Wearing a soggy, stinky bracelet shows you’re part of a something communal, which is the very opposite of haute couture

There is a moment during any music festival when I want to tear my skin off and go home. It’s not after the two-plus days of wet wipe “showers”. Or the thigh burn from hovering above a toilet seat (if there is one). Or even the powerful smell of aged cheese and human waste that’s released from the ground on the final day. This moment can happen minutes, even seconds, into the weekend. And it will continue to happen many times a day for however long the thing goes on.

This moment is triggered whenever I have to wash my hands, and the dangly bit of the wristband will inevitably get wet and stay like that for at least an hour. Maybe longer. You can ignore it for a while, but then you’ll give someone dressed like a banana a high five and you will feel it, moist and scratching, against your forearm. If you’re wearing long sleeves, forget about it. It will press against the cotton and create a soggy patch that will nag you for hours, like a 4am drum circle one campsite over. Showering? A sensory nightmare. What I’m saying is: wristbands are a necessary but annoying part of “festival admin”. You wear them because you must.

Following our rundown of the best albums in the first half of the year, you responded with your own suggestions, from Kali Malone to Kim Gordon

Is it dream pop? Shoegaze? Grunge? No idea, but I adore it. It’s so immediate. The first time I played it, it was as if I’d been listening to it all of my life. It brought back memories of being a lovestruck teenager from more than four decades ago. I can just play it and float back to my youth – the good bits, fortunately – although it also soothed away some of the more traumatic episodes. I managed to catch them live, and it was glorious. David High, St Ives, Cambridgeshire

The geekiest edge of the British music underground is fuelled by the 90s, featuring a ZX Spectrum Noel Edmonds, a Blobby-themed grindcore band, and a lady who performs the script to Theme Hospital

We’ve had live jazz bands playing Mario Kart, and a full orchestra rendition of Sonic. But there’s a whole subgenre of video game music artists who’d happily describe their sound as even more nerdy. “Nerdcore has been around for 25 years. It’s hip-hop about nerdy subjects, predominantly video games,” says 41-year-old Nick Box from Blackpool. Box has been in all sorts of “weird silly bands” such as electronic horror punk band Hot Pink Sewage , where “all I did was dress as a gimp and push play on the backing track”. He now performs solo as Cliff Glitchard and it’s even weirder than you think.

“It’s all set against a backdrop of a ZX Spectrum running an AI clone of 90s TV presenter Noel Edmonds,” he “explains”. “The show starts with the Spectrum loading screen, then a pixelated Edmonds tells the crowd he’s responsible for every celebrity death, political decision and major disaster of the last 40 years. I run around shouting about crap celebrities and end up shagging Mr Blobby on stage.”

From A-list pop names such as SZA and Dua Lipa to rising stars and leftfield oddities, here’s who to try and catch at this year’s festival

There have been the usual Facebook-comment grumbles about how there’s too much bloody pop, but at the very top of Glastonbury’s Pyramid this year is a formidable trio: high-production dance from Dua Lipa (Fri, 22.00), quintessential flag-waving whoa-oh-oh-alongs from Coldplay (Sat, 21.45) and a new flavour for a Pyramid headliner: atmospheric, emotionally intelligent R&B from SZA (Sun, 21.30). Elsewhere, there are ample party-starters in Jessie Ware (West Holts, Sat, 22.15), Jamie xx (Woodsies, Fri, 22.30) teasing his long-awaited new album, LCD Soundsystem (Pyramid stage, Fri, 19.45) and Confidence Man (Other stage, Fri, 15.45). PJ Harvey (Pyramid stage, Fri, 18.00), Little Simz (Pyramid stage, Sat, 19.45), Brittany Howard (West Holts, Sun, 18.30), Corinne Bailey Rae (West Holts, Sat, 16.00) and Kim Gordon (Woodsies, Sun, 18.30) offer various shades of provocation; and Danny Brown (West Holts, Fri, 18.30) and the National (Other stage, Sun, 21.45) essay middle age from fairly polarised perspectives. And after the reformed, original Sugababes (West Holts, Fri, 16.55) packed the Avalon field to bursting in 2022, it seems as though Avril Lavigne (Other stage, Sun, 18.00) will be this year’s hottest nostalgia ticket for the festival’s millennial core. Laura Snapes

Concert footage, theoretically bolstered with frontman Tobias Forge’s feeble skits, seems likely to please only the diehard types

The concept of a cultural object as “Marmite” – ie you’ll either love it or hate it – is an overused one but may come into play here. Rite Here Rite Now is essentially a rock concert film, showcasing the Swedish theatrical rock band Ghost, and it’s exactly the sort of on-the-face-of-it loud and wacky business that people like to describe as a Marmite movie – but the truth is that at its core, it’s a pretty tame film, which fits the band’s goofy brand of soft metal.

