A tightly visionary work addressing the isolation and mutilation of World War I soldiers; if it’s unforgiving and unflinching in focus, that’s needed, to give voice to such suffering. [Oct 2022, p.29]

Muse are so bursting with energy and ideas, even their joke songs are stadium-sized barnstormers. [Oct 2022, p.33]

The core sound is instrumental motorik rock with sweet licks. [Sep 2022, p.24]

These sketches give a sense of how Reed’s songs would be finessed. The less familiar tunes reverse the telescope, throwing the focus on the way Reed bullworked his writing muscles, toying with novelty and genre. ... What these early sketches show is that by combining novelty and song craft with the soul of a poet, Reed could reach higher. [Sep 2022, p.42]

Treading familiar terrain on a succession of tracks that adhere to his comfort zone of mannered electro-pop. [Sep 2022, p.29]

Evocative of Harry Nilsson and Randy Newman at their most extroverted, McKenzie’s songs provide great warmth, too. [Sep 2022, p.28]

The default setting is dancefloor hedonism with an air of wistful nostalgia. Best of all are the two Bernard Butler co-writes, “Glitter Ball” and “Home”, which sound like Saint Etienne at their most ecstatic. [Sep 2022, p.21]

There’s certainly an abundance of good ideas – often several within the course of one song, with hooks emerging from the fog before dissolving as quickly as they came – but the band seem to work through them in perfect harmony, on the way to even greater things. ... Their best album.

Young Blood is far darker than 2020’s soulful El Dorado. “Blood On The Tracks”, which chugs along behind a swampy, cowbell-accented groove, provides relief from the monolithic heaviness, which becomes enervating on the generic “Hard Working Man”. [Sep 2022, p.26]

Dylan Hadley and Cole Berliner’s songs are fragmentary and unpredictable, their springy guitars and elliptical vocals sometimes coalescing into sparkling hooks, at other times deliberately abstruse; think the quirky post-punk of The Raincoats, or a country-folk Deerhoof. [Sep 2022, p.26]

The bonus material proves just as revelatory as the remastered albums, as Against The Odds doubles as a shadow history of the city’s creative heyday. [Sep 2022, p.39]

However nonlinear her compositions, they’re bright, full of wonder and have a pop sensibility, recalling Four Tet, Deakin and Suzanne Ciani. [Sep 2022, p.30]

The songwriter’s takes on treacherous relationships come with a Vampire Weekend-ish talent for a multi-part melody and Phoebe Bridgers’ ear for pertinent one-liners, the stately “Underwater”, “Move Me”, the title track and bedsit-ABBA kiss-off “Cold” all deep, powerful, overwhelming. [Sep 2022, p.23]

A revitalised rock’n’roll soundtrack for a push towards the brightening of the light. [Sep 2022, p.33]

As a lyricist, she remains the understatement queen, “Let’s keep all our doctor’s appointments” from “Be Careful With Yourself” perhaps one of the most superbly subtle statements of devotion in recorded song. Nobody underdoes it better. [Sep 2022, p.26]

Whatever meanings are to be gleaned here, Bleed Out still rates as one of the band’s hardest-rocking outings. [Sep 2022, p.28]

Lifetime Achievement embraces the folksier elements of his sound, paring the music down to guitar, banjo, occasionally a harmonica and even more occasionally a full band. [Sep 2022, p.22[

The brutal realism Greil Marcus heard in X’s debut Los Angeles remains in John Doe’s solo incarnation as hard-bitten Americana troubadour, here offering 1890s tales of spartan hardship, his songs’ killers and victims chased across the South by poverty and guilt. [Jun 2022, p.26]

Lyrical malaise is matched, as ever, by immaculately crafted electronic pop music that veers just as much into joy, elation and euphoria as it does melancholic introspection. [Sep 2022, p.24]

Pinning this endlessly complex songwriter’s work down to a single tagline or meaning is unwise. His songs are not always easy, they’re not always straightforward, but 10 albums in, they’re mounting up to create one of the most impressive bodies of work of the century so far. [Sep 2022, p.16]

Longer songs are punctuated by studio chatter, voicemails, birdsong and other ambient sounds, lending the whole project an artfully informal intimacy. [Sep 2022, p.32]

Whenever he [frontman Jeremy Gaudet] does lose his footing, the band’s imaginative take on mid-2000s indie rock – all churning guitars and zigzagging synths – steadies this Chopper. [Sep 2022, p.26]

A revolutionary step in the band’s catalogue this is not, but the sound of Dwyer and co having a lot of fun in his basement radiates throughout, as does the band’s seamless knack for tapping into any strand of punk they turn their hand to. [Sep 2022, p.28]

