The singer’s tears over the Islamic State terrorist plot against her show and Southport attack make this behind-the-scenes docuseries about her world-conquering tour more moving than anyone could have anticipated

Swifties had long guessed that there would be a documentary going behind the scenes of Taylor Swift’s blockbuster Eras tour. The 2023 Eras Tour concert movie didn’t show any of the inner workings of this three-and-a-half-hour behemoth, which ran for 149 dates from 2023-24. Fans put some bits together, such as how Swift arrived on stage being pushed inside a cleaning cart. Plus, given the two albums she wrote during and about the Eras tour – 2024’s The Tortured Poets Department and this year’s The Life of a Showgirl – it wouldn’t be Swiftian to overlook another lucrative IP extension.

What fans could never have imagined was that Disney was set to start filming as the Eras tour was due to hit Vienna on 8 August 2023 – the first of three shows in the Austrian capital that were cancelled owing to an Islamic State terrorist plot. We learn this in episode one of the six-part docuseries The End of an Era, when Swift and her longtime friend Ed Sheeran are backstage at Wembley, hours before he guests at her first concert after the thwarted attack. “I didn’t even get to go,” Swift tells him of Vienna. “I was on the plane headed there. I just need to do this show and re-remember the joy of it because I’m a little bit just like …” She can’t find the words.

Unhurried trippy bass lines and poet Iona Lee’s commanding, velvety voice conjure a glamorously unhurried sense of hypnosis

From Edinburgh
Recommended if you like Dry Cleaning, Massive Attack, Nick Cave
Up next Warm Days in December out now, new EP due early 2026

As fixtures of Edinburgh’s gig-turned-performance art scene, Acolyte’s eerie, earthy psychedelia is just as likely to be found on stage at the Traverse theatre as in a steamy-windowed Leith Walk boozer. Their looped bass lines and poet Iona Lee’s commanding, velvety voice conjure a sense of slow-burn hypnosis – and just like their music, Acolyte are glamorously unhurried. They’ve released only a handful of songs in the seven years since Lee and bassist Ruairidh Morrison first started experimenting with jazz, trip-hop and spoken word, but now the group (with Daniel Hill on percussion and Gloria Black on synth, also known for throwing fantastical, papier-mache-costumed club nights with her former band Maranta) are gathering pace.

The year’s finest LPs as decided by 30 Guardian music writers – from a slip’n’slide through British club culture to a UK rapper like none before her
• More on the best culture of 2025

***