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

There is an alchemy at work here. [Apr 2016, p.57]

[“Vapours”] is brilliantly executed and, in places, genuinely frightening. Yawning drones and hissing percussive swells open the gates to chaos in “Of Shadow And Substance”, an epic 21 minute churn of layered tape loops, cello and bass strings, harp and percussion. .... The piece is more haunted and atmospherically dense than its predecessor, however both pieces share a remarkable sense of immediacy.

The music here is beautiful and involving enough to stand up just fine by itself. [Mar 2014, p.59]

In spite of these brief missteps, Change is a welcome return, revealing the multifaceted artistry of a previously enigmatic performer. [Sep 2021, p.48]

None of the pieces seems to reach a destination, and are all the more poignant for that. [Sep 2018, p.58]

It's like being in a church of flesh, a satin abattoir, an immersive video game of obsessive love--sickly, addictive, raw. [Aug 2012, p.46]

The 27th OSEES album is their most synthheavy yet, but those Blurt-like grooves are still in place and the songwriting is still tight as a gnat’s chuff on a record that in typical Osees style ranges all over the shop from new wave to skronk to punk to disco. [Oct 2023, p.56]

Forgoing any temptation to portray herself as an alluring curio, Lafawndah instead pushes a singular yet communal vision, processing a blessedly rich vein of cultural information and cutting edge influence. [Apr 2019, p.63]

Hiperasia offers a vivid, feverish soundworld of Auto-Tuned vocals, idyllic electronics and machine beats solid enough to stand alongside the best US R&B currently has to offer. [Apr 2016, p.60]

Fire is frequently scorching. [Sep 2021, p.50]

Paste is Moin at their strongest, at once familiar and strangely new. [Dec 2022, p.57]

Tasteful pedal steel from Lanois gives a gentle country inflection to cuts like “Arajghiyine” – there’s a neat dovetailing here between two desert musics – but Tinariwen’s refined nocturnal heaviness reigns unchallenged. [Oct 2023, p.60]

For Schofield, the word scrambler symbolises both a sort of opiate and a happy place from childhood, so the music highlights this dichotomy by fusing danger and warmth into an irresistible oxymoron. A sensation of the world ending while we carry on dancing. [Apr 2020, p.51]

It's inscrutable and inspired, and this time mystique has nothing to do with it. [Apr 2013, p.51]

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]

Far Side Virtual is a convincing evocation of the digital dreamtime. [Nov 2011, p.58]

The music resonates with a clarity Treanor had not yet achieved in the past, where the glassy shards of “ATAXIA A2” meet the staggered modulations and condensed hi-hats of “ATAXIA D1”, and ultimately reveal a unique and unexpected humanity. [Apr 2019, p.64]

On Malibu, melody unifies and smooths over divisions: rap and R&B, black history and black modernity, spiritual uplift with the rough material of the everyman's everyday, all made cohesive by Paak's considerable songwriting talent. [Apr 2016, p.64]

Quite aside from the technical brilliance of its execution, Doubled Exposure is a weird boogie album of immense humanity and warmth, driven to a great extent by Shuford's irrepressible charisma. [Mar 2014, p.63]

Gojira once again let loose their own brand of fury on the world. Fortitude is a tightly executed example of the way their songs are propelled as anthems – emblazoned metallic sound banners flapping loudly in the gale they have summoned up. [Sep 2021, p.62]

Basic Volume departs from the impressionistic mixtape approach to a more solid set of songs without Gaika losing his cinematic scope. [Aug 2018, p.56]

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

Gelb’s discordant phrasing and deft wordplay weave gently throughout. At heart, it’s a romantic album about lost moments. [Apr 2019, p.65]

The fact that Thug's voice can express plaintive, mournful sorrow is perhaps the most surprising aspect of this tape, even among all the astonishing vocal pirouettes and cries. [Apr 2016, p.64]

This new collaboration with Christian Beaulieu isn't quite as flamboyant as previous projects, but its an energising jolt all the same. [Mar 2014, p.63]

Tokumaru seems to have poured his entire being, subconscious and all, into these compositions, which burst with vivacity and detail. [Apr 2013, p.57]

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]

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]

Pink Dolphins kicks off with four relatively short tracks (between three and eight minutes – I did say relatively) that demonstrate the evolution of an Anteloper sound. [Jul 2022, p.42]

This EP essays six bitter flavours of magic and loss, with sentiments which might be unbearable were it not for their unalloyed beauty. [Mar 2014, p.63]

With no lyrics to anchor their meaning, many songs here are infused with pathos and awe. [Apr 2013, p.57]

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]

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

In mindbending, psych-wormhole cruising mode. Nobody should be able to write a song like “Flesh Fondue”, about alien invaders out for human snacks, as a stomping rock-out, but Hawkwind pull it off. [Nov 2019, p.55]

The result is a record that feels in touch with the qualities that have powered Oneida in the past – the dogged repetition, the scorching climaxes – but this time trades the crankier avant tendencies for a sweet dose of bubblegum. [Sep 2022, p.48]

