Pop star recognised for sharp yet candid songcraft on Brat, but loses best album category to Berwyn at awards honouring songwriting excellence

Charli xcx continues her victory lap after the success of her zeitgeist-grabbing 2024 album Brat, winning songwriter of the year at the Ivor Novello awards, which honour the best in British and Irish songwriting and screen composition.

Brat marked a career high for the British pop artist, topping the UK charts and reaching No 3 in the US, and earning huge praise for Charli’s sardonic yet soul-baring lyrics. She won five Brit awards earlier this year, the second-highest number of wins in one night in the awards’ history, as well as three Grammys.

As their album Grand Prix turns 30, we rate the standout moments from a group Kurt Cobain called ‘the best in the world’

In 2018, bassist Gerry Love departed Teenage Fanclub (TFC) after 29 years, much to fans’ despair. It’s perhaps a little romantic to see The First Sight as his parting gift, but it’s certainly an impressive closing statement of his songwriting talent: an intricate mesh of guitars, a buoyant horn section, and a typically stunning tune.

Scott Mescudi said his Porsche was set on fire with a molotov cocktail on day nine of Combs’s trial in New York

Scott Mescudi, known as the rapper Kid Cudi, testified on Thursday in the federal racketeering conspiracy and sex-trafficking trial of music mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs, alleging that Combs broke into his home in 2011 after discovering that he was dating Combs’s on-again, off-again girlfriend, the singer Casandra “Cassie” Ventura, and told the court how a molotov cocktail was thrown at his car a few weeks later.

Combs, 55, faces charges of sex trafficking, racketeering conspiracy and transportation to engage in prostitution. He was arrested in September, and has pleaded not guilty to all charges.

(Duophonic UHF Disks/Warp)
Motorik grooves, Marxist critique and vintage synths – in their first album since 2010, Lætitia Sadier et al pick up where they left off yet sound more timely than ever

The first sound you hear on Stereolab’s first new studio album in 15 years is a burst of arpeggiated synth tones. It sounds not unlike the once futuristic ident of a long-defunct TV channel. The first words you hear Lætita Sadier and backing vocalist Marie Merlet sing – their voices winding around each other in a sweet-but-sad melody, over the tight, mid-tempo rhythm of Aerial Troubles – are “the numbing is not working any more / An unfillable hole, an insatiable state of consumption (systemic) / assigned trajectory (extortion).”

To which, of course, the seasoned Stereolab fan might break into a contented smile of recognition and sigh “mais naturellement”. A retro-futurist aesthetic; tight, hypnotic grooves derived from the motorik krautrock of Neu!; vintage synthesiser tones and vocals that entwine around each other; lyrics that take a dim Marxist/situationist-influenced view of modern life: this is very much what Stereolab spent the 90s and early 00s dealing in, during a career in which they occupied their own space slightly apart from everything else.

Before Blur became superstars, drummer Dave Rowntree was busy photographing them – on the tube, in Japanese taxis … and even on a big dipper

It may be set 60 years ago, but a new ballet version of The Who’s rock opera asks questions about youth, society and masculinity that still resonate – and it brought its original creator to tears

Deckchairs fly, arms clash, bodies launch into the air as mods and rockers engage in a fierce Brighton seafront battle. But in this east London dance studio – with Zaha Hadid’s Olympic swimming pool visible through the window – young performers in sports socks, joggers and baggy T-shirts are reimagining the Who’s seminal document of the mid-60s Quadrophenia as ballet.

Isn’t this 1973 album an unlikely subject for dance? We’ve recently had Black Sabbath: The Ballet, and Message in a Bottle set to Sting, so why not? After all, Quadrophenia is theatrical at its roots. “The closest thing to a grand opera I’ll ever write,” says the Who’s guitarist and songwriter Pete Townshend. Set in 1965, the story of disaffected young mod Jimmy looking for meaning in life via music, amphetamines and aspirational tailoring became a cult 1979 film starring Phil Daniels, but a more recent incarnation was Classic Quadrophenia, a symphonic version of the album for orchestra and tenor Alfie Boe. It was when Townshend heard the instrumental version, orchestrated by the musician Rachel Fuller (also Townshend’s wife) that he said to her: “I think this would make a lovely ballet.”

