25 years down the line, Wire are still pulling off coups as daring and deadly as This Heat's debut. [#224, p.73]

Baird's mixture of history-steeped elements keeps her songs from being tethered to any given time period, including the present, which makes them apt vehicles for words about relationships fraught with uncertainty. [Jun 2015, p.42]

This is fierce, uncompromising music. [May 2017, p.47]

An exciting record crawling with new ideas. [#243, p.74]

Holtkamp and Anderegg have arrived at a strain of wide-eyed Americana with roots in the ashen wastes of the Pennsylvania landscape. [Feb 2013, p.58]

She delivers an almost unrelentingly banging techno set whose cuts, while perhaps underground, could never be referred to as deconstructed. [Apr 2019, p.57]

Anenon's third album represents a confident shift in gear. [Apr 2016, p.46]

Though Gonzalez has always been a great arranger and producer, this album demonstrates how much she has improved as a lyricist. [Sep 2021, p.56]

Everyone Was A Bird is a lot more than a pictorial guide set to music. [Jun 2015, p.46]

Lullaby For The Lost is McCaslin's boldest iteration to date. [Oct 2025, p.56]

Were it only instrumental, Dopesmoker would be some kind of masterpiece. [Aug 2012, p.55]

Caught somewhere between the big yucks and the thoughtful overview are moments of genuine strangeness that are both captivating and unsettling. [#255, p.59]

Sharp inhalations between melodic figures are given a multidimensional presence by the reverb, grounding the sound in an embodied ethereality. As track titles like “The Cosmic Spheres Of Being Human” and “Everything Is Hidden In You” make clear, the circular rhythms of this embodied presence are identical with those of the universe. [Sep 2024, p.49]

He has a fascinating rhythmic sense, phrasing almost like a man who is writing down his words as he sings them, which gives the record a strong sense of immediacy and almost improvised spontaneity. And yet the accompaniments are more elegantly constructed than that implies, a beguiling mixture of harmonic squidge and tight metrical control. [Apr 2019, p.57]

Deeply scored with pitch-black humour, concrete riffs and the mucus rattling squalling of vocalist Zack Weil, Oozing Wound shift effortlessly from the piledriver bludgeoning that motivates “Hypnic Jerk” to the more sustained instrumental fury of “Crypto Fash”, without surrendering any of their creative firepower or ability to surprise. [May 2023, p.60]

Every gesture feels bold and assured. [Nov 2015, p.53]

The whole album seems to be incandescent with anger. You would have to travel a long way to hear an acoustic guitar album as tough as this. [Jan/Feb 2025, p.82]

It manages to evoke both void and overload simultaneously, and feels by turns oppressively dense and light as a feather. [Dec 2012, p.74]

A surprisingly engrossing side project. [Feb 2013, p.58]

Little Simz’s latest--and greatest--album is divided between three emotional states: bravado, doubt and love. [Apr 2019, p.58]

No One Deserves Happiness alternates between bleak and industrialised grindcore and a powerful poetic presence that effectively conveys a sense of loss. [Apr 2016, p.46]

Musically, it’s a perfect mix. It didn’t seem possible to top Roberts’s association with Amble Skuse and the great David McGuinness, but Völvur’s use of saxophone and fiddle, paired with Roberts’s deceptively relaxed picking, makes for a perfect, unpredictable setting. Nothing synthetic here. The word, if you want it, is syncretistic. [Sep 2021, p.57]

There is a kind of exuberance you thought went out of fashion with The B-52s. [#211, p.66]

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

The entire affair has a bewitching ease, an effortlessness absent from Malkmus’s artistry since the days when he wanted to name his solo debut Swedish Reggae. [Apr 2019, p.58]

The signature sounds of each ensemble have been stirred together, so that Cooper Crane’s organ, Dan Quinlivan’s electronics and Lisa Alvarado’s harmonium pulse as one, and synths and woodwinds entwine like multiple species of ivy that have grown together on the same wall. [May 2025, p.58]

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]

She’s done it again but, as ever, differently. [Oct 2023, p.56]