A little more melodic resolve wouldn't go amiss, but 'Ester' is a solid, imaginative debut that leaves you aglow with the ice-warmth of a blip-literate Cocteau Twins.

Yet amongst [a few] luminous choice picks, sometimes it gets lethargic – and the record stalls.

It’s a sleeping giant of a dancefloor creeper that will be everyone’s favourite new electro album in approximately six months’ time.

Just as Moz's stance as a one-man outsider army and ringleader of the tormentors is restated, so is his standing as the godfather of indie disaffection and despair.

ii is a record that unveils itself slowly, initially sounding ugly and abrasive before the melodies surge to the fore. Once you look for it, there’s beauty amidst the ugliness.

It’s an album steeped in balladry and strummy, sad-girl pop, each track a soft unraveling of her inner world. And yet, coming from Rosé – an artist who has long had to keep her personal life under wraps – this stripped-back approach feels nothing short of bold.

Busy and Melissa have made a record that shimmers with possibilities, mapping out an alien territory that’s eerily inviting. Now it’s time to build on it.

Sea Of Cowards, then, is the record The Dead Weather should have come out with first, casting them firmly as a real band, albeit one that sound like they’d roofie their fan club soon as look at them. It’s actually supremely brave and exhilarating.

Thankfully, on The World Is Yours the band sound more engaged than they have in some time.

For all its high-mindedness, it’s garage-rock primalism is just as easily enjoyed with your brain switched off. Perhaps that’s the point.

Whether or not you'd want to listen to it more than once depends on your pain threshold, but those 45 minutes will be among the most terrifying of your life, guaranteed. [13 Nov 2004, p.56]

Although the decision to release what sound like half-finished tracks purposefully left in the draft folder somewhat misguided, the album doesn’t do anything to tarnish his legacy. Instead, there are moments where it shows how capable of an artist Åhr was, a gentle reminder of the stardom Lil Peep could have achieved.

All those years in Audioslave have smoothed Cornell's appealingly rough edges, and as grand as King Animal occasionally sounds, it lumbers when it should roar.

Red may only be a fleetingly satisfying confection, but maybe that was the plan all along.

Combin[es] the chummy West Coast country pop of The Thrills with the plink-plonk pub piano philosophising of Embrace. [3 Jun 2006, p.33]

Pleasantly tuneful pop-punk. [23 Oct 2004, p.51]

We’re left with a sprawling, obvious, uber-commercial, stoopid punk-pop album that might just stop five million American idiots from voting for a war-mongering Republican baby-slaughterer when they grow up. Works for me.

The immaculately chiselled 'Daybreaker' is so beautiful and distant that it almost isn't there at all.

If there's a clear problem with the album, it lies in the sugar-coated crystalline sheen that surrounds everything.

By god is it ever long (it's 16 tracks), but on the whole it showcases enough of what makes the Chili Peppers a very good rock group – chief among these are John Frusciante's excellent, inventive guitar playing, and the fact that it is with tremendous conviction that Anthony Kiedis belts out even the most ridiculous words.

As curious a party piece that is, it rather overshadows their phenomenal way with gorgeous melodies and heart-melting harmonies.

Sadly, such pop bluster is largely missing from this debut album, which is over-long and obsessed with pained R&B choruses--precisely the reasons we all went off American rap in the first place.

It’s Dire Straits teamed with louche New York cool--a combination that shouldn’t work, but totally does.

Crunching rhythms, subtle brass, and tunes as intoxicating as a blood transfusion from Pete Doherty combine as he tells the tale of a disastrous year full of rat infestations, romantic strife and weight loss.

Allow Caramel to ooze out and it’ll rock you into an unsettling trance.

Any attempt at bombast is pinned down by singer Liam Palmer’s weary baritone and wry poetry. Intriguingly glum.

Rivas’ voice isn’t enormously distinctive, either, meaning Sky Swimming rarely eclipses the dreaded adjective ''pleasant''.

If ‘The Messenger’ was everything anyone could want a Johnny Marr solo record to be, Playland is pretty much all anyone could hope for as a follow-up.

Being adventurous can often mean over-reaching but, in this case, the production turns familiar elements into one of Fucked Up’s most intriguing recordings yet.

By the end, it’s more than enough noodling, but you can’t help but marvel as Drinks shred their fingertips.

What A Time To Be Alive often sounds more like a Drake album than the jazzier, busier records that Future usually creates. Yet the Atlanta rapper dominates the record, demonstrating his impressive adaptability.

He’s the most successful former One Direction member with good reason, and this album is a high-water mark for the 25-year-old.

This is a nine-song collection of modest ambition, but ‘Buoys’ undoubtedly succeeds on its own terms, that consistently understated sonic template interspersed with surprising moments – the bassy thud of electronic drums that interrupts ‘Crescendo’, the hip-hop style piano riff that marches through ‘Master’ – that makes it a rewarding repeat listen.

