The sounds produced here move beyond music and closer to language. These machines seem to speak, generating a kind of emergent syntax. Osmium resist genre and resolution, channeling collapse into rhythm and rhythm into form. [Jul 2025, p.58]

Objects scraped, rubbed, manipulated and plucked from their natural environments for the richness of their attack, decay and luxurious resonance here produce a superbly rich, tuneful and intricately rhythmic music. [Jul 2025, p.56]

The oozing synths of “Umbra” slide deliciously in and out of phase to an ethereal keening. .... Elsewhere, she hacks and revolves samples into chittering humus – an overripe garden of imagination, bustling with enthusiasm, circuitry and life. [Jun 2025, p.64]

It’s smooth and contemplative at times, punctuated by cinematic ruptures and ambient textures that trail behind El Shazly’s elastic vocal phrasing. Her voice, processed and layered with care, frequently emerges as the central narrative device and quickly slips between intimacy and distance. [Jun 2025, p.58]

Luminal perhaps would have been more impactful as a release by itself – all but the most devoted Eno completists should prioritise it. [Jul 2025, p.52]

One thing that makes this music feel so good is the way it puts such skilled players through their paces. You can almost hear them rising to the challenge. [Jul 2025, p.52]

Lateral is far less remarkable than Luminal. .... It’s hard to discern Wolfe’s impact on what sounds like a typical Eno record. [Jul 2025, p.52]

Founding Melvins members Buzz Osborne and Mike Dillard join forces with electronic musicians Void Maines and Ni Maîtres (aka Gareth Turner) for a lively and experimental session. Both guests are let loose on “Vomit Of Clarity” where, by way of introduction, they squeeze out an involved synthesized sound collage – an effectively intriguing interval to herald in the main event. [Jul 2025, p.61]

Demilitarize was created in the wake of near-fatal illness – latent tuberculosis triggered by a brush with Covid – and is deeply reflective and personal. [Jul 2025, p.53]

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]

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

Thanks undoubtedly to their established friendship and chemistry, With Trampled By Turtles sees Sparhawk and the band bring an effortlessness and consistency to material of varied origin, from old songs never recorded with Low, to newer compositions. [Jun 2025, p.59]

Sonically, there is not much new ground to be found on Holograms On Metal Film as Stereolab are essentially revisiting the sonic pathways they carved out in the past. Yet the messaging in these songs is as timely as ever. [Jun 2025, p.49]

An impeccably crafted sonic exploration of environmental destruction and renewal, whose haunting soundscapes evoke the textures of fire and ash. Many tracks work with rhythmic, noise shaping filters, lending a throbbing, breathing, convulsive quality. [May 2025, p.66]

It feels a little overstuffed, though the effect on the listener isn’t boredom – more enjoyment at an impressive speaker taking up a little more time than expected. [Jun 2025, p.61]

In truth, what World most resembles is Mclusky circa 2002 – the same explosive energy, the same alarming imagery and sarcastic tone, but directing their exasperations in different directions. [May 2025, p.56]

Chrystia Cabral follows up her 2021 prog meets chamber pop album The Turning Wheel with an unexpected but delightful mash-up of late 1990s radio sounds. [Jun 2025, p.60]

An immensely satisfying album which repays multiple listens. [Jun 2025, p.53]

“I don’t know why I’m up here”, Hval ponders amid ebullient synths on “A Ballad”. “Lay Down” envelops her voice in a fluttering of strings and muted pads as it sifts through painful memories: “By the bed in palliative care/You had bled through your jeans” . Elsewhere, “The Artist Is Absent” paraphrases Marina Abramović, transforming presence into absence while juxtaposing low key ontological devastation with banging beats. [Jun 2025, p.52]

Things get weird and heavy with “Gimme Bread”, tense orchestral gestures and disorienting delay effects almost completely obscuring Longstreth’s lyrical allusions to hunger and scarcity. When the arrangements breathe, as in the woodwind-kissed simplicity of “At Home” or the Mount Eerie-featuring “Twin Aspens”, the album achieves a fragile grace. [Jun 2025, p.50]

Recorded with a wilful lack of finesse, it’s nevertheless the production that gives Abyss much of its heft and intrigue. [Jun 2025, p.48]

Shell~Wave is as sharp and incisive as any of Surgeon’s recordings of the last 30 years. Like the best techno, while it resonates with many rhythms, it never forgets what it is or what it does best. [Jun 2025, p.60]

