Throughout, Tobias balances the baroque, saturating instincts of chamber pop with urgent, to-the-point rock segments, the romantic swells of plucked and bowed strings on ‘Political Solution’ or ‘The Scam’ tempered by the almost post-punk gestures of ‘I Feel Hated’ that hug Tobias’s soulful cadence with hard-driven indietronica à la Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

Deaths is particularly, brazenly haphazard: it was written and recorded briskly, around full-time jobs, and the results are thrillingly erratic without ever feeling rushed.

In this transition from experimental noise that revels in randomness and discomfort, the album layers sound into intense, hypnotic rhythms that reveal compositional prowess.

The study of Fohr’s internal world is cosmic in scope. That could make for an imposing listen, so it’s impressive that the record also stands as her most instantly loveable collection of songs.

Throughout the album, Allen’s lyrics remain devastatingly frank. ... No Shame might sound more mellow than her earlier razor-sharp sass, but beneath the surface lies a gloom, one I’m glad Lily lets us see.

Once again, the results are even richer and more rewarding than on their last outing. There are subtle evolutions and tweaks to their tried-and-true formula, sure, but it’s hard to say what makes one Acid Arab record better than the one before it (and, to be sure, this one is their best so far.)

Sama’a is the sound of a band at the peak of their powers, their spontaneous interplay, invention and commitment undimmed. In the music of Ahmed Abdul-Malik they’ve found an infinite universe.

In this time when dank edgelords across techno and industrial music are still flogging the dead SS cavalry charger of suspect aesthetics and prissy growling, it's refreshing to listen to a record where you've never a doubt that the sturm-und-drang is in aid of righteous causes. May the Test Dept cogs keep on grinding.

On Samba he has returned to uphold the majestic grace that made his father’s music so compelling. Within the traditions of the music he is playing Touré continues to develop his own sound world.

It's quite fair to say that whatever is lost here in interesting experimental moments is made up for by enveloping production details which, when combined with his often unconventional musical choices, propel the record into an accomplishment that stands on its own.

Originally conceived as a mixtape, Trap Lord rightfully exists as a proper album, with thirteen tracks totalling fifty-one marvelous and misanthropic minutes.

Crucially, this is a record that deserves to be approached, consumed and judged on its own merits. And merits there are aplenty.

Wide Awake still sounds like Parquet Courts, but it’s a far more colourful, warmer and bolder version of the band.

Missteps matter little on an album that proves a minimal tour de force, home to some of the most simply enjoyable music in Hood’s 20-plus-year production history.

If age and the rigours of the road can start to tell as a result, the energy level is still there, whether on a strong version of the Gore-sung late 90s highlight ‘Home’ or a lovely turn through Memento Mori’s striking lead single ‘Ghosts Again’. There’s a bit of a bonus this time out. Following the live cuts, four songs from the Memento Mori sessions are included. It’s understandable why they didn’t make the cut, feeling more like good enough album tracks at most.

Le jour et la nuit du réel proves something else entirely: that these hunks of wood and wire and circuitry still have the potential to surprise. And to delight us with those surprises.

Fans certainly won't be bowled over by the innovation on offer, but as a refinement of their sound it is the ne plus ultra Autechre album, honed and executed to perfection with only a few drifty moments that suggest it could have been cut down to a single LP.

The power of Wand may not be pleasant, but its pandemic of virulent noise may well become the itch you can't scratch.

While nothing quite meets the precedent set by the first track, the album is a bracing adventure in texture.

I does follow a certain formula, but the band’s execution of it is inch perfect. All of Föllakzoid’s music swells and convulses with desert spectres and spirits, it’s music that occupies a world wherein the horizon can never fully be focused on, and all is far from how it seems.

Wand are a special band, and the new emotional range suits them.

An absorbing, immersive listening experience, Long.Live.A$AP outshines the recent full-lengths of technically more proficient rappers as well as those of strikingly safer hip-hop hitmakers.

The Los Angeles multi-instrumentalist returns with Childqueen, which retains stylistic elements of The Visitor but packs a groovier, struttier punch.

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.

