Each new Deafheaven album has seemed to react against the last, changing moods and textures without ever sacrificing their heaviness. Infinite Granite might be their most startling gesture yet: though elements can be traced back to 2018’s Ordinary Corrupt Human Love, it takes those elements and expands them to album length. Infinite Granite, really, is not a metal album. It’s the album where the shoegaze entirely supplants the black metal in their blackgaze equation. For almost the whole record, George Clarke sings clean – there are, literally, seconds of growling on the album; on Villain, for example – and the guitars eschew the violence of metal for something just as intense and crushing in its own way, but dazzling and beautiful and – yes, this is shoegaze, so we’re dropping the e-bomb – ethereal. That said, no Thames Valley band ever had a drummer like Daniel Tracey to power them along. His is the one element that remains metallic, even if blastbeats, too, are pared right back this time around. But he is what gives this record its power – his fills and patterns give Infinite Granite attack that never wavers, even when the music is at its most melodic. The restraint of what comes before means that when Deafheaven finally unleash everything, in the last couple of minutes of the closer, Mombasa, the power is breathtaking. This is a great, great album, one that exists entirely on its creators’ terms. You might think you know what Spanish guitar music sounds like, and you might think it an unexpectedly middle-of-the-road choice for Sean Shibe, who has always appeared more at home in programmes that set your ears slightly off-kilter: for example, juxtaposing whispering lute music with screaming electric guitar works by Julia Wolfe, as on his 2018 album softLOUD. But there’s nothing hackneyed about Camino. It’s a beautifully intimate recording, full of playing that is as far from classical-guitar cliche as a real flamenco dancer is from a postcard of a donkey in a sombrero. The programme crosses the musically porous border of Spain and France via Catalonia, taking in Ravel, Satie and Poulenc alongside Falla and Antonio José, a Burgos-born composer admired by Ravel and killed aged 33 by a Falangist firing squad. José’s elegiac Pavana Triste – the third movement of a guitar sonata that I would very much like to hear from Shibe in its entirety – follows on beautifully here from Falla’s Danza del Molinero from his ballet The Three-Cornered Hat, which is full of big, bold gestures and soft, subtle shifts in colour. All the transitions from piece to piece, key to key, have been similarly meticulously thought through – but what’s really striking is the way in which Shibe sustains a world of intensity and introspection through playing that buzzes with vitality. The attention to detail in his playing is breathtaking; nothing interrupts the flow of the music, and nothing is done purely for effect. Only in the swirling lines of the Catalan composer Frederic Mompou’s Dansa 6 is the melodic line less than crystal clear. Following on from a starkly eloquent version of Ravel’s Pavane pour une Infante Défunte and Falla’s funereal Homenaje in memory of Debussy, it’s Mompou’s Suite Compostelana that forms the programme’s climax, with six eclectic movements including a hypnotic lullaby and a vibrant closing dance. It was written for the ground-breaking guitarist Andrés Segovia, who made its first recording. Shibe’s playing of it is spellbinding, more tender and flowing than Segovia’s at every turn. This week’s other pick Transitions is an introduction to the neglected Ukrainian composer Viktor Kosenko from the pianist Igor Gryshyn. Kosenko’s 11 Études, Op 8, are presented alongside the four Op 22 Preludes and the Sonata No 4 by his influential contemporary Scriabin, and Gryshyn’s urgent playing brings out their sweeping, irresistibly melodic qualities. In recent years Iron Maiden have gone through a remarkable creative renaissance. Typified by epic prog-leaning arrangements and ambitious melodic dynamism, modern era Maiden – of which Senjutsu is a prime example – is eccentric, bombastic heavy metal at its finest. The band (one of the most notoriously tight-lipped camps in metal) recorded Senjutsu in early 2019 during a break in their Legacy of the Beast tour, managing to keep it under wraps throughout the pandemic. Their second double album, Senjutsu is as ambitious and heavy as its predecessor (2015’s The Book of Souls), but tempered by a more windswept, melancholic vibe, alongside some of their most fiendishly complex melodies to date. It opens with the title track, an ominous tribal drum pattern giving way to a soaring mid-tempo rocker. Bruce Dickinson’s voice has taken on a pleasingly oaken quality with age, powerful bass notes accentuated as he sings of the last, bloody days of a fantastical empire. The Writing on the Wall is a first for Maiden – an easygoing, southern rock-inflected groove – while Lost in a Lost World opens with gentle acoustic strumming and some wobbly Planet Caravan-esque vocal reverb before settling on a capering lead riff. Indeed, this folksy, playful