New releases this week: All genres

Review: Rebecca Taylor arrives at third album A Complicated Woman in a very different place to where she was before the release of her previous full-length, the Mercury Prize-nominated Prioritise Pleasure. Now a bona-fide pop star, the South Yorkshire chanteuse now has to deal with heightened expectations and her own experience of fame. By the sound of A Complicated Woman, she's handling both with aplomb. That's not to say that the lyrics avoid difficult subjects - her own worries remain front and centre - but the delightfully grandiose production, extensive use of choirs and orchestras, and Taylor's own penchant for penning stadium-sized sing-alongs deliver a maximal pop gem fitting her genuine star status. Rotherham's finest has never sounded so good (or, it should be added, explicit - there are some genuinely adult themes on display).

Review: Robert Smith has always treated remixing less like revision, more like ritual — a habit that’s followed him since his days in Crawley, West Sussex, piecing together worlds from scraps. This triple-disc release feels assembled with obsessive care, mapping out every possible mood lurking beneath the surface. There are club-ready flips, yes — Sally C, Danny Briottet and Gregor Tresher all push the rhythm forward — but they sit beside glacial pieces that feel more like haunted sketches than reworks. Mura Masa’s take on ‘All I Ever Am’ is disintegrated almost beyond recognition, its vocal a flickering memory. Mogwai’s ‘Endsong’ feels like the end of the world in slow motion. Even Chino Moreno turns in something striking — ‘WarSong’ morphs into a sludgy howl with heat-warped edges. But it’s the sequencing that surprises: these aren’t bolted together, but grouped in arcs, as though Smith were arranging the bones of an old idea into something still alive. Four Tet’s version of ‘Alone’ is a high point — deeply textured but featherlight. What matters is the feeling of being drawn somewhere, and Smith’s hand never letting go.

Review: More than four decades after he first appeared in smudged eyeliner and a mop of jet-black hair, Robert Smith is still finding new ways to pull his music apart and stitch it back together. This new remix collection — assembled and curated by Smith himself — feels less like a victory lap and more like a restless dissection of a legacy he’s still actively shaping. The collaborators here are hardly incidental: Four Tet, Orbital, Âme, Chino Moreno, Mura Masa, Trentemøller, Mogwai. It reads like a list built by someone still hungrily tuned into the present, not stuck in the past. And true to form, the results are all over the place — a feature, not a flaw. Some tracks lean into grandeur: Paul Oakenfold’s take on ‘I Can Never Say Goodbye’ opens with all the sweeping melodrama you’d expect, while Daybreakers stretch ‘WarSong’ into widescreen synthwork. Elsewhere, Shanti Celeste and Ex-Easter Island Head bring a strange intimacy to ‘Alone’, teasing out its ache with a different kind of spaciousness. At times, you wonder if Smith enjoys seeing how far his work can be bent before it breaks. But it never does — even filtered through others’ hands, his sense of tension, drama and deep emotional unease holds everything together.