Hunn achieves an impressive balance between stylistic coherency and jazzy beat maximalism--it's never really as light or as heavy as it first seems--that other producers of his ilk struggle to pull off. [Mar 2014, p.65]

The album’s just out of reach quality is genuinely affecting, its impressionism charged with tension. [Aug 2018, p.52]

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

It's an unlikely triumph of personality, a glacially slow decay of his icy facade revealing an earnest dedication to his craft, in its own way every bit as spiritual as his brother's more orthodox practice. [Feb 2016, p.56]

While Ekoplekz's Brit-hauntoscopy might easily have started to wear thin by now, Unfidelity's precision and diversity has plenty to offer. [Mar 2014, p.65]

The end result is the closest Cave In have ever come to revisiting the stellar stream of 2000’s Jupiter – the space rock monolith that boosted them into the wider consciousness. [Jun 2019, p.52]

Dreaming In The Non-Dream is a protest record through and through. It captures a rabid collective frustration and expels it with a palpable urgency. The fact that Forsyth and the rest of his group can do it with an eloquence that’s hard to summon in these dire times makes it all the more rewarding. [Sep 2017, p.50]

The best thing they've done since Stakes Is High. [#250, p.73]

The comforting familiarity of the Boards' muted beats, synth washes and glowing keyboards is just as potent and valium soaked as it was on their brilliant 1998 debut. [1/2001, p.71]

This is a record that doesn’t sound like it emerges from hermetic isolation, rather it feels as extrovert and joyous and intriguing and intrigued as the city that inspires it. New York City made sound flesh.

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

Nothing Is Quick In The Desert shows them in fantastic form, sidestepping those laboured moments of musical correctness that made 2015’s Man Plans, God Laughs so patchy, and focusing on the kind of ear-popping chaos that made so much of 1994’s Muse Sick-N-Hour Mess Age so uniquely addictive. [Sep 2017, p.55]

The tracks swim in their devotional depths and become new platforms for meditation and transmission. The compositions are exquisitely suited to convey the confusion and wonder of life’s early years. [Jun 2024, p.48]

Combined with the sincere and fiery anguish of Lenker’s delivery, this propensity for surprise makes Big Thief a genuinely affecting proposition. [Nov 2019, p.50]

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]

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.

The About Group, which included Hayward and Alexis Taylor from Hot Chip, tried with some degree of success to square the circle of song and free improvisation, but Abstract Concrete’s embellished structures feel more natural and no less imaginative. [Dec 2023, p.43]

The minimal tracks here stretch (and sometimes tangle) like long chains of extruded material, pulsing along into the future. [Jun 2019, p.68]

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]

What’s striking about this album, produced by Kenny Beats, is how all of its fear and anxiety are turned inwards. Sure, there’s storytelling, such as “Lakewood Mall”, in which Tyson narrates an instance where Staples evaded violence to end on homespun wisdom and a call to free Pac Slimm. But the psychic stress here is all-encompassing, preceding the threat and resulting in claustrophobia. [Sep 2021, p.64]

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 album’s first half is simultaneously some of Godflesh’s most aggro material and as gleaming and chromed as a Terminator that’s been burned down to its metal skeleton. Purge isn’t a completely boom-bap orientated album, though. “Lazarus Leper” is both one of the album’s longest tracks and one of its most old school. The primitive drum machine beat sounds like something that could have come off the group’s very first EP. [Jul 2023, p.51]

The album finds different creative forms in convergence. Efdemin uses the album format to combine audio storytelling with ambient and drone based compositions that tell their own stories. [Apr 2019, p.65]

If the crackling electronic chaff of previous efforts seems less dominant this time around, it most likely because the group have learned to skillfully incorporate it into their increasingly accomplished and accessible songcraft. [Nov 2008, p.74]

His ability to manipulate sounds of urban bleakness into piss-stained musique concrète is as present as ever, from bass that booms like mourning gasometers to choking metallic smog ambience. Yet Younger’s skill lies not as yet another artist soundtracking urban decay but in enticing and confounding with sounds that straddle the uncanny valley. [Jun 2019, p.40]

Evokes the same stark, road weary melancholy as Ry Cooder's score for Paris, Texas, but with a far more extensive sonic toolbox. [#240, p.57]

Every beat is a slow motion epic, every hook aches with promethazine exhaustion transcended through force of will. [Sep 2017, p.62]

While admiring the album for its subtle intricacies, I keep coming back to its two most straightforward songs: the extremely fun chamber punk piece “Shark-Shark” and lead single “How We See The Light”, which manages to be both wise and wide-eyed with curiosity. [Jul 2024, p.46]

Gordon sings with a becalmed daydream-y satisfaction, mixing and matching phrases from different notebooks into a confident patchwork. [Nov 2019, p.54]

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]

While several guests appear on the album – Tool’s drummer Danny Carey and bassist Justin Chancellor, among others – Krüller feels gorgeously desolate, befitting a world in a dire state. [Mar 2022, p.42]

