I wrote The Blinding Light to try to understand the mental and spiritual crisis that August Strindberg suffered in February 1896. Deeply disturbed, plagued by hallucinations, he holed up in various hotel rooms in Paris, most famously in the Hotel Orfila in the Rue d’Assas.

No sunshine without shadows was one possible theme rippling through this diva sandwich of a Prom. Even Richard Strauss's chaste nymph Daphne, achieving longed-for metamorphosis as a tree, finds darkness among the roots; and though Renée "The Beautiful Voice" Fleming has a heliotropic tendency in her refulgent upper register, her mezzo-ish colours are strong, too.

In his biography The Magic Lantern, Ingmar Bergman recalls his first encounter with the Swedish island of Fårö, in 1960, when location scouting for his next film, Through A Glass Darkly. A last, desperate bid by the film’s producers to find a cheaper setting than Orkney turned out to be fortuitous in more ways than they could have imagined.

Finally, a new band that lives up to a fine name and great cover art. Then again, Shitkid do a whole lot more than that. Their music sounds like the antithesis of contemporary chart-pop, which is refreshing, but even better, also doesn’t do the usual things artists do when they want to prove, absolutely, that they’re anti all that stuff. Shitkid is 24-year-old Åsa Söderqvist from Gothenberg, Sweden, and most of this album sounds like it was recorded down the bottom of a well, but in the best possible way.

Söderqvist’s M.O. is a punk-bored, sometimes cutesy, always teen-like, dry-as-the-Gobi Desert delivery, laying out matter-of-fact, conceptually isolated lyrics (eg, “Drive fast, that’s it, that’s immortality/I know, I’m wrong, and if I fall off I would die alone/And then again I’m happy with no helmet on/And he is behind, we’re on two motorbikes”). All this over an uber-primitive drum machine, occasional synth stabs and, more often, fantastic, sleazy Cramps-like guitar riffs, the whole thing sounding, apart from the lyrics, as if it’s been filtered through a musty old mattress.

Somehow, given how pared back the music is, the sonic muffle curiously allows moments that do shine to jump out in a really effective and original way. There’s a drugginess to it too, an opiated, downer-ville edge, even as far as the singing occasionally slurring like a gouching junkie. It adds to the otherness on tunes such as the nodding-out “Tropics” and the demented “On a Saturday Night at Home” which appears to be about Söderqvist’s bravery at facing “shiny, shiny” daylight (“It would have scared them, sure, to see what I have seen”).

There’s so much on offer here: the child-like, horror filmic psyche-out that is “Likagurl”; the unexpectedly amped up vocals firin’ into angst-ridden possessiveness on “Alright”; the uncategorisable synth slowie “Getting Mad”; every song's worth investigating. The dictionary definition of the word “uncanny” is “strange or mysterious, especially in an unsettling way” and Fish is a brilliantly uncanny album, a feast of difference, and certainly one of the most intriguing, exciting albums to appear this year.

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Overleaf: Watch the video for "Tropics" by Shitkid

My Life as a Dog is a bittersweet coming-of-age yarn which took Sweden and the art cinema circuit by storm on its release in 1985.

So here’s the thing: a heavily pregnant woman is hanging by her ankles above a raging torrent. Two teens, one with a broken arm, are stuck down a well. And 15 miners, deep below ground, take refuge from a fire in an emergency chamber, unaware it has been sabotaged by the serial killer among them, who then, using “a gadget”, proceeds to switch off the mine’s pumps so they will all slowly drown.

You can just hear Måns Mårlind and Björn Stein, the clever-sick Swedes behind Midnight Sun, cackling as they cooked up the pre-title sequence to the first episode of their new series. A grizzled man in a grey suit wakes up to find himself strapped to a helicopter rotor-blade. The engine starts. What follows is enough to give anyone quite a turn.

For many, music is simply background, blurring tinnily from phones, sense-candy to “Like”, swipe and scroll alongside Pokemon and Snapchat. Music is content, filling digital space in the same way Polyfilla fills dents in walls. Zara Larsson epitomises this. Hers is the sound of nothing happening, albeit to a relentless masturbatory tang of gossipy sex obsession. Her second album is a void in the human soul.

What's a world-renowned mezzo-soprano in her middle years to do? Slimline of voice, tall and handsome in person with piercing and slightly intimidating blue eyes, Stockholm-born Anne Sofie von Otter isn't likely to sing what is known in the operatic world as "all those old bag parts", though she's a good enough actress to have carried off a few.

The Emigrants and The New Land have to be seen. In each, the story is gripping, the acting marvellous and the depiction of the period setting evocative and flawless. Any of these aspects would be reason enough to see a film, but the clincher is director Jan Troell’s adeptness at showing how the smallest details impact on destiny. Taking a moment’s rest from a menial task on a farm can lead to consequences which colour a whole life. But this is not where it stops. Troell weaves such moments seamlessly into a grand, sweeping arc for which the only word is epic.