Grab your Stetsons! How country music is taking over the UK

With country music festival attendances soaring and US artists selling out tours, are British and Irish audiences ready for "the full Southern experience"?

The Record Executive Who Understood the Power of Ego

Clive Davis, who died this week, was more than just the man with the golden ear.

Add to playlist: the doomy predictions of incendiary metallers Burner and the week’s best new tracks

For anyone furious about the state of the world, the London band offer a welcome – and unsparing – blast of catharsis

Downtown Boys: Public Luxury review

(Sub Pop)The Rhode Island five-piece return with a ferocious rallying call to fight for your beliefs, with bouncing basslines, muted house chords and stomping drums

'I can out-dance Bowie and Jagger!' Martha Reeves on Motown, Dancing in the Street and smashing crockery with Dusty Springfield

Now 84, the voice of Heat Wave and Jimmy Mack is releasing a new album. She answers your questions on Marvin Gaye, popularising the roundabout and why she hates cover versions of her songs

‘Elon Musk is dangerous and crazy. And I kind of used to like him’: Interpol on their political awakening

They were a big 00s buzz band – but looked in danger of fading out. Empowered by fatherhood and anger at war and AI, the New Yorkers explain why they ‘really showed up’ again

Phoebe Bridgers: Lost Boys Review

(Dead Oceans) The US singer took years off after becoming ‘world-weary’ of public life – and in the meantime, her silvery balladry reshaped pop. Her return is an ornate reinvention

Appalachian Awakening: Rewriting American Music Culture

AVERY COUNTY, N.C.—If there is such a thing as the classic Appalachian success story, the rise in popularity of the outside-the-box band Cigarettes at Sunset would be that story.

‘Delivery jobs are not for the weak!’ How British singer Kwn went from Amazon driver to global R&B star

After being dropped by her label, the vocalist became a courier to make ends meet. Now she’s back – with millions of fans of her pheromone-rich songwriting

Orchestral Works of Mel Bonis album review

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra/Rumon Gamba/Elizabeth Watts(Chandos) The French composer – a contemporary of Debussy’s – wrote slender but perfectly-formed pieces of beguiling beauty

Muse: The Wow! Signal review

From Count Dracula organ to choirs crying in Latin, the Devon band are scenery-chewingly preposterous yet nuanced on this epic about extraterrestrial life

Monochromatic Light (Afterlife) review

Sorey/BBC Singers/Tines/Gibson/GBSR DuoSt Giles’ Cripplegate, LondonThe Pulitzer-winner’s sprawling amalgam of Morton Feldman and African American spiritual felt meandering, but the GBSR duo, the BBC Singers and Ruth Gibson’s viola were luminous and charismatic