Summer 2020 culture highlights: the biggest releases this season

Kitty Empire’s pop picks

It’s a cruel summer, for sure. But into the gap where music festivals used to be rides Live from the Drive-In, a socially distanced set of in-car gigs taking over car parks and race-courses from Bolton to Bristol (late July-September). The draws include Dizzee Rascal, The Streets and Tom Brennan.

New sounds are on the breeze, too. Lianne La Havas releases her third album on 17 July after an absence of five years in which the soulful UK singer-songwriter explored her identity, and influences as diverse as Jaco Pastorius and Milton Nascimento; she livestreams a ticketed performance from London’s Roundhouse on 15 July.
Irish post-punks Fontaines DC return with their much-anticipated second outing, A Hero’s Death, on 31 July, while a month later, intense fellow travellers Idles preview their forthcoming album with a series of livestreamed gigs from a secret location (29 and 30 August).

Pop diva Katy Perry is set to drop an as-yet-unnamed new record: “KP5” as it’s known, will be “75% Prism and 25% Teenage Dream”, she says, and lands on 14 August (her baby might arrive around then, too).

The rave might just be in our back gardens for now, but house music prosyletisers Disclosure release their full-length Energy project on 28 August, followed by Lana Del Rey, who has an album up her voluminous peasant sleeve. Chemtrails Over the Country Club officially marks the season’s close on 5 September.

Guy Lodge’s film picks

Christopher Nolan’s Tenet was already the summer’s most anticipated blockbuster before Covid-19 screwed up the film calendar: multiple delays to the film’s release (it’s currently scheduled for 12 August) have only got fans more impatient for its arrival. Details of the plot remain under wraps, though the palindromic title is a clue to expect structurally elastic sci-fi. Disney, meanwhile, is counting on its live-action remake of the Chinese warrior adventure Mulan – originally slated for a March release, currently down for 21 August – to pull in the crowds. Families have another dose of wholesome throwback entertainment to look forward to in Harry Potter producer David Heyman’s handsome new version of The Secret Garden (14 August); Generation X nostalgists, meanwhile, are getting the ageing dude hijinks of Bill and Ted Face the Music (21 August). Arthouse filmgoers have options too: long-awaited since winning the top prize at Sundance 2019, Chinonye Chukwe’s Clemency (17 July) is a tough-minded prison drama with a staggering Alfre Woodard performance, while a never-better Eva Green heads Alice Winocour’s soulful, enthralling female-astronaut study, Proxima (31 July).

Michael Hogan’s television picks

Many TV productions were put on pause by the pandemic, but plenty wrapped before the shutters came down, so will be coming our way this summer. First up, Cate Blanchett stars in Mrs America (BBC Two, 8 July), an addictive miniseries about the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment. All too timely is Jimmy McGovern’s one-off drama Anthony (BBC One, July), about the racist murder of Liverpool teenager Anthony Walker. Feasting our eyes on director Mira Nair’s sumptuous adaptation of Vikram Seth’s door-stopping novel set in India, A Suitable Boy (BBC One, summer), could be the closest we get to a long-haul holiday. The Muppets make everything better and they make their streaming debut in Muppets Now (Disney+, 31 July), a semi-improvised series of furry, funny, strings-attached mayhem.

Diane “Philomena Cunk” Morgan writes, directs and stars in sitcom Mandy (BBC Two, August). HBO’s period horror drama Lovecraft Country (Sky Atlantic, 17 August) is exec-produced by no less than Jordan Peele and JJ Abrams. It’s stylishly spooky as you’d expect. Finally, playwright and Succession writer Lucy Prebble is reunited with her muse Billie Piper for I Hate Suzie (Sky Atlantic, late August), which sees a fading actress’s phone get hacked and explicit pics leaked online. Funny, filthy, not for the faint-hearted.

Claire Armitstead’s book picks

Two-thirds of the way into Summer, the final part of Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet, a publishing miracle occurs: George Floyd, whose death in Minneapolis on 25 May sent a Black Lives Matter tsunami around the world, is namechecked in a teenager’s epistle to a mythological penfriend chosen for her name and her tragic ending, Hero. Smith’s quartet has all along been a bravura experiment in topicality, but this appears to defy the physics of its 6 August publication date. Aptly, Einstein and quantum mechanics feature in a novel that also pleasingly resurrects characters from earlier volumes (notably Autumn’s Daniel Gluck, now 104, whose flashbacks to wartime internment mirror Smith’s anger about present-day incarceration of refugees).

Familiar characters from David Mitchell’s back catalogue also flit through his Utopia Avenue (14 July), a chunky biofictional curve ball of a novel about two years in the life of a briefly promising psychedelic rock band in the late 1960s.

While Smith and Mitchell are summer fiction’s big hitters, three newer writers excitingly make good on their promise. Booker shortlisted Daisy Johnson (Sisters, 13 August) gives a new twist to haunted house gothic in a briskly chilling tale of two sisters holed up on the north sea coast with their depressive mum. Short-story writer Eley Williams’s debut novel, The Liar’s Dictionary (16 July), is a lexicographical delight about an intern tasked with removing mountweazels (fake words) from an 1899 dictionary. The Nigerian Tamil writer Akwaeke Emezi, meanwhile, continues a rich and timely interrogation of gender, family and identity with The Death of Vivek Oji (20 August).