Cheat Codes finds Danger Mouse rolling with a new lyrical foil and this one feels like it could run and run. [Sep 2022, p.22]

Lennox and Kember create breezy sonic collages of sunshine melody, fluidly chugging rhythms and fizzing analogue synths without succumbing to full retro-jukebox pastiche. [Sep 2022, p.29]

The album is more of a celebration than a wake, thanks to the Promise Of The Real’s youthful exuberance and Young’s own ageless spirit. [Sep 2022, p.32]

On a musical level, Lynn imparts these songs with an unhurried grace. And while there’s an agreeable twang to “Black River” and folk-country steel on “In A Moment”, synths form the album’s bedrock.

A mood of high seriousness pervades, but Spirit Exit’s blend of spirituality and futurism is often transfixing. [Aug 2022, p.25]

His spacious and captivating 2020 LP Alexandra felt like a breakthrough in this respect; Fleeting Adventure is even better.

Going Places is a felicitous reversion to type, full of mature and nuanced songcraft. [Sep 2022, p.30]

What makes Friendship different, though, are Wriggins’ striking songs, minted in the sort of conversational poetry at which Lucinda Williams excels. [Aug 2022, p.26]

There’s a palpable sense of world-weariness in his vocals and in the band’s fuzzy hooks, which makes everything sound both precarious and oddly poignant. [Aug 2022, p.25]

A bold re-statement of artistic identity. [Sep 2022, p.25]

A tantalising exploration of modern-day kosmische. Seemingly liberated by technology, these two fiftysomething blokes conjure the kind of utopian panoplies dreamt up by Harald Grosskopf and Neu! on the 24-minute “A Yellow Robe”, a swirling, burbling journey that also nods to recent experiments by Roman Flügel and Peder Mannerfelt. [Sep 2022, p.27]

Where earlier material flowed freely, here his fiddly funk and plastic grooves contrive a kind of new-age electro that at times is suave and smooth but rarely settles into anything satisfying; as much as they exude a sense of wellness. [Aug 2022, p.23]

A brace of Nick Lowe-penned Brinsley Schwarz tracks (“Surrender To The Rhythm”, “Don’t Lose Your Grip On Love”) are forensically faithful to the originals, but the older men bring an oaky maturity to Neil Young’s “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere” that likely eluded their younger selves. [Sep 2022, p.30]

Steve Shelley and Lee Ranaldo were impressed enough to pitch in, helping form a warmly familiar yet still sometimes thrilling debut album. [Sep 2022, p.24]

Ayewa always makes ambitious albums, but Jazz Codes feels like her richest yet, her Lemonade, her To Pimp A Butterfly. [Sep 2022, p.28]

These empathetic tales teem with life. [Sep 2022, p.32]

“Build A Fire”, too, is an air-punching anthem, though Torquil Campbell prefers lighter-waving on “To Feel What They Feel”, which, like “If I Never See London Again”, turns to polished ’80s production techniques. They can’t shake their melancholy, however. [Sep 2022, p.32]

Dawes have never sounded more musically sophisticated. [Sep 2022, p.23]

This carefully recorded and intimate performance captures their cool command of Texas rock'n'roll better than most. [Sep 2022, p.32]

“Hello, Hi” is one of Ty’s most lean and focused albums to date. But the closer you get, the more you spot its idiosyncrasies. Heartfelt and playful, homespun and surreal, down in the dumps and head-over-heels in love: here is Ty Segall in all his wonderful contradictions. [Aug 2022, p.18]

The Sadies’ nebulous country-rock moves through glistening psychedelia (“Message To Belial”), gorgeous string ballads (“All The Good”) and fierce garage fuzz (“Ginger Moon”). [Aug 2022, p.31]

[A] set of lean, characteristically nuanced, folk-edged songs. [Aug 2022, p.30]

Moonshine is a set piece, but “Greenway”, a nudge at The Beatles’ “Because” with rippling keys and cicadas, and the baffled starburst that is “With You” stand out. [Aug 2022, p.30]

Though their drive to fill all available space causes some songs to grow diff use, their vision coheres on “Taken By The Hand”, a suitably audacious fusion of ferocious post-hardcore and anthemic Southern rock. [Aug 2022, p.23]

The basic formula may be familiar, but Mallinder’s ear for fresh noises and slippery grooves remains as sharp as ever. [Aug 2022, p.29]

This push-pull between melody and twisting beats, veering back and forth between dark and joyous moments, is the crux of this excellent album, one that glides snappily between acid electro, synth-washed indie, crunchy pop and dance-floor rippers. [Aug 2022, p.36]

