While it lacks the hostility of its role model or its strident central voice, there's intrigue aplenty. [May 2023, p.84]

This is a still-hungry group flexing their creative muscles. [May 2023, p.86]

Sundown is both a bigger sounding LP than Pleasure, Joy And Happiness but also a deeper one. [May 2023, p.91]

Melusine retains the intellectual curiosity of Salvant's jittery, questing catalogue. [May 2023, p.86]

The Record is beautifully integrated, each song feeling like an ongoing conversation, a harmonious thread they can pick up any time. It’s very much worth getting to know it. [Jun 2023, p.85]

An excursion into invention, forsaking preparation for nuggets of inspiration and a degree of rootless wander. [May 2023, p.89]

There are ravishing moments and startling lines, but these 10 tracks collectively plod, the band's early sugar-rush sophistication never returning to grace this deliberate growth. [May 2023, p.88]

An exquisite collection of R&B message songs that have subtly been reframed with a jazz twist to reflect dystopian developments in contemporary American life. [May 2023, p.84]

The Art Of Forgetting swings between joy and darkness with a boldness and coherence that is a marvel. [May 2023, p.84]

A strangely bloodless album heavy on technical perfection rather than the visceral emotion at the core of the best roots music. [May 2023, p.91]

Polizze's bubblegum melodies cut through the fuzz (Out The Door is a cracker), while Baby ups those '80s bona fides by echoing Pixies' Wave Of Mutilation. [Apr 2023, p.89]

If modern folk music needs its own OK Computer, its own The Dark Side Of The Moon, or indeed its own F#A#∞, this may well be it. [Apr 2023, p.80]

Bob Mould's been hereabouts before, of course, but The Tubs' tightly-wound songs are good enough to transcend the concept. [May 2023, p.95]

It's a seduction in halves. [May 2023, p.93]

The tracklisting may be a bit route one, but the music is far from it. [May 2023, p.86]

A terrific set that explores the themes of loss, friendship, aging and legacy, in 12 songs that are both familiar sounding and something new. [May 2023, p.84]

While keyboardist Vijay Iyer and bassist/Moog player Shahzad Ismaily summon a succession of iridescent, jazz-ambient drones and stimulating pianistic inventions, the compelling centre here is always Aftab's extraordinary voice, a thing of languorously modulating beauty. [May 2023, p.84]

These songs have an impressive vehemency, whether showcasing uncanny AI balladry on Soul With Me, industrial wall-of-sound on Speak To Me and People Are Good, electro-pop dissociation on My Favourite Stranger, or hydraulically pumped Brel-drama on Don't Say You Love Me. [May 2023, p.85]

If it wasn’t for a couple of unfortunate lulls and longueurs, the odd dubious creative choice, it could easily look Norman Fucking Rockwell in the eye. [May 2023, p.85}

With many of Paisley's songs dealing with people struggling between places, timeframes or lovers, such unforced, reflective songwriting deftly grounds these unsteady experiences, an arrangement that simply works. [Apr 2023, p.85]

Predictable, perhaps, to mention Torrini's compatriot Bjork. ... Ultimately, though, RTS charts its own path. [Apr 2023, p.91]

There are featureless patches, bits of white-box real-estate that need a little more character, but there's always something intriguing around V's corners. [Apr 2023, p.89]

It’s another uniquely memorable record, encapsulating its creator’s restless spirit. [Apr 2023, p.86]

CookUp highlights Gendel's daring interpretative strengths. [Apr 2023, p.87]

What was initially a singular vision varies intriguingly. ... although ultimately the pick of albums 19 and 20 could have offered something without any filler. [Mar 2023, p.92]

[Bonnie Bloomgarden's] brings formidable, shamanic energy to California Mountain Shake, Magic Powers and Sunday, her untamed vocals on the latter conjuring a young Maria Mckee. [Apr 2023, p.88]

If their creative missteps in the past two decades have generally been caused by their twin determinations to keep up with modern pop and relentlessly pursue music that works in stadia, then here they’ve cut themselves free from all of that. Ultimately, it may be a watershed moment. By stripping it all back down, in some ways, they’re bigger. [Apr 2023, p.84]

Milk For Flowers sound wide awake; gloriously alive. [Apr 2023, p.89]

Occasionally it's dull - but the mood's upbeat where it once was ominous. [Apr 2023, p.83]

Manzanita mostly shimmers obliquely with light and spells. [Apr 2023, p.90]

That's a lot of black power in every sense and edition. And this time, you can get up and dance on the grass all you want. [Apr 2023, p.92]

Inventive, reactive, but hauntingly untethered, there's no doubt UK Grim comes from a very bad place. [Apr 2023, p.85]

There’s something about this mix of scrawling guitars, frank lyricism and brazen dub that is a joyfully empowering inversion of the girl group sound. [Mar 2023, p.87]