The signature sounds of each ensemble have been stirred together, so that Cooper Crane’s organ, Dan Quinlivan’s electronics and Lisa Alvarado’s harmonium pulse as one, and synths and woodwinds entwine like multiple species of ivy that have grown together on the same wall. [May 2025, p.58]

Accompanied by dohool drum, Heydarian plays with harsh and montane clarity; motif and pattern emerge within a matrix of rapidly and continuously strummed chords, giving the six tracks a drone-carved, severe beauty. [May 2025, p.66]

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]

Time Indefinite feels closer to a documentary soundtrack than a regular solo album. And it tells a poignant story. [May 2025, p.63]

Deerhoof are as playful, inventive and delightful as ever. [May 2025, p.63]

The frenetic, almost no wave angularity of that track ["Camera"] calls to mind Last Exit or James Blood Ulmer's most punk-accented moments, while the contrast between hymnal vocal harmonies and brutalist sonics in "Scene 4" recalls Swans' "A Hanging". Early in the closing track "Scene 5: Breathing Fire" we hear one of the album's more conventionally structured post-hardcore movements along with an oblique ascension narrative about “basic instructions before leaving Earth” continuing, “but what do we return to?”.

These recent realisations of Ono’s scores by that flexible collective sound remarkably current and fresh. [May 2025, p.53]

The music has the translucent character of Ishibashi’s soundtracks for Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s films, where its resonance and weight change depending on the attention you pay to them. Ishibashi’s vocals are airy, light, almost noncommittal, but this only adds another layer of enigma and malleability. [Apr 2024, p.54]

Loose Talk is an engaging listen. [May 2025, p.52]

Her own voice breaks sometimes, and it’s in these moments – when she seems to drop the mask – that the album lands its most impactful blows. Tracks like “Cosmic Joke” and “Anthem Of Me” bring more dense, pressurised operatics. [May 2025, p.51]

Albums like this serve as a stark reminder of the UK scene’s capacity for reinvention in place of stagnation. With a start as strong as this who knows what direction Glacier will take next? Whichever way she goes, we should gladly follow. [May 2025, p.67]

Whatever The Weather II showcases James’s creativity and technical mastery as much as her capacity for emotional subtlety, depth and warmth. [May 2025, p.62]

Hersh’s lyrics are pithy character portraits (“Nola nobility/And you her superhero in drugstore plastic”) peopled with lovers and wanderers (“Where are you walking?/Can I join you?”). Her lyrical brevity matches the straightforwardness of the musical set-up, as well as a well-honed confidence and swagger. [May 2025, p.60]

After The Flood is a great spin, and should be revelatory to the many folks who’ve not been able to keep up with Kuepper’s Australian-only output. [May 2025, p.57]

It has an ethereal, cosmic beauty that in less accomplished hands could be mawkish, but here feels almost miraculous. The whole album feels like an invitation to think alongside it about the end of life – and in these moments typically characterised by fear and isolation, to feel accompanied by anything at all is an unusual and precious thing. [May 2025, p.62]

A lot of All Worlds could be bundled onto daytime radio playlists without standing out too starkly. .... Echoes of these acts’ more severe youthful excursions shines through on “Akkadian” – an audacious combo of jungle breaks and coldwave verses – and “Dummy”. [Apr 2025, p.55]

It’s an abstract, often harsh, sometimes silly listening experience. [Apr 2025, p.56]

The Beach Boys and Merseybeat stylings are still present, only without a single note wasted; every gesture, shaker, blurp of synth, bubble of spring reverb feels deliberate and functional. The songwriting benefits from this directness, striking an effective balance between chipper pop hooks and more introspective, often sombre lyricism. [Apr 2025, p.56]

Ultimately, the album aligns more closely with the 1990s power pop and alt rock of Sugar – and those influenced by them, such as The Thermals and Ted Leo – than the posthardcore of Hüsker Dü, but easily bests all of Mould’s previous releases that did the same. [Apr 2025, p.55]

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

Wonder at the natural world has been an inspiration for musicians for as long as there has been music, but the mournful, realist shade to Park’s work makes that wonder all the more resonant and poignant now. [Mar 2025, p.52]

While it was surely a blast to see Styles hoofing it in person, the busy clatter of the tap shoes translates to an audio recording with only limited success. .... The seven Monk tunes presented are well chosen favourites, tackled with wit, verve and a subtle sense of invention that never strays too far from their origins. [Mar 2025, p.45]

