Atmospheric, evocative, the psychedelic soul concept work you never knew you needed. [Summer 2022, p.79]

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

The result is the most varied album that Gov't Mule have made, and certainly the most concise. There is no room for noodling, even when the tracks go over the seven-minute mark. [Summer 2023, p.76]

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]

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

The best 1983 album released in 2025. [Nov 2025, p.78]

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

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

A fun album, but one in need of trimming and extra heft. [Aug 2022, p.69]

Their seventh album is clever, arch and compelling. [Mar 2026, p.79]

If that’s code for giving the people what they want, he’s delivered. From the moment Edin opens proceedings with 83 seconds of fearless fretwork, there’s guitar everywhere. Sighommi gallops like Iron Maiden taking on Black Sabbath, Goeth The Fall overflows with cascading hooks, and 999 is a reminder that Smashing Pumpkins were always masters of a slow-burner. [Oct 2024, p.74]

Here, White Manna have created grown-up lullabies of the most primal kind.

Old timers and newcomers are invited to reconsider latter-day entries in the Stones hall of infamy. While Doom And Gloom and the sparring couplets of Rough Justice warrant rehabilitation, Streets Of Love’s overblown gaudiness typifies the quality dip that closes disc 2.

Craft's previous work suggested he might have an album in him which is as wry as it is earnestly heroic. This is it. [Aug 2019, p.80]

Continue to sound just as fresh as they did when the band first formed 40 years ago. [Jul 2024, p.78]

Frontman Brandon Coleman is alike a more muscular, less reedy Neil Young. .... A turbulent album. [Aug 2024, p.72]

This music doesn't so much rock as lurch, convulse and blister the paint off your toenails. [May 2026, p.75]

Some imaginative arrangements--notably on a brass-heavy Ghost Of Santa Fe--can’t disguise the fact that the transcendent qualities this music demands are too often absent.

The fine line between contemplation and navel gazing has always been a difficult balancing act to achieve, but here Nathaniel Rateliff, ably backed by the soulful Night Sweats on their fourth studio album, does so without the use of a safety net. And that this collective of musicians does so by breathing new life into established formats is to be applauded. [Summer 2024, p.76]

Moore, along with My Bloody Valentine’s Deb Goodge (bass) and guitarist James Sedwards (Chrome Hoof) and the aforementioned Shelley, is displaying a fine linear growth with Rock N Roll Consciousness.

A smacker. [Jun 2023, p.78]

As you'd expect, musically they're full-tilt melodic punk rallying cries, with the warmth of Greg Graffin's vocals contrasting beautifully against Brett Gurewitz's barbed riffs to suggest there's still a chance for redemption if we stand up and fight. [Jun 2019, p.86]

Now up to seven discs with live set, it's even harder to resist. [Dec 2023, p.85]

Lush and romantic, Evidence is the kind of timeless electronic album you can dream inside. [Mar 2013, p.98]

Arnold's new tunes are belters. ... This album should do the business. [Sep 2019, p.85]

Triumphal stuff. [Oct 2019, p.91]

With Lamar Williams Jr at the mic, there's a funky drift to See The Moon and Rabbit Foot, while Stax legend William Bell claims a stellar credit with the sad and sweetly sung Never Want To Be Kissed. [Feb 2022, p.79]

A bunker-born double (their second) that keeps on giving. [Nov 2022, p.74]

The band’s rambunctious twentieth studio set stomps and shakes like an irreverent collision between Sam The Sham and The Stooges on Morphine Drip, Big As My Balls and Wah Wah Power. Druggy mantra Come On Everybody Getting High With You Baby Tonight evokes 60s Bay Area psych, The Hearse classic surf instrumentals. [Nov 2024, p.74]

Springsteen has previously alluded to this [early] period of his career, albeit in the roundabout manner of fashioning songs (most notably on The River) inspired by the music he heard blaring out of jukeboxes in his youth. Similarly, formerly he has addressed feelings of emptiness and disillusionment on self-reflective songs such as Two Faces or 57 Channels (And Nothin’ On), although sat in front of a computer screen he has less recourse to clumsy metaphor.

