Life Will See You Now won’t disappoint the devoted. Pop pleasures are myriad.

Amazingly, this all hangs together brilliantly to form a restless, thoughtful and constantly engaging collection that deserves to be heard by many.

Hutchings fashions a series of pastoral soundscapes dominated by breathy flutes. It's not all a case of sonic stasis and folky bucolic minimalism, though, as Body To Inhabit proves, lit up by rapper Elucid's verbal fireworks. [May 2024, p.105]

Beautiful. [May 2026, p.103]

Blue & Lonesome is as defiant a statement in its own way as any earlier landmark. Stones co-founder Ian Stewart should be beaming wherever he is, as his boys finally realise the potential he spotted at those first rehearsals 54 years ago.

Torres apparently took five years out of recording between his debut and this album, and it feels like he’s matured, honed himself in that time, producing a most considered beauty.

The songwriting and its deadpan delivery are still engaging but the overall feel is so understated as to be frustratingly bashful. [Feb 2025, p.103]

You can almost smell Power’s building confidence throughout. Melodies boast a previously little-seen directness, while somehow retaining their delicacy.

Reset takes shape as a tribute to the consolatory powers of music and companionship, brimming with convivial charm and inner-voyage invention.

Essentially cinematic in scope and deliciously varied, the main man is somewhat reminiscent of Robert Hunter in that he digs up nuggets from a wealth of sources.

You will hear her work ethic throughout, positively Spartan, and tinged with rueful truth. A courtly service for all to attend.

The lyrics are--as ever--a highlight.

This marvellous set captures every funky, florid facet of their initial golden run in the spirit in which it was created.

A cappella mixes of studio material have been a hallmark of every major Beach Boys box set, and those on Sail On Sailor deliver as expected. ... Further studio outtakes underscore the group’s range and versatility.

The music boasts a crunchy (but pleasantly sweet) production sheen that owes a debt to classic British power pop. [Oct 2024, p.103]

Singer Vanessa Briscoe-Hay adds an arch local flavour on Dormant Til Explosion, but it's the Beautiful fingerpicked atmospherics of Armchair View which bring new colours to add in, to last the course for the next two decades. [Nov 2024, p.100]

Doves have endured intact, hopeful, and with a document to perseverance that is fitting for one of indie-rock’s great survivors. [Feb 2025, p.100]

It’s a dense, lengthy work (at 71 minutes the longest studio album of her career). Only one song, the ecstatic, pulsating techno of Sue Me, is likely to work on the dancefloor. Yet the errant, raucous confluence of sounds and styles has a homogeneity that works to create a beguiling, and ultimately hugely rewarding whole.

Cosmic art country (Infinite Surprise, Pittsburgh) and skewed power pop (Save Me, Evicted) dominate, but most impressive are Sunlight Ends and A Bowl And A Pudding, moments of experimental beauty at the core of a constantly surprising album.

Yet for all the tales of sonic Celtic carnage, Dawson’s sixth solo full-length, and second for Domino offshoot Weird World, is his most accessible to date.

It's an often dense listen, but with enough light and shade to ease the passage of its makers social conscience lyrics. [Apr 2024, p.103]

It’s still as gloriously messy, squelchy and disorientating as ever.

The result is one marvellously gloomy overview of this aspect of Lanegan’s career.

Give or take a couple diversions (Bad Call, Legalize Living) into stomping 70s glam, the Swedes deliver the usual hi-jinks with the remorselessness of an overwound clockwork toy. [Sep 2025, p.103]

While the album’s name and vintage of some of the tracks suggests a clearing of the decks, Cutouts is too cohesive, energetic and imaginative to feel like a mere odds’n’sods collection. Our beautiful world may well be melting, but at least The Smile are providing a fitting soundtrack. [Nov 2024, p.99]

A spare but slippery showcase of spontaneous-seeming instinct. [Mar 2024, p.105]

QOTSA can still devastate and his lyrics still tread that delicious line between romance and nihilism, but ...Like Clockwork either runs too slickly, or the mechanism feels forced.

The songs, all from Nelson’s pen, are what really sells this terrific record, knocked into shit-kicking shape by a drum-tight band who effortless play with delicacy or venom, and all points in-between.

His finest achievement yet.

It may be a touch overlong and that relentlessly 80s production won’t be for everyone’s ears, but this is a triumph.

At their strange best, they sound like Radiohead with an ABBA obsession. A special album from a special band.

Babelsberg is ultimately a sorely-needed tonic. Mellow-sounding, but hefting weighty humanitarian concerns on its back, it boasts a you-are-here focus normally only accorded to those who are about to peg it.

One of Will Oldham’s strongest albums in recent times, if not ever. .... It’s thoughtful, beautiful fare, along with a few singalong stormers (Mama, Mama will get a crowd swaying at 30 paces) as you’d expect from Oldham, but it’s in the lyrics that he succeeds in his desire for self-reflection.

