon-esque ‘Audrey Hepburn’, “my heart was a hellhound, now my heart sits on your lap”.

Peters’ love dividend is all over this articulate, honest-sounding, refreshingly downhome album. For all her heavy-hitter backers, in an era of “pop girlies” going hell-for-leather-hotpants (no judgement), Peters is going full Sussex. Not so much try-hard as try-easy, Florescence is 15 tracks of sweetly sung, deftly played, country-tinged, lightly beats-flecked acoustica.

With that confidence and contentment comes a disarming candour. As she sings on the whispered, simple, stark opener ‘Mary Janes’: “My body’s not a temple, more a bachelorette pad… my teeth aren’t straight, my jeans are as cool as my music taste… I’m not the coolest or the greatest in the club, it doesn’t matter… who gives a fuck, when I’m in love…” Which is the kind of confessional that is, of course, cool AF.

‘Kingmaker’, a collaboration with American songwriter and singer Julia Michaels (co-writer no less of Justin Bieber’s unapologetically brilliant ‘Sorry’), floats on gentle upward draughts of synths and is a low-key banger. ‘Vampire Time’ is an earworm pop-folk anthem, complete with fiddles and flurries of harmonies, that will undoubtedly incite Peters’ rabidly engaged fanbase, as will ‘My Regards’, a Swiftian (Taylor, not Jonathan) masterclass in electronica-lite exuberance.

As for the Nashville influence: that’s most directly evidenced in the wondrous, woodsy ‘If You Let Me’, a collaboration with, er, Wimbledon-raised Marcus Mumford, where the blend of his grainy tones and her bell-clear country vibes is truly transporting.

By the time we get, eventually, to the final, 15^th song, the enraptured, Chris Martin-swaying-at-the-piano ballad ‘Nothing Like Being in Love’, we’ve fully felt Maisie Peters’ reinvigoration. Slightly overlong growing season aside, Florescence is bloomin’ marvellous.

Later this month, the New Zealander born in 1990 as Hannah Topp heads out on tour.

The singer-songwriter – who was long based in Cardiff but is now back home – starts in Brighton, does three nights at the Barbican in London, wiggles round England, Scotland and Ireland till June, then continues round Europe throughout the summer. She winds up on the eastern side of the Atlantic at Wales’s Green Man Festival in late August, hits America and Canada for a month, before finally pitching up in Australia and New Zealand in mid-November, as spring shades into the southern hemisphere summer.

It's a lot of touring for anyone, far less for an “indie-rock enigma” (© what’s left of the music press) who’s become progressively more reluctant, in the dozen years she’s been releasing albums, to engage with the media. She hasn’t even approved a record company biography – standard promotional practice round an album’s release – in a decade.

Talking to The Guardian in 2019, Harding admitted that she’d decline to respond to questions “if I don’t feel like the answer’s going to come out in a natural, musical way”. Talking to Pitchfork in 2022, she framed her unwillingness, or inability, to describe her music thus: “It’s like somebody who doesn’t like to dance because they don’t like their body. Suddenly I’m in the middle of the floor, and I’ve got my hips working, and I just feel awful. You know?” We know.

And it’s a lot of touring for an album as wondrous, beauteous, shimmering and borderline fragile as Train on the Island. It’s her fifth album overall, her fourth in a row recorded at the legendary Rockfield Studios, Monmouthshire’s psychogeographical hotspot where rock’n’roll meets farming, and her fourth with co-producer/musician John Parish (PJ Harvey, Dry Cleaning).

That said: this is “fragility” built on stout and robust songwriting, and on production that is vividly curlicued in its detail. Once a Harding melody worms in, it stays there, curving and curling, entwined and nagging. When a Harding song unfurls, its sonic details unveil like patterns on a butterfly wing. These 10 tracks are spellbinding perfection.

The title track is a five-a-minute, lazy-jazz epic recalling Laura Nyro. The opening ‘I Ate the Most’ is beguiling folktronica, Harding’s close-mic’d voice and self-harmonies right up in your ear. ‘One Stop’ is an irresistible marvel of piano-ballad chamber-pop, conjuring both striking imagery (“I met the real John Cale, he had no words, but I don't mind, I packed the stage while he ate rice”) and, should the mood take you, as evidenced by Harding’s gyrations in the video, some sweet moves.

There are, too, gyrations of the clock-stopping, jaw-dropping vocal and instrumental kind. ‘San Francisco’ has a quiet sprawl, shifting from a loose, country-bluesy swagger, to spartan jazz torch-song, to pure singer-songwriter acoustica the next. ‘What Am I Gonna Do?’ evokes the PJ Harvey of Let England Shake era, with its tumbling rumble of drums, organ and harp, and its different manifestations of the multiple-personality Harding voice: low murmur, high keen, Laurel Canyon folk sweetness.

