Harvey/Rubin/Dennis/Williams/Talea Ensemble/Goren (Pentatone) This early work by Nadia Boulanger - better known as the influential teacher – was never performed and survived only in vocal score. Despite the best efforts of conductor Neal Goren and his hard-working cast it never quite coheres
Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979) is best remembered now as a hugely influential teacher, who spread the gospel of neoclassicism through several generations of composers on both sides of the Atlantic. She was also a conductor and organist, and at the beginning of her career, at least, had ambitions as a composer in her own right, which she largely abandoned in the early 1920s some years after the deaths of both her enormously talented younger sister Lili, and her mentor, the pianist and composer Raoul Pugno.
It was in collaboration with Pugno that Boulanger composed La Ville Morte, a four-act opera based upon a play by Gabriele D’Annunzio; it was scheduled to be premiered at the Opéra-Comique in Paris in 1914, but cancelled after the outbreak of the first world war. The opera only survives in a vocal score, and for this first ever recording, taken from performances in New York last year, it has been minimally orchestrated for an ensemble of 11 players. The “dead city” of the title of La Ville Morte is Mycenae, and the tangled story of love, lust and ambition among a quartet of archaeologists takes place among the city’s ruins. Musically it references Wagner, Fauré and most of all early Debussy, but the work never quite convinces in any of those modes, and runs out of dramatic steam well before the short final act, despite the best efforts of conductor Neal Goren and his hard-working cast of four.
Dry January 2026 gains momentum as celebrities like Bradley Cooper, Miley Cyrus and Tom Holland share their inspiring sobriety journeys and experiences.
From CMAT and the Carpenters’ fresh starts to the Beatles’ Here Comes the Sun and Nina Simone’s Feeling Good, starting again is a rich theme in pop. Here are some of the best examples
It’s hard to imagine anyone’s heart not being lifted a little by Right Back Where We Started From: the euphoric rush of new love rendered into three minutes of cod-northern soul (performed, unexpectedly, by various ex members of ELO, the Animals and 60s soft-poppers Honeybus). Avoid the 80s cover by Sinitta at all costs.
(4AD) The standout act in the sprechgesang wave, the four-piece’s newly expansive sound carries singer Florence Shaw’s distinctive tales of mundane lives spiralling out of control
Dry Cleaning’s third album features a lot of strikingly odd lyrics. Take your pick from “alien offshoot mushroom, going the gym to get slim”; “my dream house is a negative space of rock”; or, indeed, “when I was a child I wanted to be a horse, eating onions, carrots, celery”. But it’s an ostensibly more straightforward line, from Cruise Ship Designer, that seems destined to attract the most attention. “I make sure there are hidden messages in my work,” says vocalist Florence Shaw as the track draws to a conclusion, the muscular guitar riff that’s driven it along devolving into a janky, trebly scrabble.
Initially, the lyric appears to characterise what Dry Cleaning do, and Shaw in particular. From the moment they first appeared with the 2018 EP Sweet Princess, the south London quartet have attracted adjectives such as “surreal”, “enigmatic” and “inscrutable”. Most of the British bands who emerged around the same time bearing a roughly equivalent blend of post-punk guitars and spoken-word vocals sounded angry or sarcastic or straightforwardly comedic. Dry Cleaning, on the other hand, seemed mysterious. Shaw’s lyrics were collages of overheard remarks, recycled YouTube comments, lines from adverts and non sequiturs, delivered in a voice that was too icy to sound whimsical. It’s variously been characterised as “anhedonic” and “achromatic”, but might more straightforwardly be described as sounding politely bored. She occasionally shifts from speaking into singing in an untutored voice that brings to mind Stuart Moxham of Young Marble Giants’ line about their understated vocalist Alison Statton sounding “as if she was at the bus stop or something”. It was all intriguingly confusing: here were songs that could indeed contain hidden messages, that seemed like puzzles to be unpicked.
Streaming’s algorithms make it easy to avoid whole discographies – so in the interest of deeper listening, our writers dedicate time to the ones who might have got away
The first time I heard Joni Mitchell, in 1997, she was looped across the chorus of Janet Jackson’s single Got ’Til It’s Gone. The song’s credits would educate me on the sample’s origins; I had previously assumed Big Yellow Taxi was an Amy Grant original. The second time I heard a Mitchell song was when Travis covered the beautiful River as a B-side.
Ador terminated the Australian-born singer’s contract on Monday and is now suing her, a family member and the band’s former producer
The K-pop record label Ador is suing a former member of megaband NewJeans for millions in damages, it has announced, a day after removing her from the group following a year-long dispute that saw the band allege mistreatment and attempt to leave their contract.