Given Low Country Blues was Grammy-nominated, stand by for the superior Southern Blood to appear in many year-end lists.

The result is where the primordial meets the cutting edge. [Jul 2025, p.105]

It's a gorgeous, reflective, surprising listen. [Sep 2025, p.105]

Hasn't sounded so confident since his 90s commercial peak. [Oct 2025, p.131]

An immediate contender of one of the best psych albums of 2026. [Apr 2026, p.101]

Ty Segall itself reveals--even more so than Emotional Mugger and Manipulator before it--a willingness to park the DIY or garage rock tag, however momentarily.

McDowall is very much in charge of proceedings, even if her confidence in the recordings has had to be bolstered by fans in the intervening years.

The sum of these parts is utterly energising.

He’s still doing his thing but goes deeper when he digs (It’s A Jungle Out There’s litany of modernity’s failings), he’s more wicked when he picks a target (white privilege on Brothers), and is still pushing the boundaries of his craft (all of it).

Shackles Gift reveals a tougher, more concise group than before; though, on the likes of opener Rigid Man and I Want You To Know, they appear to have morphed into--to these ears at least--a less interesting proposition: a relatively straightforward rock band.

MAD! is ‘just another’ adroit, bold, clever, distinctive, epigrammatic, fascinating, groundbreaking, highbrow, inventive, jocund, kaleidoscopic, lowbrow, maverick, nonconformist, observational, piquant, quizzical, ravishing, smart, tough, unconventional, versatile, witty, xenodochial, youthful, zeitgeisty Sparks album. [Jun 25, p.102]

A career high to match her attention-grabbing 2016 debut. [Oct 2025, p.133]

Manages to bridge the gap between electronic experimentation and unabashed pop. [Mar 2025, p.103]

While The Waiting Room is not Tindersticks’ greatest album, it might be the one that best signifies how this project is an ongoing one, that the sum of all the band’s work is greater than any individual passages. That they’re playing the long game; waiting.

It's best listened to in its entirety if listeners are to appreciate the fantastical story the US singer-songwriter threads through it. [Jun 2026, p.101]

For all their upstart imitators, The Jesus Lizard return as the kings of the scene. [Oct 2024, p.101]

If you’re looking for glacial Nordic chills, Arve Henriksen’s hauntingly beautiful Towards Language will do the trick.

The emotion is so directly delivered, one is jolted by the sensation that Ms Simmons is hiding in the corridor. A wonderful record.

As with previous records, this album features an array of guest musicians, including Rufus Wainwright, Mary Margaret O’Hara, Feist, Ron Sexsmith and the Pet Shop Boys’ Neil Tennant, but these songs remain Gibbs’ from start to end, and reveal his incredible ability to explore different styles while always sounding like himself.

All Together Again proves to be a warm and diverse collection of mostly unreleased pieces for a series of commissions over the last 10 years.

There’s a nervous energy throughout, as if his whole wide world might collapse at any second. Yet, at the heart of the sonic mayhem is his ever-dependable literacy, a knack for a tidy little phrase that rings with truth above the fuzz and feedback of his guitar.

Between its playful, retro-electro settings and the murky presentiments of Marling’s allusive lyrics, Animal paints outside the lines of LUMP’s debut carefully, never suffocating the intuitive strangeness at its heart.

Butler isn't about to spoon-feed his listeners the answers to anything, though, and ultimately the most audacious trick Good Grief pulls off is in using veiled autobiography to frame portraits of the fragility of the human soul, which speaks to everyone. [Jun 2024, p.100]

Swallow unfurls as an impressively sculpted soundtrack for dystopias real and imagined. [Jul 2025, p.105]

The four volumes of the Anthology offer an impressive overview of 12 years of work (plus the Threetles and the Twotles). [Dec 2025, p.88]

The latest from equally thunderous Childish girls for a mostly covers collection. .... On balance, the girls come out ahead, but get them both. [Christmas 2025, p.133]

Ultimately. Black And White deserves this bells-and-whistles resuscitation (though collectors may be stretched by Zoetrope and marbleised wax incarnations!). [Christmas 2025, p.129]

Powerful, and relentless in its attack. [Feb 2026, p.103]

The pairing works, and although there are two, even three tracks that verge on the forgettable, the likes of the utterly sublime The Morning Stars, and the way Sick As A Dog builds to its rousing climax of “I use the same voice I always have,” more than compensate.

Goodbye Weekend sees DeMarco take issue with his critics, particularly the way his sometimes bizarre live shows have been reported. On this evidence, his talent should be celebrated. Salad Days, indeed.

Insanely rich with ideas, hooks, smart artifice and real emotion, From The Pyre is a feast of giddy raptures. [Nov 2025, p.102]

Veirs has honed her craft over nine studio LPs, and this album reveals her at the height of her powers--a record that verges on pop, in the same way that a Magnetic Fields record might, though “pop” seems too reductive a term for the layers of artistry at work here.

