Music news

• Songs about new beginnings – ranked!

  01-01-2026 14:00
  From CMAT and the Carpenters’ fresh starts to the Beatles’ Here Comes the Sun and Nina Simone’s Feeling Good, starting again is a rich theme in pop. Here are some of the best examplesIt’s hard to imagine anyone’s heart not being lifted a little by Right Back Where We Started From: the euphoric rush of new love rendered into three minutes of cod-northern soul (performed, unexpectedly, by various ex members of ELO, the Animals and 60s soft-poppers Honeybus). Avoid the
  
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• Add to playlist: the introspective ‘Afromood’ of Nigerian star Strei and the week’s best new tracks

  05-06-2026 17:18
  Less interested in spectacle than vibe, the Delta State artist’s subtle atmospheric projects are carving a quietly distinctive pathFrom Delta State, Nigeria
  Recommended if you like Omah Lay, Rema, XXXTentacion, Juice WRLD
  Up next Album Night out nowBorn and raised in Delta State and now based in Lagos, Strei is part of a new generation of Nigerian musicians turning away from Afropop’s extroverted certainties and towards something more inward-looking. His self-described “Afromoo
  
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• From G-Flip to Tame Impala: why Australian music is soundtracking so much TV right now

  05-06-2026 17:00
  From Off Campus to the Summer I Turned Pretty, it seems like Australian artists are everywhere right now – but what does the exposure actually mean?Last month, a new Amazon Prime series, Off Campus, fought its way to the top of the streaming TV pile. Releasing its first season all at once, the glossy campus drama – set around an elite hockey team at a fictional US university – racked up 36 million viewers in its first 12 days, becoming the platform’s biggest debut among w
  
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• With warmth, kindness and unlimited energy, Kanya King revolutionised Black British culture

  05-06-2026 14:55
  The Mobo founder, who has died aged 57, had an unprecedented vision: to give Black British music a glitzy and joyful awards ceremony. But her impact went well beyond it• News: Kanya King, founder of Mobo awards for Black British music, dies aged 57I first met Kanya King in the mid-1990s, when I was still reeling from the failure of my own attempt to target the Black audience via my newspaper, Black Briton. Kanya came along a couple of years later and showed how it should be done. In framing
  
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• Dua Lipa and Callum Turner wedding divides Palermo: ‘I could understand if it was for the pope’

  05-06-2026 14:15
  While some residents are proud to host celebrations, others lament road closures and city’s transformation into a ‘theme park’Concetta Chillemi was chatting to friends outside her shop next to Palermo’s gallery for modern art housed in a sublime baroque church in the city’s historic centre. A few metres away, an Italian TV crew had its camera trained on the tiny square in front of the church where event staff in black T-shirts scurried around in the heat.They were p
  
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• Taylor Swift: I Knew It, I Knew You review – giddy up! Song for Toy Story cowgirl Jessie is Swift’s best in years

  05-06-2026 12:34
  Full of handcrafted care and the rootsy soul of her country origins, this gently elated song is a reminder of what fans love about Swift … and the film seriesTaylor Swift does not fear a challenge. She’s broken records then broken those records; taken Grammy snubs as a sign she just has to work harder; mounted probably the most physically exhausting tour of all time. But in writing a song for Toy Story’s cowgirl Jessie, she’s set herself a deranged task: how could anyone
  
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• Lizzo: Bitch review | Alexis Petridis's album of the week

  05-06-2026 06:00
  (Atlantic)
  After scrapping an album and starting anew, Lizzo still sounds lost amid these weak genre-hopping songs. Perhaps the zeitgeist has simply left her behindJust over a year ago, Lizzo appeared on Saturday Night Live, announcing a new album called Love in Real Life in grandstanding style. Wielding an electric guitar, clad in a Trump-baiting T-shirt that read Tariffied, she performed its title track and two other new songs, Still Bad and Don’t Make Me Love U. As with her appearance e
  
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• ‘I knew it was over for us’: the bands who got left behind when punk exploded

  05-06-2026 06:00
  Fifty years ago this week, the Sex Pistols played their first Manchester gig – and upended pop culture. But what was 1976 really like before punk arrived? From swing bands to ‘spaghetti rock’, we discover a lost historyIn January 1976, the cover of the NME didn’t feature an artist, but a photo of a room damaged by an IRA bomb: there had been a string of terrorist attacks in London the previous year. The headline: “Is rock’n’roll ready for 1976 … I
  
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• Sing when you’re winning: the 20 greatest songs about football – ranked!

