Bow Wow Wow's return after 30 years is unexpectedly life-affirming, while Daniel Johnston's honesty has 'em snivelling in the aisles

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This Oregonian 38-year-old, perhaps best known as the "Him" to Zooey Deschanel's "She" (who guests here), hasn't reinvented any wheels with his seventh album.

Four police officers in Northern Ireland have been suspended from duty after the discovery of racist and sectarian text messages.

The most famous moment of The Futureheads' most celebrated song – a cover of Kate Bush's "Hounds of Love" – is its a cappella intro, so the idea of the Mackem quartet recording an a cappella album isn't too much for the imagination to handle.

To the younger generation of music fans, "indie" is a genre, a ubiquitous term used to describe artfully scruffy purveyors of white-boy guitar pop. In the late Seventies and Eighties, however, it was an abbreviation of "independent", used to distinguish the small, self-financed, artist-friendly record labels - the type started in garages, garden sheds and behind the counters of record shops - from their corporate counterparts.

ITTV is the third album from the Brighton duo of Laura-Mary Carter and Steven Ansell and, while they haven't quite justified their claim to have thrown away the rulebook, they're executing their spooked alt-rock with added poise and class.

“Sometimes I'm scared of being Ozzy Osbourne. But it could have been worse. I could have been Sting.”

Former denizen of Brooklyn indie girl groups such as Vivian Girls and Crystal Stilts, Frankie Rose has stepped out on her own and come up with a surprise delight: an enchanting dream-pop album steeped in her multi-tracked harmonies.

We are taking refuge in the past, whether it's 'Call the Midwife' and 'Downton' on TV, Coward and Rattigan at the theatre, or neo-Romantics in the galleries. Where's the sensation, asks Philip Hoare?

With each soaring, emotive note, Hayley Mary makes up for Australian rock’s long-standing lack of strong female singers. Despite her pixie dimensions, The Jezabels’ vocalist commands the stage with an easy authority. No wonder they have the confidence to play by their own rules.

Their name's sideways nod to The Slits' Viv Albertine is just one of a welter of new-wave influences coursing through Alberteen's Metal Book.

Not a blues album, but an album borrowing heavily from the bank of blues tonality: minor keys, draggy tempos, undecorated structures, an implicit sense of what it is to be enslaved.

It has been called the best festive song never to top the singles chart.