‘If Lady Does It’ is another perfectly executed mix of the baroque and the skeletal – one minute, just drums organ breaths and whispered vocals; the next, a rising and falling and finally fading tide of piano, acoustic guitar and that shimmering voice.

This is Train on an Island all over: a rewarding headphones record, and a record to be joyously shared. At those live shows, the sound of pins dropping will be cacophonous.

On the first single from her new album, Kacey Musgraves tells it how it is. Or, how she is.

“I'm so lonely, lonely with a capital ‘H’, if you know what I mean,” she sings sweetly but leadingly on the boot-scootin’ country-pop of ‘Dry Spell’. “I've been sitting on the washing machine, ain't nobody's tool up in my shed, ain't nobody's boots under my bed… And I'm tired of keepin' my hands to myself, 911 it's officially a cry for help…”

Toto, we’re not in Nashville. Musgraves may have the prairie-clear voice and Country FM-friendly melodicism – not to mention, in all her new promotional pictures, the cowboy boots and hat – of a stoutly establishment star of America’s biggest musical genre. But on her sixth album, the eight-time Grammy-winner is once more ploughing her own furrow – lyrically at least. The artist who released 2013 LGBT anthem ‘Follow Your Arrow’ (“kiss lots of boys, or kiss lots of girls, if that's something you're into, when the straight and narrow gets a little too straight, roll up a joint, or don't…”) is, true to form, bringing a little personal spice to this most traditionalist of genres.

This, to be fair, has long been the 37-year-old’s saddlebag. During the making of her country-busting third album, Golden Hour, the girl from the no-stop town of Golden, Texas publicly admitted enjoyed “micro-dosing on LSD”.

“That embarrassed the hell out of my mom and grandma,” she told me, cheerfully, in 2018. “But I said, sorry, I have to tell the truth. Psychedelics have been something that I’ve mildly dabbled with… If you’re responsible about it, it can be a positive thing. It’s really opened my heart and mind in a lot of ways.”

She had also recently married musician Rustin Kelly, which made for a certain lovestruck vibe to Golden Hour. But, again, Musgraves wasn’t one for playing it straight. “I don’t want people to be like, ‘we get it, you’re married, you’re in love, boring, snoozeville, song number 13…’”

A lot personally has happened since then. She and Kelly divorced in 2020. Then, until 2023 she was in a relationship with poet Cole Schafer. Hence Middle of Nowhere, a new album “written during a period of reflection and post-breakup clarity”. At its most playful, that’s the horny AF ‘Dry Spell’, and the woozy, boozy, late-night, zydeco-flavoured singalong ‘Horses & Divorces’, a duet with scene queen Miranda Lambert. Most evocatively, it’s the winsome, heart-tugging title track.

But at its most on-the-nose, that means the toe-tapping pedal-steel lament ‘Loneliest Girl’, and ‘Uncertain TX’, a by-the-numbers, clip-clopping, Texas tea-channelling collab that’s elevated, just, by the vocal contributions of the mighty Willie Nelson.

‘Coyote’ – a duet with Colorado-via-South Africa folkie Gregor Alan Isakov ­– is more intriguing, a spaced-out epic with a windblown torch and twang. But then there’s ‘Rhinestoned’, with its unashamedly easy-listening ‘Everybody’s Talkin’’ vibes. It’s a song which typifies the place where this era’s artist has found her happy(ish) place: less middle of nowhere than middle of the road. Here’s hoping that, next time round, the boldly out-there writer whose Insta handle is @spaceykacey either finds love or, as post-Harvest Neil Young famously did, finds that ditch.

The importance of being earnest: it’s bread-and-butter for the songwriting, and songcraft, of Noah Kahan. And it’s the reason why the American folk-rocker’s impassioned, sing-every-word, feel-all-the-feels fanbase grew exponentially with the third album that, finally, broke him. Broke him in, to some extent, both senses.

The formerly struggling singer-songwriter, who grew up on a tree farm in Vermont, cut through, and then some, with 2022’s Stick Season. It was a Covid-born album of connection and community that hymned the beauty of going home, staying there and leaning into the stark, autumnal/wintry majesty of the titular time of year.

Before he knew it, Kahan had racked up 15 billion streams; was a superstar in old England as well as New England; had sold out a pair of nights at storied Boston baseball stadium Fenway Park; and, three albums in, was nominated for Best New Artist at the Grammys.