It's arguable that Morrison and his smooth, jazzy pards skew a tad too good-natured - more of OG '50s skiffle's rough bite would not have gone amiss. [Apr 2023, p.82]

Thematically, Radical Romantics can be seen as a mellow follow-up to the angrier, gender-politics-driven Plunge. Instead, it celebrates self-exploration. [Apr 2023, p.88]

[Painted From Memory is] a beauty. ... [Taken From Life is] a treasure trove within a set that defines how well collaborations can work. [Apr 2023, p.94]

WOW's melodies and motifs are pretty with a dash of strange. ... But Kate NV remains thrillingly individual. [Apr 2023, p.89]

This is an inspired set that reveals new ways of hearing pop classics. [Mar 2023, p.84]

All and all, a winning, beats-driven combination of the personal and the universal. [Apr 2023, p.82]

If the default mode of these simmering barroom confessionals is a certain existential weariness, they're nonetheless dispatched with substance and soul. [Mar 2023, p.90]

The nonpareil group's best record in exactly a decade. [Apr 2023, p.82]

Her fiercest offering since 1996's landmark The Way I Should, and a long overdue follow-up to that album's righteous ire. [Apr 2023, p.83]

These 10 tracks showcase Brewis's beautifully expressive singing and, in the waltz-time jazz of Start Over, deep empathy. [Mar 2023, p.91]

This is no holding exercise. Instead, think beautifully conceived curio. [Apr 2023, p.85]

Tracks such as the thunderous Six-Pack or The Fall Of Paul might clang with dissonant noise or pinball off into a riot of machine gun rhythms, but it's generally not at the expense of songs that a festival crowd could bellow back at them. [Apr 2023, p.83]

Occasionally, the vaulting arrangements threaten to overwhelm what is a naturally lower-case singing voice, but the ambition here cannot be faulted. [Apr 2023, p.85]

The album's urgency and purpose is irresistible; there's a riot goin' on, and Algiers just lit the touchpaper. [Mar 2023, p.87]

Its largely brooding, contemplative mood raising ghosts and evoking bruised skies. [Mar 2023, p.92]

A fine collection from a timeless song craftsman. [Mar 2023, p.84]

7s feels like therapy for its creator but has the power and potential to rub off on us all. [Mar 2023, p.88]

A blend of well-crafted original material alongside several covers. [Mar 2023, p.89]

Highly seductive and pulsates with youthful energy. [Mar 2023, p.88]

Orbital remain a comforting presence, and still have plenty to say. [Mar 2023, p.85]

Yet it all still swings, rocks and rolls like a galleon in a squall, the Stones live remaining the luxury you can't do without. [Mar 2023, p.102]

O'Neill has locked into humanity's flawed relationship with nature. But there's celebration too. [Mar 2023, p.92]

What follows is a quietly substantive if still somewhat pallid, meditation on faith and death. [Mar 2023, p.92]

Their most corrosive cocktail yet of melodious sunshine pop and blackly comedic lyrics. [Mar 2023, p.85]

The likes of Beck and Stevie Nicks play supportive rather than starring roles, and the sonic flavours here recall the noir clubby pop of Humanz (2017). The woofer-pumping reggaeton of Tormenta however sees Albarn step aside to let Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny shine. [Mar 2023, p.85]

Lewis hits peak saxophone artistry here. [Mar 2023, p.89]

Dickinson is the singer's best foil since Bernard Butler, spinning a kaleidoscope of suave, modernist soul-pop. [Mar 2023, p.87]

It's also the group's most exciting, most engaged, most breathtaking album this century. [Mar 2023, p.85]

The source isn't always apparent, as Loscil and English's manipulations drift closer to the ambient techno of Gas. [Mar 2023, p.91]

A follow-up that finds the pure-toned Montreal-based singer painting with a wider palette, thanks to backing from pianist Felix Fox-Pappas and Toronto jazzers BADBADNOTGOOD. [Mar 2023, p.89]

The past might be intoxicating, but The Candle And The Flame - lucid, conversational, immediate - is beautifully present in its moment. [Mar 2023, p.84]

All guns are still blazing, but slightly differently. [Mar 2023, p.86]

They sing beautifully together and play everything. [Mar 2023, p.83]

Hawk's stentorian baritone croon is almost irony free and his freewheeling songs blossom because of it. [Mar 2023, p.93]

Despite its unruly title, Anarchist Gospel takes all the splits and divisions, the churn and the confusion, and turns them into something remarkably centred and complete, the work of a songwriter who knows who she is and how she got there. [Mar 2023, p.82]

A blissful escape from whatever ails you. [Feb 2023, p.89]

Young Fathers remain a frequently forbidding proposition, and all the better for it. Thrillingly, it's still impossible to predict what we might hear next in any of their tracks. [Mar 2023, p.88]