Lang struggles when he shoots for huge, belting rock’n’roll – most of the more conventional tracks fade into the background. ... Instead, Lang feels far more at home and intriguing with the intricate, slowly unfurling ‘Final Call’.

There’s one too many generic, string-laden ballads, and a stop-start feel to the record, a frustration given how enlivening its highs are. But if anything, it feels like a record Beer has been desperate to make since the very beginning: she’s come a long way in her time in the spotlight, but now we’re finally getting to know her true sound.

Dando is in spiky, Buzzcocks-esque form. [23 Sep 2006, p.31]

If there’s a criticism to be made it’s that the album’s perhaps a little one-note.

Adam Green’s flowering from puerile anti-folk twonk with The Moldy Peaches to suave lounge-country crooner is laudable.

Amid the admirable artistic confrontation in this record, there’s a gnawing impersonality that plagues many of the tracks here. There’s enough diamond material shining in the dirt to make this one of the most inventive posthumous albums that’s been released in recent times – it’s just a shame that the album doesn’t fully execute SOPHIE’s unique vision.

This time around Tessa Murray and Greg Hughes give the same tricks a more professional finish.

Although the collaborations here read like pop's Yellow Pages... it feels not like desperation, but a wildly ambitious Warhol-esque art project. [9 Sep 2006, p.35]

Sadly, a lack of focus in melody and structure means it's not quite as atmospheric as Mick seems to think.

Bereft of blues bombast, electronic trickery or bothersome concepts, when E's not coming on like Red House Painters he's getting seriously classical.

Bagshaw’s tendency to spout arcane guff about the Odyssey, desert rituals, buried crystals and dancing on the stones is pure hippy mimicry. Sonically, though, this is a fresh and energised ’60s homage.

Time Team is intergalactic, ambient, Rustie-ish drug music set to snare kicks and sturdy hip-hop beats that at its best is deliciously mind-bending.

Manchester Orchestra are from Atlanta and play loud/quiet grunge. Nothing new then, but fans of the Pixies and Weezer will love it.

The Moog returns here, but 'Suns'--two minutes of busted TV static--is an inscrutable opener.

It's hardly 'The Cutter', but it can just about handle the mustard.

Fundamentally, 'The Sword Of God' is a record that fumbles desperately at the door of greatness but can't quite get the key to fit. It tries hard, it's got some excellent songs on it, but it's just slightly too smarmy for its own good.

A glossy, well-produced album of populist anthems with a gangsta undertow that expands his worldview and celebrates success.

At least two thirds of it is still comprised of head-spinning speed metal, but there are signs of genuine progression -- not to mention progressive rock -- from the off.

Unfortunately, in trying to take on all comers at once, there are parts of Queen that feel like an overreach. There is a better ten track effort hiding in Queen, but you get the impression Nicki kept tracks like ‘Miami’ to hedge her bets in a bid for streaming success. The Queen is back, but only just.

By letting their heads float off into the clouds and planting their brogues firmly on the ground, Those Dancing Days have created an album of fizzing indie-pop to charm both the starry-eyed teen and the world-weary indie connoisseur.

It's all solid stuff, but if Murderbot wants to be an ambassador for the genre, then perhaps he should try tackling less divisive subjects, such as politics or war.

[An] album stacked with songs of trailblazing angst ('Je Me Perds'), sinister desperation ('Cold') and nut-cracking jams {'Stop Kicking').

Overall the album is a reassertion that when it comes to hard-pumping guitar'n'drums duos it's unjust that Steve and Laura-Mary are billed below the likes of The Kills on the big festival bill Sellotaped to God's fridge.

From its cover in, there's a knowing, bustling swagger to The Streets' finale, if only in its relishing of a quick dart for the exit.

It's often as befuddling as it is brilliant.

Yet as her sounds grow bolder, her lyrics become more intimate. Mesirow is in confident control of an inviting world that’s all her own.

On ‘It’s All Smiles’, No Rome has created an immersive world that envelopes you like a warm hug and urges you to let it all out – whether happy or sad. It might have taken a while to get to us, but an album with that effect is often worth the wait; Rome’s debut most certainly is.

Much of this record plays like a tribute to '90s miserabilists Red House Painters, all phantom-like reverb over misleadingly comforting folk tropes.

With In Our Bedroom... Stars are rewriting the textbook on romance with effortless glee.

That it isn’t resoundingly terrible (as background music it’s passable, as long as you can’t actually hear it properly) is due to its general beigeness rather than the sparse flashes that illuminate it.

Despite the surreal subject matter Johnston's soundtrack for his own comic book is romantic and deeply human.

