The marketing was the bait: sold to teenage boys who turned up for Megan Fox and got a feminist horror about the intensity of teenage girl friendship and what men do when they need a sacrifice. In 2026 the reading is unmissable; in 2009, a year after “I Kissed a Girl” had pitched queerness as a party trick for boys, Fox’s casting read as more of the same. She is magnetic and clearly having a great time weaponising her own image, and the script gives her some of the best line readings of the decade. Diablo Cody, Karyn Kusama and the soundtrack each earn the reputation they’ve developed since release. Seyfried almost convinces you she’s the plain one.

I don’t entirely know what I just watched, and I think that’s the point. It opens like a coming-of-age film about two kids bonding over a Buffy-esque TV show, then quietly stops being that and becomes something stranger. The Lynch comparisons are well earned. Schoenbrun shoots suburbia soft and pink, and the Alex G score sits underneath everything like static you can’t quite tune out. The broader soundtrack, Caroline Polachek and yeule especially, is great. What stays with me is how patient the film is about not naming what it’s actually about. For anyone working through questions of identity and dysphoria, I suspect this will matter for a long time.

King Tuff is Kyle Thomas, Vermont-based and well-connected. He’s toured with Ty Segall’s Muggers and fronts WITCH alongside J. Mascis, so the centre of gravity here is no surprise: 60s psych pop, 70s country rock, the same well that I’m always happy to see come back into fashion every few years. MOO offers nothing new. It’s just very well executed.

Recorded on the same Tascam 388 he used for his 2013 debut, the album swings between garage punk cuts and looser, more playful songs. ‘Stairway to Nowhere’ is at the glam end of power-pop and recalls David Vandervelde’s “Nothin’ No”, itself a Marc Bolan facsimile — Bolan being a clear influence on both men. ‘Invisible Ink’ is the most catchy thing here, even if it might inadvertently summon ‘Rock Got No Reason’ from School of Rock. ‘Crosseyed Critters’ is a country-rock stompalong sandwiched between garage cuts. ‘Delusions’ could be Cotton Mather, masters of a previous power-pop revival, doing a Tom Petty tribute. ‘Backroads’ closes things out on a feel-good note, and makes me want to hit play again.

Troubadour is a record of genres in conversation. Sag uses on a melodic phrase that briefly nods at Smashing Pumpkins’ Today before settling into something that’s part alt-country, part emo. Other tracks lean folk, country, shoegaze, post-hardcore. None of this is the maximalist everything-at-once approach; the genres are deployed song by song, deliberately, with the range emerging across the album rather than crammed into individual tracks. Singer Brendan Wright calls it “farm emo”, which is both funny and accurate.

It’s a breakup album, but a quiet one. The lyrics circle reflection rather than recrimination, even when the music goes loud. If you want a single comparison, it’s Uncle Tupelo plus Modest Mouse—the alt-country sturdiness of one, the restless dynamics of the other.

Moab and Redwood are the standouts. Both let the band’s range surface inside a single song without losing the deliberate per-track approach that defines the rest of the record.

Sadie Sandler and Chloe East have the right uneasy chemistry, Sarah Sherman’s framing-device dean is doing a lot with very little, and Lyonne and Garofalo turn up exactly when you want them to. Then the third act swings somewhere else entirely—a different film, a different register, a different idea of what the joke is. Whatever it was meant to do, it lands as a shrug. What came before deserved a closer.

Cameron Picton’s first record outside Black Midi (a band whose shtick I never totally warmed to) and a tonal world away from Geordie Greep’s The New Sound, whose calypso pastiche left me cold. My New Band Believe is the Windmill alumnus I didn’t expect to like. Almost entirely acoustic, built from strings, woodwind, harpsichord and pianos stacked into something that keeps tilting underfoot, it has the orchestral curiosity of Van Dyke Parks without the kitsch. “Love Story” sits in the middle like a small domestic scene that won’t quite hold still. The whole thing is intriguing in a way I’m still working out, which is the better kind of intriguing.

Sean Solomon spent the better part of a decade fronting Moaning on Sub Pop before that band wound down, and went back to making animated videos for Run the Jewels and Unknown Mortal Orchestra in the quieter stretch that followed. The World Is Not Good Enough is his first solo record, on ANTI-, and it sounds like a record made by someone who took the long way round to it.

Hushed, melodic, personal; “Postcard” is the standout and “Black Hole” is the most honest: “I’m afraid if I have children / I might pass this sadness on”. Coping mechanisms, fears named rather than dodged.

I bought Young Team when it came out, back when £15 in HMV bought you an album you’d only ever read about—which meant playing it over and over until it gave up its secrets, partly because you had the time, partly because £15 was £15. Young Team confused me. It challenged me. It took a while to really click. Click it did.

