Bree Runway is a bold new DIY musician from Hackney whose music draws as much on early noughties-era MTV as it does her rich Ghanaian heritage — and it’s an approach that’s already earned her favourable comparisons with the likes of Missy Elliott, Grace Jones and Kelis. Watching and studying artists like The Neptunes, Britney Spears and Lil’ Kim during her teenage years gave Bree an escape from the relentless bullying she experienced at school...

On a day when hundreds of gigs, tours and festivals were cancelled one after the other as the coronavirus crisis escalated, DIY dance-pop producer Georgia was the epitome of keep calm and carry on last night as she delivered an uplifting ode to hedonism. For the nervy and slightly sparser crowd in attendance, the rave-like opener 24 Hours brought some much-needed catharsis. “Hey Heaven, let’s go f***ing mad!” the former Brit school attendee and one-time session drummer for Kate Tempest later bellowed, as she sought to reassure...

“It shouldn’t be a novelty that we have an all-female line up,” Nadine Shah assertively told a sold-out audience at Camden’s Roundhouse yesterday. Opening the final day of the BBC 6 Music Festival, Shah was the first of five acts performing on International Women’s Day. Part celebration of female talent, part pointed comment to a music industry where male-heavy festival line-ups continue to dominate, the event felt on a par with forward-thinking festivals like Primavera Sound where gender parity is the norm...

Musicians have been reacting to news that the 2020 edition of SXSW has been cancelled as the coronavirus crisis escalates. The event in Austin, Texas, which features music, film and comedy, was due to begin on March 13 and run until March 22. Yesterday (March 6), organisers announced the official cancellation of the event by the city of Austin. “We are devastated to share this news with you,” they wrote in a statement posted on their website...

The 25th anniversary celebrations of Alanis Morissette’s seminal 1995 album Jagged Little Pill began in style last night, as the Canadian opened with a series of emotive, stripped-back performances that brought a sold-out Shepherd’s Bush Empire to an awed silence. The intimate set-up mirrored Morissette’s iconic 1999 MTV Unplugged performance as she sat between two guitarists and delivered acoustic renditions from an album that has sold more than 33 million copies...

Brooke Bentham was just 18 when her first single ended up on Radio 1. Earning comparisons to Angel Olsen and 1990s slacker heroes Pavement, a record deal arrived a year later, as did two EP releases and a string of high-profile festival slots. When she was 21 the South Shields songwriter began work on her debut album, fully expecting it to arrive within a year. But a crippling case of writers block left her unable to write a single song for close to two years...

Brooke Bentham has mixed emotions when she describes her debut album, ‘Everyday Nothing’. Whilst she cannot hide her excitement about its upcoming release, she’s also aware of the struggle it has taken to get here. She singles out one line from album standout, ‘Keep It Real’ to sum it all up. “Every day falls apart / It’s everyday nothing. That was the line which really captured what my life was like when I was trying to write the album,” Brooke tells NME over the phone from her London home...

Silencing 20,000 screaming fans is a tough task but one Matty Healy, frontman of The 1975, managed with ease last Friday thanks to a little help from Greta Thunberg. Healy insisted on silence, head lowered, as his recent collaboration with the young environmentalist played over the big screens. An eerie hush descended as thousands of fans quietly raised their hands in solidary with Thunberg’s message. The buoyant Love It If We Made It followed and united the audience in a hopeful call for change...

Just hours before their headline appearance at London’s Heaven last night, Inhaler shared the news on social media that all of their remaining tour dates had sold out. For a group who are yet to release an album, it was certainly an impressive achievement. A few songs in and it quickly became apparent why the Dublin quartet are causing such a stir. Charismatic lead singer Elijah Hewson proved a formidable frontman, working the audience into a rocky frenzy and impressing with his soaring vocals.

It’s perhaps no wonder that Moses Boyd’s debut solo album draws on an eclectic range of influences. Growing up in Catford, south London, Boyd’s music-loving family played everything from gospel, soul and funk to experimental, rock and reggae. On any given day, Boyd said it was normal to hear Björk, Debussy, N.E.R.D., Tupac, Nas and Youssou N’Dour in his childhood home. At school, meanwhile, Boyd was already swapping beats with his grime-loving classmates in his first year and later, after taking up the drums aged 13...