Rock bands have a long history of dubious antics in their capacity as professional provocateurs, but Ghost’s major controversy is not especially rock’n’roll: it’s a legal dispute as to whether the masked “Nameless Ghouls” who make up the majority of the band qualify as band members or session musicians. The most daring (and genuinely rather tasteless) moment in the film comes courtesy of the closing credits – a montage of various famous serial killers might feel par for the course in metal-land, but the inclusion of other imagery such as the haunting image of nine-year-old Phan Thị Kim Phúc in the Pulitzer prize–winning photograph The Terror of War is an odd choice tonally.

(Sacred Bones)
Huge riffs, guttural vocals and fearsome intent create a formidable wall of sound in the US band’s maximalist, in-your-face sixth album

A caustically intense mainstay of the US underground, Thou combine cavernously sludgy riffs with raw punk energy. Theirs is a sound of stifling humidity, a near hallucinatory heaviosity. Indeed, the narcotic heat of Louisiana – the band are from Baton Rouge – seeps through every sickly pore, wedding itself to the circling riffs, loose rhythmic under-swing and throat shredding screams alike: a brutal urban blues.

But where 2014’s breakthrough Heathen was of a more epic, doomy bent, Umbilical – the band’s sixth full length album – speaks more closely to Thou’s links to the underground punk and hardcore scenes with shorter, (even) more aggressive songs and in-your-face delivery. Working up a vast – at times overwhelming – wall of sound, Emotional Terrorist and Unbidden Guest rage along with fearsome intent while The Promise is brutally off-kilter. I Return As Chained and Bound to You and album closer Siege Perilous, meanwhile, are lumbering sludge classicism.

AO Arena, Manchester
The actor’s prog-metal spoof band with Kyle Gass hilariously skewer rock cliche – but come from a place of deep love for the genre

‘Did anyone see Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny?” asks Jack Black, referring to their 2006 rockumentary . “Well, you didn’t see it in the cinema. No one did! It almost destroyed us.” The widely panned movie was indeed a box office disaster, but otherwise has been a rare blip on Tenacious D’s almost accidental rise to global domination. Formed by Black and sidekick Kyle Gass in 1994 as a joke when they were struggling actors (before High Fidelity and School of Rock catapulted the former into the Hollywood A-list), the comedy prog-metal band have gone from underground LA clubs to arenas packed with thousands of fans, all chanting “D”.

Seemingly unwittingly, the duo have tapped into a gigantic fanbase of people who love South Park/Wayne’s World-type humour as much as they adore Led Zeppelin or Ozzy Osbourne. Like Spinal Tap, it’s a spoof that comes from a deep love and knowledge of its subject. Their gigantic rubber demon references 80s rocker Dio’s 18 foot dragon, Denzil. Black has a superb operatic metal vocal. The acoustic guitar duelling and Queen/Darkness harmonies are tremendous and some of the songs sound as if they could almost have been actual venerable rock classics had they not been accosted by two ageing comedians and packed with knowingly silly lyrics about beasts, devils, farting and “the metal”.

(Sleeps Brothers)
On their sixth album, the hardcore Sheffield quintet bring furious riffs, howling, swearing and … acoustic guitars?

Formed by school friends in former mining villages near Sheffield, While She Sleeps were briefly on a major label but have gone an independent route to build a passionate fanbase large enough for them to headline London’s 10,000 capacity Alexandra Palace. Meanwhile, over 17 years the quintet’s music has developed beyond metalcore to reflect wider influences from Radiohead to Kendrick Lamar.

This sixth album attempts the sort of genre-busting metamorphosis Linkin Park went for with A Thousand Suns. Riffola and guttural, screamed vocals still abound (singer Loz Taylor has had three throat operations). Where 2021’s Sleeps Society album featured guests from Enter Shikari, Biffy Clyro and Sum 41, here Malevolence’s Alex Taylor pops in for the brutally anthemic Down.

The psychedelic musician’s new album trades her obscure influences for stark folk, inspired by the death of her father – then warped through Google Translate. ‘You don’t to write too much about yourself,’ she says

Jane Weaver turns up to our interview in a Stockport restaurant carrying a plastic bag stuffed with albums. They are all old, the worse for wear – she’s taking them to be professionally cleaned later – and obscure: the closest the bag’s contents comes to mainstream is a compilation of soundtrack music from the 80s films of nouvelle vague director Eric Rohmer . “The music from the scenes set in discos or parties,” she nods. “ Really good. Eighties, French, synthesisers. Some of it sounds a bit like Air.”

This all seems very Jane Weaver-ish. Over the past decade or so, she has released a string of fantastic, acclaimed albums, each one a left-turn from the last. They’ve taken in acid folk, space rock, eerie, drifting electronic experimentation, hypnotic, vaguely krautrock-y instrumentals and full-on pop, all of them informed by separate moodboards of obscure influences that speak of a profoundly eclectic taste and a lot of time spent digging through esoteric records. Even 2021’s glittery, pop-facing Flock was apparently based in an infatuation with “Lebanese torch songs and Australian punk”. She is the kind of artist who says things like, “I just kind of went down the rabbit hole of 80s Russian aerobics music,” in the same way that other people might announce they’ve been streaming that Noah Kahan single a lot.