From Thundercat’s all-star funk to Kacey Musgraves’ hymns to solitude, we look at some of our favourite music of the last six months from across the pop spectrum

• Listen to a Spotify playlist of every album here

Full of handcrafted care and the rootsy soul of her country origins, this gently elated song is a reminder of what fans love about Swift … and the film series

Taylor Swift does not fear a challenge. She’s broken records then broken those records; taken Grammy snubs as a sign she just has to work harder; mounted probably the most physically exhausting tour of all time. But in writing a song for Toy Story’s cowgirl Jessie, she’s set herself a deranged task: how could anyone outdo Randy Newman’s devastating When She Loved Me, Jessie’s song about being abandoned by her owner, Emily, from Toy Story 2?

Newman’s songs for the Disney Pixar series are some of the greatest film soundtrack work of all time, and Swift knows it. In a post about her song, she acknowledged the “incomparable” Newman: “You created the Toy Story musical world, and we are lucky to get to live in it.” Her own ventures into soundtrack work have never had much staying power (beyond Zayn collab I Don’t Wanna Live Forever from Fifty Shades Darker).

The loud online hate aimed at two pop stars with polar-opposite styles suggests a shrinking realm of acceptability in which women can exist. That is, you suspect, the point

For an eye-catching spring/summer 2026 look, why not try one of the infinitely fun ways you can dress up misogyny? There’s buttoned-up faux concern. The haughty pince-nez of high dudgeon. The splashy feather boa of outrage. If you’re really bold, why not the full birthday suit of naked disgust? There are far more acceptable options, apparently, than there are for actually dressing as a famous female pop star in 2026. Between the parallel uproar over extremely different outfits worn recently by CMAT and by Olivia Rodrigo, it almost seems as though there are in fact no options at all for how a woman should look in public. Funny, that.

Yesterday, the Irish and American musicians each commented on recent backlash over their appearances that came from the scummy bottom of the internet. On Sunday, CMAT performed at BBC Radio 1’s Big Weekend in Sunderland. When the BBC posted clips of her performance on Instagram, comments about her body were so vile that the broadcaster had to disable them; tellingly, clips from the same festival featuring smaller-bodied female performers still have comments enabled. “It’s been very hard to try and describe how difficult the last few days since the bbcr1 big weekend have been,” CMAT posted, saying the commentary caused her “deep sadness”.

There’s nostalgia to the New York/London duo’s lo-fi laptop sound, but their second album pushes them into vivid, weirder new territory

From Hudson valley, New York, and London
Recommended if you like the Books, Leila, Worldpeace DMT
Up next Rumspringa released 29 May

Jonah Paz and Yaelle Avtan recorded their first ever track as Ear on an iPhone in the Bard College library. That song, Nerves, pits their murmuring voices against weightless strings and barely perceptible drums. Just as it seems poised to float away altogether, the track is suddenly overtaken by a blaring bass synth that cleaves the first act’s aching plea into an emotionally fraught, black-lit banger.

The five-piece combine traditional musical styles with mountains of synths and hurried drums – rejecting computerised production in a pointed anti-AI statement

From João Pessoa, Brazil
Recommended if you like Hermeto Pascoal, Mr Bungle, King Crimson
Up next Celestial album released 7 August, touring the UK and Europe from 15 August

Thanks in part to its famed music department at the local Federal University of Paraíba, João Pessoa – the easternmost city in South America – is a hotbed of artists playing different folk styles from all over the continent. Papangu sound like all of them at the same time. The five-piece blend a long list of genres: bossa nova, the circle-dance song ciranda and forró, with its dry-tuned accordion and pulsing rhythm section, plus the more ubiquitous progressive rock and extreme metal. The band’s virtuoso chops and intensity keep their songs from buckling under the weight of those ideas, from the hurried drums to the mountains of synthesisers and pianos.

A run of immaculate albums ended in 2018 with an identity crisis and the producer becoming a kindergarten chef. Now he’s back with a blissed-out new record

When Axel Willner went to Stockholm’s Funky Chicken food truck last February, he only expected to leave with a burger. While waiting, Willner – AKA the Field, artisan of looping minimal techno masterpieces – noticed another Axel standing two places behind him. This was unlikely enough given the unpopularity of the grandpa-ish name amid 40-something Swedish men. “I was like, oh, how will they call our burgers now?” says Willner.

Unlikelier still, not least given how out of the way the spot is, the Axel was fellow Scandi club music pioneer Axel Boman, co-founder of the joyous dance label Studio Barnhus. They got chatting during the long wait. “He asked if I had any music, what am I doing, because I had been silent for a very long time,” says Willner. He left with an invitation to send Boman some tracks, which eventually resulted in a new label deal and his first record since 2018, Now You Exist.

