(Music to Grow Seeds By)
The Pittsburgh composer moves between soporific light and dissonant shade on this plant-inspired meditative journey

In 1976, composer Mort Garson released Mother Earth’s Plantasia , an album of early electronic ditties designed to help listeners’ house plants grow. Though its horticultural facility is questionable, it became a cult classic among record collectors, beloved for its sweet, jaunty music as much as its concept. Propagation is also the raison d’être of Music to Grow Seeds By , a new cassette label that pairs a packet of seeds with a release. For its second instalment, the delphinium elatum takes centre stage, providing the inspiration and part of the production process for Pittsburgh-based sound artist Davis Galvin, who used the perennial’s lilac petals to make marks that then formed part of a score.

Joining the dots between ambient, new age and dub, Prism is a slow-building, meditative record that ebbs and flows without pause, more soundscape than standalone tracks. But an uncanniness lies beneath the calm. Opener Sipes’ Vista hinges on a deep, oscillating synth lead, which builds into a tangle of mutating low-end frequencies. The subterranean flurry comes to a head on the second track, Humidity 14, where hissing static cuts through the atmospheric textures. Later, it’s more subtle: a loungy guitar riff in Grasshopper (Solo) is scattered with barely audible mutterings, weird glitches and found sounds from walks around California and Mexico City. The dissonant layers add a disorienting edge to an otherwise soporific listen.

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(Music for Nations/Sony)
Traditional instruments, drones and repetitive lyrics make for some epic listening, possibly more suitable for a medieval TV romp

Inspired by the heartbeat of a hibernating bear – a mere 9bpm – Wardruna use grand, lumbering drones, played on traditional stringed instruments such as the talharpa, to evoke a cinematic sense of centuries passing. Birna (“she-bear” in Old Norse) follows the Nordic-folk group’s previous Kvitravn (white raven) in centring a symbolic creature within animist traditions – and it’s stirring stuff.

Band leader Einar Selvik’s craggy voice, intertwined with Lindy-Fay Hella’s elemental ad-libs, strides across a dramatic landscape of primal percussion and tumbling bone flutes as he sings of the birna’s “awakening”, possibly to wreak revenge on the destroyers of her habitat. Yet, stretched over lengthy, cyclical tracks, all this grandeur starts to feel numbing rather than visceral, with repetitive lyrics that restrain these epic tracks from real adventuring. After a languorous first half, mid-record Himinndotter’s thrilling rhythmic shake-up is an essential injection of spring-like energy, while Hibjørnen’s stark, acoustic storytelling is a welcome respite from all the thunder.

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More thrilling petrolhead action in the Mad Max prequel starring Anya Taylor-Joy, plus Michelle Yeoh’s space spin-off is deliciously arch

Having created a truly memorable character in Charlize Theron’s one-armed trucker Furiosa for his Mad Max sequel Fury Road , George Miller couldn’t let her lie. However, this is no mere rerun. It’s Furiosa’s origin story , with Anya Taylor-Joy fierce and focused as the girl abducted from her hidden valley home, the Green Place, and forced to live by her wits in a desert world of violence and rough justice. Chris Hemsworth is a riot as Dementus, the vainglorious leader of a biker gang who challenges the power of the three dominant fiefdoms – Citadel, Gastown and the Bullet Farm – amid epic landscapes and reassuringly thrilling petrolhead action.
Friday 31 January, 11.40am, 8pm, Sky Cinema Premiere

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(Columbia)
The debut album from the British star finds him rapping rings around even high-profile guest stars as he asserts his place at hip-hop’s high table

The business of reviewing the debut album by Central Cee entails a level of security you seldom encounter in 2025: no information is provided beyond the tracklist. His record label seems at a loss to tell you who produced it, there are no lyrics to clarify the knottier moments of the rapper’s famously torrential flow; the details of some of the guest artists – the owner of the Billie Eilish-esque voice on Now We’re Strangers, or the potent soul vocal on closer Don’t Know Anymore – is also apparently classified. But perhaps security isn’t really the point: artists who are really concerned about pre-release leaks just drop their albums unannounced. The whole palaver seems more about promoting the idea that Can’t Rush Greatness is a very big deal indeed.

