In the end, Vespertine commits its magic by daring to go places more obvious and more human than one would have ever expected. [#210, p.52]

The album is imbued with the expectant, febrile energy that comes with having forged ahead into unknown spaces with out the means or desire to backpedal. [Jul 2015, p.58]

There is still a sense here of a group magisterially marking time, shying away this time round from any grand, rhetorical, countercultural purpose. [Dec 2007, p.63]

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

Throughout the album Nas sounds engaged, and his choices are unbeholden to the whims of the market. [Jan 2023, p.78]

It’s up there with their debut as an introduction to the Goat sound – a sound that seems even more pertinent and gloriously openended the further we’ve come from its first explosion. [Sep 2021, p.68]

A sparkling set that traces a number of lines through Haiti's musical patrimony. [Mar 2014, p.66]

What drives each track home is the tight focus of the playing, riffs and ideas, each one the clockwork fuse on a ticking time bomb. [Oct 2015, p.60]

In many ways this is his finest outing since The Boatman's Call. [#247, p.55]

This could have been camp on a Himalayan scale. Its strength is that it's anything but. [#255, p.51]

As hinted at by the title of its opening piece “Cliffwalk” the album’s forays into new sound worlds suggest Williams is poised on the edge of a fresh chapter, testing newfound powers. [Nov 2024, p.

It evokes so many emotions in a single track, and wrestling with its bittersweetness affects you in the gut. [Apr 2012, p.67]

Adrianne Lenker’s songwriting and vocals have never been more inclusive yet forebodingly sui generis, sealing that simultaneous conviviality and strangeness that makes Big Thief’s music so addictive, and the band have got tighter and warmer from the years of touring that preceded the album’s creation. [Mar 2022, p.42]

Landless’s four singers Méabh Meir, Lily Power, Ruth Clinton and Sinéad Lynch spin tightly woven harmonies with crystalline precision over beds of drones. However the album is less doomy than might be expected from a Murphy-produced album – or maybe it’s just that these voices sparkle with light and life, even as they sing about encounters with death. [Aug 2024, p.52]

A thrilling affair. [#252, p.63]

The songwriting and lyricism are strong, but her storied voice elevates the album and invests it with a depth and serenity that few can match. [Jan 2019, p.64]

This is still a grand, holistic statement, superbly structured in its 38 minutes of ebb and flow. [Nov 2014, p.66]

The parsimoniously arranged, mostly acoustic sound of the record enhances its projection of intimacy. ... Callahan doesn’t entirely give up his old taste for blankly delivered disturbance; his memory of childbirth includes the blood. But he’s never sounded so open or so genuinely happy. [Jul 2019, p.48]

Pacific Ocean Blue has aged well, considered over 30 years later. [July 2008, p.46]

Riveting. .... The lucidity behind every message on My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross is arresting, as it is drawing from a well of pure emotion that can be comprehended in full. [Jul 2023, p.48]

Marks a radical departure in its scope and overall sound.... Unwound have reinvented their music as Progressive hardcore, framing abstract conceits in rock solid structures. This brave, ambitious record retains its edge in a blur of invention. [#206, p.76]

Female defiance and desire in a glossy, dystopic package. [Jan 2018, p.77]

Gabriel’s not trying to be clever here, he’s being sincere. And because I favour savoury over sweet, I can strongly recommend the Dark-Side Mix which has more room to breathe, a fatter bottom end and weirder edges all round. [Jan/Feb 2024, p.84]

Production wise, [Have] You In Wilderness is a touch too diaphanous and gauzy, a few tracks in, you start craving something solid to hold on to amid the clouds of billowing strings.... It's a testament to Holter's songwriting ability that this doesn't fatally mar the album, but it would be appreciated if her future work demonstrated a greater sense of its own physicality. [Oct 2015, p.54]

She mostly succeeds at marrying that [transcendent black pop] to a sound that’s broader and more accessible than anything she’s put out to date. [Jul 2018, p.53]

Fetch sinks below the high water level of conscious synapses firing to collapse perceptions of time and warm the sheets of the subconscious. [Aug 2012, p.48]