The earworm wizard blends sample-heavy electronic beats with sugary vocal highs and bassy lows, giving authentic voice to England’s fringes

From London via Brighton
Recommended if you like Jawnino, Fakemink, Jai Paul
Up next Engine Heartbreak EP released 20 May

Not many can say that Björk has played their track while DJing at the Venice Biennale, but, as of last weekend, Rian Brazil is one of them. The Brighton-born producer, also praised by pop star Lola Young, is a master of earworms, which he weaves from the sample-heavy sounds of the UK underground (see his longtime collaborator, Fakemink producer Clearo) and the saccharine highs and bassy lows of his vocals. On first listen, you might mistake the huge range of his melodies for Auto-Tune, but this, impressively, is Brazil’s raw voice, modulated vocally to achieve deeply vulnerable performances that set his sound apart from his rap-focused peers.

The Brooklyn-based artist’s songs seem to follow private trains of thought, which shift their subtle musical colours in a way that will slink in to your head, too

From Brooklyn, New York
Recommended if you like Cate Le Bon, Astrid Sonne, Julia Holter
Up next New single No Avatar out now

“No, I won’t take a photo / Just walking around with no avatar,” Frances Chang sings on No Avatar, conversational and serene against little whorls of piano, skittish drum fizz and softly flaring synths. Like Astrid Sonne’s fragmented songwriting, the Brooklyn-based musician’s songs are hard to pin down, mirroring the single’s desire to avoid outward definition. Her songs work to an internal logic, evoking a sort of uncanny domesticity: casual piano refrains, rainy percussion; the melty haze of a horizon at dusk; grooves slinking in at the end of a song like next door’s cat making itself at home. It’s a sound that shares a lot with the modern Copenhagen scene of which Sonne is a key fixture, but with more welcoming softness and warmth: Chang’s January single I Can Feel the Waves is a six-minute suite that starts out a little edgy, then yields with gorgeous warped piano and disarmingly intimate focus.

Their microtonal rock has been a huge viral hit – but are they really 333-year-old aliens inspired by Borneo monkeys? The Quebecois duo tell all

Recently, Angine de Poitrine had to get new heads. The alien-looking rock duo were not in fact born with the monochrome polka-dotted complexions and extruded faces that millions of listeners have obsessed over since they went viral this spring. Guitarist Khn has a long, twangable nose and double-necked guitar/bass; drummer Klek’s dangly proboscis bounces along to his stone-cold playing. Both are apparently 333-year-old time travellers primarily inspired by a solemn musical quartet of monkeys from Borneo. Over months of hard gigging, their handmade papier-mache masks had gone soggy from the musicians’ laboured breathing. “When I looked at mine, I was like: Jesus Christ, did I really play that much with this?” says Klek. “It was falling apart. It was like putting a Christmas box outside when it’s raining.”

But when the masks disintegrated, it was important that their more robust replacements still looked lived-in. “People have fallen in love with the band as it’s always been,” says Khn. “So we’re not gonna change everything [because] we have a bigger budget now. We’re emotionally attached to our old beaten-up costumes that have been in car accidents and are full of snot. We think people love the fact that you can feel they have lived.”

With a feral energy and a Liam Gallagher growl, the Dublin band’s beguiling music is a great evolution of a venerable genre

From Dublin
Recommended if you like Lankum, the Mary Wallopers, the Pogues
Up next Debut EP It’s a Hell of an Age out now, playing festivals this summer and touring the UK in autumn

Madra Salach means “dirty dog” in Irish, which feels about right for a group of lads bringing a feral, snarling energy to the country’s latest folk revival. Their sound builds ably on some of the architects of that resurgence – the eerie shruti box droning and carefully layered instrumentation of Lankum, the shimmering wails of Lisa O’Neill. Add a hint of Liam Gallagher to the mix – frontman Paul Banks’s voice has an astonishing force and clarity, and he affects a tempestuous, attack-and-withdraw relationship with the microphone – and you’ve got a very exciting package indeed.

(Lost Highway)
After two underwhelming pop-leaning records, the country star gets back to basics on this sparsely produced gem filled with wit and hard-won lessons

Kacey Musgraves’ seventh album feels like a sigh of relief. Since 2018’s prismatic country-pop marvel Golden Hour, the Texan has struggled to maintain a foothold in pop: 2021’s Star-Crossed wed overly high-concept breakup songs to indistinct music; 2024’s Deeper Well was a weak latte of coffee-shop folksiness and impersonal therapy speak. Middle of Nowhere sacks off all the pageantry. Subtly arranged, tinged with western swing and traditional Mexican music, the low-key sound gets back to Musgraves’ rural roots and makes a smart backdrop to these beautifully weary songs about reckoning with delusion: on the title track, Musgraves sounds gorgeously like Aimee Mann, master of the subject.

