All but unchanged aesthetically at 64, this alt-rock icon's rockin' on. [Apr 2025, p.78]

Foxes In The Snow – a shoo-in for Isbell’s seventh Grammy – has already set the bar for best Americana album of the year. [Apr 2025, p.84]

An elegantly collaged exploration of death and its consequences. [Mar 2025, p.86]

From the cascading choruses of See In The Dark to the title track's stylish chimes, and in What Do I Know she may have found Deep Sea Diver's key to crossover. [Apr 2025, p.83]

It's a beautiful soundscape to get thoroughly lost in. [Apr 2025, p.87]

There's a formlessness to the greater endeavour that ensures it's somehow less than its constituent parts. Still, the likes of subterranean Latin shuffle American Reference possess an invention and mystery that makes this an endlessly fascinating place to get lost. [Apr 2025, p.84]

Born from Locks' work with prison inmates, the likes of Distance are intricately funky collages, not a million miles away from recent tracks by Billy Woods. [Apr 2025, p.84]

Vocal melodies take a back seat to the overall 'vibe', but it's a groovy corner of the musical universe to spend time in. [Apr 2025, p.87]

This primarily acoustic reimagining brings the artistry of the Niger-based quartet to the fore with aplomb. [Apr 2025, p.86]

Due to the circumstances, guitarist Jez Williams takes the lead on more tracks than is customary, including gorgeous, Smiths-referencing highlight Last Year’s Man. But despite a difficult incubation, Doves soar here.[ Mar 2025, p.90]

Perfectly sequenced, Sinister Grift's dubious uplift gradually falls away to reveal an exquisite melancholy introspection, the sound of optimism weighted by mooring hooks of sadness. [Apr 2025, p.86]

Discreetly excellent comeback. [Apr 2025, p.87]

With both McGovern's baritone soul-mining and Damien Tuit's mercurial six-string electrifying throughout, Blindness should rightly see these Irishmen advance to the Premier Division. [Apr 2025, p.83]

It's a miracle that anyone can sustain such quality songwriting over such a prolific output. [Apr 2025, p.83]

If her 2023 breakthrough Anarchist Gospel was sparse and brooding, haunted by break-ups and deaths in the family, Armageddon In A Summer Dress bristles with Tom petty guitars, skinny-tie keyboards and a hard-won sense that - despite the miserable treatments of the have-nots - humanity might still be worth saving. [Mar 2025, p.87]

Flegel's ability to surprise and disturb rarely dims, the experimental held in exhilarating balance with their pop gifts. [Apr 2025, p.82]

Interlaced with songs of celebratory surrender are darker tracks that delve into anxiety and neurosis, and these are the most powerful. [Apr 2025, p.83]

A slightly more cohesive album - a complement to 1978's Comes A Time rather than a first take, perhaps. [Apr 2025, p.97]

Through dry humour, love songs as tender as Tim Hardin's, tremolo guitars and intensely moving samples Powers reveals a psyche reborn. [Mar 2025, p.93]

A poignant portrait of post-industrial Britain - one that's leavened by some less-than-commonplace vocabulary. [Apr 2025, p.78]

Dawson’s command of the nuances of northern English speech and empathy for small, vulnerable things of all ages shines through with all-seeing light. [Mar 2025, p.92]

The combination of Schultz's desperately appealing voice and Fraites's lonesome but poppy piano still hits hard. They're still doing things right. [Mar 2025, p.88]

This union [with Lady Gaga producers Yves Tumor and Lawrence Rothman and Taylor Swift co-writer Jack Antonoff] pushes his emotional, sophisticated rock in vivid new directions. [Mar 2025, p.84]

Boone delivers these stories like she's divorcing a husband, morose but defiant, while guest Cory Gray's keyboards help turn parochial into widescreen. [Mar 2025, p.90]

In another world, Andy Warhol would want to manage them, but on this evidence, Horsegirl have pop down to an art by themselves. [Mar 2025, p.86]

Modern Genius is a warm breeze after the hit-and-miss Afrofuturist sax/drum experiments of 2022's Ibeji. [Feb 2025, p.89]

The songs on Enter Now Brightness, however, suggest no dulling of Reid’s songwriting senses, just an acute desire to keep moving closer to seeing the light. [Mar 2025, p.85]

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]

A black-clad twist on quality pop that should rightly be blitzing from alt-radio throughout 2025. [Mar 2025, p.86]

From the get-go, JID022 crackles with a kinetic energy that drives the album's unrelenting, addictive dance pulse. [Dec 2024, p.89]

Broadly, his remains the church of raucous or jangling indie-guitar with quirks (unexpected strings at the end of I Couldn't See The Light; clunking smartphone recording The Well Known Soldier), but Universe Room rewards the patient. [Mar 2025, p.92]

Ominous drones, clanking banjos, filthy weather: a winning combo. [Feb 2025, p.87]

An often beautiful, occasionally intimidating 48-minute environment piece. [Mar 2025, p.86]

Astonishingly innovative. [Mar 2025, p.89]

Both in the consummately ominous sonics and EGL's graceful baritone, there's a pervasive end-times mood. [Mar 2025, p.90]

