Building a strong, solid foundation for his skyscraper of words, the rapper channels everyone from Malcolm X to James Brown into a mountainous manifesto of beautiful blackness that is reflective of the struggle for dignity and equality, while also working towards the banishment of stereotypes. [Jan 2017, p.61]

It's simultaneously the group's most successful integration of the various strands they've chased over the years and their most ambitious and expansive work to date. [#241, p.50]

Sonic Youth have made a joyful return to their No Wave hardcore rock roots with a vibrating set of muscular songs which glide effortlessly from Gooey power pop to full on guitarmageddon meltdown, skulled out psychedelia and beyond. [#220, p.53]

Shygirl represents the very best of avant leaning contemporary UK pop on this generous seven track EP without a single dull moment. [Jan 2021, p.85]

In emotional terms Titanic Rising is immense – names like Annette Peacock, Linda Perhacs and Judee Sill come to mind, but only because it feels like so long since you’ve heard pop this epic yet unmannered. ... With tracks like the stunning “Something To Believe” lodging themselves into your heart with the sure knowledge that your relationship with this music will only deepen as the year unfolds. [Jul 2019, p.52]

This constellation of miniature masterpieces is arguably the finest introduction to the Ra universe there is. [Jan 2017, p.84]

Absolutely gorgeous. ... It’s as clear, translucent and dazzling as the medium it both plays with and describes. [Mar 2018, p.52]

Exquisite acoustic compositions meet Crampton’s taste for dissonance and distortion. [Aug 2020, p.54]

A splendid piece of work; compelling even when shorn of its conceptual and procedural backdrop, and infinitely more invigorating when considered as one with its making. [#205, p.58]

Rough And Rowdy Ways is undoubtedly the work of an artist with one eye on his legacy, yet it’s so full of wit, mischief and life that it positively sings. [Sep 2020, p.52]

Even when the songs aren't motivated by anger or frustration, they have a drive and a momentum that's breathtaking. [#256, p.52]

Most of these songs will startle you at some point. [#268, p.50]

It joins Titanic and Big Thief’s UFOF (members of Big Thief are present) as one of 2019’s leftfield pop gems, a record created with no detectable consciousness of a wider scene but with a bedroom-wide sense of possibility. [Jul 2019, p.52]

There probably isn’t a better sequenced album on your shelves. ... The remastering is immaculate, tightening up the jangle and twang, cleaning up Russ Kunkel’s drums and improving the separation of instruments throughout. Some of the alternative versions are a little slower than others; take three of “Some Misunderstanding” might just possibly be superior to the issued take, in the usual sense that sometimes musicality was sacrificed to technical perfection. [Jan 2020, p.78]

Sirens is unlike anything produced under his other aliases The Bug, Techno Animal or Ice. It exists as a piece of sound art rather than a club record. ... Sirens is testament to the ability of sound and its manipulation to transcend language. [Jun 2019, p.60]

Granted, Flow's torrent of words is Thirlwell's familiar angsty blurt of near operatic proportions, but closer attention reveals his skill as an arranger, producer and rhythm sampler is now verging on the monumental. [#208, p.57]

Buck's refusal to recognise musical boundaries and his instinctive ability to pick out elements that work together--sometimes surprisingly so--have given us a genre-bending album of high artistic vision, spit and grit. [#258, p.52]

Played front to back it works as a dazzling kaleidoscope; on shuffle, every combination worked in a different way, with no weak links because the quality of each track is insanely high. Underground, resistant US rap par excellence. [Jun 2023, p.60]

There is no fake authenticity in this musical exploration, and Herren's musical palette is impressively wide ranging. [#241, p.63]

Displays more intellectual rigour, subtle discipline and attention to detail than many of their younger contemporaries can ever dream of attaining. [#235, p.56]

Explosively powerful, yet resoundingly fragile, her extended vocal technique illuminates an astoundingly rich range of embodied possibility. [Apr 2019, p.64]

Sonnet isn't as compelling as Hymnal, with its fine balance between abstraction and form, but it's an illustration of Meluch's abilities as a skilled purveyor of rural psychedelia. [Jun 2015, p.52]

Drawn from a live show Anderson first staged in 2000, Amelia is a narrative of Earhart’s final adventure, split for the album’s sake into 22 short parts, but flowing together, with Anderson’s voice and violin floating above the deep swells of music made by a band including guitarist Marc Ribot; Sexmob’s drummer Kenny Wollesen and bassist Tony Scherr; a string quartet; and the Filharmonie Brno, under Dennis Russell Davies. [Sep 2024, p.45]

Unlike many electronic producers whose work echoes the chill of black metal, he retains a certain subtlety – each jolt of sound is unburdened by grand posturing. [Apr 2020, p.52]

