As Quelle Chris reverts to esoteric form on Deathfame, one can’t help but miss the sustained melancholy of Innocent Country 2. But there are plenty of delights here. [Jul 2022, p.53]

Harvey's new strategy has been successful although White Chalk might be something of a curio, it's certainly her most haunting work. [Oct 2007, p.60]

Something about the music's rhythmic flexibility, the paradoxical slippage between half-speed, double-speed and triplet grooves, allows almost anything to be folded in to its matrix without altering its essential character. [Oct 2013, p.57]

Dirty and invigorating? Yes. [Jul 2021, p.67]

There’s less noise here than on Not A Dream. Nueen’s production layers thick, soft synth pads with fluttering percussive elements, smudging swung tempos back into breathing soundscapes of vocal samples and sticky rolling saturation. [Jul 2024, p.54]

Their latest concoction is a study in maximalism that weaves ideas from a multitude of artists into a succinct stylistic language. [Sep 2020, p.56]

Romantiq is hypnotic, curious and, at its best, genuinely fresh and beautiful. [May 2023, p.54]

Tomahawk – a band that have very much prided themselves on their messiness and incoherency – have made perhaps their most cogent record yet. [Apr 2021, p.64]

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]

Robert Hood's first album as Floorplan is if anything more functional than Marcel Dettmann's offering. [Oct 2013, p.58]

Godfather is no mere retread, not the sound of youth but an idealised memory of it. [Mar 2017, p.56]

Hooky, featherlight and strange. [Jul 2018, p.55]

Tower Block is easily Lawrence's best record since 1992's Back In Denim. [Nov 2025, p.61]

This has to be the sunniest winter record ever. .... Stuffed with sunflowers and tiny xylophones, this is sweet, joyful stuff. And then, just as you start to worry that it could all congeal into a Zach Braff score, Saunier hits you right in the weird.

This follow-up feels thought-out and ambitious. She knows where she wants to be. [Oct 2024, p.66]

One of the hardest and most consistent recent statements in US hiphop. [Oct 2016, p.48]

Siblings is a powerful collection of choral singing, poetry, spoken word, field recordings and samples that draws from a vast and interconnected range of friends and collaborators, and times and locations, bringing this idea of activism through communality to its exuberant climax. [Jan 2019, p.73]

A confidently created body of work that shows her strength in piecing together abstract compositions. [Oct 2017, p.65]

Timing these ten tight tracks around the five or six minute mark, lead single "Crushing Realities", "The Dream In Fragments" and "The Soul Of Everything" move with a surreal, transcendent pressure transportive and gamelan-heavy throughout. [Apr 2026, p.62]

The presence of these co-conspirators empowers the songs, but some of the duets are more straightforwardly fun. [Apr 2021, p.64]

Colonial patterns makes your ears feel like magnetised tape heads, the music dulled, pockmarked, riven with fissures of noise and age. [Oct 2013, p.58]

It serves as both a reconsideration of what’s come before and a confident step forward. [Jul 2022, p.52]

The pair’s soundtrack is trippy and foreboding, swaying between melancholy cosmic laments on slo-mo keyboards (“Leaving Moomin Valley”), mysterious Middle Eastern whines (“Hobgoblin’s Hat”), extraterrestrial dream sequences on thumb piano and wooden glockenspiel (“Most Unusual”) and a giddy blast of what sounds like computerised rodents squeaking with speeded-up glee (“Party Time”). [Mar 2017, p.65]

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

Each track Nelson has tautly defined a geography of sound specific to that place, real or imagined. [May 2013, p.64]

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

His verbal style is notable because it avoids typical ragga chat or MC freestyling in favour of an almost literary blend of prose and verse. [#219, p.75]

Implausibly enduring, oddly endearing and extreme in ways both unexpected and otherwise. [Sep 2020, p.57]

Fires Within Fires is the summation of 30 years of experimentation in tonality and texture. Yes, Neurosis are firmly positioned within the extreme metal underground, yet their music, with its ability to generate images of beauty akin to those many of us have experienced in our own lives--not to mention the loss that accompanies them--challenges this categorisation. [Oct 2016, p.49]