A riot of synth squelches, bleeps and wibbles threaten to derail the music yet never quite do; indeed, repeated listens to the likes of Love Is Blind reveal a wealth of riches hidden among the dense patchwork of sounds.

If the trappings are lovably stiff and arthritic, the songs are zeitgeist thunderbolts--especially so when a baying, screaming audience charges the very air with O-face abandon.

Give yourself over to what’s not only a 21st-century masterpiece, but also something timeless that will resonate whenever you find it.

This is the distilled, finely crafted essence of Bunyan: a hushed, reflective meditation of an album that seems to have the welcome effect of cancelling out the world around the listener.

To the end, Saint Etienne have never faltered on their mission statement. Magic is here. Believe. [Sep 2025, p.103]

The joy of this collaboration lies in Wells’ music. It’s a more varied affair than its predecessor.

It contains some stupendous playing from both men, whose repertoire covers old bop numbers and several original tunes.

This isn’t folk-rock, it’s folk-rock’n’roll.

Maybe after the stresses and strains of the past couple of years we need a familiar embrace to soothe away our pain. Raise The Roof fits the bill, even if it might win fewer prizes for originality than its predecessor.

I Was Real’s resulting stew is even more disparate than what came before – this time out, you can add boogie (Tetuzi Akiyama), jigs (WZN#3 (Verso)) and pure drone to the mixer – but still with the singular vision to bring everything together into one harmonious, joyous, borderless whole.

The results are simple, subtle arrangements that highlight their song craft.

Angel In Plainclothes is an intensely quiet - and quietly intense - listening experience that infuses itself into your veins. [May 2026, p.101]

She was a frontwoman, but with a sound that was markedly different to anything that had come before. Tourist In This Town sees a continuation of this exploration, with album opener Broad Daylight shifting from a cappella into an alt.rock crescendo with underlying electronics.

“I’ve got nothing left to say but that’s alright,” he sings in Sunday Morning Feeling, but the 13 intense, joyous tracks here suggest otherwise.

It took a while, but this album is certainly worth the wait. [May 2024, p.103]

The Car is a slick mover, immaculately appointed and often beautiful. What it’s driving at, though, can feel naggingly elusive.

It's a serious, pensive album that makes its points with articulacy and no risk of ever outstaying its welcome. [Feb 2025, p.104]

Sharpening her songs' focus and melodies with spartan precision. [May 2026, p.101]

A mere 36 minutes in length, it’s an all-killer no-filler triumph.

A layered, atmospheric, darkly playful headrush of a first offering.

He's ultimately birthed another milestone. [Jul 2024, p.107]

Her finest album to date and one to live with and cherish; that explains the name then.

The pressures of everyday living crop up again on the confessional Anxiety and Something To Love, while White Man’s World serves up a thick slice of barbed social commentary. He’s at his most heartbreaking, however, on Chaos And Clothes, chronicling the aftermath of a doomed romance.

This is possibly Dawson’s best work. Yes, it’s tough-going – you’ve probably realised he REALLY doesn’t dig this country of ours right now – but the blend of smarts, art and heart is more than enough to demand your ears on repeat.

This is a big, mature record.

While there’s a compelling dark energy to the stark, fuzz-riffed uptempo tracks (the bass-driven God Song oddly recalling U2 when they strip things down), the telepathic power of the ensemble is best realised on spectral slowies such as I’m In Love Tonight, featuring deeply resonant viola from Bad Seed Warren Ellis, and epic Never Feel This Young.

Subtly and unobtrusively produced by Fugazi’s Guy Picciotto (as Goats was), Black Peak then finds the envelope pushed further still. If the concept sounds impenetrable at first--off- putting even--keep at it.

He shifts back to the modern world, with the excellent trio of Who To Love?, Come Close To Me and My Last Affair adding deep house backing to snippets of disembodied piano, guitar and soulful vocals.

The later efforts are more like dry runs, and we might have benefitted more from a mixture of these and some key remixes from over the years, but really, what’s not to like?

While their familiar stargazing disco again dominates, the songwriting is at its sharpest as fresh influences add bite. [Aug 2024, p.103]

The Beaches get their points across by grafting moody alt-rock textures - looking at you, The Smiths-esque Dirty Laundry and Cure-reminiscent Sorry For Your Loss - with explosive chorus hooks. [Oct 2025, p.130]

If all Kneecap offered was the spectacle of someone stirring shit up, like the Pistols, PE and early Manics in previous generations, they would still be worth having around. But Fenian offers far more. Their day has come. [May 2026, p.100]

The robotic, new wave sheen of Quiet Americans fares slightly better, but on the whole, this record falls somewhat short of Shearwater’s usually excellent capabilities.