Don’t retire, Laura Marling, you’ve just made your greatest album yet

The brilliant singer songwriter may retire to be present for her daughter – it would be a huge loss to music. Plus: Razorlight and Pixies

The opening song on Patterns in Repeat, Laura Marling’s eighth solo album, is a little miracle: a song from a parent to a child that conveys all the tenderness of unconditional love without being cloying or sentimental.
On Child of Mine, Marling’s intimate voice and softly plucked guitar ooze maternal contentment that risks curdling into sickly sweetness, especially in a song employing mellotron and strings to summon the protection of angels. Yet there is something about the dryness of Marling’s delivery and clarity of observation that evokes a complex array of emotions including joy, privilege and fear, all rolled into a sense wonder any parent will recognise: “Last night in your sleep you started crying / I can’t protect you there, though I keep trying …”
There was a tangible streak of creative ambition about Marling, now 34, when she first appeared, aged 17, the darling of a late noughties nu folk scene that spawned Mumford & Sons. Her precocious songcraft harkened to a golden era of 1960s and 1970s troubadours yet with a singularity that suggested someone travelling to the beat of her own drum.
Notwithstanding two experimental albums with producer Mike Lindsay as the duo Lump, Marling’s music has tended to become more distilled with every iteration, as if honing closer to the source of her art. On first encounter, Patterns in Repeat is her simplest offering yet, shedding the last vestiges of sonic strangeness and abstract wordplay. But there are philosophical depths and rich emotions moving beneath the apparently placid surface, from the tart humour of Caroline (wherein a man rebuffs a former lover, confessing he can barely remember their song, which went “La la la / Something something Caroline”) to the pathos of Looking Back, a song originally written by her father, Sir Charles Marling (a hereditary baronet, but also a professional recording engineer) and tenderly adapted by a daughter as if discovering her parent anew.
Marling’s previous album, 2020’s Song for Our Daughter, addressed an imaginary future child whilst tackling the struggles of her own younger self. It could serve as an alternative title for its successor, which arrives following the birth of Marling’s first child, a daughter, in February 2023. The moment is evoked on a song simply entitled Patterns: “Pulled for meaning, I arched my back / And then from the black you were born.” It is a companion piece to the closing title song, both emphasising themes of familial patterns (positive and negative) echoing through generations. Marling ends with a promise to her child: “I want you to know I gave it up willingly / Nothing real was lost in the bringing of you to me.” 
She has spoken about the possibility that she may retire from music, such is her desire to be present for her daughter. A couple of biting lines in Your Girl betray antipathy to sexist attitudes she has endured in the music business, “trying to play a boy’s game / Feeling like a pawn in a pornscape.” Yet Your Girl more particularly addresses the loss of an older male friend or relative, one of many affecting songs populated by delicately sketched characters whom she clearly loves despite their flaws. “I want you to have a piece of my maternal flame / Part of me, eternity, a tolerance for pain,” she sings on Patterns in Repeat, simultaneously singing to her child and a feckless relative portrayed as lacking maternal instincts.
Everything about this album suggests someone at peace, from the tone of voice to the smoothness of sound and transparency of lyrics. It strikes me as Marling’s least ambitious yet most satisfying album, as if she has stopped trying to write self-consciously great songs and yet they still arrive, smaller but perfectly formed. I doubt it will be the last we hear from her. But, if it is, she is bowing out on a high. Neil McCormick
“There are no cool people in my band,” croons Razorlight’s ever-thorny singer/songwriter, Johnny Borrell, deep into his band’s fifth album, and the first to feature its classic line-up since 2008. He continues: “we hate those phony motherf—ers”. 
Since debuting in his late teens around the turn of the 2000’s, Borrell has always needled at public perceptions of him, and there’s a nagging sense that it’s ultimately his attitude problem which has held him back from reaching the very upper echelons of stardom initially predicted for him. 
In their original lifespan, Razorlight chimed with British rock’s return to garage-y values in the wake of the Strokes and the White Stripes, and they duly dispensed some irresistibly catchy Top 5 singles including Somewhere Else, In The Morning and chart-topper America. After co-songwriting drummer Andy Burrows quit, however, the wheels came off, and a fourth album was shelved, while their leader undertook an erratic solo career, only to be completed in ’18 with a patched-together group including founding guitarist Björn Ågren.