  04-06-2026 14:33
  ​As World Cup fever begins, we go beyond terrace chants and team anthems to look at footy-mad songwriting, from Cardiff rap to Zimbabwean rumbira ... and Rod StewartAh, fathers and sons and football. Here, Rod gets teary-eyed remembering how his dad used to cheer him from the touchline: an inessential but sweet and heartfelt song. Though Rod once told me that he tended to shout at his own son from the touchline, because he never tracked back. Continue reading...
  
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• Mike D review – ex-Beastie Boy’s first UK gig in two decades, in a Tyneside bingo hall, is uproarious fun

  04-06-2026 13:36
  King Street Social Club, North Shields
  Teeing up a forthcoming solo album, the rapper doesn’t reheat his old Beastie Boys sound, instead throwing down everything from ballads to Kraftwerk referencesAdam Yauch AKA MCA’s death in 2012 from cancer aged 47 effectively ended the stellar recording and performing career of hip-hop trio Beastie Boys. Since then, bandmates Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz and Michael “Mike D” Diamond have made few public appearances but the lat
  
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• ‘I don’t listen to indie music any more’: Ed O’Brien’s honest playlist

  04-06-2026 12:42
  The Radiohead guitarist once serenaded a girl with the Smiths and thinks George Michael was a genius. But what is his favourite football song?The first single I boughtAlly’s Tartan Army, the 1978 Scottish World Cup song, because England hadn’t qualified. I loved that Scottish team – Alan Rough, Martin Buchan, Gordon McQueen, Kenny Dalglish – and the 10-year-old me got completely swept up in World Cup fever.The first song I fell in love withWhen I was 17, I fell in love wi
  
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• Peabo Bryson, R&B singer behind classic Disney duets, dies aged 75

  03-06-2026 15:51
  Two-time Grammy winner was best known for songs from Beauty and the Beast and AladdinPeabo Bryson, the R&B singer best known as the voice behind the Oscar-winning Disney film duets Beauty and the Beast with Celine Dion, and A Whole New World with Regina Belle from Aladdin, has died. He was 75.His family said in a statement that Bryson, who won two Grammy awards, died on Tuesday, days after having a stroke. Continue reading...
  
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• ‘We’re really good. I don’t mean that arrogantly’: Yard Act on bullying, imposter syndrome and their heavy new album

  01-06-2026 06:00
  The Leeds group arrived in a frenzy of post-punk energy, picking at the scabs of society – then started questioning their instant success. They talk about dodging ‘the megaband treadmill’ to make their surreal new albumIt’s certainly a novel way to announce your comeback. On the opening song of Yard Act’s new album, over a cacophony of doomy piano chords and crashing drums, singer James Smith announces: “I’ve got absolutely nothing – absolutely not
  
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• Take That review – stadium redux of Circus tour has maximal razzle-dazzle

  30-05-2026 13:00
  St Mary’s Stadium, Southampton
  Elephants, clowns, aerialists hanging by their hair … the Big Top concept doesn’t let up at this hugely enjoyable outing for a boy band with hits to spareTake That have never been shy when it comes to repackaging their past. In 2018, they followed two official best-of collections with Odyssey, a Stuart Price-produced curio in which they “re-imagined” their greatest hits. Around the same time, band captain Gary Barlow – now overs
  
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• Add to playlist: the whimsy and warped electronics of duo Ear and the week’s best new tracks

  29-05-2026 13:00
  There’s nostalgia to the New York/London duo’s lo-fi laptop sound, but their second album pushes them into vivid, weirder new territoryFrom Hudson valley, New York, and London
  Recommended if you like the Books, Leila, Worldpeace DMT
  Up next Rumspringa released 29 MayJonah Paz and Yaelle Avtan recorded their first ever track as Ear on an iPhone in the Bard College library. That song, Nerves, pits their murmuring voices against weightless strings and barely perceptible drums. Just as i
  
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• Matías Aguayo: Anenoa review | Ammar Kalia's global album of the month

  29-05-2026 10:00
  (Platoon)
  The Chilean-German producer’s shapeshifting vocals stir Latin rhythms, ghetto house, trance and more into a playful partyOver the past two decades, Chilean-German vocalist and producer Matías Aguayo’s mutable, instinctive singing has been an instantly identifiable ingredient of leftfield electronic music. On Battles’ 2011 track Ice Cream, he squealed and tripped through syllables against a thunderous synth backing, while Japanese synth-pop group Crystal’s
  
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• Violet Grohl: Be Sweet to Me review – alt-rock arriviste aces the part

  29-05-2026 09:30
  (Island)
  The daughter of Foo Fighters’ Dave does a serviceable line in 90s throwback sounds, though the nostalgia is too reverent‘I’ll eat your liver,” Violet Grohl threatens on 595, a scuzzy, slasher-inspired alt-rock single that feels made for 90s MTV. Arch, deadpan verses give way to a big, bluesy, intentionally sleazy chorus, finished with blown-out guitar and squealing feedback: part Veruca Salt, part Queens of the Stone Age. Despite just turning 20, Grohl has the ro
  
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• ‘I can gauge John’s reaction: that’s good, stick that in’: Paul McCartney on how old bandmates – and Oasis – inspired his nostalgic new album

  29-05-2026 06:00
  At 83, McCartney is looking back for his 18th solo LP, to formative flirtations, family singalongs, even his own birth – and the febrile times that mirror our own. It’s given him ‘every hope that we’ll get through’• Alexis Petridis reviews The Boys of Dungeon Lane: ‘At 83, his gift for melody still astounds’
  ‘How far do you want to go back?” In his office overlooking Soho Square in London, Paul McCartney and I sit together on a small sof
  
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• ‘The biggest myth? That I left Sister Sledge’: Kathy Sledge on sibling rivalry, Chic and disco’s political power

  28-05-2026 16:00
  One of disco’s biggest stars answers your questions, recalling tours with Rick James, inspiration for Destiny’s Child and what she wished she asked Michael JacksonYou have been an active contributor to an astounding canon of music. What was the essential ingredient that made it all happen? eamonmccThe first word that comes to mind is passion – for the music, for what I do. If you get to be the voice of a song like We Are Family, which is here for generations to come – to
  
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• Iceage: For Love of Grace & the Hereafter review | Alexis Petridis's album of the week

  28-05-2026 13:00
  (Mexican Summer)
  The quintet add shoegaze, country and 50s rock’n’roll to their core indie-punk sound, resulting in songs that offset lyrical bleakness with gleeful, uplifting musicIceage have always seemed like a band in a state of constant development. You might say that’s understandable, given the Danish musicians were in their teens when their debut album New Brigade was released in 2011: if you don’t change between the age of 18 and your early 30s, you’re proba
  
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• Sonny Rollins obituary

  26-05-2026 18:34
  One of the great American jazz saxophonists regarded as an improvising genius by fans all over the worldThe flyers for his shows often called the saxophonist Sonny Rollins “the greatest living improviser”. On the face of it, that statement appeared to collide with the evidence, because many of the elements of a Rollins gig were repeated from one show to another.But you had to listen beyond the themes of favourite Rollins vehicles such as St Thomas, Don’t Stop the Carnival and A
  
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• Sugar review – Bob Mould’s reunited band still in a sweet spot between noise and melody

  25-05-2026 12:09
  O2 Kentish Town Forum, London
  After three unlikely Top 10 albums in the 90s, the trio are back – and on the basis of this rapid-fire set, you hope they’ll stick aroundBob Mould has never seemed to have much interest in looking back. The bridges to a Hüsker Dü reunion were burned long before drummer and songwriter Grant Hart died in 2017; the notion that Mould might revive Sugar, the band who scored three unlikely UK Top 10 albums of ferocious alt-rock in the mid-90s, seemed
  
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• Doja Cat review – pop superstar or true freak? US iconoclast plays the tension to perfection