All of which, unsurprisingly, caused a little local difficulty for an unassuming home-buddy who had long been open about the mental health challenges that had propelled him to set up his own foundation, The Busyhead Project (they’ve so far raised $6.6m to help those with similar challenges). Not for nothing is a new feature-length Netflix documentary called Noah Kahan: Out of Body. As he tells the cameras: “[I] always have felt physically ugly and facially ugly, mentally ugly… I don’t know what I look like. No clue.” One can scarcely imagine the dysmorphic disconnect when you know that, on your next, instantly sold-out tour, over one million people will be staring at that ugly mug.

Now, on The Great Divide, Kahan digs into all that: earnestly, lengthily, over 17 songs. At its most powerful, he’s bare-faced and open-hearted. On ‘Porch Light’, with its banjo-driven gallop, he addresses the turmoil he caused his divorced parents by talking about them onstage and in interviews. “Whatever made you famous, made you sick,” he sings in the voice of his mother, “but you can only do what pain allows… There ain’t no shame in calling this thing quits”.

On the surging, rousing 'Doors', he talks again of childhood and isolation and dynasty and feelings handed down: “I grew up pretending sticks were little guns, I would point ’em at my dad and he’d get mad, ’cause God forbid I hurt someone, I’d hurt anyone I could, anyone who got too close and anyone who wouldn’t look, I was born into a 100-year-storm…”

Certainly Kahan can write a tune. The Great Divide’s title track is a foot-stomping anthem occupying the middle ground in a Venn diagram overlap of Arcade Fire and Mumford & Sons. ‘American Cars’ is a mandolin-powered rerub of Born in the USA-era Bruce Springsteen.

More interesting, though, more sticky, is ‘Downfall’. It's a more delicate, finely wrought, baroque-folk song that betrays the clear influence of one of its co-writers, The National’s Aaron Dessner. The musician, who’s worked similar woodsy wonders with Taylor Swift and Bon Iver, hosted Kahan at his Long Pond Studio in upstate New York (there were also sessions in Nasvhille), and he’s well-represented here. He's co-producer of ‘Willing and Able’ and ‘Spoiled’. And, as well as ‘Porch Light’, he’s co-writer/producer of ‘End of August’, the wondrous, spacey, alive-to-the-seasons-again piano ballad that opens the album (“the minute that September hits, I’m going off my medicine”). He performs the same role on the closing ‘Dan’, another long, lyrical, song, this one about friendship, loss, the good old days and the bad old days, a Stephen King short story cast in elegiac, country-music tones.

More of that, please, and less of The Great Divide’s overly long, default setting. Too often, that’s a polished, route-one/Route 66 take on adult-oriented rock – a genre very well-represented on these near-dozen-and-a-half tracks. Too many of those songs seem purpose-built for the venues that this beardy long-hair and campfire-friendly folky now, unfathomably, finds himself playing. But maybe when you’ve done 17 billion album streams – and spent too long stuck in stick season – you can’t help but be a bit less cabin in the woods and a good bit more stadium in the ’burbs.

Mother Mary, who she? And a Greatest Hits already, really?

Certainly, the American pop phenom has big hitters in her corner. Charli xcx, fresh from her work on the soundtrack of Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, has written some of these songs. So has fellow English star FKA Twigs, hot from packing them in at the Mojave stage at Coachella. Also on board is Jack Antonoff, taking time off from his dayjob band Bleachers, winning 13 Grammys, and from being studio wingman to Taylor Swift, Lorde, Lana Del Rey, St. Vincent and Sabrina Carpenter. And this fortysomething music biz survivor around whom these red-hot creatives have coalesced is now signed to the record label offshoot of A24, the powerhouse cinematic provocateurs.

That star-chamber of collaborators neatly triangulates everything we need to know about Mother Mary without seeing the movie that bears her name. She’s a fictitious superstar, played by Anne Hathaway, in A24’s psychological thriller written and directed by David Lowery (A Ghost Story, The Green Knight). As the Mother Mary trailer teases, she’s Lady Gothic Gaga, an arthouse glamour-queen with a parasocial relationship with an adoring fanbase. And now she’s plotting a comeback tour, with killer costuming to match, which necessitates a reunion with her estranged former stylist/designer (Michaela Coel).

“You are standing under the lights,” intones Coel’s Sam in voiceover. “Here you come. Marching down that aisle. You’re doing what you’re born to do. You open your mouth. You sing your song. Mother Mary. We’re reinventing you.” Cue… a flash of body-horror, the phrase “psychosexual affair”, a script Coel describes as “witchery”, and a two-year-plus filmmaking process Lowery has likened to Apocalypse Now.

