It was more than a decade ago when I first saw Rachel Sermanni in concert, in the upstairs room at The Old Queen’s Head in Islington, London, for a Nest Collective night. She had yet to release her debut, 2012’s Under Mountains, but was already making an impact as a stage performer.

Partie de Campagne (1946), while not being one of French cinema giant Jean Renoir’s best-known films, unfinished and just under 40 minutes long, is still regarded as an important if not essential example of the director’s multi-faceted and often innovative work.

Joshua Redman’s latest album, where are we, marks the jazz saxophonist’s debut on the Blue Note label, after a recording career which now spans just over thirty years and has many high points, not least his eponymous debut on Warner in 1993.

With 2022’s Laurel Hell and Be The Cowboy from 2018, the Japanese-American solo musician Mitski Mayawaki – better known simply as Mitski to all – had refined a massively Eighties influenced, synthesiser led sound.

Having combined the invaluable songwriting experience of her earlier, more frenetic and indie lo-fi albums, her most recent two efforts were creatively elaborate and thematically whole.

Northern Irish rockers Ash appeared in the mid-Nineties, channelling The Ramones when the UK was in thrall to either bangin’ club music or Britpop. They had a good commercial run, longer than almost all their contemporaries, mustering 18 Top 40 UK hits, their last in 2007 (although their albums still usually make the grade).

Anyone who is still dismissing Corinne Bailey Rae as a one-hit wonder of easy listening fayre from almost 20 years ago is going to get their preconceptions well and truly shattered by Black Rainbows. Her fine new album is a diverse but coherent collection that jumps from unlikely genre to unlikely genre throughout – even taking in a couple of punky crackers along the way.

The Saphead gave Buster Keaton his first starring role in a full-length comedy, but 1923’s Three Ages is the first feature film which he wrote, produced, directed and starred in. Two-reelers were a form where he could go, in his words, “wild and crazy”, the more outlandish the visual humour the better.

In a recent interview with The Observer, Pretenders frontwoman Chrissie Hynde admitted, “I don’t think of myself as a songwriter or a musician. I feel as if I’m doing my thing, and I’ve got away with it.” With the band’s 12th studio album, Relentless, Hynde’s not only got away with it but become a pioneering figure in the alternative music scene for the following four decades. 

Much like her pop predecessor Avril Lavigne, musical snobs over the age of 25 are likely to be suspicious of Olivia Rodrigo. As the 2003 BBC review of seminal angst classic Let Go (every millennial woman’s mirror to her teens) posited, ”She’s only 17. She’s pretty. She’s sold a zillion albums already. She must be rubbish, right?” The difference between those two decades is staggering.

The Chemical Brothers are unstoppable. Their live shows are a guaranteed monster good time, redolent of proper old-school rave-ups, but with visual tech from some freaky eye-boggling future. Their last album, 2019’s No Geography, was a total belter. Their latest, their tenth, is also a total belter. They do what they do. But they do it so bloody well.