Introduction serves both as a reminder of Thompson's often overlooked sense of humour and an exploration of certain cliches endemic to the pop song, but most importantly, it just rocks. [#266, p.63]

Hus’s second album Big Conspiracy is the refined work of a man who’s emerging calloused and implacable from a tough decade, most recently a 2017 conviction for carrying a knife which cost him eight months and a string of festival appearances. Through it all, his music has swayed joyously escapist more than harrowing or politically charged. [Apr 2020, p.56]

The trio’s interpretation of the material is highly sophisticated, with the freshness and spontaneity of a newly minted band. [Aug 2022, p.56]

A combination of versatility (Lucas is both singer and multiinstrumentalist) and judicious use of the recording studio makes Vanishing Twin’s fourth artist album devoid of voids. It’s perhaps their best release to date. [Dec 2023, p.52]

Carter has created a complete work that simultaneously looks back over its shoulder and glares straight into the eye of the future. [Apr 2018, p.50]

While the title Shebang has percussive compactness, the music on Ambarchi’s latest release, which is scintillating from the outset and exhilarating through and through, stretches out and expands across four continuous yet distinct sections. When the music fades away, after 35 minutes, the urge to hear it again straight away is simply irresistible. [Oct 2022, p.38]

The album's high point "Who Wants To Live Forever" is a duet between Reznor and Spanish artist Judeline, and like "Vaster Than Empires" from Reznor and Ross's Queer soundtrack is all the more complex and humane for reaching outside the tight-knit NIN universe. "As Alive As You Need Me To Be" is a fitting phrase to conjure at this point in NIN's lifespan their entire oeuvre has never felt more like a living thing, both within and outside the group. [Nov 2025, p.55]

With Discombobulated, Hen Ogledd have grown to fully inhabit their costumes, Sun Ra Arkestra style, with the greatest musical and lyrical realisation yet of their diverse strengths. [Mar 2026, p.49]

It's an extraordinary and compelling celebration of a hardcore punk classic. [Oct 2007, p.71]

Hutchings is eloquent on flute, Mthunzi Mvubu plays searing alto, while Muhammad Dawjee (tenor saxophone) and Malcolm Jiyane (trombone) have inexhaustible drive. [Jan 2023, p.62]

Fela’s youngest son inherited Egypt 80 from his father in 1997 when he was 14 years old and keeps alive its joyously angry spirit. “Last Revolutionary” is a passionate tribute to the wider inheritance of anti-colonial effort and courage that comes down through Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba and Jomo Kenyatta, as well as the Nigerian founders. It gives way immediately to the signature title track, which owes much of its airplay to a typically intense but refreshingly unmannered Carlos Santana feature as well as some of Seun’s most intense tenor saxophone. [Apr 2018, p.51]

Rundle explores shadowy dreams and gothic fantasies through a series of precariously balanced electrified compositions that hover around her--light as a feather one minute, heavy as lead the next. On Dark Horses rides headlong into the singer’s psyche as she pulls us into the darkest corners of her imagination and breathes out fevered secrets. [Oct 2018, p.64]

It’s a beautiful album, easy to play and dance to, but no less than Seun’s, tinged with enough bitterness, anger and sorrow to provoke deep thought about West Africa’s richest and most problematic musical legacy. [Apr 2018, p.51]

His new LP is a sonic assault; holding tight to punk ruthlessness and discipline, drenched in Dirty South origins. [Oct 2018, p.68]

The result is a genuinely experimental record, with more than a dash of cheerful craziness. .... The intonation may not be classically perfect, but this is the timbre he wants, and the saxophone can party over a gleeful Latin beat. [Mar 2026, p.68]

No 4 is the culmination of a pull towards music that’s more space horror soundtrack than contemplative melancholia, and Vantzou’s darkest release yet. [Jun 2018, p.64]

A quietly masterful concoction. [#236, p.62]

Estrella Sanchez and Amor Amezcua (daughter of Mexican rave icon Bostich) avoided the trap of a rushed debut album, and Pasar De Las Luces justifies the simmering approach, albeit too long at 64 minutes. [Mar 2018, p.58]

Right at the top of “Change Of Tone” there’s a fragment of studio chuckle that underlines just how remarkably spontaneous and unfussed this genre-messing project really is. There are long, slow passages of astral funk, MC’d by Terrace Martin’s vocoder and guest vocal murmurings, but also moments of much darker jazz futurism, elements of freedom (like the bizarre guess-the-nextnote piano fill under the PM Dawn-like “Awake To You”) and further elements of verité and concrete. [Jul 2018, p.57]

Impressively raucous. [#240, p.68]

Harps and synthesized beats all have a home here; and it feels futuristic in a way that reminds me of Ursula LeGuin and Todd Barton’s Music And Poetry Of The Kesh: synthesizer based folk music as the imagined legacy of a future indigenous culture. [Sep 2023, p.67]