For all the proggy flights of fancy here, Absolute Elsewhere still resolutely retains what made the band’s unique take on death metal so fascinating in the first place. Once the novelty of hearing them bust out Rick Wakeman-esque synth flourishes amidst churning blastbeats has worn off, repeated listens reveal the band’s songwriting skills feeling more finely honed than ever, with a consistent (if entirely surreal) logic underpinning the structure of both these side-long movements.

Gallarais is a quiet album, but a deeply unsettling one.

The Budos Band are the real deal, and Burnt Offering is quite a ride. For connoisseurs of heavy sounds, I can't recommend this highly enough.

Constant Noise redirects attention to the urgent task of repairing the fractured connections within our society. At times, the message may feel on the nose, but to articulate an appropriate emotional response, such directness may be warranted in an era where division reigns.

Where 2012's Pansophical Cataract was a bit of a meditative blur, Ryonen is more like an adrenaline hit, pumped with rushing rhythms that get the heart hammering against the ribcage.

Overmono have produced an album with a euphoric and kaleidoscopic appeal.

Polygondwanaland is one of their strongest excursions yet, not just of this year but of any.

Just as it’s often repeated that serious science fiction is written about the present rather than the future; this cinematic soundtrack seems reflective of contemporary reality much more than an invented narrative.

From the rock & roll of 'Freaks and Geeks' to the ska-indebted 'I'll Reach Out My Hand', this is unadulterated glee.

The earlier EP was impressive but they’ve noticeably pushed themselves further here, achieving something sharper, more their own.

Everything here is distorted. Everything as resonant as it can possibly be. Sharpened, infinitely intensified and yet simultaneously blunted and blurred. There is just the right amount of detail.

An intriguing listen. Just when you think you have it worked out, Souleyman changes the script, and tempo, and you’re back to square one.

‘Time Ring Rattles’ was added last year. Shorter and more frantic than the rest it bursts in the middle of the album, a spray of staccato dots and vivid daubs achieving a swarming mania. Calming down again ‘Sparkles, Crystals, Miracles’ is a warm and dreamy beauty, its mood gently ascending into a widescreen outro.

What this amounts to is a collection that’s a good way in to the work of a songwriter whose output is three decades strong and a welcome addition to Tweedy’s discography in its own right.

Dense snapshot lyrics put us in their head state, somewhere between reflection and rumination. As always with grief, there aren’t easy answers. But that act of picking at the cadaver leads to Iceboy Violet’s most focused and affecting set of songs, one that honours the humanity of its subject through bare writing.

Elegance and delicacy seem to be the intended effect, as well as intelligence, both innate and hard-won with time.

Odds Against Tomorrow is contemplative and, at times, undeniably beautiful. If earlier albums like A New Way to Pay Old Debts desublimated blues and roots music, Odds Against Tomorrow resublimates it. On this set of tracks, Orcutt mourns the loss of expressivity in music and conjures the fantastical spirit of the blues.

Musically speaking, radical reinvention isn't Oozing Wound's raison d'etre, so don't expect a new version of the wheel. Instead, there’s willful progression, incremental growth, and renewed focus. After the sprawling Whatever Forever, High Anxiety's comparatively concise seven-track, thirty-four-minute runtime feels super concentrated and highly potent, calling to mind the band's previous high-water mark, Earth Suck. But High Anxiety is no rehash.

Half Divorced is packed full of pep. They’ve stomped on the gas and it burns along like a raging forest fire.

The sonic backdrop is richer, more luscious and colourful, whilst rhythms that once would twitch are now more confident and loose.

The album manages to be wholly fulfilling. Each track takes on its own character, sometimes wispy and laid black, channelling the unbounded soulfulness of Erykah Badu’s New Amerykah albums like on She’s My Brand New Crush. At other times they’re pointed and deliberate, such as ‘Cut To The Chase’, which does away with sung lyrics entirely for statements spoken over tribalistic percussion and futuristic electronic harmonies.

The results are simply amazing, Ghil effectively standing as the premier noise album of 2013.

The centre is hard to hold and purposefully so. This is an album that exists in dream states, oneiric in its exploration of textures. And as soon as there’s something approaching a collage approach, like on ‘Crushing Realities’ or opener ‘Elemental Dream’, it is swept away in favour of something more liquid.

