It's a smart, exuberant set. [Dec 2022, p.32]

The group's most unabashedly pop-forward and irresistibly buoyant effort since 1996's Dizzy Heights. [Nov 2022, p.32]

The spacious, stereo-panning "binaural" sound mix works particularly well as a headphones album. [Dec 2022, p.29]

The album largely struggles to match the buzz and momentum of its tone-setting opener. [Nov 2022, p.36]

There are some cloying twee moments, but the players' telepathic interaction imbues even their slightest songs with crackling immediacy. [Nov 2022, p.36]

The psychedelic delirium of the music is all we really need to know. [Nov 2022, p.29]

The third installment is almost shockingly concise at 30 minutes. ... Hearing one of the group's freewheeling jams coalesce into "Bel Air" 10 minutes into the proceedings still sparks a frisson of recognition that makes the series so exhilarating. [Nov 2022, p.46]

This full-bodied, all-star immersion into an insalubrious world inspired by late '70s/early-'80s continental disco is somehow more appealing than Matmos' recent foray into Polish mid-century avant-garde. [Dec 2022, p.35]

She sings achingly slow, self-loathing, minor-key ballads which would function well with just a clawhammer acoustic guitar accompaniment. But she transforms the rest of them into epic pieces of sludge metal. [Dec 2022, p.36]

Their strongest, punchiest batch of songs to date. [Dec 2022, p.36]

Crutchfield's distinctive, smoky voice couldn't be more different from Williamson's softer one, yet the way they melt together on the choruses you'd swear it was fated. [Dec 2022, p.35]

The furious cumbia/rock fusion of "Graveyard Love" and the gentler cosmic pop of "Tourmaline" may comprise a new creative apex for these inveterate overachievers. [Dec 2022, p.29]

The result is a glorious, dizzy riot with no precursor. [Dec 2022, p.18]

There's a comfort, a natural ease, to Black Lips's Apocalypse Love that could never be mistaken for laziness. [Dec 2022, p.25]

It's wonderful to have them back, and on such imperious form. [Nov 2022, p.30]

If it's not as striking as its predecessor, its colourful patchwork exterior clothes some of Hitchcock's finest recent songs. [Nov 2022, p.29]

If the music and lyrics are both impressive, though, it's the interaction between them that makes Stumpwork such a triumph. They work together and against each other, pushing and pulling, fighting arrhythmically or slipping into step as the moment demands. [Nov 2022, p.38]

Turner's observations and the way he relishes a smart turn of phrase bring these vignettes to life in a way that's almost frighteningly vivid, even when his circuitous melodies don't always land. ... Much like For Your Pleasure or Gaucho, The Car functions both as intoxicating advert and withering critique. [Dec 2022, p.24]

You can choose to interact with this theme [an alien visiting Earth] or let it drift to the background, instead sinking into ¡Ay!'s gently shifting moods of innocence, curiosity and delight. [Nov 2022, p.28]

YTILAER picks at the fabric of the universe and if it doesn't always find the answers it wants, the expansive musical backdrop underlines its slightly ecstatic, questing spirit. [Nov 2022, p.34]

The earthbound "This Love", shuffling along on metallic, moody guitar, and the twining, spaghetti-western eeriness of "Sucker Punch" are more engaging, but Here Is Everything could use more of the punch that lists the standout "Trouble". [Nov 2022, p.25]

Avoiding sentimentality, this quality unexpectedly turns out to be vital to the album's success. [Nov 2022, p.18]

Nothing Special draws back from Okkervil River's giddy pop whirls in favour of beautiful, ruminative, Lambchop-ish ballads which, while lengthy, never outstay their welcome. [Nov 2022, p.36]

A real beauty. [Nov 2022, p.38]

A bold endeavour with some genuine thrills. [Nov 2022, p.35]

The welcome brevity of most tracks gives Snaith even more room to vary tempos and textures. [Nov 2022, p.28]

Her light, airy palette, punctuated by arresting stabs and scattershot rhythm, is informed by vintage Squarepusher and Plain - but Eastman's pioneering work as a black, gay musician operating in challenging times clearly resonates with James. [Oct 2022, p.32]