Campaigners say knowledge taught at Newark School of Musical Instrument Crafts vital to preserve traditional skills, especially luthiery

The making of stringed instruments will become a critically endangered craft under plans to close new courses at the only UK college teaching the skills as a full-time degree.

The Newark School of Musical Instrument Crafts, owned and overseen by Lincoln College, has said it would accept no new applicants for world-renowned courses, including those currently enrolled on its foundation courses.

As the folk icon celebrates his 84th birthday today, he looks back on falling out with Paul Simon, smashing up pianos with Dylan – and the classic song he’s still not got quite right

Martin Carthy has returned to Scarborough Fair. It’s been 60 years since he first recorded the song on his self-titled debut album, and famously taught it (or tried to teach it) to both Bob Dylan and Paul Simon, when they came to watch the young guitar hero playing in the London folk clubs. Dylan transformed the song into Girl from the North Country, while Simon turned it into Scarborough Fair/Canticle, a hit single for Simon & Garfunkel and the opening track on their 1966 album Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme.

Carthy’s new version is on Transform Me Then into a Fish, his first solo album in 21 years, released on his 84th birthday today. It now has sitar backing from Sheema Mukherjee, giving it a mysterious, spooky edge. “That’s the kind of a song it is. Try not to be scared of it,” said Carthy, whose sleeve notes when he first recorded the song provided a reminder that parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme were herbs traditionally associated with death. “It finds a home among the weird, oddball songs. I was interested in what Sheema could do with it, and she responded as a wonderful musician will respond …”

‘Machines were revolutionising recording. We were told to lay down a 20-second backing track, a guide vocal – then go and play table tennis’

Lol Creme and I left 10cc at the height of the success because we felt things were starting to become repetitive. We came from an art school background and we were thinking visually. Even at that stage, there were two film-makers waiting to come out.

After his band Rawayana were driven out of Venezuela by their own president, Beto Montenegro joined with Li Saumet of Bomba Estéreo to make music that battles political strife with pure joy

The coming together of two of Latin America’s most successful and inventive pop acts might seem like a market-savvy partnership dreamed up by their record labels, but for Li Saumet, frontwoman of Colombia’s Bomba Estéreo, it’s a cosmic calling.

“One day I received a message from the universe: it’s time to make a song with Rawayana,” she says, sitting next to Beto Montenegro, frontman with that Venezuelan band and now Saumet’s partner in the supergroup Astropical. In a Bogotá hotel ahead of a performance at Estéreo Picnic festival, the duo regularly finish each other’s sentences, and Saumet rests her head on Montenegro’s shoulder with the ease of a sibling. On Astropical’s self-titled debut album, Saumet’s vibrant calls to dance and appreciate natural beauty bounce harmoniously off Montenegro’s softer vocals.

As an R&B star in the 00s, the singer found herself pitted in the media against artists like Beyoncé and Rihanna. Two decades on, she’s building bonds with a new generation of stars – and going viral with a gravity-defying chair trick

Backstage at April’s Coachella festival, beyond the influencers, branded content and celebrity PDAs, a viral moment was brewing. R&B superstar Ciara was dancing on a chair – not just any dance, but a gravity-defying move that involved laying stomach-first on the chair’s back, arms locked, feet wiggling to the music. She wasn’t alone either; friends Cara Delevingne, Victoria Monét and Megan Thee Stallion were all doing the move too. The soundtrack was Ecstasy, the sultry new single from Ciara’s forthcoming eighth album, CiCi. The dance became a trend on TikTok, with even a 75-year-old grandma from Miami successfully giving it a go.

