Whilst Bandana doesn’t have Piñata’s same effortless sense of an instant classic, it has considerably more urgency and contemporary punch, also reflected in the once-again immaculate choice of collaborators, Killer Mike and Pusha T in particular contributing a devastating sucker-punch to ‘Palmolive’.

There is humour--albeit dark--throughout this precious, timeless album.

There are countless high points, memorable moments and addictive grooves on these two discs, and Haiti Direct is most certainly already a candidate for compilation of the year.

Rather than carry a casket loaded down with the fast-tiring tropes of the doom genre, with Foundations Of Burden Pallbearer choose to breathe thrilling new life into them.

Forty-two minutes of profound pleasure all in all, which both challenges the clichés of guitar-based heaviness and mines them for their ore.

Her distinct 2018 style isn’t lost at all. The dreamy synths, the soft vocal harmonies and the unhurried compositions are still there in several tracks on this record. Thanks to that, Orquideas is the perfect tracklist to introduce any newcomers into a more niche latin sound.

Joy as an Act of Resistance is a feature-length confirmation of what many have long suspected: channelled via frontman Joe Talbot, the Bristol five-piece are striking a midpoint between polemical and impactful, the grit of which few contemporary guitar bands have any odds of outdoing.

Where Visions looked inward--sounding like the echo of your voice inside your skull--Art Angels blasts relentlessly outward; an unabashed pleasure seeking missile that blurs the lines between euphoria and the nauseating sickness of excess.

To say this is a 'fans only' set is something of an understatement, but if you do have an interest and indeed if you can actually afford it, this is a lovingly put together and ridiculously detailed exploration of a record that has aged very well. For those whose interest is more casual the two-disc edition is well worth revisiting.

They mix a palette of distinctive darkness, creating a work of remarkable richness and thematic consistency. While there are still full-throttle assaults that recall the face-chewing passages of The Apostacy (‘Angelvus XIII’ packs particular bite), vast swathes of the album exude a more sinister magnificence.

Shah’s control of the narrative makes her songs sound more confidential than confessional. She exercises the same incisive observational skills that she applied to songs about social unease and toxic relationships when she turns the lens on herself, as willing to be cutting, critical and humorous when she is her own subject.

She has delivered a body of work where she has given herself the space to be resilient, vulnerable and inspiring.

It might be less daring than some of the other hankerings, but there’s no room for emotional snobbery on Plunge, no victory that’s not worth celebrating: those seized, stolen intimacies she’s grubbed around for, the flashes of desire and flushes of pleasure, are things to be savoured.

With her third album Dirty Computer, that she’s truly achieved a tour-de-force. ... There are times though where Monáe’s feminism feels disappointingly cis- and vagina-focused--I wish she’d taken the time to explore the politics of non-cis women and non-binary people a little more. But Dirty Computer succeeds at what it came to do--it’s here to make you think, and it’s here to make you dance. It is the most clearly delivered result of Monáe’s vision so far.

Part of the album's cunning is owed to the time allotted for disparate strands to develop and take form.

The overall impression is of a lamp shone directly into the darkened corners of Shackleton's music, casting all its hidden detail in sharp relief.

Former Things indicates more ambition, comfort in shifting tones and overall sophistication in its production which ultimately proves a more rewarding listen. A thought-provoking and reaffirming record.

David Bowie hasn't sounded this relevant in an age. [Blackstar] marks the bold and rejuvenated beginnings of a second or maybe third wind.

Mitski has a powerful voice, but the way she reins it in on Nothing’s About to Happen to Me creates some of the most affecting moments.

The core remains. It is a worthless task to try and work out exactly what exactly it is Sundfør practices, beyond an extreme form of uncompromising pop.

Circle have reached many great heights over the last two decades, but this new album again attains a new zenith.

Hidden mysteries of not, it’s impossible to be anything but charmed by this record.

Here, the trio integrate skeletal post-rock with soul and jazz, deconstructed by a presiding impulse to blur lines between terms or genres, allowing it all to collapse and collide. It’s harmony clashing with disharmony, the musicality of concrete sound.

[Endless and Blond(e)] are great--but they require time and, realistically, a step-back from the extraordinary (and sometimes ludicrous) hype that necessitates Ocean’s new works be either masterpieces or a complete let-down.

John Glacier sits firmly at the helm, shifting the mood around her with each note and nuance, yielding a quiet magnetism throughout.

The great joy of Agriculture’s music is the way they make these abrupt shifts flow naturally. On their second album they broaden the scope of their sound while integrating its many aspects more fluidly.

