On his 11th album, that gloss is pared down, revealing just how well-crafted and intricate Bejar’s songs have become.

It's a hard-hitting statement album that raises the bar the band set with their previous offering to an insanely higher level. The grooves seem deeper, the horns punchier and the hooks catchier. [Oct 2024, p.100]

It's a hell of a noise for just three men to make with SLIFT effortlessly achieving white knuckle transcendence across eight very long tracks. [Jan 2024, p.99]

Most of these songs (with the exception of the spooked, slow burner Hawaii--featuring a fantastically creepy snigger on the intro--and the yearning, melodically twisting beauty of Give Me Strength) would find their way onto various Young albums of various vintages over the years, but there’s an accumulative effect in hearing performances of songs as powerful as Pocahontas, Powderfinger and Campaigner unadorned and fresh in their authors mind.

An album aglow with a clear-eyed confidence in hushed, honeyed quietude.

Badbea fair glows with uncomplicated affirmations, literally buzzing with Collins’ unique wasp-tone guitar interjections--a sound that no one else has come close to approximating.

Talking Heads: 77 is truly fascinating. From the demos and outtakes through the album to the live show, it demonstrates a young bad, without a route map, re-writing pop music. [Jan 2025, p.95]

[A] challenging, deeply odd at times and hugely enjoyable album.

In short, if you collect Jansch you won’t regret investing in these for a second. If you’re new to him, you’ll find a musical universe opening before you.

Ratboys have definitively made one of 2026's first brilliant albums. [Feb 2026, p.103]

Perhaps the strongest work yet from a unique talent. [Apr 2025, p.102]

With expressive restraint, key collaborators John Parish and Flood utilise instruments and field recordings to tactile effect, while leaving room for Harvey’s voice to resonate. The results hold their folk-horror secrets close and harbour dark suggestions on investigation.

Ollie Judge's vocal drawl may remain slightly too post-punk 101, but otherwise Cowards teems with ideas that land. [Mar 2025, p.105]

Fittingly, Central Belters ends on the monstrous My Father My King, the band at their most uncompromising and vital.

The Overload is quite the debut.

Overall, the sound is pristine--it’s been remastered from the original 24-track tapes by esteemed engineer Paul Blakemore--and is accompanied by a thick booklet packed with essays.

A rich and dense record that rewards repeated, attentive listening. Yet despite the lyrical prowess on display, it's the incredibly detailed soundscape that really impresses. ... Grant is well on the way on creating a musical language all his own. [Jul 2024, p.102]

Bruised but still brawling, Relatives channels the horror and embattled hope of our times with a vital insistence.

Possessing a kinetic, free-spirited energy. [Mar 2025, p.103]

There’s a taut, garage-like sensibility to the arrangements, a discipline lacking from the originals, in a satisfying, worthwhile salvage expedition. [Jan 2026, p.101]

Overall Sleep Well Beast is a more subdued record that shows evidence of their solo side projects having shaped their new direction. Those who know that a new National album often requires multiple listens to fully grow and reveal its charms and nuances will have their patience rewarded, as this is a beautiful piece of work.

Relentless is a masterly achievement, tasting of truth.

As he goes on to dig into toxic masculinity, his own ageing process and urban isolation (on the striking Safe & Well), Malcolm Middleton’s music is masterful, a combination of dense electronics and angry guitars which perfectly meet the mood of a fiercely current album.

I See You may represent a sonic shift towards the light, but The Xx are still singing dark songs concerned with introspection, heartache and regret. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Good.

Cosmically cool. [Apr 2025, p.101]

The album would have benefitted from a slightly wider variation in pace, with an additional up-tempo song or two. [Jun 2024, p.103]

Iif you’re not in on the joke, the album might fall flat sporadically. Still, taken with the right level of salt, ICC is a brave, bold and multi-faceted experience that can knock one’s socks clean off.

Overall, Bird Songs Of A Killjoy is the sound of someone recording exactly what they want to. Nothing here feels out of place, or sounds like a pastiche of another era. Bedouine has found herself a winning formula.