With Burrows and bassist Carl Dalemo rejoining in ’21, but friction always a possibility, they shrewdly enlisted hippie-punk producer Youth to bring all his experience and good vibes to this full reunion outing, at his idyllic Space Mountain studio in southern Spain. Borrell’s exceptional way with pop melody is a baked into every one of the ten  concisely constructed tracks, variously recalling Tom Petty’s consummate FM rock (U Can Call Me), Metronomy’s post-millennial synth-enhanced New Wave (Zombie Love) and Talking Heads’ wiry punk-funk (Empire Service). 
The opening four tunes are extraordinarily catchy, yet each is marred by queasy allusions to sex (Zombie Love) and drugs (Dirty Luck), which’ll be a turn-off to many listeners, while the third’s entitled Taylor Swift = US Soft Propaganda – inexplicably, as it bears no relation to the actual lyrics, which embarrassingly sum up the song itself as “like a filler on a Jonathan Richman album”. Musically brilliant, but frequently annoying and self-defeating, it feels like Johnny B has clipped his own wings again. Andrew Perry
When Pixies first reformed in ’04, with original bassist and co-songwriter Kim Deal in tow, they focussed on live recreation of their landmark alt-rock recordings from the turn of the ’90s, when their explosive loud-quiet sound was a direct influence on Nirvana’s world-beating Nevermind.
Deal maintained that they shouldn’t diminish their legacy by attempting to extend it, which seemingly proved to be a deal-breaker: since she departed in ’13, the band, now incontrovertibly led by Charles Thompson IV, aka Black Francis, have dropped an album with unerring regularity every two years.
This fifth outing of the second lifespan could never feel as momentous as ’88’s Surfer Rosa, or Doolittle (’89) – after all, those records have also been regurgitated by everyone from David Bowie and PJ Harvey, to Arcade Fire and Kings of Leon – nor, indeed, as occasionally brutal, given that Thompson is now pushing 60, and no longer the existentially troubled Massachusetts collegiate misfit of old. Yet, he remains such an unusual songwriter, ever drawing on the many styles of yesteryear, just like everyone else, but somehow skewing them according to his own bizarre logic. 
Second up, You’re So Impatient rattles along like a lost mid-’60s garage-psychedelia nugget, but with a simmering fury that lurks unresolved. The near title track, Jane (The Night the Zombies Came) gives baroque chamber-pop a surreal cinematic twist, with its Morricone twang and offbeat “Jane!” chorus shouts. Other nutty developments include Chicken’s lament from the viewpoint of a decapitated bird, and The Vegas Suite’s unguessable four minutes of increasingly wayward “Vegas” rhymes.
Recorded with newfound producer-of-choice Tom Dalgety in autumnal Vermont, this album marks a debut for third substitute bassist, Emma Richardson of Southampton’s Band of Skulls, whose hoity-toity English harmonies are deployed on country-flavoured tunes like Primrose and Kings of the Prairie, thus avoiding duplicating Thompson’s unmitigated Americana combo, the Catholics. 
In Pixies’ world, nothing is so straightforward: as per the album title, the undead make unbilled appearances, songs stray off radar, and you’re readily persuaded once again that the great Black Francis is touched by an extraordinary genius. Andrew Perry
By Poppie Platt
Katie Gavin featuring Mitski, As Good As It GetsHaving nestled herself firmly into the indie top-leagues as lead singer with MUNA, Katie Gavin continues her solo project with this beautifully yearning guitar ballad about accepting that a relationship has run its course (“You only understand me / 80 per cent of our days / The sex can be amazing / And otherwise it’s ok”); her musical hero, the eternally wondrous American-Japanese singer Mitski, features.
Lady Gaga, DiseaseSomewhat overshadowed by today’s news that Kate Bush is plotting new music, pop’s resident wild auteur returns with her first new “pop” song since 2020 (she recently released a companion album to Joker: Folie à Deux made up of jazz and show tunes). Driven by an erratic, EDM-heavy beat and pounding synths, Gaga’s vocals sounding as powerful as ever, Disease also has a pleasingly Gothic overture – has she heard The Cure are back in business?
Romy & Sampha, I’m On Your TeamRomy – DJ, producer and former guitarist for The xx – teams up with pioneering singer-songwriter and producer (and long-term friend) Sampha for this stripped-back piano ballad about the effort required to make love last. Sampha’s vocals, in particular, wash over you like an ocean wave: effortlessly powerful, beautifully natural.
Tyler, the Creator, NoidHaving this week announced a global tour for next summer – including five nights in the UK – hip-hop’s most consistently innovative artist unleashes a furious rock-rap musing on the dark side of celebrity; his paranoia about fame-hungry vultures lurking on every corner having reached fever pitch (“Triple checking if I locked the door / I know every creak that’s in the floor / Motherf—er I’m paranoid”).