If the lyrics deal with wavering states of mind and quiet struggles, though, the music is sharp and direct, echoing Belly or Tsunami but also keeping pace with Lucy Dacus or Phoebe Bridgers. [Oct 2025, p.88]

EURO-COUNTRY is everything great pop music should be: smart, subversive and tremendous fun. [Oct 2025, p.88]

The title track, inspired by the band's current motto, is a powerful evocation of The Strokes going electro, while Path Of Most Resistance taps a kooky, Devo-ish guitar hook. If Your gym playlist needs refreshing, look no further. [Sep 2025, p.82]

Sherwood's most thrillingly exploratory solo album so far. [Oct 2025, p.83]

Altogether, a bold and beautiful record. [Sep 2025, p.78]

"Surprised" might not be the answer, but these big, generous songs still land an emotional punch. [Sep 2025, p.79]

Unabashed clever buggers, their seventh is where Water From Your Eyes let their hearts rule, and it's a glorious sound. [Oct 2025, p.86]

There's no arguing with Fogerty's singing either - nor his distinctive guitar; part anger, part mad joy, like he's playing mid-Apocalypse. As for the arrangements, they're pretty much can't-believe-it's-not-Creedence. [Sep 2025, p,86]

Shows[s] significant growth from 2023's more dream-poppy debut Erotic Probiotic 2. One senses this twisted R&B Baby Bird has even more in the locker. [Sep 2025, p.86]

Throughout, singer Ellie Roswell is a compelling presence, and the result is Wolf Alice's best yet. [Oct 2025, p.80]

Another of those Mac DeMarco LPS wherein a deliberately spare palette pays dividends. [oct 2025, p.90]

A delightful collection of woozy, folk-tinged, hallucinogenic pop. [Sep 2025, p.83]

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]

New radiations is not without moments of ponderous stasis. Nadler still shines as a spell-weaver and mistress of moods, though. [Sep 2025, p.79]

There are startling moments: the title track’s D&D blues-rock, for example, The Groundhogs doing The Tempest in a nasty basement; or Juvenile’s ice-rink keyboards, McCombs ennobling and mocking adolescence (“You suck/I suck/Primus sucks”). Other songs, though, creep up more subtly, such as Miss Mabee’s Elliott Smith hush, or Peace’s heartbreaking Go-Betweens valediction. [Sep 2025, p.80]

Though the full potency of this band is only ever manifest live, ABOMINATION REVEALED AT LAST - the Osees' 8th LP in five years - bears thrilling testament to their appetite for insurrection. [Oct 2025, p.88]

Highlights: Bird On A Swing's Glen Campbell moves and Lou Reed's gorgeous tribute to a "tai-chi Master". [Oct 2025, p.91]

The results are less out-there, but mostly play to Allison's strengths. [Oct 2025, p.91]

Flux lacks a little of the old uncanny razzle dazzle, but there's no doubting the elegance of its execution or the expertise of its creator. [Sep 2025, p.79]

She takes memories and splashes them around in them, a style she's made her own. Hokey, lo-fi acoustics and a fluid off-key croon add a surreal edge. [Sep 2025, p.86]

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

The 13 tracks gallop along, urging listeners and musicians to stand up for what's right and take the fight to the forces of oppression. [Sep 2025, p.86]

Altogether Stranger is a significant upgrade and these dystopian but hopeful, image-drenched songs are surely the way ahead for an artist who's becoming special. [Jun 2025, p.82]

The Black Keys’ raw edges are retained amid the Hendrix fuzz of Man On A Mission, while on the slick, Philly-shaped soul standout Make You Mine, the pair soar to new poppy heights. [Sep 2025, p.79]

The trio return with 12 mesmeric tracks that are a love letter to their native south Manchester and its iconic brutalist architecture. [Aug 2025, p.85]

Funny, thoughtful, pragmatic and whimsical, We're Only Human is a perfect alt-country album [Sep 2025, p.84]

The opening Witness introduces philosophical detachment which anchors Oliver's sceptical worldview throughout as he hovers between the sanguine and the sly on rousing yet playful anthems like the title track or the funky The Trick.[Sep 2025, p.84]

This is a thoughtful, artfully curated release that furthers the artists' reputation. [Aug 2025, p.93]

Both the Entermedia set and the alternate takes underscore how much the studio shaped and sculpted these songs. Like the etiolated, unstrung Polaroid band portraits on the album sleeve, there’s a lack of connective tissue in these versions, the alternate Found A Job lacking the delirious carnival sheen of the album take, the live Artists Only missing the full cinema-matinee drama of Jerry Harrison’s moustache-twirling keyboards. [Sep 2025, p.88]

