Playlist

TV

The Underwoods

In its first four seasons, House of Cards has been a gleefully exaggerated portrait of politics as a wicked game. As Season 5 begins, Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey), a Democrat, is still in campaign mode, doing everything in his power to win another term as president. His wife, Claire, is still his running mate, one of the bigger whoppers from last season. The new season finds the Underwoods working to drum up paranoia and anxiety among the populace. This is the first House of Cards season without creator Beau Willimon at the helm. Senior writers Frank Pugliese and Melissa James Gibson are the new showrunners. But the jaw-dropping twists are expected to come as fast as in previous seasons.

Music

The '80s bands

US singer John Darnielle has been a master of sharply observed character studies since he started releasing The Mountain Goats cassettes in the early '90s. He examined a dysfunctional couple on 2002's Tallahassee, dealt with his own troubled childhood on 2005's The Sunset Tree, and used tarot cards as a catalyst for 2010's All Eternals Deck.

After focusing on the rather hermetic world of professional wrestling for 2015's Beat the Champ, Darnielle turns his empathetic eye to another subculture: Black-clad goths and the rise and fall of the '80s bands they loved. Aside from the dramatic Rain in Soho, bolstered by a 16-voice choir, and the New Order-like coda to Shelved, the sound is far from goth: Darnielle eschews his usual guitars for a gentle Fender Rhodes, and new member Matt Douglas sweetens the spacious arrangements with woodwinds.

Book

Grief and murder

British writer Paula Hawkins' latest novel, Into the Water, is a story about how grief shapes us and how we move on from tragedy.

A small town is rocked when several women get swept away by the river that runs through it, including a single mother of a 15-year-old girl. In order to take care of her, the girl's aunt returns, though the older woman vowed that she would never come back to the town that holds so much of her grief. But things aren't always what they seem, and soon it becomes clear that the women may have been murdered. With an intricately woven mystery at its core, the book examines how memories can deceive us, and how our childhood shapes our perceptions of reality.