Across bold genre shifts and collaborations with Moses Boyd and more, the British-Nigerian musician’s lush work is driven by her Sade-esque vocals

London-based Sola ’s forthcoming mixtape is called Warped Soul . It’s a title that makes sense. While her Sade-esque vocal is mellifluous and soulful, the British-Nigerian singer, multi-instrumentalist and producer has been honing a sound that is lush and yet decidedly off-kilter since her 2018 debut EP, Wealth Has Come . She has previously called it “music which you can both cry and vibe out to”.

Priscilla Bajomo started out begrudgingly learning classical piano as a kid at her parents’ behest, though she would later study music and business at New York University, recognising her love for the medium. Still, she didn’t initially think of herself as a singer, until discovering an affinity with the work of Nina Simone, and during time spent visiting her father in Nigeria, listening to Fela Kuti. She grew in confidence, choosing to perform as Sola, her Yoruba name. Her output traverses everything from woozy trip-hop on latest single, Weak , to colourful electronics, cinematic ballads, silky R&B, jazzy percussion and Timbaland-style left-field futurism (on the captivating Scream999 ). Tellingly, Sola’s music is released via Jamz Supernova’s Future Bounce label, known for eclectic, nocturnal sounds that are difficult to categorise.

Warped Soul is out on 28 September via Future Bounce

With scores of artists playing for local teams across the capital, it’s no wonder these squads double as nurturing creative hubs

By the early 2000s, MCs such as Akala, Kano, Tinchy Stryder and Terminator were showing the UK that both football and music were viable careers no matter what barriers you faced. Lyrics were littered with references to Premiership matches; in 2010, Skepta rapped about Thierry Henry’s decision to leave Arsenal in his track English Breakfast.

In 2014, former Everton player Yannick Bolasie and retired Man City striker Bradley Wright-Phillips even faced off in a rap battle on Lord of the Mics . More recently, a younger generation of rappers such as Headie One and Youngs Teflon have continued this special relationship, with the former further immortalising Zinedine Zidane’s 2006 head-butt in his track Back 2 Back.

With Yellow Magic Orchestra, he paved the way for electropop and hip-hop but was far happier as a backroom boffin than an electronic pinup

• Ryuichi Sakamoto dies aged 71

Ryuichi Sakamoto was not a man cut out to be a pop star. As a teenager, he liked the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, but his abiding passion was New York’s underground avant garde art scene – Joseph Beuys , Fluxus, Andy Warhol – and its accompanying experimental music: he was fond of pointing out to interviewers that he was born the year that John Cage composed 4’33. At university, he studied the work of modern composers Boulez, Stockhausen and Ligeti; he had a particular interest in the challenging electronic compositions of Iannis Xenakis. The first album to bear Sakamoto’s name, 1975’s Disappointment/Hateruma, was a collaboration with percussionist Toshiyuki Tsuchitori that consisted entirely of free improv. If he was going to have a role in the Japanese pop world at all, it was in the background, using his keyboard skills and interest in the fast-developing world of synthesisers to find employment as a session musician.

But a pop star was exactly what Sakamoto became, at least for a time. A 1978 session for singer Haruomi Hosono led to the suggestion that they should form a band with drummer Yukihiro Takahashi. Yellow Magic Orchestra went on to become both the biggest band in Japan – inspiring a degree of paparazzi attention and screaming fervour among fans that Sakamoto seems to have loathed every minute of – and the first Japanese artists to find more than novelty or cult status in the west.

Sakamoto was one of Japan’s most successful musicians, acclaimed for work in Yellow Magic Orchestra as well as solo albums and film scores

Ryuichi Sakamoto, the Japanese musician whose remarkably eclectic career straddled pop, experimentalism and Oscar-winning film composition, has died aged 71.

As a member of Yellow Magic Orchestra alongside Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi, Sakamoto created joyous and progressive electronic pop in the late 1970s and early 1980s, alongside solo releases. He acted alongside David Bowie in the 1983 film Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence and composed its celebrated theme , the first in a series of film scores including Oscar-winning work in 1987 with David Byrne and Cong Su for Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor.