Immanuel Wilkins’s third Blue Note Album – Blues Blood – has a big concept behind it. According to the album blurb, we are offered “a multimedia performance about the legacies of our ancestors and the bloodlines connecting us...”. It features “distinctive voices tapping into different aspects of heritage”… and "meals are cooked onstage during the live performance.” The basic idea behind it is that the healing properties of music can be applied to dealing with historic trauma.

With Warped Tour anniversary rumours in the air, Green Day and blink-182 touring the world, and 20 huge new tracks from Sum 41, The Offspring’s latest contribution to the thriving Pop Punk scene couldn’t have been timed better. Supercharged is landing in the open arms of an already excited fanbase, and the legends of the genre do not disappoint.

Having helped to shape the distinctive Skate Punk sound of the 90s and early 2000s, it’s no surprise that The Offspring recreate that energy effortlessly with Supercharged, but it is impressive nonetheless.  

This record keeps you guessing. It starts off with “Hybrid Romance”, an ambient piece that’s very pretty but has swooping glassy synths that crack and fracture and could easily be about to break into some super jagged Berlin deconstructed club music at any minute.

But less than two minutes later and we’re into “Chlorine”, a song in the modern country-inflected pop style which wouldn’t sound out of place on most daytime radio channels, and you could easily imagine the Californian Ded Hyatt performing as a support act for Taylor Swift or Harry Styles.

While it does get very cold in the north of Norway, it’s likely that Permafrost’s chosen name reflects a fondness for Howard Devoto’s post-punk outfit Magazine as much as it does their home country’s environment. “Permafrost” was a track on Magazine’s second album, 1979’s Secondhand Daylight. And, with respect to the title The Light Coming Through, the penultimate track on Magazine’s 1978 debut album was “The Light Pours Out of me.”

With the Pagan festival of Mabon and the Autumnal Equinox only just past us, it seems appropriate for Scandi psychedelic rockers, Goat to provide a soundtrack of celebration as we head towards the colder months. And, as expected, Goatman and his crew have not let us down with their completely wigged out set of funky vibes and transcendent rhythms.

From the very first chords of "Yellow" in 2000, Coldplay have been an ever present at the summit of popular music's hierarchy. Their uncanny knack of crafting sickly sweet melodies and soundscapes that dig deep and stay with you, willingly or not, has seen them through different styles in their now over 25 year long career.

Dan Snaith’s career has been a joyous thing to watch. Almost a quarter of a century the Canadian started out as Manitoba (soon renamed to Caribou) making a giddy mixture of dreamy ‘60s psychedelic pop, glitchy electronica and then cutting-edge dance music.

The Smile’s second album Wall of Eyes, released in January, is a thrillingly discomfiting album by Radiohead alumni Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood and Sons of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner. It has a coherent mood and flow, a great screw-the-musicbiz rock song in “Read the Room”, and a scintillator for all seasons in “Bending Hectic”.

Lady Gaga has made clear this is not her official new artist album. It’s a side project, inspired by Harley Quinn, the nom-de-chaos of the Arkham Asylum inmate she plays in Todd Phillips’ much-anticipated sequel Joker: Folie à Deux. The original Joker, deep-dipped in Seventies Scorcese aesthetics, saw DC Studios demonstrate they could take superhero fictions to exciting new places. Setting the bar higher, the new film is a musical.

Ezra Collective were faced with a challenge. The quintet needed to follow up from their achievement in winning the Mercury Prize in 2023 with Where I'm Meant To Be. That was a remarkable moment in itself, ending a 31-year drought during which a jazz album had been nominated for the prize more or less every year, but never won. Their task was to produce an album while being in demand and constantly touring all over the world. The result, the 19 tracks of Dance, No One’s Watching, infused with a positive spirit throughout, is very good.