The compensation suit against Danielle Marsh, a 20-year-old Australian-born singer, comes months after a Seoul district court ruled that NewJeans’ five members must honour their contracts with Ador, whose parent company Hybe is also behind the K-pop sensation BTS. The band’s contract runs until 2029.
Scatological lyrics, social conscience and a shoutout from Walton Goggins – 2026 is going to be the laptop garage band’s year
It’s a Saturday night in Camden, London, and Getdown Services’ fans are getting the beers in before “Britain’s best band” play one of their final gigs of the year. The Electric Ballroom is heaving, despite this being their second show here in a month. There’s no shortage of twentysomethings with shag hairstyles to explain why the duo live up to their slogan. “They’re fun, which we need right now – life is bleak,” says Dulcie. “And they’re socially aware,” adds her friend Lotte. “Even though theyare quite silly, they’re grounded.”
Across the bar, Dylan, 22, says that he finds Getdown Services and their genre-agnostic beats empowering: “They’re a laptop garage band that are having fun doing what they love, and seeing that makes me want to do what I love as well.” His pal James, 29, has returned for a repeat performance. “I came to the other Getdown Services show and I felt more jubilant than I did at Oasis,” he says.
Raye, Deftones and Yungblud do UK tours, Jill Scott returns for more neo-soul, and the classical world gears up to celebrate Hungarian composer György Kurtág at 100
Seventeen years on from the release of her debut single, Florence Welch finds herself in an intriguingly strong position: while most of her early 00s indie peers are forgotten or in reduced circumstances, she is a major influence on pop, from Ethel Cain to the Last Dinner Party to Chappell Roan. Her recent album Everybody Scream was a strong restatement of her theatrical approach – with more light and shade than you might expect – but it’s on stage that she really comes into her own.
• UK tour begins 6 February at the SSE Arena, Belfast
Detty December means a month of “back to back to back” partying in Nigeria’s megacity, both for locals and visiting members of the diaspora. Bring your stamina, dancing shoes and wads of cash.
Personne n'a fait mieux. Avec plus de 600 000 albums vendus, Gims s'impose comme le roi incontesté du marché musical français en 2025. Mais combien l'artiste a-t-il réellement empoché ? Spoiler : un sacré pactole.
Disillusioned by his early EDM success, Alex Young bought hardware, embraced UK dance culture – and reinvented himself
From Washington, DC Recommended if you like Floating Points, Jon Hopkins, Joy Orbison Up next A slew of new music from the vault
It was probably the moment when he was paid $10,000 to DJ a spin fitness class that Alex Young, barely 16 at the time, felt he had lost touch with what music was all about. “At 13, I was like, if I could ever hang out with Skrillex, my life would be complete,” he says, sipping a pilsner on an icy day in Washington DC. “Then by 15, I’m doing it.”
The Netherlands’ guttersnipe answer to French chanson and German schlager is as popular as ever – but has it lost its roots as the defiant voice of the working class? Our writer sways along at the Muziekfeest van het Jaar to find out
‘U doet wat, precies, meneer?’ My chic twentysomething hairdresser throws me a puzzled look: “You’re doing what, exactly, sir?” I am not behaving like an Englishman. I have just told her that I have bought tickets for the Muziekfeest van het Jaar(Music of the Year festival) in Amsterdam’s cavernous Ziggo Dome: a two-night extravaganza that is being recorded to be broadcast on New Year’s Eve as a kind of Dutch equivalent to Jools Holland’s Hootenanny, all dedicated to the brassy, sentimental, often untranslatable and still monumentallypopular Dutch pop known as levenslied.
“Levenslied” roughly translates as “songs about life”, and although popular throughout the land, especially in North Brabant, it is commonly associated with Amsterdam, and specifically the formerly working-class district of the Jordaan. A social and local music, levenslied concerns itself with family, friends and close associates. Stylistically, it has a connection to the 20th-century French chanson réaliste of Edith Piaf and, when in a party mood, finds common cause with German schlager.
Yuval Sharon will leave the financially strained Detroit Opera after this season. In March, he brings his unorthodox vision to Wagner at the Metropolitan Opera.
Topped by Rosalía’s multilingual, ultra-ambitious Lux, here are the best albums of the year as voted for by 30 Guardian music writers • More on the best culture of 2025
Gary Graffman in 2018, when he turned 90. He was an acclaimed concert pianist before developing focal dystonia, the neurological disorder that restricted him to his left hand, in his 50s.
Dying is a process and in a person’s final hours and days, Nickie and her Threshold Choir are there to accompany people on their way and bring comfort. Through specially composed songs, akin to lullabies, the choir cultivates an environment of love and safety around those on their deathbed. For the volunteer choir members, it is also an opportunity to channel their own experiences of grief and together open up conversations about death
With thanks to onscreen contributor, Lindsey, who died since the making of this film
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