But her hooks still hit. The warm, sparky I Believe in Ghosts feels made for tired stoics to kick it together on a dusty dancefloor; femcel anthem Dry Spell pairs an unwavering rhythmic canter with a thousand-yard stare as Musgraves rues “I’m so lonely with a capital H” – she means horny, a line that doesn’t work until you figure: maybe it’s been so long she can’t even remember the word. And the spartan arrangements let more of Musgraves’ conversational wit and side-eye shine through. The hopeful romance of Back on the Wagon, where a woman swears her busted man has changed, and the sweet pedal steel breeze of Loneliest Girl, where another insists she’s happy alone, are two sides of the same tenderly flipped coin: how many ways do we have to kid ourselves to get by? Horses and Divorces is country’s Girl, So Confusing: a reconciliatory – but raucous – duet with old foe Miranda Lambert that resounds with the lightness of letting go.

The trio combine sludgy rock, homemade electronics and squawking into a watertight groove that makes light work of their complex musicianship

From Glasgow, Scotland
Recommended if you like Horse Lords, Melt-Banana, abrasive saxophone
Up next Album out now, touring the UK and Ireland from June

Taupe’s lawless mix of “not jazz”, sludgy rock and homemade electronics hits like a shock of cold water to the face. The Glasgow-based trio are a formidable live band: thunderously loud, crushingly tight, quick to surrender all control and trust-fall their way through wild improvisations. Their third album, Waxing | Waning, out now on Prague’s Minority Records, finally captures that power, as well as the band’s oddball humour and free-flowing imagination.

Ex-Spice Girl Sporty is ready to take your questions on everything from her Wannabe days to DJing, triathlons and her ninth solo album, Sweat

Some former girl- and boyband stars spend a lifetime trying to escape the image that made them famous. Not Melanie C. Since the Spice Girls debuted 30 years ago this summer (What’s that sound? Oh, it’s just the unadulterated violence of mortality) she has never shied away from her past as Sporty Spice. Her ninth album, Sweat, leans firmly into it. Led by its gauntlet-throwing title track, these are work-bitch bangers for the gym, the dancefloor – inspired by her pre-Spice raving youth – and quite possibly the bedroom, sung by a triathlon fiend who forged a reputation as a world-renowned DJ.

You can ask Melanie about her solo career – she’s the only Spice Girl still making music – or anything else when she sits for the Guardian’s reader interview. Perhaps her new love of the intensive competitive workout Hyrox, what the departure of Mo Salah means for her beloved Liverpool FC, why 90s nostalgia has taken over social media, whether tabloid culture is any less cruel than it used to be or how it can possibly be three decades since Wannabe changed the world.

The sibling duo’s follow-up EP spikes their off-kilter pop with new darkness, adding atmospheric balladry to their glorious racket

From South London
Recommended if you like Charli xcx, Confidence Man, Klaxons
Up next UK tour starts 21 April

If this was April 2008, Punchbag, AKA south London siblings Clara and Anders Bach, would be headlining an NME tour alongside Alphabeat and Frankmusik, while the Popjustice forum would have hailed them as the new face of “wonky pop”. The sonic calling cards of that ramshackle iPod-era micro-genre – off-kilter, unvarnished electropop piled high with myriad other genres – were streaked across Punchbag’s debut single Fuck It. A sweaty riot of 90s rave, maximalist bass and Clara’s spit-soaked vocals, it felt tailor-made for soundtracking an awkward snog on Skins. Last May it was joined by three other frantic bangers on the duo’s debut EP, I’m Not Your Punchbag, the highlight of which, You Used to Be So Sexy, sounds like a GarageBand-produced the Veronicas had they grown up in east London as opposed to Brisbane.

(Geffen)
On this giddy first taste of the US pop star’s third album, she sets aside her rock bona fides to revel in the opulent flush of a crush-come-true. But why does it seem so doomed?

Is there anything better than an ink-fresh pop lyric so nailed-on that you can’t believe 60 years of songwriters didn’t get there first? Or like, at least 20, ever since Googling crushes became an entirely normal component of modern romance: “One night I was bored in bed / And stalked you on the internet,” Olivia Rodrigo sings on her comeback single, a casual admission with its own innate melody destined in turn to stalk listeners’ brains all summer. Her perfect couplet heralds an ecstatic chorus about the giddy terror of getting exactly what you wanted, exactly how you wanted it, and barely being able to breathe or stifle puking: “The most alive I’ve ever been / But kiss me and I might drop dead!”