When I suggest trying it in our interview, Ciara’s face lights up with enthusiasm. “You can do it,” she says, her American optimism making me believe she’s right. “What kind of chair are you sitting on right now?” I show her my cheap Ikea number and her enthusiasm dips somewhat. She’s sitting in the back of a plush-looking car at a New York airport, waiting to fly to Atlanta, her phone held close to her face so she can see better. It’s not the chair I’m worried about, I tell her, but my general fitness. “You do need a little strength in your arms,” she says, sitting back as if to say: “Let’s not risk it.”

(Method 808/Peach Discs)
Six years on from her acclaimed ‘fast house’ debut, the UK singer-producer invites listeners into a sunlit space between night out and morning after

No one could accuse Shanti Celeste of being a dance producer who indulges in lofty conceptualising about their music. Not for her, the album that represents the soundtrack to a film that hasn’t been made yet, or a sci-fi-influenced cosmic opera, or a globe-spanning travelogue inspired by the peripatetic lifestyle of a DJ. Her acclaimed 2019 debut album was called Tangerine, a title she chose because she “really like[s] fruit”. A journalist who gamely attempted to press further, inquiring about the images conjured in her mind while creating the music, was told: “Moments on the dancefloor.”

Tangerine featured ambient interludes and the sound of Celeste playing the kalimba in the living room of her father’s home in Chile (she moved to the UK with her mother as a child). But its signature sound was the author’s own, in which the subtlety and depth of classic US house productions by Moodymann, Masters at Work and Mood II Swing was melded with a giddy, rave-y euphoria and rhythms that proceeded at pacy tempos more common to techno. Called upon to come up with a term to describe it, she offered the admirably prosaic “fast house”. There’s something very telling about the fact that her career – first as a DJ, then a club promoter, record label boss and ultimately an artist – flourished after she quit university, irked that tutors on her illustration course kept asking her what her work meant: “I wouldn’t be able to explain it. I just wanted to paint.”

(MNRK)
The Atlanta sextet are as unruly as ever – but there’s a newfound poise on their third album, plus some maddeningly catchy choruses

From the smirking spoonerism behind their name to their unruly brand of mathcore, a slashing mess of panic chords and hairpin melodic turns that sounds like Botch performing Faith No More’s Angel Dust, the Callous Daoboys are a lot to take in. But on their third album, the Atlanta sextet display newfound poise, even refinement, in songs that are at turns heavier, more ambitious and more straightforwardly pop than anything they’ve put out before.

There is a dystopian concept at work here – we are invited to view I Don’t Want to See You in Heaven as a monument to failure housed in a futuristic museum – but it’s essentially a framing device that allows vocalist Carson Pace to turn over mid-20s anxieties at a safe remove. “Your mother saw me waiting tables and she asked if I was doing that ‘band thing’ still,” he murmurs on Lemon, which surges from skittering indie-pop into a muscular refrain fit for imperial-phase Linkin Park.

(Smalltown Supersound)
Stirring motifs fill the spacious settings on the Montreal musician’s first album in eight years, building a blend of modern classical, jazz and new age

Kara-Lis Coverdale has a CV as confounding as it is impressive. For many years, the classically trained pianist and composer split her time between soundtracking local church sermons in Montreal and performing in international concert halls. Meanwhile, she became entrenched in the electronic music world, joining forces with producers such as Tim Hecker, Actress and Caribou. As such, her music is hard to pin down, slinking somewhere between modern classical and electronic, with shades of jazz and new age, too. But for all its dimensions, nor is the Montreal-based musician’s sound particularly challenging: her new album – her first in eight years – is a gentle listen, made up of short, dreamy compositions that are light and quietly ecstatic.

