Retaining your sprightly playfulness while making a mature comeback isn't easy, but Sky Larkin straddle the two with ease.

While it's an impressive document, it can’t quite recapture the nocturnal intimacy of ‘Nothing Else But This’ and ‘Dream’.

With so many influences laid bare, it does take until seven-minute-long crescendoing closer ‘Saintless’ to truly showcase what they can achieve musically.

The result is joyous electropop with depth--dance beats, '80s-ish synths and Caila's soulful, voluminous vocals fanning out into gorgeous harmonies.

Whenever Mr Rager sets off on his next adventure we're ready, musical machetes in hand, to follow him into the undergrowth…

The good news is that lyrically, Nas is pretty much back on form.

We Are The Ocean's third is a record full of lean, muscular rock and sees a band who were once regarded as sub-You Me At Six also-rans, deliver an undeniably stonking LP full of catchy choruses and chunky riffs.

To the ears of their detractors, Courteeners will always sound unexceptional, but in the eyes of the faithful, Mapping the Rendezvous will only make them more irreplaceable.

It hasn’t completely reinvented the wheel for Hurts, nor has it allowed them to rest on old habits. Instead, it presents them at their most open – and in age of isolation, there’s much to admire in that.

Even if ‘Access All Areas’ doesn’t overwhelmingly herald the return of R&B girl group dominance, the massive momentum FLO have built over the past two years hint that the dam is about to break.

Overall, Painting With is a dizzying, lurid treat, almost too much to take in, craving its natural habitat. And it’ll really come alive out in the wild.

Spins a web of eerie jazz-junglist percussion. [22 Jan 2005, p.51]

There's no escaping it: Foster The People are a great pop band, and Torches pop production accentuates every handclap and harmony for maximum effect.

The Brooklyn duo's fifth album is less pan-pipe chill-out and more a brooding and oppressive morass of sound akin to a shamanistic Zola Jesus.

In their relentless slavery to the groove, the songs fall hopelessly flat. [12 Feb 2005, p.51]

They've set themselves up nicely here, already nipping on the heels of fellow slacker extraordinaires Surfer Blood and Yuck.

A stern but playful combination of caustic menace and bright hooks.

An utterly charming album.

the promised sense of youth and experimentation rarely surfaces. If anything, Feel Good goes too far the other way, sounding insipid and polished in comparison to The Internet’s debut.

It's blissful, soulful proof that although SMD might have stopped chasing the hit parade, they haven't stopped making hits.

His attempts to revolutionise, strip bare and stretch the borders of R&B with all manner of glitches, gollums and glaciers are admirable, but it’s only when he tranquilizes his inner Usher for the downbeat piano throb of ‘See You Fall’, the spectral orchestration of ‘Pour Cyril’ and the acoustic minimalism of ‘2 Years On (Shame Dream)’ that he achieves the subtlety and invention of, say, Sufjan Stevens.

Butler’s done well to harness the fuller ideas first explored on "Smokey" but, in doing so, has sacrified raw Devendra for something just a bit too, well, Bees-y.

You'll be comfy, you might spot some pretty things on the hard shoulder, but ultimately it doesn't get you anywhere.

The album is beautifully structured, leading from spare and shimmery beginnings into harder, weirder and more varied territories, all those snippets and elements and personalities crafted into a shifting, subtle whole that quietly captures your attention from start to end.

We’re unlikely to be totally rid of guitars on a Kings Of Leon album any time soon, but there are more daring rhythms and more sophisticated production here.

A solo charm assault with mixed results.

The sad fact is that Blink-182 are now indistinguishable from the increasingly tedious 'teenage dirtbag' genre they helped spawn.

Listening to 'Blue' is like meeting your first girlfriend ten years on, and realising that the things you fell in love [with] are long gone. [19 Jun 2004, p.56]