A remarkable turn in the road for a remarkable composer. [Mar 2021, p.55]

The execution is elegantly minimal and yet alive with textures and warmth, despite the album's melancholy and often morbid content. [Mar 2018, p.55]

Thankfully here, in spite of the occasional song in Latin or mention of the Peninsular War, Batoh succeeds in stripping things all the way back to a jewel-like clarity. ... Even when things do take on a heavier and more expansive turn, technique, structure and lyrical meaning are powerfully combined. [Feb 2019, p.44]

There is a distinct lack of filler (as usual) but the best of the 11 songs is “Dead Weight”, which adopts a sideways crawl like a hermit crab in hobnail boots as our anti-hero tears herself to pieces and hurls them at the feet of an admirer. [Jul 2021, p.67]

Ladd's eclectic and downbeat montage of samples creates a rootless soundscape, seemingly geographically transient, restless, impatient and unsettling. It is the perfect backdrop for Ladd's soul-searching reflexes and rants. [#251, p.54]

The only drawback to this semi-collage approach is that many tracks are too brief. [#256, p.51]

This feels like a love letter to dayglo dreams of the online world of 20 years ago, with beats and samples too evolved, too exuberant to sink into mere nostalgia. [Oct 2016, p.51]

Exorcism addresses a similarly uncomfortable subject, her sexual assault in 2016 and what it means to be a survivor of trauma. That Wilson can turn such trauma into vibrant, addictive pop music is testament to her abilities within strict limitations--the entirety of Exorcism was crafted on a Prophet 6 synthesizer--but Exorcism is unafraid not just of its subject matter but of occupying an intrinsically ambiguous place for the listener. [May 2018, p.59]

Its infusion of HipHop drum programs, Old Skool electronics, rabblerousing calls-to-arms and repetitive guitar riffs is highly addictive. [#213, p.58]

This album will be warmly welcomed by On-U Sound and reggae fans everywhere. [Oct 2023, p.57]

The record’s surfaces are highly polished and glisten with a near futurist glow that’s only occasionally interrupted by percussion, most affecting when those pristine surfaces recede to emphasise the melodic lines that dance over them. “Vanity” lets ominous synths rumble while ornate electronics flourish above while the reverberating motif of “Tasakuba” is potent with longing and desire. [Jul 2021, p.69]

he 22a label founder flexes his expansive musical influences across ten new creations. One of the most exciting tracks here is “Buffalo Gurl”. Dividing its time between earlier R&B and sultry jazz chords, it’s the pick me up you didn’t know you needed. [Aug 2019, p.65]

This is Byrne at his best, as he calmly describes the impact of the object upon the victim’s history, feelings and anatomy that are being destroyed as a result of its violent intrusion. [May 2018, p.60]

They're both adept at the refined art of turning nothing new into something memorable. [#207, p.61]

This album feels more urgent and defiant than its predecessor. [Jun 2023, p.49]

Its exploratory, playful, even mystical temper, slipping easily between the emotional zones the history of song traverses, suggests a boredom with eschatology. [Oct 2016, p.55]

There are moments when the insights of Newsom's improvised mythology fall into pseudo-profundity... But still it easily stands with this year's entrancing reinventions of song--Julia Holter's Have You In My Wilderness, Jim O'Rourke's Simple Songs--and the high points of her own catalogue so far. [Nov 2015, p.46]

Recorded during a post-tour chill, the album writes a caustic, often dejected and cynical travelogue. ... Meanwhile, subtle slivers of sarcasm and dry humour punch through this acerbic sound. They find their way in bass-led, sumptuous lounge sludge on “Smoker’s Piece”, assess the “Current Situation” with screeching dissonance and pained shrieks and bemoan the grey daily life on the closing “Every Thing, Every Day”. [Apr 2021, p.54]

Where the previous two explore themes around rebirth and grief, Trappes’s vocal fills Penelope Three full of redemption and hope. On “Red Yellow”, synth lines swoop and sink despondently into the mix, but Trappes’s vocal is ascendant and bold. In places, this ability to draw striking emotional clout from delicate shoegaze-y soundscapes recalls Sophia Liozou’s 2020 album Untold. [Jul 2021, p.69]

