Swift now has joint highest number of chart-toppers for a female artist, as The Tortured Poets Department earns biggest opening week in seven years

Taylor Swift has tied with Madonna to become the female artist with the most UK No 1 albums, earning her twelfth chart-topper with the global phenomenon that is The Tortured Poets Department.

Swift also dominates this week’s singles chart, with three songs in the Top Five including a No 1 for Fortnight, featuring Post Malone. It’s her fourth No 1 single, and her third chart double.

SWG3, Glasgow
Delicately sipping a Red Stripe and accompanied by a seven-piece band, the Brit School grad loosens up her Mercury prize-nominated album with radiant star power

One hand raised to the heavens, the other fixed sharply on her hip, Olivia Dean is beaming. The 25-year-old musician is just three songs into her largest headline tour so far, and Echo – last year’s suave, soulful pop single about possibly misplaced trust – is a chic foil for her glamorous, Supremes-style choreography and her chemistry with her charismatic seven-piece band. With one flick of the wrist she summons a flourish of keys, a cymbal splash or a joyous trombone solo, and Dean looks both thrilled and in total control.

Still: “I’m quite nervous this evening,” she confesses, delicately sipping a Red Stripe. It’s surprising to hear from the Brit School graduate, a week after she delivered a stand-out Coachella set but, then again, Dean’s crowds are growing rapidly. Only last year she played to an audience a quarter of the size, down the road at King Tuts. She’s since been nominated for three Brit awards, and in June she’s bound for Glastonbury’s Pyramid stage.

French singer dedicates top prizes at Les Flammes ‘to all the blacks’ after backlash over rumoured Paris show

The French pop star Aya Nakamura has won three big prizes at France’s Les Flammes awards for rap, R&B and pop, and she thanked fans for their support after a racist row over rumours she would sing at the Paris Olympics opening ceremony.

“I’m very honoured because being a black artist and coming from the banlieue is very difficult,” Nakamura told the ceremony, which she opened with a medley of her songs. She dedicated her awards – female artist of the year, pop album of the year, and international star of the year – “to all the blacks”.

(x2/Parlophone)
The duo’s first LP in four years finds them refining and updating their late-80s heyday sound, with a new producer in tow

Cultural gravity makes certain events inevitable, such as Sean Lennon and James McCartney writing songs together. Or Britain’s most successful pop duo returning to refine and update the sound of their late-80s imperial era. Nonetheless is Pet Shop Boys ’s first album since 2020’s Hotspot , which concluded their Stuart Price-produced trilogy. New producer James Ford takes 1986 debut Please ’s simplicity and the lush orchestration of 1990’s Behaviour and applies both to this fan-pleasing collection.

For those who wish the pair’s albums came with a reading list concealed inside a clutch of club flyers, there’s Dancing Star, a lovely three-minute biopic of Rudolf Nureyev – the Russian joining the vast dinner party of historical figures, including Casanova, Debussy, Hitler and the Queen, featured elsewhere in Neil Tennant’s lyrics.

As the boss of PC Music, the godfather of hyperpop confounded critics but won over Beyoncé and Charli XCX. Now, with a supersized new solo album, he’s continuing his mission to make pop more unpredictable

Everything about AG Cook is exhausting. As a producer of elasticated outre pop his output is as varied as it is frenetic, taking in everything from bass-rattling electronic workouts for cultural behemoths such as Beyoncé to celestial dreamscapes for underground newcomers, via collaborations with Caroline Polachek and longterm partner in crime, Charli XCX. Having initially steered clear of solo albums to focus on running his divisive yet hugely influential label PC Music, Cook’s debut, 2020’s 7G, featured 49 tracks and more than two hours of music ranging from face-melting dance experiments to a lo-fi Sia cover. Apple, a more streamlined, but no less polarising followup arrived a month later.

His hard drive somehow still not yet full, Cook is now back with his third album Britpop, a three-part, 24-song opus split into Past, Present and Future sections. As part of its promotion he’s been busy creating TikToks and launching his own parody website Witchfork , billed as “the least trusted voice in music”. “It’s obviously embracing some troll behaviour, which has always been a bit of a thread for me personally,” he laughs.

