As soon as that marvellous voice opens up on the gorgeous chorus of this album's Don't Lose Sight you already know he's fashioned another one [great record]. [Oct 2025, p.72]

33 years in, Suede aren't treading any water. [Oct 2025, p.78]

Fans of Byrne's spiky post-punk oddball persona may feel short-changed, but his latter-day incarnation as a folksy, funny, starry-eyed romantic hits rhapsodic new heights here. [Oct 2025, p.73]

A collection of songs so sugar-coated it should probably have been packaged with insulin. [Oct 2025, p.72]

This second solo album dissects an array of internal torments in scarifying style; more gruesome and brutal than ever, and often glitching like a fractured psyche. [Oct 2025, p.72]

Single My Mind IS A Mountain may open the record in brash fashion, but by lush centre points Souvenir and CXZ, Deftones feel both comfortably themselves and completely unpredictable. [Oct 2025, p.72]

Choice cuts from an incomparable half century. [Oct 2025, p.87]

The sound that would soon seduce millions was already here. There's Buckingham's unique Flamenco-tinged guitar sound, evident throughout, for a start, as well as Nicks' already assured songwriting. [Oct 2025, p.87]

The gold for hardcore fans still long-pocketed enough to remain completists 0 a 41-track Re:call segment corraling non-album alternatives, B-sides and soundtrack work. Of course, this is the only element proper Bowie fans truly want. But do they actually need it when it comes irrevocably bolted to eight CDS of stuff they've already got? .... The Rare stuff? All gravy. [Oct 2025, p.84]

Arctic Moon is an album that works for both the long haulers and the novices. [Oct 2025, p.79]

The entire album's tremendous fun, uniquely brilliant and brilliantly unique. [Sep 2025, p.76]

Halestorm have never sounded more comfortably ‘themselves’ than on album six, so after two decades, it seems that their cage has broken at last. [Aug 2025, p.74]

The duo's genre-mashing tracks remain reliably omnivorous an exhilarating. [Sep 2025, p.79

They're clearly having a blast, in every sense - there's enough noirish sarcasm to make that clear - but there's also a punk nihilism at play that makes this debut album a compellingly unsettling listen. [Sep 2025, p.77]

This is all quality stuff from a name you can trust. [Sep 2025, p.80]

The Hives Forever Forever The Hives is vibrant, loud and sure to destroy dance floors worldwide. [Sep 2025, p.76]

"No Hope", "Everybody Dies" and "Care Less" all sound like phrases scratched on a teenager's notebooks, but The majesty of their songwriting craft - imagine The Byrds if Evan Dando had sat in for the session - makes even the darkest of days feel like a new dawn. [Sep 2025, p.81]

It might be ultimately pointless, but it works because Fogerty's voice is so extraordinarily intact and because the songs are still invincible. [Sep 2025, p.77]

Universal platitudes makes Ricochet feel like Disney-fied protest compared to some of the thornier acts and topics grabbing headlines right now, but there's no denying the message of unity is on point. There's a maturity to Ricochet's sound. [Sep 2025, p.81]

As this once-fabled recording attests, the Family Stone's chops and their leader's startlingly innovative tropes (including scat singing and testifying) were already in place that March. [Sep 2025, p.85]

An incendiary record from a band teetering on the edge of a crumbling precipice. [Sep 2025, p.78]

A surprisingly vibrant, bright-side kind of album it is too. [Sep 2025, p.78]

A successful continuation of the Babymetal mission. [Sep 2025, p.74]

That it's as listenable as it is intelligent sweetens the deal. [Sep 2025, p.80]

This compelling tenth from the weary-voiced Texan finds him in deeply reflective mode. [Aug 2025, p.77]

Play fast and loose with notions of Americana. [Aug 2025, p.77]

Some early Talking Heads fans would say something was lost when the band lost their preppy soul edge and went down the Byrne and Eno art-school alleyway with their next pair of albums. Others might say More Songs About Buildings And Food suffers from being a halfway house between the band’s early sound and what it would become under Eno and Byrne’s constrictive guiding hand. But even as a transitional record More Songs About Buildings And Food is extraordinary. [Aug 2025, p.83]

Proves that an evening sitting round Weller's record player would be an interesting one indeed. [Aug 2025, p.74]

Outtakes or no outtakes, this reissue manages to pull off the considerable trick of feeling like a complete whole – the first iteration of the classic line-up after Motörhead’s formation in 1975. [Summer 2025, p.85]

A glorious and raucous set of tunes. [Aug 2025, p.79]

A pure pleasure. [Aug 2025, p.75]

While Stephen Wilson Jr. and Sierra Ferrell prove to be capable duet partners, Nelson excels alone with guitar. [Aug 2025, p.77]

