As ever it's the small details they alight upon which resonate. [Jul 2025, p.79]

It's a perfect mix of expertise and lightness of touch. [Jul 2025, p.87]

All in all, it underlines that These New Puritans remains a band apart. [Jul 2025, p.84]

This is a record that more frequently speaks and embodies the language of connection, of entwining and union, the clash between hard-edged politics and the beautiful fractals of their music less stringently juxtaposed than in earlier work. [Jul 2025, p.76]

It's all high drama, dark figures and wild impulses - hugely entertaining, but when Muphy sings "this is the meaning of my life", you don't doubt it for a second. [Jun 2025, p.86]

Altogether, with added depth and melody, it’s Maries’ best yet. [Jun 2025, p.88]

Aside from Jump Out's nightmare car ride ("Cell phone's dead, neighborhood is dark/what's the plan now?"), even the occasional rockers aim for atmosphere rather than combustion, yet Furman's trademark anger and angst find a way through. [Jun 2025, p.85]

These 11 songs brim with images of armed men, noxious air and entitled egotists, intermingled with notions of self-liberation and community solidarity. But the sonics too often seem stuck in Garbus's past. [Jul 2025, p.83]

Luster is less dreamy than blurry, as if her subconscious is piloting this deep-trawling ambient indie with breathy vocals submerged in waves of drone and fuzz. [Jul 2025, p.86]

An uncompromising set that will swallow hardy listeners up into its shadowy world. [Jul 2025, p.85]

At times the central theme, exploring our relationship to Earth and ancestral wisdom, veers into portentousness- but this is undercut by the rich musical mix. [Jul 2025, p.83]

Akpro's narcotic melodies grip tight as dubby bass lines (played by Akpro) probe alongside loping beats, flickering embers of guitar, saxophone haze and the singer's sultry delivery. [Jul 2025, p.80]

If You Asked For A Picture is a zig-zagging combination of gentle (the opening Thumbtack is acoustic guitar plus reverb-y, quivering vocals before muffled drums kick in halfway through) and tempestuous. [Jul 2025, p.79]

A mix of sentimental parenting and venal cynicism, the orchestral Pot Of Gold is peak Doherty. [Jun 2025, p.88]

Litle Feat aren't reinventing the wheel here, but the one they have still works just fine. [Jun 2025, p.87]

This collaboration feels like a specific crystallisation of his {thom Yorke's] enduring love of electronic music, its release on Warp fitting given how much Autechre and Aphex Twin informed Radiohead’s Kid A-era pivot. [Jun 2025, p.78]

It's largely stripped of their loftier excesses. Instead, the tone - meditative, inward-looking - coalesces around Circle Of Trust's tender electro, Ride Or Die's minimal escapist lullaby or the tech-U2 of She Cries Diamond Rain. [Jun 2025, p.80]

Fourteen tracks long, The Road... is almost overwhelming, like overdosing on chocolate truffles, but even after all this time, Philippe's compositions are only getting stronger. [Jun 2025, p.89]

An exquisite, sometimes spectacular achievement rich with emotive resonance. [Jun 2025, p.80]

This fifth and self-produced eponymous LP restates their collective intent with the hip-hop groove and soaring chorus of Gold Rush, the breezy drivetime rock of Old Tape (tackling persistent self-criticism) and the Judee Sill verses of Mad Love. [Jun 2025, p.80]

With its silvery guitar and tentative vision of collective power, the title track also offers a means of escape. It frames an album that, in its own determined way, boldly meets the moment. [Jun 2025, p.83]

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

It's the jubilant reach and dynamite in the details that make The Scholars a rock opera worthy of the form. [Jun 2025, p.85]

It's the vast common ground that they delicately negotiate and improvise in which makes Totality so enthralling, so satisfying. [Jun 2025, p.89]

Idol's rebel yell still has snarl and charisma, but some of these songs (Wildside; Too Much Fun) feel like pop-punk makeweights included to get Dream Into It up to 35 minutes. [Jun 2025, p.82]

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

Colossal. [Apr 2025, p.85]

Best of all is Politics Don Expose Them, which hits hard yet swings on great horn lines and a catchy call-and-response chorus. [Jun 2025, p.88]

Funny, bleak, cathartic and brave, with a winning redemption arc, in all but design Weirdo is a blues album - transforming unbearable pain into deeply affecting, original art. [Jun 2025, p.86]

You can't pin them down, but there lies the joy. [Jun 2025, p.84]

Hieroglyphic Being aims to take you to a higher state of consciousness. There's plenty of fun to be had there. [May 2025, p.91]

Somehow, he and producer Jake Davis have conjured an utterly compelling account of Tyler's lurching mental health. [Jun 2025, p.87]

