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

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

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

A few more enticing tunes within the mix might really elevate them to a higher plane. [Mar 2026, p.78]

Dream Nails are evolving with grace and wit, trading the splenetic feminist rants of their early career for more musically and emotionally nuanced terrain. [Mar 2026, p.81]

Much of it's lovely, from the relaxed, melodic strumalong title track to ... well, the relaxed strumalong of just about everything else. It's the kind of album that makes you think there's nothing wrong with the world. [Dec 2018, p.84]

Actually, You Can is business as usual, which translates into a 'gloriously unusual racket'. [Jan 2022, p.83]

It’s all smart stuff, but presented with tunes that hook into your brain. They’ve lost none of their spark in the 34 years since their debut, and have the edge on bands half their age.

Death Song (their first album in four years and one whose title neatly appends their name to the VU classic that first inspired them) is their heaviest to date, a toxic draught of garage-rock and booming psychedelia that buzzes with echo and reverb.

Alone In The Universe is a triumph of songcraft and studio invention, one that trounces notions of soft rock and guilty pleasures. He might be a man alone, but he’s got the whole world, potentially, in his hands. Again.

The New Abnormal is less new big bang, more engrossing sizzle. [May 2020, p.76]

Despite its nonlinear creation, the album is one of their tightest and most consistent in years. [Sep 2019, p.83]

An unlikely masterpiece. [Apr 2021, p.89]

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

Love Chant is a wonderful and surprisingly vital return to the fray. [Nov 2025, p,75]

[Beautiful People (Stay High) is] a tearaway slice of white-boy soul, so immediate that you'll join the cast-of-thousands vocal by the second chorus. the rest of Ohio Players is almost as good. [May 2024, p.75]

He's dancing to the beat of his own drum, and it's hard not to want to join him. [Jul 2018, p.86]

Social Cues feels like the sound of a great band in desperate need of some down time. [Jun 2019, p.88]

The Mule's taste and experience largely wins the day. [Oct 2013, p.87]

Cartoony, authentic, moving and daft, and the true heirs to the Ramones, Shonen Knife are just great.

Anyone who spends their weekends lurking in the more pungent corners of sci-fi/horror/comic-book shops will lap it up; for everyone else it's less Star Wars, more Space Balls. [Oct 2018, p.85]

Earns its place. [Jul 2023, p.87]

Idlewild remain as dependable as ever. [Nov 2025, p.78]

Predictable as this dynamic may be, EITS are never ponderous, never less than beautiful. [Oct 2023, p.84]

Strip away all the sumptuous studio texture and these lyrics--about savage love, violence and revolution--are sodden with adolescent gothpunk cliché. But this scarcely matters when the future arena anthems Magnetized and We Never Tell hit their stride: lusty, energised and refreshingly shallow.

Too much of Big Music seems to be reaching for a gravitas it can't back up with emotional or musical substance. [Dec 2014, p.104]

It's a perfect kind of insanity, and it gets the old adrenalin pumping nicely. [Summer 2014, p.91]

The post-hardcore foundations are here, complete with drama-fuelled, singalong choruses, but what The Used have built upon them opens up a new world of creative opportunities for them.