A welcome return. [Nov 2022, p.29]

It's impeccably crafted, with Mitchell and Johnson's radiant harmonies to the fore over arrangements that sometime evoke the bittersweet bliss of Fleetwood Mac ot turn-of-the-70s Grateful Dead. [Nov 2022, p.26]

No overhaul then, but the BB alure still holds. [Nov 2022, p.26]

The band's pivot away from fuzzed-out jangle pop to something closer to shoegaze adds to the dreamy feel. [Nov 2022, p.25]

Producer Adrian Sherwood now completes the picture with this sound-system-style refashioning, breaking tracks open, resetting them in eerie dubscapes. [Oct 2022, p.25]

There’s little to be found here that doesn’t already sound inescapably familiar, but it’s perfectly rock-solid stuff all the same. [Oct 2022, p.25]

The Arkestra's rich, gestalt thinking makes these pieces simmer and spark, building ritualistic power. [Nov 2022, p.36]

The message is heavy but the music is tremendous fun. [Nov 2022, p.38]

A celebration of the inherent power of community and music’s ability to connect and resonate through the ages, created by someone fast becoming one of the most important young voices in modern American folk music. [Oct 2022, p.18]

Heaton and Abbott's fifth breaks taboos about infant deaths on the quietly moving “Still” and nobly restores self-belief on the uplifting “When The World Would Actually Listen”. They remain impervious to musical snobbery, too. [Oct 2022, p.31]

It's not quite experimental, but there is evolution in this superbly judged set. [Nov 2022, p.21]

Louis O'Bryen and Asha Lorenz paint a drunker, more heartbroken picture of twentysomething romance on this downbeat sequel. [Nov 2022, p.36]

Fastidiously complex, yes, but also capable of moments of disarming prettiness. [Oct 2022, p.23]

The results are sometimes too meta to be particularly satisfying, but when but coheres - as on the bracing, static-smeared "Backwash" - it's worth the effort. [Nov 2022, p.29]

You can almost hear doors swinging shut in monastic apartments, as he abandons his perfectionist MO to grapple with faith and loss over mangled voice demos and musique concréte sheets of rain. [Oct 2022, p.36]

For the most part it's Snarky Puppy at their jazziest, but there's still space for plenty of sweaty funk and prog-rock wigging out. [Nov 2022, p.36]

It's an album of rich multifaceted complexity that showcases what a truly inimitable artist Björk is. [Nov 2022, p.24]

It’s the work of a focused artist who is consistently attempting to stretch out the parameters of their own ever-expanding sonic world. ... Yet another late-career highlight. [Oct 2022, p.22]

Klaus Dinger’s Apache beat and Michael Rother’s steel reels of guitar still have elemental power. ... The National, and Stephen Morris (of New Order) and Gabe Gurnsey, acquit themselves adequately, but Neu!’s music is so singular, there’s next to no point trying to take the material on, even in tribute form. [Oct 2022, p.46]

“De-Hibernate”’s depths are murky but its surfaces sparkle, “Does It Go Dark?”s sludgy drones answer in the affirmative (before changing their mind), and “Haze Loops” drifts past in a beautiful blur swaddled in echoing, blissed-out guitars. [Sep 2022, p.30]

These songs balance the regrets with the triumphs, which lends songs like the title track and “My Hidden Heart” a playfulness as well as an immense poignancy. [Oct 2022, p.33]

If we can now safely conclude that the Pixies are unlikely to hit the heights of early days, then let’s face it, it’s the rare mortal who can; but it’s also the only slightly less rare mortal who can make albums as solidly good as this one. [Oct 2022, p.30]

Space and darkness area constant among these eight tight songs, but there’s also plenty of punch. [Oct 2022, p.36]

The result is quietly dizzying. [Oct 2022, p.25]

The idea is to immerse yourself in the natural flow of the music; admirable, though who these days has time to experience it all in one go? [Oct 2022, p.29]

Wiggy electronics abound, from the urgent gallop of the title track and the woozy psych-pop of “Kinetic Connection” to the cinematic orchestrations of “Slacker” and “A Quarter To Eight”. Think The Flaming Lips’ sci-fisonics given a very English twist. [Oct 2022, p.26]

