Confession presents dal Forno’s music at its most lush and sensual, evoking 90s dream pop as much as 80s post-punk. It still has the chilly sensibilities of her previous work, but there’s a shimmering lightness there as well, like sunlight reflecting off the ice.

Requiem is unlikely to be an album that creates a new legion of converts, but for devotees of this true innovator it’s an incredibly rewarding one.

These four songs are the antithesis of the gluttony of the “gifting” economy and they’re all the better for it.

The music is satisfying for Nine Inch Nails longtime fans who get to hear old music replayed with energy – and is even fun at times – but there’s not that much to it beyond that. .... The project feels curiously unimaginative.

With Future Present Past, Irreversible Entanglements have delivered an album that matches the quality and creativity of its predecessors. At the same time, they’ve refined their vision – coupling familiar sonic elements with a new-found directness.

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.

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

Kammerkonzert is cemented in the fundamentals of music creation, using orchestral music as its base camp. But of course, Jenkinson wouldn’t let you get away that easy, and as the music builds he washes his wonderful, abstract pigments all over those traditionalist forms – whilst maybe just hacking off a few musical purists along the way.

Dying Is The Internet is a different breed, boasting fully-fleshed, albeit unorthodox songs that impress with their serpentine arrangements.

It’s good to hear that 40 years in the game hasn’t jaded their urge for silliness. .... It’s all entertaining enough without breaking too much of a sweat.

It sounds, somehow, like a record from the 1960s that nobody made. Not because it sounds retro, but because it has the self-evidence of something that should always have existed.

Eisenberg manages to patch together not only personal memories but also their different musical routes into a stunning record that feels like an early contender for album of the year lists.

By the end of MIKE’S POMPEII, the rapper has shown a range of styles, flows and cadences that perhaps doubters wouldn’t have thought he was capable of on SURF GANG productions. Sweatshirt’s UTILITY, whilst treading new production ground, still feels quintessentially him.

Distracted feels like something rarer: a deeply human, painstakingly crafted album. Stephen Bruner has taken our collective exhaustion, our grief, and our hyper-connectivity, and transmuted them into a masterpiece of progressive R&B.

The enrobed duo of Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson have produced a beguiling work that distils the overwhelming impact of nature on the human psyche into 80 minutes of utterly transcendent avant metal.

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

With just nine tightly constructed and sonically consistent songs, the record is a fleeting rush, but what keeps it from being slight is all the rich perspective and detail.

It shouldn’t work. But it does.

Densely packed, I Guess U Had To Be There contains nothing superfluous and no lines wasted – just impactful verses set against Bash’s cacophonous yet cinematic compositions.

This new music is carefully constructed, cerebral, intrinsically heavy, and has the quiet amazement of someone looking at their near-forgotten reflection. It’s not a complete transfiguration, but owns its corner of darkness, and shines precious shards of light on what might come.

Ladytron are back, and with Paradises, their danceable and thoughtful pop music seems to have gained new resolve.

It’s a confident evolution from her 2020 EP Character Development!, with Grey producing an utterly refined sound that encapsulates the highs of the 2010 pop, bro-step and bubblegum bass eras.

Full of ire and desire. .... Gordon is no luddite. She’s incorporating sounds and techniques that – and apologies for bringing age into it – most other septuagenarians would recoil from.

Saputjiji is a profoundly uncomfortable and rigid listen, stripped of easy melodies and devoid of false hope. .... She has built a towering work out of static, grief and unyielding resistance, proving once again that she is one of the most vital, terrifyingly brilliant artists operating in Canada today.

Remarkable record. .... Of The Earth is so much more than an expected next step, far greater and more expansive than a development of earlier themes and ideas. For all that Shabaka’s journey has already proved to be long, winding and singular, you leave this record convinced that he’s only just getting started.

The Pleasure Is Yours absolutely delivers on its title: it will surely make any room its in a sweeter place for playing it. But its proof, too, that sometimes you can have too much of a good thing.

As with all Callahan’s work, his immaculate comic timing, pathos and heart are intertwined – the strongly held centre of the maelstrom.

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 folk guitar rhythms and stray words are easy to catch, and that surface level listen is pleasant enough. But the immediate impression of gentleness is something of a bait and switch. Maria BC calls for you to be on your toes so that you are not caught off guard when the message finally breaks through.

