3 h. ago Chloe Chua: Mozart Violin Concertos album review – teenage prodigy’s interpretations are balanced and mature

Chua/He/Singapore Symphony Orchestra/Graf(Pentatone)The Singaporean violinist plays Mozart with a clean focused tone, an elegant turn of phrase and a quiet wit. As Chloe Chua points out in her notes, Mozart’s Violin Concertos were written by a teenager – so why shouldn’t a teenage violinist do them justice? Chua – joint winner of the junior Menuhin Competition in 2018, aged 11 – was 15 and 16 when she made these recordings. The framework is conventional – there are no great surprises in the tempos, and she is backed by the modern instruments of the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, who give an energised but refined performance conducted by Hans Graf. So far, so traditional. And yet Chua consistently holds the attention with interpretations that are notably mature: balanced, considered and never trying too hard. The faster movements having a gentle momentum, the slow ones plenty of space; everything Chua plays has a clean, focused tone, an unfailingly elegant turn of phrase and a quiet w...

Culture

5 h. ago Billie Marten’s Dog Eared is a brilliant, soothing album with a sense of looming danger

The Yorkshire-born singer-songwriter changes her approach for a hypnotic new record

Politics

6 h. ago Jim Legxacy: Black British Music review | Alexis Petridis's album of the week

(XL Recordings)The rapper and producer doubles down on his vaulting style, lurching from alt-rock to distortion and chipmunk soul on an astonishingly coherent and melodic third recordOn Father, the first single to be taken from Jim Legxacy’s third mixtape, the listener is offered a vivid image from the author’s past. The teenage James Olaloye, as he was then, is on the streets of Lewisham, the south-east London borough where he grew up. He is “rolling up a blunt, scheming for the funds trying to come up off the roads on my own two / I never had a father”. Inevitably, this means he’s up to no good: “Making money off a phone a key’s what they want.”It’s a familiar scenario in the world of UK rap, a genre in which you seldom want for bleak descriptions of the life its stars have left behind on often deprived council estates. But in the case of Father, it comes with a small, but striking detail. “On the block,” he attests, “I was listening to Mitski.” Continue reading...

Culture

8 h. ago St Vincent live at Somerset House review: absurdity returns in full force

After playing it straight on her last visit to London, Annie Clark’s eccentric stage presence and theatrical personas made an entertaining comeback

Society

27 h. ago Mad Cool 2025 review: Further proof that Olivia Rodrigo is unquestionably a rock star

Muse and Nine Inch Nails delivered knock-out sets at the hot Madrid festival while Gracie Abrams triumphed over tech problems

Politics

49 h. ago Wireless Festival review: big talk from Drake after the most bruising time of his career

The three-night Drake takeover of Wireless was a show of strength for the star, but a disjointed final night slightly dampened his triumph, says Makua Adimora

Politics

3 d. ago Bilbao BBK Live 2025: A shapeshifting, eclectic event of ambitious scale

European festival saw severe thunderstorms but also severe fun, as Kylie Minogue, Pulp, and Raye drew crowds of over 115,000 people

Politics

3 d. ago Mad Cool 2025 overcomes a freak injury and sound issues to deliver giddy, inclusive thrills

From Olivia Rodrigo to Iggy Pop, Spanish festival has something for everyone

Events

4 d. ago Stevie Wonder at BST Hyde Park was soulful, silly, and miraculously good

The music icon concluded his five-date UK tour with a performance at London’s Hyde Park, signing, sealing and delivering a night of ebullient highs

Politics

5 d. ago Nostalgia and a Lauryn Hill cameo can only take Drake so far at Wireless Festival

Licking the wounds from his feud with Kendrick Lamar, the rapper isn’t afraid to wield the power of his address book when he needs it the most

Politics

6 d. ago Justin Bieber: Swag review – inane lyrics undermine a gorgeously produced R&B passion project

(Def Jam) The surprise seventh album from the former tween idol is musically expansive, abetted by a host of star producers. If only he’d thought about the words a bitIn the mid-2010s, pop music changed. Instead of hounding the listening public with focus-grouped, machine-tooled crowd-pleasers, the biggest stars began releasing expansive, experimental albums that played to their own tastes and interests. These were records that were artistically self-indulgent, mostly in a good way: Rihanna’s sleazy, sultry Anti, Beyoncé’s densely referential Lemonade, Lady Gaga’s soft-rock-heavy Joanne, Miley Cyrus’s psychedelic Wayne Coyne collaboration Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz (I may be the only person who holds that example in such high regard.)With his fourth album Purpose, Justin Bieber was adjacent to this shift. Leaning into the ascendant tropical house genre, collaborating with Skrillex and pursuing a sound you sensed a 21-year-old might actually like, it spelled the end of Bieber’s ...

Politics

6 d. ago Kokoroko: Tuff Times Never Last review – ruminative jazz outfit get stuck in a relaxed rut

(Brownswood)The London collective have an easygoing, ruminative sound – briefly lifted here by moments of lively counterpoint – that can feel all too placidSince breaking out with their 2018 track Abusey Junction, London jazz collective Kokoroko have become known for a soothing brand of improvised instrumentals. Blending whispered melodies with muted horns, downtempo hand percussion and shades of highlife guitar, theirs is an easygoing, ruminative sound. Their 2022 debut album, Could We Be More, continued in the same vein, full of warm brass and gently layered vocal harmony.So does their latest effort, Tuff Times Never Last. Across its 11 tracks of , tempos rarely exceed 100bpm, wallowing in tranquil bass lines and languorous grooves. The group establish a confident and comforting tone, playing through the lullaby vocal harmonies of Never Lost, the slowed guitar of Closer to Me and Rhodes piano reverberations on My Father in Heaven. Continue reading...