“Yes I am a long way from home” sets the template—and, as it turns out, the template for Mogwai’s whole career: the gentle build, the sense of something unfurling, controlled bursts of noise punctuating the calm. “Like Herod” then takes that template and stretches it in every direction at once: longer, quieter, louder, more hypnotic, messier, more majestic. “Tracy” is unhurried and contemplative, a feeling magnified if you turn the volume up at the end and catch the phone conversation about what sounds like a sizeable physical altercation within the band. “R U Still in 2 It”, with its spare instrumentation, repeating refrain, and lyrics about a narrator trying to right a relationship that’s already gone, remains darkly affecting nearly thirty years on.

The sequencing is immaculate, culminating with “Mogwai Fear Satan”, which justifies its sixteen minutes and remains the best thing the band have ever done; apocalyptic, cinematic, the sound of a group throwing vast amounts of noise and feeling at a wall via a handful of chords and a few simple riffs and somehow constructing elegance out of it. The flute that arrives near the end sits atop the chaos and offers clear juxtaposition to the insistent drumming beneath.

Young Team doesn’t immediately come to mind when I list my favourite albums, and I sometimes wonder whether I’m too forgiving of the records I first heard as a teenager. This one passes the nostalgia test. It still thrills.

There’s something faintly perverse about covering an artist’s self-titled debut in full; you’re not just borrowing their songs, you’re borrowing the album that was meant to be them. Asher White seems to know this, and the strangeness is part of the appeal. Pratt’s 2012 record still sounds like nothing else—at once ancient and contemporary—and White, working from a louder, more experimental-pop palette, reimagines it without trying to outdo it. “Mountain’r Lower” becomes something akin to a proper rock song; “Casper” has blasts of noise. Elsewhere, prepared piano and synths drift in where there used to be only fingerpicked guitar. You don’t need to know the original, though, if you do, the recognition is half the pleasure.

The plot creaks and Cruise does his earnest-sprinter routine, but the real pleasure is watching Pollack assemble the deepest supporting cast of the decade. Hackman (weary, rueful), Hal Holbrook’s avuncular menace, Ed Harris doing more with a sigh or a “fuck!” than most leads manage with a monologue, Holly Hunter stealing twenty minutes outright, plus Strathairn, Brimley, Busey, Tobin Bell, Sorvino, Dean Norris: every door that opens, someone you recognise walks through.

svn4vr (“seven forever”) makes lo-fi folk–hip-hop hymns: fingerpicked guitar and quivering vocals pulled through the clipping, stray noise and loose structures of bedroom rap. Herts on fire is seven tracks of battered gospel, prayers addressed unambiguously to Yahweh, and it took me seeing “Hertfordshire” written in the lyrics to clock that “herts” is a home-counties pun; the accent sounds West Coast, not West Watford. The production is genuinely difficult. Things hiss and thud where you’d want them to settle, and the first pass is more confusing than rewarding. But the songs underneath are real, and the religious content is unusual enough (devotional without being either kitsch or knowing) that the mess starts to feel like the point rather than a failure of means. Qualified recommendation, and I’ll keep listening.

Gavin Miller’s 20th album as worriedaboutsatan sees him swap the glacial longform ambient of past records for something tighter and more composed. The familiar ingredients are all here: dub bass, shoegaze guitar, post-rock patience, the melancholy synth washes. What’s new is the directness. Live drums and bass give some tracks a brisk, dancefloor edge the longform pieces never reached for, and ‘Icelandic Hardcore’ delivers its melancholy in sharper bursts than Miller’s usual mode. This is good work music for me, which might not read as a compliment, but is.

Most of Riz Ahmed’s acting happens through his eyes—Ash barely speaks aloud, his lines passed through a telephone relay operator. That constraint sharpens everything, and it’s all gruff exchanges, mailed packages and payphone protocols. Then the ending arrives, and it crumbles. A script this fastidious about process shouldn’t ask you to swallow quite that much.

Eisenberg’s experimental instincts haven’t gone anywhere: the melodies still take unexpected turns and the guitar work still catches you off guard, but here they’re folded into something closer to the 1970s singer-songwriter tradition. Folky, with jazzy touches. The avant-garde scaffolding of earlier records gives way to songs that breathe differently, and Eisenberg’s voice sits at the centre in a way it hasn’t quite before. The lyrics circle memory, time and youth without tipping into overt nostalgia. If you’ve bounced off their more uncompromising work in the past, this is the way in.

Uses each of its 160 minutes. Digressions into folklore, a severed leg inside a shark, Jaws, Carnival, yet it’s compelling throughout. Moura anchors the sprawl with a fantastic performance. The real achievement is textural: the 1970s Recife of the dictatorship years is rendered so completely, with all the grain, the cars, the sweat-damp collars, the paranoid zoom-ins that you’d hope for. You’d believe it was unearthed from a vault rather than shot last year.