Tumultuous, trippy and brilliantly untamed, Sonancy is a magnificent comeback.

Live, earlier material, Welcome To The Occupation and Me In Honey especially, benefits from an increased aural muscular density, while several songs from Monster itself pack a greater punch than the studio versions. [Dec 2019, p.90]

Avenged Sevenfold have lost any previous limitations and inhibitions, and they’ve crafted a landmark metal album.

Drive-By Truckers have never been angrier, but, just as crucially, they've never been more musically eloquent. [Mar 2020, p.86]

Unfeigned and irresistible.

Plenty of pallid indie math-rock imitators--from Godspeed! downwards--have attempted to do what Boris do here, and all have failed. Boris abide.

Satirising the music industry itself as impressively as The Fall, The Sherlock Holmes... is classic Headcoats. [Dec 2025, p.77]

It's no surprise party - and less giant leap than consolidatory glide - but Can We Please Have Fun has its fair share of high times. [Jun 2024, p.74]

In its second half, Crawler takes brave experimental swerves. [Jan 2022, p.82]

Their best album yet. [Apr 2023, p.78]

Simms certainly knows how to deliver Wire energy - compact, disciplined, no waste, no spray, as on Primed And Ready. There are also lovely moments of Wire pop here. [Mar 2020, p.87]

Ash still put out heart and reliable joy. [Oct 2023, p.86]

A fearsome riffstorm of therapeutic venting. [Summer 2021, p.87]

Michael Brauer’s interpretation – same songs, different mix – alters the texture of familiar songs like Love Sick, the spectral Cold Irons Bound and Make You Feel My Love, now something of a standard thanks to Adele, Michael Bublé and, er, Nick Knowles. ... The live pieces are more informative, with songs performed between 1998 and 2001.

When Marshall calls himself Madman Butterfly and sings The Presence Of Haman and The End, you’ll wonder why he doesn’t do it more. He may have allowed himself to be overshadowed by his guests, but Marshall is the star here. [Oct 2024, p.77]

While Larkin Poe are worthy, though, they’re never dull. [Jun 2020, p.87]

Ultimately still mesmerising, enhanced by photos and memorabilia-stacked book plus 36-page reproduction of Bowie’s notebooks, the box set provides a suitably chaotic time capsule of a magical period now bathed in extraordinary poignancy. [Summer 2024, p.82]

A mad, florid knockout. Strength through absurdity.

It’s a bold, bombastic rock album that really chimes with our troubled times. Alter Bridge got issues, and that’s a good thing.

Eric Bibb manages to steer his unique blend of blues and folk in fresh directions. [Mar 2026, p.79]

Throw in the odd ambient curveball and you’ve got an album fizzing with life from experts in their field.

Her splendidly named new album How Did This Happen And What Does It Now Mean is a forest of invention and great songs. [Dec 2024, p.78]

It’s a deeply intimate, deeply beautiful examination of regret, loss, disappointment, solitude and personal demons, made all the more alluring by his warm, frank, subtly emotional vocals.

The result is a compact and highly combustible album that packs 10 songs into just 22 minutes. [Aug 2022, p.86]

You've got another classic BJM album. [Apr 2023, p.79]

The DIY arrangements--treated guitars, keyboards, the odd banjo--sometimes sound like they’ve been fixed up with gaffer tape, adding to the immediacy of songs like Boy Band, a comedic tale about has-beens on a dodgy comeback trail, and the autobiographical, genuinely affecting Property Shows.

This lone soldier is at his best when the cavalry arrives, with Jagger honking on a languid You Di The Crime, and Keef tussling with Jeff Beck over a fine Cognac. [Summer 2018, p.89]

Inevitably, the two extra discs are thick with superfluous alternative and extended mixes. But there are fine non-album singles here too, notably the glossy synth-funk stomper European Son and a plastic-soul remake of Smokey Robinson’s I Second That Emotion. Also included is the four-track Live In Japan EP first released in 1980, and a full live album recorded at the same show. ... Glorious.

A carefree antidote to worrying times. [Summer 2018, p.91]

Diggle has done his old friend proud with the Buzzcocks' new normal. [Mar 2026, p.81]

So while the reverbed guitar strings of instrumental The Phantom Of New Rochelle evoke the early 60s, Don’t Travel Through The Night Alone brings things up to date. Terrific fun throughout. [Dec 2024, p.79]

Despite, or because of, its aptly era-appropriate brevity, English Heart is immaculate, and a lot better than it needs to be. Warm and beautiful.