Despite the modest track lengths – 2017’s Grafts was made up of three extended parts – From Where You Came is an exercise in spaciousness. Built from strings, brass, keys, synthesisers and wind instruments, the arrangements are slow and sparse, with each song sighing softly to a close. It’s exciting, then, when a stirring motif comes in – something Coverdale is really good at. On standout Flickers in the Air at Night, a spritely melody bubbles through a wash of atmospheric synths and strings; Daze perfectly captures a feeling of sweet melancholy in its gorgeous Balearic-ready woodwind trills. Offload Flip, the most straight-up electronic track on the record, takes things a little deeper with its distorted, metallic drum loop that occasionally strays off beat.

(Anti-)
Inspired by the music of Luboš Fiser and Catholic requiem mass, the instrumentals are deft and surprising, but Pimienta’s captivating, flawless vocals steal the show

Five years since her Grammy-nominated breakthrough record Miss Colombia, singer and producer Lido Pimienta has taken a radical shift in direction. On Miss Colombia, Pimienta combined sprightly electro pop with cumbia rhythms and soaring vocals to critique racism and misogyny – now, her fourth album La Belleza (The Beauty) is a nine-track orchestral suite touching on everything from Gregorian chant to strings-laden love songs and dembow rhythms.

Inspired by Catholic requiem mass music and the luscious harpsichord folk of Czech composer Luboš Fiser’s score to 1970 film Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, Pimienta and producer Owen Pallett began writing and arranging for the 60-piece Medellín Philharmonic Orchestra during the Covid lockdowns. The result is a moving work of remarkable depth.

(Backwoodz Studioz)
The New York rapper confronts trauma and state-sanctioned terror with his latest release, pulling out innumerable images of inhumanity

Golliwog has the ambience of a horror movie: dissonant strings, like nails on a chalkboard, form the basis of the track Star87; agonised screams are sampled throughout; every so often, an ominous drone will fill a song to the point of overwhelm. On that level alone, New York underground icon Billy Woods’ latest album would be a feat of sound design, and one of the year’s most engrossing, unnerving records. Of course, this being a Billy Woods record, that’s just scratching the surface.

Golliwog’s horror aesthetics are a counterpoint to its tales of real, everyday nightmares. Through samples, guest verses and his own lyrics, Woods unearths innumerable images of inhumanity: stories of CIA torture methods, “12 billion USD hovering over the Gaza strip”, a class of professional “zombies” willing to turn a blind eye to the working class that makes luxury possible.

(Self-released)
The Dublin-based French-American singer and guitarist’s heart is in the Appalachian mountains – but her songs swim from country to blues and French chanson

Bookended with canonical traditional songs and sung in eerily bright a cappellas, Gamble is a confident, self-produced debut by an exciting new voice. This is Zoé Basha, a Dublin-based French-American singer and guitarist whose folk music swims deftly around country, jazz, French chanson and the blues.

This is a nourishing, impressive 11-song set, with Basha’s voice swooping high and low like the Appalachian mountain music she loves. It begins boldly with Love Is Teasin’, first recorded by Appalachian singer Jean Ritchie and also covered by Shirley Collins in her formative years. Basha’s precise enunciation nails her protagonist’s wearisome experience of love, but a friskiness also lurks at the ends of her phrases, her highest notes tremulous with heat. She also masters playfulness on Sweet Papa Hurry Home (a cover of Jack Neville and Jimmie Rodgers’s 1932 country song, Sweet Mama Hurry Home, which shows how naturally the genre’s roots mixed with jazz), sweet suggestiveness on Come Find Me Lonesome, an original tailor-made for a blues club: “Cold is creeping up my spine in the night-time.”

(Warner)
Denigrated by some as the epitome of attention-deficit youth, the English pop musician became huge nonetheless – and her latest has an inspiringly free-associative feel

There’s something telling about the fact that PinkPantheress launched the first single from her second mixtape with a video boasting that it was 2:57 long. “Ion [I don’t] wanna see no more song length jokes,” ran the caption accompanying a brief video of her dancing to Tonight, a track that throws together a mass of musical reference points: a sample from US emo-rockers Panic! at the Disco stitched to a speedy four-to-the-floor house beat, a candy-sweet pop melody, a hefty bassline that suggests the influence of UK garage or drum’n’bass and a lyric that alludes to both Avril Lavigne’s Complicated and Kings of Leon’s Sex on Fire.