As well as being aware of frequencies in our immediate surroundings, deep listening observes cosmological energies. Angel Tears In Sunlight seems to resonate with Oliveros' observations by interweaving distant galaxies with her own rapturously intimate sonic sphere. One of Oliveros' greatest assertions is that is not only the ear that listens – you listen with your whole body.

By rights no group should be peaking after 30 years of making music together, yet that is the situation in which Oxbow find themselves. Will they ever transcend Thin Black Duke? Such are the ideas and attention to detail on this record, only a fool would bet against them.

Although Cocoon Crush finds Hertz pushing in a more organic, expressive direction than on Flatland, it’s a record that is still stamped with his distinctive quirks--thanks no doubt to his studious self-editing--as he continues to chart a path as one of current electronic music’s most consistent producers.

There is an intimacy inherent in the way that caroline let the stitches, scraps and seams show across this record, and masterful playing and songwriting matches the presentation perfectly.

Reward is Cate Le Bon’s most emotionally astute record to date, and her melodic prowess is the strongest it’s ever been. With that, Reward sounds like a modern classic, because it has a longevity that very few records possess.

L’Rain has produced another fascinating record, a reappraisal of past work, while managing not to repeat herself. It is a very interesting album, as much about resilience as it is grief.

One of the purest, most ferocious, most generous albums I’ve heard. A simple offering, and an outright masterpiece of emptiness and full-to-bursting-ness at the same time.

Adept as Shaw is as a songwriter, these twists in tone would be harder to pull off were it not for the rest of the band, whose instrumental offerings have taken a noticeable leap forward since 2022’s Stumpwork album.

An extremely accessible record for a broad-range of new listeners and one that’s easy to return to.

He lacks the humour, more explicit angst and emotional confidence of John Grant and lacks Garneau's devotion to melodrama and pop. He is hardly Stephin Merritt. He exists independently as a cultural explorer as well as simply a very fine, very sensitive songwriter.

Meticulously structured yet fuzzily abstract, cloudily claustrophobic yet aurally vast, it sounds nothing like a traditional rap LP yet definably and definitively adheres to the most crucial characteristics of the genre. It’s certainly a marvel and may well be a masterpiece.

‘Wited, Still and All…’ is a soft and broken, but strangely discordant cut, while ‘Of This Ilk’ and ‘Vital’ allow the more musically daring sides of the group to surface, with start-stop rhythms and razing riffs fencing the mass of metal aftershocks. As the album nears its end, there is a sense of something huge moving past just beyond the reach of senses, leaving a trail of subtle melodies behind. A way forward where there was none before.

The first seconds of ‘Freestyle’ are a patchwork of samples giving way to a tight and propelling track that shares its dark allure with 90s alt-rockers Morphine. Punctuated by bass saxophone, the spoken-word vocals are articulate, bringing to mind Howard Devoto at his best.

This is an album that vindicates maturity, long years of toil, cumulative effort, resilience, patience, wisdom.

Sonically, Purple Mountains embraces and accentuates Berman’s taste for cushion-edged, almost AOR country-rock, with none of the powerchords or uptempo jigs that peppered late-period SJs LPs Tanglewood Numbers and Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea.

The reissue's bonus material, culled from the original cassettes Darnielle recorded to, fails to outshine the album's original tracks, but does offer a few highlights.

Either it sounds like 35 years of extreme metal and fast hardcore boiled down into one molten sea of fury, or you straight up don’t get it and are doomed to exist on the other side of the glass. See? This us-and-them rhetoric feels more fun the more you listen to this album.

The really great thing about this heavy, intense album, as punishing as it is beautiful in its resolve, is that it shakes to the core the philosophies that Björk laid out so methodically on Biophilia, but she still finds a dark difficult way back to hope and love.

The tropes of romantic art are self-consciously manipulated, but the artifice is made plain, and the finished work feels more real as a result.

Bursts of reggae wooziness, gnarled free-jazz atonality, and electronic noise afford the album a shock of modernity and adventurousness without feeling forced or awkward.

All the material contained within is new, and very good. The bands are in fine form, building on their former forms.

That documentary ["All Junglists: A London Somet’ing Dis"] was the first thing I thought of when listening to this compilation, because while the medium is different, that fresh underground attitude is defiantly the same on this record as it is on that film.

Virgins is Tim Hecker at his most thought-provoking and enigmatic.

Mitski’s devotion to music has resulted in a tremendously earnest and endearing record.

It is these three songs [MMMOOOAAAAAYAYA, Pool Hopping and Threatening Each Other re: Capitalism] that, in their hugeness, tend to overshadow the rest of the record on initial listens. Though the remaining tracks should not be missed or dismissed because of that.