No Lube So Rude is an album of alacritous beats and riotous self-expression with moments, like ‘Watcha Gonna Do About It’, that are oddly redolent of Madonna’s electronic-focused albums from throughout the 10s. In truth, at times it can start to feel a bit one-note. .... Nevertheless, that famous quote so often misattributed to Voltaire stands, as do the words of Peaches herself: “Now more than ever, there are so many forces that just want you to give up and be quiet. If this album can help you resist that, then that’s what it’s for.”

The multiple styles and masses of guest appearances on Discombobulated could have produced a scrambled blob, but instead the community around the core band members adds clarity and strength.

Wuthering Heights the album is an independent work of art. .... With a voiceover from Cale that sounds a bit like a corny narrative piped out in a theme park ride or immersive experience, the song ["House"] builds into a majestic, doomy dirge. But the rest of Wuthering Heights is a pop album, if a gothic one. ‘Dying For You’ and ‘My Reminder’ are immediate hits, while ‘Always Everywhere’ and ‘Chains of Love’ carry the swooping melodrama of a 1980s power ballad.

In the end, the accompanying audiovisual film probably captures the album’s possible reception: numbers of people dance happily around Harle, while others stand still, looking slightly underwhelmed.

She may be six albums in, but having taken the time to pause and recalibrate, Scott is proving that she still has much to say and a voice that is worth listening to.

The entire album is a feast for the senses, its production DIY yet lush, kitsch yet rich.

Across the album, Csihar proves himself a top-tier metal vocalist operating between growling, shrieking, operatic wailing and other inhuman vocalisations. Necrobutcher’s presence on bass is equally notable. In a genre where the instrument is often buried, his lines remain audible and forceful, contributing to the chaos, rather than disappearing into it.

Developed over a rough couple of years for the band, with both singer Valentine Caulfield and drummer Alex Macdougall battling sickness and enduring multiple rounds of surgery, it nevertheless arrives sounding invigorated and defiant.

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.

You might expect that pulling one part away from the whole would leave you with something solitary, but Weitz’s departure from his proverbial and literal ‘collective’ does not reduce him to a singularity. Instead, he emerges as a complex sum of parts all of his own.

In its moodier moments, the music can be as gorgeous and inherently moving as Rafael Toral’s explorations of sustained harmony on Traveling Light. Yet, a sense of disquiet follows like a shadow, haunting the melodies, ready to break the enchantment. .... When they finally culminate in the overpowering, elatedly bright ‘A New Morning Breaks’, Dorji’s music begins to feel truly necessary, a transmutation of current anxieties into a determination to move forward.

It’s the sound of joyous, playful experimentation squatting the rarefied worlds of chamber ensembles and concert halls. .... Even when Daniel steps furthest into abstraction it never feels like pretensions towards aloof, high art alienation.

Crisp, rich tones leave space for the imagination to flood in, and take us to a location that exists only in the mind. Sidings is Craven Faults’ best, most irresistible work to date.

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.

No More Like This is intelligent but not chin-stroke music. It’s for the dance floor – and the after-party.

There’s humour present in the exuberant ‘Let There Be Shred’. This is Megadeth at their most Spinal Tap, and that is in no way a criticism. There are some mid-paced, albeit melodically snarled, numbers in the centre. For the Risk fans, perhaps? The aggression and guitar solo heroism re-erupt in the second half when Mustaine revisits his preoccupations with warfare.

In scratching their own itch, Xiu Xiu have made a brave record.

A glorious return from the off, III begins amidst a shocking cloud of fuzz with everything a little broken up around the edges.

As the album progresses, new textures arise in contrast with the previous tracks, keeping the sprawling 80-minute runtime unpredictable and intense.

It sometimes feels as if Sleaford Mods retreat a little too far on The Demise of Planet X – diagnosing collapse with sharp wit but leaving little in direction or galvanising force. In a Britain that could use art to provoke unity as much as amusement, that distance feels not just like an easy route, but a missed opportunity, no matter how enjoyable the chaos remains.

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.

Each creative filament feels fully charged, dancing across tides of mercurial water. Lattimore’s harp echoes and elevates a time that harks back to a more distant past and Barwick’s synths and siren-calls keeps us in the glass-edged moment.

‘‘Feet’ is probably the set highlight, a real mutant groover, whilst ‘Bobby’s Boyfriend’ actually becomes creepier for its more skeletal arrangements. .... However, straightened up versions of live favourites ‘Whitest Boy On The Beach’ and ‘Tinfoil Deathstar’ suffer for lack of mania and a flatness that doesn’t tally with the memories of incendiary live shows.

