Charli xcx and John Cale mix elegance with brutality on their collaboration House

There’s loads of music out there, and sometimes it’s hard to keep up.

Rather than letting the algorithm dictate your music taste, you can listen to Rated by THE FACE – a playlist that’s lovingly curated and updated by our (human) editorial team every week.

Smerz – Imagine This (New York Edit)

Between Big City Life EDITS and Rosalía’s Lux, it’s been a big week for my headphones. Smerz’s remix album features fellow Scandi cool girls such as Astrid Sonne, Molina and Erika de Casier as well as FACE cover star Clairo and London-based art-pop duo New York. Imagine this is a song that, like much of Smerz’s best work, acts as a sleek, wry observation of modern romance. Under the microscope of New York though, it becomes something grittier and sleazier with a creeping synth that boomerangs in and out of the track, and a revving car engine that stops abruptly halfway through the song. Still, New York’s production takes enough of a backseat to let Smerz’s smart storytelling shine through, ​“And as the city turns quiet/​you both have to admit/​That this isn’t now/​But it could have been it.” Time to put the headphones back on charge. TL

Grace Ives – Avalanche

Grace Ives cemented herself as a stalwart of hyperactive, oddball dream-pop back in 2022, with the release of her excellent second album Janky Star. She has now – finally! – followed it up with Singles, a collection of three songs which the New Yorker lovingly calls her ​“thringle”. It was hard to pick just one to write about here, but Avalanche just edged it. Fizzing with restless energy, this is a tune about the crash-out which inevitably follows a dizzying high. ​“Yeah, I want want want what I had, had, had/​All the waiting and the sitting left me dull, dull and flat/​If I run right off for my cute little life/​Then I’ll settle into something and I’ll die by the knife,” Grace sings with abandon, synths and piano lilts shuddering in the background. Let’s make thringles a thing in 2026. JW

Olan Monk – 10 Days

Everyone’s always banging on about summer music, but what about great winter records? Olan Monk’s compelling new album Songs for Nothing will help you embrace the darkness of these colder months. Raised in the Connemara region in the West of Ireland, the songwriter has taken inspiration from the rugged nature and the profound atmosphere of the Galway Bay, weaving elements of sean-nós singing and Sinéad O’Connor’s songwriting into a drum machine-powered drone rock sound. With a choppy guitar riff and a powerful vocal melody, 10 Days is one of the album’s catchier tracks, but from the very first line, Olan Monk is dedicated to the darkness: ​“I can’t deny that I have tried and failed to be somebody else.” DR

Rosalía – Divinize

In all the feverishly excited press around Lux, much has been made of the album’s density. Rosalía has pitched the classical-leaning record as a slow-burner which demands you to put your phone in your pocket and pay close attention – a quietly radical act in an era when most people have basically surrendered to the bleak idea that their attention spans are being fried. But listening to Lux doesn’t feel like a hard slog. Third track Divinize, in particular, is addictive due to its stunning melancholic beauty. Over crumbling pianos and palpating drums, the Spanish star sings of religion and sensuality in Catalan and English, weaving melodies which are so instantly alluring that you feel they’ve been with you all your life. DR

Charli xcx & John Cale – House

Whenever she’s quizzed about her influences, Charli is quick to reference The Velvet Underground. She even threw out the idea of making a Lou Reed-style album after joining Clairo and her band on stage in Australia last year. But it’s been hard to imagine how the reigning queen of bombastic club-pop could incorporate the Velvet’s stone-cold art rock. Until now, that is. When you hear the screeching strings on House – which appears on the soundtrack for Emerald Fennell’s potentially-shocking adaptation of Wuthering Heights – you immediately think of John Cale’s unsettling viola on Venus in Furs, or The Black Angel’s Death Song. After the 83-year-old Welshman himself orates a poem with gravelly delivery, Charli jumps in to scream ​“I think I’m gonna die in this house,” her warped voice building into a tidal wave of distortion which crashes against the drums. Charli says she’s been inspired by Cale’s comment that VU’s music needed to be both ​“elegant and brutal”. Mission accomplished. DR