A band absolutely floating free, and realising that this Throwing Muses thing is beyond all of them, beyond all of us, an almost tidal pull on the cells, forward into life. Sun Racket is an essential truth kit for a post-truth world. [Jul 2020, p.52]

The overall effect is fresh and forward thinking throughout. [Jul 2017, p.53]

[A] finely crafted and very songwriterly affair (with echoes of Talk Talk, The Auteurs and Roy Harper). [Jan 2017, p.74]

It’s very easy to get lost in this music, in the sense of immersively absorbed rather than uncomprehending. [Jun 2022, p.47]

There’s no subject harder to broach in polite society than loneliness. Martin and Robinson know this and should be commended for taking an extended gaze into this particular abyss. [Mar 2019, p.54]

Kingdom's debut album is all pop. Not in the formulaic sense, but in its sophisticated amalgam of everything that is skilled and aesthetic from both mainstream club production and underground dance subgenre. [Mar 2017, p.49]

Through it all, Tutti’s voice hovers above the tempo, clear, cold and mysterious like northern lights over a rave. Mantras that resonate inwardly speak also to an exterior side. 2t2 holds its structure like a living system. [Aug 2025, p.58]

Just as these wise, bittersweet, intimate and wry songs and poems about love and the everyday have a life of their own beyond being haunted by the Nick Drake legacy, so too The Unthanks’ quietly scholarly interpretation of Molly Drake has a distinctive and nuanced self-assuredness. [Jul 2017, p.54]

The delicacy and lightness of the album is underpinned by mesmerising, rich textures, constantly buzzing and clunking away beneath the surface. [Jan 2019, p.70]

Anyone interested in just how far out and far in British music can be i 2017 should have Stillness spot-welded into their systems right now. [Mar 2017, p.50]

A typically lightfooted zip through the ironies and anxieties of the modern world. If “Do Things My Own Way”, “JanSport Backpack” and “Running Up A Tab At The Hotel For The Fab” don’t become setlist staples, then I’ll eat my hat (and yours). [Aug 2025, p.59]

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

Nite Jewel sounds like a latter-day Prince protégé, with a beatific calm to her tone. [Jul 2017, p.56]

Civilization's simplicity is deceptive: not every producer can take such basic elements and fashion somethings so thrillingly menacing. [May 2012, p.72]

Smith and Unthank magnetise throughout with their combined vocals, even on unaccompanied songs such as “Captain Bover” (the story of Tyneside press gangs), melodically entwined, but contrasting soft and rugged. [Feb 2023, p.59]

Another delightful batch of off-kilter pop, kosmische dance beat and much more besides. Albeit slightly less eccentric than its predecessor, All Clouds Bring Not Rain is a further indication how Memorials' music works in a variety of mysterious ways. [May 2026, p.60]

This batch is a collection of film and advertising themes that stretch the limits of library music. “See The Cheetah”, credited to The Big Game Hunters, would have had all the kids frugging at a 1990s easy listening club. Best of all is “Moon Journey”, Garson’s symphony of tootling chugs, zaps, bloops and blasts that scored the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing on CBS News. [Sep 2023, p.66]

Punish, Honey is also a diverse and sonically surprising work, infectiously odd and encouragingly bold. [Oct 2014, p.63]

It’s very easy to get lost in this music, in the sense of immersively absorbed rather than uncomprehending. [Jun 2022, p.47]

Climactic yet precisely controlled, it's a reminder of The Necks strengths, all of which are on display at different points throughout Open: their astute handling of pacing and momentum, finely honed collective sense of timing, and their shared ability to balance at length a group equilibrium, be it delicate or clamorous in register. [Oct 2013, p.50]

It’s less focused, more instinctive in its approach to collaboration; the boundaries it sets for itself are less rigid. This meandering work is vastly more accessible than most of Moor Mother’s catalogue, but no less cerebral and impressive. [Aug 2022, p.52]

This EP chases Cosmogramma into the same territory, but seems to favor consistent, looping palettes and original electronics over the latter's ad hoc sampling. [Oct 2010, p.66]

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]

Falkner's presence helps tighten up Moore's game with out diluting his essential weirdness, while Moore encourages the usually perfectionist Falkner to cut loose and re-engage with the taste for lo-fi leakage. [Mar 2017, p.50]

