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]

This is the band taking stock, creating a record that has a bleak, sonically rich beauty. [Jul 2025, p.88]

We get bouquets as well as barbed-wire. [Jul 2025, p.84]

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]