It is its author Kieran Hebden's best work to date and confirms the prolific young soundmeister as a major talent.

That's not to say there's not some exceptional music on this record, it's just once again the impact of the best moments is dulled by the inclusion of some indifferent electronic compositions.

The Lost Tapes is no barrel-scraping… it's more dark magic straight from the source.

Though ‘Comfort To Me’ retains The Sniffers’ talent for a rowdy rock’n’roll track – the largely instrumental ‘Don’t Need A Cunt Like You (To Love Me)’ blazes in and out of view with one-and-a-half minutes – it also shows a more reflective side to the band amid the silliness.

There’s no sense of bet-hedging in its lengthy runtime and no real filler. It’s the sound of an artist in his imperial phase doing as he pleases without needing to try too hard: not just a low-key flex, but a richly entertaining listen.

They find a balance with the old xx though. Fragility and self-doubt are still themes. Indeed, the highlight is Romy’s pensive, vulnerable ballad ‘Performance’.

After a foray into a different sonic world, on Swift’s return to pure pop she still shimmers.

Deafheaven’s brilliance has long been hung upon the pursuit of a truth, like documentarians before they hit the edit suite. These songs are filthy, dank, often devoid of light, but like a weed emerging from a pavement’s crack, there’s something resembling hope there. A suggestion that maybe there’s something more.

They peddle the same sort of fake-rustic rootsiness that seems to be colonising our era: all these flatpack off-the-peg dreams of Ruritania that iPad-stashing mid-lifes have taken up as a counterpoint to their rabid technophilia.

If you want it to be, it's brilliant. It's also a record so ambitious, so angry, and so mad-as-a-goose that there are otherwise intelligent people who will hear it once and straight away deem it an interminable racket. [30 Apr 2005, p.61]

It's like 'Pet Sounds' born and raised in the Bronx. [26 Mar 2005, p.51]

Encasing the malaise and drudgery of the last two years and preserving them in dark grey ash, ‘Pompeii’ captures a distinct sense of isolation without explicitly spelling it out. There’s much to excavate here.

Inevitably, when the Prozac finally wears off the more 'thoughtful' numbers fall flat on their faces. [20 Aug 2005, p.58]

This time round, the humour is more subtle but the observations on life, and increasingly death, are no less keen.

What this collection of songs from his mid-'90s creative purple patch shows is that few people in recent times have done sadness so exquisitely.

The blurred lines are kinda the point and half the fun. But now The Moonlandingz have turned fiction into semi-reality by making their debut album... and it’s brilliant.

Ultimately, what these songs leave is a feeling that, for all the album’s brilliant shine, experimenting with darker styles might not go amiss for what’s next.

It’s compelling and moving songwriting that manages to depict all of life’s complexities, Canal spinning raw emotion into beautifully crafted songs.

A swaggering display of confidence by a band in total command of their craft, ‘Tsunami Sea’ is solid-as-granite proof that heavy music retains its vitality and relevancy in 2025. The punishing elegance of Spiritbox’s new album will punch a hole through your chest and wrap its aqueous arms around your heart.

The mental processes, emotions, and reflections that have defined a transformative period, and the years that preceded it, all come to life here.

Every bit as stark, foreboding, but utterly singular as 'Tilt'. [6 May 2006, p.33]

Davidson’s Working Class Woman is smart, intriguing and deserves to be heralded as one of the year’s most inventive releases--Lord knows she’s worked hard enough for it.

Their most intriguing, beautiful and dazzling record to date.

'Source Tags And Codes' comes with an albatross-like weight of expectation round its skinny neck - yet happily, it's supported by a band who have grown to match it.

If you really want a definitive collection of Ice-T's work, go and buy his albums 'Power' (1988) and 'OG - Original Gangster' (1991). This is not to criticise this greatest hits package, which, technically, does a decent job of presenting an overview of his illustrious career. However, when you have an artist like Ice, with such an impressive body of work, you have to come with more than 17 tracks.

‘Model Citizen’ is the work of a band who are absolutely for the now. Mom, this pop-punk thing definitely isn’t just a phase.

It all adds up to the most serene, stylistically varied album Marling has ever created.

Smother is deeply sad and lonely, but still a barbed invitation to intimacy; like Coleridge's albatross, an extraordinarily elegant, stunning, (near)-perfect portrait of how terribly bad decisions can turn out.