Here they sound more focused and alive than they have for a while.

MGMT might be an uncomfortable journey at times, but it’s also a transcendental one you’ve never been on before.

There have been plenty of albums borne out of the pandemic (Swift’s ‘Folklore’ era) and some whose recording wrapped up before it all went to pot (Dua Lipa’s ‘Future Nostalgia’), but few bridge the gap between the old and new world quite like ‘Who Am I?’ The band capture their optimism of a new life worth living, but never shy away laying bare the challenges of doing so in times like these.

Provides us with a fascinating insight into the mindset of a band who’ve gone from BMX riding curio’s to the oddest paid-up residents of the top ten for years.

If Two Door are to hold onto anything from ‘Keep On Smiling’, it should be the playful, curious moments that convey a sense of fun, even if that’s deceptive. When things get serious on this record, the band stumble and the smiles begin to slip.

It’s true that in parts Battle For The Sun, Placebo’s [sixth] studio album, will give the open-minded/easily-fooled aspartame butterflies in the stomach, methadone iris dilation and nicotine-patch heart tremors.

In music, there are few things more tiresome than an artist obsessed with the idea of authenticity – they usually forget how to have fun. And this is a trap that Rag’N’Bone Man’s second album ‘Life in Misadventure’ falls straight into.

The nuance and specificity of his last album’s songwriting is largely absent; instead ‘Autumn Variations’ is akin to aimlessly swiping through Instagram, blurry snaps of followers’ leafy happenings whizzing past in a distracted daze.

It’s a diverse collection to keep you on your toes.

If Sidewalks is husband-and-wife duo Matt and Kim's vision of a perfect night on the tiles, then partying with them must be hellish.

Some of it is awful. Some, notably 'Hide Away' and 'Lucky Day' are as good as anything on prime-time Stones album 'Black And Blue', which is saying something.

Morning View's insurmountable flaw is that Incubus sell themselves as an Intelligent and Sensitive rock band, without actually appearing especially intelligent or sensitive.

But if attempting to dress ancient monuments in radical, avant-garde clothing was always going to be a hit-and-miss project, he's still succeeded for the most part in making a richly ambient, evocative record from apparently staid and stale old material.

While charming, Albumin suffers from a distinct lack of harmony.

Songs schizophrenically jump from A to X, from great to merely good, with scant warning or point.

Although it's not quite the perfect pop record 'Video Games' might have led us to wish for, Born To Die still marks the arrival of a fresh--and refreshingly self-aware--sensibility in pop.

There's really only one salient truth about "Ersatz GB" – that The Fall, even at nearly 30 albums old, still stand alone and aloft.

A pleasant listen, but it's hardly fresh.

Essential listening... but only if you're of that particular breed of misfit who grills their cornflakes before adding milk, in order to make breakfast that bit blacker an experience. [1 Apr 2006, p.41]

An older, wiser, more mature and more accomplished Thrills but -- to be honest -- the heart of 'Let's Bottle Bohemia' could quite easily have been made from the leftovers of 'So Much For The City.' [11 Sep 2004, p.54]

Poaching multifarious links from dance music's evolutionary chain, MSTRKRFT grind the good-time sounds of Marshall Jefferson-era Chicago house with harder Detroit techno, and use much of the rest of the album to stretch their ideas out.

It's essentially more of the same kickabout beach-pop that Brian Wilson might have sounded like if he'd listened obsessively to '80s indie legends Felt while he was plaing in his sandpit. [1 Jul 2006, p.36]

Melissa has delivered a hugely sexual, gleefully psychedelic rock record that’s so full of deliciously melancholic stadium destroyers and beautifully de-tuned melodic bombs that, at the perfectly reasonable age of 32, you get the impression that the really good stuff is only just beginning.

Tribes have roared back fiercer than ever.

...And Star Power is the sound of record-collection rock having a nervous breakdown.

It critically casts an eye over Wolf's public persona.

At its best, the album is a selection of polished and inoffensive pop songs, but at its worst, it’s forgettable.

As bewilderingly little logic as Black Dice's rave collages contain, they're nailing something close to unique.

The cocky confidence that barrelled them into the big time might just be losing momentum--a band made of bold leaps have started dipping toes.

For the most part it's clear that the New Zealanders have lost what sense of direction or purpose they had left. [7 Oct 2006, p.39]

Overall it sounds like the work of a man struggling to recall his motivations for making music in the first place.

While being as well-crafted, catchy and dynamic as the first one, it leaves you feeling distinctly underwhelmed, as if the band had simply reprogrammed the Pro-Tools machine that they'd made the first album on and changed the lyrics and speed of the songs a bit.

