(Asylum Records)
After a couple of earthy, rootsy albums, Sheeran emphatically returns to pop with another of his indelible hooks, surrounded by Middle Eastern instrumentation

Ed Sheeran’s new single arrives at an interesting point in his career. His last albums, 2023’s Subtract and Autumn Variations, felt not unlike a riff on Taylor Swift’s pandemic-era Folklore and Evermore: two albums released in the same year, produced by the National’s Aaron Dessner, a little woodier and more understated in tone than usual. Subtract in particular enjoyed the kind of critical acclaim that Sheeran’s work seldom attracts. They were also the first Sheeran albums not to yield a billion-streaming track: his commercial zenith, 2017’s Divide, contained five, among them Shape of You, one of only two songs in history have to topped 4bn streams on Spotify.

Maybe a muted commercial response was part of the plan (or rather, a relatively muted commercial response by Sheeran’s standards: Subtract still went to No 1 in 13 countries). Having spent a decade voraciously pursuing vast success – and shifting 200m albums in the process – perhaps Sheeran had decided the moment was right to deliberately pull back, to do precisely what he wanted regardless of the sales figures.

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The UK indie-rockers won two Grammys for their debut album. Ahead of their second, they explain how they protected one another amid sudden fame – and how queer love and Davina McCall inspired them

Wet Leg’s Rhian Teasdale looks like a pop star from a different era. She walks into a bar in east London wearing a giant, floor-length pale-pink padded coat. She has bleached eyebrows, dip-dyed hair, drawn-on freckles and jewels stuck to her nails and teeth. For a moment, Top of the Pops could be on primetime TV and a copy of Smash Hits in my bag. But then Wet Leg’s story always did feel anachronistic. In 2021, they managed what indie bands don’t often manage any more and became an overnight success. That June, they released their first single, Chaise Longue, a deadpan, perfectly simple and cheerfully daft megahit; they conquered the US and Japan, toured arenas and topped the album charts with their scathing, self-titled debut, scoring two Brit awards and two Grammys.

They were still touring that album last summer, supporting Foo Fighters in stadiums. But eventually they found time to make a new one. Trailed by the punchy, indie-sleazy Catch These Fists, Moisturizer otherwise largely ditches their trademark death-stare sarcasm in favour of stompy but soppy love songs. Teasdale lives in London and we are meeting in person, but Hester Chambers, the band’s co-founder and lead guitarist, lives on the Isle of Wight, where Wet Leg met and formed. (Having written their debut alone, this time, they co-wrote with drummer Henry Holmes, guitarist Joshua Mobaraki and bassist Ellis Durand.) Tracking Chambers down will prove a trickier task, but more on that later.

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This tale of a terminal cancer patient’s newfound horniness upends every expectation you have for on-screen sex – as well as the definition of a soulmate. It leaves you longing for more

Sex is for men. This is a lesson we learn from a very early age. Maybe it is a nice lesson to learn if you are a man, though I imagine the pressure to be seen to know all about it from the off could feel a teensy bit much now and again. I’d probably take that over the internalised shame and alienation from your own body – and from one of the main drivers of pleasure that exists – so that we may all enjoy perpetuating the species, though, I think.

(Why yes, this is all about me! And yes I did grow up Catholic, which can’t have helped. You’re such a sweetheart for noticing!)

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Dispatches, presented by Cathy Newman, talks to 16 survivors or witnesses of the ex-Harrods boss’s abuse, as well as tracking down his alleged enabler. The result is a raw, horrifying and invaluable watch

It is disturbingly easy to respond with little more than fatigue to reports of powerful men sexually exploiting women, because there have been so many. The part of us that should emit shock, disgust and righteous outrage becomes dulled through overuse. And so, when Mohamed Al Fayed, the billionaire former owner of Harrods, died in 2023 and was then credibly accused of being one of Britain’s worst sex offenders, the collective reaction felt like a shrug.

The new Dispatches investigation, Delivered to a Predator: Al Fayed’s Fixer, however, ought to sharpen our revulsion and our resolve to fight for change. Building on the 2017 Dispatches documentary Behind Closed Doors and the 2024 BBC programme Predator at Harrods , it outlines the scale of the tycoon’s wrongdoing: last year, the Metropolitan police said it believed Al Fayed may have raped or abused at least 111 women and girls, but here a lawyer working for survivors estimates the number to be more like 300.

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The tale of the ex-SNP politician’s career is packed with her fierce, funny Commons performances – and the sad truth about how little chance she was given to thrive in the corridors of power

Mhairi Black’s maiden speech in the House of Commons 10 years ago remains a thing of beauty. We are only treated to a snippet of it in this excellent documentary about the former Scottish National party politician – the youngest MP elected to parliament since 1832 – but I recommend finding the whole thing on YouTube . Black, then just 20 years old, has the Commons in the palm of her hand, simultaneously charming her fellow MPs with her dry wit and laying bare the deprivation in her Paisley and Renfrewshire South constituency (among the horrors: a man who starved himself in order to afford his bus fare to the jobcentre, only to collapse on the way there). The documentary does, however, retain some of her best one-liners from that address. Among them, the fact that her MP status and changes to housing benefit meant that she was “the only 20-year-old in the whole of the UK” that would be getting any government help with their housing.

