A few beers down, in the middle of a crowd listening to music you love, you tend not to think of the latest news story as your highest priority. But Britain's relationship to Europe weighs heavy on the mind these days, and when the news of the violent attack on Jo Cox started filtering through as we danced under the Catalan sun on Thursday afternoon, it threw the nature of Sónar festival into relief.

In interviews, the Scottish songwriter RM Hubbert has described his new album as being the “mirror image” of his best-known work, the 2013 Scottish Album of the Year (SAY) Award-winning Thirteen Lost and Found.

Jon Hamm, Mad Men’s swooningly handsome Don Draper, is not only a fine celebrity catch for a series rapidly gathering comic momentum. Since nothing in Toast of London is ever to be taken at face value, Hamm is also two kinds of puns: ham on toast, the snack, and ham, the exaggerated style of acting much in evidence during the show. It all added up to another delicious episode of this extravagantly multi-layered show.

“It’s gonna get loud, it’s gonna get heavy,” purrs Nina Gordon on “The Gospel According to Saint Me”, the opening track from what must surely, if you overlook Independence Day getting a sequel 20 years later, be one of the more unlikely of the current wave of Nineties reunions. It’s a lyric that succinctly captures what were always the band’s best features – gooey back-and-forth harmonies and an unyielding commitment to the distortion pedal – and one that bodes well for the Chicagoans’ first album together since 1997.

To let you understand the spontaneous grin that burst across my face when I first heard Foil Deer probably needs a little context: I studied, and now have a job involving, corporate law. Still, there’s no getting away from the fact that the powerful feminist themes and dirty, grungy guitar work form only part of the reason that Massachusetts indie rockers Speedy Ortiz’s third album is such a fantastic listen: frontwoman and songwriter Sadie Dupuis’ wordplay has never been stronger.

I often think that, once a band hits certain milestones – longevity, moderate commercial success, critical acclaim – it can be difficult to know where to begin. I don’t mean the big bands, with the songs you’d recognise if you heard them in an advert or at a festival, their big hits acting as gateway drugs to those who’d like to find out more; but rather those mid-level indie bands beloved by those in the know and yet whose names prompt glazed looks when your colleagues ask you who you went to see at the weekend.

Let’s get one thing straight: Sufjan Stevens’ Carrie & Lowell is not a folk album. Folk, in this case, is a word used as a comfort blanket in an attempt to summarise the Michigan songwriter’s return to simple, acoustic music after the apocalyptic electronica of 2010’s The Age of Adz or the epic, high-concept Illinois. But folk music is a communal thing, predicated on culture and oral tradition.

The hip hop music of California has always been deeply stoned, and the wave of instrumental beats that have emerged from LA in recent years have taken this to quite some extreme. The scene around the Brainfeeder collective and Low End Theory club have, in fact, produced some of the most deeply psychedelic music of the 21st century, and Sam Baker aka Samiyam is one of the key figures within that.

Some people are lucky enough to have the sort of friends that, no matter how rarely you see them, you can call them up and instantly pick up right back where you left off. Some people are even luckier, and have the sort of friends that they see even less but yet, when they reconnect, they can spill out their most intimate longings and hopes and discomforts and immediately feel unburdened. Seasons of Your Day, Mazzy Star’s first album in 17 years, is like that friend.

The punchline about angry upstarts journeying to po-faced middle-aged is an easy enough one for a band to make, but over the past few years the Manic Street Preachers have managed something far harder: they’ve started to make good records again. Rewind the Film is apparently the more sedate of two planned albums and it’s no laughing matter - even if a song called “Anthem for a Lost Cause” is straight out of Manics 101.