Acute, obsessive, unsparing songs about romance, always with a self-aware handle on their intensity – or a wink at how lovestruck girls get labelled “crazy” – have become Rodrigo’s trademark. (She calls her benign form of online stalking “feminine intuition”.) Now 23, she broke out as a pop star in 2021, after a lifetime as a Disney Channel fixture, and pulled off one of the quickest, most effective and indelible acts of redefinition of any musician to emerge from that entertainment monolith. (Even her pop peer and fellow Disney alum Sabrina Carpenter took five albums to find success on her terms.) Rodrigo’s debut single proper, Drivers License, was an epic heartbreak ballad, though the sticking points of her debut album, Sour, were the pop-punk ragers. She convincingly translated that into her second album, 2023’s Guts, which drew on the influence of her mum’s riot grrrl records; she scored mentorship from St Vincent, brought the Breeders to support her on tour and got the Cure’s Robert Smith to duet with her when she headlined Glastonbury in 2025.

The Grammy and Emmy-winning ‘first lady of Celtic music’ was credited with popularising Irish music and lyrics

Moya Brennan, the lead singer of Irish folk group Clannad, has died aged 73.

In her later years, Brennan had been living with pulmonary fibrosis and faced the possibility of a double lung transplant. A statement from her family said she died peacefully in the company of loved ones in her native County Donegal.

Pushing his winsome songwriting into rootsier territory with a little help from co-producer MJ Lenderman, the New Yorker’s debut album is primed to soundtrack your summer

From New York City, New York
Recommended if you like The Clean, This is Lorelei, The Feelies
Up next Debut album Hercules out 10 July

Tracey Nelson’s self-titled 2025 debut EP was one of the year’s best lesser-heard gems: Five tracks of sparkling, winsome indie-rock that recalled classic antipodean jangle bands the Clean, Twerps and Dick Diver. Tracks such as New Years Flowers and Just Shoot Me Now suggested that Austin Noll – the NYC-based singer-songwriter behind the project – was a classicist with a keen sense for bright melodies and self-deprecating one-liners.

Electric Ballroom, London
The era-defining duo’s ultras are suitably spoiled in the first of this intimate five-day run, showered with rarities that put a different spin on their well-known history

‘Tonight …” says Neil Tennant, with a suave pause, “no hits!” The crowd roars. “B-sides?” he teases. “Album tracks! And what we’re calling – although really it’s both of those – fan favourites.” It is a rare gig when the singer of a history-defining pop band can promise that no one will be hearing some of the best songs of all time tonight – West End Girls, Always on My Mind, Rent, to name some of several dozen – and get a hero’s welcome. But Pet Shop Boys have been on their Dreamworld greatest hits tour since 2022, one that’s barely even made room for their excellent and underrated 2024 album Nonetheless on the set list, let alone many wildcards. The Pet Shop Boys casual has been lavishly fatted in recent years. The Pet Shop Boys ultra, however, has been a little parched.

It’s something this five-day run of intimate shows at Camden’s Electric Ballroom seeks to remedy, drawing from the band’s margins to promote a new tome on their highly intentional visual history: in typical one-word fashion, the tour is called Obscure. Tennant and synths foil Chris Lowe announced beforehand that they had rehearsed 35 possible songs from their 42-year run, but their enduring commitment to the single format, with its considered B-sides and remixes, makes the possibilities endless: one fan compiled a pre-game playlist of 226 “B-sides and non-singles”, and doubted even then that it was comprehensive. Tennant has a tray containing the lyrics – fair play, given that two songs tonight have never been played before, while others are getting their first trip out of the cupboard in decades.

Brady Ebert, a former member of the Grammy-winning US hardcore band, allegedly hit the father of Brendan Yates with his car

Brady Ebert, the former guitarist of the Grammy-winning US hardcore band Turnstile, has been charged with attempted second-degree murder after allegedly hitting the father of the band’s frontman, Brendan Yates, with his car.

On 29 March, police found William Yates outside his home with “trauma to his lower extremities”, with a broken bone protruding from his leg, according to the Baltimore Banner.

The Chicago band’s frantic, urgent guitar melodies celebrate hope, friendship and family in these uncertain times

From Chicago, Illinois
Recommended if you like Modest Mouse, Wilco, Car Seat Headrest
Up next Second album Something Worth Waiting For out 24 April, touring the US from April and Europe in summer

In Friko’s hands, a swirl of influences and experiments curve the many colours of indie rock into an endlessly inventive, radiant ramble. The Chicago band’s upcoming, cheekily titled second album, Something Worth Waiting For, explores the energy of yearning: for growth, for change, for stability. Across nine tracks, Friko take inspiration from their recent spate of touring to orbit the idea of finding things worth moving for and the value of the journey itself.