Locked in sequences and formulae, there is a rich depth to the spectrum of sounds. [Jan 2021, p.69]

For every track that delivers the expected, another does something quite extraordinary. [Oct 2008, p.72]

It is psychedelic in the best sense of the word, evoking constant movement, but a motion that is always interior, burrowing deep into the psyche of listener and player alike. [Mar 2017, p.52]

Perhaps some of the head-scratching freshness of Burgess-Olson’s early material has been lost--but with her gear-led, no-fuss production sensibility, she slots in perfectly on Ninja Tune’s Technicolour imprint alongside prolific mavericks like Hieroglyphic Being and Legowelt. [Jul 2017, p.59]

The freshness and spontaneity of a new collaboration shines throughout The Quickening – it ensures a fresh, unmannered feel in its tangled explorations of American landscapes and is all the more compelling for not being too perfectly polished. [Sep 2020, p.46]

While the lack of fixed personnel gives the album a gloriously freewheeling mixtape feel, Remy’s lyrics and persona in these songs, – particularly the wondrous title track and the miraculous “Tux” – demonstrate both a sleep deprived hunger for changes of spiritual and musical trajectory – sometimes within a single song – but also a recurrent return to elemental, physical needs, and the sheer lambent wonder of the grooves and hooks always keeps you rapt. [Mar 2023, p.60]

The way these four strong musical personalities making up the current quartet are moving forward while acknowledging their history gives Thirteen an extra dimension. [Apr 2026, p.56]

The sixth album by this Norwegian power trio is, like each of its predecessors, a fierce demonstration of their strengths as individuals and as a collective. [Feb 2019, p.54]

The combination of simple but taut musicality and literate lyricism is a winning one. [Apr 2021, p.54]

This is warped, tactile and certainly druggy music. However, it's the duo's use of breathless double time flows that vividly replicate the mesmeric metal hum of psychedelics. [Oct 2014, p.64]

The album repeats and reiterates her major concerns--artistic, political--and renders them witty and endearing. [Oct 2013, p.51]

Swans are alive, utterly. A terrible beauty is reborn. [Sep 2010, p.51]

There’s so much going on in these dense constructions, you’re likely to hear new layers and combinations with each spin. [Oct 2022, p.46]

The pop craftsmanship on display throughout Pangs is just the thing to make vinegary dregs go down easy. [Mar 2017, p.53]

An interesting example of a performer getting more experimental and simultaneously more studio-savvy, Chenaux has produced his best work yet. [Mar 2012, p.51]

Supple openendedness of texture and the cyclic reoccurrence become one and the same as the music goes on and on – liberating words in time, rather than setting them in stone. [Sep 2020, p.46]

They’re on fire here and now, reassuringly within that sound world you’re familiar with but – perhaps because the album is self-produced – sounding freer, looser and more magnificent than ever. ... A band who’ve clearly lost none of their miraculous touch with their sources, who incredibly seem to have an entirely new lease of life. [Mar 2023, p.60]

It’s the definition of method to madness. The sense of barely controlled chaos, occasionally lashing out in random directions, only adds to the wonder that it holds together and maintains momentum. [May 2023, p.61]

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

A cohesive album in the traditional sense, Hesaitix is an epic world-building exercise littered with simulations of natural beauty. [Dec 2017, p.55]

The album’s stylistic breadth and the cinematic sweep of its production add up to a more polished version of the anthemic, collaborative sound cultivated on the tour, heard on his 2020 Live At Le Guess Who? 2018 album. [Aug 2023, p.51]

It's probably the most conceptually interesting record Squeeze have ever put out and also one of their most consistent and adventurous latterday works. [Apr 2026, p.60]

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]

Like his collaborative music with Peverelist, it's these tracks' mesmerising qualities that give rise to their oblique emotional resonance, even if Utility as an album is relatively low on surprises for an artist whose history to date has been littered with them. [Apr 2016, p.55]

It would be very hard to see Y In Dub as completing the project of taking dub into white punk, but taken on their own, separate terms these tracks are deep and engrossing explorations of a set of possibilities few others have dabbled with. [Nov 2021, p.57]