Since the English singer-songwriter-producer first came to public attention in 2021, by posting snippets of the tracks she had made on a laptop in her halls of residence to TikTok, brevity has been her calling card: most of the songs that caused her commercial breakthrough lasted barely 90 seconds; one, Attracted to You, was over and done in 67. They garnered hundreds of millions of streams. Moreover, they were the first steps on an impressive commercial ascent that’s involved a major label deal, a succession of gold and platinum awards, a place on the Barbie soundtrack and invitations from Olivia Rodrigo and Coldplay to support them on tour. Perhaps inevitably, they also attracted criticism from people who viewed her less as a success story than a symptom: wilfully insubstantial, attention-deficit music befitting an era in which pop has lost its place as the basic substance of youth culture, an age when its primary function is just to burble briefly in the background of videos offering makeup tutorials and wellness tips.

(Edition)
Ideas of migration and self-discovery inspire the latest album from Hong and her imaginative band, entwined with harmonies and delicate effects

Drummer/composer Sun-Mi Hong didn’t get to where she is now without a struggle for independence. She was born in Incheon, South Korea, to a conservative family and earmarked for a teacher’s life, but her teenage dream was to become a drummer. At 19, as the only woman in a not-overly respectful percussion class, she got wind of the Amsterdam Conservatorium’s jazz course, moved to Europe and met her band of skilful soulmates. Her evolving music leans towards a European chamber-jazzy sound with occasional American hints of Wayne Shorter, Paul Motian, or Ambrose Akinmusire. The Dutch jazz scene has feted her: the latest of its accolades, the Paul Acket award for an “extraordinary contribution to jazz”, will be presented to Hong at the big-time North Sea jazz festival this July.

This album continues her series inspired by ideas of migration and self-discovery. The band’s signature sound of closely entwining brass and woodwind harmonies open the two-part title track: tenor saxophonist Nicolò Ricci and Scottish trumpeter Alistair Payne are improvisers of elegant shape and balance, and delicate thematic tone-painters, too. Quiet abstraction unveils the second section, before canny slow-burn pianist Chaerin Im’s piano ostinato and Hong’s surging percussion ignite a crescendo: Hong often favours free-swinging Elvin Jones-like grooves in which the core of the beat roams all over the kit. Soft horn sighs, cymbal flickers, and Italian bassist Alessandro Fongaro’s fast flutters colour the plaintive Escapism, Toddler’s Eye is a springy folk-dance and the suite A Never-Wilting Petal confirms this imaginative band’s talents for balancing storytelling with on-the-fly musical adventures.

SEC Armadillo, Glasgow
One half of Hall & Oates can’t quite hit the high notes of the soul-poppers’ heyday, but is helped by talented sidemen

Hall & Oates sold a gazillion records and deserve every dollar. Their songs of the 1970s and 80s are pure pleasure; sun-kissed, smooth and mellow. It is a music of high noon, no shadows.

But what happens when twilight comes? Daryl Hall is 78. The partnership with John Oates, 77, has reached a messy end, with lawyers involved. Now he is on the road, under his own name, playing the songs of his gilded youth in a more tarnished age.

OVO Hydro, Glasgow
Bedazzled and surrounded by inflatable body parts, the US band sound as thrillingly absurd on this reunion tour as when they brightened up the charts the first time around

Maximalism is too timid a word: the Scissor Sisters’ first tour in a decade rolls in like an alien carnival. A gorilla-suited master of ceremonies pulls a curtain to reveal the New York band’s logo standing statuesque: scissors split wide open, blades curving into shapely legs. Amid a deserted jeep, retro payphone and broken highway, the metaphor is clear: the Sisters are a crash-landed UFO shaking up dusty Americana.

