A lifetime’s pain and a decade juggling mixtape fame with his trap life erupting in one magnificently choreographed molten flow of poetry. Not that it’s all full blast, Potter comes with the widescreen vision of Scarface or Ghetts, stepping back as necessary, philosophically patient. [Jul 2023, p.65]

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]

Aesop’s penchant for storytelling – particularly on “100 Feet Tall” and “Aggressive Steven” – is still incredibly engaging, delivering a fraught narrative that touches on mental health, exploitation of the vulnerable and human responses to corporate stimuli. [Jan/Feb 2024, p.77]

It’s Shellac as usual, so lean, mean experimental rock music which sounds like you are right there in the room with the band. There’s a hint of mature craftsmanship in the classic descending chord sequence of “WSOD” and the waltz time of “Girl From Outside”. [Jul 2024, p.60]

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]

On Return – as on all of their albums – Fu Manchu evidently strive to maximise the impact of each riff, hook and rhythm, resulting in some decidedly funkadelic noise. [Aug 2024, p.62]

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]

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.

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]

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 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]

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]

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]

Channeling her raw, unflinching energy with the help of a host of collaborators, the album incorporates rap, live instrumentation and a range of bpms, murmurs and screams, forming an aural documentary of sorts. [Jul 2025, p.53]

Given the remit of this collection, you’d be forgiven for anticipating a jumble of two-bit Human League and Gary Numan rip-offs. Thankfully this unexpectedly odd compilation delivers a whole lot more. [Jul 2025, p.68]

Broken Homes And Gardens is not his best record, but it is an absolutely pure statement of where he was at for the last few years, and is a sheer pleasure to hear. [Sep 2025, p.49]

The album is a present, absorbing companion. Recorded in just three days, the album’s six tracks have that elusive quality of feeling both spontaneous and meticulous. [Aug 2025, p.46]

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]

Songs like "My House Is Not My Dream House", "Constant Companion" and "Harmonizing With Myself" continue the theme of domestic solitude running through recent work, addressed with an eye for detail that elevates the songs far above standard confessional singer-songwriter fare. [Apr 2026, p.60]

What's striking, and moving, is how the old communal spirit of Pullman's music feels stronger than ever, despite (or because of) the distances of time, geography and memory that had to be patiently overcome. [Apr 2026, p.56]

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

Having already worked with the likes of William Basinski and Herndon, remixing for Björk and Max Richter, Jlin is taking the innovative spirit of a regional Chicago born style to the institutional stage of the creative establishment. Applying that to a project with a choreographer like McGregor is an experiment in combining the best of both worlds. [Oct 2018, p.55]

The sheer density of stylistic markers here is perhaps most representative of the nature of Iglooghost’s production, the album being immersed in the chaos of skittering beats and cut-ups with vivid synth lines that twist, crack and inflate in dazzling clusters. [Oct 2017, p.55]

Suffice to say that future, past and present are safe in the hands of 700 Bliss. [Jun 2022, p.47]

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]

Their most beautifully conceived and ambitiously extended work to date. [#252, p.59]

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

On Angels & devils, The Bug crystallises a vision of low end and lower urges that feels dangerously universal. [Aug 2014, p.48]

It collates her various sides and strengths into the most complete and resonant recording of her career. [Feb 2023, p.44]

This album explores that idea of opposites attracting and co-existing within one entity. It’s also a powerful, confident pop record tooled up to compete with the heaviest hitters (Paul White’s production is key, as it has been for Danny Brown and Charli XCX) while occupying its own uniquely ambivalent and querulous space. [Nov 2019, p.60]

Glenn's rich, wordless vocal melody becomes a trellis for the winding vine of Elizabeth's vibrato as she sings the arc of a blooming romance. The mood is joyfully bittersweet, basking in the glow of a shared life which, like all living things, must end. [Mar 2026, p.49]

Autechre Guitaris elegant and crystalline, a set of fascinating miniatures composed of unexpected links and gaps. It's as confounding and crafted as an Escher staircase. [Mar 2025, p.47]

This is a beautiful record, but I wish it had a little more chaos in it. [Oct 2008, p.58]

A record that is often overwhelming, at times breathtaking. [Nov 2018, p.55]

The vocal arrangements almost all verge on the irritating--overblown neo-gospel--but there’s too much good here to deny on that basis. [Oct 2016, p.63]

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]

Polyphonic chants mesh with distorted piano hits and percussive clatter in an ecstasy of derision and judgment, before turning into a righteous roar. [Oct 2021, p.58]

Playing it, you're reminded anew of the restlessness and emotional range at the heart of Young's art. [Feb 2014, p.64]

