The touchstones - Julee Cruise, Kate Bush, The Blue Nile - are more classic than experimental but the heartbreaking emotions remain utterly real. [Jun 2026, p.88]

What matters is that Harding remains a fascinating songwriting provocateur, preternaturally discipline, but able to trip emotional wires you might not even know you had. [Jun 2026, p.82]

It's a moody, unpredictable thing, from the Call's Balearic moment of ecstasy, to the deconstructed country-folk of Feist's What Happens Now, to the indie-noir of This Briefest kiss, all sulphurous bass and saxophone, but these many facets cohere brilliantly. [Jun 2026, p.88]

Sol. Hz radiates a luxuriant warmth that's hinted in its title. [Jun 2026, p.93]

Expressing both righteous anger and relaxation of spirit, this is her most assured record yet. [Jun 2026, p.85]

This album feels like a reliable harbour. [Jun 2026, p.87]

Dreamy, psych-folk beauty. [Jun 2026, p.91]

Another album of homages, jammed fast and loose in early 2025 at Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound studio in the wake of a cancer diagnosis for the singer’s father Chuck – who died soon after on March 29. The urgency and catharsis in these tracks makes sense in that context, but there’s something else here: a deep connection with music, felt in every groove and texture. [Jun 2026, p.89]

Their latest band, captured on Live Forever in full electric flow. [Jun 2026, p.84]

These are certainly boss songs – Easter Lily feels like the strongest collection of material U2 have mustered in at least 20 years.

Their third LP proper was still their best, most filler-free creation. .... Reminds us how much The Lovin' Spoonful mattered, and why Neil Young fantasied about joining them. [Jun 2026, p.94]

The best Paisley Underground-adjacent, Byrds-infatuated new LP you've heard in a while. [Jun 2026, p.68]

Like its closest Amos siblings, Scarlet Walk (2002) and American Doll Posse (2007, it's far from immediate, but the delayed gratification reaps rewards aplenty. [Jun 2026, p.86]

As trad indie goes, The World Is Not Good Enough is concise, fluid beauty, just 229 minutes of plangent songwriting that explores Solomon's alarming lack of cope mechanisms. [Jun 2026, p.86]

It is simultaneously comforting and haunting, an emotional closeness that is both playful an unsettling. [Jun 2026, p.93]

The epic A Friend Like You, the tenderest song about being unable to walk away from a relationship, rueing "why the hell do you have to be so sweet", or the self-explanatory Sad Song, ironically the jauntiest track here. [Jun 2026, p.87]

The best pieces here really are as good as their previous iterations; very occasionally, perhaps even better. [Jun 2026, p.96]

Throughout, Starr’s drumming is reliably great, and while he may indeed have travelled a long long road, here he sounds 85 years young. [Jun 2026, p.86]

While the song selections are unimpeachable, the execution varies massively. [May 2026, p.101]

It's a new remix of the original album that dazzles. [May 2026, p.101]

On Fenian they back that shrewdness with songs of depth and substance. [Jun 2026, p.90]

13 is a shape-shifting delight sans longueurs. [Jun 2026, p.88]

Reverberant secular folk, with spectral guitar and magic-realist vocals. [May 2026, p.93]

Grohl can still subvert his own formula: opener Caught In The Echo brilliantly synthesises Ian MacKaye with Paul McCartney, and the needling pulse of Window is superior Josh Homme-age. The wired Child Actor, meanwhile, reveals a conflicted man behind the persona. [Jun 2026, p.86]

There is nothing brash or student bout these subtle, layered songs: her vocals remain hushed, confiding, blurry, a distant cousin of Justin Vernon's abstract exhalations. [Jun 2026, p.84]

If Come Closer occasionally strays into the arena of techno-hippy (admittedly a compliment on the siren-squall of Ring The Alarm), the duo provide enough incentives to keep you there quite happily for a while. [Jun 2026, p.90]

It is a little heavier on the electric-piano than the louche post-punkers' previous outings, with Diaphanous, Map Of The Night Sky and Out Sweet Sould reaching out toward the baroque, Coral-style musical theatre that defined Bid's records as Scarlet's Well. [May 2026, p.89]

If dark forces are gathering, her songs do not lack an icy beauty. [Jun 2026, p.90]