Though often unfairly miscast as a depressive, Texan troubadour Bill Callahan’s fourteenth studio album, Apocalypse, is not a vision of the end of days so much as a revelation of new frontiers. The spare poetry and seemingly simplistic motifs that characterise his sound will be familiar to fans, but this latest song cycle – apparently recorded live – is packed with surprises: high lonesome surf guitar, woolly fuzz, cinematic funk and meandering free jazz forms, arcadian flute solos, volumes of stormy distortion – and much more to be discovered here, I’m sure!

Ryan McCarthy is from Readings Hawthorn.