Sam Fender: Seventeen Going Under review – music that punches the air and the gut

The North Shields songwriter replaces his former broad-brush politicking with rousing but arrestingly bleak, personal material that puts his indie-rock peers in the shade

Fontaines DC review – sparks fly for once-in-a-generation post-punk poets

The Dubliners burst brilliantly back on stage with literary-hearted rock that’s up there with the Smiths or the Pogues

Yard Act review – spiky chroniclers of sour times

Letting rip in the backroom of a pub, post-punk Leeds band skewer Brexit Britain with wit, bile – and a broken wrist

Public Service Broadcasting: Bright Magic review – mood music, from Weimar to Bowie

Berlin is the inspiration for the band’s inventive if melancholy fourth album

The Lathums: How Beautiful Life Can Be review – hearty 00s indie revivalism

The Wigan outfit have risen fast by feeding the eternal appetite for jangly indie – but aren’t as lyrically sharp as their forebears

Nick Cave and Warren Ellis review – showman regains strut in his step

Cave and Ellis’s serenely beautiful music may lack the melodrama of Bad Seeds shows but there was wit, rawness and love

Idles review – primal howls and bullish power for the pits

Joe Talbot dominated the Bristol band’s post-lockdown homecoming with spring-loaded unpredictability

Big Red Machine: How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last? review – slightly self-indulgent supergroup

Aaron Dessner and Justin ‘Bon Iver’ Vernon recruit Taylor Swift, Fleet Foxes and more for this album full of misty autumnal beauty – and a quiet punch

Green Man festival review – magical return for this psychedelic carnival

Mogwai, Nadine Shah, Fontaines DC and more mesmerise in the festival’s overwhelming, glorious comeback

Latitude festival review: a hyper-real return to glitter, beer and British musical brilliance

The first full-capacity festival since the pandemic began hosted a series of artists – Sons of Kemet and Self Esteem among them – that show how vibrant the UK’s scene still is

Mega Bog: Life, and Another review – a beautiful, bewildering fantasy

Meaning eludes the listener in Erin Birgy’s sixth album, an oblique, jazzy folk-pop offering that, with time, reveals itself

Arlo Parks review – impassioned live show creates heady sense of joy

Playing to a masked, distanced audience may not be every singer’s dream but this was a performance of dazzling intimacy

The Goon Sax: Mirror II review – striking, superb songwriting by Aussie indie trio

With three highly distinct writers, the still-developing band are in a fascinating state of flux

Lucy Dacus: Home Video review – forthright vignettes of a Virginia girlhood

The Boygenius member sets a homicidal fantasy to intense indie rock on her otherwise gentle third album

Kings of Convenience: Peace or Love review – a beautifully simple return

For their first album since 2009, the Norwegian duo keep things pared back to explore the complexity of love and desire