The album’s second half doesn’t let up on the grooves or the gusto.

hubby and the Gang are what punk should be in 2021; heavy, fun, and unrepentantly honest.

Pure baroque 'n' roll goodness.

It’s disorientating, harrowing, yet hopeful – the ending needed to complete the circle. The only thing to do now is go back to the start and enjoy it all over again.

Sketchy is a bold album in so many ways but it’s also incredibly, comfortingly Tune-Yards: High energy, offbeat movements, looped vocals, powerful cries, incredible rhythms, a belief that fighting for what is right is the only option. It’s life affirming.

Day Of The Dead certainly makes a compelling case in favour of the Grateful Dead's merits as musicians and songwriters as opposed to uncommonly successful marketers of an alternative lifestyle.

For all the light-headed horns and lo-fi bedroom production, there’s this clarity and precision that ends "Cracking". Jinx is both their misadventure and their healing as intrepid explorers of the New York night.

With only the most faithful replications of the original performances falling in any way flat, the contributors' ability to balance reverential respect with an ethos of printing their own identity on these indelible songs is what makes I'll Be Your Mirror succeed where so many similar tributes nosedive into dull irrelevance.

The album’s cohesiveness and its lush sonic range are clearly among the benefits of improved production, and Gibson has made good use of his new toys. Nevertheless, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that few of the album’s highlights quite match up to the strange magic captured by All Hell’s finest moments.

The layers of noise, which at first may seem intimidating, are so harmonically rich they immerse the listener as the sounds interact creating new and unexpectedly mellifluous sounds.

This is a record of patient, sojourning hope, so leave your adolescence at the door.

Embracing crippling fear has never sounded so bracing.

The four-track offering is a rather wild journey, in that it refuses to offer anything up easily. Instead, it allows its intricate layers to build up to whatever it is they eventually come to stoke inside of you.

On Fast Idol, Stewart once again offers a perfectly poignant distillation of danceable, downbeat synth music.

There are no bad songs on the record, just ones in which fewer ideas work.

Restless Spheres never settles on one kind of terrain for long, but it exudes the assurance of an artist who has explored a range of styles over time and found his consistency among all of them.

In Nobody Loves You More, Kim Deal delivers an album that stands both as a tribute to her past and a reassertion of her relevance, it’s an emotional and moving experience.

It builds dread with slight but sudden stabs, scrapes, and bubbling bass, and rarely gives you the pleasure of a cathartic release. It’s a long way from the funky chaos of “Houseplants”, and it’s all the more interesting for it.

While Prelude might feature thicker arrangements and traffic more in classic pathos, with Pyre, TLDP are as sublime and theatrical as ever.

Even as another merely good Wilco album, however, Schmilco does pay plentiful dividends for listeners patient enough to discover its gradually revealed riches.

It will be undoubtedly considered a ‘return to form’ for fans who might have felt a little aggrieved about Altın Gün’s turn towards a softer direction on their last two records, but for new listeners, this is a superb place to jump on the bandwagon and a perfect introduction to a world of music that they might not have experienced otherwise.

As Albarn croons, “Every generation has its gilded poseurs” and The Ballad of Darren prove that Blur are some of the best ever to do it.

Pedestrian Verse sees Frightened Rabbit make a triumphant return to the magnificent songwriting present on their lauded second album, The Midnight Organ Fight.

The songs are much more complex and nuanced than one might expect on first listen and, like most good music, it is an album that deserves deeper comprehension.

It’s such an confrontational piece of work that you need to mentally prepare prior to the needle hitting the groove. Once it does though, you are dragged into Bo Ningen’s world, a place where the fusion of rhythm fighting against musical aggression has never sounded so thrilling.

Their debut album – aptly titled the record – is here in all its poetic, cutting glory; and it’s been entirely worth the wait.

Wolfe has crafted an impeccable release here, building upon her existing methods and evolving as a songwriter. Things feel more confident – there’s more energy and oomph.

Somehow, despite his success, Flowers understands that good music isn’t about what you have, but what could have been, and although his wife must wonder who he’s singing about all the time, the rest of us can press our face against the windows of childhood car journeys, and dream.

It’s the imagery that Williams draws from in her lyrics that places you there. ... Despite the sense of movement, one doesn’t get the feeling that Williams is driving, running or swimming towards nor away from anything in particular. Rather, that she’s on the journey because it means something in itself to sit alone in a dark and silent car and see everything become clearer.

The variety of genres synthesised to generate this finished record show that they have absorbed life's lessons and reconstituted them to suit a unique outlook. The effect is a strangely familiar, yet singularly arranged thread of consciousness.

These are powerful, thoughtful songs that stand up to hours of repeated listening, and always raise a smile in the process.

Yes, they are working with a previously-explored aesthetic, but they are molding it into a beautifully-original product, per a vision that refuses to forget music’s former greatness.

Hughes sells it (and everything else on Zipper Down) in spite of relevance or degree of truth because he knows what any fan of Eagles Of Death Metal knows: they're here to entertain you and that's pretty much it.

The Regrettes already seem pretty at home in their new soundscape, roaming between stripped-back guitars and fully-fledged pop.