Heady stuff that pays imaginative tribute to the duo's shared Latin American diasporic heritage. [Jul 2024, p.105]

Gorgeous. [Jul 2025, p.104]

It becomes quickly apparent that Weirdo is a more personal record - gut-punchingly so, at times - but for all the pain that inspired it, it feels like a celebration too. [Jun 2025, p.105]

One of the most powerfully intense live acts on the circuit, Prostitute have miraculously transferred that intensity to this truly extraordinary record. [Apr 2026, p.108]

With Semper Femina, Marling is back on more assured ground, largely acoustic, with subtle arrangements and an exquisite use of strings that seem a natural, wholly fitting addition to her ever-expanding palette.

It is a warm and free record, benefitting from the improvised jam sessions that took place on both US coasts in Brooklyn and Burbank. You can feel the sense of openness at either end of Heartmind’s musical spectrum.

Along with equally genre-transcending Ryley Walker and James Blackshaw, here is stunning proof that Tompkins Square have serious intentions beyond the reissue market. Watch this space, listen to Brigid Mae Power.

Not just a compilation, not even just a big compilation, The Roaring Forty is a moving trawl through the life and times of an extraordinary artist who has never stood still.

[Heroes is] an immediately striking highlight of the album but, in all truth, most of the remaining 10 songs are up there with his very best.

Furman’s stories erupt in sunbursts of detail, lived-in and lividly imagined.

He may have been too pure for widespread appeal at the time of the album’s original release, but an arguably more open and receptive 21st Century country fanbase should delight in this reissue.

If there’s a sense that some of Kouyate’s charm has been lost through his newfound worldliness, the experiments bear exquisite fruit on Ayé Sira Bla.

An album that taps into Suede’s galvanic guitar-rock drama without falling prey to that dread declaration of stagnation, the back-to-basics album. Perhaps deceptively, Suede’s approach here is forward-thinking.

You may rejoice, you may be bemused, or you may soil your drawers and run for the nearest exit. It's quite an experience, however you find it. [Apr 2026, p.109]

Skinty Fia is another triumph for this era’s most vital group.

Overflowing with cultural, mythological and artistic allusions and a prepossessing unrest, Life Metal is an album that insists upon provoking imaginative thought, and is sure to do more for your gut motility than any prune.

The album is streaked through with intelligent string orchestrations that don’t feel bolted onto the songs to pad out or prettify them but increase their psychological intensity.

[Eddie Piller] doesn’t sequence chronologically; his approach is more scattershot, with the emphasis on listening experience rather than presenting a history lesson. But 60s mod in all its rainbow colours is represented.

Paul Weller’s electric autumn that began with 22 Dreams effortlessly continues, and this may be the best instalment yet.

In terms of the original nine-track album, a new stereo mix is designed to bring a warmer ambience to proceedings, and it succeeds especially on The Night Comes Down’s clearly defined separations of May’s many multi-layered guitars, a fuller in-your-face theatricality to Freddie Mercury’s voice (on Great King Rat and Jesus most effectively), and more organically resonant drums throughout. .... This is a record that continues to impress as a groundbreaking hybrid of heavy rock, prog and glam. [Dec 2024, p.97]

Stumpwork demonstrates that the Dry Cleaning business is going from strength to strength.

It is a salve, and a beautiful, mysterious thing, which doesn’t necesarily need to be anything more than a beautiful, mysterious thing, however many hours of labour and technical nous have been spent crafting it.

It works because it’s so astonishingly, genuinely clever.

Askew executes sad back-parlour arpeggios on a Hdusty, reverberant piano and his distinctive 10-stringed Martin tiple, his antediluvian voice as tremulous as Willie Nelson on a toning table.

What a world of pleasure will open up to any adventurous young music fan taking a punt on this one though, and then proceeding to connect the dots.

