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]

Some bands arrive as a work in progress. Others, such as Divorce, are fully formed from Birth. .... They tick boxes aplenty. [Apr 2025, p.86]

Moves in a similarly contemplative and conversational vein to 2020's To Cy & Lee: Instrumentals Vol. 1, gently but assiduously pushing the boundaries. [Apr 2025, p.86]

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]