Well, of course it is. If some of the claims regarding Central Cee’s success and its spoils on Can’t Rush Greatness sound suspiciously like the lily being gilded – Does he really employ a private chef? Is it correct, as guest Skepta proudly claims on Ten, that he’s among the 10 biggest rappers in the world ? – he’s still, unquestionably, the dominant name in UK rap. Private chef or not, the home counties pile that Can’t Rush Greatness says Oakley Neil Caesar-Su now calls home must be running out of wall space for the number of platinum discs he’s amassed over the last four years. Moreover, Central Cee has done the one thing no one really expected a British rapper to do, and succeeded in the ice-to-eskimos business of breaking America. “Nobody else from London’s gone Hollywood,” he swaggers on CRG, as you might if you had thus far scored three platinum US singles. It’s an achievement not entirely without precedent, although you’d have to go back 35 years, to the handful of US hits scored by Monie Love, to find a British rapper who achieved anything even remotely comparable.

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(Swims Int/Warner)
The soft-alpha streaming sensation behind Lose Control returns with more of the same Motown and Stax pastiches, with the odd diversion into soft rock

While Brat summer grabbed the headlines as 2024’s defining musical movement, a straighter, more masculine, less lurid green development was rumbling in the background. Defined by American men with big voices, big emotions and big streaming numbers, it gave the world Benson Boone’s Beautiful Things (1.7bn streams on Spotify alone), Noah Kahan’s Stick Season (1.3bn) and Teddy Swims’ Lose Control (1.4bn). While the messy Brat defined a summer, the soft-alpha era is seemingly here for the long term.

The most interesting of the trio is Swims, a heavily tattooed former frontman of a post-hardcore band who now sings retro soul as if auditioning for Mark Ronson’s band circa 2007. This sequel to 2023’s Part 1 (home to US chart-topper Lose Control) continues to churn out immaculately crafted Motown and Stax pastiches, with Funeral and the mellower Your Kind of Crazy built on warm piano trills, loping drums and stacked backing vocals. Alongside stomping opener Not Your Man, they highlight Swims’ occasional lyrical shortcomings: in his world, women are unknowable, often wicked tricksters who are just too damn easy to love.

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The Hollywood stars join Graham Norton on the sofa to discuss their nuptials-themed romp. Plus: Lucy Worsley on the reputation of Bloody Mary. Here’s what to watch this evening

11.05pm, BBC One

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Mo Amer’s excellent comedy about life as a Palestinian refugee in the US gains ever more poignancy. Plus, Sterling K Brown reunites with This Is Us creator Dan Fogelman for a gripping thriller about the bodyguard of an ex-president

With the US administration threatening to take hostility towards immigrants to new levels, there’s real poignancy to the second and concluding season of this excellent comedy . Palestinian refugee Mo (Mo Amer) is in Mexico, trying to get back to the US and trapped between trusting the legal process (risky) and relying on the hustle (riskier). But things are about to get much worse after an attempted border crossing hits a snag. It’s full of wit and warmth but the show’s polemical thrust is subtle and acute – the implication is that the energy and ingenuity immigrants such as Mo are forced to expend on survival would be a boon to any community or country they chose to inhabit.
Netflix, from Thursday 30 January

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With an oeuvre ranging from swooning Merchant Ivory serenity to bravura blasphemy, we rate the acting dynasty doyenne’s finest films as she approaches her 88th birthday

In a brief but memorable role as a socialite dumped by her husband, Redgrave cuts through the schmaltz to provide some of this disaster movie’s most affecting moments. She also happens to be mother of the reporter breaking the story that a comet is about to wipe out life on Earth.

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Katja Meier was told to make the protagonist of her television series 20 years younger … so she decided to find funding and film the pilot herself

When Katja Meier got on to a leading scheme for female writers over the age of 40, she could not have been more delighted.

After finishing her script, production companies loved it – but had just one request: could she make the female protagonist 20 years younger?

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