It sounds vast and brutal. An early salvo of sub three minute crunchers peak with the juddering, wounded "To Feel Something", and the galloping metal number "Make Me Forget You" is the highlight of a longer closing trio. [Mar 2026, p.60]

Rendering his [Neşet Ertas'] sparse, haunting, saz-led arrangements in Altin Gün's electrified image does require a fair bit of upholstery, but they play with delicacy and poise, transforming "Bir Nazar Eyledim" into a remarkable kosmische pop ballad. [Mar 2026, p.60]

They're still worth rooting for just about but mileage -may vary. [Mar 2026, p.54]

The result is a dreamy potion of cascading stringwork and ethereal song, a soothing, otherworldly balm, grounded in ancient tradition but partly inspired by modern tragedy, as the album title suggests. [Mar 2026, p.53]

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]

With Discombobulated, Hen Ogledd have grown to fully inhabit their costumes, Sun Ra Arkestra style, with the greatest musical and lyrical realisation yet of their diverse strengths. [Mar 2026, p.49]

While opening track "Echo In The Field" evokes Laraaji's Day Of Radiance, Moran's compositions here, while still intricately crafted, are more prickly than expansive. Second track "Prism Drift" is tetchy clockwork sprung with piano bass strikes of doom.[Nov 2025, p.63]

This Soul Jazz set is the biggest jungle splash for a long time, featuring the booming basslines, the fiercest of Amen breaks and heavyweight ragga vocals on essential cuts from Krome & Time, Cutty Ranks, M-Beat, Bizzy B, Lemon D, Top Cat, and more all dating from the prime years of 1993-95. [Jan/Feb 2026, p.97]

The album is notable for featuring White's first vocal performance, both on "I Don't Do/ Grand Central", where he's joined in spirited conversation by Zoh Amba, and the title track, on which he narrates his inner life through word association and repetition. It's a taste of a new compositional element that will be interesting to hear develop. The album's other collaborator is White's regular producer Guy Picciotto, whose light touch encourages an egalitarian approach to sound, where everything is in the mix and everything matters. [Jan/Feb 2026, p.94].

The unlikely tonal blend makes Lux one of the least predictable collections of spiritual songs in pop history. [Jan/Feb 2026, p.90]

Children's voices soften and lift the sound, not with nostalgia but with unvarnished purity. Even the darkest tracks have this sense of movement: "Endgames" trudges on a low, stubborn pulse until bowed strings and harp flourishes nudge it into tentative radiance. The album becomes a procession, carrying its own weight into a brighter place. [Jan/Feb 2026, p.88]

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]

Iconoclasts finds von Hausswolff at her most unabashedly accessible and soulful. [Jan/Feb 2026, p.86]

His words remain relatively vivid but his voice is old, his stories nostalgic, occasionally tired. A baffling decision to sprinkle a handful of past recordings through the tracklist reveals he can't compete with his own 20 year old offcuts. .... Otherwise he's generally best when choice sparring partners inspire sparks of life. [Jan/Feb 2026, p.83]

The laser focus evenly applied to songs from the upcoming album (Grant Hart's heart-wrenching "Don't Want To Know If You're Lonely" and "Sorry Somehow") and older material makes it apparent why Hüsker Dü were the first US punk band to make that historic leap into the mainstream. To catch an earful of them in a live setting after that dicey dive is truly an illuminating experience. [Dec 2025, p.68]

Refusing to conform to any one style, Die Spitz surprise throughout with songs like "Voir Dire" and "American Porn" that lash out and sting, alongside the seemingly endless looping guitar stutter that accentuates the glorious roar of "Down On It". [Dec 2025, p.60]

Their second album Vesper Sparrow explores the arrhythmic and atonal multilayered textures that underpin Ellis's soaring contemporary jazz saxophone. .... The closing "Evensong Part 4" is a celebration of disconnected, cycling, melodic instrumental chants, layered into a richly joyous texture, with a Sowetan jazz feel.

Moments of levity arrive in "Cherry Blue", "DIS" and "Waterfalls" but overall the album's evenhanded pacing creates a strange unease. It seems governed by the temporal logic of its samples, as if Lopatin were intent on preserving their integrity rather than reshaping them. The emotional resonance that usually grounds Lopatin's work feels somewhat displaced by this formal precision. [Dec 2025, p.54]

Some will delight in her richly creative studio experiments, while others may find it too vague and discursive, despite several strong cuts like "Devotions" and "Think About It/What U Think?". [Dec 2025, p.63]

The results are overwhelmingly chirpy, but there's a frisson between his uniquely crusty voice and the shimmering digital surfaces. He sounds comfortable, but he doesn't blend in. [Dec 2025, p.63]

The Alchemist's patented gangster music soundtracks, full of moody textures and synths, can sound quite placid. It's up to Armand Hammer and co to bring rough tension and focus to an album that often feels overly atmospheric, despite standout cuts like "Dogeared" and "Super Nintendo". [Dec 2025, p.63]

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]

Throughout, strings carry forward brief, carefully composed interludes, dipping into sound fields that recall early 2000s post-rock; pensive percussion and melodic guitars riffing in and out of focus. The compositions are painterly and precise, punctuated by chimes and deep piano tones. [Dec 2025, p.56]

Each turns in a fine performance, yielding some decent tracks, but they fail to generate the kind of frisson that would make this more than a historical curio. [Dec 2025, p.55]

A conventional song based offering, but essentially a continuation of the dialogue between Gunn/guitar and luscious underscoring this time more orchestral than electronic. The mood is generally soothing, but shot through with occasional suggestions of disquiet. [Nov 2025, p.53]

Those accustomed to the aggro, politically charged jazz rock of Brooklyn's Sunwatchers might be taken aback by this second solo outing from their saxophonist. Tobias titles what he concocts here "anti-imperialist pop", which shows there is still a kind-hearted intent behind the music even if its bubbly beats and dreamy vocals might sound like a mad stab at the mainstream. [Oct 2025, p.62]

Both Ishibashi and O'Rourke have spent lifetimes devoted to improvisation, and even if they only pick up a conventional instrument here and there on Pareidolia, the magic they weave on computers is no less spontaneous. [Oct 2024, p.54]

What a blessed relief, given all this, that Dan Bitney, John Herndon, Doug McCombs, John McEntire and Jeff Parker, collectively, still sound wholly and unapologetically like themselves. [Nov 2025, p.60]