Well this is something different. Goth pop teetering on the verge of histrionics but redeeming itself with some super-catchy melodies, expert musicianship and one hell of a lead singer. The Last Dinner Party's influences clearly include Queen, Kate Bush, Love, Sparks, Roxy Music, Abba, Florence + The Machine (who told them they’d won BBC Radio 1’s Sound of 2024) and much more yet are that most overused of words – unique.

It seems like time flows differently for J Mascis. He’s now not far off 60, it’s 40 years since he founded Dinosaur Jr, and he’s been involved in untold musical project from the most rarefied of abstract psychedelia to guesting with Lemonheads and Nirvana, but within his own core output he is tapped into exactly the same wellspring as he was all those years ago.

Piero Schivazappa’s 1969 debut The Frightened Woman toys with living up to its title, suggesting a sadistic test of endurance. Its Italian title, Femina Ridens, though, translates as The Laughing Woman, and this is really an ironically extreme battle of the sexes, carried by extravagant pop art designs and its star Dagmar Lassander’s playful pertness.

Terrapath is a prog-rock album with a large dash of jazz-rock fusion. When the styles were in their Seventies pomp, an album side could be occupied by one cut. Both sides might feature, at most, four, maybe five tracks. Yet Plantoid’s debut LP fits 10 tracks into its 39 minutes, three of which are under three minutes apiece.

In Présages, Joanna Hogg talks about ghosts. This short film from 2023, commissioned by the Pompidou Centre, is included as one of the special features in the new BFI Blu-ray release of Hogg's intensely atmospheric The Eternal Daughter, with its virtuoso performance from Tilda Swinton in a dual role. Other special features include a Q&A with Hogg, Swinton and Francine Stock.

Critically acclaimed in the US, singer-songwriter Sarah Jarosz has won four Grammies during the course of her career. Born in Texas, spending most of her adult life in New York, her seventh album was created in her new hometown of Nashville, with an all-star cast of country-flavoured session musicians and producer Daniel Tashian.

Since The Smile drummer Tom Skinner’s bandmates Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood are two-fifths of Radiohead, the trio is often designated a “side project”, or satellite, as if its music pales beside the mothership’s. On the strength of its second album, that’s an absurd, not to mention insulting notion.

Alkaline Trio’s gruesomely named 10th album, Blood, Hair, And Eyeballs, is a commentary on the modern world through the dark, poetic lens that the band have honed over their 25-year career. In both theme and sound, it captures their identity while offering new observations.

Halfway through this album, “They Sold My Home to Build a Skyscraper” unlocks it. On first listen I’d been nodding along with the first few songs, enjoying how they find glimmers of more or less forlorn hope in amongst sadness and middle-aged domestic stress.

When Ed Sheeran sang about a Galway girl in his radio-friendly folk number of the same name, he hadn’t met NewDad vocalist and guitarist Julia Dawson. This Galway girl doesn’t play a fiddle. She fronts an ethereal foursome re-energising a classic shoegaze sound rather than falling in line with fellow Irish acts and their hard-hitting anthems (see 6Music staples IDLES and SPRINTS).