A dense dream dialogue. [Jun 2015, p.96]

New Facts Emerge could be said to be business as usual: ie, it cannot be quantified, and pulses with raw music, stimulating confusion and a certain monstrous glee. [Sep 2017, p.88]

Hannon's most personal and poignant album to date. [Oct 2025, p.86]

There are meanders and lulls. Yet for a record intended to reflect and connect Lateral and Luminal, Liminal stands up on its own, not so much a final destination as a buzzy, fluid crossing-place for Eno and Wolfe's ideas. [Dec 2025, p.79]

While the concept means Parks' violin takes a backseat, it makes for a dizzying, future-facing hybrid of dancefloor sounds. [Dec 2025, p.85]

Her best songs - cinematic anthem Lost Woman's Prayer and highly charged Every Day In Faith - sound like well-established country classics. [Jan 2022, p.89]

Wonderfully immersive stuff. [Mar 2022, p.85]

It's a return to their best. [Oct 2012, p.83]

These new songs see González deepening his palette with subtle gradations, his response to a chaotic world reassuringly measured yet still heartfelt. [May 2026, p.84]

His voice is a bit more raw in his 91st year, but that just adds yet more resonance. [Dec 2024, p.85]

Blow by blow, it all adds up to Depeche Mode's best album in years. [Apr 2017, p.95]

A searching, typically heart-warming record about middle-aged men somewhat adrift, yet ultimately anchored to people and place, Endless Arcade testifies to the Fannies' endurance. [Jun 2021, p.82]

The CD reveals R.E.M. still have plenty of fuel to throw upon their smouldering career. [Jan 2008, p. 100]

They've forged a sound that's ambitious and close to unique. [May 2008, p.109]

Charming. [Sep 2022, p.95]

This is a powerful performance of empathy and passion. [Feb 2012, p.99]

Dreamers Are waiting is possibly the most Crowded House-sounding album crowded House have made since their Crowded debut. [Jul 2021, p.83]

A work of transcendent pop beauty that finally explains the idea of "ekstasis" by leaving the listener beside themselves, in a state of rapturous joy. [Apr 2012, p.91]

Frequently overwhelming yet unconventionally comforting, there's a bebop-style envelope-pushing at work. [Jul 2018, p.95]

For a collection with an eye on the setting sun and the slow decline, it's a fine late flowering. [May 2015, p.91]

The most striking thing about Listening To Pictures is how effortlessly contemporary it sounds. [Jul 2018, p.94]

A mellow, tender, easy album...

Here comes irascible, unhousetrained indie-rock, laced with discord and lo-fi gnarl, yet thoroughly fresh and weirdly magnetic from start to finish. [Jun 2013, p.84]

Glitters like broken glass. [Jan 2012, p.92]

A sweet, herbal fug hanging over proceedings, Zebra joins the dots between blissed-out Balearica, trippy kosmische, Eastern and Afro vibes and spacey jazz. [Sep 2018, p.91]

Dreamily exploratory, but rooted in pop. [Apr 2004, p.102]

This is some coming-of-age classic. [Sep 2004, p.96]

Segall's charms are as abundant as his releases: may his well never run dry. [Jun 2012, p.84]

A little too much. [Apr 2005, p.90]

A near two-hour spiritual masterclass, recorded live at London's Church of Sound, that simultaneously enhances, enriches and expands. [Dec 2018, p.89]

Proof that inventive, envelope-pushing indie rock hasn't disappeared off the map just yet. [Apr 2021, p.83]

Throughout, Joan still sounds as bewitched, bothered and bewildered by love, a timeless sensation that transcends digital intervention. [Mar 2018, p.94]

RRD's tempo is beatific, fingerpicked guitar and violin cresting sweetly, though some fervent moments provide real highlights. [Mar 2018, p.90]

Jet Plane And Oxbow pulls together crisp, motorik grooves, dirty great guitar riffs and arms-aloft choruses. [Feb 2016, p.90]

