If anyone required a reminder of music criticism’s intensely performative role in global culture, look no further than its reaction to ‘El Mal Querer’ within the US and UK. Much has been made of its reconstructive qualities, imagining that the threads of R&B, electronic voice treatment and Justin Timberlake samples weave through flamenco’s superannuated frame like so much scaffolding. In truth, mainstream pop has been swiping bits from Catalan and Latin quarters for decades, and this is perhaps why Rosalía’s breakthrough LP feels so natural: for many listeners, that sonic palette came closer to distillation than adulteration.
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As Lucia Fairfull strides off stage, finding her way into the sunniest corner of Brighton Palace Pier, I’m still catching up with what’s just happened inside Horatio’s. Her band LUCIA close their set with ‘Melted Ice Cream’, rounding off a glorious racket that’s caught more attention than you’d expect for an early afternoon slot. Though the single came out last year, it seems destined to live on as a timestamp for 2018, as evocative of its era as anything by Weezer or Best Coast – perhaps the two bands most identifiable in its genetic make-up – immediately recalling a specific time and place in our lives, a history shared by our own experiences as much as the rock hagiographies that stack up around them.
A renewed sense of an international identity post-Brexit is shining a long-overdue spotlight on the incredible music being made around Europe. You sense that Amsterdam-born songwriter 
We’re going to the beach. Not the clean, iridescent shores of film scenes or sepia photographs, signifiers of a landscape that privilege the temporal over the spatial — it is always the childhood or the honeymoon that we beckon toward, and whether the sand in the picture belongs to Blackpool or New Jersey is mostly irrelevant — but the real beach. The sun is not shining. It rained a few hours ago, in fact, or is just about to, because there’s a dull kind of sadness in the air that lingers either side of the storm. To your left is a row of shops and cafés, closed on Sunday. To your right is a parking lot, asphalt grey in keeping with the weather, littered but otherwise empty. In front of you is the sea.
For all our literary devotion to sunlit afternoons and dark nights of the soul, real life rarely works in such easy contrasts. Our gold medal moments are flecked with sadness, swollen in purples and blues under the skin, and we scold ourselves for allowing the compromise: this should be the job, the house, the lover, the moment. “How can a child of the sun seem so cold?” Laura Veirs asks on her tenth album The Lookout, and though the line appears only once in allusion to the Colorado native’s childhood memories, it is the question that permeates the entire record.
Matthew Neale 