There’s no doubt that the wait for O’Brien’s debut has been worth it. She’s an artist who has a vision, and has not only executed it but found a new way of kickstarting the heart of a genre that quickly became a dead horse to be flogged whilst commanding a new space of her own.

On Wonderful, Glorious, Mark Everett not only has the songs but also a band capable of delivering the sort of breadth and depth of response he needs to keep the Eels vehicle moving onwards and upwards.

He may be pretentious, narcissistic and borderline offensive, but you have to hand it to Chilly--what he is doing here is pretty damned clever.

A glimpse at the album cover for Seer, a severe black circle surrounded by a chaos of stars and glimmers, betrays the album’s chief theme: moments of symmetry floating in space.

Margo Price has broken free from the shackles of country music on That’s How Rumors Get Started, pivoting effortlessly and elegantly towards a classic rock sound. There’s a whole lot more space and freedom to express herself now, and it suits her real well.

Taken together, it’s a sprawling, surprising album that proves a heavier sound looks good on her.

Hoop has been producing thought-provoking, arresting folk music since Kismet was released nearly a decade ago, but this is her most cutting, cohesive, and critical record yet.

Strangers feels and sounds like a breakthrough album, a set of linked short stories set to music. Having built a head of steam with her previous six records, album number seven sounds like Nadler’s waiting game is at an end.

Broken Twin may eventually necessitate more gusto and variation in tempo and dynamics should Romme want to further forge her plow forward. However, she intended for May to be a return to basics; with it, she has produced a compelling and painstakingly beautiful triumph of understatement.

Take Her Up to Monto continues Murphy’s reemergence as one of the most interesting and chameleonic electro artists of the moment.

It shouldn’t all work together, but the record has a beautifully cohesive groove, the many disparate parts seamlessly fitting together in typical Rostam fashion.

Boxed In is an album that's hard to pin down, but it hits hard enough in places to get the party started and holds just enough back to make you want to return to it again and again.

Although Burch indulges herself in lovelorn lyrics for the entirety of the album, she manages to keep everything fresh and clean even when the tempo slows down.

The album’s only real mishap is the lack of sonic cohesion between energizing jams and moments of quiet clarity, but each song is able to hold its own as a solid pop offering.

Burhenn’s remarkable vocal dexterity that allowed her to jump tempos and genres so easily there is still alive and well on Lovers Know, yet embedded here in a dense synthpop milieu.

Petrichor lingers long after the final note. This is not just Shake’s best work – it’s a classic in the making.

Those who like their Bad Seeds really bad may be disappointed with the tracklisting, but what stands true with this release is that Cave can be at his most powerful when at his most soulful.

The more deeply you dig in, the more compelling depths Fleuves De l’Ame reveals.

The result of his efforts is a celebration of the strength of his character and like his personal journey, Southeastern is story full of meaning and it commands the listener’s full attention.

With Endless Summer, Sóley has delivered a reminder for us all to emotionally re-set.

An addicting 46-minute listen that grows with consecutive approaches.

With The End, So Far, Slipknot haven’t reinvented themselves, but returned to their roots with an older, wiser and more concise outlook, resulting in a record that chews its listeners up almost instantly, and spits them out an hour later feeling beaten, battered and ultimately, cleansed.

Their latest album Battle Lines is a potent reminder of the power of the combination of hard rhythm, electronic experimentation, and hard-hitting lyrics.

Working with producer Randall Dunn again at the famed Avast! Studio in Seattle (fortifying that West Coast pedigree), Black Mountain have become more capable than ever of transmuting their kaleidoscopic visions into a volcanic unison.

Despite the mad proliferation of comparable contemporaries, The Deer Tracks have balanced out, and in so doing added context to their oeuvre whilst avoiding sounding derivative.

The album’s nine uniformly strong tracks reflect the major life events that have led to an extensive break from the heavy lifting involved in writing and recording as a solo artist.

The result is a hugely compelling, powerfully inviting album that manages to be simultaneously and seamlessly equal parts intimate and epic, experimental and elementally down to earth – often simultaneously. A perfectly formed gem, in other words.

On Hold On Baby, we find King Princess both more coy and more confident than we’ve ever heard her, and she leaves us little doubt that both those sides of her feed one another.

The infectious results deserve to elevate McCombs beyond his durable cult hero status.

Overall, Trick is reminiscent of those rare enjoyable hangovers--contemplative, contented and tranquil. And like those hangovers, it is unusual and a delight.

On This Stupid World, Yo La Tengo proves they are still relevant arbiters of rock.

There is a broad crossover appeal, and there is so much to unpack. They have taken the sounds of their EPs and expanded into something more expansive, without losing what endeared them to audiences. This is a thrilling, evocative debut that lives up to the hype.

There’s the sense that the artist is using this record as a transitionary vehicle, a space where he can blend familiar themes with unfamiliar sounds, adopt different lyrical approaches and mix them with different styles of production and instrumentation. Such an effort is testament to Sweatshirt’s status as one of the foremost artists of the hip-hop avant-garde.