Across the album woodwinds and brass establish the atmosphere, allowing Callahan to revisit some darker parts of himself with the safety of knowing that everything will be fine. [Dec 2022, p.64]

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]

Ultimately, these elements mostly serve to contextualize some beautifully conceived programmed music within an edgier club culture. [Jul 2012, p.62]

Throughout In These Times McCraven displays a preternatural ability at composing outside of 4/4 time, his oddly metred pieces built upon ear-catching melodies and dynamic rhythmic interplay. ... In These Times encompasses the fire and natural eclecticism found in the best contemporary jazz.

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

It is a fine, unnerving album. [Mar 2016, p.45]

MBV is a successful return. [Mar 2013, p.49]

Circle’s ability to fuse distant or disparate modes and styles is part of what makes their music so compelling. Where attention might before have been generated out of the way it all fitted together, the tension here is more about viscerality, more about the vocal and guitars tearing through your body than seeping into your brain. [Sep 2017, p.48]

When she laughs that she’s never read Robert Greene’s self-help manual 48 Laws, not only is she declaring her album a bullshit-free zone, she’s redefining priorities for 21st century grown-up rap. On this form you have to hope her approach prevails. [Nov 2017, p.70]

It’s a joyful noise, for sure. [Oct 2023, p.50]

Finlay Clark and David Kennedy ride a similar wave to improv duos like 75 Dollar Bill or Orcutt/Corsano, recalling their own thrilling work on 2020’s Fast Edit. The sliced mayhem of that set is missing here: instead, the group seem to have spent the years working on stitching themselves ever more tightly together. [Jun 2024, p.58]

The sum is Ocean’s most thorough reading of his world to date. [Oct 2016, p.65]

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]

Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! sees Cave at his wittiest and most relaxed, though perhaps also most detatched. [Apr 2008, p.53]

There may only be nine tracks here, but it’s like there are worlds upon worlds to explore; Strom had a knack for making every note feel special. [Feb 2021, p.55]

The record is a meditation on masculinity, both lyrically and musically. But it is a sombre, barely lustful masculinity that growls and shrieks and howls and tells stories here. [May 2017, p.52]

Cocoon Crush is, partly, the album that you’d imagine Future Sound Of London’s Lifeforms might have become if they’d had a million times the processing power at their disposal. Poised and composed. [Dec 2018, p.45]

A general choogle drives most of the songs, the production tends to suppress any heavy metal impulses, while the dense arrangements also neuter Dawson’s gnarled improvisational guitar style, so extremes are essentially cancelled. It’s the most normal sounding record I’ve heard from either party, but the singer can’t help but entertain even within these surprisingly prim surroundings. [Dec 2021, p.48]

There have been so many reissued and remastered releases throughout The Beach Boys’ career that even the most dedicated completist might grow weary at the prospect of another. However, the tracking sessions on the third and fourth discs, and the alternate versions and rarities on the fifth, are significant additions to the band’s officially released discography. [Sep 2021, p.69]

While Haram was a bit heavy on the neo-noir vibes, Test Strips bustles with dynamic turns, and guests inspired to step out of character. [Oct 2023, p.51]

The trio crowbar open new fissures in metal’s ever-shifting tectonic plates with five astonishingly powerful songs, each imbued with its own magic and mystery. [Jun 2021, p.54]

Despite its self-effacing title Workaround comes not as an afterthought to the above, but as distillation and progression, its 14 tracks at once crisply compelling and filled with playful delight, honed by minimalism and absorbingly complex, a constant 150 bpm that’s the opposite of metronomic. [Feb 2020, p.46]

It’s great to hear “Starfield Road” and other tracks from Sonic Youth’s neglected post-Dirty albums. But it’s the deep cuts – like the stunning “I Love Her All The Time” and the closing “Inhuman” – that really drag you back. [Oct 2023, p.66]

Low's original stark minimalism has gradually given way to a broader sonic range, without sacrificing their strangely accessible otherness. [#204, p.68]

