Reading Festival’s 2024 line up was the embodiment of playlist culture. Once a key contender in the UK’s Rock and Alternative market, then a rite of passage for students partying their way into their first year of university, it’s fair to say that the festival has experienced some uncertainty in its identity in recent years.

Miguel Zenón’s Golden City (Miel Music) is an ambitious album. Its ten tracks and a postlude seek to portray “the beauty and resilience that give San Francisco its soul”.

I won’t give it loads about the atmosphere and attendees at We Out Here – suffice to say that in its fifth edition, it has maintained all the strengths I mentioned last year, with the added benefit of slicker-operating infrastructure having ironed out any remaining wrinkles in its new Dorset site. The navigability, sound levels, smooth running bars etc were all just a little better, which only added to the good vibes that have been there from the start.

Some pointers suggest how Finland’s Shadowplay might sound. They took their name from a Joy Division song. Their key founder member was Brandi Ifgray – born Visa Ruokonen. He had been in the final line-up of first-generation Finnish punk band Ratsia. Add in Shadowplay’s 1988 first album Touch and Glow’s cover version of Gang Of Four’s “Damaged Goods” and that would seem to nail it. Dark then, with the edge of punk.

Whether it’s maturing or selling out, the tendency for rock bands to soften and smooth down their sound is understandable and, for fans, usually dispiriting – edge, purity, and strangeness evaporate as the dollars roll in.

I had been softened up for the Medicine Festival by a recent visit to the global music extravaganza WOMAD – a trio of us met a guy called Paul aka SpriITman – an ex-IT expert who after a health crisis realised he was a healer. Bear with me on this.

Jon Hopkins is on a journey, and we’re fortunate that he feels he can share the trip with us. His latest offering takes the listener beyond the paths opened up in Singularity (2018) and Music for Psychedelic Therapy (2021).

The music of Brit alt-rocker Cassy Brooking, AKA Cassyette, comes from the emo school of pop-metal. Her 2021 debut single was, appropriately, called “Dear Goth”, she’s much-hyped by Kerrang, and has been tour support for both Bring Me the Horizon and My Chemical Romance. All these are apt reference points for the music on her debut album which is feisty, occasionally spicy, and – contradictorily – very precisely produced to suggest a gnarly aesthetic.

The UK festival scene has been going through a bit of a difficult time in the last couple of years, with a number of events closing down due to financial problems. This has obviously hit the “boutique” end of the marketing hardest, with several smaller capacity, specialist weekends going to the wall. Stowaway Festival seems to be bucking this trend, however, and opened for its third year of business last weekend.

For a record whose subject matter involves unfaithfulness, ageing, loneliness, fear of death, darkness, sorrow, battles, haunting, sleeplessness and struggling to breathe, this is a lot of fun. But then Susanna Wallumrød has always leavened fathomless darkness with wry wit.

Early on in her career she was covering songs like Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” and even Kiss’s “Crazy Crazy Nights” as icy ballads, and throughout she has always had an arch cool that has allowed her to gaze into the abyss and relay what its gaze says back to her as startlingly enjoyable music.