The tracks are constantly in restless conversation, playfully sparring, casting light on new angles every listen. .... Implosion conjures a dystopian Ballardian skyline, but at times is able to point beyond it, offering a glimpse of how much more the genre has left to explore.

The bombast side of things is immensely powerful from the off. It’s the glue. Indeed, more than any other aspect of this live music, it is the choir – a triumphant icing of richly layered, though regularly in unison, often enormous, high quality backing vocals – that lends this concert both its sepulchral juggernaut energy and its sheer ‘open space’ rolling vastness. .... For me, the quietest moments work least well. Cave’s overwrought melodrama requires the back alley impoverished, addicted, outsider energy of his earlier eras, rather than this comfortable, even imperious, audience conducting showman.

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.

The instrumentation fits perfectly with the otherworldly, thoroughly non-jazz sounds of Toral’s guitar pedal wizardry, and the absence of an expected dissonance between the two feels strangely hypnotic.

Changes In Air is subtle, almost ornate, but Coverdale whittles minute variations and intricate textures to discretely demand our attention. Encouraging us to actively notice rather than passively absorb.

Watch It Die will likely comfort those already on side, but it leaves you wondering whether well-intentioned decency is enough when the world they’re responding to demands more than sanitised anger and familiar sounds.

It’s good enough that you could even pitch it as the fitting finale for an entire era of rap, one whose greatest voices are now firmly approaching pension age. But the album actually creates the opposite problem: it’s too alive to be an ending, too rich with ideas and sonic pleasures.

Although some darkness is present, A Man For All Seasons delivers a sense of hope. The album’s charm is in its vulnerability.

Musically, it’s a travesty. .... Little glimmers of Mike Patton’s personality do, accidentally, seep in. His campy performance during ‘Heaven’s Breath’ lands somewhere between Alice Cooper and Nick Cave.

A vital artefact, 1985: The Miracle Year catches Hüsker Dü at their most inventive, straddling the line between hardcore ferocity and pop accessibility while revealing a potent mix of raw power, emotional maturity and musical ambition that helped pave the way for alternative rock’s emergence from the underground into the mainstream.

There are highlights, sure (twigs is too preternaturally talented to avoid those completely), like the gleeful ‘Sushi’ or gorgeous closer ‘Stereo Boy’, but even the more compelling tracks like ‘Cheap Hotel’ – a satisfyingly eerie piece of slow-garage – would rank towards the bottom of EUSEXUA’s track-list. What’s odd is that we know twigs can do this style justice – she has an album from early this same year to prove it – so its bewildering to hear her deliver one unrewarding song after another.

What you’ll know after listening to Vesper Sparrow, is an option for the album of the year.

Lopatin doesn’t just wring moments of grin-inducing audacity from the archive, though, but a startling degree of emotional range too. .... It’s a magic trick he pulls off again on Tranquilizer: sifting through the graveyard of our computers’ dreaming and conjuring something enchanting.

A Little Death showcases Rousay’s ability to convey complex feelings of nostalgia, bringing to mind the themes of films such as Aftersun or Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind in their wistful approach to the portrayal of memories.

While track-sequencing can edge towards clunky territory at times, How You Been is a colourful murmuration of percussive, glacial synths and exploratory jazz interplay. Exciting, expansive and entrancing, SML are evidence of the supergroup’s enduring power.

After the insular mood of Quaranta, with its themes of addiction and depression, it’s refreshing to hear Brown having unabashed neon-lit fun.

Their seventh stellar album in a row. .... The Alchemist makes for an inconspicuous partner, creating eerie soundscapes upon which Woods and ELUCID make things a whole lot eerier. And make no mistake, there are some hair-raising cuts here. .... Armand Hammer are equally adept at turning the world suddenly inward, punctuating political madness with moments of real poignance.

The album is spacious yet claustrophobic, improvisatory yet focused. You find something new with each return visit.

Across seven songs, she builds an intimate ecosystem of sound: an act of re-inhabiting the body through vocal layering, breath and harmony.

For all their compositional and audible dissimilarities, each group of tracks represents a strident argument for the place of the human and the instinctive even amid finished pieces which, at first exposure, may read as more electronic than organic. .... Throughout each EP there’s audible glimpses of the rooms the live performances took place in: shouts and applause being the obvious ones, the sense of space and warmth more felt than heard.

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.

