Our very own prophets of rage are back and their anger is – quite understandably – off the scale. Even these hardened cynics couldn’t have dreamt that the country would have deteriorated even further since the release of their most successful album to date – Spare Ribs – in 2021. Morally and financially bankrupt, there’s not much to celebrate in the UK right now. Which suits Sleaford Mods down to the ground.

This double album takes Van Morrison back to one of his early muses – Skiffle and its repertoire, that precursor to the rock'n'roll years that took hold of Britain in the 1950s, having percolated across the USA through the first half of the century, combining folk, blues, country, bluegrass and jazz into one steaming head of home-brewed folk, hopped up on washboards, jugs, washtub bass and the like.

John Hughes’ most beloved cult film feels like contraband now, a bracingly harsh bulletin from Eighties teen life, full of barbed, uncensored talk between its five school detention misfits – the titular “breakfast club”.

According to the press release for Karin Dreijer’s third album as Fever Ray, its completion was preceded by many hours of therapy with the result new things are known. Amongst them that Dreijer “can be struck by despair but also by the big feeling of love and awe”. Dreijer declares “I know what love is and I want to show you”. Radical Romantics is the result of these realisations.

As films involving cats go, The Cassandra Cat (Až přijde kocour) is up there with the best. Part fairy-tale, part political satire, Vojtěch Jasný’s 1963 fantasy, shot on location in the picturesque village of Telcis, is an offbeat, unclassifiable gem. Unsurprisingly, the post-1968 Czech authorities disapproved, withdrawing it from circulation.

“I’ve found another way / I’ve found another Heaven” sings Stuart Gray on the feedback-soaked opening track of Black Helium’s new album, Um. And if that’s what has fed into these psychedelic barbarians’ tunes on their third disc, it’s truly something that he needs to share around.

The years since slowthai’s Mercury Prize nominated debut have been patchy. There was the public reckoning after his oafish behaviour at the NME awards, but then he scored his first number one album a year later. He’s become a father but also struggled with his mental health. 

One of the greatest things a musical artist can achieve is world building. That is, creating a distinctive type of environment, language and coordinates for everything they do such that the listener is forced to come into the musical world, and to engage with it on its own terms rather than by comparison. It’s something that musicians as diverse as Prince, Kate Bush and Wu-Tang Clan achieve have achieved, likewise plenty of more underground creators too.

Colombian-American singer Kali Uchis knocked it out of the park with the vibrant, eclectic global pop of debut Isolation, one of the best albums of 2018.

Begin describing Aftersun to someone who’s not seen it and you’ll struggle. Charlotte Wells’ debut feature looks embarrassingly slight on paper, its 93 minutes following a young girl on a Turkish package holiday in the late 1990s with her youthful dad.