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Music | Warmduscher – Too Cold to Hold

Warmduscher's brilliant fifth album opens not with the Massachusetts drawl of frontman Clams Baker III, but with the Scottish burr of Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh. He takes a hit of the hallucinogenic drug DMT and surrenders to the trip, seeing friends "from 500 miles away" and immersing himself in "a universal pool of beautiful energy". His journey does well to sum up Too Cold to Hold's own chaotic narrative. Along with bandmates Benjamin Romans Hopcraft, Adam Harmer, Marley Mackey, Quinn Whalley and Bleu Ottis Wright, Baker draws the listener into a cacophony of punk-rock, funk, hip-hop, and South African gqom.

Roisin O'Connor | Music editor

Film | Gladiator II

The older Ridley Scott gets, the less he cares about habits and expectations. There are only stories, and the thrills they elicit in his audience. How lucky we are to have that bravura. Gladiator, released in 2000 and currently at the bow of a miniature revival of the classical epic, was a relatively sombre and serious work. It threw grit in history's eye. Gladiator II is equal in scale and spectacle, and weighted with metaphor, but it's also shot through with the kind of wry, absurdist slant that's come to dominate Scott's work of the last decade and a half, from Napoleon to Alien: Covenant. At times, Gladiator II is pure camp. To insist that it shouldn't be is to hold on too tightly to the dour expectations of the 21st-century blockbuster.

Clarisse Loughrey | Chief film critic

Theatre | MADDADDAM, the Royal Ballet

You might wonder if, by making a ballet out of Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake trilogy of dystopian sci-fi novels, Wayne McGregor was biting off more than he could possibly chew. On stage, The Royal Ballet's MADDADDAM is a kaleidoscopic pileup of images and ideas - as if McGregor never met a rabbit hole he didn't want to go down. It can be exasperating, beautiful, or just odd. The hubris is part of the point: MADDADDAM is about the need to tell stories, and the struggle to tell them.

Zoe Anderson | Theatre

Music | Shawn, by Shawn Mendes

This album glows with the warmth of a roaring campfire. And certainly, Mendes makes for a dreamy camp counsellor, guitar resting on his knee as he pumps out a steady stream of quasi-heartfelt, quasi-corny songs – the forgettable kind that are easy to pick up on first listen ("Sweet is the sun/ Warm is the rain/ June is the month/ Free is the day"). Like any camp counsellor worth his braided bracelet, there are glimpses of endearing candour. "You can say I like girls or boys, whatever fits your mould," he sings on "Mountain". And later on "Why Why Why", he quietly drops a tabloid-worthy bombshell: "Thought I was about to be a father, shook me to the core, I'm still a kid." His vulnerability is admirable – if only his songs were half as daring.

Annabel Nugent | Features writer and commissioning editor

The singer has joined forces with his son to record a new album. He talks to Mark Beaumont about their need to record together and the emotional end to his feud with former singing partner Simon – 'It's now a thing of the past'

Read an extract from our Saturday Interview below…

After making his first appearance on stage in Japan aged two, pushed on in a wheelbarrow and a child's kimono to sing a few notes of "Feelin' Groovy", Art Jr occasionally sang with his father as a curly-haired, bright-eyed Mini Me, and later joined his father's band as an adult.

"I remember shows that we did that we were so close together, working one mic, my son and I, that our foreheads touched each other," Art Sr fondly recalls. "It was a blissful moment of closeness." Naturally, when his son pushed for the pair to record together, Art Sr agreed, despite not having released an album since 2007's Some Enchanted Evening and being on an indefinite hiatus from touring since a swathe of cancelled tour dates in 2023. "It needs to exist," he says of the record, and his son is firmer still. "[The album] was created out of the notion of how terrible it would be to not make this project," he says. "Time is so valuable, and we rarely stop and think about it."

Read the full interview here

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