‘Future Times’ is a comforting record, delivered by a highly-skilled musician taking on the epically harsh world of the 2020s, and facing off against the dark forces with the pure power of mind-melting music. That kind of optimism is in short supply and we need more of what Plankton Wat has to offer us: mind expansion, inner calm, and irresistible fuzz.

The Silver Globe is arguably her most sonically adventurous work to date.

This is a concise and clever record.

Basses Loaded is excellent. Like every other Melvins record it holds its own identity while oozing the same sweet black guitar sludge they have re-perfected many times over the years.

It’s simultaneously unnerving and feel-good, witty and disconsolate. And though recorded two years ago, somehow it captures the essence of what it is to be a conscious entity negotiating the world in 2021.

The album is a gorgeous stew of musical openness and stylistic shape-shifting, without once abandoning the heritage that has birthed it.

A draining, breath-snatching release, nature morte satisfies on an intellectual level as much as one that is viscerally primal.

WOOF charms mainly by the dint of its barefaced cheek: a record like this has been long overdue, especially since the pandemic.

Characteristically, she doesn’t offer up any concrete solutions on Everything Perfect is Already Here. Instead, by listening to her music, and how she weighs every element with equal care, we’re able to stop and begin to find gratitude for the moments we might have once ignored, however fleeting they may be.

Lanegan blends his most satisfying and heady aural brew to date.

This is a very smart record, and one that bears repeated listening. The emotional maturity and frank lyricism shine through the electronic sounds and idiosyncrasy of her style, and ultimately good songwriting finds a beautiful symbiosis of sound and text.

Their bravest and strongest work to date.

One of Haines' best efforts, Nine And A Half Psychedelic Meditations On British Wrestling Of The 1970s And Early 80s is an album that does much to encourage the here and now as it does to paint an impression of a time long gone.

Blue Veil has a cinematic sense of tension that keeps the music from retreating into passive background music, but never feels overbearing. As much of a deviation as Blue Veil is from her previous work, Railton has lost none of the sense of control that sets her apart as a composer.

It is sparkling and wistful, and it's quite lovely.

Some listeners are bound to find this repetitive too, and nowhere near different enough from his previous work. Yet To Syria, With Love is also Souleyman’s heaviest and hardest record since Leh Jani back in 2011.

The five members of the Golden Quintet perform this suite with perfectly poised balance and musical integration, composer Smith's trumpet taking the obvious lead with crystal clarity yet never lapsing into solo virtuosity for the sake of it.

The album hits its stride by 'The Strange Attractor', a pulse-raiser that seductively conjoins steamy, tranced out vocal inflections to an urgent, vacillating tribal tempo.

Rather than simply throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks, together, the pair throw a lot, all while investing time and a marked sense of freedom to what each track could eventually become.

Hippo Lite is somehow softer, more palatable, indeed liter than DRINKS’s previous output, but not at the expense of the punchy attitude, the sense of humour, which has made them so captivating from the beginning.

The Men may not be here to change rock history but at the very least they deserve serious recognition for the fact that they keep doing exactly what they want, and that it continues to be as honest and as shamelessly exhilarating as the best rock music always should be.

At her brightest and her best.

The songs have all benefitted from these unexpected levels of time and space to add additional material and occasional re-writing. Pulling from the twin pressures of studio time and commercial schedule combined to give the songs a sense of gentle completeness.

What we're witnessing here isn’t radical reinvention (which is hugely overrated anyhow), but the continued refinement and mastery of a specific milieu, and the judicious introduction of new elements and a new collaborator in Arve Henriksen.

Put simply, Redemption is an impressively ambitious record, and its to Richard’s credit that she pulls it off as a cohesive piece of work.

Ballads Of Harry Houdini is more like a spiritual sequel to the rockier and cross-genre Highway Songs from 2016. It feels deceptively slimmer with just six songs, rather than nine. In fact, its total running time is ten minutes longer. Maybe more focused, then?

Using mournful drones, haunting vocal arrangements and the judicious inclusion of foley-type sound effects, Cotton communicates not simply the details of the story but the emotional journey of its characters.

The tracks crackle and shimmer with an abandon not heard since their debut.