More than twenty years after their self-titled debut album rocketed them from New York’s queer cabarets to household-name status in the UK, the band tumble from the shadows – effervescent frontman Jake Shears in bedazzled denim, cool-headed guitarist Del Marquis, and PVC-clad multi-instrumentalist Babydaddy – and the bawdy, stabbing synths of early single Laura pull a sold-out crowd to their feet.

OVO Hydro, Glasgow
Her Tension world tour reaches the UK, and it’s the work of a relaxed but inherently flamboyant singer with a bold new vision for her back catalogue

The lights go down in Glasgow, and Kylie Minogue ascends from underneath the stage like a pop deity: head-to-toe in electric blue PVC, sitting in the centre of a giant neon diamond. After acclaimed runs in Australia and the US, she’s kicking off the UK leg of her Tension tour, celebrating an era that started two years ago with lead single Padam Padam – a phenomenon everywhere from gay clubs to TikTok – and continued with her equally hook-filled albums Tension and Tension II.

In contrast to some recent over-complicated arena tour concepts from the likes of Katy Perry, the Tension show is admirably straightforward after Kylie’s big entrance, allowing her to remain the focus at all times. She races through hits – some condensed into medleys – at an astonishing pace; from 1991’s What Do I Have To Do, to Good As Gone from Tension II. For Better the Devil You Know, she changes into a red sequin jumpsuit and matching mic, leading a troupe of highlighter-coloured dancers in front of a minimalist, impressionistic backdrop. There’s something of the Pet Shop Boys’ art-pop flair in the show’s considered design choices, and in Kylie’s inherent – rather than costume-driven – flamboyance.

Utilita Arena, Birmingham
Performing solo to a backing track, the rapper nevertheless generates extraordinary heat with his fluid and furious flow atop foundation-rumbling bass

Fireworks explode, flames burn, smoke engulfs the room and a screech erupts from the audience as a masked Tyler, the Creator emerges from a thick green haze to the gut-rumbling bass of St Chroma. It’s rare to hear such a frenzied response to new songs but it establishes the mood for an evening during which the LA rapper’s most recent work, from 2024’s Chromakopia, is received with the same level of adoration as old favourites. And he runs through the album almost in its entirety.

Performing solo on stage to a backing track, he bounces giddily but gracefully across the vast space. The bass frequently hits outrageously hard throughout the evening, shaking the building’s foundations, such as during the grinding charge of Noid. While effective, the frequent bass drops do sometimes kill some of the detail in the music, as well as perhaps overcompensating for the lack of live instrumentation.

Co-op Live, Manchester
The Boss and his E Street Band pluck hope from the depths of despair with a fiery show that hits out at the US administration but ends with love

Before Bruce Springsteen sings a word on the opening night of his European tour, he has something to get off his chest. “The mighty E Street Band is here tonight to call upon the righteous power of art, of music, of rock’n’roll in dangerous times,” he says.

“The America I love is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous administration.” The band then launch into a roaring, rousing version of Land of Hope and Dreams, as strings swoop, brass soars and Springsteen gives an impassioned take of the song he sang for Clarence Clemons on his deathbed.

Aggressive, hedonistic and seductive – often in the span of the same song – the independent LA-based singer-songwriter spans shoegaze, vaporwave and capital-P pop

From Los Angeles via Virginia
Recommended if you like PinkPantheress, Kylie Minogue, Daniel Lopatin’s Chuck Person alias
Up next Album She Comes from Nowhere, released 20 June

Neggy Gemmy has quietly spent the past decade building one of the strongest catalogues in underground pop. Born Lindsey French – and previously known as Negative Gemini – Neggy Gemmy’s music spans coldwave, shoegaze, trance, vaporwave and capital-P pop; her records can be icily aggressive or hedonistic and seductive, often in the span of the same song. Although her work is always distinctive, she’s also canny with iconoclastic references. On 2016’s Body Work, she sampled Britney Spears’ Everytime one song before her own masterpiece of emotional desolation, the breakbeat ballad You Never Knew; the highlight from her underrated 2023 club odyssey CBD Reiki Moonbeam, titled On the Floor, sounds like – and, in a just world, would have been – a 2000s Kylie Minogue single. French’s forthcoming album She Comes from Nowhere still foregrounds her distinctive voice, which can be both breathy and appealingly harsh, but it also incorporates touches of gauzy, gallic bands such as Stereolab and Air, adding appealing new textures to her work.

