The success of Manchester’s Outbreak festival shows the appetite for the genre isn’t just healthy, it’s on the rise. Its organisers discuss the scene’s evolution, its fragility, and its (very loud) future

At the end of June this year thousands of people – from Scotland to Bulgaria, Chile to Singapore – gathered in an industrial estate in Manchester to boot each other in the head. That wasn’t the express purpose, of course, but a common side-effect of attending Outbreak, the hardcore punk festival that has become a flagship event for a genre experiencing an unprecedented moment of mainstream visibility.

Bursting out of the American suburbs in the late 1970s, hardcore was a response to the punk and new wave invasion that had dominated the years prior. Early bands such as Black Flag, Bad Brains and Dead Kennedys distilled the rawness of punk and pushed it to extremes, pioneering a do-it-yourself ethos, and a fast, frantic sound that became the definitive sonic kickback to a decade of Reaganomics and rising conservatism. Though the sound of hardcore has evolved over the decades, spawning various subgenres (screamo, queercore, powerviolence) and acting as the jumping-off point for many of the pop-punk and emo bands that defined the 2000s, that grassroots philosophy has been unwavering. It’s there in the origins of Outbreak, too.

Royal Albert Hall, London
Beautiful wind playing in a slow-burning Brahms joined searing strings in Schoenberg and Alice Coote’s fine-grain singing of Mahler for a space-testing night

Outside the Proms, British orchestras from beyond the M25 get far too few opportunities to showcase their achievements in the capital’s concert halls. It’s not surprising, then, that those bands often have points to prove when they do make their annual visits to the Albert Hall, and the three that have appeared there during the first week of this summer’s Proms have all shown what London is missing the other 10 months of the year.

After the fine concerts from the Hallé and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales , the third to acquit itself so well was the BBC Scottish Symphony, under its chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth. The range and originality of the concerts that Wigglesworth has come up with during his first two seasons in Glasgow have quite often put the BBCSSO’s London sibling to shame, and while this programme of Brahms , Schoenberg and Mahler was very much a mainstream affair, the way in which it was put together and the musical connections it suggested were never commonplace.

O2 Forum Kentish Town, London
Katie Crutchfield and her band bask in a rolling sound with smoky twangs and divine harmonies, creating affinity among her fans by leaning into the lessons of mid-30s life

W axahatchee ’s fifth album, Saint Cloud, came out on 27 March 2020, arriving into a changed world. Having made her name on crunchy indie rock, here Katie Crutchfield’s embraced the country music of her Alabama youth, as well as the storytelling Americana of formative influence Lucinda Williams. It was a full band affair, richly produced and wistful, that was sorely deprived of its rightful live incarnation while gigs were off limits.

That April, a viral tweet from author Jia Tolentino perfectly summed up the experience that Crutchfield’s newly expanded fanbase was craving: “Just imagine … you’re standing in a big warm crowd, two songs into hearing this Waxahatchee album live, your friend wiggles back through next to you and hands you a beer, you say ‘thanks dog I got the next one,’ you take simultaneous sips and go on vibing :’)”

(EMI)
Eight years on from their last album, the Australian duo’s fabulist nostalgia-pop is a triumph of feeling over artifice

The music industry doesn’t offer participation prizes, but if it did, Australian duo Luke “Emperor” Steele and Nick “Lord” Littlemore, AKA Empire of the Sun , deserve flowers. Their work comes freighted with so much cape-swishing, astral-travelling effort. The pair’s speciality is fabulist nostalgia-pop: songs with as few sharp edges as possible, swaddled in sleek, shiny futurist imagery reminiscent of 80s fantasy movies such as Labyrinth . Their lyrics brim with the thrill of kids on a beach digging up amulets. Eight years since solid last album Two Vines , that spell is largely unbroken.

Like their three previous projects, this one contains at least two elite tunes (Changes, Cherry Blossom ) interspersed with effervescent yet evanescent second-tier tracks (Revolve, Music on the Radio , Ask That God) and smoothly produced non-bangers (everything else). As usual, there’s a ballad seeking the vibe of a romcom’s penultimate scene – the tear-soaked tux at the graduation ball – that’s fatally hobbled by Steele’s effect-laden vocal. His candyfloss tones sound strangely insincere whenever the tempo drops. Mostly, though, Empire of the Sun make you forget all the artifice that’s gone into creating their music and let you collapse happily into the emotions it evokes.

(10 Summers/BMG)
The fourth album from Kendrick Lamar’s Not Like Us producer features cloying love songs, odes to Mom and thanks to God

When Jesus told his followers to have “faith the size of a mustard seed” he was partly thinking ahead to the career of LA hitmaker Dijon Isaiah McFarlane, whose 2014 debut album predicted 10 Summers of chart domination. But rare is the rap producer who can stay hot for more than a few seasons. For two years Mustard’s signature sound – a minimal concoction of 808 handclaps, booming bass and Dorito-crunch snares – filled the charts with club-rap-R&B crossovers ( Tinashe ’s 2 On, Jeremih’s Don’t Tell ’Em). But by 2016’s Cold Summer his era was all but over.