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

Fans of retro-styled chamber pop should find the vibes here to be exquisite. That said, Mering cleverly balances the sumptuousness with a lyrical orientation that taps into a universal melancholy, cutting through the fog of nostalgia with a sober, contemporary sensibility. [Jan 2023, p.74]

Limned in choirs, organs and brass, the languorous “Snow Is Falling In Manhattan” flips dolour into something magical, and transcendent. Strip away that prairie pedal steel and loosen the seams, and “Darkness And Cold” would be the kind of standard Leonard Cohen might test drive, were he still with us. [Aug 2019, p.59]

Arca’s operatic tone adds another layer to the expression of emotion and open sexuality in his work--“Piel” and “Coraje” being particularly striking. Ghersi’s voice emerges quietly, piercing through foreboding sonics with sombre gentleness. [May 2017, p.54]

A self-consciously serious, elaborate, capital R Romantic dramatic statement that pulls no punches, more Greek tragedy than break-up album. [Mar 2015, p.55]

Fohr’s music achieves ever greater levels of emotional richness while keeping a careful distance from the confessional. [Nov 2017, p.54]

These are tragic celebrations, Dionysian seances for the most schizophrenic of times. [Sep 2018, p.66]

Septet is beautifully appointed make-out music, redolent of Adrian Younge, Miles Davis’s 1980s re-emergence and late 70s pre-electro Herbie Hancock. [Sep 2021, p.54]

Richard may not be the most distinctive lyricist, yet she still leaves a strong impression. Her uniquely hazy voice and the way she adds unusual trills to her stanzas means that the listener is always aware of her presence. [Jan 2023, p.70]

She’s not one to let ideology or commercial realities kill her sense of uninhibited playfulness. So the scorching “Balloons” with her withering take on white fans buying Black trauma is followed by the flirtatious “Boomboom”, buoyed by the same hunger, the whole even more than the sum of its individually magnificent parts.

This Soul Jazz set is the biggest jungle splash for a long time, featuring the booming basslines, the fiercest of Amen breaks and heavyweight ragga vocals on essential cuts from Krome & Time, Cutty Ranks, M-Beat, Bizzy B, Lemon D, Top Cat, and more all dating from the prime years of 1993-95. [Jan/Feb 2026, p.97]

Another nuance of Virgins is the pacing. With the exception of a few slightly predictable orchestral driftscapes, Hecker's editing instincts have rarely sounded this restless and razor-sharp. [Oct 2013, p.45]

Though this particularly esoteric presentation was not unique to Serpentwithfeet, few executed it as well. But just as he did with the genre tag pagan gospel and his initial handle Josiah Wise Is The Serpent With Feet, this time around Wise has, lyrically at least, mostly discarded such trappings in service of something more tangible and familiar. [Jul 2018, p.49]

Each artist has taken her songs on their own terms, with out grandstanding, and this approach has yielded some inspired performances. [Jul 2015, p.46]

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot's faceless, airbrushed production takes you back to the dead days of 1970s AOR radio. [#220, p.66]

As you try to sift through the dense crosstalk of twittering beats, your ears are beguiled ever deeper into Konono's rhythmic threshing machine. [#253, p.52]

This is the most introspective Wolves In The throne Room release to date. [Sep 2011, p59]

Whether the listener feels it succeeds will depend on their willingness to accept its surface passivity. ... Shall We Go On Sinning is most persuasive on the second side. [May 2020, p.60]

These tracks embody the heartache arising from Remy struggling with her place, and the place of her sisters, in the world of male power and dominance. [Mar 2018, p.57]

Self-reflective and conceptually probing, it demands and sustains repeated listenings. [May 2013, p.55]

This is no mere revivalism. It’s a bridge with the past, created for the future. [May 2018, p.57]

The self-titled release is (indie) rock at its most exuberant, positive and loving. [Oct 2021, p.58]

'Bomboo Banga' is pure power monotony, her deadpan one-note voice mixed with car engines, samples of Bombay pop, Booty Bass and tribal rhythms, is a perfect soundtrack to a stroll down London's Banglatown. [Sep 2007, p.57]