Some of Out Of Season's lyrics are almost too impossibly idealistic and airy fairy to carry off. [#226, p.54]

The End Of Radio’s cache of 1994 and 2004 John Peel sessions admirably bucks expectations even as it serves up multiple reminders that Shellac are a crack live unit equipped with airtight panic room ragers. And while singer/guitarist Albini takes care to toast BBC DJ Peel, who died weeks prior to the 2004 sessions, the charge here lies in hearing Albini, drummer Todd Trainer and bassist Bob Weston improve upon and deviate from the studio recordings. [Sep 2019, 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]

Where Vernon’s album [For Emma, Forever Ago] registers like a melancholic exorcism of listless youth and failed relationships, Bachman does not engage in that kind of soul searching, though he elicits a similarly potent emotional response. [Jan/Feb 2024, p.77]

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]

From the cartoonishly unhinged prog/ boom-bap hybrid “Savage Nomad” to “Shine” (a duet with Blood Orange that flirts with melancholic, synth-heavy new romanticism) it’s the seemingly contradictory emotional timbres that animate uknowhatimsayin¿ and provide the core tension that brings the project to life. [Nov 2019, p.50]

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]

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]

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

Drawing on such lofty motifs doesn’t make Dalt’s records any less intimate or enjoyable. Instead, they offer more space for exploring the most vulnerable corners of an artist’s emotional state, by using metaphor and allusion as a way to express the inexpressible. [Jun 2018, p.52]

The production, courtesy of DJ Dahi, No ID and James Blake, spirals outward from the world this Long Beach native’s peers inhabit and into satisfyingly experimental territory. [Oct 2016, p.65]

This strained affair makes the party rocking simplicity of 2 Chainz or even LMFAO look absolutely artful. Brown's too smart to make music this dumb effectively. [Nov 2013, p.66]

Its satisfying blend of genres amplifies the best of what both these artists have to offer. [Apr 2026, p.63]

Don’t let inevitable mainstream acclaim obscure the beauty and ingenuity of this album; it’s big enough for everyone. [Apr 2019, p.52]

Both tends such fertile, fetid soil that it almost works as an argument against its creator bothering to break bread with anyone else. That is, until you remember that there’s no good reason that he or we should have to choose one course or the other. [May 2020, p.61]

A striking document of Swans' current live form. [Jul 2012, p.64]

His most intimate work to date. [Jan 2015, p.68]

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

[Tempest has] a sense of dues paid as a continual creative replenishment, rather than a swansong. [Nov 2012, p.63]

Ab-Soul music fuses street-level concerns with the sort of erudite, rhyme scheme-fixated wordplay more commonly associated with rapper who value beats and rhymes over life. [Jul 2012, p.71]

This collection, and its atmosphere of sharing a bench with the 20th century’s Mozart as he explores still nascent songs, is an appropriately seductive tease to what will doubtless be a decades-long unearthing of the vault’s untold treasures. The songs themselves, as they’re presented here, really are secondary to this feeling, something like finding a just unearthed message from a departed loved one. [Dec 2018, p.69]

Horse Lords music has never been untidy, but this LP’s seven tracks evince a hyper-focused precision. Even when they flirt with entropy during the last two minutes of “May Brigade”, the transition from rhythmic grid to textural layering is immaculately executed. ... This may not lead the people to call for Comradely Objects rather than Ed Sheeran or (name your preferred chart topper here) but it’ll do the job just fine the next time you need some new minimalist jams for a highway drive. [Nov 2022, p.62]

Until the Quiet Comes is cluttered and schmaltzy. [Nov 2012, p.59]

Stripped of the visuals, the seemingly endless succession of minor variations (75 tracks between the two collections) on the same sets of glossy and pleasant synth arpeggios can be at once bitty and overwhelming. [Oct 2016, p.63]

The percussive result is a monster truck rally of low end synths stomping the shit out of some scuzzy Gun Club/X/Flesh Eaters-style Los Angeles punk trash, while a cheering section of saxophones blast and honk away on the sidelines. [Sep 2024, p.58]

Once this inward looking tendency was a strength; now it seems safe. [Nov 2016, p.68]

The quartet’s albums represent a live sound that applies the means of a beat combo to frankly ecstatic ends via tuning while their mixtapes offer a more diverse and fragmentary accounting of collective interests. The twain finally meet on The Common Task. [Apr 2020, p.56]

The recording and mixing is impeccable, with each instrument distinctly isolated, enabling the tracks to take on lively 3D forms. This does result in a striking directness, but the tightly wrapped sound sometimes feels like it’s in battle with the naturally inventive playing of the trio. [Sep 2021, p.56]

