Is cosmic obliteration really what the future holds, as the latest trailer for the forthcoming First Steps appears to show?

What if Thanos really had finger-snapped away half of all life in the universe and then kicked back on his scorched Titan homestead like a giant, purple Cincinnatus? What if Ultron had succeeded in uploading himself into the cloud, turning every smart fridge and Fitbit into a genocidal death bot? What if Loki had kept the Tesseract, conquered Earth, and turned Avengers Tower into a golden skyscraper shaped like his own smirking face?

These are the Marvel sliding‑doors moments we are secretly relieved that we will never see – too bleak, too bonkers, or too off‑brand to survive outside the whiteboard of producer and Marvel boss Kevin Feige.

The mysterious new artist’s thrillingly complete sound world is glitchily complex but beguilingly light on its feet

From Sheffield, via Leeds
Recommended if you like Mark Fell, Jlin, Beatrice Dillon
Up next Live set at No Bounds festival in October

It’s thrilling and satisfying when an artist’s debut album is so fully realised: as if they have their own hyperlocal dialect, and are saying something genuinely new with it. So it is with NZO, a mysterious Sheffield-based electronic artist whose album Come Alive is a defibrillating jolt of vitality. You can find affinities with other artists and styles here, for sure: the bookish but playful minimalism of another Sheffield musician, Mark Fell; Objekt’s trickster vision for bass music and techno; the white-tiled cleanliness of some of Sophie’s work; Jlin’s paradoxically static funk. But the way it’s all pulled together is totally NZO’s, making for music that’s so light on its feet despite its incredible complexity.

Springsteen obsessives rejoice! The Boss has released seven lost albums, made between 1983 and 2018. Where to start? Let our Bruce scholars light you through the darkness …

Bruce Springsteen is opening his treasure trove: Tracks II: The Lost Albums features 83 previously unheard songs – unless of course you’re one of the close friends that Springsteen has apparently been playing them to “for years” – from unreleased albums made in the gaps between his storied catalogue, spanning 1983 to 2018. To make sense of this vast tranche of new material, we got “tramps” Michael Hann and Laura Barton to pull apart the risks, regrets and riches in this landmark box set.

Michael Hann I saw the trailer for Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere the other day, which shows the symbolic moment in which the young Bruce buys his first new car, a 305 V8. “It’s awfully fitting for a handsome devil rock star,” the salesman says, leaning through the window. “I do know who you are.” Springsteen looks up and says, wistfully. “Well, that makes one of us.” I think that captures what Tracks II: The Lost Albums are , with Springsteen making sense of himself in those years when the world had decided on a very clear idea of which Bruce Springsteen it wanted, thank you very much. My feeling is that now, he’s very clearly delineated the Boss from another, more nuanced version of Bruce Springsteen. The Boss tours with the E Street Band; Bruce Springsteen writes a memoir, performs a Broadway one-man show, makes left-field records following his muse. Now he’s maybe able to do what he wanted to do in the late 80s and through the 90s because he’s secure in being able to switch between those two ideas – and he does know “the Boss” is an idea that he created – and also secure that his audience trusts him enough not always to be the Boss.

The Photographer’s Gallery, London
He got his first cover shot at the age of 11. By 14, he was touring with a reggae legend, who taught him how to smoke. And he has spent the rest of his life chronicling Black British experience and so much more

It’s a Sunday in 1971, and a shy 11-year-old kid is wandering around Hackney with his camera, looking for something to photograph. Spotting a Palestinian Liberation Organisation rally, he stops to take pictures and promptly takes his prints to a photo agency on Fleet Street. Incredibly, one of them ends up on the front cover of the Daily Mirror, pocketing the child snapper the princely sum of £16.

There are many remarkable stories like this surrounding Dennis Morris and his photographs at his three-floor exhibition Music + Life. Born in Jamaica, Morris moved to London before encountering photography through a camera club at his local church, St Mark’s in Dalston. There was, perhaps as a consequence, a religiosity about the way Morris devoted himself to the medium (he was dubbed “Mad Dennis” for preferring photography over football). Around the same time as he shot the PLO protest, Morris had also set up a humble commercial photo studio in the bedsit he shared with his mum – he pinned up a white sheet and borrowed a tungsten spotlight from St Mark’s. A few of these pictures from the early 1970s feature in the show, striking in their maturity and command of the camera. He understood how to make his subjects look and feel good.

