Jim and William Reid’s musical trajectory has been extraordinary. They started out by out-punking punk with terrifying noise barrages and wilfully clumsy three-chord thrashing, but quickly revealed a deep love of classic pop song structures which became ever clearer as they sonically mellowed in the early stages of their career.

On this, their 10^th album, the melodious Mancunians started at the drum kit and built from there. This is no bad thing.

There are few bands who can claim to operate in a similar visionary style as Everything Everything. Since their 2010 debut Man Alive, the Manchester group have played in a space all their own, dissecting the structures of human relationships from the personal to the political all while refining an experimental yet accessible art-rock sound.

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.

Shaun Ryder is now known mostly for being Shaun Ryder, via any random TV programme that will pay him a couple of quid. In this light, his musical achievements have lost some of their shine over the decades. But, if given the chance, a couple of those Happy Mondays albums and the first Black Grape album still own the room.

Around the time the time that he retired his Ziggy Stardust alter ego, David Bowie put out an album of covers, done in a Glam/Proto-punk style. This included tunes by the Yardbirds, the Kinks and various other Garage Rock bands that were somewhat outside the mainstream at the time.

Pick-Up Full of Pink Carnations is the Vaccines’ sixth studio album and their first since the departure of original guitarist Freddie Cowan. As with previous releases, it’s rammed with catchy hooks wrapped in in fizzy pop rock tunes – but despite Justin Young’s claim that “it’s about the loss of dreams”, it is also distinctly lacking any nuance or real soul.

Where 2022 threw a personal surprise Album of the Year with Maggie Roger’s dancey indie-folk blend on Surrender, 2023 was more of a return to business, with a range of my regular listens all popping up with solid-to-supreme listens.

Sofia Coppola knows a thing or two about teenage girldom. Like many of her other characters – in The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation, Somewhere and Marie Antoinette – the subject of her latest film, Priscilla Presley, is an ingenue living in a gilded cage and surrounded by lavish boredom. It hardly matters whether the setting is actually the Park Hyatt Tokyo, Chateau Marmont, the Palace of Versailles – or Graceland, in this case.

In the Light of Time - UK Post-Rock and Leftfield Pop 1992-1998 was unexpected. Collecting 17 tracks, it brought a fresh perspective on a particular aspect of the UK’s independent-minded music. This ground-breaking, agenda-setting release was effectively the soundtrack to what has been written about post-rock.