There might only be five songs here, but each one has a similar transformative effect. [Jul 2022, p.88]

This remains far from forbidding music, with an orchestrated heft that's as close to Ennio Morricone as it is Glenn Branca. [Jun 2021, p.83]

Not as humorous as 2Bears nor as wistful as Hot Chip, here Goddard further explores the potency of the danncefloor combined with intelligent, leftfield pop. [May 2017, p.92]

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

Meditative, twitchy, cerebral, the Heliocentrics are at once timeless and of the now. [Jul 2017, p.93]

Under The Midnight Sun invests those primal energies with the wisdom of age, creating something fresh and powerful. [Nov 2022, p.85]

Fabulous. [Jun 2009, p.98]

On Bella, Thompson is once again in the crossfire of a stop-start relationship. [March 2011, p. 109]

Policy is a dazzling execution of one man's crazed vision. [May 2015, p.91]

[Luke Haines] has never been backed like this before. ... It's as if The WreckingCrew wound up on a Skip Spence album. [Nov 2022, p.91]

His exhilarating meld of hip hop beats and mesmeric grooves proves that should he reform his old band, it's not because he needs to. [Nov 2009, p.95]

An album of swooning, soft-lens electronica that is firmly of the Eno/Aphex Twin lineage. [Jul 2018, p.95]

Brings to mind the MC5, the Stones and Otis Redding. [Jun 2003, p.113]

His craftsman's melodiousness and honest voice add balm and balance. [Jun 2012, p.84]

Dense and dark as always, but with new light seeping through the undergrowth, Unseen is The Handsome Family's masterpiece. [Sep 2016, p.95]

One of the most cerebral-yet-groovy hip hop albums you'll hear. [Apr 2002, p.104]

An often challenging, always thrilling triumph that rewards deep listening and re-listening. [May 2023, p.92]

Lemmy-recalling rocker The End finds chief pilot Dave Brock poignantly recalling years of adventure as past Hawkwind sonic signatures collide, while the mordantly comic The Beginning looks in electronic/acoustic fashion to a post-human existence of uploaded consciousness. [Jun 2023, p.85]

Apart from the more lightweight yarning of In Electric Blue, each track on this album takes you further into her brave new world. [Jun 2023, p.94]

It'll surely rank as British alt-rock's finest debut of 2012--genuinely fit for a place in Dougall Sr's pantheon. [Oct 2012, p.88]

A step up from last year's choogling Livin' The Die: freakier and funnier. [Dec 2019, p.88]

Crooked Fingers' downcast Americana hues always felt like Bachmann's most commercially potent mode, a point Swet Deth proves time and again. [Apr 2026, p.91]

This is straight-ahead folk-Americana, often gentle and slow (Lorelei; The Season) sometimes spirited (Ram-A-Lam-A-Ding-Dong), with Lenker duetting or backing up his dusty cobweb voice. [Nov 2024, p.85]

A funny, funky and gloriously eccentric stew. [Oct 2006, p.100]

The hair-raising honesty of their younger incarnation might have softened, but their new confidence and control ensure theses songs let a lot of life in. [Apr 2021, p.78]

In Amber goes the whole hog. ... Frequently beautiful and occasionally offers succour. [Jul 2022, p.90]

A lush, shimmering and fully immersive experience. [Nov 2012, p.90]

Emotionally speaking, however, Merritt has recreated an inner life that sound agonisingly real. [Apr 2017, p.94]

Intriguer may be more route one than 1993's mighty, loose-limbed "Together Alone," but it is classic Crowded House, and greater for it. [Jul 2010, p.97]

The star is Derek Trucks' sweeping washes of whooshes that wrap the five tunes in a warm blanket, 12-minute ender Pasaquan showcasing his stinging, dexterous, raga-blues brilliance. [Aug 2022, p.95]

Lovely. [Nov 2007, p.102]

His best yet. [Feb 2012, p.98]

