Thompson’s extraordinary, lyrical guitar playing squirts out in occasional Day-Glo flashes, but the magic remains in his ability to keep his little microcosmos tightly marshalled. Bleak midwinter 4 EVA; spring forever unsprung. [Jul 2024, p.82]

Hawley continues to enchant. [Jul 2024, p.85]

Stewart's mental health struggles delayed work, but the finished product distils personal pain into a powerful mix of Scott 3 and the Care Bears. [May 2024, p.84]

It is sentimental and raw, demented and ultimately reaffirming. [Aug 2024, p.81]

McFarlane inhabits her songbook, eking out fresh meanings and truths. Unashamedly old-school backing from a core quartet of Giacomo Smith (sax), Joe Webb (piano), Ferg Ireland (bass) and Jas Kayser (drums) plays to her storytelling gifts. [Aug 2024, p.84]

A haunting meditation on the state of America in the age of Trumpery (How I Wish) is the highlight, preceding the title track’s rousing gospel call to civil rights action. In contrast, she also documents the intimate and personal (Nothing Personal). [Aug 2024, p.89]

A quietly entrancing atmosphere is sustained throughout. [Jul 2024, p.84]

It’s a non-stop cavalcade of chá-chá-chá (including flute worthy of Orquesta Aragón) and mambo that should bring any dancer out of their shell. [Sep 2024, p.92]

What follows is a remarkably moving distillation of Blur’s 33 years as pop stars. [Sep 2024, p.84]

She counts up her decades on the twinkly Hell-Oh Sixty, ponders the cruel power of good hair on Bangs, and documents love passing its sell-by date on The Farewell Tour, before finding Tom Petty-ish redemption with closing heartbreaker Last Night’s Rainbow. [Oct 2024, p.89]

When Fuller and Turner sing together (try Happiness or Cherry) it’s truly spectacular, two of a kind becoming one. [Oct 2024, p.90]

Newbies Jet Pac Boomerang and Went To A Party zing with his best, quality control being the soul of wit. [Oct 2024, p.88]

She turns doubt and anxiety into subtly burnished, soulful nocturnes, more sensual than any existential crisis should be. [Oct 2024, p.82]

Setting Macfarlane’s words to music, the 13 tracks of Ness offer calm with a suitably disquieting undertow, rather like the place itself, with Thorpe’s countertenor adding to the melodrama. [Nov 2024, p.86]

There’s a song (Love & Revolution) about how much he fancies his wife! Fear not, however – Seun hasn’t gone soft in the six years since his previous album, and it doesn’t take long before the heavy artillery steps in. [Nov 2024, p.93]

His voice is a bit more raw in his 91st year, but that just adds yet more resonance. [Dec 2024, p.85]

Shaping billowing waves of electrostatic to articulate the sound of his hometown, Nairobi, at night. Worth resurrecting an old ’90s genre tag from The Bug’s past for Natur: illbience. [Nov 2024, p.87]

Tuttle locates the beauty, complexity, joy and decay within Chapman’s demos and opens them out into a new kind of collage-kosmische, finding the European psychedelic resonances in Chapman’s multilayered blues patterns and reworking them for some kind of grand, universal eternity. [Oct 2024, p.87]

Studio-recorded in a single sitting, the Arkestra honour their mentor’s methods by keeping everything moving, seemingly to infinity. [Feb 2025, p.89]

Songs of experience, beautifully realised. [Jan 2025, p.86]

His phrasing the rare product of a lifetime spent refining how to sing plain and true yet always with the hint of a raggle-taggle tune pulsing beneath the surface. [Jan 2025, p.84]

Héritage is a triumphant return, a complete rewriting of what their purpose and apprach were a decade ago. [Feb 2015, p.85]

It's yet another beauty. [Mar 2025, p.93]

It's all consummately executed, just lacking a burning lyrical purpose. [Mar 2025, p.86]

The bare-bones magic of Don't Forget Jane and Of Mind And Feeling proves Lewis's capacity for generating uplifting melodies matches the brawn of his solos. [Mar 2025, p.89]

It's a winning formula that will maintain Lakeman as one of the country's biggest folk draws. [Mar 2025, p.89]

The title track, inspired by views of County Antrim's scenic Rathin Island, is an exercise in crepuscular melancholy that inexorably yields to uplifting chordal beauty - shafts of sunlight dispelling the Gloom. The four tracks that comprise The Liquid Hour, meanwhile, evince Tiersen's skill as an electronic orchestrator. [May 2025, p.91]

Eliot's songwriting, always more Jacques Brel than Jam, has palpably matured. [Jun 2025, p.84]

Clinic fans will dig this. [May 2025, p.93]

