Music

On Everybody Scream, Florence Welch is at her best

Her sixth album is a work of witchiness and craft – a profound, primal record that harnesses deep reserves of feminine energy

Oxford International Song festival hits a note of radicalism

New works by or about women powered this year’s Oxford Song festival, tackling everything from Ireland’s Magdalene laundries to the heroines of Iranian myth

Albums of the week: Tortoise, Tame Impala, Miguel, Emma Rawicz

Nine years after their last album, Chicago-born quintet Tortoise prove they’re as supple and inventive as ever

Lily Allen’s comeback album is the lament of a ‘nonmonogamummy’

On her latest album West End Girl, the singer details the breakdown of an unevenly open marriage

Wexford festival’s operatic rarities

Verdi’s Le Trouvère, transported to the Spanish civil war, is just one of the powerfully sung surprises at the Irish waterfront party

Albums of the week: Bruce Springsteen, Sudan Archives, The Last Dinner Party, Laura Jurd

The full-band Nebraska ’82 edition is a fascinating alternative reality

Benjamin Britten’s oddball masterpiece

Albert Herring is a subversive portrait of stuffy postwar England

Patti Smith in her prime

Fifty years after the release of her wild and swaggering record, Horses, the spirited singer has more gravitas than ever

Reviews: The Necks, Cheikh Lô, Jay Som, Charles Lloyd

The trio’s 20th album, Disquiet, is three hours long – a maximal, mantric work that stands out in the modern attention economy

Misogyny and misinformation in a 21st-century Handel

Mob rule and a marauding bear feature in sparkling revivals of two of the composer’s lesser-known gems. Plus, a masterclass in high-speed Rossini

Lady Gaga’s fever dream

Showcasing her latest album, Mayhem, the US star unleashes an extravaganza of camp absurdity, then strips it all away

Geese, Richard Ashcroft, Marta, Jacob Collier

Geese’s Getting Killed is a knockout full of swagger and tunes you can sing along to

Is Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl her happiest album yet?

The star follows her lovelorn previous album with a set of punchy, clear-eyed odes to joy

Robert Plant with Suzi Dian, Cardi B, Cate Le Bon, Joy Crookes, Ala.Ni

Saving Grace is an engrossing excavation of musical roots

Jim Legxacy – the rise of an unconventional rapper

At 26, Legxacy is three mixtapes and the same number of live gigs into a fresh, fidgety body of work that draws on his south-east London upbringing and personal tragedy

Garland – a horse, a car park, and a night of pure imagination

The young composer’s inventive new work at Peckham’s Bold Tendencies is unlike anything but itself. Plus, an epic Verdi boasts a starry cast

Albums of the week: Kieran Hebden and William Tyler, Kojey Radical, Wednesday and L’Antidote

Hebden, aka Four Tet, and Tyler reunite on an elegant, undefinable record that up-ends expectations

Anna Netrebko electrifies in a controversial Tosca

Music and politics meet in a stripped-back Puccini in Jakub Hrůsä’s ROH debut