Mother Mary, then. Spice World: The Movie it ain’t.

This default lead song on this seven-track soundtrack album – there’s also an 11-track Original Score album, by violinist and composer Daniel Hart, a frequent Lowery collaborator – is ‘My Mouth Is Lonely for You’, which we see Hathaway perform in the trailer. A breathy, burbling disco confection, it’s the poppiest, least, well, witchy song here, which is remarkable given that it’s the contribution of Twigs, the artist whose current album Eusexua could have served as a thematic template for the torrid, feverish passion at the heart of Mother Mary.

More on-message is ‘Blue Flame’, glitchy, spooky and spectral, and the result of the collective songwriting efforts of Antonoff, Sounwave (Kendrick Lamar), Charli and George Daniel (of The 1975, and of Charli’s wedding vows). ‘Burial’ is equally illustrative of the pop star Mother Mary is likely meant to be: Catholic-curious, mainstream-adjacent and a bit try-hard transgressive. Written by the same grouping, minus Sounwave and with the addition of Hathaway, it’s throbbing, moody electro with the feel of late-period Madonna reaching for some edge. If Madge took a vaycay in Brat Summer, ‘Burial’ would be the theme song.

Then, from a whisper to a scream, comes ‘Cut Ties’: a plinky, pretty-in-pink ballad which blooms into intense, multi-voiced, strings-and-things melodrama. ‘Holy Spirit’ is a death-disco anthem which is unashamedly what I’m calling “dark ABBA”. It’s mirrored by ‘Holy Spirit 2’, which is the mic-drop track that the holy trinity of Benny/Björn/Gaga would surely conjure. In reality, it’s the compositional work of Hathaway, Lowery, Claire Givens of a band called People Museum and composer Aaron Boudreaux. So, mega kudos to those guys.

Leading from the front on all of these is, appropriately, Hathaway – on the strength of her contributions here, a Hollywood A-lister who could more than hold her own alongside diva-whisperer Antonoff’s other studio clients.

“Everybody has a true angel,” she sings, gloriously, in the Tori Amos-channelling ‘Dark Cradle’, “everybody has an obsession, everybody has a dark idol… everybody has a secret…” In times of trouble Mother Mary comes to us, speaking words of, if not wisdom, then meme-worthy caution. Overall, Hathaway – the Hollywood A-lister who channelled Oscar-winning tears as tragic Fantine in Les Misérables – again proves she has serious vocal abilities. She dreamed a dream… and so what if, for the character of Mother Mary, it turned out to be a bit of a nightmare? With this bespoke, bejewelled, bijou soundtrack, it was worth it.

Mother Mary is in cinemas on 24^th April. The album is out now

Album #3 time for the west Londoner whose poetry-channelling, Mercury-winning debut Collapsed in Sunbeams came out five hectic years ago, and it’s all back to Arlo’s. “We’re doing dishes, the party’s starting to thin,” she sings in a dazed coo on the opening track, “Aleda’s cousin’s out the back being sick / The walls are scratched up / It smells of chips and gin / Crash and Ames are back at it / She kissed his cheek before she split”.

Not so much the party, then, but the afters. Hence the title – ‘Blue Disco’ – of a curtain-raising song which is bruised, gauzy dreampop ripped straight from the soundtrack of a Sofia Coppola elegy to late nights and lost boys/girls. Because Ambiguous Desire is the record on which the Covid-era, bedroom-pop #sadgirl gets her groove on… ish.

As much was telegraphed by first single ‘Get Go’: skippy, pleasingly decaffeinated drum’n’bass that spans the night, from wide-eyes on a strobing dancefloor to wee-hour cab rides across London/New York/LA, Local FM on low. The come-up and the comedown in one blissed-out banger.

Follow-up ‘Heaven’ went in similarly hard-and-soft, the beats nagging, the sentiments wistful (“I wish I had the language, to tell you the way this feels,” Parks sings in her cochlear-close voice, “let’s get involved, until the dawn breaks”). Likewise ‘2SIDED’, the pain and longing of unrequited love layered over Eighties synthpop jolted by junglist rhythms.

Template firmly established by those three tasters, last week the 25-year-old released ‘Beams’. It’s what’s known in the music business as the “focus track”: the song put out right before the album and/or the song that everyone involved thinks is the strongest and best exemplar of the record as a whole. And, mostly, it is. Over trip-hop beats and Chris Martin-style, lighters-aloft piano, ‘Beams’ paints another picture of a sleazy-cool motive (“We were sobering up / On a stranger’s stairs / Looking over shots / Of Harley Weir”), but with a shadow of emotional rejection and suicidal thoughts that’s more than just a bad trip.