While the music works when it’s slow, sparse and emotional, the band’s debut comes into its own when it steps up the pace.

Carefully constructed and wonderfully cohesive, it's an album or earnest, yearning rock that shows Lonely The Brave are aiming for the fire cannons and shirtless mega-gigs that Biffy Clyro have worked so hard for.

There's something disappointing about this, however undeniable the quality of material.

Like a scented Lush bath-bomb of mediocrity. [27 May 2006, p.31]

This one whips the spliced, spooked melodies and vintage rhythms of Blood into new, distorted shapes that at times recall the dark textures of Prurient's 'Bermuda Drain' or Fever Ray's debut.

Fever Dream is perfectly listenable, but missing the magic spark that made them smash successes when they first emerged.

In turns more glam-indebted and more duskily evocative than anything they’ve previously offered up, Himalayan’s aims are as monumental as its title.

After the conventional bar-band fuzz of The Catholics, ‘Nonstoperotik’ is a welcome return to the quirky experimentalism of "Frank Black" and "Teenager Of The Year."

When it strays from charmingly retro to willfully 'raw' it all goes wrong.

Few albums designed to sound like a party actually play like one, but Bruno Mars has pulled it off with style.

This might not be the ‘music of the night’ that rotund talent show type Lloyd Webber and his phantoms had in mind, but based on the majority of this album Messrs Kapranos, Hardy, McCarthy and Thomson can definitely take us out tonight.

They don't quite conjure the heart-slowing plod of Pecknold's mob on their second album.

This Is All Yours engulfs you like a deep forest. Alt-J Mk II, then: an impressive expansion, with hugely improved connectivity.

A diverse but wholly coherent set of songs, this spaced-out odyssey is well worth the trip.

Dry The River have made a very good debut album.

The uncluttered production always feels reasonably on-trend, but too often these songs just aren’t catchy or inventive enough to be truly memorable. The result is another pretty decent album that doesn’t quite ignite.

It all adds up to an overlong, slightly repetitive but ultimately compelling album of two halves.

Another Eternity is a far more mainstream-sounding album than their 2012 debut ‘Shrines’, but it’s also rooted in sounds from the underground.

Imagine a two-piece BRMC if they'd grown up in a sub-zero landscape in Denmark where the only cultural sign-posts are trashy sado-pulp novels, distorted Velvets bootlegs and endless re-runs of Marlon Brando in classic biker-flick 'The Wild One'.

This record may not be as wild-eyed and rabid as it's predecessor, 2000's 'Cocaine Rodeo', but it's loaded with more illicit sex, insanity and glam-punk brilliance than you can shake Satan's pitchfork at.

It works in the same way that Doves' 'Lost Souls' did; that is, by inviting us to bed down in its sumptuously familiar lyrical folds while offering us a warm mug of Something A Bit Different.

This latest effort sees her turn indistinguishable. [1 Apr 2006, p.43]

It gleams like a skate-park erected in the clouds, and this is your invitation to strap on shin-pads, get up there and carve up some cumulonimbus.

As an album, the moments of intelligent beauty aren’t quite obscured by the gloom-by-numbers and, considering how rabidly commercial this really is, that’s something of a little victory.

Ride Your Heart manage to transcend the dated California girl stereotype while knowingly plugging into what still makes the myth so appealing.

After 64 minutes of the same, it all starts to feel like a bit of a grind.

Get marooned with them, while you still can.

It's a tough record to get a handle on, all fidgety switches of tempo and style, but the slippery acid of 'Industry City' and woozy electronica of 'Closer 2 U' reveal the breadth of Woodhead's vision.

Feels a bit like your bedroom partner trying on all kinds of flash costumes and gadgets to try and excite you, and the realisation that it wasn’t really necessary and they wouldn’t have had to bother had you just shown them a little more love in the first place.

At its best, this is the sound of Captain Tofuheart; at worst -- on 'Elegy' -- it is literally an out-of-tune dirge. [29 Apr 2006, p.39]

Romancing is full of brash, exciting music that's as fun as doing The Big Shop with headphones in.

His reinvention nears Hot Chip’s disco-pop on ‘Pagliaccio’, flirts with hip-hop via the big beat and looping riff of ‘Turbine’, and blends lyrical emotiveness with slow-tempo electronic touches on ‘SIHFIY’.

The album itself reveals she’s also got a penchant for exhuming the sickly-sweet memory of Minnie Riperton’s ‘Loving You’ and setting it to 17 different slow jamz drenched in studio gloss.

Kurt’s going for a mirror image of the album here: reimagining some songs (‘Air Bud’ becomes ‘Wedding Budz’), expanding others (‘Snowflakes Extended’), adding reprises and, thankfully, including a brand-new track--the lovely ‘Feel My Pain’.