Black – if it wasn’t clear already – is a force of nature, and someone we surely need in politics. And yet, her exit from Westminster is what this one-off film is all about. We zip between archive clips from her younger years as an IndyRef campaigner; the last days of her career as an MP (Black announced her intention to stand down at the next election in 2023, following through on that promise in 2024); and her post-politics life. There’s also footage from last year’s Edinburgh fringe show, Politics Isn’t for Me, which saw her turn her tumultuous time in parliament into something approaching comedy, commanding the stage with what she calls her “Britney mic” jutting out in front of her mouth (the Guardian described it as “ comedy therapy ”). Being a young, gay woman in the Commons, we learn, took a profound toll on Black’s mental health. She tells us as much – describing it as having had “anxiety all the time” – but we can see it, too, the colour slowly draining from her face as her 20s march on. When we cut back to the present, she is calmer, happier; there is talk of regaining independence and control.

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The artist and musician is a brilliant subject for an epic, in-depth biography, but this is merely hagiography

In 1966 a woman sat down at the Destruction in Art Symposium at London’s Africa Centre and invited people to cut off her clothes. It was an era when Yves Klein used naked women as paintbrushes and Allen Jones made sculptures of fetishistically dressed women posed as furniture. But Yoko Ono was in control of her own self-sacrifice. It was the third time she’d performed this paradoxically passive action, and each time it was the audience who exposed themselves as they took scissors to her clothing.

This was also the beginning of a sojourn in London for the Japanese-born New York artist that would catapult her from avant garde obscurity to global fame. Her exhibition at the Indica Gallery that same year was visited by John Lennon, who climbed one of her artworks, a ladder to the ceiling. At the top he used a magnifying glass to read the tiny word “YES”. The love kindled that day would be blamed for breaking up the Beatles.

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Toby Jones plays the spaniel-eyed schoolmaster setting Harry Lawtey’s needy young pupil on course for haughty international stardom

The career of Richard Burton seemed mythic at the time, and more so in retrospect. In Pedro Almodóvar’s latest movie The Room Next Door , Julianne Moore’s character is even shown reading Erotic Vagrancy , Roger Lewis’s account of Burton’s then-adulterous relationship with Elizabeth Taylor in the early 60s, the title taken from Pope John XXIII’s extraordinary denunciation: “You will finish in an erotic vagrancy, without end or without a safe port.” In fact, the nearest thing Burton ever had to a safe port was his inspirational English teacher Philip Burton in Port Talbot, south Wales, whose own frustrated dreams of the theatre were poured into the bright young miner’s son Richard Jenkins, coaching him in acting and even making him his legal ward and getting him to change his surname to Burton to facilitate the teacher’s sponsorship of his Oxford scholarship.

It’s the subject of this heartfelt, vigorously acted, enjoyable, if slightly naive movie from screenwriters Tom Bullough and Josh Hyams, and director Marc Evans. Toby Jones stars as the spaniel-eyed Mr Burton and Harry Lawtey is Richard, a lanky, needy kid morphing into that insufferably haughty and sonorous prince of the English stage. It tells a uniquely painful and dysfunctional story, and does its best to show how Burton’s pride always coexisted with shame and self-hate, and culminated with him playing Hal in Henry IV Part 2 at Stratford with Mr Burton in the audience, the pair effectively enacting their own version of the Hal/Falstaff betrayal scene.

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We would like to hear your memories of Val Kilmer – whether you met him, or appreciated his work as an actor

Val Kilmer, the actor best known for his roles in Top Gun, The Doors, and Batman Forever has died at the age of 65 .

We would like to hear your memories of Val Kilmer – whether you met him, or appreciated his work as an actor.

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The influential US commentator has written a book about how politics can change people’s lives for the better. But first, there are more pressing challenges to address ...

Ezra Klein, the New York Times podcast host and progressive media’s undisputed nerd king, starts his new book with something of a palate cleanser for our troubled times. For a few paragraphs, he and his co-author, the Atlantic journalist Derek Thompson, whisk us out of the grim reality of contemporary politics to a world of Abundance (the word they picked as their title).

“You open your eyes at dawn and turn in the cool bedsheets,” they purr, before conjuring a near-future utopia where the cost of living crisis is a distant memory. “You live in a cocoon of energy so clean it barely leaves a carbon trace and so cheap you can scarcely find it on your monthly bill.” The fridge is full of fresh fruit and vegetables from skyscraper farms that sit amid rewilded landscapes. This is what we can look forward to, they say, if we sweep away the bureaucratic cobwebs that mean government too often gets in the way of innovation, rather than leading it.

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