Whether acknowledging unfaithfulness, fretting over her advancing years or giddily professing undying love, Lewis creates songs and characters as compelling as they come. A couple of duds and some overzealous production aside, that is still very much the case on The Voyager.

Self-assured and comfortable in his skin, Lee Ranaldo is properly striking out on his own and sounding all the better for it.

It’s all so assured, yet Fratti never returns to the same thought for long. It’s impressive for a musician who’s comfortable with her voice and instrument.

Mudhoney have released an astute, politically relevant and commendably fired-up garage punk belter of an LP. Aye, it blindsided me too.

It’s smart, angry, and visceral folksong, and perhaps exactly what we need just now as the trappings of our hypermodern culture fail us and the world starts to burn. A record that shows us our errors and pulls us back to the land makes for a fruitful medicine.

Quiet Signs, as sparse and subtle as its name suggests, shares its secrets only with those willing to give their complete and undivided attention in exchange.

LV are remarkably adroit tunesmiths, able to navigate the fine lines between minimalism and melodicism without ever descending into dry formalism or familiar clichés. Josh Idehen has a voice that is just as expressive and powerful.

It's a remarkable record, a reminder of that Reich, unlike many composers of his era, has not become archive material. He continues to speak to the cutting edge of music, to experiment with new compositional directions, to be vital.

This album is a demonstration of how BigHit Music’s in-house producers and TXT members' composing skills blend smoothly to experiment with sound in clever but relatable narratives. ... The Chaos Chapter: Freeze is a surreal album in which a mix of sounds, music genres, and metaphorical lyrics seem out of shape – until you step to the right distance to appreciate the whole painting.

A soup of electronic interference, exhausting percussion and smothering bass-cloud. It's stultifying like a bad case of screen fatigue; tangled and sparking - the sound of frazzled, short-fusing nerve ends.

With their uncanny knack of still sounding like very few other bands before or since their early stirrings, faith in letting the "moment" loose has once more revealed Levi, Pell and Khan to be a strange and sorcerous triptych unto themselves.



There is an eerie majesty threaded through this record that trickles through, burrows under the skin and then keeps going.

Adrift is a simultaneously relaxing and arresting experience. It's headphone music that rewards encapsulated ears and enclosed eyes.

Sleep are telling us they have been experimenting in the laboratory-studio on their rare strain of heavy music, turning the art of thundering stoner rock into a science. And with that fusion of the two cultures, this album delivers the monument to their craft they have long promised.

There is a sense of nostalgia throughout, with tracks such as ‘Angels Pharmacy’ and ‘Remembrance’ featuring female vocalist Zsela giving off hazy club vibes. The turn to voice, Actress’s first time, has formed a deeper sense of worldliness, the invasion of corporal sensation into his production style.

It’s an album that needs the thick-skin its title connotes to listen--you won’t emerge from it feeling joyous, but you will emerge seeing a truth that will deeply unsettle.

There are no crescendos or sections that wrestle for attention, but rather, an ever-shifting soundscape that swirls and swims like a starling murmuration. The shapes it makes in the air are often wounding, but also graceful. And like all of his work, it is devastating in the best way possible.

Science Fiction Dancehall Classics, with its blend of revamped urban dub and bizarre cybernetic aesthetics, proves the most suitable companion primer to Sherwood's own 2015 selective compilation, Sherwood At The Controls, Vol. 1: 1979-1984.

After the assimilation of the band into the mainstream rock pool with New Wave and White Crosses, their decision to make a stellar pop-punk record, judged on the quality of its hooks, is a great linear move. 'Blues is a palette cleanser that still causes a ruckus.

Their 2018 debut, Not With That Attitude, was a winning combination of bile, big hooks, and a great sense of humor and, although they didn’t need to, the band has expanded their palette on Contender and it’s paid off handsomely.

R.I.P practically begs to be handled, examined, shuffled and rotated in every direction, the better to identify each tiny grain of sand and dirt that's gone into its construction.

Take Her Up to Monto is the schizophrenic underbelly of Toys’ teary composure, and its much less interested in working through earthly lived experience than it is in traversing it.

While perhaps not as original or unpredictable as their previous monoliths, Infinite Granite is undoubtedly another epic, engrossing and engulfing piece.