Rivalled only by Titanic and La La Land for its 14 Oscar nominations, 1950's Best Picture-winner All About Eve is a film that audiences and reviewers love – even though Joseph L Mankiewicz’s brilliant screenplay makes no bones about the fact that he thinks both fans and critics are less than loveable.

It may not be a totally new phenomenon, but just recently there seems to have been a rash of techno and electronica producers and DJs working with musicians of a psychedelic bent to record side projects of one kind or another.

Dazzling. That was the first adjective with which the illustrious Marian McPartland described Helen Sung’s piano playing, when she had the remarkable Houston-born pianist as her guest for an episode of the NPR radio show Piano Jazz in 2006.

Although Hey What is 47 minutes long and includes 10 tracks, it comes across as shorter due to its homogeneity. That’s not to say it all sounds the same, but that it has the overarching feel of a suite where the individual songs equate to movements within a long-form piece. It means that Low’s 13th full-length studio outing is an album as such, rather than a grab-bag collection of disparate compositions.

One of several 1960s Czech films which explicitly addresses the Holocaust, Zbyněk Brynych’s 1964 thriller The Fifth Horseman is Fear ( …a pátý jezdec je starch) wrong-foots us from the first frame.

Martina Topley-Bird, who started out doing vocals for Tricky’s first single "Aftermath" aged 15, has matured. On her fourth solo album, self-produced, she builds confidently on the dreamy vocal lines that were essential to the Bristol sound of the '90s.

Certified Lover Boy is not a mixtape, a playlist or a collection of loosies, but an Album. With a capital A. This is a distinction Drake makes when it’s time to get serious, when he wants us to sit up and listen intently. Unfortunately, Drake Albums often get bogged down in this seriousness. Both 2016’s Views and 2018’s Scorpion were slogs to get through. The spark of If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late and cohesion of Nothing Was the Same felt missed.  

Following the death last year from COVID-19 of keyboard player Dave Greenfield, it appears the The Stranglers’ five decade journey may finally be drawing to a close. They bucked all odds by maintaining a path after singer Hugh Cornwall left in 1990, and the last two decades, especially, have seen them hold steady, both as a live draw and with critically respected albums.

From the first moment the military drums start pounding and the epic brass begins to build, you know you’re listening to the start of something exceptional. Something groundbreaking, important – a masterpiece. Opening track “Sometimes I Might Be Introvert” demonstrates the confidence and skill of Little Simz – now 27 – and represents a huge step forward from her highly praised album, GREY Area.

Iron Maiden are in very many senses as English, as camp and as ridiculous as Christmas pantomime, even down to the “HE’S BEHIND YOU!” looming of their vast onstage zombie mascot Eddie. Which is not to say there’s nothing to them: far from it. Just like pantomime, their durability shows how much they speak to something deep and archetypal in their audience’s spirit.