The chef, author and presenter wants to be John Bonham and might be found busting out Baker Street at karaoke, but which song reminds him of lost love?

The first single I bought
I Don’t Like Mondays by the Boomtown Rats from Sounds Nice on Birtley High Street, when I was in my teens. I know it was about a school shooting, but at the time, I thought: I have a visceral reaction to Mondays as well.

The first song I fell in love with
Still in Love With You from Thin Lizzy’s Live and Dangerous album. I was learning to play drums and Brian Downey, Thin Lizzy’s drummer, used to do this wonderful shuffle beat because it’s a relatively slow track, and his playing is beautiful. I still play the drums. I’ve never stopped being a musician.

From ensuring your swearwords are in languages other than English to outrageous euphemisms, contestants in the famously camp extravaganza have ways to avoid being toned down …

When the winner of this year’s Eurovision song contest is announced shortly before midnight next Saturday, it won’t be the first climax of the evening. “I’m coming / I’m coming,” a scantily clad Finn will announce in the chorus of her song. Australia’s male entrant will invite listeners to “sh-sh-shake me good” so they can get “a taste of the milkshake man”. And Malta’s submission is going to prompt the audience to shout the word “Kant” – due to it sounding like a rude English term for female genitalia.

After the 2024 edition of the world’s largest live music contest was largely overshadowed by political positioning over the war in Gaza, many artists at this year’s event in the Swiss city of Basel are returning to what they like to do best: celebrating the act of lovemaking in pop songs. Because even though the European Broadcasting Union’s official rules ban lyrics “obscene … or otherwise offensive to public morals or decency” from Eurovision’s three live shows, the matrix of what is considered beyond the pale is more complicated. It mostly means you can sing about sex, but you can’t name it. At least not in English.

With a magnificent scouse accent and entertainingly debauched lyrics, EsDeeKid is blowing up fast – plus check out new music from Fiona Apple and more

From Liverpool
Recommended if you like Playboi Carti, 2hollis, YT
Up next New music soon

Second in the league table of unfairly maligned British accents behind Brummie, nothing sounds like scouse, consonants rolling around at the back of the mouth while vowels wheedle their way to the front. Delivering the accent at its most potent is rapper EsDeeKid, part of a vibrant UK rap underground going any which way after the drill years.

Musician whose hits also included the satirical anthem Supermodel from the Clueless soundtrack died early on Thursday

Jill Sobule, the singer-songwriter whose hits included the satirical anthem Supermodel from the Clueless movie soundtrack and the groundbreaking single I Kissed a Girl, has died in a house fire at the age of 66.

Sobule’s body was found in a home in Woodbury, Minnesota, on Thursday. Authorities are investigating the cause of the fire.

The bandleader, who has died aged 71, created a vast body of work that influenced everyone from Ramones to REM, thanks to his absurdist energy

• News: David Thomas, anarchic Pere Ubu bandleader, dies aged 71

Rock journalism in the 1970s was never short on hyperbole, but when Jon Landau described seeing the young Bruce Springsteen as “rock’n’roll future” – a line which subsequently became part of Springsteen mythology – the singer felt so “suffocated” by the quote he tried to stop it being used and even reputedly tore down his own posters. However, some years later, when a similarly excitable Rolling Stone magazine declared that “modern rock’n’roll reached its peak in 1978” with Pere Ubu’s debut album The Modern Dance, the band’s singer David Thomas took it as a challenge. “I wasn’t going to stop making music in 1978 just because everybody said ‘they’ve ended rock’n’roll’,” he insisted later. “I had – I have – other things to say.”

