Worth the wait. Her voice is on excellent form and her band has its understated arrangements down to an art. [Sep 2025, p.82]

An exquisite, arresting introduction. [Sep 2025, p.85]

The result is like two rock esotericists in a bunker alchemising to compelling effect. [Sep 2025, p.84]

Choruses swell gorgeously but unpredictably out of the continual wordplay and there's occasional moments of musical reverie. [Sep 2025, p.79]

The superior ones are palate cleansers or re-fertilisations of barren songwriting soil. But the best are things in and of themselves – artworks the performer has shaped just as surely and idiosyncratically as the writers. Find El Dorado is one of those. [Sep 2025, p.76]

The Manticore Tapes constitute an alternative history showing just how potent early Motörhead really were. [Aug 2025, p.92]

Cobb as a blockbuster album in him, but not quite yet. [Aug 2025, p.79]

Buxton's posthumous appearance on the raw, Eddie Cochran-esque What Happened To You also shines, but elsewhere things sometimes get formulaic, the horror cod and the guillotine a little blunt. [Aug 2025, p.77]

The sound quality is akin to a great bootleg – vocals suffer during I Ain’t Got Nobody, the only Sly original here – but the energy and impact of the group is brilliantly intact. [Sep 2025, p.94]

Overall, it's a gently entrancing and quietly elegant album. [Sep 2025, p.80]

Their onslaught harbours moments of intense, unlikely beauty, while theirs surface attack is a testament to hardcore's enduring power to shock and thrill. [Sep 2025, p.82]

Expand their ragged country-rock sound, the strings, horns and choral backing vocals investing in Wriggins' frayed ruminations and road-weary baritone with a necessary blue-collar grandeur. [Sep 2025, p.80]

It is an enormously beautiful. [Sep 2025, p.86]

Sunwise is anything but one note. [Sep 2025, p.85]

Ten songs in all, played on acoustic and electric guitar and occasional banjo, with a perfectly understated band. [Aug 2025, p.80]

That confiding voice retains its hushed intimacy throughout but there's a lack of the soaring melodies that distinguish her recent collaborations with Julie Fowlis and Karine Polwart. [Aug 2025, p.76]

While the humour in Always Some MF is more bracing tan previously, it's only on the stark minimalism of Cure For Emptiness where Maltese appears truly vulnerable. [Aug 2025, p.104]

This is Birch untethered, stretching out and rightfully enjoying the musical havoc she intigates. [Aug 2025, p.76]

Working '80s influences like Sade and Loose Ends into highly textured romantic anthems set in a London town shimmering in high summer. Stacked vocals, keyboards and old-school synths underscore the plentiful solos. [Aug 2025, p.84]

The Fateful Symmetry finds this political/music-making radical at his most approachable and reflective, often structuring intimate 'proper' songs around piano chords and unabashedly catchy hooks. [Aug 2025, p.79]

Her naturalistic voice is a relaxed conduit to elegantly detailed songs about the psychogeography of er native Cardiff (Ghosts Of You), expectant motherhood (St Ives New School) and Jarvis Cocker dancing stylishly alone (kitchen sink pop jangling Dancing ON Volcanoes). [Aug 2025, p.79]

Moisturizer shows, decisively, that while the metal gauntlets might be very much on, creatively, Wet leg's gloves are off. [Aug 2025, p.74]

It's a steady, comforting blast of warmth, from the Jon Hopkins-Style soft techno pulse of Soft Gradient beckons to Nocturne's ambient swell. [Aug 2025, p.79]

This Material Moment is a reassuringly complicated fusion of Bjork and Richard Dawson with intense mid-'70s Virgin records vibes. [Aug 2025, p.80]

Catches the sense of wistful dislocation that comes with trying to go home again, the after-hours sidewalk cafe intimacy of Manejando Por Pando or Cancion Mama suggesting quiet reckonings and reorientations. [Aug 2025, p.83]

It's a more straightforward offering than their previously tangential records, though no less compelling for it. [Aug 2025, p.79]

Walk This Road glides between cheerful boogies and sunny R&N vamps, luxuriating in the relaxed chemistry of the four surviving members. [Jul 2025, p.86]

Ultimately, A Sober Conversation amounts to a brilliant and bold record that is all the more powerful for its deployment of life-affirming groves and melodies. [Aug 2025, p.78]