This is Smith’s most essential non-Fall work since his collaboration with Inch back in 1999. [Apr 2020, p.60]

It not so much that her talent has blossomed, more that it has thawed a little, releasing music that edges tantalizingly close to greatness. [Feb 2014, p.50]

The sound is persistently visceral even as the succession of surfaces and interventions belies a planned set of juxtapositions. [Dec 2010, p.52]

To these ears at least, Rundgren’s finest since 2008’s Arena. [Jan 2023, p.75]

Music For Writers is lovely to review, both because it does exactly what its title suggests aiding concentration and contemplation for writers, and reviewers while standing up to a degree of scrutiny. [Nov 2025, p.53]

McGuire creates a journey that will absorb and transport any listener willing to let its sincere warmth and good wishes into their hearts. [Feb 2014, p.54]

Dance Music 4 Bad People features some of his headiest and most luscious productions, which conjure imagery of bodies glistening with sweat while moving in unison within the dusty confines of some basement club. [May 2025, p.54]

The music is smooth, the message is simple and the demands aren’t easy, but they’re vital. [Mar 2025, p.51]

Real world concerns – motherhood, self-growth, the responsibilities of adult life – are transformed into brightly synthesised fantasias. ... For a small scale project, Bamboo’s vision of pop feels pristine, a little utopia realised. [Jul 2019, p.57]

It's a generous, open-hearted collection of jams. [Nov 2025, p.50]

The results are sketches, in the best sense: unplanned, absorbing accidents as new pathways, concerned with mood rather than architectural precision. [Oct 2012, p.60]

Their debut album King Night defies genre tagging and, for once, lives up to the drooling media accolades already smeared on it. [Dec 2010, p.54]

A smorgasbord of bittersweetness, with yearning pads providing a translucent bed for snatches of fragmentary counterpoint. [Sep 2023, p.50]

The clunkier, funkier patterns mapped out here have something proufound to say about the relationship between us and our technological world, about where our dancing and moving bodies fit in among the conurbations and databanks of our lives. [Apr 2015, p.57]

There's a generous, sloppy fistful of day-glo power-pop in these songs. [Apr 2014, p.52]

House And Land’s eternal music drone tendencies are more sparingly employed than their debut, but folkie staple “Blacksmith” is a glorious outlier to this end, Morgan’s shruti box a keening back and forth foil to a two centuries old tale of metalworker induced heartbreak. [Aug 2019, p.64]

Nikki Nack is a terrific album with charm and invention to spare. [Jun 2014, p.58]

Charged with relatable warmth and an emotive, human energy that’s close to 2003’s For Octavio Paz or a less melancholy version of 2005’s School Of The Flower. [Dec 2021, p.47]

The album feels both of the original vintage in its occasional psychedelic trappings and, masterfully, altogether new. But, perhaps most importantly, it richly rewards repeat listens. It’s a dense record, but not an overly busy one, and different instruments bubble to the top with each run through. [Apr 2023, p.59]

The Omnichord Real Book isn’t for Me’shell Ndegeocello new jacks or the musically light hearted, but for listeners who aren’t afraid of taking a musical journey with no straight path. [Jul 2023, p.58]

Ultimately the digressions charm and gel thanks to the generosity of Freedia’s performances, marshalling us through dance manoeuvres in service to the communal heart of bounce. [Sep 2023, p.52]

It’s the input of guest musicians and co-producer Dave Harrington that draws the best out of the material. [Sep 2022, p.46]

Lyrically, Mm.. Food is the best of the three albums released by Daniel Dumile this year. [#250, p.73]

[A] cunning, witty album. [Oct 2012, p.62]

Craft and primitivism are often presented as opposites, but here they complement each other so completely that you couldn’t have one without the other. [Mar 2018, p.55]

Ghettoville feels dead, finished, hopeless. If this is, as the publicity hints, an end to the Actress project, then it is a dramatic one. [Feb 2014, p.44]

Haley retains the analogue wobble of his earlier work, particularly evident on 2010’s Cyanide Sisters and 2011’s Galactic Melt where his crisp and crunchy beats are at their impactful best. But on Persuasion System he’s combined them with stronger melodies and arrangements, elevating their effect from that of incidental, if still effective background music to the gripping theme of a main character. [May 2019, p.48]

Map Of A Blue City is the closest Ribot has gotten to a singer-songwriter album. It suits him. [Jun 2025, p.53]

Gengras's sublime drones--layers and layers of modular synth--evoke the spectacle and tragic history of his native California's wilderness. [Jun 2014, p.62]

There is a roughness and a sense of surprise to these tracks completely lacking from many other Four Tet productions. [Oct 2012, p.62]