Thus, by the time of his death this week aged 71, he’d made a further 18 studio albums and dozens more live albums with Pere Ubu, plus many others as a solo artist with a myriad of backing bands. He performed in theatrical productions and delivered lectures. Another LP was apparently almost finished, along with an autobiography. He carried on performing even after technically dying twice and subsequently requiring kidney dialysis and a Zimmer frame. “I’m sort of glad that I can’t jump around any more because I don’t have to worry about falling into the drums,” he gleefully insisted. “All my concentration goes into singing.” Absurdly, given his gargantuan critical reputation, he once attributed his almost pathological desire to keep working to a feeling that “artistically, my entire life is failure. I want to get it right”.

The reggae singer best known for War Ina Babylon and Chase the Devil was most productive in the febrile political climate of 1970s Jamaica, but his influence remains undimmed

• Jamaican reggae artist Max Romeo dies aged 80

Max Romeo, who died on Friday aged 80 from complications related to a heart condition, was one of Jamaica’s most celebrated vocalists; critiquing the island’s pervasive class divides and wealth disparities with a distinctive tenor, he denounced punitive US foreign policy and detailed the turbulence of world affairs.

Best known for War Ina Babylon, a playful commentary on the factionalism that blighted Jamaican society during the mid-1970s, and Chase the Devil, on which he vowed to banish Satan to outer space, Romeo enjoyed repeated chart success in Jamaica during his long and varied career. Collaborating with the Rolling Stones in the early 1980s, he later opened a recording studio at his home in the Jamaican countryside, helping a younger generation of artists to come to prominence, including his daughter Xana and son Azizi.

Malian singer-songwrier and guitarist who had international success in a duo with his wife Mariam

One of the most extraordinary success stories in the history of African music began in 1978 in the south of the Malian capital, Bamako, in the Institut des Jeunes Aveugles, a school for young blind people. It was there that Amadou Bagayoko and Mariam Doumbia began to make music together. Over two decades later, by now married and known as Amadou & Mariam, “the blind duo of Mali” (as they were once billed) became an award-winning commercial triumph, headlining at festivals and concerts around the world.

Amadou, who has died aged 70, played the electric guitar, sang with Mariam, and wrote or co-wrote many of their songs. They had enjoyed a lengthy, sometimes difficult career together when their lives were transformed by a collaboration with the French-Spanish globally-influenced pop star Manu Chao. He heard one of their songs on the car radio while driving through Paris, and offered not just to produce their next album but to co-write and sing on some of the tracks, adding his slinky, rhythmic style to the duo’s rousing blend of African R&B. The result, Dimanche à Bamako (2004) introduced the duo to a new global audience, selling half a million copies worldwide and reaching No 2 in France.

In a second feature marking 40 years of the Smiths, fans including Andy Burnham and Connie Constance consider how and why the band have endured

• ‘An astounding rush of real-time creativity’: 40 years of the Smiths’ Peel Sessions

John Peel once described the Smiths as “just another band that arrived from nowhere with a very clear and strong identity”. Unlike other bands, he said, the Smiths weren’t trying to be T Rex or the Doors; they were simply the Smiths, a group whose aesthetic lineage was curiously hard to trace.

What they left in their wake, of course, is far easier to map out: there are few indie bands since who don’t, at least in some way, take their cues from Morrissey, Johnny Marr, Mike Joyce and the recently departed Andy Rourke. As far back as their 1983 debut, the Smiths were inadvertently shaping ideas about how indie should interact with fandom, masculinity and the mainstream music industry, and writing music that would be referenced and reinterpreted by generations to come; over the past 40 years, you can see their aesthetic and spiritual influence in everyone from the Stone Roses to Oasis and the 1975.