The most coherent album Gelb has produced in some years, up there with the best of his considerable canon. [Apr 2019, p.92]

A blurred landscape of muffled beats warped tape and corroded ambiance that suggests club land euphoria. [Feb 2013, p.93]

The everything-but-the-kitchen-sink sonics are matched by an unrelenting emotional honesty. [Jul 2020, p.85]

The Drones whip up a heady storm of garage-bred blues, post-punk intensity and Crazy Horse-style amp overload, in which they couch fevered narratives worthy of Nick Cave. [Nov 2006]

A superbly crafted reiteration of Walker's aesthetic, with the Chicago scene influences of 2016's Golden Sings That Have Been Sung given greater prominence. [Jun 2018, p.90]

Of all her many guises [...] this may be her most powerful. [Feb. 2011, p. 94]

What's so impressive about Man on the Moon, however, is that it's a complete vision, designed to be listened to as a whole. [Dec 2009, p. 92]

An engaging, yet still hip-swinging trip. [Jun 2015, p.96]

A superior folk-tinged brand of MOR. [Oct 2005, p.102]

Her fiercest offering since 1996's landmark The Way I Should, and a long overdue follow-up to that album's righteous ire. [Apr 2023, p.83]

All and all, a winning, beats-driven combination of the personal and the universal. [Apr 2023, p.82]

Fingers Crossed marks another welcome return. [Oct 2016, p.98]

Whether it's the horrors of recognising yourself in an obnoxious younger person, his downbeat but defiant re-working of Jerusalem or the uncharacteristically optimistic The Wolfless Years, it's still the words that really stay with you. [Aug 2013, p.93]

The Sunday Valley songs survive the transition best, particularly All The Pretty Colours, but the psychonaut jiber-jabber from 2014's Metamodern Sounds In Country Music album comes a strong second. [Jan 2021, p.86]

Mazurek's rare talent for sculpting and reshaping space remains blissfully intact. [Dec 2020, p.85]

The Sisypheans is measured and reflective. [Dec 2019, p.91]

Flow Critical Lucidity – the best record Moore has been involved in since Sonic Youth’s The Eternal, 15 years ago now – feels as close as he’s come to something new. [Nov 2024, p.86]

Strikes a perfect balance. [Sep 2006, p.96]

Leeds quintet serve up sonic catnip for post-punk nerks. [Dec 2017, p.96]

Has a spare, homespun feel with its simple folk guitar. [Sep 2023, p.82]

Echoes of Aphex Twin, Nils Frahm, Arvo Part and Biosphere swirl around a deeply personal but sonically seductive piece of work. [Jan 2016, p.94]

Hozier's audacity can feel outsized and overbearing, but his tandem of earnestness and eccentricity here is more winning than not. [Sep 2023, p.91]

Another excellent installment. [Jun 2021, p.87]

The cascading ping and pop of 35 Summers and arpeggiated digital melancholy of Unbank is evidence of Plaid's empathy with this most beguiling of music forms. [Nov 2011, p.103]

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]

It stretches out the crashed edits of 20120's Suburban Tours, to something more diffuse and soulful. [Feb 2012, p.97]

He's written better collections of songs, but for fun, warmth, vigour and power, it' sup there with his best. [Mar 2013, p.86]

King fulfils his promise. ... His honey-rich voice and whipsmart guitar playing are the standouts here. [Sep 2022, p.86]

Her gift for unearthing colourful material and then delivering it with both swagger and soul is compelling. [Mar 2016, p.99]

The Allstars have that same dynamism plus a similarly brutal rhythm section, which sounds like a billion wasps playing Sister Ray in your brain, but they have found some missing ingredients, such as melody and variation. [Sep 2008, p.112]

Gibson's captivating, narrative postcard songs are bolstered by a cast of Brooklyn musicians. [May 2016, p.96]

The sound has been filled out. ... The burnished folk rock accentuates the intimacy of Power's voice and her writing. [Jul 2020, p.80]