deft

PinkPantheress’s Capable of Love tour might be the least creative-directed pop spectacle mounted this year, and it’s all the better for it. Loosely tying into the lightly gothic conceit of her 2023 debut album Heaven Knows, the show, ostensibly, has a haunted house theme: the 22-year-old producer and TikTok star is surrounded by large ornate mirrors and dusty-looking furniture, and every few songs a menacing voice booms through the speakers to introduce another section of the show.But, as with Pink’s music, she cannot…

In 2007, Paramore released their breakthrough hit, Misery Business. It’s a song the band have a complicated relationship with. A few years ago, singer Hayley Williams began offering caveats about it – “I haven’t related to it in a very long time”, “I wrote it … because I was a dick”, “let’s celebrate that we’ve all done a lot of growing up since then” – then, for a period, declined to perform it at all. She made an exception for a guest appearance at Coachella with Billie Eilish, and Paramore returned the song to their…

K-Trap, AKA 27-year-old drill pioneer Devonte Perkins, used to perform wearing a balaclava, which the rapper has explained wasn’t to avoid surveillance or look like a wrong’un, but a tool to let him develop his artistry without people knowing who he was. The decision paid off. Recent mixtape The Last Whip II landed in the Top 20, Stormzy is a fan and K-Trap’s releases have featured Giggs, Fredo and Skepta. All of which has left the Londoner somewhere between underground and mainstream: playing smaller venues, but selling…

On his last album, 2019’s More Arriving, the US-born, Indian-raised drummer and producer Sarathy Korwar proved himself highly adept at thoughtful, engaging musical storytelling. Kalak is the London-based artist’s fourth full-length record as bandleader, and finds him less searing, more meditative than on its predecessor – but still every bit as vital.Examining the double meaning of the Hindi and Urdu word “kal” (which is both “yesterday” and “tomorrow”), Kalak unfurls with questions such as: who gets to be remembered; how…

One of those improbable tales that seem almost too weird to be true, the story of Brandon Lee, the unusually mature 16-year-old student transferred to Bearsden Academy in Glasgow in 1993, holds an enduring fascination for his fellow students. One of them is Jono McLeod, the director of this mischievous exploration of the now infamous case of a thirtysomething con artist who passed himself off as a kid.It’s a limber piece of film-making that blends animation (there’s a hint of the distinctive style of Beavis and Butt-Head…

What happens when a magnet for controversy depolarizes with age? Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel Lolita still attracts plenty of analysis, admiration and disgust, in the classroom and beyond. But despite the pedigree of the beloved film-maker Stanley Kubrick, the first film adaptation of Lolita – released 60 years ago this week – is arguably more of a curio these days, forced to excise or elide some of the book’s thorniest elements for the sake of being allowed to exist at all.The sheer unlikelihood of a Lolita movie being…