There's something of the counsellor's couch about these songs, a record that trembles between acute self-awareness, self-laceration and self-preservation in its quest for "the deep blue OK". [Jun 2025, p.82]

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

Unpredictable and stylistically chameleonic, Deerhoof's clamorous noise and freak-out rifferama seems perfectly attuned to current world flux. Still there is joy here too. [Jun 2025, p.80]

Some of the most minimal yet complex, heavy but refined music going. [Jun 2025, p.86]

Ultimately, this is music with therapeutic benefits, for the listener as much as for its creator. [Jun 2025, p.89]

The Blind Boys Of Alabama and Norah Jones pops up in Sweet Things Just For You, but no guest can overshadow June's sweet and salty tones. [Jun 2025, p.89]

Vernon continues to deal in emotionally heavy music operating on the cutting edge of tech. Everything ID Peaceful Love is the standout. [Jun 2025, p.87]

They range from the short and comic (Sweep Piece is the sound of producer Robin McGinley brushing a room for two minutes) to longer, studio-based ensemble performances that are often surprisingly beautiful. [May 2025, p.92]

Stygian Waves has a pleasing surety of direction. [Jun 2025, p.84]

The result is a record so euphoric and emotionally direct that understanding the words is not a prerequisite. [Jun 2025, p.86]

An album for banjo/fiddle fans and music history buffs. [May 2025, p.84]

The results are as dreamy and swirling as Clouds Taste Metallic-era Flaming Lips, with Smith's unworldly vocals floating over the top. [May 2025, p.86]

What might be his [Zac Condon's] most beautiful record to date, particularly the instrumental numbers. [May 2025, p.88]

More a shiny recalibration of TVOTR's high-density art rock than a radical restart, especially of their more electronic, funky and pop-facing side. [May 2025, p.90]

A gentle, spartan album overflowing with straight-forward songs and harmony vocals, which evoke Emmylou Harris as much as Margo Price. [May 2025, p.87]

A radiant light cutting through the gloom, illuminating icy drone, crepuscular ambient and reverb-heavy beatless trips. [May 2025, p.91]

His voice is magnificent, the songs simple and moving. .... Wonderful. [May 2025, p.84]

Tribal, jazzy, at times doom-laden, After The Flood is undoubtedly the darkest moment in Kuepper's long and storied career. [May 2025, p.89]

Heroic in its scope and shifting moods, it's more performance piece than repeated listen. [May 2025, p.93]

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]

Whether it's the Damon Albarn-embellished Afro-pop of Pure Love or Buschtaxi's wonky take on reggaeton, delightful weirdness seeps from every pore. [May 2025, p.91]

His retro-pop stylings are just as keenly observed and affable. [May 2025, p.93]

The hit rate is high, and Mike Scott is clearly having fun cutting himself free from The Waterboys' past, and playing fast and loose - much like the mercurial subject of this album. [May 2025, p.88]

What separates this album from the 14 he's made before is the involvement of Adam Granduciel, who produces luminously, plays guitar, synths and more, and enlists his bandmates for much of the remaining instrumentation. [May 2025, p.87]

Her alternately husky and tremulous Dolly Parton timbre weaves through a yacht rock/mid-'80s Fleetwood Mac hybrid (Spirit), a Eurovision-worthy almost power-ballad (Right Now) and the quasi-disco, gospel-edged shuffler Baby. [Apr 2025, p.80]

Enthralling fever dream of an album. [Apr 2025, p.82]

On all fronts, a nourishing listen. [May 2025, p.86]

A career highlight for Carlile and a rejuvenation for John. [Apr 2025, p.79]

End Beginnings can fill rooms - but is equally devastating on headphones. [May 2025, p.91]

Times feels like a valedictory vista - across time, money, sex and space travel. [May 2025, p.91]

What's certainly clear is that this spin-the-bottle project has legs, its relaxed meeting of minds a mellifluous triple-threat. [May 2025, p.84]

There's less reverb this time, but it all sounds great, befitting a set of excellent songs. [May 2025, p.85]

Forever Howlong is a remarkably unified - and gloriously intriguing - piece of work. [May 2025, p.84]

Barratt’s plummy texts present fragmentary narratives aquiver with unresolved tension and hyperreal detail. Her compadre is talking them up as In Every Dream Home A Heartache rebooted, but Loose Talk is surely but an intriguing distraction compared to that pop-cultural landmark. [Apr 2025, p.79]

A walk on the wild side, it turns out, that's unleashed a freewheeling new strength. [May 2025, p.92]

It's a record where everything escalates quickly - proof Snapped Ankles know exactly how to read the room. [May 2025, p.91]