Bristol Old Vic
Seiriol Davies’ musical biography of Edwardian aristocrat Henry Cyril Paget is crammed with wit but its subject remains enigmatic

‘Regrettably,” sings Henry Cyril Paget, “very little is known about my life.” There’s a reason for that: the fifth Marquess of Anglesey died at 29 having bankrupted his estate through his extravagance, including mounting plays that no one came to. His family subsequently attempted to destroy all evidence of the man who had shamed their proud line of landowners and empire builders.

Seiriol Davies first discovered hints of the forgotten, cross-dressing Edwardian aristocrat on childhood trips to a local National Trust property, and debuted this chamber musical about him on the Edinburgh fringe nine years ago . This new production, directed by Lisa Spirling, adds zhuzh to the songs, with an onstage four-piece band – directed by Dylan Townley’s Maestro – augmenting its original cast.

At Bristol Old Vic until 12 July. Then at Underbelly, George Square, Edinburgh , 30 July to 24 August

Donmar Warehouse, London
Samira Wiley is superb as a corset-maker who embroiders dreams for herself and others in Lynette Linton’s tremendous production

Lynn Nottage’s 2003 play explores what you hold close and who you are when your defences are down. In 1905 New York, Esther, a skilled Black corset-maker, creates ravishing undergarments in Wedgwood blue or salmon pink, trimmed with “every manner of accoutrement”. Stitching romance for others, she fears she will never know her own – until George begins writing from Panama, where he is labouring on the canal.

Tucked into her modest, mouse-grey dress, Samira Wiley’s Esther embroiders dreams with every letter. Despite forebodings from her landlady (Nicola Hughes, plush and beady), she insists: “I am his sweetheart twice a month and I can fill that envelope with anything I want.” Kadiff Kirwan’s melodious, greedy-eyed George arrives in New York and the first act ends on the edge of hope. Later, disappointment settles: intimacies fray, promises prove moth-eaten.

After Dune director Denis Villeneuve was confirmed to be the next 007 director, we asked you which actor you think should join him

Bond should have an element of danger about him. So yes Tom Hardy immediately springs to mind. I also think Tom Hiddleston would be good at a more lighter touch Bond though, the Roger Moore to Hardy’s Connery. All the other candidates either sound way to young or in the case of Idris Elba, great actor though he is, a bit old for the role. machinehead

Whilst Idris and Tom Hardy would undoubtedly have been excellent – Tom Hardy, in particular, has that undercurrent of menace that Connery always carried – as, I think, would Christian Bale, their time has passed. I did think Nicholas Hoult might be a reasonable pick, though possibly too “pretty”. But were I casting it, my money would go on Jack O’Connell: right age, English, dashing and could probably do rugged, thuggish violence if SAS Rogue Heroes is any guide. EvanByrne2

The Booker-winning author on taking inspiration from Kafka, and a youthful passion for Jackie Collins

My earliest reading memory
My mother reading Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows to me – and reading it again and again, because I loved it and her. I was perhaps three. We lived in a little mining town in the middle of the rainforest. It was always raining and the rain drummed on the tin roof. To this day that’s the sound I long to hear when I relax into a book – a voice in the stormy dark reminding me that I am not alone.

My favourite book growing up
Books were an odyssey in which I lost and found myself, with new favourites being constantly supplanted by fresh astonishments. Rather than a favourite book I had a favourite place: the local public library. I enjoyed an inestimable amount of trash, beginning with comics and slowly venturing out into penny dreadful westerns and bad science fiction and on to the wonderfully lurid pulp of Harold Robbins, Henri Charrière, Alistair MacLean and Jackie Collins, erratically veering towards the beckoning mysteries of the adult world.

Soho theatre, London
There is crackling chemistry in Harrison David Rivers’ two-hander starring Omari Douglas and Alexander Lincoln

There are never just two people in a room, or two voices in a conversation. For the interracial gay couple in Harrison David Rivers’s 2017 play, those voices are freighted with complexity: white privilege and Black hurt, queer joy and rage, all shimmering around the simplest dialogue.

Jesse (Omari Douglas) is a Black playwright who prioritises his work; Neil (Alexander Lincoln) is a white activist who comes from wealth and will cross the country to support a protest. Set between 2012 and 2015 – from Obama in excelsis to rising Trump – the play skitters across this timeline, not always clearly (“Emotional truth is of greater value than logic,” reads an author’s note). Scenes are short and sharp – some only a splinter – and typically end in a snog or a strop.