Depression, with or without psychotic episodes, is a rare subject for drama or music theatre - and with good reason: the sheer unrelenting monotony of anguish and self-absorption is hard to reproduce within a concentrated time-span.

Manchester trio The Longcut’s latest album, their third, comes nearly a decade after their last one, but is rife with ideas and energy as if it's still riding the crest of their initial success. Their M.O. is twofold, either shoegaze-ish, jangle-tinted numbers with wispy indie vocals in a singing style not a million miles from Ian Brown of The Stone Roses, or mantric post-Krautrock jams that pulse with building energy. The cuts in the former style are not dramatically special but the ones in the latter tend to be vividly realised and truly dynamic.

The best of Arrows boasts imaginative production, combining drone guitar tactics with subtle electronics. This is partly courtesy of Tom Knott, regular associate of psych-folkers The Earlies, who mixed the album and added brass sounds to the nearly nine-minute “Popic". It's one of the best songs, the album’s catchy chorused centrepiece, and it blossoms into a prolonged rock-out which owes debts to Philip Glass. Other stormers include the ascendant guitar-led instrumental “Beasts”, the bleepy synth banger “Deathmask” and the closing “Monuments”, a Godspeed You! Black Emperor-esque wall of euphoric guitar distortion.

The slower, janglier cuts, the ones with more focus on singing, are not quite as effective, but neither are they a wash-out. So much about popular music is timing and luck. It’s so often about catching a wave as it starts to swell, riding a combination of genuine gigging popularity, fan devotion and media acclaim. The Longcut’s stars were aligned perfectly for just under a year circa 2005-06 when they were one of the hottest new bands in Britain. For whatever reasons, their career never exploded and now bands such as FEWS are the hopefuls mining this territory. Don’t disregard this band yet, though, for there is enough potency on Arrows to bode well for a future resurgence in their fortunes.

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Overleaf: watch the video for "Deathmask" by The Longcut

The last we heard of US duo Daphne & Celeste was 18 years ago, when they made their name with three hits, notably the nursery-rhyme playground chant bitch-offs “U.G.L.Y.” and “Ohh Stick You”. They famously performed under a hail of bottles at Reading Festival in 2000, then disappeared, going on to peripheral film-acting careers. Max Tundra, an alt-tronic artist who is released on vanguard labels such as Warp and Domino, now engineers a comeback for this millennial, tween-pop pairing. On paper, this is a great, original idea. Upon listening, it’s partly successful.

Mostly gone is Daphne & Celeste’s bubbly juvenility, although they still emanate shiny glee and sweet harmonies. Instead, Tundra has created a meta-commentary on pop, conceptually similar to what artists such as Scritti Politti and The Associates were doing at the dawn of the 1980s. The music is modernist electro-pop, then, yet often awkwardly so, perhaps deliberately. Songs such as the one-minute title track, the bright-eyed “Sunny Day” and the pared-back “You and I Alone”, are straightforward and lovely, but elsewhere dense lyrics and production push into odder territory.

Having Daphne & Celeste sing lines such as “You extemporise/We’re too busy getting idolised” on the stompy robot-electro of “Taking Notes”, apparently a commentary on 21^st-century media, or meditate on the disappearance of a post-acid house pop star on “Whatever Happened to Yazz?”, is intriguing but doesn’t always work musically. Well, not as catchy pop, anyway. And the subject matter veers from the “vascular component” of plant-life on “Song to a Succulent” to an ace takedown of Ed Sheeran and his ilk on “BB” (“Three chords and a minor key/An exercise in mediocrity”!). On extended listening, it’s a surprisingly complex album.

Like Matthew Herbert’s production of Róisín Murphy's debut solo album, Save the World is often more cerebrally interesting than engaging. I was never in danger of falling in love with it, but at its best it boasts a post-modern novelty that’s both bemusing and fascinating.

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Overleaf: Watch the video for "You & I Alone" by Daphne & Celeste

Lisa Halliday’s striking debut novel consists of three parts. The first follows the blooming relationship between Alice and Ezra (respectively an Assistant Editor and a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer) in New York; the middle section comprises a series of reflections narrated by Amar, an American-Iraqi while he is held in detention at Heathrow en route to see his brother in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Greta Gerwig, in her hugely acclaimed, semi-autobiographical directing debut (a Golden Globe for best director, five Academy Award nominations) opens Lady Bird with a Joan Didion quote: “Anyone who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento.”

STIMMUNG is always an event. Stockhausen’s score calls for a ritual as much as a performance, with six singers sitting around a spherical light on a low table, the audience voyeurs at some intimate but unexplained rite. Singcircle has been performing the work for over 40 years, and its director, Gregory Rose, clearly has an innate sense of its pace, structure and aura.

Such introspective subtlety might be mistaken for reticence. But from the rare instances when the Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes lets rip - and they're never forced - you know he's wielding his palette with both skill and intuition, waiting for the big moment to make its proper mark. Flyaway passages in Chopin which in other hands bubble like pure champagne flow like pure spring water; the source is everything.