The result is both viscerally corporeal music, full of gristle and breath, and richly ambient. [Oct 2022, p.27]

Here his [Vieux's] guitar melts audaciously into Khruangbin's spacey atmospherics and futuristic R&B. [Nov 2022, p.38]

There are strong moments, from the sweet, mixtape-ready “Backup Plan” to “Sweet Tooth”, which brings pep and rockier guitar. But Moss badly needs a bit more Upside Down energy. [Oct 2022, p.29]

Over a barrage of different beats, Hutching creates abstract-expressionist drip paintings using a single colour, or striking day-glo illustrations using broad brush-strokes, or pointillistic portraits using hundreds of identical dots. [Nov 2022, p.24]

There’s a tenderness to the way he puts the instruments in conversation with one another, drawing out Younger’s harp and Macie Stewart’s melancholy violin solo. That’s ultimately what makes this record so powerful, even if you’re not familiar with its touchstones: by colliding the past with the present, McCraven makes a point of making progress. [Oct 2022, p.24]

Things Happen That Way isn’t an exemplar of his style, nor (clearly) is it a late-career blooming, but it is a richly resonant farewell from a maverick veteran. [Oct 2022, p.32]

The album maintains its hallucinatory aura throughout; it’s a dazzling aural anime from a wildly original artist. [Oct 2022, p.29]

The songs are raunchy and resentful, idealising and vocally aching for a lover, or wrestling with more complex feelings. [Nov 2022, p.26]

Songs such as the languid “Deeper” and the joyous “Stoned Love” are full of spiritual healing, as self-doubt is replaced by a hard-won inner radiance. [Oct 2022, p.32]

Bittersweet melancholy is rarely more refined. [Nov 2022, p.38]

Some thoroughly arresting moments that fall midway between Justin Vernon and Scott Walker. [Nov 2022, p.26]

They're not best known for melodicism, but in a funny way the slow-blooming compositions here are full of charming, playful melody, detailed in exotic colours. [Nov 2022, p.25]

It’s rarely coherent and not always pretty, but the most effective therapy rarely is. [Oct 2022, p.26]

TV Priest remain wedded to a very contemporary wading-through-treacle post-punk feel but at times add a little space to the music rather than surrendering to claustrophobia. [Nov 2022, p.38]

Auto-Tuned electro-soul, reggae-lite rhythms and deceptively political lyrics are key motifs here, although Nick Zinner of Yeah Yeah Yeahs lends some grungey thrust to "Fall First." [Nov 2022, p.36]

The album come out riffing, with a packed list of guest guitarists. ... Ozzy sounds world-weary, sometimes a bit knackered. [Nov 2022, p.35]

This recurring tendency to grandiosity is especially frustrating given that less is generally more throughout the album. [Nov 2022, p.35]

People Helping People is evenly split between eerie, washed-out rumblings and more frenzied outbursts of Sonic Youth-ful skronk and motorik madness. [Oct 2022, p.33]

Infectious, silly and even a little dangerous again. Through it all — even on the two quieter tracks, which stick outa little awkwardly among the Killing Joke fuzz — Brett Anderson is the consummate guide, vocally at his peak. [Oct 2022, p.34]

There’s a seam of pop here that his parent band largely lacked, which fills moments like “You Remind Me” with a warm flush of romance. [Oct 2022, p.29]

It captures the core of what Jones does. His compositions are always assured, and his playing is never overwrought. [Jul 2022, p.29]

“Savage” and “Maps” could be John Foxx’s Ultravox remixed by Larry Levan, the songs’ harder synth and post-punk textures continually softened by Polar’s emotive vocals and Geist’s love of warm, soulful grooves. [Sep 2022, p.23]

The mood of Expert In A Dying Field is yearning and reflective, as Stokes picks over the bones of relationships on mournful janglers like “Your Side”, punky rocker “Silence Is Golden”, the shimmering “Best Left” and terrific closer “2am”. [Oct 2022, p.25]

