Some works of art take a little time to appreciate, of course. Your friend protests an early defeat: it’s a slow burner. It heats up halfway through the trilogy. It takes a few listens. Undoubtedly that can be true, and I don’t mind waiting; in the meantime, you’d better know how to tell a goddamn story. Five seconds into Lissie‘s My Wild West and I’m hooked, the opening instrumental rattling to a close just as it’s picked up pace. Already, I don’t care where she takes this story. I just know I’m going to enjoy hearing it told, and she’s not even opened her mouth yet.

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“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” I don’t know if BOA ever went through a Camus phase at college, but they seem to have channelled some of the goalkeeper’s poignant spirit into their music. Freshly signed to indie label Hand In Hive – the folks who also brought us Drunken Werewolf favourites Saltwater Sun – the band have just unleashed their debut single, “Holier”. And boy, is it a dazzler.

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Grace Mitchell has got this sewn up. They’re calling it “post-Yeezus“, but this is post-Born To Die: husky vocals honeyed with a slight Southern slur; pop melodies played out on huge, moody piano chords, strung together with that ballad-in-the-club production; and lyrical narratives that snake through a few well-worn metaphors to get to the same message: break the rules, stay up late, live fast, die young. “We live the DJ life, We go out every night.” In 2015, this is about as route one as it gets. Christ, there’s even a song called “Bae”.

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Dolores Haze, you will remember, is the real name of the 12-year-old girl at the centre of Nabokov’s Lolita. At the centre of the room-spinning stupor these four Swedish women induce with guitar, drums and gutteral howls, there’s a similar mesh of innocence and experience to be found. This is the young band, after all, who describe their style as “goth sex, diva couture,” while sounding like they still kick out the jams in their parents’ garages.

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The signposts are erected for all to see. I Thought The Future Would Be Cooler begins with a few tentative prods at a synthesizer, like a child exploring the instrument for the first time, before the song unfolds into a taut, Moroder-ish paean to human mortality.  It’s a fine tradition, and one that stretches back well beyond YACHT‘s DFA Records background: rigid disco-punk melodies have long been the de facto soundtrack to your band’s pronouncements about, like, the future and stuff. You get to look like you don’t give a fuck, eyes now permanently rolled into the back of your head, while making it clear that you secretly do give a fuck, because politics. It’s a tricky balance sometimes.

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Richey Edwards once said that he hated Slowdive more than Hitler, and while the benefit of hindsight may render the comparison a tad unfair, you could certainly argue that they have a lot to answer for. As well as the slew of obligatory reformations, shoegaze reluctantly reared its head once more around 2007, offering a whole new generation the chance to feel like they’d taken a bit too much ketamine and fallen asleep in a microwave. Enter Ringo Deathstarr, the Texan pedal-botherers now on their fourth album.

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Five long years in the waiting, the release of Divers marked a sweet release for Joanna Newsom fans. Though many were still processing the unfathomable grandeur of 2010’s Have One On Me (sprawled across a three-disc format more befitting a Final Fantasy saga than a folk album), the scarcity of live shows only added to the artist’s mythical status. If there’s any concern about tonight’s performance, it’s that of living up to her critical beatification.

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“I say ‘cunt’ in a lot of different ways on this album,” muses Jenny Hval. She does. In the mouth of the Norwegian polymath, words are not so much spoken as they are tasted, chewed over, explored with the tongue for soft and brittle consonants. And when she spits out the word ‘bake’ on the spoken word opening to Apocalypse, girl, 2015’s most playfully avant-garde album, it’s perfectly clear that this is the more obscene word.

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Gaze into Kim Keever’s sublime artwork for Divers and you will find the album’s spirit stitched into its rich swatches of pinks and blues, each colour saturated until you start to feel the heat coming off it. It is dizzyingly beautiful, and though the scene is simple enough, there isn’t a single stray patch of canvas wasted.

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Where next for our intrepid heroes? We return, of course, to the adventures of British Sea Power, a band for whom no amount of critical adulation in the broadsheets will ever translate to a decent festival billing. You sense there was a point around 2005, probably when “Please Stand Up” was released as a single, that they could have gone stellar; could perhaps have been an Arcade Fire, or at least The National. Maybe it wasn’t meant to be. (Bittersweet, not least because Win Butler famously followed the English band around on tour, pre-Funeral.) Regardless, it was probably our gain.

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