This hyped anonymous duo match the oddness of their costumes with shredding metal, microtonal flourishes and Dalek-style vocals

From Saguenay, Quebec
Recommended if you like Holy Fuck, Prescott, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard
Up next New LP Angine de Poitrine Volume II released 3 April. Touring the UK in May

In 2023, two young men – their earthly identities a jealously guarded secret – began “a joke that spilled into reality” intended to simulate something like its namesake heart condition. Weary of the solemn aura that attaches to guitar rock, they began playing what their website describes as “mantra-rock dada pythago-cubiste” as Angine de Poitrine. It is a joke delivered with mesmerising finesse.

After starting out as a child actor, the US artist found music. Now co-writing with Phoebe Bridgers, Haim and Kim Deal, her dogged, DIY career has been powered by conviction

The title of Morgan Nagler’s solo debut, I’ve Got Nothing to Lose, and I’m Losing It, speaks to the sort of wisdom you can only accrue after several decades in the game, the kind that compels you to put your name to an album for the first time at the age of 47. But Nagler’s MO was there from day one, as an 11-year-old child actor going for a bit part as a popular girl on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. “I showed up and there were 200 girls there,” says Nagler. “I remember thinking, I’m never gonna get this. So I decided to read the lines as a super-nerd.” The producers rewrote the part and hired her to kiss Carlton.

Today, Nagler lives in the same neighbourhood as Will Smith himself – not Bel-Air but a semi-rustic enclave of Malibu, California, albeit in the guesthouse of her friends’ place rather than a celeb mansion. She started acting around age five, after her family moved from rural Oregon to California. She did it for two decades, taking parts in shows including Frasier, Star Trek and Clueless. But, at 26, Nagler jacked it all in to pursue music after realising how fulfilled she was playing guitar in her trailer between takes. Some people told her she was making a mistake, but she knew otherwise. Music, says Nagler, “is the only thing that makes me feel connected in any meaningful way. For me, that’s way more important than comfort or stability. I’ve always had this blind faith.”

She co-wrote Gracie Abrams’ hit album then struck out solo, winning a fervent cult for her funny, wordy songs. As her tour hits the UK, she explains why imperfection is so important in pop

Backstage at the Berlin venue Huxleys Neue Welt, Audrey Hobert is showing me around her dressing room. On the 27-year-old pop star’s second time outside the US, the novelty of having local snacks on the rider hasn’t dimmed, although her enthusiasm for chocolate thins can’t distract from what’s going on across the room. A comically overlong beige trenchcoat hangs on a rail, the excess length puddling on the floor. Two sets of joke-shop Groucho Marx glasses sit on the dressing table, the original black brows and moustache replaced with orange fluff to blend with Hobert’s vivid strawberry blond. “Those glasses are not flattering,” says Hobert. Having matching hair under the giant plastic nose, she says, “makes it more flattering”.

In a few hours, Hobert will start her set standing on a ladder that is concealed by the coat, wearing the glasses, miming on a prop banjo and singing a peppy song about charming strangers called I Like to Touch People. After it ends, the lights dim, Hobert climbs down and swaps to a regular-sized trenchcoat. Despite the changeover being entirely visible, the lights come back up as if to say “Hey presto!” – the trompe l’oeil of high-budget pop stagecraft remade as slapstick.

The enigmatic Bradford producer is moving into eerie new territory informed by folklore and delivered with a tangibly menacing low end

From Bradford, UK
Recommended if you like Adrian Sherwood, Kris Baha, Guerilla Welfare
Up next New EP Don’t Forget the Ritual released on 28 February

Miles J Paralysis maintains a low profile, with just a handful of releases available on Bandcamp and a sparse, faceless Instagram presence. The enigma suits the music he has been making and sharing under the alias since early last year: dark, dubby and complete with obscure vocal samples and titles such as Always Liked Scarecrows and Cursed Moor.

The Londoner defies classification, writing, producing and arranging her unique mix of neo-soul, R&B, indie and grunge – and gathering some big-name backers along the way

From London
Recommend if you like Rochelle Jordan, Ragz Originale, Sailorr
Up next New music due later this year

Natanya tears genres open and rebuilds them in her own image. Her drums swing loose and jazzy over heavy 808s; synths drift dreamily before snapping into gritty guitar riffs. Writing, producing and arranging all her own work, she weaves together neo-soul silk, R&B groove, indie edge, and flashes of grunge, all carried by a buttery falsetto that nods to Aaliyah, Amy Winehouse, Janet Jackson and early Destiny’s Child.

Taylor, who did for Ghanaian music what his friend Fela Kuti did for Nigeria, has been called the greatest rhythm guitarist in history

Ghanaian musician Ebo Taylor, a definitive force behind the highlife genre, has died age 90.