Strange, out of time, unfashionable, eccentric, obsessed with found sound, full of boffiny tics and tricks. [24 Jul 2004, p.48]

This, basically, is an extremely tastefully done, soulful modern r’n’b record.

Over the album’s 12 tracks, Stefani doesn’t mope once--in fact, a lot of the time she sounds like she doesn’t give a s**t. ‘Where Would I Be’ and ‘Send Me A Picture’ say it with Disney dancehall, while ‘Me Without You’ is the closest she comes to balladry, singing “I don’t need you/not a little bit” over polished trip-hop.

Sadly, the energy and abandon that has made Tiga's recent remixes so essential is largely absent. [4 Feb 2006, p.29]

This fifth album resolutely refuses to tread water, instead coming on like a literary pop version of The Maccabees’ recent explorations in jittery psychedelia.

Bieber appears to have rediscovered his mojo, resulting in one of his most focused projects to date.

Killer Sounds gets away with its confused billing because Hard-Fi have always known instinctively how to navigate their way around a chorus. That skill set survives here in big, stupid bloody pop songs.

While this record smacks of a youth spent listening to Blur, Oasis and their baggier forbears The Charlatans and The Stone Roses, its pool of influence is bigger.

As a solo artist who’s far eclipsed the output of his former epoch-defining band, no one can criticise Brown for trying. But he can definitely do better.

This gallopingly demented album comes off like a battle between two gargantuan, city-pulverising, sci-fi beasts engaged in an epic ruckus.

FSOL fans may not be impressed. But for connoiseurs of sprawling, loony progtronica, this other-worldly masterpiece is so far out you need a telescope to see it.

The second half is noticeably weaker than the first and the constant perkiness will grate if you're in anything other than a blinding mood, but there's plenty here to appreciate and it's perfect iPod fodder. [Sep 2008, p.46]

Frustratingly, flashes of the wired energy that got them noticed in the first place are few and far between.

This is some of the most focused, ferocious rapping that Lil Wayne has achieved in ages. Yet this still doesn’t necessarily result in a great album.

Vitalic's third album retreads the same gleefully maximal path as the records that came before it.

At times, ‘In Pieces’ still stands as a fragmented version of the songwriter and producer’s talents.

Sadly, The (I)NC have mistaken the ultra-safe sound of maximum R&B for the scream of revolution. [24 Jul 2004, p.49]

Eyes Wide Tongue Tied is more testament to subtlety and getting the basics right.

If you get a kick out of glorious, ragged old rock'n'roll, then you'll consider it essential.

If you can get past the earnest nostalgia and tweedy affectations, this isn't a bad album, just an average one.

The album had to happen, and for a band that are now ostensibly a touring entity, the measure of its songs is whether you’d want to hear them being played at, say, Field Day this summer. Slipped between their classics, they’ll do just fine.

Their taste in remixers still tends to the indie-friendly, but their imposing guitar squalls are repeatedly processed into a wildly different beast.

With their third album, bijou trippy-hippy souljazzfunksters Morcheeba have let it all hang out - and so all those half-formulated ideas they hadn't the guts to record earlier are here. It's

Sadly, it seems that with 'Audioslave' these people who were involved in some very exciting rock records in the 1990s, now seem happy to be making some bad ones from the 1970s.

Suit represents Nelly going smooth and seductive for an entire LP, and it is about 9,000 times as bad as that sounds. [2 Oct 2004, p.63]

The trademark tempo jiggery remains and it's all threaded together with airy production that underlines rather than overwhelms.

MS MR might lack some of the extrovert star quality of the acts Plapinger usually signs, but 'How Does It Feel' is an emotional ride that shows she has plenty of her own worth sharing.

There are moments when her A-Level Debating Club earnestness gets the better of her, but there's still three quarters of a great album here.

Ultimately 'Porcelain' proves that there's more to great bands than good musicianship. [10 Jul 2004, p.49]

Sounds like helium-voiced rockers Rush discovering a social conscience. [30 Oct 2004, p.65]

Ultimately, 'Killing Puritans' is well-crafted and commendably diverse, but somewhat joyless and cold. It aspires to social significance without having much serious to say, just as its creator casts himself as a taboo-trashing auteur rather than accept his true status as a skilled artisan in the commercial dance field.

Dr Alex Paterson and co are open for business again, plying their dubby squiggles, electronic bubblebaths and trippy soundbites to the next generation of cosmic travellers. It’s well worth a dip.

It’s yet more evidence that Drake’s art is suffering under the strain of his obsession with churning out as much music as is physically possible. And while 21 doesn’t have the same problem, both halves of the duo are responsible for an album that had the potential to be a classic, and missed.

