(XO Music/Republic)
On a somewhat exhausting sixth album, Abel Tesfaye uses Brazilian funk, punishing house and lush 70s soul to press great songs into the service of rotten lyrics

It takes precisely 20 seconds for the Weeknd’s sixth album to imply that it might also be his last. “All I have is my legacy … I’m all alone when it fades to black,” Abel Tesfaye sings over a lush bed of synthesisers that quickly takes on the influence of 80s boogie. It’s a line that feels very on brand. Hurry Up Tomorrow’s release has been promoted with billboards declaring “THE END IS NEAR”, social media posts in which Tesfaye has inferred the album is the final “beautiful chapter” in his story and interviews during which he’s suggested that a 2022 incident in which he lost his voice on stage was some kind of cosmic message: “You can end it now … when is the right time to leave if not at your peak?”

It is perhaps worth noting that the same was true of his last album more-or-less: 2022’s Dawn FM was rich with end-times imagery, mentions of the afterlife and arrived accompanied by interviews in which Tesfaye announced his desire to “remove the Weeknd from the world”. A cynic might suggest that implying he’s about to retire – or at least retire the Weeknd persona that he has inhabited for the last 13 years – now seems part of his release strategy. In fairness, it feels a lot more explicit this time around. One theory is that Tesfaye is more interested in pursuing a career in film, something viewers of The Idol, the abysmal drama series he co-wrote and starred in in 2023, might consider less of a career move than a terrible threat.

From a career-detonating collaboration with the Rolling Stones in 1969 to a hypnotic experiment with 13-era Blur, Marianne Faithfull’s career was one of reinvention – yet always underpinned by her wrenching, affecting vocals

• News: Marianne Faithfull dies aged 78
• Alexis Petridis: ‘Faithfull was not just a muse’
• Peter Bradshaw: ‘Faithfull was a magnet for film-makers’

Marianne Faithfull’s 60s releases were wildly variable, perhaps because she seems to have been beholden to the whims of producers who didn’t really know what to do with her: one minute she was recording rounded-edged folk – Cockleshells, What Have They Done to the Rain – the next retooling the Ronettes’ Is This What I Get for Loving You? to no great effect. But, occasionally, she rose above it all, injecting her cut-glass delivery with an alarming degree of melancholy, as on Morning Sun. The B-side of her hit This Little Bird, it’s a pretty but slender song, driven by what sounds like a echoing harp, that her voice transforms into something weirdly wrenching: “I’m very sad, tears follow me,” she sings, and she genuinely sounds it.

The late singer made her share of bad decisions – but someone this artistically adventurous and unafraid was never going to have an ordinary life

• News: Marianne Faithfull, singular icon of British pop, dies aged 78

• Life in pictures

It is difficult to think of a moment in pop history less receptive to a 1960s icon relaunching their career than in 1979. At that point, British rock and pop resolutely inhabited a world shaped by punk: it was the year of 2-Tone and Tubeway Army’s Are ‘Friends’ Electric?, of Ian Dury at No 1 and Blondie releasing the bestselling album of the year. And it was a central tenet of punk that the 1960s and their attendant “culture freaks” were, as Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren put it: “fucking disgusting … vampiric … the most narcissistic generation there has ever been,” and that the decade’s famous names should no longer be afforded the kind of awed reverence they had enjoyed for most of the 70s. “No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones,” as the Clash had sung.

And yet Marianne Faithfull, who has died aged 78, turned out to be the kind of famous face from the 60s that a world shaped by punk could get behind. She was living proof that the rock aristocracy were remote and decadent and ripe for the culling. Never given the credit due to her by her most famous associates, the Rolling Stones, she had to go to court to get her name appended to the credits of Sister Morphine, a song she had co-written. She subsequently spiralled downwards, at startling speed, from having a seat at swinging London’s top table to life as a homeless junkie. Her years of addiction on the streets had so ravaged her voice that, by the late 70s, it was completely unrecognisable as coming from the woman who had sung As Tears Go By and Come and Stay With Me.

As Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag turns 60, we rate the prolific funk/soul powerhouse’s finest studio, live and soundtrack albums

If you want a roll call of James Brown’s formative influences, just check the covers on this album: Hank Ballard, Roy “Good Rockin’ Tonight” Brown, dirty blues supremo Bull Moose Jackson and Billy Ward’s impressively morbid The Bells, which – never knowingly understated – Brown used to perform on stage with a doll representing his lover’s corpse.

(Jagjaguwar)
Fronting a brand new band, the singer-songwriter dives into the dark side, with confusion and foreboding creeping through 80s moods, big choruses and fine melodies

The last time the world heard from Sharon Van Etten, it was 2022. She was pictured on the cover of her sixth album, We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong, standing in front of a house while wildfires raged worryingly close by. The songs lurking inside were informed not just by the environmental catastrophe unfolding on her doorstep, but the “collective trauma” of lockdown and the fraught complexities of parenthood. It was well reviewed and sold enough to dent the charts in several countries: business as usual for a perennially acclaimed and influential singer-songwriter. Perhaps too usual.

Over the course of her career, Van Etten has gradually bolstered and rounded out her sound, from the austere acoustic confessionals of her 2009 debut, via trebly Velvet Underground-ish indie, to something noticeably bigger and smoother, a tasteful – but not bland – take on widescreen alt-rock: mid-paced, stately, buoyed by synths and swelling choruses. For all the strength of its songwriting, there wasn’t much on We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong that her fans wouldn’t have heard before. The laudatory reviews contained adjectives that, viewed in a certain light, could take on a faintly troubling tone: “comfortable”, “tried-and-true”, “familiar”.