Gibbard's freighted eloquence gives Asphalt Meadows its unsettling immediacy. [Oct 2022, p.26]

The seemingly simple yet thoroughly conceptualised material here, all held within specific harmonic language, is beautifully realised. [Oct 2022, p.26]

An ear for arrangement detail — be it fuzzy synths or rustic washboard-like percussion — lifts often simple, acoustic-led songs into enduringly captivating territory. [Oct 2022, p.36]

Pandemic restrictions demanded some creative rethinking for these seven tracks. ... Guitars are still central, however, whipping the Chameleons-like “Ricochet” along and performing as bedrock melodic clanging for the six-minute, Sisters-adjacent closer, “Tearing Up The Grass”. [Oct 2022, p.33]

[Greg Dulli has] pulled the Whigs back into (sharp) focus. ... Closer “In Flames” is a welcome reminder that few can match the Whigs in the slow-burn desperation stakes. [Oct 2022, p.23]

He describes the album as a “coming of age” project, and at 59 it’s evident he’s still processing the past. [Oct 2022, p.31]

There’s something about the funky syncopation between the two and their slightly punky sensibility that elevates GA-20 way above so many dreary blues revivalists. [Oct 2022, p.29]

This fully formed debut is incontestable evidence of an important new act. [Sep 2022, p.30]

Natural Brown Prom Queen revels in ear-catching beats and hooks while still maintaining Parks’ mile-a-minute rate of musical ideas. [Oct 2022, p.34]

Album highlight “Understood” sounds particularly Young-like here too, but elsewhere Martsch sounds confident in his own skin, merging interlocking layered guitars, subtle melodic touches and licks that veer from crunchy to blissed out. [Oct 2022, p.26]

Together they make smart but unstudied pop music, as invigoratingly weird as it is instantly winning, stuffed with gleefully incompatible styles and with a broad emotional range. [Oct 2022, p.31]

Her flow has a bratty edge and unhurried, authoritative core, capable of Philly soul sweetness on “Lo Rain”, or riding low, squelching beats on “IDGAF”. ... Meanwhile, “Let Me Be Great” isa pan-African firework display celebrating her rooted rebirth. [Oct 2022, p.34]

The xx duo eagerly depart from the templates that have served their band so well, thereby imparting Hideous Bastard with a spontaneity that complements the courage and candour in the lyrics. [Oct 2022, p.34]

Worth the price alone is the inclusion of their peerless ’97 Nurse With Wound collaboration “Simple Headphone Mind”/“Trippin’ With The Birds”, half an hour of sublime Neu!-sozzled psych as Steven Stapleton caresses the ’lab’s “Long Hair Of Death”. [Oct 2022, p.48]

Opener “Globe” is a bubblegum headrush: giddy, kinetic, punctuated by smile-inducing cries of “you got this”; “Champagne”, with its shared bassline, a bittersweet mirror image. The skittish “TV Flicker”, inspired by a sudden family bereavement, breaks the mould somewhat, adding range to the mix. [Oct 2022, p.33]

"Living Torch I" is gentle and organic, a hypnotic four-note refrain offering some of the spiritual uplift of her organ work. The shorter "Living Torch II" presents something like the same ingredients, but strafes them with electronic attack. [Oct 2022, p.33]

Art Moore conjure up some compelling scenes on their debut. [Oct 2022, p.25]

There’s a strong Big Thief vibe to tracks like "Lot's Wife" and "Silsbee" - named after the small town where the album was recorded - but Why Bonnie have a more traditional concept of melody, best expressed on the excellent "Sharp Town". [Oct 2022, p.36]

Although his dabblings in bluegrass pastiche are less convincing elsewhere, it’s all shot through with characteristic, likeable idiosyncrasy. [Oct 2022, p.36]

If the reggae-metal of "I'm Insecure" is a little club-footed, the charisma of her delivery still wins through. [Oct 2022, p.31]

Her candid, self-interrogating lyrics and glassy, soulful voice take centrestage. [Oct 2022, p.29]

Tracks such as "My Name is Blank" capture the album's essence - a middle ground between metal and punk - on a record that barely lets up for a single second. [Oct 2022, p.25]