Nick Cave walked onto a simple black stage and quietly perched on a stool. He took a deep breath and launched into "Anthrocene". "This sweet world is so much older," he sang with arms outstretched. His huge baritone voice travelled across the arena as if he'd been playing them for years. In fact, this is his first stadium tour. It's a move that's partly been prompted by Cave's ever-increasing profile as an artist. One imagines it's also because of a fundamental change that's happened in him as a person.

When Miley Cyrus released the deliriously patchy Bangerz in 2013 she was as over-exposed as any pop star has ever been, as I subtly pointed out at the time. Far less so now. Her only album in the interim has been a slightly tedious, flung-out drug folly of a Flaming Lips collaboration in 2015.

It was this album's good fortune to arrive on a miserable rainy afternoon. At other times my first impressions might be a bit harsher about its comfortable, retro dad-grooves and easily flowing sax solos, but instead I let it wrap me like a blanket, and by three tracks in it was absolutely impossible to dislike it.

London indie-rockers Wolf Alice’s debut album, My Love Is Cool, made it to no 2 in the charts a couple of years back. It was a bona fide success story and a rare thing, a gold record for a female-fronted outfit who major in grungey, ambitious post-Pixies rock. It was derivative, but also showed a feisty, admirable willingness not to be pigeonholed, especially on songs such as the ecstatic “Freazy”. Its successor initially seems destined to be even more wide-ranging, to reach headier heights, but then settles, during most of its second half, for being simply a decent album.

Let us not damn Visions of a Life with faint praise, however. There’s real meat to get teeth into. The clanging wooziness of opener “Heavenward” is immediately replaced by the sweary punk smash-up “Yuk Foo”, and then Wolf Alice really show their pop colours with the skanking, Slits-like-yet-polished “Beautifully Unconventional” and the lush “Don’t Delete the Kisses”, which comes on like an electro-pop commingling of Blondie and Franz Ferdinand, with Ellie Rowsell doing a Pet Shop Boys-style rap in the middle.

Her rapping makes a return on the unpredictably brilliant “Sky Musings”, the lyrics for which are literary, modernist, lateral, crafted, and dramatic. The swooping themes of “Planet Hunter” are more briefly and simply cast, an oblique, intriguing, self-repudiating love-life assessment – possibly – while the theatrically building “Formidable Cool” also weaves words with aplomb. Throughout, the ghost of the Cocteau Twins spooks about but never poltergeists.

And that’s it. Apart from the final, enjoyable eight-minute title track blow-out, the latter half of the album indie-coasts along rather forgettably. Never mind. Eight out of twelve songs is a good hit rate. And four of them are corkers! Also, most of Vision of a Life’s intended listeners will quibble less about indie predictability, which makes this an authentic, slightly-left-of-centre success story.

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Overleaf: watch the video for "Beautifully Unconventional" by Wolf Alice

That this year is the 40th anniversary of 1977, the year punk rock went mainstream, shouldn’t obscure the pub rock foundations underpinning much of what was supposedly new. The Clash’s Joe Strummer had fronted pub circuit regulars The 101’ers. In 1976, the Sex Pistols regularly played West London pub The Nashville Rooms. The Damned came together after Brian James and Rat Scabies scouted the audience at a Nashville Pistols/101’ers show for potential members of the band they intended forming.

David Crosby might be entering life’s twilight but, like a tired drummer, he seems to be speeding up towards the end. Perhaps he’s simply hit a rich vein of form – the success, both artistic and critical, of 2014’s Croz, and the 2016 follow-up, Lighthouse, certainly suggest that he has.

The Horrors have always had a penchant for churning out pop-tinged gems, and on V, with help from Adele/Coldplay/Florence and the Machine producer Paul Epworth, they’ve applied their same winning formula to darker music. The album cover, a mishmash of faces, sums up V perfectly – it nods to a huge range of influences, creating something that feels larger and more engaging than all of them on their own.

“Hologram” oozes in with monolithic drums and hazy synths, storming its way to the four-minute mark before offbeat eight-bit sparkles create a solo that’s as bemusing as it is enjoyable. We’re hearing a highly polished version of a band who’ve always sounded highly polished. Next track, “Press Exit To Enter Hell” and single “Weighed Down” showcase classic Horrors, boasting sunny vibes and wandering structure.

The weirder moments of the album are among the best. The muddy “Ghost” is arguably the most out-there moment on the album, as its croaking organ loop explodes into a colourful blend of Americana, post-rock, and glitch-pop. “Machine” has an industrial slant which gives its catchiness a sense of danger and unease, whilst “Gathering” slowly turns from bland indie-folk to something that wouldn’t sound particularly out of place on Bowie’s Blackstar. It’s perhaps the most hopeful song on the album, with the refrain, “There’s someone out there, seeing everything and who knows what you know”, coming across as comforting rather than cosmically creepy.