Like Eye Of I and The Messthetics & James Brandon Lewis, it seeks to engage a larger audience while remaining true to the musical values that Lewis has affirmed throughout his career. [Mar 2025, p.51]

The net result is pure expression, where themes and narratives matter less than how he speaks and twists his words into sound art. [Mar 2025, p.63]

Each song on Universe Room offers up a unique aural sensation that becomes more acute with repeated hearings. While some of the material takes several playbacks to fully tune into, other songs such as the opening “Driving Time” (with its crackling night-time cricket chorus intro), the mysterious “I Will Be A Monk”, the Pixies sounding “Elfin Flower With Knees” and hit single (surely!) “Fly Religion” become instant ear worms burrowing their way into your brain. [Mar 2025, p.59]

MIKE is a charismatic voice who excels at the art of humblebragging: “They tellin’ me I’m big, I’m shorter inside/But the remainder what I give when I’m recording these lines”, he raps on “Lost Scribe”. But one wishes he’d offer a few actual choruses instead of modest refrains. [Mar 2025, p.63]

Cultural cherrypicking goes with the territory of global pop stardom, but here the disappointment comes in the underutilised signature sounds of both lead producer Koreless and FKA Twigs herself. [Mar 2025, p.61]

Cope’s wit and poetic skills remain as sharp as his playing, all of which is further illuminated with swathes of nostalgic Mellotron and tenderly plucked acoustic guitar. [Mar 2025, p.59]

The tracks succeed more where they move away from those compromises towards experiments, extremes of play, texture, tempo, density or sparseness. [Mar 2025, p.53]

With nowhere to hide, her voice is revealed as an equally fine instrument, informed by previous interpreters such as Sandy Denny, Anne Briggs and Jacqui McShee, but with an earthier, softer edged quality. [Mar 2025, p.48]

As the work progresses, the architectural aspects of English’s music become apparent and alive, with the aural suggestion of fluid movement within rigid structures, frames that can hold and refract spatial mysteries. By “V” and “VI” the movement of amorphous sonic forms becomes magisterial, the air, increasingly heavenly. [Mar 2025, p.48]

Closing track “Alone Together” is the exception, with its laidback 70s groove. Otherwise there is a rich sense of eerie detachment, more Eno than disco. Not a desolate one but a widescreen richness of field recordings, sweetly echoing synth tones, spoken word interludes, plaintive wheepling of birds and clarinets, ghostly acousmatic sounds and layered vocal harmonies. [Mar 2025, p.46]

Those arrangements, many drawn from Ra’s own vintage charts but others assembled by Allen, have an urbane lushness, the 24-piece ensemble swinging hard in tight formation, only occasionally letting their freak flags fly. [Mar 2025, p.44]

The various elements at work on these five finely etched pieces rarely settle into any single pattern or vibe, but they also never feel like pastiche. It’s all music for the trumpeter – whose playing has never sounded more mature and exploratory – and every component of the music is as rigorous and evolved as his own vision. [Mar 2025, p.44]

For this project, Bakorta’s vocals are left at the studio door, which initially struck me as a shame, but a few listens reveal how much stronger the album is for being entirely instrumental. .... It’s clear enough what the remixes set out to achieve and, on their own merits they sound good. But in the context of the album as a whole they feel slightly tacked on; worth listening to, but maybe in a separate sitting. [Jan/Feb 2025, p.92]

It’s melodic, often strikingly beautiful and consistently daring. [Jan/Feb 2025, p.98]

There’s no real sense of ebb and flow in concession to the album format, but Active Agents & House Boys ruts away enthusiastically throughout its 58 minute running time without any hint of flag. [Jun 2024, p.48]

There’s real delight in these waters – and some shadows too. [Dec 2024, p.45]

The material from Antibes and Paris is similar – standards, plus modal compositions such as “So What” and “All Blues” that first appeared on Kind Of Blue. The difference – and it’s huge – lies in the freedom with which these are explored. This excellent set brings out that difference in all its aspects. [Jan/Feb 2025, p.102]

Afrikan Alien consolidates renewed supremacy with casual swagger, epic statements like “Afrikan Di Alien” and “YGF” sandwich more routine slices of virtuosity from the flex of “Big Smile” to the earnest romance of “Round & Round”, normality victorious against a hostile world. Strutting victorious on “Ya Zee”, he’s aspirational, iconic. .... He’s still in a league of his own. [Jan/Feb 2025, p.97]