element (primary songwriter Steve Harris is a big Jethro Tull fan) appears throughout Senjutsu; the album has a palpably ancient bearing that calls to mind castle barricades, mud-caked peasants and heroic derring-do. The wonderfully overblown Death of the Celts – a 10-minute epic that takes in acoustic finger picking, trademark gallop and a lyric discussing ancient battle topography – is a case in point, teetering thrillingly just on the edge of high-camp Spinal Tap absurdity; album closer Hell on Earth, meanwhile, traverses darker emotional waters. This is stunning escape-velocity songwriting that proves – yet again – that Maiden’s true golden age is their current one. In 1992, the US film professor Carol J Clover published Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton University Press). In it, she introduced the concept of the “final girl”, a female protagonist who survives the bloodbath to take on the slasher in the closing scenes. If the final girl is heroic, she is also a problematic figure, kept alive by the film-maker because of her sobriety or chastity while other women who have more fun get the axe. The sequel makes the final girl’s victory pyrrhic anyway. Midway through Screen Violence, Chvrches’ intense fourth album, a song called Final Girl puts the well-worn horror trope to a more personal use. Lauren Mayberry – mouthpiece of the Glaswegian synth-pop trio – doesn’t want to “end up in a bodybag”. In 2019, Chvrches co-authored a huge tune, Here With Me, with Marshmello. The EDM DJ then went on to work with Chris Brown, the rapper convicted of violently assaulting Rihanna. Chvrches tweeted their dismay. Trolls descended with rape and death threats. Chvrches beefed up their security and ploughed on, pondering the entertainment industry’s spinning moral compass, and their own mortality. (Covid obviously helped with that too.) As the song Final Girl quietly considers fame’s curious ins and outs, Mayberry wonders whether she should be “screaming”. Elsewhere, she’s having “nightmares”, immune to the comfort of “lullabies”. “They’re reading my rites,” she sings on a song called Violent Delights. At heart, Chvrches are a Glaswegian indie band, one who have parlayed their keen grasp of synth euphorics into the international pop big leagues. They have faced down trolls before. Although Mayberry, Iain Cook and Martin Doherty now routinely slug it out with factory-made, female-vocalist-featuring EDM-pop franchises – especially since their mainstream-facing Love Is Dead LP of 2018 – their formative years in the underground have always supplied this trio with a sharp and occasionally dark edge. It is an edge no more, but the defining feature of this pugilistic album. A big, icy romp recorded by the three members in isolation until they could be reunited for the vocals and finishing touches, Screen Violence doubles down on film tropes, cosies up to horror auteur John Carpenter for remixes. It features Chvrches’ very best Cure homage, How Not to Drown, as a duet for the Cure’s main man, Robert Smith, now back in demand as a validating guest vocalist (cf Gorillaz’s Strange Timez) as delays plague the Cure’s 14th album and their bassist departs. Of course, “screen violence” isn’t limited to 80s video nasties. It embraces the reality-distortion of the screens in our hands, as well as the pleasure of escapism: schlocky horror can still be an enjoyable displacement activity. Inner horrors – self-doubt, regret, disillusionment – are all present and correct here too, as Mayberry reflects on her own past behaviour on the album’s bookends, Asking for a Friend and Better If You Don’t. Even as Chvrches deal with the wider world, this is a highly personal album for the singer-songwriter. “Wish I’d reached out to my mother more,” she sings on Lullabies. Through it all, she comes out swinging – just like that final girl. Mayberry has even playfully bleached her hair blond in tribute to all those low-budget, high-brass movie heroines. Then there’s another living nightmare: being gaslit by society, as well as your intimate partner. Chvrches have a song that absolutely nails that too: the massive, arena-seeking sledgehammer He Said She Said, a two-hander in which a “he” plays mind games with Mayberry’s “she”. It echoes the edicts of the wider culture. Be thin, but not too thin. Drink, but “don’t be a mess”. “It’s all in your head,” he sneers. “I feel like I’m losing my mind,” counters Mayberry, not unreasonably. If Chvrches’ sound can be bombastic, this is heft in the service of a massive theme. Why do final girls survive? Because they are “good” girls, morally upstanding people-pleasers whose own pleasure takes a backseat to being nice and pretty. In film, those girls stay alive. Real life is much more complex. Here, the song Good Girls decries the double standards women are forced to live under – and the endless parade of male artists whose misdeeds keep on being exposed. “Killing your idols is a chore, and it’s such a fucking bore, ’cause I don’t need them any more,” sings Mayberry. She’s done with being a good girl too. “I won’t apologise,” she declares unequivocally.