Purim blends new material with rebooted old favorites here, applying her lush liquid harmonies and dazzling six-octave vocal acrobatics to voluptuous bossa nova reveries. [May 2022, p.32]

Narcissistic (“Black Hole Baby”, a montage of radio praise and day-in-the-life mission statement), earnest (“crushed.zip”, an anxiety-fuelled showcase for singer Orono’s sugary-sad voice) and deeply weird. [Aug 2022, p.33]

Dan Hyndman supplies a reliably cryptic stream of absurdist prattle, though his decision to stick with largely adlibbed lyrics robs Down Tools of some of the force and focus of last year’s excellent Lines Redacted. [Aug 2022, p.30]

Its eloquent yet unfussy nature and thoughtful arrangements are clear affirmation. [Aug 2022, p.33]

There are rowdy barn-raisers, but also melodic, meditative grooves and strange, insidious songs. It’s an album of almost fragile beauty, intense loneliness and raging storms. Not for the last time, Crazy Horse took Neil Young somewhere he wasn’t expecting. It’s just a shame it’s taken us so long to get there too.

They’ve managed to make tonal inconsistencies feel like an actual consistency, rather than being a jarring and detracting experience. They’ve wrangled chaos into submission, and currently sound like no other band out there. [Aug 2022, p.34]

Pearson’s clear knack for melodic songcraft is plentiful, across the breezy “Talk Over Town” or the sugary indie-pop of “Alligator”, resulting in an album that nails introspective songwriting just as seamlessly as it does infectious pop. [Aug 2022, p.31]

Full of hits and misses as it sways back and forth between indie and electro, never quite finding its feet. [Aug 2022, p.30]

There are no giant leaps here, it’s very much Interpol as you know them, but there’s plenty of micro evolutions, impressive production and subtle tweaks to make this a welcome addition to their catalogue. [Aug 2022, p.28]

The effect is kaleidoscopic, as the music constantly moves and morphs to reveal new shapes, colours and meanings. [Jul 2022, p.31]

Bock’s solo work takes a subtler but no less arresting approach, weaving in melodic passages for strings, organ and woodwind and rhythmic calls to her Brazilian heritage in ways that only fully reveal themselves with repeated listens. [Aug 2022, p.25]

GBV’s second of 2022 is another LP packed full of charm, imagination and winning tunes. [Aug 2022, p.26]

The only downside to this soundtrack is that you can’t watch Prince slink around stage or pretend to take a bath with the audience, but at least the Blu-ray. [Jul 2022, p.44]

From the creeping “Let That Sink In” to growling “Warpaint”, Sage Motel is super stuff: check in at your earliest convenience. [Jun 2022, p.31]

Exploratory, visionary record. [Aug 2022, p.22]

The bereft “Have Mercy On Me” and hopeful, lightly gospel “I Have Wandered All My Unending Days” are particularly striking, while the concluding 11-minute instrumental mix works as metaphor for Cave’s faith: immersive and foundational. [Jul 2022, p.25]

Emerald Sea isn’t your average third album. An otherworldly mix of Gustav Holst’s drama, The Flaming Lips’ psychedelia and Broadcast’s retro-futurist exotica, with hints of the band’s earlier Beach House dream-pop, it breaks a fourth wall of sound with “The Glare”’s saturated reverberations, while “Deeper Surround” offers a chimerical carousel ride of synths. [Aug 2022, p.33]

On The Spur, Shelley captures the ache and the sweetness, the loss and the love, the coming and going of it all, with greater scale and skill than ever before.

The pair sparked and quickly knocked out an album that sounds years in the maturing. [Jul 2022, p.25]

The way it weaves this constellation of influence and artfulness into 10 songs that are lighter than air, deceptively simple, yet cumulatively, surprisingly moving. [Aug 2022, p.32]

It starts with rousing rebel anthem “The Real”, and further highlights include the shoegaze drawl of “What’s In A Name?”, the jittery “Silenced” and the sinister growling surf of “You Think I’m Joking”. [Jul 2022, p.25]

This is a generous, curious and commendably weird LP. [Jul 2022, p.26]

Reggae Film Star is a luminous beauty. [Aug 2022, p.29]

“Mr Bojangles”, sung with cornpone syrup by Dylan, here earthily returns to the drunk-tank cell where Walker met its subject, a broken-down, alcoholic tap-dancer his song invests with heel-clicking magic. The tune defiantly climbs, strings waltz and Earle stores sentiment ’til the end.