Fine Art is a consistently uplifting experience even if on record Kneecap’s excesses don’t always convince. The banging “Rhino Ket” feels like Poisonous Poets doing Slowthai impressions with Bad Boy Chiller Crew. But more often it works. [Jan/Feb 2025, p.96]

The themes may change, but draped around catchy and crisp melodic motifs, the textures remain as gorgeous as ever. [Jan/Feb 2025, p.95]

Most of the 18 cuts clock under two minutes, long enough to showcase just how fresh and creative Raczynski still is, yet short enough to feel as concentrated jolts of energy. [Jan/Feb 2025, p.88]

GNX plays like a extended victory lap. None of the year’s singles are included, references to the beef are scattershot and subliminal but its embers suffuse every preening boast and putdown. There’s no need for big conceptual flourishes of previous albums. This time around Kendrick is the concept, his creative intensity manifested as weaponised normality. .... From thereon [“Wacced Out Murals”] it’s a rap masterclass. [Jan/Feb 2025, p.86]

The whole album seems to be incandescent with anger. You would have to travel a long way to hear an acoustic guitar album as tough as this. [Jan/Feb 2025, p.82]

Tuttle has not so much completed the pieces as translated them. .... What makes this release, however, is the inclusion of Another Fish. .... It allows the listener to hear the before to Tuttle’s after, adding depth to the process of Another Tide. And to hear Chapman’s response to Fish, in which rather than return to its thorny Fahey-esque blues chromaticism, he explores a strangely plastic but warm mode.

We get the sense that everything has changed; life goes on despite this. Her lyrics carry the same sort of dull, resigned honesty, recognised all too well by those who have experienced profound loss. [Oct 2024, p.48]

Mikael Åkerfeldt’s death growls are back, as are the intricate sextuplet grooves familiar from Ghost Reveries – but the style is also restlessly omnivorous, deftly changeable between moments of brutal death metal, bucolic folk, orchestral segues, power balladry and the head-spinning melodic complexity of 1970s progressive rock. Recently recruited drummer Waltteri Väyrynen shines throughout. [Nov 2024, p.55]

“Pensées Magiques” has little spoken word, yet it somehow perfectly conveys a sense of nightfall across the landscape, as if you and Atkinson are quietly absorbing it together. [Nov 2024, p.48]

The Crying Out Of Things, their latest album as a duo since 2021’s I’ve Seen All I Need To See, builds on the idiosyncratic elements of their established sound – monstrous distortion, crushed electronic beats and samples, scorched screams, fragments of punk, metal, pop, hiphop and dub – and the results are thrillingly, crushingly bleak. [Dec 2024, p.42]

It’s off to a shaky start – for this writer at least – with the lugubrious dirge of Procol Harum's “A Whiter Shade Of Pale” – and I wouldn’t mind never hearing The Small Faces’ “Itchycoo Park”, which follows, again – but The Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset", Pink Floyd’s “See Emily Play” and Tomorrow’s “My White Bicycle” all receive tasteful, stripped back renditions. [Dec 2024, p.54]

Songs are short with a pop-punk punchiness. “Defendants” could be a relationship song encoded in the to and fro language of a courtroom and features a breezy guitar solo, as do several tracks that follow. [Dec 2024, p.47]

Throughout her third album The Hollow, Forsyth hardly needs to name her emotions, using her voice to communicate them purely in terms of depth, size and shade. [Dec 2024, p.46]

One of the most intriguing aspects of the artist’s work with drones is their anticipatory quality, which makes it feel like time is standing still. Even in its noisiest, most overwhelming moments, Natur renders the world in slow motion. [Aug 2024, p.52]

Sharp inhalations between melodic figures are given a multidimensional presence by the reverb, grounding the sound in an embodied ethereality. As track titles like “The Cosmic Spheres Of Being Human” and “Everything Is Hidden In You” make clear, the circular rhythms of this embodied presence are identical with those of the universe. [Sep 2024, p.49]

The magic of demos is being able to discover well known songs anew. In this form, the yearning and invitation of “Colour Me In” takes on a more literal meaning (“I am grey still on the page… Just an outline, sketchy but fine…Somehow I feel that I’m just the idea”), but is somehow even more poignant, and a reminder of how songs that began so deceptively simply would be taken into so many hearts, coloured in with countless listeners’ emotions and experiences. [Oct 2024, p.69]