(PIAS)
The Manchester band sing about edginess and emotional danger, but never manage to give their beats any tension

You can imagine a private members’ club commissioning Porij as artists-in-residence: the young Manchester band makes dance music so smooth and so inoffensive that I can imagine it goes down a treat among the UK’s young, moneyed finance set. The title of their debut album Teething is a misnomer; even if it implies growing pains or an unsettled genesis, perhaps with a rewarding outcome, that rarely comes through on this record of neutered garage beats and platitudinal lyrics.

Throughout Teething, Porij allude to edginess or emotional danger, but it never comes through on the record. Marmite’s vengeful lyrics (“Haunt my life, I’ll haunt yours back”) can’t cut through its glazed poolside ambience. Sweet Risk, about entering a reckless relationship, conveys none of that tenuous sense of abandon in its weightless jungle beat. In recent years, dozens of other artists, from Avalon Emerson to Kllo and even TikTok chart-topper PinkPantheress, have more successfully fused underground sounds with heart-on-sleeve pop lyricism; in sanitising the sounds they’re referencing, Porij wind up behind the pack.

There are highlights among the haze. Stranger is a deeply affecting exploration of gender dysphoria whose lyrics are alternately guileless (“I just want to wear little shorts in the deep end”) and profound (“They were so close when they made me”). You Should Know Me is ingratiating simply by virtue of having a full, sinewy bass line; Gutter Punch, although borrowing liberally from Billie Eilish’s Bad Guy in its second verse, is destabilising and magnetic. For the most part, though, Porij can’t help but feel warmed over.

Artists from Dua Lipa to Nia Archives are tapping the boisterous energy of mid-90s music – and even embracing the union jack. Can they avoid the genre’s laddish lows?

For some, Britpop was a high point for British guitar music: that time when Blur, Pulp, Suede and Oasis thrilled the world with wit and brio. Others argue it has aged worse than Loaded magazine: blokey, beery, conservative and still clogging up the charts. Indeed, there’s perhaps something a bit dismal about the fact that James and Shed Seven have both had No 1 albums in 2024.

Nevertheless, a crop of young artists are turning to the energy and iconography of mid-90s Britain for inspiration. The jungle artist Nia Archives, 24, wears a dazzling union jack on her teeth for the cover of her debut album, Silence Is Loud. “No one’s really making Britpop at the moment,” she told the Face in February, “but I have a feeling 2024 is gonna be the year.” Dua Lipa has said she was “looking through the music history of psychedelia, trip-hop and Britpop” while making her new album, Radical Optimism, adding that Britpop “has always felt so confidently optimistic to me, and that honesty and attitude is a feeling I took into my recording sessions” – although you’d be pushed to notice the influence on the new singles she has released so far.

There’s plenty of great stuff in this documentary to keep super fans happy – but you only need to know 80s banger Livin’ on a Prayer to get emotional as the ageing band break down before your very eyes

Every pop biography has the same dilemma: fans of the artist want to know all the details, while viewers with only a passing interest just want to get to the good stuff. You can tell which side of the line Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story falls on by looking at the running time. Its four episodes are all well over an hour long.

By far the strongest instalment is the opener, which can be watched in isolation as an evocative charge through the period leading up to the band’s formation and breakthrough. The best rockumentaries have the power to pitch us into a past moment we wish we could hang out in – the place and time here that crackles with fantastic potential is New Jersey in the back half of the 1970s.

(Total Pleasure)
Are we finally seeing the real Annie Clarke? Replacing alter egos with raw immediacy, she delivers one of her best albums: restlessly inventive and packed with ideas

The cover of St Vincent’s previous album, Daddy’s Home, featured Annie Clarke in character: heavy eye-make up, ripped stockings, blond wig – the “benzo beauty queen” who haunted a number of songs.

Well, of course it did. Clarke once released an album called Actor, and role-playing is very much her thing: the prosthetics-heavy “grotesque beast” on the sleeve of her David Byrne collaboration, Love This Giant; a “cult leader” for her eponymous 2014 album; the vertiginously heeled “dominatrix in a mental asylum” of 2017’s Masseduction. But curiously, Daddy’s Home also contained a song that appeared to question the wisdom of adopting personae at all. “So, who am I trying to be?” wondered The Melting of the Sun, before lauding a succession of confessional singer-songwriters: “Saint Joni” who wasn’t a “phony”, “brave” Tori Amos, “proud” Nina Simone. “But me, I never cried,” it added, “to tell the truth, I lied.”