As an authentic artist, PJ Harvey manages to remain true to her essence as well as constantly shifting her creative stance. Each of her albums has been a leap forward, and yet anchored in a sound and style that are immediately recognisable as hers.

This new album, the first in seven years, is in character – sensual, mysterious, a mixture of introverted softness and extrovert violence. It's very good, full of surprises, slow to reveal itself, like a really well-accomplished piece of poetry.

You could say the catalyst behind it all was Rocketman himself. During his Apple Music Show, celebrated CBE Elton John named Gabriels’ self-released EP, Love and Hate in a Different Time, one of the most seminal releases in the last ten years. At that time, little was known about the US-UK trio. When they eventually signed a major record deal a few months later, there wasn’t a single photograph of the three of them in the same room.

A “back to basics” album is a risky thing. When an act has expanded into big, lavish or experimental production, it’s not a simple act to strip that away. Trying to go back to the intimacy or spontaneity of early work can feel forced: they may find they’ve become reliant on the possibilities of studio craft, or simply evolved into a different kind of artist. U2’s recent horrorshow of a catalogue-reworking album, for example, shows just how laboured such an exercise can be.

“Summer Glass” is The Greater Wings’ fourth track. A synthesiser pulse evoking water dripping from eaves unites with glistening harp arpeggios and muted strings. The voice weaving through this is distant, shrouded in fog. Lyrics are about “being ready to travel again,” wanting “to be whole enough to risk again.” Atmospherically, there are intimations of the intense 1969 Jerry Yester and Judy Henske LP Farewell Aldebaran and Beach House at their most oblique.

“There's a richness and a true depth here that places Jeopardy alongside (U2’s debut album) Boy as early Eighties tonics for ailing mainstream-rock. The Sound are on to a winner. There isn't one track here that isn't thoroughly compulsive. Overall it's a vastly impressive sound, with as much energy as I've heard on any record all year…the result is a form of sheer power-rock that doesn't make you blush or grimace.”

Dartmoor-born folk star Seth Lakeman has an illustrious album catalogue behind him, and this is the general release of a limited-edition vinyl released earlier this year for Record Store Day.

Richard Jobson may be the only original member left standing in first wave Scottish post-punkers, the Skids’ line up. But almost 45 years on from the release of their debut album, Sacred to Dance, the band is again pumping out anthemic rockers in the same vein as when they first started out.

TUESDAY 27^TH JUNE 2023

I wake up around 11.00, get outta bed around 12.00.

And that’s it again for another year. Oh Glastonbury. A fever dream where the time of reality stops as you hop on a ride to a land of magic.

Barb Jungr has made a speciality – some might even say her own art form – out of taking well-known songs, and discovering far more subtlety and meaning in them than people ever knew they had. As she explains in the notes accompanying My Marquee: “ I love well-constructed songs with lyrics that, however apparently simple, can yield other levels of interpretation and subtlety.” One writer has called what she finds in these songs “confessional depth”.