Raw and emotional, the work ripples with atmosphere and melody, each movement brimming with youthful optimism. [Oct 2024, p.65]

Atmospheric and engrossing, Birds & Beasts is a quiet triumph. [Oct 2024, p.62]

Susanna is backed by a quintet of musicians who move in perfect harmony with her slowly uncoiling vocal. Shifting between jazz, orchestral and synthesized sounds, her approach to the time-honoured love song format is a much needed breath of fresh air. [Oct 2024, p.62]

Xiu Xiu’s music compels you to empathise even if you cannot fully relate to it. The poignant, pulsing curves of “Piña, Coconut & Cherry” bring this perspective into focus: “You must love me, love me, love me, you are mine, this is mine”. [Oct 2024, p.60]

Born Horses feels like a logical progression, the band’s luscious drift and bittersweet arrangements blossoming into widescreen vignettes of love, loss and revelation, but delivered with a poise and scale previously unseen. [oct 2024, p.58]

To say the album is all over the place musically is both understatement and compliment. .... No More Water: The Gospel Of James Baldwin is revolutionary fire music – but it’s also a celebration, a party held in honour of a man who did so much, expecting nothing in return. [Oct 2024, p.57]

This playfulness – which tends to be overshadowed by Hendricks’s LOUD persona – continues to be one of the most rewarding aspects of listening to a JPEGMAFIA album. [Oct 2024, p.53]

Undoubtedly Revelator will be lapped up by Elucid aficionados, but equally this may be the album that compels the wider world to pay attention. [Oct 2024, p.52]

Strange and seductive. [Oct 2024, p.48]

There is a sense of overwhelming resignation perhaps best summed up by “Shame” with its line “and god remained silent”. On “Tape” they proclaim, “Earth keeps the most vile things displayed” , their fight redirected towards gluttonous voyeurs. The previous track “Camcorder” ends with “Let’s watch it again”. [oct 2024, p.48]

The result is a predictable major label mixed bag, overburdened with string arrangements and backing vocals. Even so, it’s an enjoyable album, with standout tracks like “Outubro”, a melancholic Nascimento original with vocals by the leaders; the plaintive “Morro Velho” featuring Orquestra Ouro Preto; and “Get It By Now”, a composition with a wonderful unexpected harmonic reversal. [Nov 2024, p.65]

Wynn’s solo album Make It Right is a more comfortable listen than much made by The Dream Syndicate since their 2012 reformation. [Nov 2024, p.62]

If it undeniably looks into a past long before any of the members were born, the actual results provide more welcome context, using the music of the 1960s to create a sound which, in toto, didn’t actually exist during that decade. [Nov 2024, p.62]

In spite of the album’s inconsistency, it ends on a high note with the sugary Eurotrance tropes and ear-popping lushness of “Love Me Off Earth”, where guest vocals from New York based vocalist Doss convey an otherworldly melancholic euphoria before being pitch-bent into the stratosphere. [Nov 2024, p.60]

A few tracks don’t work, like “Murdergram Deux” where he fast raps alongside Eminem in a staccato bore. While LL can still flow, he doesn’t find pockets of rhythm with the same ease he once did. But there is magic. [Nov 2024, p.56]

The album is a well-sequenced 50 minute statement that you can nod your head or trance out to. [Nov 2024, p.48]

Bleed feels more constructed than played, a diorama of dissolving shapes spread out in time. But the piece’s patient evolution and implied but ever-present rhythm all confirm that this is Necks music. [Nov 2024, p.55]

The songs that Kramer left behind, however, turn out to be wholly life affirming and full of energy – and what seems at first like a tagged solo project reveals itself to be informed by an intimate understanding of the values that MC5 stood for, with Kramer fanning the embers of the group to keep the Motor City spirit burning. [Nov 2024, p.53]

The Hard Quartet manage to create a collection of tight, fun songs that feel at once old-timey and modern. [Oct 2024, p.52]

With 16 short compositions across 40 minutes of running time, many of these pieces feel sketchy and structurally underdeveloped. Yet, there is a pleasing rawness to Bowness’s DIY production, which skews towards electronic pop, flavoured with post-punk and industrial. Bowness’s honeyed voice brings a measure of vulnerable gravitas. [Nov 24, p.55]