Thanks to Muldrow, these compositions now bump and swing to the blues of the day. [Sep 2020, p.47]

Nightcap further distinguishes them as more than a clever amalgam of Dead tropes. The shifting time signatures and dramatic dynamics of “Wasted Time” suggest a fondness for Gabriel-era Genesis while the courtly melody and stentorian storytelling of “Altered Place” conjure thoughts of The Moody Blues at their late 1960s zenith. [Jan 2021, p.72]

While it might be hard to hear this music as revolutionary now, there's no denying how commanding and demanding both the tuneful and flat out noisy sections are on modern ears. [Oct 2014, p.70]

Hardly the stuff of revolution, Still Smiling nevertheless feels comfortable in all of its swollen riches. [Oct 2013, p.54]

Despite her apparent striving towards sharpness and clarity, Hatis Noit avoids sterility in these pieces, all eight of which are constructed solely from her voice; while this starkness could leach the emotional impact, instead it is magnified. [Aug 2022, p.53]

By the time you’re through to the end of the album, Negro’s precise refusal to have bullied you with his ideas means you’re happy to return to the beginning and let that sunlight in again. Central heating for kids. Lovely. [Mar 2019, p.57]

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]

Sorrow is a faithful revision. [Apr 2016, p.58]

Ex Eye fuse together in a whirring blare of intricately constructed math metal, where each player can be distinctly heard weaving their individual musical craft within the group’s membrane. [Jul 2017, p.60]

Pungent and atmospheric. [Nov 2021, p.62]

The album demonstrates control at every point, moving effortlessly between elegant restraint and a precise, brutal pummelling that sounds like a battering ram smashing through a door. [Sep 2020, p.48]

Sixth album Long In The Tooth burnishes the group’s analogue groove science with familiar movements of heroic, brassy swagger. [Jan 2021, p.72]

Legacy + is a unique intergenerational conversation on wax. Both halves are set in Afrobeat, while one sticks more to the tradition than the other, and the contrast is beautiful to hear. [Apr 2021, p.58]

The beats are tighter, the rhymes sharper and the subject matter more relevant. [July 2008, p.66]

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]

It’s not often that an album comes along that feels this loaded with transformative potential. [Jul 2021, p.66]

Another thunderous slab of delicious sub-Sabbath riffage with guttural-via-brattish vocal on top. [Apr 2016, p.60]

Opener “Reverance” gives us a great deal--tremolo string flourishes and swirling synthesizers, filter gates as grand as castle keeps that slowly open up to reveal lush vegetation within--but of percussion it gives us none. From there on, the album offers up interplanetary R&B. [Jul 2017, p.62]

A polished affair which approaches doom metal with something like a pop sensibility – the melodies bring to mind Deftones or the accessible end of UK bands like Paradise Lost and My Dying Bride, though Esfandiari’s strain of gothic gloom, for all its theatricality, feels less superficial and more the product of genuine internal turmoil. [Nov 2021, p.62]

It builds on themes and ideas introduced earlier in a clear and discernible way. ... No Era Sólida is more organic and less definable. [Sep 2020, p.49]

Niblett takes the old quiet-loud dynamic and stretches it to unexpected lengths. [#258, p.68]

The material on the album is a constellation of soft and fragile connections between intangible forms of rock. ... Juana Molina moves “Al Sur” with propulsive singing and electronic rhythms, making the song her own before “Into Love Again” brings this lovely album full circle with a Yann Tiersenlike folk ballad. [Apr 2021, p.60]

It seems likely Buzz and company have also been listening to a fair bit of Magma and Aphrodite's child, given the interludes of unaccompanied percussion, brooding Gothic keyboards and tightly complex arrangements which result in the most consistently impressive album this line-up has released to date. [Jul 2010, p.64]

Guitarists John and Michael Gibbons tar into riffs which, for all their power, articulate a cosmic loneliness, while Isobel Sollenberger intones troubled mantras with the benighted insistence of an unquiet spirit. [Oct 2013, p.55]

Some will find Cruel Country monotonous; the patient however will be rewarded with an abundance of thoughtful, delicate, often brutally plaintive songcraft. [Aug 2022, p.60]