It’s all exquisitely happysad, the phrasing as gracefully well-turned as we’d expect from a published poet, an album with one foot in the club and the other back in the bedroom, its protagonists repeatedly circling each other in the haze of either dancefloor smoke or of that ambiguous desire. Eventually, though, the listener’s head and hips yearn for a thrust of the “queer hedonism” in which Parks seemingly immersed herself at New York’s Paradise Garage. By the time we reach the penultimate ‘What If I Say It?’, we’re back in the enervating realms of the dreaded “dinner party soul” that came to characterise the fag-end of trip-hop.

On the final ‘Floette’, at least, the washes of atmospheric synths build to a frenzy of percussion and free-jazz drums. As Arlo Parks says in the album’s closing words, in the end, at last, at least, “we’re blossoming”.

Furrowed-brow talk about a comeback artist’s “journey” are de rigueur and, usually, de boring. Their back catalogue is a bit spotty. Their fortunes dipped. This time round they junked a few early song ideas. The record label got on their pip. They fell out with the bass player, and with the delivery guy who supplied muse-boosting 3am matcha lattes to the studio.

But Robyn: she’s been on a passage through the music industry and through life that’s so odyssean – not to mention, at times, Sisyphean – it’s a surprise Christopher Nolan hasn’t directed her new pop videos.

Signed in her early teens in her native Sweden on the strength of music the adolescent had written about her parents’ divorce. A second album the world outside her homeland refused to release because of the lyrics about abortion. A rebuttal of a US label’s overtures, which led them to seek out an “American Robyn”, using her producer Max Martin, the result of which was Britney Spears and ‘…Baby One More Time’. Ending up on that label anyway when her label bought that label. A stunning trilogy of mini-albums in one year (2010’s Body Talk). A stone-cold classic in the shape of that era’s ‘Dancing on My Own’, the sad banger that someone, somewhere, is smile-sobbing to right now.

Then, in the eight years since her last album, Honey, Robyn decided to undergo IVF as a single parent while also getting fruity on the apps. And now, here she is at 46, back back back with ninth album Sexistential, on a new hip new label (Young, home of the xx, FKA twigs and Kamasi Washington), reunited with Martin and with longtime collaborator Klas Åhlund, being shot for edgy magazine covers by provocateur-in-chief Juergen Teller, and making (oh yes) some of the best music of her 30-year career.

These nine perfectly judged tracks are Robyn having fun, cutting loose, leaning into everything she’s learned in those three decades. ‘Dopamine’ was the appropriately mood-boosting first single, an icy-cool electro party anthem from a heat-seeking fortysomething. ‘Sucker For Love’ is a minimal synth art-bop that sounds more like early Eighties Sheffield than 21^st century Stockholm. ‘Talk To Me’ is the shape-throwing, dancefloor-sparking result of her reunion as co-writer with Martin, one of the pre-eminent ultra-pop hitmakers, well, ever.

And then there’s title track, a roof-raising and indeed eyebrow-raising masterpiece of detail, confession and celebration. ‘Sexistential’ is a libidinous, suitably throbbing, mommie-horniest melodrama in which Robyn raps about the hormonal hurricane of a middle-aged mother-to-be with “ovaries on hyperdrive”. The rest of the lyrics? Glad you asked. “F*ck a app, I need me some IRL / I'm on the clock, just give me your ASL / F*ck a Plan B, baby, it's no big deal / I'm already 10 weeks in maternity / F*ck a single mom, I'm not judgemental / In my sweatpants, and some juicy hentai / F*ck a therapist, it's not mental / I need philosophy, this shit is existential.”

While I’m googling “hentai”, the picaresque continues, to a meeting with her doctor, discussion of her dream donor and how “Adam Driver always did kind of give me a boner”. I’ll just leave that there, save to say that, this summer, Robyn is on tour, at arena-scale. The sound of 10,000-plus fans bellowing that line nightly already feels like the unlikeliest concert singalong moment of the year, alongside “who the f*ck is Madeline?”.

Upwards, onwards, outwards, very forwards: now that’s a journey.

Sexistential is out now via Young

Krautrock. Rage-rap. Footwork. Skeletal techno. You can’t say Kim Gordon hasn’t been living her best musical life in her solo career. In the 15 years since the messy dissolution of Sonic Youth, rent asunder by musical and personal partner Thurston Moore’s infidelity, she’s roamed far and free from the alt.rock/proto-grunge terroir of that ground-zero New York guitar band.

