The Irish showstopper may have lost out on the Mercury prize to Sam Fender with her third album, 2025’s Euro-Country, but she’s quickly becoming a national treasure anyway. She’s taking her witty-sad social commentary about body shaming, Irish identity and her irrational dislike of Jamie Oliver on the road this week, celebrating her mammoth year and culminating in a homecoming show in Dublin on 5 December. Most of the 2025 UK and Ireland dates are sold out but you can sign up for waiting list tickets here or get ahead and book for 2026. In April, she also heads to the States, supporting fellow flame-haired showgirl Florence and the Machine.

Kate Hutchinson, Nerve music critic

It was a tense wait to see what Channel 4 had done to one of my favourite novels of recent times, but this four-part adaptation of Louise Kennedy’s Troubles romance, Trespasses, is as close to flawless as they come. The star-crossed affair between Catholic teacher Cushla and married Protestant barrister Michael, set in 1970s Belfast, is tenderly played by Lola Petticrew and Tom Cullen. And Gillian Anderson steals every scene she’s in as Cushla’s blowsy, alcoholic mother. I came to Kennedy’s writing through hearing the former chef interviewed on Radio 4, which led me to her extraordinary short story collection, The End of the World is a Cul de Sac. When TV captures the delicacies of the original this well, it has to be applauded.

Julia Raeside, writer

Ani is a young academic, a specialist in Paradise Lost whose addiction to graphic porn is causing her life to unravel. Sensitive, sad, sometimes funny, Sophia Chetin-Leuner's new play is impeccably directed by Josie Rourke, with extraordinary designs - reminiscent of textile sculpture with hidden pouches that the artist Louise Bourgeois might have made -  by Yimei Zhao and an unforgettable performance from Ambika Mod as Ani at its heart. The current run is sold out but sign up here for returns.

Jane Ferguson, Nerve co-founder

For Artangel’s latest commission, French artist Noémie Goudal has transformed the dark interior of a railway arch into something akin to a rainforest. Layers of vegetation are projected on to three screens themselves collaged with layers of plant forms. The images change from black to white and then slowly infuse with colour before returning to black. A soundscape with music composed by Chloé Thévenin and sound designer Amaury Arboun moves with the changes and is accompanied by the constant metronomic drip, drip, drip of water onto the metal plates at the base of the screens. Goudal's work is rooted in scientific research on water and its cycles but the installation also offers a welcome, calming escape from the bustle of Borough Market.

Susan Ferguson, writer

Early Tori Amos meets early-and-late Björk meets both spare and weird Arthur Russell meets Soviet Kitsch-era Regina Spektor meets Kate Bush (any album, really) meets Michael Nyman's 1982 soundtrack for The Draughtsman's Contract meets Mozart's Symphony No 25 in G minor meets Joseph Szigeti's otherworldly recordings of Bach's violin partitas meets Jacqueline du Pré's preternaturally moving 1965 Elgar performance meets Rebecca del Rio singing Llorando (or Crying), blowing Roy Orbison out of the water, meets – well, you'll hear something else, something infinite, but there's no doubt that the Spanish singer Rosalía's fourth album, Lux, is maximalist, extraordinary, epic. A story of transcendence, the album (the cover of which features the singer in a white nun's habit) begins with the invocation of a journey both material and spiritual: “How nice it'd be, to come from this Earth, go to Heaven, and come back to Earth.” Throughout the next 15 songs, 50 minutes, and 13 languages, we go with her and feel, I think it's not an exaggeration to say, changed, or at least able to leave the here and now for some kind of reprieve. This is the pop music we need, in what can feel like a grim, spiritually (and morally) void world: ambitious, deep, sweeping, profound. 

Emily LaBarge, Nerve art critic

Imagine getting a supermarket to stock itself just for you. Or to get access to a kind of volatile power, just like that. Three episodes in, and the brave new world of Pluribus – the new show from Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul writer-director Vince Gilligan, in which the most miserable woman on earth is driven to save the world from happiness – is getting increasingly engrossing and sparky. Its mood is glossy, eerie sci-fi with Rhea Seehorn a tonic as the grieving, foul-mouthed Carol, and Karolina Wydra compelling as a spookily gorgeous, hard-to-resist AI-like drone.

Jude Rogers, writer

Liam Neeson in Taken has nothing on James Brolin in this recently unearthed underground crime classic. With his shirt unbuttoned and his hair unkempt, Brolin plays a gruff ex-cop stalking the scuzzy streets of 1970s New York in search of his kidnapped daughter. If you miss this week’s select cinema screenings, fear not: its distributor, Radiance Films, is making the film available on 4K UHD Blu-ray in early December, with a host of exciting extras. 

Ellen E Jones, Nerve film critic

THEATRE
Romeo and Juliet

(16 March-6 June 2026, Harold Pinter theatre, London SW1)

Sadie Sink, so brilliant as Max in Stranger Things, makes her West End debut opposite fellow debutant Noah Jupe (Hamnet, A Quiet Place) as the star-crossed lovers. Directed by the acclaimed Robert Icke (Oedipus, The Doctor).

THEATRE
1536

(2 May-1 August 2026, Ambassadors theatre, London WC2)

Ava Pickett's play, set in Tudor England when Anne Boleyn was Queen, was a critical and box-office success for the Almeida earlier this year. 

MUSIC
Pulp with special guest Self Esteem (and more to be announced)

(Friday 28 August 2026, Wythenshawe Park, Manchester)

The band have just announced that this August date in Manchester is likely to be their only major UK headline concert next year. According to their Instagram post, if you’re signed up to the Pulp newsletter by the end of today (Tuesday), you will receive an exclusive link to the pre-sale from Wednesday 19 November. Otherwise tickets go on general sale from Friday 21 November.