Challenge Me Foolish reveals just how influential he was and continues to be. [May 2018, p.62]

Their latest effort, All Tense Now Lax, impresses both for the nuances of its industrial abstractions as well as how vigorously it avoids recognisable styles. [Jul 2015, p.48]

Diehard metalheads will continue to grumble, but Opeth are never going back to their old sound, and with Sorceress they’ve proved the wisdom of their choice. [Oct 2016, p.57]

The undulating, snarling “Black Transit Of Jupiter’s Third Satellite” is a bubbling 12 minute antimatter expanse, the pot of black gold at the end of this particular rainbow. The journey to get there is ravishingly bleak and massaging. [Jan 2020, p.58]

Breezy, disorientated, unhurried, its content seeks an instant surface rapport through a bold display of clips and cuts. [#245, p.69]

More substantial, positive and dynamic. [#225, p.58]

It’s dense and esoteric, but gorgeous. [Oct 2019, p.55]

Electric Brick Wall isn't as groove based as the previous album, but it's an even more complex, discomfiting listen in many respects. [Jun 2014, p.48]

Allegiance & Conviction is Windy & Carl’s first new album in a good long while, and it was worth the wait. [Sep 2020, p.61]

This is music strapped for battle, the beats tooled up and live-sounding, the loops and details kept to a brute minimum by Doom so that the lines, and guest spots from Vinnie Paz and Open Mike Eagle, can really punch through. [May 2018, p.63]

Lines like “History repeating itself” and “She never lost hope/When life was so hard” feel a bit generalised – the sentiment might have benefitted from a more nuanced or poetic approach. Overall however the decision to give the heroic and celebratory a wide berth is a sound one, making way for something much darker and more unsettling – a reminder that doing the right thing in times of widespread fear and conflict is seldom easy. [May 2024, p.49]

Patton and Vannier make a fine combination, vintage and modern, taking familiar sounds wonderfully elsewhere. [Oct 2019, p.58]

Where the 1982 take was hollow and grating, the gaps and silences gradually roaring with accumulating noise, this version is euphoric and transparent. [Jun 2014, p.42]

What unites them is the boldness of the material and their treatment of it. [Jun 2014, p.48]

Ultimately, pulling apart Everything Squared to discover its workings is like trying to dissect a cobweb: nothing is the central focus yet every gossamer-light part is spun with perfect precision and tension. [Sep 2024, p.53]

DJ Shadow’s latest is a hulking, 26 track beast that shifts from uptempo breakbeat and rubbery electropop to string-laden suites with relative ease. ... With synthesized tones ranging from lush to jarring, the instrumentals indicate the ear for texture that has characterised Shadow’s work since 1996’s Entroducing. [Jan 2020, p.69]

Pieces Of A Man is coherent, marrying the raw energy of trap with jazz-funk inspired beats. Black Milk’s instrumentals “Stress Fracture” and “Gwendolynn’s Apprehension” are remarkably complex both melodically and rhythmically. [Jan 2019, p.80]

Melvins' evolution from potential stoner rock dinosaurs to 21st century sound shifters is complete. [Jul 2008, p.52]

A highly engaging and very endearing album. [#223, p.59]

It is al-gitarra in the classic style: raw and intimate, with the gravel-voiced Abaraybone leading the band through the militant and melancholy blues that have long been his trademark. [Oct 2019, p.61]

Much thought has gone into the arrangements and programming, and that provides surprises as well as variety, but the consistent bottom line is respect for the songs, which is surely the best way to pay tribute to Collins herself. [May 2015, p.52]

Each track is a mini drama of yearning and patience. These are studies in building momentum, meditations on how to temporarily tap into a shared singular spirit. [Jul 2024, p.50]

Somehow the music manages to be deeply exotic and familiar at the same time. [Jun 2014, p.50]

[The Lost Tapes is] a welcome re-opening of the gates. [Jun 2012, p.53]