  22-05-2026 12:12
  OVO Hydro, Glasgow
  Moving seamlessly throughextravagant choreography between bubblegum–rap and darker, rockier material, the singer is always in full command Since her breakout almost a decade ago, singer and rapper Doja Cat has been musically restless: bouncing between the pop-rap of her first album Amala to her darker, toothier 2023 release Scarlet; collaborating with SZA then heel-turning to cover Hole. On last year’s fifth album Vie she negotiated the tension between the pop pers
  
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• Kurt Vile: Philadelphia’s Been Good to Me review – indie rock’s most easygoing dude gets existential

  21-05-2026 13:30
  (Verve)
  Sounding characteristically virtuosic but unbothered, Vile is more forward-thinking than ever on a record that surveys the bliss and bumps of life in his mid-40sThese days, Kurt Vile songs begin in the middle of the story. In the third decade of his career, the journeyman musician seems even more content than ever to ride his own wave, to let his laid-back koans sit in the air without explanation or context, waiting for a listener to find the right frequency to understand or absorb them
  
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• Nedra Talley Ross helped make the Ronettes the platonic ideal of a girl group

  27-04-2026 11:28
  Even though she was unwell, the last surviving Ronette was full of poignant memories and saucy asides when I met her last year. And she had a rich life after pop success• Nedra Talley Ross dies aged 80 – newsNedra Talley Ross wasn’t a household name any longer, but she had been once upon a time. When she turned 18 in January 1964, George Harrison was among the guests who helped her celebrate. She and her cousins were feted, surrounded, adored. For she and her cousins were the Ro
  
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• Dave Mason, co-founder of Traffic who had a star-studded solo career, dies aged 79

  22-04-2026 12:44
  British singer and guitarist wrote and performed Traffic classics including Feelin’ Alright? before platinum-selling solo albums and work with Jimi Hendrix, Fleetwood Mac and moreDave Mason, the co-founder of rock band Traffic who also collaborated with Jimi Hendrix, Fleetwood Mac and many other A-list musicians, has died aged 79.A statement from his representative said he died peacefully on Sunday at his home in Gardnerville, Nevada, having settled in the US in 1969. “Dave Mason liv
  
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• Add to playlist: the dark fog of Los Angeles saxophonist Aaron Shaw and the week’s best new tracks

  16-01-2026 13:00
  The woodwind player who taught André 3000 music theory releases his searching debut album next monthFrom Los Angeles
  Recommend if you like Miguel Atwood Ferguson, Shabaka Hutchings’s flute music, the Coltranes
  Up next Debut album And So It Is released 13 FebruaryFor woodwind players, breath is everything: the lifeforce of artistry, the thing that furnishes sound with personality. But a few years ago, the Los Angeles saxophonist Aaron Shaw realised he was becoming increasingly breath
  
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• A$AP Rocky: Don’t Be Dumb review – a charismatic, playful return, but it’s no slam dunk

  16-01-2026 11:07
  (A$AP Rocky Recordings)
  Now a father of three and burgeoning actor, Rocky finally comes back to music with his strongest album since his 2013 debut – though there’s plenty of flabIt has been eight years since A$AP Rocky, once and future king of New York rap, released an album. In the world of hip-hop, where even A-list stars such as Rocky’s friend and collaborator Tyler, the Creator are prone to releasing multiple albums a year, this is a lifetime. In the time since Rocky relea
  
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• Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore: Tragic Magic review | Safi Bugel's experimental album of the month

  16-01-2026 10:00
  (InFiné)
  The composers’ first collaborative album ebbs from epic, cinematic heights to delicate and dreamy lullabiesAfter years of touring together, Los Angeles-based composers Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore have developed what the former refers to as a “musical telepathy”. Tragic Magic, the pair’s first collaborative album, evidences this bond: born out of a short series of improv sessions in Paris, it’s a wonderfully immersive set of new age and ambien
  
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• Julio Iglesias denies sexual abuse claims of two former female employees

  16-01-2026 08:58
  Women allege Spanish singer subjected them ‘to inappropriate touching, insults and humiliation … in atmosphere of control’The Spanish singer Julio Iglesias has broken his silence over allegations that he sexually abused two women who worked in his Caribbean mansions, saying he has never “abused, coerced or disrespected any woman”.The 82-year-old entertainer, whose career spans six decades, had been accused by two female former employees who allege they had been sex
  
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