Fans of the early records of Margo Price and Courtney Marie Andrews will find much to love here, while the diversion into groovesome country soul on Rows Of Clover keeps the head nodding. [Feb 2023, p.84]

His own music finally snaps into focus: gone, the scrappy garage/glam, in favour of sophisticated singer-songwriterly pop constructed around acoustic guitar, strings, extravagantly multi-tracked vocal harmonies and consistent tunes. [Mar 2023, p.86]

The album's abstemious drums help the untethered material breathe, and on point contributions include Lisa Hannigan, and fellow voyager Daniel Lanois, whose sombre instrumental opener Prelude To Song primes us for gravitas-laden songs of loss, warning, transformation and stoicism. [Mar 2023, p.92]

Delicate yet powerful, and utterly compelling. [Feb 2023, p.92]

Elements of deep soul and space-age pop combine to create a retro-futurist vibe, songs sounding instantly familiar but slightly fried, as if beamed in from other worlds. [Feb 2023, p.84]

This suprise follow-up to May's A Bit Of Previous smacks of pressure-off invention, the sense that they know how to do this by now - and have fun doing it - cemented by Late Developers' title. [Mar 2023, p.84]

A meticulous and bold piece of sound art, but one which is rooted in a plaintive local, human response to global catastrophe. [Mar 2023, p.91]

This is music that needs to be heard in as long a form as possible, so nothing breaks the immersive hallucinatory effect, and you can lose all sense of time direction and place. [Mar 2023, p.93]

An electrifying exercise in first thought as best thought, ... One Day is thrillingly direct. [Feb 2023, p.83]

Furling expands the sonic palette, bringing in piano, percussion, harp, vibraphone and more. The results bring new dimensions to her psychedelic folk. [Feb 2023, p.92]

While Idles boast similar reserves of adrenalin and attitude, Italia 90 better deploy groove. [Feb 2023, p.84]

Despite the occasional maudlin drift, The Bad ends meet rapturous ends when they rally against impending darkness. [Feb 2023, p.85]

The flittering hooks of Whitty's first solo outing impact with tender grace. [Feb 2023, p.90]

It initially feels fragile, but Carvings is hard to shake off. [Feb 2023, p.84]

Are these essentially live recordings of a visceral, in the moment experience? Of course they are. You can’t fake that vital spark. ... Live And Dangerous still stands as the band’s finest hour; the crystallisation of all that made them so irresistible, so brilliantly volatile. [Feb 2023, p.94]

Not the pinnacle of his varied career, maybe, but not a low, either [Feb 2023, p.82]

Another Day To heal opens encouragingly. ... Midway through, La La Land derails, as Queen Of Spaces errs into forlorn folky picking, while Slowly On The Wheel opens with one-finger piano and voice. The Chugging Face Eraser and Baba O'Riley-ish Pockets pulls things together. [Feb 2023, p.84]

Gigi's Recovery fully achieves TMC's transformative purpose, its lyrics of unflinching self-scrutiny leading to side two's exhilarating Only Good Things and the thrillingly airborne climactic title track. [Feb 2023, p.82]

Time's Arrow is Ladytron's equivalent of Simple Minds' early-'80s heyday, where burnished synth-pop meets the hyperreality of travel. [Feb 2023, p.87]

The lack of solidity can make Mercy nebulous like any spirit photo, it sometimes takes work to find the shape, fill in detail. Yet slowly, its unfamiliarity coalesces into a cold beauty, memory acting as a spur, not a comfort blanket. [Feb 2023, p.85]

Repeat plays lay bare a record of rare ambition and thematic complexity. [Feb 2023, p.84]

The result is brooding, often humorous musing on life, joy, occasionally death. ... But it's tender love song Mary, with its meandering sax, that stops you. [Feb 2023, p.92]

While Long Live The Strange turns the outsiderism of Supergrass's Strange Ones into an anthem, with bonus chorale. The rest is more soul-searching, but with instrumental structuring and melodic grace of satisfying excellence. [Feb 2023, p.82]

The narrative lines are fractured, the satire removed; these songs play out like stress responses, fight-or-flight impulses, each one a little panic room. ... There’s not a lot of feeling OK on CACTI, but for once, it feels like exactly the right place for Billy Nomates. She’s brought herself, entirely. [Feb 2023, p.86]

The six lengthy meditations here refine the formula. [Jan 2023, p.84]

The finale to an exemplary act of curation. [Jan 2023, p.102]

It's Plain's elusive ruminations and off-balance poetics that resonate in ever more artful, affecting ways. [Feb 2023, p.88]

Muted, syncopated beats, ghostly pedal steel and icy Solina string machine conspire to create the effect of a slow-motion scene: unwanted debris blowing away in the wind, with our stronger and more resolved singer standing at the centre of the wreckage. Even amid the ashes of her past, it seems, Margo Price keeps burning ever more brightly. [Feb 2023, p.80]