Yet the prophecy came true – Not Like Us, the killer blow in Kendrick Lamar’s ugly beef with Drake , became Mustard’s first-ever US No 1 in May. Sadly, it’s the kind of club-rap ripper that’s in short supply on his fourth album, an occasionally biographical tale of childhood nostalgia, middle-age melancholy and returning to the church – albeit voiced by 20 guests, from longtime rap foil Ty Dolla $ign to soul royalty Charlie Wilson.

(Unsound)
This searching, soulful release conjures up the spirit of summers spent by the lake and in the forest

Named after a Lithuanian snake spirit that supposedly brings families health and prosperity, Polish guitarist Raphael Rogiński’s hypnotic new album is filled with the heat and light of summer. His materials are the eastern European folk forms he first heard in the forests and lakes of the Poland-Lithuania borders during childhood summer holidays, and the memories formed there (he writes dreamily of floating at night in a boat with his brother in the liner notes).

Created with Warsaw musician/producer Piotr Zabrodzki, and mastered by Oren Ambarchi collaborator Joe Talia, these 12 tracks show how an electric guitar, amped up for reverb and resonance, can evoke a sense of wonder at natural history (many of the track titles are the Lithuanian names of flowers). Still, you can hear echoes of Rogiński’s first instrument, his grandmother’s Uzbek kamānche (a three-stringed lyre), in the gorgeous Paprastasis Amalas (which translates as Common Mistletoe) and the gnarlier Pelkinis Gailis (Marsh Rosemary), his raw, finger-picked style lingering longingly over the minor-key laments.

(Jagjaguwar)
The Canadian indie-garage-rockers take the mickey out of pop, punk and the stories we tell ourselves, but strong feeling outweighs the cynicism

Trite metaphors, tortured similes and outright cliches are, ahem, ten a penny in today’s pop lyrics – so how refreshing to have Zach Choy, bandleader with Canadian indie curveballs Crack Cloud, writing with such wit, bite and the kind of perfectly scanning rhyme you get in the best sea shanties or children’s literature. That isn’t faint praise: it’s deceptively hard to write lyrics this rhythmic, this rounded, much less so while making trenchant comments about the very capabilities of art.

Crack Cloud have had a shifting lineup over the past decade and two previous albums, and the band match Choy’s ambition, playing a singular kind of maximalist garage rock decked out with synths, saxophones, strings and singalongs. Yet he remains at its centre, a drummer-singer with a history of addiction. “Road to recovery, an early talking point,” he notes drily of the press ( including the Guardian ) who latched on to this traumatic story when the band broke through around 2017, and Choy is so aware of how personal narrative and pop culture are constructed.

(10k Projects/Capitol)
The US rapper’s subject matter is lightweight and this debut album only lasts 23 minutes, but funny, snotty lines abound and the music is often viscerally exciting

Ice Spice is a divisive figure in the world of rap. There are people who think her rise over the last two years is representative of all that’s wrong with rap: witness the wailing and gnashing of teeth that greeted her inclusion in Complex’s list of the 50 best New York rappers, albeit at No 50. Equally, there are people who posit her as something of a saviour figure, “a new rap star in a genre that sorely needs one”, as one recent US profile put it, citing statistics that point to “a steady decline in [rap]’s consumption”. Said figures suggested rap and R&B’s share of the US market had declined by 1.5% between 2022 and 2023, but it was still by far the biggest genre in America – no need to man the lifeboats just yet. But you can’t argue with the fact that Ice Spice (born Isis Gaston) is rap’s biggest breakout star in recent memory: feted by Taylor Swift and responsible for four US platinum singles in just over six months.

The weird thing is that the naysayers and boosters alike have reached their conclusions for exactly the same reasons. There is Ice Spice’s relentless pop focus. “Let’s talk drill / Who bigger than she?” she brags on her debut album’s Gimmie a Light, but her take on the subgenre rids it of grit and menace. Admittedly her current single, a collaboration with Central Cee called Did It First, features plenty of gunfire in time with the hard Jersey club beat, but the filtered vocal samples behind it are melancholy, even poignant. The synth line on the amazingly titled Think U the Shit (Fart) carries with it a memory of electro-infused 80s pop-R&B. When the backing tracks tend to the ominous – as on Phatt Butt or Plenty Sun – something about Ice Spice’s snotty humour lends their mood the air of a cartoon or video game.

The director, along with his collaborator Chrystabell explain – or try to – their new album Cellophane Memories and the magical marriage of music and film

‘Where we’re from,” says The Man from the Other Place in David Lynch’s TV series Twin Peaks, “there’s always music in the air.” The line concerns a terrifying alternate reality called the Black Lodge, but could apply to the whole of Lynch’s surrealist cinematic universe. From industrial drones to soaring ballads, it has always been filled with music: think of Roy Orbison songs shattering reality in Mulholland Drive and Blue Velvet , or Julee Cruise’s spectral singing in Twin Peaks . “Cinema is sound and picture both – 50/50 really,” Lynch says. “I don’t know why everyone doesn’t think this way.”

Lynch has long made his own music, dating back to 1977 with his soundtrack for his debut feature film Eraserhead, composed with sound designer Alan Splet. Lynch gave his first vocal performance on Ghost of Love, a song for 2006’s Inland Empire in a spine-chilling croon, and has since released two solo LPs. Now, his new album Cellophane Memories, made with longtime collaborator Chrystabell, is another strange adventure in sound: an album of ghosts, fed by several of the long, devoted creative partnerships that have shaped Lynch’s remarkable 78 years.