Thirty-four years and 16 albums in, Therapy? still sound as vital and hungry as they did when they dropped their debut. [Jun 2023, p.72]

This album skips by far lighter than more ponderous collections like 2004's Together We're Heavy. [Sep 2013, p.88]

A cohesively themed album lathered in muti-tiered guitars, anthemic chouses and high-density power riffage, tempered by road-honed dynamism and built for the stage. [Sep 2023, p.76]

The album really benefits from Buck's undimmed musical sensibility. [Apr 2020, p.88]

This ominous set of industrial ire and theatrical brooding sees him in his element, prioritising atmosphere over tunes, both coldly alien and vulnerably human. [Jul 2021, p.82]

Though their trademark dynamics of rise and fall, and tension and release are firmly in evidence, there remains a mesmerising sheen throughout that’s utterly hypnotic.

Delivering the goods with considerably more venom than you might expect at this stage in the game, Lamb of God remain hard to b(l)eat. [Jun 2020, p.89]

Playing those and more top-drawer songs including The River and Born To Run (previously mothballed footage of 10 songs from the two shows are included) and a superb E Street Band behind him, Springsteen gives it his usual all, at arguably the peak period of his career and live performances.

A rich feast for connoisseurs, a rewarding research project for curious casual fans. [Dec 2021, p.78]

There's much to love here, with the jangle-crunch of Buckle Under Pressure and prefer To Lose proving he has the ideas as well as the gear. [Apr 2023, p.75]

Amelia is the work of a true auteur at the very height of her craft. [Sep 2024, p.74]

Still producing some of their best material. And on this form there's plenty of bite in this cranky old dog yet. [Sep 2023, p.78]

Hard truths are faced down and bad voodoo gets annihilated throughout in unflinching, life-affirming, hard-rocking glory.

The songs are tight and feisty, with guitarist Kurdt Vanderhoof and Rick Van Zandt trading off each other with flexibility and style, Howe giving full vent to his range and depth.

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]

Intense and stripped back, with only his own art to fall back on, Cave cuts a truly formidable figure. This is an album you will return to again and again. [Dec 2020, p.85]

Singer Britt Daniel still knows less is more, though, and the tracks are lean and pared, every stab counting. [Mar 2022, p.83]

Cohesive, diverse and swollen with hidden depths. [Jul 2020, p.88]

This album will leave you so wobbly and weak-kneed, you might have to take a few days off work to recover. Headphone melter of the year so far, for sure.

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

A spellbynding brew. [Nov 2020, p.87]

Good things abound. [Oct 2024, p.73]

The ramshackle mix of lyrical longing, acoustic guitars and glacial synths would ordinarily be described as Americana, but the lyrics are still as British as fish and chips. [Sep 2023, p.76]

An hour in her company is still time well spent. [Sep 2023, p.79]

It's a disorienting yet potently addictive mix, reflective of industrial metal's labyrinthine roots in electronica, new wave and beyond. [Oct 2023, p.86]

A distinguished, intriguing return. [Sep 2013, p.91]

Washes of keyboards, a thunderous tattooing of drums and great, empty atmospheric spaces make for an inestimable, all-consuming listen, not least in the fragile-sounding Lacuna/Sunrise and the roiling I.M.S.

It's another record to follow deep into the bayou, chasing the will-o-the-wisp harmonies. [Dec 2021, p.70]

The quartet's explosive indignation is undeniably thrilling, as is their deft mastery of the genre's roaring dynamics. [Sep 2013, p.91]

Their attitudinal distillation of blues, glam and grunge sounds like a marriage made in rock heaven. [Jan 2022, p.84]

[The band] sound like they’re grabbing at big choruses like an alcoholic scrabbling for a bedside breakfast whisky. But on The Feelers, the motoric Spices and Me & Magdalena, Craig Finn’s sneered diatribe about a manipulative rock junkie, they nonetheless stumble across a rich, National-like lustre of dark grooves and opiated euphoria.

Their return album is a fire-and-brimstone rock-and-soul delight. [Sep 2013, p.91]

Allen provides a genre-defining pulse. [Sep 2023, p.81]

Not just vast in musical scope, The Astonishing offers an entire Dystopian world of its own, not to mention exhibiting the potential to be an overblown Broadway rock opera, eye-frazzling sci-fi movie and nerd-delighting video game into the bargain.