It’s a classic KC album. His Scottish brogue, the bagpipes, accordion and harp all reappear for his now expected impish magic.

Pray For Rain sees Pure Bathing Culture taking a step towards an elevated form of the type of leftfield pop the band produced during their first outing, and in doing so, they’ve created an album wrought with subtle nuances and big ideas.

Dungen Live is first and foremost a team effort, a totem for the kind of intuitive and intoxicating musical family communion that is hard to come by.

Its power is found in the band’s ability to trap and pin you down to experience a place unholy – to transport you into their gnarled world that struggles to give way to its inevitable ruins.

Instead of signaling a demise (of a feline nature or otherwise), the album represents yet another sonic rebirth from a band who has been making a methodical career out of rising from the ashes of inactivity to surprise us all once again.

The album is a heavy 17 tracks that last over 70 minutes, meaning it’s a long and intense listen, but deliberately so--loneliness is a long and intense feeling.

On first impression, in|FLUX is almost alienating, an unsettling listen that does all but invite you back for more. But with determination, passion, and survival instinct – the very feelings explored at such length – it yields excellence.

There’s decidedly no fall from grace here for Grant Hart on The Argument, his most ambitious and accomplished album in years.

Shamir represents what it is to be an outsider, with each of Revelation’s nine tracks teaching us to face our insecurities and embrace our weirdness. Even in the darkest times, Shamir’s brilliance continues to shine through

It’s an overwhelmingly dark album.

Courting the Squall is a collection of songs from a musician unencumbered by expectation or industry pressure, just Guy Garvey recording a bunch of tunes with his friends and seeing where his muse leads them. That free spirit gives his poignant solo material a fresh buoyancy that still sounds intimate, due to his estimable songwriting gifts and the band’s ability to not overthink these compositions and just let the musical magic happen naturally.

Avalon Emerson is doing everything required on Written into Changes to tear up the dance-pop rule book.

Surprising, always engaging debut solo album.

Mythologies is the sound of a band who've realised their previous limitations, improved on the sounds they're most comfortable with and invited us to listen to them discovering their ability to splatter the canvas with all kinds of beautiful mess.

Sexistential is Robyn at her most lucid, practicing at liberation and assuredness now with this singular caveat of reinhabitation that doesn’t celebrate Robyn as a pop iconoclast with thirty years of consistent brilliance on the scoreboard – or doesn’t only; rather, she wields that in the creation of a self-mythology that also manages to sound brilliant on its own merit.

It’s music made by a human being, intended for human beings, about losing one’s humanity in order to transcend it. By nature, that makes it immensely incomprehensible, scary and challenging, even difficult to get through for the uninitiated. But if you meet Anhedönia's creation on her terms, ready to plunge into the depths and emerge semi-alive, Perverts will open up to you – at least, it did for me.

It’s haughtier, humbler, more powerful, more delicate; it’s like Anna Calvi was dipping a toe in the sea, and now that she knows that the world rather quite approves of her, she’s ripped the ripcord and is delivering the beast within.

Even if a few rougher edges wouldn’t go amiss, the results prove resonant, occasionally reminiscent of the similarly genre-blending mash-up of black music styles exemplified by Sault.

Mellow Waves is the sound of an artist reaching a conclusion, one that is content with its place in music history as it is hopeful of the future.

Cyclamen is immaculately crafted and the arrangements themselves would be worthy of praise regardless of whose name was attached to them, but it’s Graham’s razor-sharp lyricism and vivid vocal delivery that gives the music real heart and therefore makes the LP worthy of listeners time.

It scrambles the brain, leaves the heart feeling empty, but compels the body to move. Woof scratches that primal itch. It's the sound of a society unraveling, and Fat Dog has captured it.

In Criminal, Luis Vasquez has constructed an album dark and bleak in nature, an exploration that sees him turn his attention to creating hard hitting industrial rock in order to deal with all he's lived through. It's a record of which he can be proud.

While the big-tent ambitions of Farm To Table make for some of Strange’s most exciting fare, they also narrow his range sightly, making the record feel in some ways more creatively restrained than his debut.

On The Ship he has managed once again to take listeners somewhere thrilling and new, while rising to the challenge of adding another dimension to a distinctive career filled with innovation and originality.

Where The Heaven Are We ably showcases their innate knack for massive hooks--it’s a rock-solid debut with something for everyone.

Ultimately, the Growlers’ sunny disposition and incredibly natural, economical style of songcraft carries them through Chinese Fountain, an album which manages the impressive feat of leaving the listener both utterly satisfied and hungry for more.

2020’s Morissette is as emotional as ever and her songs are incredibly heartfelt.

It’s a disco ball in a downtrodden pub that occasionally shines a light on the ashtray angst of early Iceage, while remaining focused on the wider picture.

AI could never replicate the unique balance between deranged imagination and supreme sanity that is the mark of a great Sparks record like this.

Sure, these songs are dense, but they are dense, triumphant pop songs. They will make you want to get on up and turn it loose.

Suffice to say, Alicia Bognanno is in her prime as a musician, songwriter, and producer, and somehow comes out of Losing better than before, proving herself as one of the most consistent and impressive artists of the decade.