It may not be game-changing and it'll be slaughtered by those who have a hatred of hipsters/fun. But it's harmless entertainment, and London gets full marks for what he's best at--experimentation.

It's an album full of the sort of drippy ballads and droopy soft rock that should induce an involuntary gag reflex in anyone under the age of 45.

Talk about a fall from grace. [4 Jun 2005, p.58]

The most achingly trendy record you'll hear this year. [1 Oct 2005, p.45]

Having already redefined garage last time around, he's conjured up an album equal parts R Kelly, Ali G and Terence Trent D' Arby, which will only send him further into the stratosphere.

The whole thing fizzes with a wired guitars-on-sleeve honesty and an artful intelligence more akin to The Mars Volta after an emergency jazzectomy thanThe Datsuns’ deadheaded dolt rock.

A modernist alt-rock chill blows through it, but Surfer Blood’s spirits stay cautiously upbeat, even indulging some Foals-y math-limbo guitar fripperies on ‘Other Desert Cities’.

This latest project succeeds by further propelling the rapper’s soaring momentum even while in lockdown.

You won't listen to it again and again; yet the time you do, it'll be a blast. [4 Feb 2006, p.29]

Few giant leaps nail the perfect landing, and Morrissey’s two-footer into full-blown electronica stumbles occasionally. But there’s also plenty of reason to hold your political nose and cross the Twittermob line.

‘True’ is the only real misstep on the record’s first half: a preachy self-love anthem that feels like it might’ve come together without Marina thinking how the lyrics sound when sang out loud, but it’s quickly passed over when ‘To Be Human’ arrives.

The Hacker is still a dab hand at dark electro, his rich, chewy tracks bubbling like molasses in a cauldron; Miss Kittin still veers close to self-parody.

This is easily the weakest DMX release to date.

Not a misstep for Eno, but not quite the best of both worlds, either.

If you were merely whelmed by FF’s anaemic third, then this album of dub versions could be the infusion you’re looking for.

Despite the odd catchy moment such as ‘Die Happy, Die Smiling’ you’re left thinking that those yodelling fucking elf-botherers Sigur Ros have got a lot to answer for.

For the most part, the songs furrow a similar path throughout the 20 tracks and, unlike most double albums, which are either loaded with fillers or come in two bloated parts, ‘CYR’ feels like a single complete record crammed full of pop anthems. Pumpkin detractors may well hate this record’s simplicity, and they’d be right to criticise it for sounding same-y to a point. But there’s no denying Corgan’s ability to craft a tune.

Moments when his former wretchedness is recognisable rescue the album.

Their first new music in three years, is a cohesive listen.

Flitting between ambient sequences and army-of-guitars maelstroms, this 71-minute magnum opus was recorded in Berlin and Iceland, but loaded with rampant Anglophilia, evident in a Joy Division homage and John Lennon interview clips.

Their mid-career crisis record full of poor-man's-Bjork wailing and dour shimmer rock, notable only for the funky mantra of 'Kali Yuga' (George Harrison exploding), and 'Point Dume' (the noises you'd hear in the night if your flat was haunted by Brian Wilson).

No acoustic stinkers. No Live And Unrehearsed At K-ROQ radio sessions. No ropy early demos. No remixes. Just Green Day, playing solid, dependable, familiar idiot-savant punk-rock.

There are bits of 'Amputechture' that sail perilously away from good honest prog into the realms of free jazz. [9 Sep 2006, p.37]

If soukous and Congolese rumba sound exotic, the reality is as bland as yam quiche.

In making this (undoubtedly scary) leap away from what’s expected of them they’ve pulled off the second album reinvention of 2010.

They're not so much fiddling while Rome burns as clattering bass and drums magnificently while they take a torch to Redcar.

Their rootsy rattle'n'roll fails to connect with anything more grabbing than a vague lyrical nostalgia.

It's functional, but dispensable.

While they’ve never been terribly fashionable, they’ve always used that to their advantage, projecting a underdog siege mentality whilst simultaneously selling out arenas. Concrete Love, however, is nothing to beat their own drum about.

No Romeo may be sweet, but it doesn't leave a lasting impression.

As a reminder of Eminem’s vocal showboating, ShadyXV is impressive. The problem--and it’s a persistent one--is that where once his anger was energetic, now it simply betrays lethargy.

The Strypes maturing isn’t surprising or disappointing, but the loss of the identity that made their ascent so startling is. That it seems to have been swallowed up by an unoriginal and dated indie sound is all the more galling.

Ultimately, it’s this blend of new-found maturity and crowd-pleasing choruses that transform Ezra’s second offering into the perfect progression from the sound of his debut.