As intriguing as it is, it's of course lacking the focus of Neilson's brilliant songwriting and characterful voice, while likely offering him vital creative inspiration for his next record proper. [May 2025, p.91]

Without Marshall, they're less overtly folk-based and on the stand-out Caroline, they're as rewarding as David Gray at his most up-tempo, while Madison Cunningham brings a feminine touch to Blood On The Page. [May 2025, p.87]

As ever, the sonic palette is richly clean, the harmonies stacked, and Jerry Douglas’s dobro an empathetic, keening presence in constant dialogue with the singers, now the dominant solo instrument in the ensemble. [May 2025, p.87]

Dreams On Toast's music is much less nuanced and thought-provoking - but that's no slur. [May 2025, p.86]

A gloriously measured and understated take on blues standards. [Mar 2025, p.84]

Forever Is A Feeling is layered, lush and contemplative. [May 2025, p.86]

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

It's when he boosts the Zulu content on Emmanuele - his sweet tenor blending with clicks and close-harmony singing - or breaks everything down in a contemporary style on Kea Morata, that you'll feel like you have been transported to a new world, where everything is possible. [Apr 2025, p.85]

Dan's Boogie remains fascinatingly obscure in places, but these songs are full of buried gold. [May 2025, p.84]

Over its 11 tracks, it draws the listener fully into its dreamworld. [May 2025, p.86]

This one's a real keeper. [Apr 2025, p.87]

[The tracks] are stripped back, letting the raw essence rise to the surface and evoking the strength of feeling that comes through their live performances. There’s the swing of Sam Cooke at the Harlem Square Club, the search for ecstasy of the Family Stone at Woodstock, the power of Aretha Franklin at LA’s New Temple Missionary Baptist Church and the fervour of Mahalia Jackson and Mavis Staples at 1969’s Harlem Cultural Festival. [May 2025, p.82]

The result successfully veers from radio-friendly gems Everyday Magic and Time Waited (built around a tumbling piano sample from pedal steel player Buddy Emmons’ 1969 LP Emmons Guitar Inc) to Free-styled riffer Squid Ink and bluesy closer River Road. [Apr 2025, p.78]

This is very much alright. [Apr 2025, p.82]

This time, this sound pitches harder and faster between the troubled and te transcendent, the mystical and the physical, but Greentea Peng is still dispensing powerful medicine. [May 2025, p.85]

It's like Lonnie: The Movie in sound - an absolute blockbuster. [May 2025, p.92]

Though some Lemon Twigs fans might miss Michael's edgier, thornier songwriting, big bro's serial melodicism and multi-instrumentalist nous across everything from penny whistle to cello slays. [Apr 2025, p.80]

Within ominously booming coordinates often evoking Hans Zimmer-style soundtracking, dark-pop miracles reliably happen. [May 2025, p.84]

This is a new band, but it already sounds primed for the long haul. [May 2025, p.90]

Although there are lengthy passes of mellifluous flute playing, the largely instrumental composition is lacking in focus. But there is much to enjoy ere in the more concise songs. [May 2025, p.92]

You don’t need to know how many times and ways Wilco addressed these songs over two years to be dazzled and moved by the madrigal-guitar and astral-piano dance in Muzzle Of Bees, or the jaunty pop-psych bait of Handshake Drugs with its undercurrent of helplessness and allusion to Tweedy’s own battle with prescription medication (soon won through rehab). But it’s an instructive windfall in dedicated experiment and resolve. [Mar 2025, p.94]

Central to Whatever The Westher II is an underlying hum and crackle that offsets its engrossing sound design. [Apr 2024, p.84]

Storytime and Greensward Days showcase Andy Strickland's thoughtful guitar work, Dr Clarke essays a home counties kind of Pebbles psychedelia while Ten Years celebrates the quiet joys of 60-something man chat. [Apr 2025, p.78]

While some of its more indulgent elements may not be to all tastes, his scale of ambition and dazzling audacity should be applauded. [Apr 2025, p.76]

Reflective, yet joyful, it's an absolute triumph. [Apr 2025, p.79]

Allison is as vocally ethereal as [Kendra] Smith and Newcombe as filmic and adventurous as [David] Roback. [Mar 2025, p.92]

A lovely, evocative album on which Stratton's measured approach barely masks underlying tensions. [Apr 2025, p.80]

It's Williams's confessions, delivered with an intensity worthy of Richard Thompson, that make their second album so compelling. [Apr 2025, p.79]

Though the lyrics sometimes explore the US's increasingly polarised political allegiances, Leithauser's passionate optimism and the record's grooving drums keeps our spirits up until mesmeric guitar arpeggios usher in the beautifully pensive title track/closer. [Apr 2025, p.79]

Merges jazz and Arabian classical music with invention and panache. [Apr 2025, p.87]