Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield never set out to play country music. In her teens, she performed in a high school power pop band, The Ackleys, alongside her twin sister Allison. A few years later, the siblings formed PS Elliot, a riot grrrl group. They even nabbed a support slot with explosive punks Ceremony in their hometown of Birmingham, Alabama (ruffling a lot of feathers in the hardcore scene at the time).

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.

Crashing chords are followed by a spindly, untrammelled solo guitar. After this subsides, the singer lays out the issue: “I try, I cry, I just can't see why. It's clear, she's near, the sights and sounds I hear.” He’s distressed, his anguish palpable, All the while, slabs of guitar squall get ever-more edgy, increasingly wigged out. There are more solos which aren’t far from those of The Velvet Underground’s “I Heard Her Call my Name.”

Julia Holter has created a long line of albums that trade on sophisticated poetry, both lyrical and musical, and her latest, perhaps the most adventurous of all, inhabits a world where nothing is certain, narratives are disjointed, and the imagination of the listener is left to run free.

Some icons sit back and bask. Kim Gordon does not. She has occasionally intimated that her New York cool and relentless work rate may be down to a smidgeon of imposter syndrome, even after all her years on the frontline. Whatever the truth of it, her output since Sonic Youth (and her marriage) dissolved in 2011 has been prodigious.

Just as it’s not the best idea to judge a book by its cover, it’s also not advisable to judge an album by its insipid title. Led Zeppelin IV and Leonard Cohen’s Ten New Songs being obvious cases in point.

A few records changed music. One such was “The Love I Lost (Part 1)” by Harold Melvin & The Bluenotes. Issued as a single by the Philadelphia International label in August 1973, its release introduced what would become a major characteristic of disco music. This was the first time a particular groove was heard; the percussive use of the drum kit’s cymbals with an emphasis on the hi-hat.

Released yesterday to coincide with International Women’s Day, The Sisterhood will surely prove to be one of the brightest jewels in Sarah Jane Morris’s varicoloured discography.

Back in 1979, Koko operated as The Music Machine. As such, the Camden Town venue lent its name to the film Music Machine, marketed as the British equivalent of Saturday Night Fever. Buying into this vision of the North London setting as a hot-bed of dance-floor action required a suspension of belief: at the time, the then-grubby Music Machine’s staple bookings were metal, punk, post-punk and the emerging Two-Tone bands. This was no disco.