A considered affair, brilliantly performed but rarely thrilling, with highlights coming in the form of hypnotic slow burners like “The Air’s On Fire” and the soaring finale “Moonlight Understands.”

Lime Garden isn’t shy about their influences, sure, but what many of those artists lacked at the time, soaring choruses that linger for days, they deliver in spades.

The eclectic range Bey displays in Fidelity occasionally runs into filler, but it also drops clues into what her next big statement might entail.

For the most part, Birding follows the Cocteau Twins template to a tee, seemingly daring listeners and critics alike to find a better descriptor than the all-too-obvious ‘ethereal’. But deary are smart enough to inject some variety, which they achieve by incorporating heavier, almost explosive passages.

There’s nothing too revealing here, but the familiar, comforting touch they always offer is more than welcome.

A sumptuously produced record with an enviable hit-to-miss ratio, Middle of Nowhere delivers more than enough drama, humour, and sparkle to solidify Musgraves’ place on the country music throne.

Easter Lily, released on Good Friday, offers the visceral, emotional experience that U2 fans have been yearning for the longest time.

While they try subtle new tricks, like compressing Grohl’s vocals to almost-grating levels amid muddy sound mixing, their attempts at sounding edgy usually land in a pleasant middle ground.

Ultimately, Something Worth Waiting For is an album of good songs with some sequencing and balance issues. Its problems have nothing to do with quality in the traditional sense, but Friko will need to temper some of their maximalist tendencies if they want to seize the indie rock throne.

Consistent, assured, and suitably varied, Brink is a very impressive debut from a band with a bright future. Confuse them with Scouting for Girls at your peril.

While well-intentioned, the EP overall gave me some pause, as it proved that U2 sometimes can’t help themselves to write placid pop rock songs that don’t disrupt their quest for supreme relevance.

Her exploration of the self in Pain Will Polish Me sometimes feels lacking, which makes the project seem somewhat drab. But it’s the small touches she adds, such as the instrumentals named after her child, Hera, that are unexpectedly poignant.

Creature of Habit is another respectable entry in her increasingly understated and overlooked discography.

Sometimes, as on “Pure Sticker Shock,” the emphasis on open space can drag. Let’s just say that there’s a lack of punchy anthems, but as tracks like “Votive” and “Ballad of the Last Payphone” demonstrate, the supergroup’s brand of tuneful melancholy remains intact.

Sexistential is urgent, direct, and strikingly concise.

Many of the songs here are structured around pull and restraint, mostly drifting in a calm haze before surprising you with sudden bursts of energy. The quieter moments, like on “The Woodland Has Returned,” feel more impactful than their twitchy, spastic excursions.

The sparkling closer “Reverie” and the excellent “Butterfly” deserve special mention, but honestly, side B is uniformly strong. The tragedy of Ricochet is that it follows such a feeble side A.

Of This Earth, like most Shabaka Hutchings albums, dating back to Sons of Kemet, requires full immersion. On his third LP, the jazz polymath takes you on a musical journey that requires both stillness and stimulation.

We Are Together Again aims to repeat the trick [2025's The Purple Bird], with its earnest country twang and cast of familiar collaborators, but ultimately it lives and dies by the quality of its songs—and they just aren’t consistently good enough.

Listening to a couple of tracks in isolation is fine, but taken as a whole, the record feels airbrushed to the point of predictability. Pleasant, of course, and well assembled, but devoid of the spark that characterised their earlier work.

There is no sense of fatigue here. Alongside Sebb Bash, ELUCID sounds reinvigorated on what is essentially a more traditional Hip Hop record than Revelator—and, if I’m honest, a better one.

It might be facile to attribute the highs of IT’S THE LONG GOODBYE to Graham’s backstory, but he and his bandmates tap into something special, earnest, and powerful.

Varied yet elegantly stitched together, Hard Hearted Woman shows the many sides of Cogan, whose story is as resilient as the subjects she depicts.

It is a meaningless shell of a record with few, if any, redeeming features.

While Transmitter doesn’t sound like a late ’60s artefact, it still sounds like Clarke—a refresh rather than a revolution, and a perfectly satisfying one at that.

While The Collective felt novel and boundary pushing, PLAY ME, though similarly adventurous, aims to reflect our daily anxieties with tired commentary that risks dating itself.

Mackenzie-Barrow is clearly a talented songwriter and, taken individually, most of the material here is engaging. Taken sequentially, however, his sparse compositions blur together, emphasising his vocal limitations and rendering Book of Churches a somewhat dour affair.

Their easy-to-digest, familiar sounds will inevitably go down well, but are unlikely to linger in the memory long enough to trouble the headliner. Remember Sports have learned their craft, but they are yet to truly master it.