His son Kweku Taylor announced the news on Sunday: “The world has lost a giant. A colossus of African music. Ebo Taylor passed away yesterday; a day after the launch of Ebo Taylor music festival and exactly a month after his 90th birthday, leaving behind an unmatched artistry legacy. Dad, your light will never fade.”

Dressed in Sunday school apparel and singing exclusively in Dutch, this unorthodox five-piece embrace clinical chaos

From Kapelle, Holland
Recommended if you like Black Midi, King Crimson, YHWH Nailgun
Up next New single Maalstroom out now

Tight-fitted in scrimpy Sunday school apparel, Grote Geelstaart – Dutch for great yellowtail fish – make music that’s decidedly less orthodox than appearances suggest. Drums skirmish with frighteningly efficient, jackhammer velocity; synths and guitars buzz and ring like fire alarms; the bass rumbles like a jammed freighter engine. Grote Geelstaart’s clinical chaos goes hand in hand with vocalist/guitarist Luuk Bosma’s primal punk dramaturgy, reminiscent of Nick Cave, James Chance and underrated Dutch punk thespians De Kift. This MO translates wonderfully to Grote Geelstaart’s Zeelandic roots, a place where an intricate network of dykes is built and maintained to keep the unforgiving North Sea at bay: human ingenuity v lawless elements.

(Sacred Bones)
The Manchester/Berlin band’s second album refines their industrial-club sound, as physical and hyper-detailed as being dragged under by a wave and admiring the flotsam

Mandy, Indiana are not a band inclined to make life easy for themselves. They wanted to record their debut album, 2023’s I’ve Seen a Way, in a Peak District cave known as the Devil’s Arse, although budget restrictions meant they had to settle for one day in Somerset’s Wookey Hole caverns. The Manchester/Berlin-based four-piece’s new album, Urgh, was written in what they’ve called “an intense residency at an eerie studio house” near Leeds; at the time, singer Valentine Caulfield and drummer Alex Macdougall were both undergoing multiple rounds of surgery. Given the industrial, siren-like intensity of their music, in which Caulfield chants about personal and societal horrors in her native French, impounding themselves in such a place might have seemed unnecessarily masochistic.

Mandy, Indiana seem to feel a moral imperative to embrace extremes. Caulfield has often reiterated her (accurate) stance that “if you’re not angry, then you’re not paying attention”; her incantatory lyrics to new song Dodecahedron indict complacency in the face of a burning world. Given the grievous state of things, the band’s short-circuiting assault may hold about as much appeal for some listeners as sticking your fingers in a live socket – but for those inclined to catharsis, they also fully understand the imperative to push beyond merely observing injustice to viscerally embody its head-spinning force. Otherwise, what’s the point?

Theo Zhykharyev, the Ukrainian wizard working low-profile under this brand since 2017 has pivoted to a new realm which blends ferocious energy with freewheeling fun

From London
Recommend if you like Devo, Home Front, Snõõper
Up next New album Bridge of Sacrifice released 13 March

Theo Zhykharyev is one of those brilliant weirdos capable of turning wild ideas into reality. Since starting Powerplant as a bedroom recording project in 2017, a couple of years after he left Ukraine to study in London, he has released records built around fizzing electro-punk, dungeon synth and treble-heavy hardcore, concocting Dungeons & Dragons-inspired role-playing adventures to accompany some of them, while slinging visually arresting DIY merch through his Arcane Dynamics label. Yet even coming amid an output this freewheeling, his upcoming new record is full of surprises.

The singer-songwriter has donated access to his music archive to ‘ease the unwarranted stress and threats’ Greenlanders have experienced from the US government

Neil Young has donated a year’s worth of access to his music and documentary archive to the people of Greenland after the territory’s future became the subject of a fraught dispute with the US.

“I hope my music and music films will ease some of the unwarranted stress and threats you are experiencing from our unpopular and hopefully temporary government,” Young wrote in a statement on his website, Neil Young Archives, which offers comprehensive access to the 80-year-old songwriter’s recorded and live catalogues and other output.

Rapper, now known as Ye, apologises to his family and to the Black community and says he loves Jews, blaming his bipolar disorder for his ‘poor judgment and reckless behaviour’

Kanye West has taken out a full-page advert in the Wall Street Journal apologising for his antisemitic behaviour. “I am not a Nazi or an antisemite,” he wrote. “I love Jewish people.”

In a letter titled “To Those I’ve Hurt”, he attributed his inflammatory actions, including making profoundly offensive statements and selling T-shirts bearing swastikas, to his bipolar-1 disorder, which he said he developed as a result of medical oversight failing to diagnose a frontal-lobe injury sustained in a car crash in 2002.

To Those I’ve Hurt:

Twenty-five years ago, I was in a car accident that broke my jaw and caused injury to the right frontal lobe of my brain. At the time, the focus was on the visible damage – the fracture, the swelling, and the immediate physical trauma. The deeper injury, the one inside my skull, went unnoticed.