For the listener, its rawness can feel akin to ambulance chasing or scrolling the sidebar of shame. But in the fishbowl of fame that Allen has existed in since ‘Smile’ came out in 2006, it’s also a massive eff you to the prurient media class. .... Here it is in all its hypnotic, looking-at-a-car-crash glory: vomiting up beautiful couplets of utter emotional desolation and romantic hopelessness.

The growing distance of time and space unfortunately seems to have had an effect on the album, which, while not without its bright spots, is disjointed and lacks the group chemistry that’s kept their best work so resonant over the years.

Hamdan stays true to her musical roots while capturing the anguish of our times. She balances grief with persistence, tempering pain and disappointment with the experimental grooviness she’s known for

There’s a distracted short-attention-span looseness going on that feels artificial and I hope it is, because otherwise it’s just thick. Shallowness worn proudly. Where some lines technically work, overall it gets so disjointed and almost comedically dumb-arse, it becomes less than the sum of its parts.

The band, led by its creative core Douglas Dulgarian, have managed to fuse the noisiness of reverse-reverb effects and jungle breaks with the dark, heavy textures of contemporary shoegaze. And Lotto, their most recent outburst, might well be their greatest.

‘Out Of These Blues’ adds a country twang to the formula. ‘Live With Hope’ uses a gospel choir. A couple of others are more stripped back and equally forgettable.

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.

On their best album to date, it makes for extraordinary music, rich and rewarding. The smallest tonal shifts define the way the next moment feels.

SickElixir is the sound of technology having long widened the disparity between the ruthlessly wealthy and those clinging on by the half moons of their brittle fingernails. .... Blawan has provided the perfect soundtrack for us to writhe about to, like maggots in the dark.

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.

This is unabashedly retro-stuff, cut from the same silken cloth as Timbaland and Noah Shebib. But that’s no bad thing. Rochelle makes the sound her own, effortlessly. Some music is just cool, plain and simple.

The album unfolds at its own unhurried pace. Initially, it can feel almost vaporous, but its textural richness rewards patience; with each listen, new layers emerge, like light shifting through water at different times of day.

The trio’s music here is still that much more dynamic and to the point, especially as Ambarchi’s ghostly riffs start waving through the groove’s valleys and mountains, evoking the intricate loops of his solo albums.

Perhaps the main strength of 41 Longfield Street Late ‘80s is that these songs rarely turn out to be what you thought they might be, which is a fairly on the nose metaphor for life itself – especially viewed 35 years later through the distorted prism of the 2020s.

Bowie sounded like Bowie again. .... Judging by the excellent A Reality Tour live album, remastered and resequenced here, Bowie was on a roll. .... The ground was being tilled for Bowie’s extraordinary swansong, Blackstar. .... His late-career bits-and-bobs tracks, as evidenced by the music gathered on the Re:Call 6 compilation and The Next Day Extra and No Plan EPs, were often fantastic.

Allbarone, then, is arguably the rawest and truest manifestation of Baxter Dury yet.

Squandered its potential. Maruja emerge from the studio with raucous rap-rock and meandering jam music in tow, resulting in an album full of the same songs several times over. By the end, listeners may feel they have deja vu. Fans may feel they have dementia.

A pleasing anachronism landing on a very different planet. Even though the band had reformed for some dates a decade ago, it’s a return that feels as unexpected as a reappearance from the ghost of Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra.

It feels almost too intimate for the world to hear.

Raymond tells timeless tales through her free-spirited performances. If, sometimes, it feels as if seventeen separate melodies are somehow being flung from six strings and two sets of five fingers at once, then know that all of nature, its blooming flowers, its swooping birds, appear in our ears because of her innate command of an explosive musical articulation.

Saint Etienne want you to remember them this way with not just the pop album of the year but with the pop album of all our lives.

If Autofiction was the first entry in a new triptych, considering the same themes at a more mature stage of life, then Antidepressants is a fine middle panel: a warp of the formula that is considered and progressive, if not as immediately thrilling. .... What a blessing that they’re using this renewed energy to keep complicating and interrogating their own artistry.

However dark the underlying motives are, The Collapse Of Everything gives a sense of hope, rising from ashes.

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.

Musically, Smith’s electronic extravaganza finds kinship with such auteurs as Fever Ray and Estonian producer Maria Minerva. From shimmering hypnagogic pop on ‘Both’ to playful 8-bit ‘What’s Between Us’, Gush is inventive and unpredictable.