Together, Holden & Zimpel deliver something restorative and transcendental. [Aug 2025, p.80]

It's a more straightforward offering than their previously tangential records, though no less compelling for it. [Aug 2025, p.79]

Sunwise is anything but one note. [Sep 2025, p.85]

Worth the wait. Her voice is on excellent form and her band has its understated arrangements down to an art. [Sep 2025, p.82]

All The Young Droids has something for all manner of vintage synth fiends. [Jul 2025, p.97]

There's some beautiful songs about the road. .... Opening track Everything Burns has a dark mood and some great guitar - Tuttle's guitar playing is more up-front on this album. [Sep 2025, p.81]

Scrappy, heartfelt, yet utterly beautiful, it's a fitting farewell from a unique talent. [Oct 2025, p.87]

Band kiss-and-makeups can seem contrived, unconvincing; but this one feels genuine and sparky, Biffy's urgent, passionate music oxygenated by time away. [Nov 2025, p.83]

Another exquisite recording documenting the near-telepathic connection between guitarist Oren Ambarci, bassists Johan Berthling and drummer Andreas Werliin. [Oct 2025, p.86]

Gedge's throaty warble remains his band's only real constant, but this is a rollercoaster ripe for re-evaluation. [Oct 2025, p.97]

Another songwriting masterclass. Again. [Dec 2025, p.78]

Amid these diaries of dissolution, there is defiance - plus a consistent compositional potency that suggests latter-day Damon Albarn. [Dec 2025, p.85]

Nelson still plays Trigger. .... Willie's technique varies 'twixt hard blues and laid-back swing. This novel approach is a perfect description for both Nelson and Hagard's personal interpretation of how they perform country music. [Jan 2026, p.83]

Nugent's own stately take on I Am Asleep And Don't Waken Me, Caoimhe Hopkinson's lovely Jamieson's Favourite and Junior Brother's joyous tumble through The Lark In The Morning bring playful spirit to old pub session favourites. [Dec 2025, p.87]

Frequently gorgeous collection of slow-motion jazz standards. [Feb 2026, p.87]

Her songwriting pen has never been sharper. [Jan 2026, p.83]

If you like your teen dreams served a la Smokey Robinson And The Miracles, you'll find plenty to swoon along to here. And no nonsense. [Jan 2026, p.87]

Brown's post-production science turning these intricate guitar matrixes into something smeared, meditative and wholly transporting. [Feb 2026, p.97]

He makes it all the juxtapositions and fusions feel fresh and natural.[Mar 2026, p.80]

Brutal and delicate, merciful and relentless, [Ahmed] luxuriate in the new spaces and sightlines the studio opens up. [Feb 2026, p.87]

Besides A Sympathetic Person's skippable spoken-word intro, every move lands securely, with melody and frontman Ramon Shanker further assets. [Apr 2026, p.90]

These new songs see González deepening his palette with subtle gradations, his response to a chaotic world reassuringly measured yet still heartfelt. [May 2026, p.84]

Throughout, Susman's serene croon delivers tantalising oblique images - "We'll talk a different language eventually/Shape every disaster carefully" (Mediocre Demon) - which add more layers to an already rich hue. [May 2026, p.88]

The album's nine tracks oscillate between driving neo-Krautrock and string-caressed pastoralism, everything garlanded by Kaye Gibson's euphoniously harmonised lead vocals and buffed to a gleaming finish by John Entire's mix. [May 2026, p.91]

Those smitten with Myriam Gendron and Josephine foster's more direct missives will be instantly seduced. [May 2026, p.89]

Expressing both righteous anger and relaxation of spirit, this is her most assured record yet. [Jun 2026, p.85]

More than half of these 10 crisp, vital songs derive from guitarists Pete Astor and Andy Strickland co-writing for the first time, applying decades of hard-earned wisdom and fresh vitality to quintessential designs. [Jun 2026, p.84]

Every song on Two Dancers reflects the meticulous intelligence of master stylists. [Sep 2009, p.90]

Heal's molten flow of grandiloquent '70s rock and '80s electronica is unstoppable. [Jul 2014, p.88]

With Memories Are Now, she understands exactly when to use the bridle and bit on these wild, wise songs. [Mar 2017, p.98]

But as personal as all of these songs sound, there’s a universality to Small Changes that, as with all Kiwanuka’s records, will emotionally connect with others. Everybody hurts, it seems to say, but this might help. [Dec 2024, p.86]

Sometimes futuristic, at others surprisingly formulaic, it’s another stepping stone on Sinephro’s path to greatness but one where the parts are worth more than the whole. [Oct 2024, p.87]

Ever predictable, funny and imaginatively constructed, Viagr Aboys is a total gas. [Jun 2025, p.80]

