“Reaffirmation” is the sound of a San Francisco ballroom in 1968. The 12-minute long track opens mysteriously with what might be a Mellotron on the flute setting. A bubbling bass guitar arrives, along with jazzy piano. At 02.50, the tempo picks up and the guitar, which until then has delicately picked its way through the arrangement, begins to soar. There’s a vaguely funky section and, just over half-way in, a dive into an almost free-form spiralling section. This is top-notch psychedelia.

Lil Nas X is good at being a pop star. Like, what could pop culture need more than a young, flamboyant, witty gay rapper from the deep south who can top the US country charts then just when it appeared he might not be able to live up to the success of “Old Town Road” lap dance Satan in the video for the Latin-tinged “Call me by Your Name” and storm to mega sales all over again?

Dylan’s 1980s weren’t great in terms of critical acclaim. As an emerging new fan, I knew that first hand from the scathing reviews accorded Shot of Love by the British music press when it was released in the summer of 1981, it seemed about as welcome as a door-knocking Jehovah’s Witness first thing on a Sunday morning. 

Following the death last year from COVID-19 of keyboard player Dave Greenfield, it appears the The Stranglers’ five decade journey may finally be drawing to a close. They bucked all odds by maintaining a path after singer Hugh Cornwall left in 1990, and the last two decades, especially, have seen them hold steady, both as a live draw and with critically respected albums.

Iron Maiden are in very many senses as English, as camp and as ridiculous as Christmas pantomime, even down to the “HE’S BEHIND YOU!” looming of their vast onstage zombie mascot Eddie. Which is not to say there’s nothing to them: far from it. Just like pantomime, their durability shows how much they speak to something deep and archetypal in their audience’s spirit.

In an interview with Zane Lowe about her new album, Halsey said that the producers wanted to “make some really weird choices”. This was, you suspect, the intention: you don’t bring Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross of Nine Inch Nails onboard to produce the follow-up to your mainstream pop breakthrough without being open to something pretty weird.

It’s a decade since we sadly lost the talents of Gerry Rafferty to liver failure in 2011, at the age of 63, but this Friday sees the posthumous release of his 11^th album, Rest in Blue.

Despite their implosion three years earlier, 1977 was a good year for The Stooges. The CBS budget label Embassy reissued their 1973 Raw Power album in the wake of their songs cropping up in the repertoires of The Damned and Sex Pistols.

Following in the slipstream of wide critical acclaim for posthumous album Mutator, released earlier this year, comes Alan Vega After Dark by the former Suicide frontman. It’s a starkly different album to its predecessor, swapping concrete collisions and considered collages for the tremolo tones of vintage rock and roll, the driving krautrock energy of 70s Dusseldorf and the space cadet cadence of… well, of Alan Vega.

What is the Shadow Kingdom and how do you gain access to it? In Bob Dylan’s case, it may be found in the film noir classics of his birth – 1941’s The Maltese Falcon onward – and it’s those noir settings, artfully condensed and reduced to a signature sauce, that dictate the tone of the dim-lit tableaux that decorate the settings for Dylan’s first foray into online streaming.