Although lacking the shock of the new, Birthing is a far more thematic and aurally darning meditation than most. [Aug 2025, p.74]

Things get rough and rocky in places. .... But the soft centres of Davina McCall and U And Me At Home keep Moisturizer a light and vivifying lotion. [Aug 2025, p.73]

Discount the fillers, which are of high, if throwaway, quality and you've a strong 12-banger cracker of a record. [Aug 2025, p.72]

It's not the most ambitious record in the world - at this stage in their career Bush don't seem to be trying to capture a new audience or to chase the zeitgeist - but I Beat Loneliness does give the impression of a band reaching out to the listeners they know are already there and offering the comfort of emotional understanding and musical familiarity. [Aug 2025, p.78]

Offering no major reinvention. That said, it kicks harder than a mule in lead boots. [Summer 2025, p.82]

Walk This Road is an album as full of joy as it is of craft. [Jul 2025, p.76]

The most motley of crews manage to bring out the best in McCaughey's songs and he's on peak form here. [Summer 2025, p.72]

The weirdly comforting sound of an oddball genius proffering words of hope as the word burns all around us. [Summer 2025, p.78]

Employing rhythmic sideswipes, jarring guitar clangour and dub bass frequencies through a production filter marked 'Mud'. [Summer 2025, p.79]

As ever with the Maels, the relentless high-camp levity and heavily mannered, shrill, staccato delivery can sometimes jar on MAD! [Summer 2025, p.72]

A re-engerised record that sits comfortably next to is 'N' Hers and Different Class. [Summer 2025, p.73]

Its 10 songs are bombastic, unabashed boogies, each one stacked with layer upon layer of symphonic volume. [Summer 2025, p.73]

An ambient suite based on a two-note motif, as if homing in on a detail on Luminal, dwelling on it, tenderly bleeding it dry. [Summer 2025, p.76]

Tracks on Luminal such as Hopelessly At Ease are almost unsettling seductive, while Wolfe's every sung syllable on Shhh looms large and expansive. [Summer 2025, p.76]

Nothing is rushed, nothing hasty, very little upbeat - as befits a band with such a rep for beautiful misery. [Summer 2025, p.76]

God knows what genre it is, but Fairytale Codex is an arty trip into the unknown well worth making. [Summer 2025, p.77]

This collection is a breathtaking gift that Springsteen acolytes will cherish. [Summer 2025, p.84]

Their impressive fourth album punches like a clenched claw. [Jun 2025, p.71]

Johnny Cash starts with Johnny 99, the title track of his 1983 album released just a year after Springsteen's Nebraska, with his own distinctive drawl and guitar twang, demonstrating that the Boss's songs have all the necessary country ingredients. The more traditional Travis Tritt then employs an arsenal of cliches on Tougher Than The Rest. .... [Steve Earle] delivers a brooding, almost menacing live version of State Trooper. [Jul 2025, p.86]

‘NEVER ENOUGH’ covers a massive expanse whilst also maintaining the core of Turnstile we fell in love with on ‘Pressure To Succeed’. And succeed they have.

It's tip-top stuff. [Jul 2025, p.81]

Their alt.rock energy remains, but their overwrought nu-metal bombast is dialled down. [Jul 2025, p.74]

One of the band's most reflective releases (here she works toward acceptance of the fragility of her body while also reasserting its many strengths) but also one of their most defiant. [Jul 2025, p.78]

Unatoned isn't the best Machine Head alum, but it's a top-tier one for sure. [Jun 2025, p.75]

On sturdy, soulful vocals, Richard Watts is again Trower's mouthpiece for these well-observed songs (his concerns include culture wars and the clock's now-deafening tick). But the truest expression comes from the guitarist's extended freeform solos. [Jun 2025, p.77]

Anything goes, and dizzyingly does. .... Taste that? It's fresh air. [Jun 2025, p.71]

The woman's on fire. [Jun 2025, p.70]

Delicious. [Jun 2025, p.75]

Its shorter, pacier tracks up the dynamism, making for a pummelling - if somewhat relentless - experience as deep-strata hardcore tracks like Detroit and Blackage shift gears into more ponderous interludes. [Jun 2025, p.72]

Buzz is in full-on demented rock-god mode (Victory Of The Pyramids), a full-throttle sludge trash that out-Hawkwinds even the mighty Hawkwind themselves. [Jun 2025, p.71]

Thematically it’s a steady path, although musically Dream Into It is fairly erratic and offers quite a disjointed listening experience as it jumps from style to style. [Jun 2025, p.70]

Hawkwind sit in 2025 alongside the kosmische likes of Berlin’s Arcane Allies, making similar forays into space. It’s all good – and this is certainly good. [Jun 2025, p.74]