V is an ambitious album, coming in at just under 55 minutes; whilst many of the songs could easily have been shortened into more accessible pop hits, their commitment to slowly building each song might just be what makes The Horrors still so enigmatic five albums in.

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Overleaf: Watch the video for "Machine" by The Horrors

Foo Fighters are a global superstar act. And why not, as the late film critic Barry Norman used to say. After seeing them at Glastonbury, they strike me as an irresistible proposition; their Sonic Highways TV documentaries, about music in American cities, are superb; and Dave Grohl, even after decades in the spotlight, still seems like a top fellow. Someone said to me recently they didn’t like him because he was “too nice”. That’s stupid, isn’t it? Who wouldn’t want to share a beer over a barbecue with him?

Concrete and Gold involved a lot of barbecuing. Recorded at a studio complex on Sunset Boulevard with pop producer Greg Kurstin of Adele/Sia/Lily Allen fame, each day would end with a big old meat-fry and booze-up. Others in nearby studios would join in. Thus, this is likely the only rock album to feature a member of Boyz II Men (as well as backing vocal appearances from Justin Timberlake and Alison Mosshart). It comes across as a shiny, giant stadium rock event, so polished it glimmers, like ELO having it out with Cheap Trick or, on the monster-riffing “La Dee Da”, The Sweet. The enjoyment in its making is more than evident.

Grohl always wants to challenge himself, and recent albums have had parameters set to achieve this, but his band would benefit enormously from a complete musical rethink. They’re so talented and engaged with what they do, yet while they're masters of the vast melodic chorus, and of filling every inch of sonic canvas to build a MASSIVE sound, the format for their songs is predictable. And they also drift into vintage rock pastiche, especially on the title track, which is, in essence, a tribute to Pink Floyd's “Comfortably Numb”. Never mind. Songs such as the Queen-meets-Muse monster “The Sky Is a Neighbourhood” are air-punching gig-slayers, while “Happy Ever After (Zero Hour)” showcases Grohl in Cat Stevens-ish catchy campfire mode.

Concrete and Gold is fun, it’s good-natured and full of verve, and there are parts of it that zing, but this is Foo Fighters' ninth album. Don’t they ever feel like really changing things up? Maybe not. It works for them, after all, and they enjoy it. Then again, someone just popped their head around the door and said, “Is this Foo Fighters? Why do they always sound the same?”

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Overleaf: Watch the video for Foo Fighters "The Sky is a Neighbourhood"

The one-time drummer of the Beatles is all about peace and love. Even when he takes to YouTube to tell his fans to stop writing to him, he does so with peace and love. All you need, it would appear, is love. And peace. But mainly love – and more of it, if at all possible. 

Gary Numan famously has a devoted fanbase. For this album he had a live video feed that allowed them, for a small fee, to watch him in the studio, working on it from conception to completion. Unlike any of his peers from the post-punk years, he draws new young fans to his contemporary releases. His 21^st century career has seen him growing more and more gothic, heading far into industrial-electronic Nine Inch Nails territory, albeit with his own twist. He is many leagues away from the pristine synth-pop that made his name circa 1979-81.

Numan’s last few albums have grown progressively more and more morose, sacrificing his pop sensibilities at the altar of gloom’n’doom. The last one, Splinter (Songs From a Broken Mind), was unremittingly dirge-like. Savage, however, has an unlikely bounce, and is the best thing he’s done in at least a decade. It’s a concept piece, imagining a future world where resources are gone, all is desert, where “human kindness and decency are just a dim and distant memory”. Numan always had a thing for sci-fi. Indeed, post-apocalypyic Mad Max imagery influenced one of his less successful mid-Eighties looks. Savage is, then, as gloomy as ever, overlaid with Numan’s ongoing focus on biblical imagery and the perils of Christian dogma. What makes it is the sound, which is amped, widescreen, techno and adventurous.

Co-producer Ade Fenton has long been Numan’s partner in the studio, and he excels himself here. Songs such as “Ghost Nation” and “My Name Is Ruin” have a crunchy, granular electronic feel, but are also epic. And for fans of “the old stuff” there are even hints of the minor key synth riffs that originally made Numan’s name (especially on “What God Intended”). Numan moved to LA a few years ago and it’s as if the hugeness of the landscape has filtered into his music.  

From “Bed of Thorns” to Vangelis-like closer “Broken”, there’s also a heavy Middle Eastern flavour to the album’s melodic make-up, a muezzin wail translated to stadium electronics. The lyrics, of course, run along the lines of “I’ll show you ruin/I’ll show you heartbreak/I’ll show you loving/And sorrow and darkness”, but this time he’s unafraid of a big chorus. You can imagine “When the World Comes Apart” being sung en masse by fans.

Gary Numan’s latest album surprises by taking what he’s been steadily doing for a decade and a half, and reinventing it, boosting it, increasing its vibrancy and electronic power.

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Overleaf: watch the video for Gary Numan "My Name is Ruin"