Politics

6 d. ago Phase Space: Degrees of Freedom review | Safi Bugel's experimental album of the month

(Phase Space)Switching wonky techno for spacious abstraction, Gwenan Spearing debuts a new alias on an EP of uncanny generative electronicsAfter establishing herself as a techno DJ in some of the wonkiest corners of underground dance music, Gwenan Spearing has spent the last few years settling into slower, more abstract territory. Alongside her club sets, she co-organises an ambient deep listening series in Berlin and spends her spare time experimenting with modular synthesis. Phase Space is the latest expression of this interest, a project rooted in generative electronics and real-time responses.Degrees of Freedom is Spearing’s first outing under this new alias: an EP of meandering ambient tracks that blur the lines between electronic and acoustic as instruments are sampled, warped and overdubbed through her synthesiser. On the subaquatic opening track Sync, cowbells are stretched and delayed beyond recognition against a pulsing analogue rhythm. Towards the end of Some Pluck, a den...

Politics

6 d. ago Bless Me Father by Kevin Rowland review – the Dexys Midnight Runners frontman tells all

A picaresque story of massive success and deep despair that Rowland narrates with an impressive lack of self-pityIn the summer of 1979, Dexys Midnight Runners were a band you would have been hard-pushed to describe as anything other than unique. Their sound was a pugilistic update of classic 60s soul, topped with frontman Kevin Rowland’s extraordinary vocals, impassioned to the point that he permanently sounded on the verge of tears. It was fervent and a little retro, perfect for a musical climate in which mod and ska revivals were already bubbling. But Dexys’ image threw a spanner in the works. “I wore a white 1930s shirt and big baggy light-grey trousers tucked into white football socks just below the knee to give the effect of ‘plus fours’,” writes Rowland of a typical outfit. “I wore pink Mary Jane ballet shoes and my hair swept back, Valentino style.”Other members appear on stage clad in jodhpurs and satin harem pants. The disparity between how they sound and how...

Politics

6 d. ago Justin Bieber dropping surprise album this week: Everything we know

Highly anticipated album comes nearly five years after ‘Justice’

Politics

7 d. ago Wet Leg prove they’re more than a flash in the pan with second album Moisturizer

Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers double down on the weird energy of their debut

Politics

7 d. ago Clipse: Let God Sort Em Out review | Alexis Petridis's album of the week

(Roc Nation)Scathing disses, star guests, inspired Pharrell beats and great lines from chilling to laugh-out-loud: the duo’s first album since 2009 is so much more than the drama around itThe beef between Drake and Kendrick Lamar may be over, but its aftershocks continue to reverberate. The most peculiar example might involve the reunion album by Virginia rap duo Clipse, AKA Pusha T and Malice. It was scheduled to be released by a subsidiary of Universal, home to both Lamar and Drake. But the label apparently demanded that the track Chains and Whips, featuring Lamar, be removed – despite the fact that, dazzling and pugilistic though his verse is (“I don’t,” he avers, “fuck with the kumbaya shit”), neither it nor the rest of the track seems to reference Drake. Years before the Drake/Lamar beef erupted, Pusha T released The Story of Adidon, a Drake diss track so brutal that one critic compared it to “bringing a gun to a knife fight”. Pusha T alleged that Universal’s “lyrics committee”...

Politics

7 d. ago REVIEW: The Black Keys tell fans 'I'm happy for you' ahead of Oasis return but sound issues stop them from soaring

The rock duo tore through fan favourites at Castlefield Bowl with hit after hit on balmy Manchester night

Sport

8 d. ago Kendrick Lamar & SZA review – a pyrotechnic party of dark and light

Hampden Park, GlasgowHe’s icy, she’s all sunshine – but the rapper and R&B star’s talents prove perfectly complementary in a historic two-handerHe’s icy and controlled, she’s a beam of sunshine. Kendrick Lamar and SZA’s Grand National stadium tour has already broken records as the biggest co-headline tour in history, and they’ve still got five months left on the road. This yin-yang spectacle is a rare chance for fans to see the world’s most influential figures in rap and R&B in one night, and to bask in their chemistry as storied collaborators.Their sets weave together over three hours, welcoming us first into Lamar’s incisive (and enjoyably irritable) state-of-the-artform address, filmed austerely in black and white, before blossoming into full colour for SZA’s tactile songwriting about exes, bad habits and heart-leaping, interplanetary hope. The contrast is abrupt but high-energy, and when they overlap for duets, everything changes again: Lamar permits himself a broad grin...

Politics

8 d. ago Wet Leg: Moisturizer review – Doritos, Davina McCall and dumb fun from British indie’s big breakout band

(Domino)After winning multiple Grammys and Brits, the Isle of Wight band explore love and sexuality on their second LP – but there’s still room for some barbed put-downsMoisturizer concludes with a track called U and Me at Home. In it, Rhian Teasdale sings about the pleasures of doing nothing over guitars that bend in and out of tune in the style patented by My Bloody Valentine. Nothing much happens in the song – there’s some discussion about possibly getting a takeaway, and a brief nod to the “happy comatose” effects of weed – but it does feature a few lines that function as a kind of Wet Leg origin story. “Maybe we could start a band as some kind of joke,” sings Teasdale. “Well, that didn’t quite go to plan now we’ve been stretched across the world”.You don’t need to be a member of Wet Leg and aware of the circumstances of their formation – apparently the result of a conversation between Teasdale and guitarist Hester Chambers while on a ferris wheel – to feel slightly surprised at...

Events