If there is only one artist who you could say is in their moment, then it would be hard to look past Charli XCX. Having set in motion a whole cultural zeitgeist with previous album Brat, the pop and dance extraordinaire has forayed into fashion and film, lending to the score of Emerald Fennel’s take on Wuthering Heights last year.  With seemingly the world at her beck and call, Charli could have gone in any direction for album seven. Having conquered the mainstream with Brat, marrying electropop with dance and rave to wide acclaim, the easy choice could have been to return to that well Read more ...

I didn’t want to review Shania Twain. My sense of her is of ancient mega-selling hits I can’t stand. I didn’t even go to her Sunday afternoon set at Glastonbury 2024. But it’s difficult to get most music writers to cover the biggest pop stars of our era. So here we are. And, you know what? It's a much better album than I was anticipating.I wasn’t looking forward to slating a smorgasbord of nursery rhyme, line-dance cheese. Given her remit, it felt unfair and pointless. But I’m off the hook. Even the songs that head that way, such as the breakbeat-rolling “That’s the Money”, boast acceptable Read more ...

It is never a great sign when a local authority is forced to comment on a music festival. The opening night of the In The Park series of shows at Newcastle's Exhibition Park forced such a reaction from the city council, after claims of overcrowding to see headliner Lewis Capaldi perform, on a day of sweltering heat. Nothing amiss was found according to the council, and by this night, the final one in the series of shows, there were thankfully no issues to cause concern. Instead the sunshine was accompanied by a light breeze to create an atmosphere more suitable for picnics than rock Read more ...

“Guys, don’t grow old gracefully… it wouldn’t suit you,” The Who’s Pete Townshend told the Rolling Stones at their induction to the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame in 1989. They listened. Fast-forward some four decades to 2026, and the surviving Stones have eschewed any state of grace for a raucous, almost confrontational new album in Foreign Tongues that bubbles over with energy and purpose. It picks up where their studio comeback Hackney Diamonds left off and turns it all up a few notches.However, a word of warning: if the “loudness wars” of modern-day production get you down, you’ll need to Read more ...

Butthole Surfers were once a major force in underground rock music. Due to a combination of bad luck and bad decisions, poor management and selling far fewer records than the likes of Nirvana, however, they have unjustly found themselves relegated to a scanty footnote in music’s history books. One of the pieces of bad luck that led to this story state was their record company, Capitol burying and refusing to release their 1997 album After the Astronaut – claiming it as “unsellable”.In fact, the album was eventually heavily remixed, with some new tracks added and others removed for the 2001 Read more ...

VINYL OF THE MONTHEd O’Brien Blue Morpho (Transgressive) Image The last thing theartsdesk on Vinyl thought it needed was a solo album from Radiohead’s guitarist but Blue Morpho, Ed O’Brien’s second album, spikes expectations. The opening “Incantations” is fab, a low-rolling, bongo-tastic thing hazed in mysticism, like a particularly stoned offcut from Plant & Page’s No Quarter project. The album was, apparently, a healing exercise for O’Brien, who was having brain doldrums. It feels that way, lightness touched with sadness, like that Read more ...

Sweating in my lair, there’s no trip to the mecca this year. If the festival was on, I'd be there right now, but it’s a fallow year and Glastonbury Festival is keeping its head down. The Glastophilic chat rooms bubble with antsy longing. My house is prowled by ghosts of yesteryear. Finetime’s camera is dormant. The cows on the farm chew their cud in peace.Instead of taking it to the wire in the fields of dreams, scribbled later with the urgency of one possessed, sleepless and obsessed, I can only offer ruminations. Snapshots and snippets. Aided by a large box of mementos from the attic, I Read more ...

Beginning with “The Ground Above” and closing with “Otherside”, there’s an ambient, otherwordly, disembodied feel to Beth Orton’s new album on Partisan Records, a follow-up to  2022’s self-produced Weather Alive, which had its own spectral, dreamlike airs. “The Ground Above” is voiced by one of those unsettled spirits that rise out of one the hoary old Murder Ballads, but here, Orton is disembodied “among the choirs of the gods”, “ecstatic as a mother’s love” and lusty too: “And you kissed me and I knew what I was for, And it wiped me out like chalk off of a board.”Her voice is worn and Read more ...

The World Cup is everywhere in Scotland these days, even among the country’s gigging venues. Rolled up Saltires were visible on the balconies of the O2 Academy, a reminder that the Glasgow venue is hosting watch parties for the national team’s matches, and when Lola Young came back onstage for the encore she was serenaded by fans belting out “no Scotland no party”, to which the Londoner cheerfully joined in.Roughly an hour earlier, the 25-year-old had walked out to the sort of wild reaction that greeted John McGinn hitting the back of the net against Haiti, with screams and hollers from the Read more ...

Thirty years since the release of their breakthrough self-titled album and lead singer Bradley Nowell’s passing, sunburnt reggae punk rockers Sublime are back with an hour-long love-letter to their past, and their home. The band proudly states in their 1996 chill out track “Doin Time”, that they’re “qualified to represent the L.B.C”, a statement that has stood the test of time considering how little they have faltered. All of the same laid-back stoner rock, soaked in sunlight, Mexican beer and good times, but now, however, there’s a new man at the helm. Jakob Nowell, son of founding Read more ...

For many years Paul Weller had a conflicted relationship with the oldest parts of his back catalogue. It was rare to hear more than one of his pre-1990 songs in concert. Then he started slipping them in, but only a couple. Tonight, he’s clearly at peace with the whole of his long and varied career, playing seven songs by The Jam and four by the Style Council in a set well over two hours long. It’s a joy to hear these gems scattered with vital precision among the eclectic smorgasbord of what came after.Weller has always been a lean, urgent presence and he remains so. Chewing gum, iron-grey of Read more ...

Back when One Direction alumnus Niall Horan released his second album, Heartbreak Weather, in 2020, songs such as “Nice to Meet Ya”, “Arms of a Stranger” and “Small Talk” hinted that new sonic adventures might be opening. Not in the vanguard sense of, say, St Vincent or FKA Twigs, but hints of envelope-pushing, nonetheless. These did not lead anywhere and, now up to album number four, he’s settled to a very 2026 gumbo that melds 1970s West Coast soft rock/yacht rock with a pinch of indie edge, but without the tunes to match his own poppiest (such as the contagiously joyful, if saccharine, “ Read more ...