Mixing classic covers (Big Joe Williams’ “Crawling King Snake”, Charlie Patton’s “Pea Vine Blues”) with his ‘new’ compositions, lyrical advances into commonplace blues melodies like “When The Frisco Left the Shed”, there’s timelessness in every note here, every expression. [Jul 2022, p.29]

Throughout Taylor and Ralston draw from astral jazz, Alice Coltrane's meditation music and the expansive orchestral funk of David Axelrod to create something uniquely emotive over four lengthy and very different tracks. [Aug 2022, p.31]

With its combination of Goodman's ache-filled vocals and Crazy Horse clamour, "Keeper Of The Time" is an even more striking demonstration of what she can do. [Aug 2022, p.26]

She’s made another very good album, her first in six years. [Jul 2022, p.33]

Whether in the propulsive “The Fall” or the more delicate “Desire”, she’s rarely sounded so commanding. [Jun 2022, p.34]

With a '70s/'80s-inspired disco-pop feel, creating a Eurovision-like mood that you probably wouldn't expect to find on a Sub pop release. The lack of top-line sheen, though, ensures this album retains a rough edge without sacrificing any intrinsic appeal. [Aug 2022, p.33]

Their unfussy but subtle playing embellishes the simplicity of Nash’s melodies, while experience brings renewed pathos to songs like “I Used To Be A King”, “Man In The Mirror” and even something as straightforward as “You’ll Never Be The Same”. [Jul 2022, p.30]

There’s plenty for prog loyalists to appreciate in the knotty polyrhythms, hopscotching bass and divebombing guitar excursions of tracks such as “Harridan” and “Chimera’s Wreck”, but genre agnostics may find more inviting access points in the sumptuous stripes of rueful melody, nuggety riffs and widescreen pomp-rock dynamics that Wilson and friends create. [Jul 2022, p.31]

All the writers who share Lund's love of droll wordplay, and all their works are illuminated by Lund's signature laconic twinkle, and the Hurtin' Alberans' deadpan virtuosity. [Aug 2022, p.29]

Behind their heavily stylised surface, these are fairly standard heartbreak ballads, but Li's voluptuous gothic gloom is still intoxicating. [Aug 2022, p.29]

Halvorson's string arrangements admit complexity without overwhelming, and the Mivos String Quartet play gracefully and authoritatively. [Aug 2022, p.26]

You're left wishing these jazz quintet pieces breathed more. [Aug 2022, p.26]

White Jesus Black Problems fizzes with indignation and exults in contradictions. [Aug 2022, p.25]

Works best when it diverts furthest from the originals. [Aug 2022, p.25]

By far the most compelling persona on Mr Morale & The Big Steppers is the Kendrick who is trying to make sense of his own family. ... ["Mother I Sober" is] a tour de force, almost but not quite as revelatory as "DUCKWORTH", a similar family saga off 2017's DAMN. And the best moment is when the strings swell and Lamar's voice changes. [Aug 2022, p.24]

It’s just five tracks, barely half an hour of music, but worth the wait in gold. ... Particularly on the radiant “Make Lovely The Day”, where she’s accompanied simply by Steve Hackett’s fluttering acoustic guitar, it’s like hearing the greatest British singer of her generation for the very first time. [Jul 2022, p.33]

Sophie Allison's ascent from teenage bedroom-pop savant to incisive chronicler of Gen Z angst hits a crescendo on Sometimes, Forever, an improbable but rewarding collaboration with Oneohtrix Point Never's Daniel Lopatin. [Aug 2022, p.33]

This pleasing mix of exploratory guitar tones and ever-shifting rhythms that switch between the kinetic and flowing makes for an arresting debut. [Jun 2022, p.25]

Reflective of our era of political polarisation, the likes of “Contempt For You” can make for bruising listening experiences. Yet there’s still plenty of solace to be found in performances by Iceland’s Elin Ey and the ever-remarkable Anohni. [Jul 2022, p.26]

Though some tracks really need the context of performance or visuals, on the astral fourth-world funk of “Eye In The Wall”, Hadreas sets sail on his own Arthur Russell-style “African Night Flight”. [Jul 2022, p.31]

Ultraviolet... demonstrates both purpose and renewed vigour. [Jul 2022, p.25]

Deliluh are more economical on their third album, even if they regularly expand on its mix of Kyle Knapp’s intimidatingly recited, enigmatic lyrics and angular post-punk. [Jul 2022, p.25]

An album of skippy, infectious, electronics-soaked disco rock. [Jul 2022, p.26]

Love and hope stay preciously rare yet infinitely possible, and this album’s guttering, guiding light. [Jul 2022, p.33]

Les Racines is ultimately a full and fierce showcase for Vieux’s own prowess, and his restatement of desert blues. [Jul 2022, p.27]