There's not much variety over these nine tracks, but to hell with variety when you sound this good. [Dec 2008, p.56]

At every turn it bubbles with the delight of discovery, and shows the alchemical reaction between the two studio personae coming along very nicely indeed. [Mar 2017, p.54]

The production from DJ Mustard hits like a cannonball dive into chlorinated waters, as Greedo croons his mystical pain salves, channelling Soulja Slim and Boosie if they grew up on Grape Street. But he shows his depth on the gorgeous anthem to his wife “Gettin’ Ready”. [Jun 2019, p.69]

Delivers on the forward-looking promise of The Art Ensemble’s motto: great black music – ancient to the future. [May 2019, p.61]

Her lyrics see human experience both on an intimate and an epic scale: such expansiveness is well complemented by her music, even if the dancefloor only exists within her home. [May 2013, p.56]

One of 2021’s most impressive and poignant examples of progressive rock? Damn the torpedoes, let’s go with that. [Nov 2021, p.62]

Praise A Lord is a record conceived and assembled with considerable care – literate, theatrical and elegantly audacious. [Apr 2023, p.62]

An excellent showcase of their different approaches. [Oct 2007, p.55]

The payoff comes about a third of the way in, when the spirit of Foghat makes an unexpected appearance and everything goes boogie. [Oct 2013, p.55]

Well-placed details like the joyfully absurd airhorn sample in “Pachyuma” and the phased pulsing of “Orion Song” come across as both lighthearted and profound. “Moscow (Mariposa Voladora)” is a churning, chugging dancefloor banger, textured with acoustic instruments and resonating with a timelessness that unites past and present, ancient and future, here and now. [May 2018, p.46]

There's a handful of new material, all displaying superb arranger's skill. His unusual voice has improved too, broadening and mellowing from that nervous tenor of old. [May 2013, p.58]

What J Hus has over all else this year is an ebullient ironic pseudo-oblivious pomp, the kind of breathless mongrel music you’ll only ever get from folk young enough to miss how vital it is they’re breaking all the rules. [Jul 2017, p.62]

They continue to surprise and enchant. [Sep 2020, p.52]

Where Lopatin’s earlier work often evoked the sense of a simultaneous need and impossibility of love--most notably in his Chris de Burgh sampling “Nobody Here”--the music here seems to strive for immediacy. [Jan 2019, p.70]

Held up against the 6Music conveyor belt of sprechgesang wannabes, however, the group’s debut album resembles both a nod to the past and an accomplished piece of work in the context of now. [Jul 2023, p.52]

Warping songs into strange shapes is no guarantee of success in itself, but while Picton lets his imagination off the leash and his songs take some unravelling, they are structurally sound and melodically adventurous. [May 2026, p.59]

Though heavier than ever, Jesu shares a bittersweet longing with the best of Mould's oeuvre, a sense of innocence on the cusp of corruption. [Oct 2013, p.55]

Back In Black actually manages to sound vibrant and resonant without sounding dated – thanks in no small measure to the immaculate production throughout from Black Milk. [Aug 2022, p.64]

While The Singles fails to represent Can’s adventures in untethered improvisation and oceanic drift, if you wanted to hand somebody one record that told them what Can was, you could do far worse. [Jul 2017, p.67]

In truth, every twist and turn, every tempo change on Siberia is evidence of the group's unabated thirst for adventure. [Oct 2013, p.55]

It’s just possible that, nearly three decades into her recording career, It’s Real is Ex Hex frontwoman Mary Timony’s strongest release to date. [Mar 2019, p.62]

Galás crisply delivers excerpts from two works by the German expressionist poet Georg Heym, Das Fieberspital (The Fever Hospital) and Die Dämonen Der Stadt (The Demons Of The City). [Sep 2022, p.46]

It occasionally breaks into shocking moments of lo-fi howl, as on the 11 minute “Distortion”, which begins with a juddering, buzzsaw chord. The jumbled and constant flow of imagery emerges every now and then from the tumult of his guitar, so that one pulls the other in a different direction. [May 2018, p.54]

Origin Of The Alimonies is Hunt-Hendrix’s most compositionally elaborate and layered work yet. [Jan 2021, p.74]