You can’t say she isn’t having pointed fun either. The already-iconic lead song on 2024’s The Collective was ‘Bye Bye’. Over a trap beats-meets-noise-rock bed, she intoned her packing list for travelling. Altogevva now: “Milk thistle. Advil. Black jeans. Blue jeans. Cardigan. Pyjamas, silk. Eye mask. Ear plugs. Sleeping pills. Black dress. White tee. iBook. Power cord. Medications. Bella Freud. YSL. Eckhaus Latta. Eyelash curler. Vibrator. Teaser.” The result: the TSA airport patdown anthem we didn’t know we needed.

Now, on her superb third solo album Play Me, the 72-year-old continues that playfulness, with added razor-sharp observational edge. She opens with the grimy, inner-city jazz of the title track, and this time the listicle lyrics are taken from Spotify playlists: “Makeout jams… Neon cowgirl… Easy rider... ‘’70s hippie... Spring pop…… Rich popular girl… Villain mode… On wheels… Chill vibes…”

As for Gordon’s music: you can, the DSP (Digital Service Provider) (you knew that) tells me, find it on their Oblique playlist, where that means “angular, asymmetrical”. Which, while not unreasonable, does barely sufficient justice to the engaging, transfixing brilliance of Play Me. She and repeat collaborator Justin Raisen (also producer for Charli XCX and Yves Tumor) wanted these songs to be short. Fast. Focused. Tight. That they've done, with the album’s 12 songs clocking in at a (surely deliberate) one second shy of 30 minutes.

‘Girl With a Look’ is a New Wave bop throwing, yes, angular shapes over gauzy synth. ‘Busy Bee’ is a turbulent post-rock jam that mixes late-period Radiohead with Aphex Twin-style skree and echoey drums from Dave Grohl. Lyrically it includes a tweaked sample of Gordon and her old bandmate in Free Kitten, Julia Cafritz, talking in the 1990s. Funnily enough, their three-decades-old quotes from the depths of the era’s rock patriarchy feel relevant: “Those boys are lucky that we broke up before they made it big… Or they’d have a lawsuit on their hands… Man, I think you should still sue their ass… Maybe we will!”

Because these punchy songs have punchy messages, too, about personal politics and actual politics, about tech dystopia and the flailing mayhem of Gordon’s homeland. The itchy, glitchy ‘No Hands’ laments an America where there’s “no hands on the wheel, it’s a steal”. On throbbing sub-bass lament ‘Subcon’, in pitch-shifted vocals and haiku-tight lyrics, she takes aim at the vainglory of the broligarchy (“You wanna go to Mars, and then what?”). In the pitch-black satire of ‘Post Empire’, she breaks from the sprechgesang to sing, dreamily, “Love what you’ve done with the empire”, before adding, just to check: “We’re post, right?” We’re crying with laughter. Or laughing through tears. One of the two.

Play Me ends with ‘Byebye25!’, a sequel, listicle and protest song all in one: it runs down ideas or phrases from Trump’s “banned words” list. You know, things he doesn’t believe in, and certainly won’t be funding, or even allowing to exist, in his big beautiful US.

From the top: “Mental health… Gulf of Mexico… Gay… Bird flu… Immigrants… Intersex… Diversity… Climate change… They/them… Tile drainage… Measles… Abortion… Women…”

This is Play Me, already the most vital album of 2026. Make America Gordon Again.

Play Me is out now via Matador Records.

“When you’re putting everything into it yourself, it’s a pressure cooker. So it does drive you insane. And eventually you will hate some songs and feel like you’ve failed on a few. But as long as there’s an emotion there, whether it’s anger or ecstasy, or feeling something, that’s intensity enough to carry it.”

James Blake told me that in 2013, a few weeks after the one-man-production-hub won the Mercury Music Prize for his second album, Overgrown. The then-25-year-old blessed with an oratory’s worth of vocal range was still – quietly, modestly, wryly – on a high. “My album sales went up 2500 per cent in the week after the awards. But I’d only sold about four records,” he added with a smile. At the ceremony at The Roundhouse in North London, such was the unknowability of the six-foot-six songwriter from Enfield that host Lauren Laverne introduced him as James Blunt. He joked that he should have performed ‘Your Beautiful’ as his winner’s song. “I was kicking myself afterwards – there was the perfect to opportunity to sing a song that had actually sold some records.”