A storm may have been raging in the north of England last night, but you wouldn’t have known once inside the tropical-tinged interior of Manchester’s Gorilla. Transformed into a summery paradise, the stage at the intimate 600-capacity venue is adorned with palm trees, pineapples and sun-kissed lighting as Glass Animals made a welcome – and emotive – return to touring. It’s been a traumatic 18 months for the Oxford quartet, following the serious injury of drummer Joe Seaward after a road accident in Dublin...

It has been six years since Elly Jackson, aka La Roux, released her masterful second album and five years since she last toured — an eternity in pop years. So it was little wonder Jackson’s loyal fan base raised the roof when she appeared on stage last night. Against a tropical-themed, neon backdrop, Jackson beamed as she bridged the gap between her absence and return with material from 2014’s ‘Trouble in Paradise’...

“I made exactly the record I want, and it feels very me,” Mackenzie Scott – aka Torres – has said of her latest, ‘Silver Tongue’. Her first entirely self-produced outing, the Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter’s fourth album dispenses with the multiple personas she adopted on her last, 2017’s ‘Three Futures’, and the nervous first-person narratives of both her self-titled 2013 debut and its follow up, ‘Sprinter.’ ‘Silver Tongue’ is a candid, real-time account of Scott’s relationship in the here-and-now."

Slipknot frontman Corey Taylor was in a reflective mood as the group arrived in London. “The first time we played here was actually at the Astoria...that place only held...like 300,” he reminisced, recalling the story of their first tiny gig in the capital. Stood in front of a sold-out 20,000-strong crowd at the O2, Taylor paused to gather his emotions. “The legend of that show... got us here.”

“I’m falling apart… I thought I was passed this but I’m losing it,” Sarah Mary Chadwick’s cracking voice howls over a skeletal piano ballad on ‘When Will Death Come’, the opening track to her new album. The listener is thrown into the stream-of-conscious narrative of an artist coming to terms with the recent death of her father: it’s a harrowing and painfully desperate opening. Recalling the intimate lyricism of the late Daniel Johnston, Chadwick’s private, heartbreaking pain is conveyed emotively from the offset..."

The band’s career has spanned 15 years and five albums, but the lyrics on the first track of Holy Fuck’s new album, ‘Deleter’, propose a bold change in direction. Recorded on New Year’s Eve at Jack White’s Third Man Studio in Nashville, the song celebrates the catharsis that comes with starting anew – especially on the eve of a new year. “I want to scrap all of this / And start over again,” guest vocalist Alexis Taylor of Hot Chip sings on one of the most hopeful and assertive opening tracks to greet a Holy Fuck album in years.

On the cover of Loraine James’ latest album, For You And I, the past and the present blur as the London-born producer holds up a photo from 2006 of the high rise block of flats she grew up in against a picture of the flats as they are now. On the newer picture, there are three towers – one blue, one green and one purple – the latter being the one where James grew up. On the older photo, a fourth, yellow building is missing...

Beck and Pharrell first discussed the idea of working together in 1999, but it’s taken almost 20 years to finally bring the two together. Speaking to NME recently, Beck revealed that Pharrell asked him to initially work on the new N.E.R.D. record; from there, the two began sharing songs and, soon, a body of work emerged. A full collaboration ensued and ‘Hyperspace’, Beck’s 14th album, was born. Elsewhere, the record sees guest appearances from Coldplay’s Chris Martin, Sky Ferreira, Paul Epworth and Greg Kurstin on what is Beck’s most collaborative work for years.

“It’s remorseless,” Ken Loach says with a weary sigh, as talks about the poverty besieging the UK that he and Paul Laverty, his long-term writing partner, witnessed whilst researching his latest film. Sorry We Missed You is the follow-up to 2016’s I, Daniel Blake, and sees the veteran director return to Newcastle-upon-Tyne to document the plight of low-paid workers on zero-hour contracts. What he and Laverty discovered, he says, rivalled the shocking conditions he first documented 53 years ago in the game-changing Cathy Come Home.

“I’ve always said, even when I was a young woman, I said I don’t worry about the variety of roles available for women on screen. I worry about roles for women in real life. As we see women enter into major roles in real life, drama will follow. There are still not enough roles yet, but they’re coming. The unfairness and the prejudice of the lack of roles for women has always driven me crazy, it’s enraging. But things are slowly changing.”