Goat has distilled what could have so very easily become an overblown meandering jam fest into a punchy, forceful and infectious masterpiece of cosmic rock & roll – the will is palpable, nigh a trace of fat on these bleached bones.

The Scientists never really broke through to a wider audience. But what they did do is leave behind a body of work that was picked up by subsequent generations and cited as highly influential. There’s certainly much to enjoy here but there’s also plenty to re-affirm their cult status in the greater scheme of things.

It’s emotive, heavy, satisfying. It’s Deftones. They’ve made their album again and, honestly, you wouldn’t have it any other way.

Funny, weird, irreverent, a bit messy in places, Wet Leg’s debut feels like a rollicking night out at your local indie disco compacted into thirty-six brisk and breezy minutes. Across a dozen by turns funny and fraught tracks, the highs and lows of twenty-something life are captured with zinging joie de vivre.

As great as these tracks are though, it's difficult to shake the feeling that they just aren't really Daft Punk.

Dalton famously believed that a singer shouldn't have to raise her voice to be heard. These minimalist arrangements, whether it's Isobel Campbell affecting a slight twang to match her guitar or Larkin Grimm legitimate twang (and the album's only banjo), are a fitting tribute in themselves.

It’s ‘The Promise’, perhaps, that best shows how these elements have been streamlined for maximum impact: deliciously tricksy drum patterns and a bleach-guzzling melody are welded to a simplistic lump hammer thump to devastating feels-so-wrong-it-must-be-right effect.

Innocence Is Kinky is a remarkable album, one which delves beneath the surface and returns with something both seductive and strange.

There is nothing comfortable about these traditions, but the evident joy in each other’s skills pushes the three musicians to peaks of subtle innovation. What News is just the latest in a string of Alasdair Roberts albums which turn our idea of folk music upside down and give it back to us charged with a new potency.

In Colour is ultimately too tidy and, Young Thug features aside, afraid to take risks, and is therefore all the more beige for it.

Voices From The Lake is a love letter to slow, concentrated listening.

McMahon examines masculinity, vulnerability and how cultural consumption converges with personal demons, and it has resulted in an album of immense integrity, defiance and beauty.

For You & I is consistent in its spirit with the label’s catalogue: often in its sound, too, although in a decade and a half Hyperdub has covered enough ground for this to be nebulous. That spirit, though, manifests itself in a defiant queerness; a grab-bag approach borne of big city multiculturalism; and a clear fascination with, and love of, sound in general.

This album is more grounded than the last: $ilk and Khalil Blu’s arrays into progressive soul, as well as their Soulquarians-style samples and wavy melodies, counterbalance the former’s intensity with a sense of calm befitting introspection. Their refined production creates the kind of depth wherein $ilk’s more personal lyrics can come through.

With features like BIA, Jorja Smith, Reykon, Tyler The Creator and Bootsy Collins, Uchis’ debut is clearly meant to make a big impact, and her romantic-tragic persona complements it beautifully.

Excellent. .... The single guest vocal comes on the album’s only misfire ‘Childlike Things’, which bizarrely features vocals from North West, the eleven-year old daughter of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, who contributes a rap in English and Japanese. With its sing-song chorus, brattish chanting and self-consciously zany lyrics (“Like a chocolate teapot / Melt ‘em down and burn ‘em up”) it sticks out on an otherwise sophisticated album, and is just plain annoying.

It is the sound of a musician coming to terms with the excruciation of making art and exposing himself without armour.

This is no retro throwback, Power Trip have poured their genuine, obsessive love of early thrash, but also Cro-Mags, Prong and Black Flag to create a boiling pot of modern metal mastery.

Fatigue deserves to be listened to in succession. It needs you to sit down with a cup of tea, it needs to be envisioned and thought through. You need to let it embody a change for you, and take you somewhere else, where you can sit in the duality of your own emotions. Each song is preceded by an interlude to piece the emotions of each track together.

Herein lies Róisín Machine’s beauty at its most uncomplicated: every single one of its songs implores you to dance, and in doing so implores you also to forget the human fragility of which you are so incessantly reminded. Vicariously through Róisín Murphy – be she god, machine, person, or something floating between them – we can forget our fragile bodies, losing ourselves in a blissful utopia, even if only for an hour.

Above all, it represents a bold, sensorily majestic step in the right direction by an artist no longer content to tread water.

As is often the case with PC Music-affiliated works, this is an album which displays, and not infrequently, extraordinary flashes of inspired production work, but can descend into tedium with as much suddenness. ... And when the whole affair does eventually draw to a close with the hum of an air conditioner and the sound of the flying Jony Ive heroine thing from Wall-E, you will probably give an audible sigh of relief. And then spin the whole album again.

