Fresh from a too-close experience of armed robbery in the US, the flamboyant indie band tell Mark Beaumont about their new album, America as the new Roman empire, and being on Louis Tomlinson’s mood board

North Shields’ answer to Bruce Springsteen is back with stories of his tattered heart and the pride and poverties of his country – but the songwriting on his latest album plods more than it ricochets

The Liverpool band have built on their indie past to become global touring, triumphant TikTok stars. Mark Beaumont asks about the intoxicant years, the LA fires and their new album

Hip-hop king’s performance will undoubtedly go down as one of the most important halftime shows in the history of the event, if not the most significant mass-televised rap performance of all time

The Dublin chart-toppers are back with their third album, the pop-skewing ‘Open Wide’. Ahead of its release, the band sit down with Mark Beaumont to chat about acclimatising to arenas, quarter-life crises, ‘nasty’ politicians – and why their frontman being the son of rock luminary Bono only made them work harder

Twenty years on from the group’s genre-splicing debut album, Mark Beaumont talks to those who were there, from The Rapture to Hot Chip, about the most influential New York band of the Noughties

Everyone remembers the Irish singer’s mesmerising video for ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’. Few know that Prince was the musician who wrote and released the original – or the level of chaos that ensued when he and O’Connor met. On the song’s 35th anniversary, Mark Beaumont delves into its emotive story

The 82-year-old delivers an extraordinary set drawn almost entirely from The Beatles and Wings canons, bringing tears, nostalgia and even screaming

The soulful Sixties crooner was 33 when he was shot by the manager of a $3-a-night motel in Los Angeles. The lingering conspiracies surrounding his death, writes Mark Beaumont, threaten to overshadow a life of music and civil rights activism – not to mention a voice that would go on to influence Otis Redding and Tina Turner

Bidding farewell to 2024, The Independent’s music critics Mark Beaumont and Helen Brown count down the best albums of the year