It's got some absolute burners on deck. ... It's also got plenty of noisy psychedelic horseshit they did in the early 90s, but even that stuff sounds glammy and cool. [Mar 2019, p.88]

The likes of Crocodile Smile and Love Is Like Gravity seem to teeter on the brink of chaos, but these seasoned players hang these pieces together faithfully and beautifully, jutting and jagging every which way, conjuring up the vivid abstractions of Thomas's lyrical visions. [Jul 2023, p.87]

It has power, darkness and bucketloads of testosterone. [Sep 2013, p.92]

‘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.

Witness a contemporary twist on the classic R&B revival. Hallelujah.

The results are mostly magical, largely because these songs still sound like Simon at his wry and melodic best.

Dose Your Dreams is fucking ace. [Oct 2018, p.85]

The wistfulness, the super-saturated sound, the layered harmonies and instrumentation, the timeless echo of pasts and retro-futures colliding. The humanity, the performed frailty at the heart of manufactured perfection. Lynne still has it. He still knows how to create the magic.

On the darkly groovy Crowded Rooms Hart is joined by singer-songwriters Eska and JGrrey to bolster Dury's spoken narrative as he grapples with successfully finding his place in the here and now. [Jul 2023, p.87]

Rock Or Bust is actually a very lean piece of work. [Jan 2015, p.114]

This anthology is front-to-back brilliant. [Sep 2023, p.79]

While long-term fans might initially be disappointed by the marked absence of the bar-room swagger of yore, repeated listens bear fruit. [Jun 2021, p.80]

The news is good though: Davies is in terrific, matchless voice, his storied career standing up to a sprawling treatment without too much drag.

From Hell I Rise is more than just a retread of past glories. Part of the credit goes to Death Angel singer Mark Osegueda, whose vicious performance consciously avoids referencing Slayer's Tom Araya on the title track and the anti-war Trophies Of The Tyrant. [Jul 2024, p.78]

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

A near-constant crisis of confidence isn’t always the best character trait for a rock’n’roll singer, but this Devon power(ish) trio make it work on their solid debut album.

More high-quality psychedelic-doom musings. [Sep 2013, p.93]

Dan Auerbach's production is warmly intimate, LaMontangne's singing a quiet marvel. [Jul 2014, p.95]

Things Change positively aches with melancholy and regrets, but, like the finest outlaw country crooners, Barham manages to find slivers of light in the darkness. [Summer 2018, p.86]

They're a strange band. In places it's as if they've accidently ended up in a room together and just carried on doing their thing, and by some weird magic it all comes together - a game of aural chicken which no one backs down but everybody wins. [Oct 2025, p.78]

Merciless - their eighth - doubles down on that solid breakneck thrash metal/hardcore [heard on 2020's Carnivore]. [Dec 2024, p.76]

Necessarily lo-fi, one accepts the sonic limitations of cheap tape and the fact this material was never meant to be released. [Jan 2015, p.120]

Overall, time has not diminished Frame's evergreen gift for bittersweet, heart-twanging introspection. [Jul 2014, p.95]

Nothing Last Forever might even be the closest approximation yet of what the 60s actually sounded like. [Oct 2023, p.83]

In other hands, this would make for a frustrating listen, but there's a melodic warmth to mainman Stu Mackenzie's cosmic musings. [Jan 2015, p.120]

Fish cherry-picks her favourite bits from the old masters and fuses them with Stax-flavoured brass, southern warmth, classy pop balladry in Fairwell My Fairweather and nicely sleazy swagger in You Got It Bad. [Oct 2019, p.86]

A solid return from a beloved band with plenty of wry lyrical tricks still up their sleeve. [Dec 2019, p.82]

It all makes for a varied, sophisticated and somewhat restrained listen, as the Wakefield trio's bawling attack is tempered to allow subtler flavours to seep through. [Apr 2026, p.75]

Confessional, witty, with a touch of The Vaselines, Swear I’m Good At This finds singer Alex Luciano magnifying small daily failures and turning them into works of art.

This is a promising first step into a new era. [May 2018, p.91]

Some space is wasted--the album would feel more concise without the ambient sonic interludes it's peppered with--but when they hit their stride, as on the magnificent Throw Me An Anchor, Baroness seem unstoppable. [Summer 2019, p.86]

Anthem Of The Peaceful Army isn't quite the finished article. ... At the final count, Anthem Of The Peaceful Army is shaping up to be the finest debut album of both 2018 and 1972. [Nov 2018, p.80]