Their ability to serve up soulful, clearly hard-lived songs - think bespoke merge of Gram Parsons, Glen Campbell, Todd Rundgren, Fleetwood Mac and Supertramp - without sounding kitsch is quite some feat. [Sep 2025, p.83]

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

An exquisite, arresting introduction. [Sep 2025, p.85]

The result is like two rock esotericists in a bunker alchemising to compelling effect. [Sep 2025, p.84]

Choruses swell gorgeously but unpredictably out of the continual wordplay and there's occasional moments of musical reverie. [Sep 2025, p.79]

The superior ones are palate cleansers or re-fertilisations of barren songwriting soil. But the best are things in and of themselves – artworks the performer has shaped just as surely and idiosyncratically as the writers. Find El Dorado is one of those. [Sep 2025, p.76]

The Manticore Tapes constitute an alternative history showing just how potent early Motörhead really were. [Aug 2025, p.92]

Cobb as a blockbuster album in him, but not quite yet. [Aug 2025, p.79]

Buxton's posthumous appearance on the raw, Eddie Cochran-esque What Happened To You also shines, but elsewhere things sometimes get formulaic, the horror cod and the guillotine a little blunt. [Aug 2025, p.77]

The sound quality is akin to a great bootleg – vocals suffer during I Ain’t Got Nobody, the only Sly original here – but the energy and impact of the group is brilliantly intact. [Sep 2025, p.94]

Overall, it's a gently entrancing and quietly elegant album. [Sep 2025, p.80]

Their onslaught harbours moments of intense, unlikely beauty, while theirs surface attack is a testament to hardcore's enduring power to shock and thrill. [Sep 2025, p.82]

Expand their ragged country-rock sound, the strings, horns and choral backing vocals investing in Wriggins' frayed ruminations and road-weary baritone with a necessary blue-collar grandeur. [Sep 2025, p.80]

It is an enormously beautiful. [Sep 2025, p.86]

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

Ten songs in all, played on acoustic and electric guitar and occasional banjo, with a perfectly understated band. [Aug 2025, p.80]

That confiding voice retains its hushed intimacy throughout but there's a lack of the soaring melodies that distinguish her recent collaborations with Julie Fowlis and Karine Polwart. [Aug 2025, p.76]

While the humour in Always Some MF is more bracing tan previously, it's only on the stark minimalism of Cure For Emptiness where Maltese appears truly vulnerable. [Aug 2025, p.104]

This is Birch untethered, stretching out and rightfully enjoying the musical havoc she intigates. [Aug 2025, p.76]

Working '80s influences like Sade and Loose Ends into highly textured romantic anthems set in a London town shimmering in high summer. Stacked vocals, keyboards and old-school synths underscore the plentiful solos. [Aug 2025, p.84]

The Fateful Symmetry finds this political/music-making radical at his most approachable and reflective, often structuring intimate 'proper' songs around piano chords and unabashedly catchy hooks. [Aug 2025, p.79]

Her naturalistic voice is a relaxed conduit to elegantly detailed songs about the psychogeography of er native Cardiff (Ghosts Of You), expectant motherhood (St Ives New School) and Jarvis Cocker dancing stylishly alone (kitchen sink pop jangling Dancing ON Volcanoes). [Aug 2025, p.79]

Moisturizer shows, decisively, that while the metal gauntlets might be very much on, creatively, Wet leg's gloves are off. [Aug 2025, p.74]

It's a steady, comforting blast of warmth, from the Jon Hopkins-Style soft techno pulse of Soft Gradient beckons to Nocturne's ambient swell. [Aug 2025, p.79]

This Material Moment is a reassuringly complicated fusion of Bjork and Richard Dawson with intense mid-'70s Virgin records vibes. [Aug 2025, p.80]

Catches the sense of wistful dislocation that comes with trying to go home again, the after-hours sidewalk cafe intimacy of Manejando Por Pando or Cancion Mama suggesting quiet reckonings and reorientations. [Aug 2025, p.83]

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

Walk This Road glides between cheerful boogies and sunny R&N vamps, luxuriating in the relaxed chemistry of the four surviving members. [Jul 2025, p.86]

Ultimately, A Sober Conversation amounts to a brilliant and bold record that is all the more powerful for its deployment of life-affirming groves and melodies. [Aug 2025, p.78]

Asher steers The Secret Of Life toward familiar traditional-pop territory. The Placid setting brings out the politeness in Streisand's guests. [Aug 2025, p.76]

The Stylistics would've killed for a song like Paradise, and I'm not sure they'd have performed it better. [Aug 2025, p.82]

