Pop

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

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

Jade, Ed Sheeran, Sophie Ellis-Bextor and Mulatu Astatke

The former Little Mix star’s new album shimmers with her post-Simon Cowell pop nous and vocal range

The Tubs – an indie band for a post-indie landscape

The Welsh rock band operate on a shoestring, making brilliant, life-enhancing music without a publicity machine

Albums of the week: David Byrne, Sabrina Carpenter, SL, Harold López-Nussa

The former Talking Heads frontman’s latest solo effort finds him with an eyebrow arched, revelling in life’s absurdities

Gorillaz stun in star-studded show of lush visuals and borderless music

Damon Albarn and artist Jamie Hewlett revisit their 2010 album Plastic Beach to mark 25 years of their virtual band

Guedra Guedra, Margo Price, Blood Orange, Brigitte Beraha and the Lucid Dreamers

Electro-acoustic producer Guedra Guedra is on a mission to decolonise dance music

The rise and rise of Chappell Roan

The US star becomes ever more unconventional in a bravura show in Edinburgh

Albums of the week: Earl Sweatshirt, Mac DeMarco, Wolf Alice, Blake Mills & Pino Palladino

The rapper’s new record Live Laugh Love points to his characteristically wry humour, but finds him in a more mellow frame of mind

How Laufey remade jazz for gen Z

The Icelandic singer embraced retromania for the TikTok age, but her third album lets modernity enter her nostalgic soundscape

The gospel according to Annie and the Caldwells

Amid the resurgence of faith-based music, a Mississippian family led by a powerhouse matriarch enthral secular audiences at a gig like no other

Albums of the week: Cass McCombs, Goldfrapp, Conan Gray, Eve Adams

Cass McCombs’s quietly brilliant new record cements him as truly elusive storyteller

Albums of the week: Ethel Cain, Amaarae, The Black Keys, Monzanto Sound

The singer-songwriter’s bleak, hypnotic third album is a startling success

Drake’s new tour is hugely dorky and weirdly heartening

The superstar rapper’s energetic show is a strange, soppy bubble of narcissism – and it’s wildly entertaining

Albums of the week: Reneé Rapp, Debby Friday, The New Eves, Ashley Monroe

The 25-year-old’s second album is full of grandstanding and slow-burning rage

Baxter Dury: ‘I attract the madness’

The indie provocateur’s tales of menace and failed male ambition have been turned into an album of dancefloor bangers