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]