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]