For all its retrospection and melancholy there's a determination on Saloman's part to relight past fires, face down the miseries of This Britain. [Oct 2021, p.77]

The best showcase yet for a candid performer for whom the warts are the best bit. [Sep 2023, p.79]

It's an album that rewards repeated immersion within its layers of acoustic guitar, questing strings and Mellotron. [Oct 2023, p.87]

It’s the Medicine we need, and it works best when they up the dosage. [Nov 2023, p.77]

A record of sophisticated electronic alt. rock, where the organic and artificial merge wonderfully. [May 2026, p.73]

This time around, the woozy, comforting psychedelia of old remains, the songs trickling into one another, sleepy synths sighing, purring and pulsating. But Eternally Even comes with the biggest serving of soul he’s cooked up yet, sexy basslines sizzling even as he looks death in the face for We Ain’t Getting Any Younger Parts 1 and 2.

A little unwieldy in places, but still pleasingly timeless. [Jul 2019, p.85]

The result is a minor wonder of wit, weight and emotion - the Horses back to full gallop. [Feb 2022, p.82]

Meliora is easily the sextet’s finest outing to date, a meticulously executed, artful collection of black-souled retro doom-pop, as heavy as Metallica, as melodically sophisticated as ABBA.

It's lush, grown-up, thoughtful, funny and very good. [Sep 2014, p.93]

It’s a 21st-century record for a 21st-century audience that, with an old-school 48-minute duration, only ever leaves the listener hungry for more.

It's Lanegan's Americana growl that keeps the whole thing sounding ironically timeless. [Nov 2019, p.85]

As evidenced here, experimental doesn’t mean inaccessible. This is music from the past that, while only looking forward, is still daring the present to catch up.

Nobody will pretend Atonement is a classic. But it is firmly fired up. [Sep 2019, p.82]

All nine studio albums are covered, although the sequencing defies logic. [Dec 2023, p.85]

Finally, there's a modicum of funky glide in his introspective alt.country slide. [Sep 2023, p.81]

This is the best Wire album of this century. [May 2013, p.84]

For much of it they elect to look backwards, to formative times in their music story. [Jul 2022, p.82]

S&M2 is a success on the grandest of scales. [Sep 2020, p.84]

It's ace, but he's not a man you'd trust with secateurs. [Jun 2021, p.83]

Coda itself a contractual hotchpotch of career-spanning outtakes, is the only reissue given the three-disc treatment, with a total of 15 extras as disparate as the album itself.

Despite its subject matter, the Bristol tykes are still sonically and vocally as visceral as ever. [Mar 2024, p.81]

This is a set of unlistenable, wigged-out, repetitive, directionless grooves in the main, but we love ’em anyway.

Padded out with uneven live albums, indifferent remixes and anodyne film soundtrack songs, this 120-track package makes for depressingly arid listening in places. That said, no anthology that includes the heart-soaring Absolute Beginners or the high-gloss Let’s Dance can be considered a total wash-out.

Aat its best this reassuringly svelte and only occasionally sparse eight-track EP is a thing of beauty.

A brilliant record, combining as it does the herky-jerky, febrile near-hysterical wit of Sparks with that of Franz Ferdinand.

While it can’t match the last, extremely impressive Heartbreakers set, Hypnotic Eye, it’s a strong country-rock presentation from what’s not quite the sultan of side projects but rather more than Petty’s return-to-roots Tin Machine.

It may not be the most important return of the year, but 133 serves as a reminder that Muir is a leader in the field of party starting. [Jul 2013, p.87]

Brothers of the 4X4 is as lively as a flea with ants in its pants, fizzing with tongue-in-cheek humour, and his lawless punk attitude runs through it like a poisoned river. [Nov 2013, p.89]

Blank Realm thrash expertly between raucousness and beauty, culminating in the tremulous Gold. This really is a very fine album indeed.

Some of the retro-crooner murder ballads risk straying into cliché, but there are inspired sound-collage experiments here too.

With a disc including live outtakes and priceless B-sides, this is an essential collection.

As with any compilation, it’s never entirely clear how much clearance from publishers impacts on the criteria for inclusion, but there are rare treats to be mined here.