At times they overstretch – the tail-end of Part One drifts like fish and chip wrapper in the breeze – but a visit to Coral Island elicits the intangible pull of a place in time etched forever in the mind. Roll up, roll up.

The four Memento Mori outtakes included are sub-par, but the concert material turns moody introspection into a black celebration of life with thunderously affirmative power. [Jan 2026, p.101]

Landfall is a humourous, magnetic, and heart-breaking album, and paved with the kind of pathos that could make even TV’s Mr Tumble feel a little flat.

There’s a new sense of confidence in the vocals, the clarity of the melodies, and production flourishes. Lyrically, too, there’s a shift – the troubled soul-searching has (mostly) given way to a sense of joy and acceptance at his place in the world. There are songs here that do not so much start as saunter into earshot, in no rush to reveal themselves and all the more seductive for it.

While unearthed solo cuts like the eerie Child Bride intrigue, it's the stab at rocking up one of the most wilfully unrocking albums in the canon which really fascinates. [Christmas 2025, p.128]

POPtical Illusion is another engaging set that rewards repeat plays on account of the inventive electronic textures and Cale's reflective, often politically tinged lyrics. [Jul 2024, p.104]

As closer I'll Ask Her lands a sharp-edged critique of closed-ranks machismo, URGH's urgency of purpose is the loudest takeaway here. [Feb 2026, p.101]

Available on vinyl for the first time, and heralding the reissue of Jansch’s entire catalogue, Live At The 12 Bar is a cut above many of the similar live captures of Jansch’s work.

Chorus collects Lush’s entire back catalogue and presents it bound in a beautiful hardback book. Its contents remain highly desirable too.

Understandably ruminative in nature, it’s a renewed sense of creative vigour which provides the driving force on a piece of work which stands among the composer’s best.

As befitting a band who met studying music at Toronto’s Humber College, this Late Night Tales is akin to capturing a conversation by friends bursting with excitement, sharing their latest musical finds.

While this collection spans three decades, the focus is skewed towards the later years.

From the off, Flaming Pie sounds like the work of a man comfortable with his past. ... The 2CD and 3LP sets will appeal to those not willing to shell out hundreds – they cherry-pick the best of the home demos, outtakes and B-sides.

It reveals The War On Drugs at their most song-conscious and streamlined. The epic, immersive, unfurling tracks that have become a Granduciel trademark are notably absent (Granduciel says he abandoned a 32-minute jam track). Psychedelic flourishes are few and far between. Many tracks boast a hitherto unheard immediacy: prominent synths, unabashed choruses, and big-sounding songs.

Not everything works. The aforementioned Always You leaves little impression and the clunky Caroline’s Monkey, which shoehorns in every hackneyed junkie reference you can think of (“holes in her skin”, “ice in her veins”, monkeys on backs, etc, etc), is just about rescued from oblivion thanks, again, to its auditory nod to Kraftwerk’s locomotive-fixated sixth studio album. But otherwise, Memento Mori is brimming and sometimes soaring with immediate pop songs.

While certainly not all things to all comers, this deluxe edition makes a good fist of it.

Try the delectably thick-eared Shadow by The Lurkers, the uneasy Violence Grows by Fatal Microbes (with Honey Bane’s vocal a clarion warning from history), the insouciant Kicks In Style by The Users and, impregnable in its perfection, New Rose by The Damned --the opening salvo, the vital spark.

It may occasionally sound warmly, comfortingly like the past, but this is an album with its mind fixed firmly on the future.

This one lives up to the hype, producing acme-level chamber jazz and acknowledging Blue Note's history while pushing the label's narrative forward toward futurity. [Jan 2025, p.105]

Among the highlights are Carla's Beads, with its enveloping synth swirls and ringing percussion, and the mellow ambient jazz of Bi-Location. [Jul 2024, p.107]

Like the 1999 film Magnolia that earned Mann an Oscar nomination, Mental Illness would make a similarly engrossing mosaic of stories for the big screen.