Never merely texture, just noise or dumb repetition, but always, instead, living and intelligent music. [Nov 2011, p.63]

Reset is bright and cheerful, drenched in supersaturated colour and psychedelic sunshine. Most impressive is the way the music explicitly draws from the past without slipping into pastiche or retro-nostalgic recreation. [Sep 2022, p.48]

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

I Phantom could prove to be one of the most consistently rewarding HipHop records to land in 2002. [#223, p.52]

With this stripped-back suite, HTRK demonstrate such alchemy – achieving dramatic tension and emotive resonance from skeletal means. [Oct 2021, p.49]

She’s the type of restless innovator that doesn’t stick with the same style for too long, and FIBS is a joyful, energetic follow-up to her debut. [Nov 2019, p.56]

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

You Know What's It's Like presents the emotional cente of dal Forno's work with a clarity previously absent from either band. [Nov 2016, p.55]

He spins an engrossing narrative in short spans of time, packing songs with layers that are felt when they're not immediately perceived. [Nov 2011, p.63]

Rainford is a classic set of Scratch vocals: science fiction nursery rhymes, apocalyptic lullabies, their melodies light as air yet rocksteady. Scratch’s delivery at the age of 83 is like Dylan’s present-day rasp, no longer about hitting notes or even tone necessarily, but heavy with the weight of his personal and musical history. [May 2019, p.61]

This is a collection of songs that the group genuinely love and it shows. [Apr 2013, p.61]

Her voice is low and dragging, richly witch-like and wise. A selection of one-off recordings and “orphans”, Quieter is loose and beautiful, sludgy but solid. [Aug 2018, p.52]

At some point in the future Tyler, The Creator may define his ideology and grow tedious with it; for now he remains on top form revelling in ambiguity. [Sep 2017, p.62]

This LP kicks off with a run of tunes that are wistful and simply beautiful. [Nov 2019, p.56]

The result is one of the year's most thought-provoking electronic works. [Nov 2016, p.56]

His voice retains a high pitched vulnerability, but the urgency of his reports from the flipside of hippiedom have softened into the sound of someone more comfortable with their place in the universe. [Sep 2013, p.48]

Despite being busy, Miri isn’t crowded. Kouyate has returned to a more acoustic sound after the electrified Ba Power, and his ngoni structures the songs with clarity and poise. [Apr 2019, p.68]

With Bajascillators the group have achieved master mood shift status, producing a work that is simultaneously dreamy and psychedelically transportive. [Oct 2022, p.38]

Silhouettes & Statues--83 songs across five CDs--is a useful opportunity to take stock of goth’s actual achievements. It charts the genre’s emergence from post-punk, emphasises points of overlap with anarcho, industrial and even synthpop, and ends in 1986 before the arrival of Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson and hordes of neo-celtic, pagan folk and cyber goth sub-groupings. [Sep 2017, p.69]

JPEGMAFIA ain’t really here for the put-ons and doesn’t expect his listeners to be either. But those expectations do not come without a kind of sound education, one that considers the context and multiplicity of characters he’s speaking to and through. In that way, Cornballs demands repeat plays, critical engagement and a goddamn sense of humour. [Nov 2019, p.57]

This wonderful music is most certainly bleeding freely from somewhere deep inside Jenny Hval. [Nov 2016, p.58]

Even though there are no drums, nothing here ever feels aimless. [Sep 2013, p.48]

This isn't really the future of HipHop, but as a fleeting reverie on its conflicted present, it makes for a fantastic detour. [#217, p.55]

Thankfully it offers something much more than the sum of its parts and references. It speaks to our present moment with a yearning generosity and the kind of deep knowing that only comes with age. [Mar 2023, p.51]

One Eleven Heavy have an uncanny knack for sucking in the charms of rock heroes of yesteryear and expelling them with contemporary fancy, with the best results being the hazy drag of “Hot Potato Soup” and the dizzying Allman Brothers-like closer “Three Poisons”. [Nov 2019, p.62]

A few of these ten songs burble with easy rhythms – “Lye” rocks with crunchy, prog rock horns looped by The Alchemist. But overall, the tone of SICK! feels contemplative, slowly unfurling with repeated listens even as Earl crams over 20 minutes of thoughts into the work, with no hooks to leaven the intensity. [Mar 2022, p.43]

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

There’s still no shortage of the epic thumps and crashes that made Lotic such an exciting prospect in their early days, except now they have more space. Instead of overwhelming a listener with the persistent high of audio ultraviolence, it allows for more subtle dynamics. [Aug 2018, p.57]

It's a genuine pleasure to hear an ensemble this aesthetically united working at such a high level. [Nov 2016, p.61]

The aforementioned “Carpathian Darkness” is an archetype for the album as a whole, thoroughly captivating despite (or because) of its familiarity. [Feb 2021, p.46]

Joyful, heart-warming, brain-fizzing stuff. [Jul 2022, p.50]