Musically, it's painfully simple; sonically, it's painfully complex.

His most stripped back to date, featuring mostly Dawson’s voice, guitar and percussion, so that when a saxophone appears it drops like a bomb. It is also his most direct and haunting work, and a confident, sophisticated achievement that is surely his best work so far. .... With End of the Middle, Rich has given us the album we didn’t know we needed.

Each track is inevitably a wild combination of memories, ideas, and influences – midi-fied sacred harp singers clash with squiggly synthesis, fiddle collides with the most absurd funk bass. Meanwhile, the spectre of prog is everywhere and the club is never far away. Amazingly, it all works.

Discernible throughout Are We There is the sense that she is operating with more levity and confidence than ever before, and a song that ends with a joke, a studio outtake and the sound of laughter is the perfect way to see it out.

Shrewdly, she rarely repeats herself, keeping things fresh by always being adventurous. That’s worked throughout her career, and it works on Tension especially.

For all its complexity and dazzling scope, The Blackest Beautiful never loses its ability to channel the seething madness and, most importantly, fun of the band's live show.

From The Sea To The Land Beyond (whether encountered with or without the moving image) is a potent and poetic exploration of our own human mortality in contrast with the unyielding permanence of nature and the sea.

II is nothing short of a modern classic; the sound of a band fusing elements of electronic music with raw psych-rock to devastating effect--something more lauded bands have failed to do.

Sangare sounds energised by the new production context: the new sound becomes her, and as one would expect it is her power, verve and versatility that truly carry the album. [Jun 2017, p.70]

A masterpiece of sound design, that's no backhanded compliment. This album is the sort of sound design record that more sound artists should aspire to make.

The overall mood is reflective but such things are relative, this is still intense and emotionally heavy stuff.

Shade reviews different ways Grouper has approached her work over the years, but is also a unique look at the style that has emerged as a result, even if some of the stops along the way are less polished. If Grouper is normally minimalist in her recordings and performances, Shade is like having Harris perform in your living room: it isn’t always flawless, but it is absolutely special.

A History Of Every One deposits its listener right up close, and seemingly the improvisations are adapted to take that into account.

This soundtrack creates an air of wonder and foreboding, that only very occasionally and briefly plunges you into the darkness. ... Working skilfully with a modest, mostly-stringed timbral palette, Krlic incorporates the traditional Swedish nyckelharpa (as did Mark Korven for The Witch) and the hurdy-gurdy to underpin the conventional themes and create an unsettling wheezing groan, characteristic of these ancient instruments.

It’s underwhelming. This is not to say it doesn’t have beautiful moments, it is not to detract from Sisay’s exquisite voice; but overall this feels like one in a long line of emotive “indietronica” records that slots into one of those “chill and alt R&B” Spotify playlists. It’s fine, but it’s kind of forgettable.

Even with each powerful stride forwards in his career, it never seems Baxter will quite escape the shadowing of his late father, Ian. Yet, perhaps it is this paternal context, this very partial eclipsing that leaves Baxter’s work with a great style of its own. After all, a light emanating from shade will always appear brighter than one already doused in daylight.

The density of soil has been scraped back, giving each song a lightness and an ability to breathe.

The range of sonic ideas, fully realized songs, and prodigious vocal talent on Kaleidoscope Dream arrives as the most pleasant of shocks.

An album that is assured, contemplative, and sometimes a bit sad.

It astonished ... It is a celebration of sound at its finest and most pure: from the smallest scratch to cathartic crescendos, from spiralling improv to contemplative silences. Every note, whisper, bleep, and shift is significant. It is marvellously multifaceted but never obnoxious: a refreshing, one-of-a-kind conversation between jazz, classical, and electronic.

On the surface, My New Band Believe is a fully-acoustic singer-songwriter record, but whole strange worlds exist in every groove.

In its breadth of ambition and stunningly realised sounds, Dark Energy delivers more than just a new twist on an established style. Remaining tightly linked to the music of Jlin's forebears and contemporaries, it nonetheless maps out an inspiring and tantalising glimpse of electronic music's future.

Floreat isn't simply a seduction--in the most understated way, it's too intense for that.

Luxury Problems plays like a logical continuation of this chapter of Stott's music--the sweet spot between fear, obstruction and the warm embrace of total sound immersion.

American Standard is, paradoxically, perhaps the band’s most straight-up listenable record while also their hardest to process thematically. .... It focuses in large part on a life lived with bulimia nervosa. Like the band’s four previous albums and sundry collaborations, these experiences are examined under a harsh, bright, unforgiving light in a manner that’s deeply unflattering but also cuttingly incisive.