This is a delightful, delicate return. [Apr 2025, p.105]

Dim Probs engages with deeply rooted truths. [Oct 2025, p.133]

Fantasy Empire, with its discernible riffs, moments of relative calm--and even, dare it be said, choruses--is the best entry point for anyone curious about a powerhouse which has, up to this point at least, operated on the blustery, splattered neon fringes of noise rock.

Filthy, funny, affecting, Arab Strap sound like a band with a future again.

An intimate, expansive take on Brit-folk influences, mapping unexpected detours before achieving a communal flush. [Dec 2024, p.106]

An album that shows humour and fortitude in the devastating loss of innocence. [Aug 2025, p.103]

The results are some of the most affecting works of his career, spun through with deep meanings and political sentiment.

An often-electrifying listen, full of surprise. Although rough and ready, Paul McCartney's ineluctable creativity shines through. [Jul 2024, p.97]

It may take a while to get past opener I Shaved My Head, but once you do, the apocalyptic intensity of Environmental Catastrophe Film and unfolding drama of Sibling Fistfight At Mom's Fiftieth/The Un-Sound are absolutely stunning. [Nov 2025, p.103]

Produced by Kate herself, this live set sounds incredible.

Lyrically, Chatten’s world is still tumultuous, yet he’s learned to coat it around a romantic, less uptight sound. Hopefully Fontaines D.C. can carry some of these moods forward but, whatever happens, this is a superb interlude.

This is soul-bearing at its most intriguing, the listener never quite sure of the root of the singer's malaise but nonetheless urging him to find his way to where he's going in one piece. [Nov 2024, p.101]

Amid all the proto-ambient wash is much soul and even funk, albeit of a lo-fi variety.

While this is a deeply personal work whose soul-searching recalls the defences-down honesty of Blur’s art-rock masterpiece 13, it’s emphatically not a solo album… Though it could be a duo album. One of the most touching elements of The Ballad Of Darren is hearing Albarn and guitarist Graham Coxon singing together.

Barely any light gets in during nine tracks that all sprawl over five minutes, titles such as DTM. (Dead To Me), Screamin’ Jesus and the racism-savaging Duke’s God Bar harnessing the rage Vega called an energy into seething walls of multi-tiered electronic cacophony, wailing guitars and jackhammer beats, although the closing Stars carries the underlying optimism that was also a crucial element in his work.

The lyrics continue to take a few listens to fully digest (beyond the regular laugh-out-loud moments), as do Fearn’s often misleadingly direct grooves. His basslines sound particularly mighty here, and Williamson’s vitriol (which fills most of the record) continues to be very much needed in contemporary Britain.

In showing the workings behind the most important transformation of his career, Rock’n’Roll Star! underscores just what a remarkable thing Bowie achieved: this is the mortal man behind the extraterrestrial dressing, and it’s no less compelling for that.

All of this music is a blast, an affecting display of the emotional textures which Collins has always dealt in so confidently, regardless of his health issues. [Apr 2025, p.100]

This Richmond, Virginia quintet bring as much energy and focus to the music as they ever did. [May 2026, p.92]

A third of the way in, there’s a sequence of up-tempo dreampunk numbers harbouring brattier attitudes and melodies of a more generically slapdash nature, at which point this reviewer’s notebook became overly burdened with ditto marks. The quality picks up later with a couple of shimmering near-ballads. As far as power duos go, that’s not a bad ratio and it certainly beats those impotent hacks known as The Black Stripes or The White Keys or whatever they were called.

As well as drawing more liberally from the likes of My Bloody Valentine and the Cocteau Twins, this time they’ve woven into the mix some 80s synth-pop motifs (Masquerade could be Duran Duran circa 1982), but the overall effect remains as bewitching as ever.

Look For Your Mind! is another winner for the d'Addarios, packed tight with stunning musicianship, sparkling songcraft and ingenious arrangements. [May 2026, p.98]

A record of complex emotions and fine-grained nuance. [Jan 2025, p.105]

With Silent Earthling, TTT present a nuanced and more muscular version of their sound.