The producers who helped define the sound of pop music in the 90s and 00s are in dispute over earnings from their final album as NERD

Chad Hugo is suing Pharrell Williams, his production partner in the Neptunes, over claims that Williams owes Hugo up to $1m from their final album as NERD, 2017’s No One Ever Really Dies.

The Neptunes defined the sound of pop music in the late 90s and early 00s, producing for artists including Kelis, Britney Spears, Beyoncé, Clipse and Justin Timberlake. As NERD, they released five albums.

Not Such an Innocent Girl makes No 1 for single sales and downloads, after revelations about family rift

• ‘My mum went so far as to call me evil’: nine things you need to know about the Beckham family feud

There is a light at the end of the Beckhams’ hebdomadis horribilis: Victoria Beckham has the UK’s highest-selling single of the week with Not Such an Innocent Girl, originally released in 2001.

After her eldest son Brooklyn’s bombshell revelations about the rift with his parents, including his horrified account of his mother dancing “on” him at his wedding to Nicola Peltz in 2022, fans taking mater and pater Beckham’s side in the celeb gossip of the year showed their support by buying MP3s of Beckham’s debut solo single. (Her first effort without the Spice Girls, 2000’s Out of Your Mind, was a collaboration with Dane Bowers of Another Level.)

The LA-based pop duo are sending a jolt through TikTok with maximalist songs that emote wildly in every direction

From Los Angeles
Recommend if you like Erasure, Chappell Roan, Jade
Up next Debut album Big Disgrace out 13 March

Just when you think pop is finally moving away from the synth-heavy 80s sound, another thrilling new act comes along to say: “Nope!” With shades of Erasure and a good dollop of theatre kid energy, Haute & Freddy are the Regency-styled freaks sending a jolt through TikTok. Their latest single Dance the Pain Away is the year’s first true banger, a dazzling sad-pop production that bursts through the January gloom, thrusts a spritzer in your hand and drags you to the dancefloor.

The number of small venues shrank by just nine in 2025, but more than half of them reported making no profit, while employment in the sector dropped almost 22%

The number of grassroots music venues (GMV) in the UK shrank in effect by just nine in 2025, the lowest rate of annual decline since 2018.

Thirty venues closed permanently between July 2024 and 2025 and 48 ceased functioning as GMVs, citing financial viability, change in ownership and eviction or redevelopment. However, 69 spaces that had previously ceased operating as GMVs returned to the sector.

From David Bowie being reincarnated as a kettle to Reese Witherspoon in space, our writers list the TV head-scratchers they can’t get enough of

With a gun to my head, I couldn’t tell you with any degree of accuracy what Tim Robinson’s The Chair Company is actually about. In terms of straight plot, it’s the story of a man who is drawn into a conspiracy after a chair breaks when he sits on it. But beyond that, it’s honestly anyone’s guess.

The woodwind player who taught André 3000 music theory releases his searching debut album next month

From Los Angeles
Recommend if you like Miguel Atwood Ferguson, Shabaka Hutchings’s flute music, the Coltranes
Up next Debut album And So It Is released 13 February

For woodwind players, breath is everything: the lifeforce of artistry, the thing that furnishes sound with personality. But a few years ago, the Los Angeles saxophonist Aaron Shaw realised he was becoming increasingly breathless. In 2023, aged 27, he was diagnosed with bone marrow failure, meaning he wasn’t producing enough oxygen-carrying red blood cells. A change of approach was required.

After a series of cryptic billboards teasing fans, the As It Was singer reveals the title and release date of his first record since 2022

After a brief teaser campaign in which billboards around the world promised “we belong together” and “see you very soon”, Harry Styles has announced his fourth solo album.

Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally will be released on 6 March. It was produced by Kid Harpoon, the British songwriter and producer who has worked on all of Styles’ previous albums. The artwork shows the 31-year-old pop star wearing sunglasses and ducking beneath a disco ball seemingly suspended from the night sky.

The ad campaign ended in late 2025, the Swedish streaming giant confirmed, having previously said, despite protests, that it did not violate advertising policies

Spotify is no long running advertisements for the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the streaming service has confirmed, after the Trump administration campaign ended in late 2025.

“There are currently no ICE ads running on Spotify,” the Swedish company said in a statement. “The advertisements mentioned were part of a US government recruitment campaign that ran across all major media and platforms.”

Somewhere between record label and artist project, False Aralia harks back to microhouse and dub techno with its deep, detailed productions

From San Francisco
Recommended if you like Rhythm and Sound, Ricardo Villalobos, Vladislav Delay
Up next Double LP from Topdown Dialectic released in spring

False Aralia disappears into a misty gulch somewhere between record label and artist project. It’s ostensibly a label, where each EP has a different named artist, and each sleeve, designed by Nick Almquist, features a different abstract expressionist monochrome doodle. But all the tracks are numbered, not named, and each EP is actually the work of just one producer, Izaak Schlossman (credited as IS), joined by a changing cast of collaborators.