Downstate's a more focused listen. [Mar 2025, p.93]

Cowards is all killer, both musically and thematically. [Mar 2025, p.84]

The results, recorded in Brooklyn over two years, are something of a revelation. [Mar 2025, p.82]

Aside from the occasional rote workout (Sweeden, enlivened only by Denys Baptiste’s squalling sax), Renascence finds Cymande firmly in the pocket. [Mar 2025, p.93]

The feel is sweaty, late-night techno, and while the Detroit clatter and acid squelch is more alluring this time around, it's Saoudi's lascivious persona that really pulls yoyu into the album's nether world. [Feb 2025, p.84]

She's found a gift for reinvention; the change suits her. [Mar 2025, p.84]

The songs are often slow (Boise, Idaho and One Of These Days (I'm Gonna Spend The Night with You) are lovely), sometimes more upbeat (smile-inducing Tonight With The Dogs I'm Sleeping; waltz-time Guns Are For Cowards) occasionally Doomy (Is My Living In Vain?). and all backed by a rich ensemble of Nashville "cats". [Mar 2025, p.90]

Stability and appreciation of life's little victories have rarely sounded more delightful. [Feb 2025, p.84]

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

As well as less oft-aired selections from Stoogean days (I'm Sick Of You, a ferocious Death Trip), the Bowie era (Mass Production) and later solo outings (The Endless Sea, off '79's New Values), there's a trumpet-led singalong for The Passenger, and Loose rendered with a near-big band swing - weird but actually rather wonderful. [Feb 2025, p.85]

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

If you like Papa M and Nic Jones, prepare to be delighted. [Feb 2025, p.87]

Caribou meets late-period Madonna, perhaps, but given DIA's depth of melody and nuance, Minus might be the Phoebe Bridgers of Techno-pop. [Feb 2025, p.82]

As always, Genders writes beautifully strange folk songs that wouldn't sound out of place back in folk revival clubs like London's Les Cousins, except they pop and ping with Lindsay's lo-fi beats and organic samples. [Feb 2025, p.83]

This self-written, almost wholly self-played treasure trove of lavishly arranged widescreen epics owes as much to John Barry as John Grant. [Feb 2025, p.90]

There's a lushness to Dungan's layering throughout that reminds of William Tyler, Stuart Hyatt and labelmate Ezra Feinberg. [Mar 2025, p.90]

Rarely has ruminations on decline, in fact, sounded so vigorous. [Mar 2025, p.90]

A breathless, party-starting exploration of the connection between the Congo and cumbia. [Mar 2025, p.91]

Sensuous and calm, yet cut through with deep strumming guitar and a rolling lilt, it has a folk rock drift that's less ribald, less edgy than the theatrical spark of 2021's A Common Turn and in|FLUX (2023). [Mar 2025, p.90]

Booker has relocated to a more contemporary - and sonically speaking, far more interesting - place here. [Feb 2025, p.82]

One of those bracing, snarky, crafted and fun records that reminds you of a bunch of old favourites while simultaneously exerting its own personality. [Feb 2025, p.83]

In all, another most welcome Delivery from the Antipodes. [Feb 2025, p.84]

To call it a mature album would be to take away some of the perennially youthful spirit of Mogwai, but it certainly achieves a crafted, discerning grace. However hellish it may have been, a baptism in The Bad Fire has clearly proved to be a renewing experience. [Feb 2025, p.86]

It's a slow burner that catches fire. [Feb 2025, p.82]

Exquisitely intimate; the kind of emotionally articulate record Karen Carpenter might have made had she lived longer and fully discovered her own writing voice. [Feb 2024, p.87]

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

Marries Gerald Clayton's vivid, painterly piano with Immanuel Wilkins' malleable alto sax and vibraphonist Joel Ross's heady melodicism, its internal poetry enhanced by Kendrick Scott's sophisticated drums and Matt Brewer's intricate bass. [Jan 2025, p.85]

As Hear My Song proves, she was never about the standard. An inability to rein herself in, to be anything other than Laura Nyro, remains the hallmark of her stop-start career. [Feb 2024, p.92]

Linderman owes what happened to her with this superbly honed musical novella. [Feb 2025, p.80]

Hums with profound, eerie power. [Feb 2025, p.91]

Full Moon thunders on near-relentless sub-bass (Mntanami, about her absentee father) and post-dancehall Amapiano beats, with interludes of wishy-washy synthy vulnerability - a serviceable backdrop upon which this irresistibly raunchy personality reliably shines. [Feb 2025, p.88]

Nu-riot grrrls who may well be doing it better than anyone since Bikini Kill. [Feb 2025, p.91]

The overall feeling of lab-hygienic utility is clearly intended, but a pretty wistfulness also whistles down these wires. [Feb 2025, p.87]

It's a nuanced, multi-layered insight into Raczynski's increasingly becalmed world. [Jan 2025, p.87]

Franz Ferdinand's first album since 2018's Always Ascending finds them re-invigorated, if not wholly reborn. [Feb 2025, p.88]

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]