Almost 13 years on, as he releases his wonder-inducing seventh album Trying Times, much has changed for Blake, and much hasn’t. He’s spent the biggest part of his subsequent recording career living in Los Angeles but has now, after a decade, returned to the UK. He’s worked with some of the biggest names in music, including Beyoncé, Frank Ocean, SZA, Rosalía, and Kendrick Lamar, his studio skills highly covetable in R&B and hip-hop, but is still probably – visually, certainly, lanky stature notwithstanding – unknown to most.

For most of that time he’s been in a relationship with actor/activist/writer Jameela Jamil, whom he credits with inspo for her “constant and unwavering dedication to quality”, and who contributes here as a co-writer. And he’s still cheerfully creating music in a pressure cooker of his own construction – he spent two-and-half years making Trying Times, during which period he extricated himself from the major label system and set up his own indie, CMYK Records, to self-release his music.

That go-his-own way freedom finds vivid form across these 13 tracks. Whereas previously his writing and production have on occasion been a marvel of precision minimalism, of ascetic electronica – something to admire rather than love – the songcraft and soundscapes on this album are astonishing. Human, soulful, inclusive, wholly embracing.

He enters the ring with the opening ‘Walk Out Music’, a pulsing synthwave anthem of encouragement and resilience: “You’re no good to anyone,” he and his pitchy backing vocals sing, “dead.”

Lead single ‘Death of Love’ contains a “master sample” of Leonard Cohen’s ‘You Want It Darker’, and has Blake singing close-mic, voice swooping the octaves. ‘Make Something Up’ is a beautiful, drifting earworm, an acoustic guitar strum swelling alongside a hymnal wash of vocals and a low-rise wall-of-sound production. The exquisite ‘Didn’t Come to Argue’ sounds like a comedown take on a Great American Songbook torch song – then, when Monica Martin joins on vocals, pivots to a Sufjan Stevens psych-pop symphony. After Blake contributed to last year’s The Boy Who Played the Harp, Dave returns the favour with punchy bars on the head-nodding glitch-pop of ‘Doesn’t Just Happen’.

Blake largely recorded much of this album at Peter Gabriel’s Real World near Bath, bucolic studios where, rather than create in the windowless rooms of before, he could let the light in. That feeling of play is there in ‘Rest of Your Life’, a vocal-lite, sun-up rave-up that’s both beseeching and chilled: “What are you doing the rest of your life? Spend it all with me… no pressure, I’m breezy”. And it’s there in the closing ‘Just A Little Higher’, a piano ballad that blooms to the orchestral grandeur of violin, viola, cello and double bass, the wearied ache of his voice right (t)here for us. “Adjust your sights just a little higher,” he sings, another note of encouragement and resilience and caution to bookend the album, “’’cause they’re playing us from a great height.”

Trying times? For James Blake these are, in no small way, achieving times. Bravo, maestro.

In the week that David Byrne brings to the UK the cavalcade of communal joy that is his Who is the Sky? tour, here’s the cavalry. As something like spring breaks across the country, Harry Styles releases an album hymning, if not the importance of good punctuation, then the power of connection, of dance, of disco, of, yes, kissing. As lead single 'Aperture' had it, we belong together. Which might be a bit tilting-at-windmills in the current (geopolitical, economic, existential) climate, but I’ll take it.

On Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally, partly recorded in the techno central that is Berlin, Styles leans into abandon that’s both wilful and artful. As he explained to Haruki Murakami in their recent conversation piece for Runners World, “I wanted to recreate [what] I had on the dancefloor, being lost in instrumentation and the musicality. It was so immersive, like, this is how I want to feel when I’m on stage, too. I don’t want it to feel like a sermon I’m delivering. I wanted it to feel like, oh, we’re in this music together. Like I’m in it with you.”

Hence the titling and routing of this year’s world tour: Together, Together runs to 67 dates but comprises multi-night “global residencies” in seven cities. For this sub-three-hour pavement-pounder, music and the sharing thereof is a marathon and a sprint.

On 'Aperture', this fourth album’s opener as well as its lead single, Styles and longstanding co-writer and wingman Kid Harpoon set the pace, the song’s lyrically vague, blissed-out message of rave inclusivity lashed to a fizzy, dizzying mash of Balearic and electro. 'Ready, Steady, Go!' has a delicious, day-glo Hot Chip shimmer. 'Are You Listening Yet?' is a carnival-ready call-to-arms (or, at least, -to-the-dancefloor) complete with Styles rap, gnarly guitar solo and Basement Jaxx-style exuberance.

There’s more primo electronic-culture cherry-picking on 'Season 2 Weight Loss': a track with a winking title and an exquisitely produced percussive scaffolding that are both worthy of LCD Soundsystem, although the gospel – strong backing vocals from Wolf Alice’s Ellie Rowsell and House Gospel Choir – elevate it from sticky dancefloor to heavenly plane.