It’s enchanting rock’n’roll that might well tempt you into selling your soul – if only for one night of sweet soft-metal abandon. [Jun 2025, p.72]

Stronger melodies, more powerful performances, now an emphatic lead [Maiah Wynne], it's as if she's finally decided to step out of her famed compatriots' shadow and taken centre stage. The band have expanded musically, too. [May 2025, p.74]

They've crafted their most focused, direct and unburdened collection yet. [May 2025, p.74]

Six albums in, The Horrors sound fresher than ever. [May 2025, p.75]

The result is varied, strange and engaging. [May 2025, p.75]

Same edgy, post-punk, anything-could-happen-next discomfort about them [as 90s band Compulsion]. Which is nice. [May 2025, p.79]

Their hearts are in the right place, but their percussion needs pumping. [May 2025, p.79]

A wonderful return. [May 2025, p.79]

An album preoccupied lyrically with past, present and future is matched by music that is sleek, chromium-plated, retro-futurist. [May 2025, p.73]

Charming result. [May 2025, p.74]

Unexpected diversions into country honk (Cold Hearted Woman, Hot On My Tail) and cinematic balladry (Weekend In Rome) may also raise eyebrows among diehards. But when the storm clouds clear, the band's innate pop sensibilities shine as brightly as ever. [Apr 2025, p.76]

While this largely live covers set doesn't necessarily flex the Welsh guitarist's creative muscles, it confirms him as a musician who has the genre under his fingernails. [Mar 2025, p.75]

Curious Ruminant will not sate anybody’s desire for a tub-thumping Tull album, but Anderson seems to be beyond that now. Instead his mind is overflowing with lyrical tangents and still capable of dispensing hooks, and he’s entering the final stages in fine fettle. [Apr 2025, p.70]

A bit mad, but utterly compelling. [Apr 2025, p.77]

This eleventh album - earthy, grain-infused Americana folk rock and eerie noir-country in tone - sounding like Hersh sinking deep into the southern soil. [Apr 2025, p.70]

It's a remarkable evolutionary step forward. [Apr 2025, p.77]

The Overview is not so much a return to form (Wilson hasn’t been off it) as a return to full-fat, unskimmed prog from the man whose work with Porcupine Tree gave the genre a good name even before it earned reappraisals in more recent years. [Apr 2025, p.72]

Mature in a good way, this is an excellent album. [Apr 2025, p.77]

It's an album outside its own time, designed to intrigue the dedicated few rather than service the content-consuming many, and if nothing else it's bringing the art of enigmatic charisma back to the world of rock. [Apr 2025, p.74]

It's starkly, scarily beautiful and transcendent in places, chilling yet comforting in others. [Apr 2025, p.75]

An album that equals the original. [Apr 2025, p.77]

He tops it [2021's Blue Hearts] with Here We Go, thanks to a stripped back approach and a more hopeful lyrical tone. [Apr 2025, p.76]

Long on delicately gauzy, seductively shoegazey atmospheric, but short on whup-ass. [Apr 2025, p.77]

Universe Room continues the indie-prog leanings of last year's Strut Of Kings, as though R.E.M were dipping into the less coherent corners of Tommy and Nursery Cryme, but across its 17 tracks finds time for plenty of lo-fi diversion too. [Apr 2025, p.72]

The streak of familiarity that runs through the album is down to the way songwriters Wesley Schultz and Jeremiah Fraites construct their folk-pop melodies and arrangements, but they've given their sound a fresh impetus. [Apr 2025, p.70]

A charming history emerges from Young's immerse archive. [Apr 2025, p.70]

There’s a rejuvenated feel to this reunion album of the ‘dream team’, which is themed around the impact of sleep disruption from sleepwalking to nightmares. [Mar 2025, p.77]

Friar Tuck is a humorous and bewildered look at the modern world from a man who has never quite seemed a part of it. [Feb 2025, p.75]

A good deal more than alreet, for sure [Mar 2025, p.75]

Their second album sets its heart-on-sleeve emoting to some properly sweeping arena-sized tunes. [Mar 2025, p.75]

Iggy is in fine voice throughout, raising a middle finger to both age and doubters. [Mar 2025, p.76]

With Bloom, Larkin Poe prove they’ve got the whole authenticity thing locked down. [Mar 2025, p.76]

This is much more raw Manic Street Preachers, fuelled by despair as usual but also simplicity. .... Critical Thinking shows that with the Manics, rage never sleeps. [Feb 2025, p.72]

Lambrini Girls are political but transgressive, smart but not pretentious (no way!), humourous, but dark - very dark indeed. Subversive, in all the hidden senses of the word. [Feb 2025, p.73]