It's easily Body Count's finest hour. [Jan 2025, p.82]

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

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

Matt Berninger walks a distinguished line between control and catharsis, with only occasional collapses (Graceless, for example), but when the music falls away during Bloodbuzz Ohio, you hear a band carried on by both the roar of the crowd and the structural might of their songwriting. [Jan 2025, p.83]

With piano and dulcimer adding unforeseen acoustic texture, Trees Speak’s soundworld is ever-changing, often terrifying, but rarely short of awe-inspiring. [Jan 2025, p.90]

The waves that roll through Mosaic are chiller, more austere, but no less beautiful. [Feb 2025, p.89]

Ambient noise draws the threads of these songs together – distant chatter, the sound of rain – but it’s the night buses and pubs of Wonderlight that best catch The Night’s Victoria Segal muted glimmer. [Feb 2025, p.82]

Tuneful ’60s folk-rockers Lucky #8 and Mary Miracle raise the tempo while closer Fractal Canyon is a joyful epiphany of redemption. [Feb 2025, p.84]

Straddles the line between the jackhammer clattering pop of Girls Aloud (Sorry, Etc is almost a facsimile), the elusiveness of Fiona Apple and Chvrches’ own electro backdrop. [Feb 2025, p.88]

Though it’s not the recluse’s reverie that was 2020’s fine single-hander Monovision, Long Way Home also feels somewhat introverted. [Sep 2024, p.86]

Tropicália, Third to Six Soft Machine, Santana, Dungen, Alice Coltrane and Kamasi Washington seem to be in there. The Nick van Bakel-led, Melbourne-based art-popsters subsume all of this and more into the whole; a seamless coagulation. [Jan 2025, p.85]

As with predecessors Omega and The 7th Hand, Blues Blood brims with fresh harmonic ideas, but also an emotional potency that resonates long afterwards. [Nov 2024, p.90]

Add in lyrics that could make Brian Wilson weep and here is an album equally suitable for long winter nights and bright summer parties. [Jan 2025, p.89]

It’s a truly gorgeous record, capturing the grand contrarian at his happiest, living in the present and reworking the past. [Nov 2024, p.89]

Its essence remains constant, as post-punk, soul and Southern rock collide in an ever-delectable succession of hyper-melodic bangers – sunny online-trolling satire Flash Bare Ass, and faith-keeping marital romancer Light On surely count amongst JP’s career-best. [Jan 2025, p.82]

As fine as anything they’ve done, making a virtue of their shoestring gear and lo-fi recording tech to create minimal space-rock morsels focused on interior melancholy. Their melodies are sluggish, warm and desolate, their arrangements spare but affecting. [Jan 2025, p.90]

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]

Coleman is the revelation, a muscular, soulful conscience in the modal frenzy, raw and swinging like a barroom Coltrane. Shorter is already headed for tomorrow, spiralling through So What and Walkin’ with acrobatic modernism. But Coleman paved the way. This is his party. [Jan 2025, p.94]

They remain wholly beholden to Liam Fray’s songwriting, but they’re assisted by contemporaries: upwardly mobile Scottish soul singer Brooke Combe offers depth-giving harmonies on Sweet Surrender, as does Pixey on the unusually sweary First Name Terms. Solitude Of The Night Bus skirts too close to Arctic Monkeys, but Fray is developing apace. [Dec 2024, p.85]

The stylistic shifts and sheer quality of the songwriting make Fever Longing Still almost the perfect Paul Kelly album. [Dec 2024, p.93]

Dad is no longer the singer he was, which of course makes Cat Stevens’ title track all the more poignant. .... Junior does most of the heavy vocal lifting and it is he, you suspect, who suggested Ph.D.’s I Won’t Let You Down and Eurythmics’ Here Comes The Rain Again, both of which turn out to be highlights. [Jan 2025, p.82]

Stein steers these heavy songs with an admirably light touch. [Jan 2025, p.89]

Some of the best moments, though, are when you can get past their familiarity and hear the newness of the individual voices creating the harmonies – and also hear how much they seem to enjoy and inspire each other. [Dec 2024, p.103]

Each little element of Queen I’s flamboyant, sometimes preposterous excess now has its own place in the sonic firmament, youthful, incomparable Freddie Mercury close enough to touch. Rest assured, though, that the integrity of the original recordings remains. There are no new overdubs. [Dec 2024, p.96]

From a brilliantly tense 1977 cover of the Detroit Emeralds’ 1972 disco hit Feel The Need, to a Velvets-drone re-murking of Dylan’s She Belongs To Me and his recent doomy techno-goth NIN collaboration Star, these rough, raw and unfinished gems remind us that Ferry’s art was never just about surface perfection but always in what lies beneath. [Dec 2024, p.99]

Talking Heads: 77 still feels like a record that is always going to get past you, speeding ahead of the curve. [Jan 2025, p.96]

["Fünf"] A finale that thrillingly manifests the Can legend – equal parts ascetic and visceral, a wondrous zone where the corporeally propulsive co-exists effortlessly with the cerebral. The preceding Eins to Vier really aren’t bad either. [Jan 2025, p.98]