Like any good runner, Styles knows it’s also about pacing. 'Coming Up Roses', one of only two songs that bust the four-minute mark, is a lovely, pizzicato-coloured ballad that blooms into a gorgeous wash of strings courtesy of maestro arranger Jules Buckley. Then, straight after, the nominative determinism of 'Pop', a libidinous, burbling synth-pop singalong whose lyrics give us the tour title, not to mention a special image of Harry, viz. “it’s just me on my knees”. I’m not sure it’s thanks he’s giving.

We break the tape on an arms-aloft high with the final 'Carla’s Song', the album’s longest track and a heart-pounding, Eighties-synth aerobic workout. Altogether now: “I know what you like, I know what you really like, you can hear it any time.” Like the rest of the album, the message is persuasive but hardly profound. But if it isn’t the suitably euphoric, appropriately escapist, wholly on-brand main set closer on the Together, Together tour, I’ll eat my legwarmers.

The bottles of a group of recently launched fragrances are more than mere vessels. Considered objects, some are shaped from materials more regularly used in a sculptor’s studio than perfumery laboratory, others are the creations of award-winning architects and industrial designers.

At Louis Vuitton, Fantasmagory, the seventh scent of the maison’s Les Extraits line, is the work of in-house master perfumer Jacques Cavallier Belletrud. Here, the key note is vanilla: Cavallier Belletrud chose tahitensis vanilla, whose pods, once sourced in Papua New Guinea, are pulped and then cryogenically frozen, before CO2 extraction captures their aroma. Fantasmagory’s flacon is equally visionary, as Louis Vuitton’s signature rounded glass bottle (designed by Marc Newson) is topped with a silver metal cap in the shape of a wind-blown flower, as sketched by Frank Gehry.

French creative Philippe Mouquet designed the bottle for Barénia Eau de Parfum Intense by Hermès. A follow-up to 2024’s Barénia Eau de Parfum, for this year’s iteration the brand’s in-house perfumer Christine Nagel swaps the formulation’s patchouli note for the rich scent of a patchouli absolute. Mouquet is well versed in Hermès’s visual vocabulary, having previously designed printed silks, timepieces, including the Heure H, and the Terre d’Hermès bottle, among others. This new flacon is lightly dressed in an amber tone degrade lacquer, its metal plate inspired by Hermès’ Collier de Chien bracelet.

Another French heritage business, Trudon has introduced Nuit Rouge, a new collection of three night-time fragrances. All three, including the amber woody Midnight Omen (by perfumer Émilie Bouge), come in ruby-red lacquered glass bottles with golden metal name plaques. At Perfumer H, a golden beetle sticker is placed on limited-edition issues of Rose With Insect, for which Lyn Harris added the scent of peaches, neroli, cardamom and musk to rose. Gold tones also come to the fore at Dries van Noten. An olfactory interpretation of nights in Cuba, perfumer Jordi Fernández’s Havana Gold blends the scent of liquorice with tobacco, all captured in an amber-tinted glass flacon with an aged brass base.

Also of note are Eragon by Parfums de Marly – one of three fragrances that make up the brand’s new Les Extraits offering, which is inspired by guillochage, a centuries-old mechanical engraving technique, and which come in glass bottles topped with tactile, engraved metal caps – and Lazuliou by Diptyque. Themed around peacocks and the bird’s striking plumage, Lazuliou’s paper box is decorated with a watercolour by artist Nigel Peake. A textured illustration also features on the glass bottle, framed in Diptyque’s signature oval.

Elsewhere, it’s the possibility to personalise that makes flacons stand out. Dior’s Rose Star is a thematic tribute to Christian Dior’s favourite flower and his lucky star. Created by the maison’s perfume creation director Francis Kurkdjian, 100ml and 200ml bottles of Rose Star can be ordered with Couture caps – embossed with Dior Oblique, Cannage, Houndstooth, Toile de Jouy, Plan de Paris or an animal-theme Mitzah pattern – as well as complimentary engraving.

Staying with caps: at Loewe, the lids of three new Crafted Collection bottles (Roasted Vanilla, Iris Root and Bittersweet Oud) are sculpted from pale white granite.

Finally, Ffern. The creations of the Somerset-based company are released seasonally and available by lottery. If successful, expect to receive new scents with each season’s solstice or equinox. At Ffern, sustainability is writ large. Outer packaging is free of plastic, there’s a kraft paper tube in lieu of caps, and the glass bottle is fully recyclable via regular recycling collection.