Still Brazy is thoroughly and unapologetically regional, but its thematic engines are universal. [Aug 2016, p.63]

Marshall’s electronic, krautrock-ish backing tracks extended what Lanegan had previously laid down on previous albums Blues Funeral and Phantom Radio. Gargoyle however has more of an early 1980s UK electronic rock feel, with Lanegan’s rough vocal rasp sawing through musical timbres reminiscent of what was being played out at Manchester’s Factory. [May 2017, p.47]

A streamlined combination of motorik rhythms, electronic textures and tuneful choruses. [#242, p.72]

Hot Sauce Committee finds The Beastie Boys being The Beastie Boys with nothing that isn't exactly what on would expect from The Beastie Boys. [Jul 2011, p.44]

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]

Like all the music collected on Off The Record, "Lake Shore Drive Five" serves as a testament to McCraven and his band's ability to make improvisation sound focused and intentional, even as they take us on an unexpected journey. [Jan/Feb 2026, p.88]

Black Encyclopedia Of The Air is a new reckoning of all things, an upending of the status quo presenting us with a world of new possibilities. [Sep 2021, p.56]

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

Those expecting a return to the group's former electronic shock treatment will be sent reeling by the subtlety of this latest release, where ceaseless sonic bombardment has been replaced with a more studied and intricately forged set of almost-songs and mangled machine shop melodies. [Jun 2013, p.56]

Tender without being overly sentimental, this is music with real feeling. [Dec 2018, p.59]

Hurley was simply ready to make a new record, which includes a cover of The Louvin Brothers’ gem “Alabama” and a remake of his gorgeous “Lush Green Trees”, and that’s what he did. It’s a gesture that shouldn’t be taken for granted. [Dec 2021, p.50]

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]

Built around Richman's distinctive voice and guitar style, Only Frozen Sky Anyway is typically hook-laden and heartfelt. [Oct 2025, p.50]

A set of vigorous yet highly intricate arrangements of new material. [Oct 2017, p.60]

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

The issue with Pusha’s fourth solo album isn’t his insistence on portraying a heartless American striver as if he’s the rap game Al Pacino – it’s that he’s unable to consistently conjure the menacing intensity that enlivened his work with with twin brother Malice as Clipse. [Jun 2022, p.52]

Yowzers is Gay’s most cohesive work to date, while losing none of its predecessors’ spirit of adventure. [Jul 2025, p.59]

It's a concise, tidy sounding album, with little of the noise leakage of old. [May 2011, p.51]

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 veers between between a kind of funk slop with trippy organ squelches and good ol' fashioned rawk with biblical overtones, It feels a little like drowning in a bath of Jack Daniels, but not in a good way. [Sep 2010, p.53]

The best stuff views the world through the sunkissed psychedelic lens of Brazilian psych-troupe Os Mutantes; the lesser material just sounds like lite Brian Wilson. [#243, p.59]

The closing 'Honey' leaves all the issues behind and drips with the kind of sultry retro-funk that proves New Amerykah to have been well worth any amount of waiting. [May 2008, p.70]

Extended periods of concentration can create a flow state in which work feels effortless, even meditative, and it's this state that Eyes On The Lines evokes. [Jun 2016, p.50]

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]

Mechanics Of Domination is careful, elegant and cerebral but it is also quietly stirring. [Nov 2017, p.56]

Devour is unwaveringly formless; drills, drones and hysterical screeches become food for trauma. It’s frightening, at many points torturous, but not without emotional weight. The record mirrors what oppression really looks, sounds and feels like – no pool parties, ice tea, sunglasses and shiny colour palettes, just untamed agony, screaming and pain. [Sep 2019, p.60]

This is Irreversible Entanglements at their most accessible, their free jazz roots tightly folded into song form. While the tighter structures of such tracks leave less space for improvisation, the band find other ways to expand the sound, as on "Panamanian Fight Song" where an ambient piano intro recurs as a reverb-heavy apparition. [May 2026, p.53]

Mozart’s Mini Mart, his first LP since On The Hot Dog Streets (2012), is militant and magnificent--as oddsome as dress wearing-era Kevin Rowland, as socially astute as Sleaford Mods, as mythomaniacal as Kanye West.

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

For those looking to block out the outside world and escape into something soothing and sublime, Past Life Regression will most certainly do the trick. [Jul 2022, p.56]

More impressive is how well he and his production circle weave their microfibre soul samples as to draw perpetual tension out of complete simplicity. [Nov 2012, p.73]

Significant Changes is a brilliant album that merges Jayda’s parallel worlds. [Apr 2019, p.65]