There’s always been a debt to The Beatles percolating around within Segall’s vast discography: a certain elegant way with a tune, a Lennonish rasp, that’s suggested he could make a more straightforward album, with a little more appeal beyond the garage rock illuminati. Possession is essentially that record, one where his Beatlesy nous aligns to a sort of strutting glam-baroque, without losing the dynamism that made Segall’s scrappier projects such fun. [Jul 2025, p.82]

Never sounds less than game. [Nov 2021, p.87]

The more chances Tears For Fears take, the more they thrive, and they take chances here: seems like a new album was a good idea after all. [Apr 2022, p.88]

Much of Everything Was Beautiful has a vital, thundering pulse. ... Utterly beautiful, as advertised. [Mar 2022, p.80]

Live In Paris is a pure window into the troubled soul of the mid-2010s Tuareg. [Jan 2016, p.92]

Fidelity is beautiful, diaristic and a very real portrait of modern black womanhood. [May 2026, p.86]

This time there's noticeably less fuzz and extraneous squall piled on top. [Feb 2004, p.92]

Here the ensemble hangs together a little more coherently. [Jan 2026, p.86]

FLOTUS is highly processed, highly textured--and yet for the most part, it sounds surprisingly natural and unforced. [Dec 2016, p.86]

This is the most uncompromising album of the year. [Oct 2014, p.96]

At each stop on the tube map, much yobbo-chorus fun ensues. [Jan 2021, p.86]

A work of transcendent pop beauty that finally explains the idea of "ekstasis" by leaving the listener beside themselves, in a state of rapturous joy. [Apr 2012, p.91]

Those attuned to the harsh aspects of existence, who despair at the forces shaping the world, won't find any answers as such, but Angels & Devils' blend of fever dreams and corporeal nightmare articulates the confusion beautifully and brutally. [Sep 2014, p.86]

The results isn't just his best album post-Sonic Youth, but some of the best music he's ever released. [Oct 2020, p.90]

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]

Through the hypnotic, J Dilla produced Love to the ghostly Incense, the short skit You Loving Me to the skittish jazz of Agitation, it's the sound of an artist in full, uncensored flow. [June 2010, p. 93]

He and Lucille are still as one and the guitar licks come exquisite and often. [Nov 2008, p.119]

Essential listening for serious-low-life connoisseurs. [May 2012, p.101]

Excellent comeback. [Apr 2026, p.90]

A powerful and uplifting experience. [Mar 2026, p.84]

Thirty years on from Dubnobasswithmyheadman, the masters of post-rave audio narrative still know how to blow your tiny mind. [Dec 2024, p.90]

Musically satisfying. [Apr 2026, p.93]

The Allstars have that same dynamism plus a similarly brutal rhythm section, which sounds like a billion wasps playing Sister Ray in your brain, but they have found some missing ingredients, such as melody and variation. [Sep 2008, p.112]

It's all so sad, and surrounded by 80-plus minutes of restless, questing uncertainty. [Nov 2018, p.90]

Sinner Get Ready spotlights the itinerant Californian's magnetic vocals by removing harsh textures, reflecting her move to rural Pennsylvania with a majestic palette of choral polyphony, crashing percussion and traditional porch and church sounds. [Sep 2021, p.86]

He sounds shyer and less relaxed at the onset than on the 1968 archive At Canterbury House. [Jan 2014, p.112]

I've Been Trying to Tell You works wonderfully on many levels. Those harsh first impressions give way to something altogether more beautiful. [Oct 2021, p.94]

Following the creative upswing of 2012's Silver Age and 2014's Beauty & Ruin, this is definitive work. [Apr 2016, p.87]

The delivery is folk emo. [Dec 2017, p.92]

[Cryptic, allusive, impressionistic, The Bible needs its own concordance at times. Yet, after three decades on a quest to close in on the mysteries of being human, Wagner's perceptive edge hasn't blunted. [Oct 2022, p.83]

Her sultry rasp--think Nancy Sinatra meets Bettye Lavette--delivers disquieting, brooding self-penned originals over warped, folk-tinged, electric blues. [Sep 2003, p.110]

It's among the best albums ever made. [Nov 2002, p.92]

Here, his eloquent trumpet is framed by musical backdrops that range from noir-esque alt-rock to ambient soundscapes and jittery hip-hop beats. [Feb 2018, p.93]

Progressive conceptual art, underpinned with profound personal resonances. [Jan 2024, p.87[

A melancholic late-night album, then, but one that really sounds beautiful. [Mar 2014, p.91]

Its uvowedly less manic, but uknowhatimsayin¿ still cuts deep. [Nov 2019, p.93]