The best music of autumn 2026: Johnny Marr, Phoebe Bridgers, Rachel Chinouriri and more

Reading Festival There’s not much time to dig into her deep catalogue of future-facing pop, but she satisfies the hardcore “Time itself is a circle,” as the rock’n’roll philosopher Nietzsche once said, accurately foreshadowing Charli xcx’s only UK festival appearance this summer. Like her performance on Glastonbury’s Other Stage last year – a pyrotechnic farewell to the puke-green reign of Brat – Charli’s Reading and Leeds appearance is a not-quite-headline slot that also follows a rowdy set from grime don Skepta. As before, her sunglasses remain glued on throughout. Yet in the past 14 months, everything else in Charli’s pop factory has undergone a hard reset. She’s released two albums – a grandiose, gothic soundtrack to Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights, and last month’s high-concept Music, Fashion, Film, an album of raw, glitching micro-rock, with guitars shredded into Tetris-like pieces, and fitted with lacerating lyrics about shopping, egotism and mortality. She’s also launched an acting career, thrown a big fat celebrity wedding and, somewhere along the way, found time to rehearse her biggest, most vertiginous show to date...

From cover design to shelf placement and influencer partnerships … how publishers will persuade you to buy their books this autumn Think about the last book you bought. How did you choose it? Was it from a recommendation, a review, a TikTok video? Did the cover grab you, were you swayed by the quotes on the front, or did you just happen to spot it on an appealing table as you walked into the shop? Did you think about all the nudges that led you to that decision – by the publisher, the bookseller or that person you follow on Insta? The reality is that our reading choices are directed and massaged at every turn. “It’s all about the art of persuasion,” says Philip Gwyn Jones, who was a publisher for more than 30 years and is now a literary agent. And who are the persuaders? They’re the booksellers, the supermarket stock buyers, the publishing houses and their ranks of marketers and publicists. And, more recently, persuasion often comes from BookTokers and online influencers, social media videos, podcasts and Instagram posts. How is all this changing publishing?..

News, buildup and discussion before today’s fixtures Get in touch: mail Luke and Her brain runs a hundred miles a minute. She does not need traditional entertainment. “I’m not good at watching TV – I can’t sit still,” Bronze says, sitting sort-of still, on a bench shielded from the wind, overlooking Chelsea’s training pitch at Cobham. “Someone recently asked me what I listen to in the car and someone else jumped in and was like: ‘Lucy has her own podcast going on in her own head.’ I don’t listen to music, I don’t listen to podcasts, I just have a million thoughts going on.” Bronze’s late ADHD and autism diagnosis help it make sense, but her mum had always suspected she might have one of the conditions, so it wasn’t a surprise. “Naomi Girma said to me: ‘I’ve never met someone who trains so hard in the gym with zero music on; it does not make sense.’ I was like: ‘It’s literally in my head, I don’t need anything else.’”..