VDGG’s fourth album since they became a trio in 2007, Do Not Disturb is every bit as strange, angular and unpredictable as anything the band did in the 70s.

In a nutshell: fuzzily fierce.

Big Bad Beautiful Noise is their first album in four or so years, and it’s their best and most consistent since 1988’s seminal Birth School Work Death.

We’re hanging on to them by our fingernails, but this is impressive stuff.

Thomas might have this new album down as the James Gang teaming up with Tangerine Dream, but PU exist in a world their own, one that bears only passing resemblance to reality.

Locating the sweet spot where spontaneity and polish meet, Widdershins swings in all the right directions.

Album number three takes Anna Meredith-style neoclassical and jumbles it with a woozy mix of Broadcast, Hounds of Love and glockenspiel gamelan. [Oct 2018, p.89]

A surprising distillation of longing, memory and loss. [Apr 2019, p.88]

A stylish lo-fi gumbo of grunge, punk and indie. [May 2019, p.89]

Sweet, potent vignettes of American folk storytelling. [Jun 2019, p.89]

A relentless stream of strong, sinewy riffs and blistering solos. ... It's just a shame he doesn't trust his own voice more. [Jul 2019, p.85]

The barrage of noise that results is undeniably epic, oddly stirring and gloriously daft. [Aug 2019, p.81]

This, almost surreally, is only their seventh album and contains not a dull moment. [Sep 2019. p.83]

They're also still some way off leading any packs, but they're making up ground. [Feb 2020, p.90]

Foxx sounds just as vital as he ever was. [Aug 2020, p.89]

It’s all cracking stuff. The early Motown song Money (That’s What I Want) and Muddy Waters’ Rock Me, Baby add soul, and the studio chatter is worth hearing if only to catch Morrison calling out for Kentucky Fried Chicken and announcing that The Doors’ next album will be called Ride Out.

Not a great comeback, but just good enough. [Jun 2021, p.81]

Reason To Live is full of a warmth and pleasure in life that suits his growing maturity as songwriter and raconteur well. [Jul 2021, p.80]

[A] blend of instrumental moods, torpid 80s indie and self-regarding songs that never entirely clear their launchpad. [Oct 2021, p.79]

All told, a crowd-fuelled triumph. [Nov 2021, p.75]

Mayall endures, and keeps exploring, with his best originals - Got To Find A Better Way and Deep Blue Sea - bent happily out of shape by screeching violin. [Feb 2022, p.79]

Trower’s guitar playing is deliciously inventive, whether he’s channelling Mark Knopfler on Wither On The Vine or moving closer to Eric Clapton circa 461 Ocean Boulevard on the title track.

It's a delight to hear the fully emergent Young so up and close with such a pantheon of wonder, and the sound is near-perfect. [Jul 2022, p.87]

Eschewing Young’s work recorded with Promise Of The Real – or indeed anything written this side of 1995 – Noise & Flowers’ nine crowd pleasers offer exactly what that brilliant title suggests.

Occasionally things are wide of the mark, such as with the ponderous Junkie, but that's mostly an anomaly in a record full of snarky, sneering metal that has the punky energy of a new band on the block. [Sep 2022, p.77]

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]

Shades of Dead Moon and The Scientists, US 80s hardcore litter tracks like Plasticity and the monstrous swirl of lead single Almost Everything but Mudhoney remain their own, inherent force of nature. [May 2023, p.77]

Romy Vager's vocals are raw, earnest, and Tambourine is Brain Worms distilled, a taut memoir of remote mourning. [Jul 2023, p.87]

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

A triumph. [Dec 2023, p.76]

Effortless virtuosity and timeless idiosyncratic tropes elevate nine tracks recorded at Sam Phillips Studio in Memphis (except for the live Got My Mojo Workin'). [Jul 2024, p.83]

Most touching is the full-circle thrill of hearing P.P. belt out her 1968 standard, Angel Of The Morning. [Dec 2024, p.77]

Gabbard played all the instruments himself, which is admirable but limiting. He needs a band to break up the somewhat metronomic feel. And a producer who can bring a radio-friendly flourish. [Jan 2025, p.82]

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]

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]