Gay's treacly voice and keening cornet pierce the static on another initially oblique musical jigsaw, whose pieces begin to fit after a few listens. [Aug 2025, p.85]

It sounds so authentically mid-to-late 1960s that Dear Patti - a song about missing an opportunity to play on the same festival bill as Smith - could almost be a lightly warped vinyl pressing from the era. [Aug 2025, p.76]

Singing with a sweet weariness, Kline can seem bemused by her melancholia, her resigned acceptance given an appealing warmth by a band whose gentle sway lends her pop miniatures depth. [Aug 2025, p.78]

This is college rock meant to be blasted over the radio, a record as vigorous as it is joyous. [Jul 2025, p.87]

Do It Afraid doesn't sound quite as home-made and fingerprint-smudged as Bey's lo-fi previous recordings, there's still no-one who sounds like her, no-one chronicling the agony and ecstasy with her unguarded and resonant vision. [Aug 2025, p.81]

[Inyo] As a standalone release, like SOPS [Streets Of Philadelphia Sessions] and LA Garage Sessions '83, this would rank among Springsteen's best. [Aug 2025, p.88]

They might be joyful adventures in the material world, but Matmos have a gift for hinting at something just beyond it. [Aug 2025, p.80]

In all, a gloriously imperfect storm. [Aug 2025, p.79]

Focusing in the songwriting, at its best the album recalls Gene Clark (Outsmarted), folksy Led Zeppelin (All God Did and Make You Happy) and even the very best of his father (the title track). [Aug 2025, p.77]

Impassioned, ambitious and accomplished. [Aug 2025, p.82]

Has a[n] unhurried Southern swing that pulls like an undertow against the emotional freight of confessional songs like Solitaire and Nature's Child. [Aug 2025, p.82]

Yildirim's group put the focus on melody, instrumental prowess and the melancholy in her voice. [Aug 2025, p.83]

A challenging yet rewarding listen. [Aug 2025, p.85]

Hymnal flows like diaphanous silk, the Berlin-based artist's otherworldly vocals stitching a sensuous golden thread throughout. [Aug 2025, p.85]

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

The songs often begin like standards then vanish beneath noise creeping in from the sides. .... Before the music returns to the foreground, triumphant. [Aug 2025, p.83]

Ripped + Torn attests to the sophistication of their songwriting with this brutalist form. [Aug 2025, p.80]

I Quit subtly pushes their boundaries. [Aug 2025, p.80]

Perhaps the most uncomplicated and joyous of them all. [Jul 2025, p.80]

While its parent album's themes of grief, ageing and mortality don't naturally transfer themselves to the dancefloor, it's often that juxtaposition that makes these reworkings so effective. [Jul 2024, p.78]

As always, with such projects, Goddess flies or falls on what these collaborators bring to the table, but the material here is as strong as it is varied. [Jul 2025, p.84]

Like all tribute albums it's a mixed bag. [Jul 2025, p.92]

This may be the best album of their 50-plus years together. Bonkers, yes, but quite brilliant. [Jul 2025, p.84]

Breathless, and breathtaking. [Jul 2025, p.86]

Talkin To The Trees is one of these simple pleasures, a port in the storm in these troubled times. [Jul 2025, p.83]

A dense, cosmic country, limber astro-funk and psychedelic pop record, it might be KGATLW's finest to date. [Jul 2025, p.80]

What might be Morrison's best album since 1991’s Hymns To The Silence. [Jul 2025, p.88]

Eno has rarely sounded so luminous and wistful, evoking alongside Wolfe a desert sunset that makes you excited to be alive but sad to have only so long left. [Jul 2025, p.83]

An album that, in the best sense of the term, is all over the place. [Jul 2025, p.84]

Death Mask makes for a visceral, at time abrasive listen. [Jul 2025, p.85]

Where Ribot's electric guitar commands attention on other records, this acoustic picking is languid and warm, lending the album the intimate intensity of a midnight conversation. [Jul 2025, p.78]

Her finest work yet. [Jul 2025, p.79]

More is that rarest of reunion records: one that transcends nostalgia to actually enhance a band’s legacy. [Jul 2025, p.74]

There's gentle humour to take the edge off but this is haunting, impossible beauty. [Jul 2025, p.80]

2 is a special new chapter, inspired and beguiling. [Jul 2025, p.79]

While there are shades of Berninger’s day band in the propulsive Nowhere Special, for the most part it’s a more laid-back affair in the stylistic vein of R.E.M.’s Automatic For The People, or a country-tinged The Blue Nile. [Jul 2025, p.86]

There's a newfound earnestness and openness to caroline's songcraft. [Jul 2025, p.78]

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]