The result is often similar in sound to the classic Malian groups, but much gnarlier. ... The drumming is a pummelling, clattering hailstorm of toms and snares, thrashed out at heart attack tempos. It’s all-consuming, exhilarating and fearfully hard playing, and as a truly disorienting backdrop to a virtuoso band, it pushes Tal National’s music into the realm of the unique.[Mar 2018, p.51]

What on the record might be the magnified pop of dust and surface scratch, here could represent imperfections on a cosmic scale--the debris of space and time, swallowed and digested. Where Basinski succeeds is the tone he adopts; rather than the heavy dread of inevitable supermassive doom, these sections are somehow wide-eyed and full of slowly drifting wonder. [Mar 2019, p.49]

Something about its balance between geometric elegance and genuine emotiveness gets at the heart of what makes him a great composer. The playful movement lends a sense of humanity to the structure, and the structure lends rigour to the dance. [Apr 2018, p.60]

Z-Machines' output is lifted above the realm of gimmick by music producer Kenjiro Matsuo gathering a selection of artists to compose for them. [Apr 2014, p.62]

Like Portishead, this album may very well achieve background ubiquity, but that should not be allowed to obscure the strangeness and currency of this record. [Mar 2011, p.46]

Standing apart from the usual darkwave fold, Lorelle Meets The Obsolete make music that's melodic, accessible and moreish without compromising their darker, more experimental instincts. [Oct 2025, p.64]

Martyn is very good at what he does: the record radiates maturity, technical chops and a cool, sometimes poignant emotionality. [Jun 2014, p.62]

The musicians' sensibilities combine to create a bliss pop which doesn't simply evoke the spirit of summer, but allow it to bleed into every chord. [Oct 2012, p.64]

The live material captures a potent clash of styles and reminds that progressive rock was not necessarily a pseudo classical confection. [Mar 2018, p.66]

Haino’s signature detonations and Yacyshyn’s punctuation leapfrog each other, creating a Möbius strip of energy that escalates freely without falling--a tightrope walk that American Dollar Bill has been building towards all along. [Mar 2018, p.48]

Their world is one where the scrambling of senses serves a true psychedelic purpose--to open doors, to facilitate fresh ways of perceiving and, most gloriously, to wonder. It’s great to have (all of) them back. [Mar 2019, p.49]

Rival Dealer constitutes Burial's boldest statement to date. [Feb 2014, p.44]

This is jazz that’s best heard at maximum volume. [Apr 2018, p.62]

The addition of Steven McDonald from Red Kross and Jeff Pinkus from The Butthole Surfers lends more low end weight to the band’s already bottom heavy sound, but otherwise Pinkus Abortion Technician is business as usual. [Jun 2018, p.65]

Future is one of the few true artist of Auto-Tune, and the emotional honesty lying behind trad-rap boasts bleeds from his words in a minor key and a pitch as subtly tremulous as a wobbling bottom lip. [Jun 2014, p.63]

Knowing the emotional background behind its recording makes it unbearably poignant but this crackly, lambently textured mix of treated piano, longwave static and vocals would move anyone who had a heart. Sublime art from horrible circumstances and Craig’s best work to date. [Apr 2020]

This is rain-choked pain music, inspirational negativity, hypnotic blood moon melodies over crack-slanging boasts. [Mar 2019, p.65]

Where Shine New Lights doesn't radically deviate from TJO's design concept, but it does favour a more minimal feng shui. [Feb 2014, p.51]

Each track feels like an experiment in throwing footwork principles at other genres to see what might stick, but the results are uniformly excellent. [Apr 2018, p.62]

The polished arrangements, alien harmonies and attention to detail that have characterised Stereolab output over the years are all present and to the usual high standard. [Nov 2010, p.60]

An album that marries similarly weighty existential themes with a deft, almost playful sonic curiosity. Though its lyrics grapple with capitalism’s erosion of humanity and the psychic toll of modern life, the music itself is anything but oppressive, being loaded with irresistible hooks, kaleidoscopic colours and confident, warm, kinetic production. [Jun 2025, p.50]

The compositions recorded by Matt Carlson and Jonathan Sielaff's synth and reeds duo have a sense a purpose often lacking in the hit and miss output of today's numerous modular operators. [Apr 2014, p.63]

There’s a sweetness, and an earnestness, driving these ecstatic breakbeat rave confections (you can hear the influence of Drew’s hardcore-heavy record collection too). In someone else’s hands that mood could feel forced, or just plain naff, but Resonant Body never does – if your hairs don’t stand on end for the daft euphoria of “Spin Girl, Let’s Activate” or the raw junglism of “Ecstatic Beat”, it’s about time you got off the dancefloor. [Oct 2019, p.64]