Unsurprisingly, Badu’s is the least pretentious, the least bogged down in gushing musical detail; it’s also the most politically woke and personally reflective. It is perhaps the most in tune with Fela’s own unique worldview, with eternal struggle as a way of life. [Feb 2018, p.65]

The whole set has the provisional, unfinished feel of a diary or sketchbook. Some tracks are arranged so sparsely you’d think they’re missing parts; the flipside of this is that For You & I an incredibly personal, even intimate listen. [Nov 2019, p.64]

Stripping Yonkers’s tunes of any of these traits, Dwyer makes them over into larger than life anthems and the results are pretty damned splendid. [Oct 2020, p.59]

$ilkMoney's new album might well be his best to date. [Oct 2025, p.65]

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]

A strong late career release. [Oct 2018, p.63]

This new album manages to project an even simpler and more accessible surface with extraordinary depths of reference and feeling, even a track dedicated to Begum Rokeya, the Bengali feminist educator and author of the extraordinary genderswitching utopian fiction Sultana’s Dream. [Dec 2022, p.57]

It feels crudely stitched together. [Mar 2011, p.49]

With co-producer Andrew Lappin and an army of 20 musicians who contributed to various tracks in tow, she has produced a record that flexes its knowing complexity and retains a sense of experimental pop curiosity throughout. [Aug 2021, p.59]

It's a remarkably brutal record, gleefully stomping about with all the toys spread across the floor, and all the better for it. [Apr 2016, p.54]

From its cryptic title to its discombobulating assemblage of stylistic approaches in the track listing, Oil Of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides is chaotic and disjointed. ... Bringing a range of seemingly contrasting elements together, SOPHIE has been problematising commonly accepted binaries since dropping the berserk dance pop of “BIPP” on Glasgow’s Numbers label in 2013. [Sep 2018, p.49]

Becs is something of a return, then, but equally it demonstrates that the guitarist's approach to pop composition has developed considerably over the past 13 years. [May 2014, p.83]

Isn't so much a leftfield perversion of HipHop as it is a restoration of the genre to its avant garde roots. [#231, p.67]

A superb album, in which Wyatt gathers all of his strengths, with the personal and the political, the aesthetic and the ethical are brought together as only he can. [Nov 2007, p.64]

The way these surprises are smuggled in via skilful sonic illusions attests to Holden’s wide listening habits, and his judgement for bringing different sounds together like an old school studio producer. [Apr 2023, p.54]

Universal Beings is heady and refined. [Nov 2018, p.58]

The brasher moments of Afrique Victime are at least as worthwhile, Moctar having assembled a crack band. ... If this guy only really has two main modes – flamboyant electric blues and downhome, tricksy folk-rock – he can scorch in both, making complaints churlish. [Jun 2021, p.53]

No great leap forward, but with a sound this distinctive, that's not yet a problem. [#205, p.59]

This is a rare gem of an album that projects Kacy and Clayton into the category of all time great folk duos. [Jun 2016, p.50]

An immediately addictive listen. [Oct 2020, p.59]

We Have Dozens Of Titles is a view into a fascinating kind of processing, digesting and inventing. The results exist outside of even microgenre, flummoxing the desire to categorise at every turn. [Jun 2024, p.68]

Listening to Sarah Davachi's newest album in the scorching heat wave outdoors, the world slows to an ominous crawl. As the sombre organ notes take hold, a bird with a worm wiggling in its beak becomes a dark omen. Branches move ominously with the slight breeze, filtering brief flashes of sunlight. Every little detail gathers unbearable weight, falling deeper into a hypnotic abyss. [Oct 2024, p.50]

Slikback pours the joy of a new marriage and baby into this collection of chaotic and innovative tunes. [Sep 2025, p.58]

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]

As always Harris’s dedication to using a small spectrum of sounds to convey a wide range of emotions is noteworthy. Shade is another stunning piece of work – after all these years, Harris still makes it easier for some of us to get to know ourselves. [Oct 2021, p.48]