No Highs is a soundtrack for knotted stomachs – introverted, devoid of catharsis and all the more moving for its honesty and restraint. [Apr 2023, p.54]

A fascinatingly fractured yet whole album, it is the sound of a man not only investigating but celebrating the full cultural spectrum of his existence. [Apr 2017, p.51]

On Jinxed By Being, both Chasny and Shackleton find a collaborative meeting point where sound complements their respective aesthetics and bodies of work, while moving them towards something thrillingly new. [Aug 2024, p.59]

Bowles still makes his most emotionally compelling statements with his banjo. [Sep 2016, p.46]

A fastidiously crafted and appealingly damp hour of digital earthsong. [#229, p.57]

The guests (Denmark Vessey, Nick Offerman--yes, Ron Swanson himself--and Your Old Droog among others) are perfectly judged and the deeper message of the album, that relaxation and repose in 2018 are luxuries that those on the frontline can’t afford, is delivered with extra heft and power thanks to the lightness of touch and the sardonic style hiphop’s coollest couple demonstrate throughout. [May 2018, p.63]

A scattering of influences have been streamlined into tightly focused songs, with a keen sense of melody and an impressive grasp of agitated, Gang Of Four-style rhythms. [#247, p.70]

This album is not afraid of discord or rhythmic slippage, but it's delivered with an assurance that his experience and discography allows. [Jun 2014, p.51]

The music on Freak Puke isn't exactly unheavy, but its heaviness is of a different vintage. [Jun 2012, p.60]

The nature of their interaction sheds light on the physics and mathematical realities which underlie music and its capacity to stimulate or move us. Often in that process Drift Multiply happens to be unapologetically beautiful. [Dec 2020, p.55]

Eno's striving nature and his ability to morph sounds, alter moods and conduct psychoacoustic experiments still yields weird and enjoyable fruits here. [Jan 2017, p.64]

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]

The Twigs sound tough and robust, ready to take on the whole world rather than cultivate one small part of it. [Feb 2013, p.45]

It is a gorgeous piece of work. [Jul 2022, p.48]

Its comforting gloom draws you closer and closer, extending an invitation to lose yourself that could easily be mistaken for escapism. But this music is one of presence, not absence. [Sep 2025, p.61]

The throttled mayhem that spits from the record is in keeping with the legacy of the aforementioned punks [Dead Kennedys and Misfits], as well as DC hardcore pioneers Bad Brains. [Oct 2025, p.54]

What is most striking about Why Do The Heathen Rage?, Which reworks Black metal songs as electro, house and techno, is how intelligently respectful it is. [Jun 2014, p.55]

We Have Amnesia Sometimes proves that Yo La Tengo should leave their comfort zone more often. [Sep 2020, p.61]

The songs are long, mostly clocking in somewhere between ten and 20 minutes; the minutely orchestrated whole gives the misleading impression of a tightly controlled collective improvisation, with everyone doing their own thing together with spectacular commitment and focus. [Dec 2025, p.56]

Abalanced, democratic collaboration, with neither unit dominating.... Ghost's faraway sound lends Damon & Naomi's straightahead arrangements a yearning, devotional air... [#199, p.56]

The sonic diversity and range of Magdalene is a marked departure from the breathy triphop of LP1, yet a thematic trajectory is clearly traced from the suggestive sensuality of the first to the combative provocation of its follow-up named after a defamed biblical figure. [Nov 2019, p.54]

Packed with energy and furious with ideas. [#269, p.45]

It's ridiculous but oddly moving. [Nov 2014, p.62]

In spite of daft moments, the chilly shimmer of Push The Sky Away works its magic. [Feb 2013, p.45]

Edging closer to the creation of a pop kingdom realised on her own terms. "1/17" is "Castles In The Sky" for the hyperpop generation, whose nostalgic weakness for Y2K club classics is well served here lyrics like "Poetry and nude selfies, love the way that you know me" hit hard. [Sep 2025, p.62]

As Town And Country's move into mellow artists maturity, C'mon is an oasis of sensitive calm from our loutish world. [#217, p.61]