Bomb-dropping is the new black again in Trump's dysfunctional America. Awareness of that contributed to the crackling cloud of dynamic dread hanging over last night's concert staging of John Adams's opera-oratorio - my description, not his - about the July 1945 desert testing of the plutonium bomb under the supervision of self-divided Robert Oppenheimer, an American Faust.

Second and third times lucky: after the migraine-inducing multimedia overload of Peter Sellars's premiere production of El Niño, first seen in London in 2003 and subsequently excoriated in eloquent prose by the composer himself, John Adams's layered masterpiece has had two further performances here proving that the drama is all in the music. Vladimir Jurowski's 2013 Festival Hall interpretation literally had the edge, in its razor-sharp focus, on last night. But it's always good to see the composer as conductor make light of his rhythmic complexity as he nears his 70th birthday, and we also got to hear three stunning soloists fresh to the work.

As the title implies, there is the natural violence embodied in the storms of an unpredictable phenomenon as well as the ambiguous birth, to pain and to glory, of a special child ("niño" in Spanish). In one of the carefully selected Gospel texts, Joseph asks Mary why she weeps one moment and laughs the next. She tells him: "it is because I see two peoples with my eyes, the one weeping and mourning, the other rejoicing and glad". That duality makes this an apt nativity story to embrace at the end of 2016 (in one of the little spoken prefaces at which he's become so good, Adams imagined Herod today tweeting at 3am his loaded wish to be led to the infant Jesus).

The most vivid bearer of the two sides, apart from the orchestra, is the soprano soloist. The music was written to showcase Dawn Upshaw's girl-next-door radiance as Mary up to the birth and her new-found (in 2000) ability to twist the expressive knife in the most shattering and musically complex number of Part Two, the climactic setting of poet Rosario Castellanos's bitterly ironic "Memorial de Tlatelolco", Adams's "slaughter of the innocents" enshrined in the hushed-up 1968 massacre of Mexican students. If Joélle Harvey (pictured above by Arielle Doneson) couldn't quite emulate Upshaw's cutting edge here, her devotion and emotion were total, and her youthful luminescence always shone (though I'm not quite sure why the three soloists needed the same amplification as the countertenor trio; except in big ensembles, Adams always keeps the orchestra down for them).

Castellanos is to El Niño what Wilfred Owen is to Britten's War Requiem, giving, along with fellow Mexican Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the Chilean Gabriela Mistral and Hildegard of Bingen, a much-needed feminine perspective to the wonder and terror of childbirth. She's a poet I'm immensely grateful to Adams and Sellars, his anthologist, for letting me discover. Mezzo Jennifer Johnson Cano couldn't quite banish memories of the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's superior sinuousness in the wonderful setting of "La Anunciación", Castellanos's vital female take on the mystery of conception and pregnancy, but later brought tears to the eyes with her part in the duet "Se habla de Gabriel" ("Speaking of Gabriel"). Hers is a magnificent instrument, as is the revelatory bass-baritone of Davóne Tines (pictured below): memorable in Joseph's anguished reproach "Mary, why did you do this?", shatteringly good in the high-lying ululations of "Shake the heavens", and deeply moving as Joseph sees everything in mankind and nature still at the moment of birth.

Adams has a dependable group in countertenors Daniel Bubeck, Brian Cummings and Nathan Medley – memorable contributors to El Niño's even more complex if not quite as symmetrically perfect sequel The Gospel According to the Other Mary. At the one point where they step out as soloist Kings, Medley was quietly remarkable in the easeful switch between natural and falsetto registers. Adams's careful selection of instrumental colours to match brought forward amazingly expressive work from the LSO wind, while the brass helped to underline the mounting tension of Part Two and the violent snaps when the storm breaks. A professional choir might have given us more focus in quieter passages, but the London Symphony Chorus offered block shock in the apocalyptic moments. Who can ever forget, once heard, massed voices and snapping orchestra in the downward bending of "For with God no thing shall be impossible" from its D major brilliance?

And the London Youth Choir (all girls, from what I could see) played its part in the final miracle with real finesse. All that's been lacking from the richly shifting canvas have been the multiple voices of children. At the point in the numinous setting of the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, where the infant Jesus commands a palm tree to bend down its fruit for the refreshment of the refugee family and fountains pour out from the roots – eerie ascents to match the downward cascades from heaven of Part One – the young intone Castellanos's most simple and beautiful poem, "Una Palmera", ending with the simple word – voices in thirds, finally accompanied by one guitar only – "poesía" ("poetry"). It's the benediction we all need towards the end of a terrible year.

• Second LSO concert conducted by John Adams on Thursday 8 December
• David Nice's blog on further background to El Niño
• Read more classical reviews on theartsdesk

Next page: watch Davóne Tines sing 'Ol' Man River'