As steel guitar groans and floats away like dying stars at the close and Raymond bends drones to her will, John Cale's singular Welsh spirit feels near. [Oct 2025, p.32]

Things are really supercharged here by Epworth's electronic touch. It's a highly potent and undeniably successful combination. [Oct 2025, p.24]

Jump Into Life feels like a vital reminder of how the expression of joy can serve as both an act of resistance and a demonstration of resilience. [Jul 2025, p.33]

Smith sees the fragments left behind by an old songwriting mentor - paintings, cups of coffee, the gift of her first guitar - as things to be celebrated, and the same is true of these 10 fragments of herself. [Jul 2025, p.37]

It's all inimitably Sparks. [Jul 2025, p.37]

Fractures sound healed, leaving Sunflower Bean's classicist optimism intact. [Jul 2025, p.37]

"Time" hits hardest, a righteous prayer riding on Stax brass and gospel harmonies toward safe harbour. [Oct 2025, p.28]

Beautifully curated collection. .... It's rare for familiar work to be re-contextualised in such a way that you hear it with new ears. But that's exactly what happens here. [Oct 2025, p.48]

Meticulously crafted, haunted and hypnotic. [Sep 2025, p.31]

The playing is admirably under stated throughout, and the highlights numerous. [Sep 2025, p.29]

Edwards sounds comfortable and confident in this setting, although occasionally she indulges some awkward, first-draft lyrics. [Sep 2025, p.31]

Who Is The Sky? benefits greatly from Byrne's singular perspective as a songwriter. It also shows how much more expressive he continues to become, even here in his eighth decade on Earth. [Oct 2025, p.26]

Like all the best goodbyes, Saint Etienne bow out on top form and affectionate terms. [Sep 2025, p.26]

A flood of captivating images are buoyed along by the rich musical tapestry and a song that's illustrative of the broader mood: uplifting and open-hearted, looking backwards and forwards without blame or trepidation. [Sep 2025, p.22]

Antidepressants is the most unhinged, intoxicating Suede album since Coming Up, and boasts the best first side of a goth album since the Banshees' Juju. [Oct 2025, p.22]

A little like The Strokes of Is This It trying their hand at metronomic Can jams or mesmeric slowcore. And yet melody is key throughout. [Sep 2025, p.33]

You Heartbreaker, You lands like an accusation, with love (and other) songs which draw blood. [Oct 2025, p.23]

Excellent news that Price has re-embraced the old-school virtues that got her noticed in the first place: the rowdy yet droll honky-tonk tear-up, heard here on such Southern soul-infused cuts as "Losing Streak" and "I Just Don't Give A Damn". [Oct 2025, p.31]

The whirl of ideas is intoxicating. .... But there's space for moments of straightforward beauty too. [Sep 2025, p.29]

Only Frozen Sky Anyway is a seriocomic meditation on the absurdity of humanity, unfailingly generous in music and spirit alike. [Oct 2025, p.32]

Take the modulated soundscapes of, say, Terry Riley or Max Richter, add some beats, more warm analogue synth arpeggios and some fuzzy vocals and you've got a close approximation of Gush. [Sep 2025, p.39]

A finely judged set that draws deep from his Texan heritage and that of nearby Louisiana, a favourite teenage haunt of his. [Oct 2025, p.24]

Engaging New Zealanders The Beths masterfully marry muscle and vulnerability here. [Sep 2025, p.28]

Strong on characterful production, writing and lyrical fronts, it's a country-pop tour de force that showcases her insight and humour as she addresses everything from the economic precarity of her homeland to the devastating harm done by body shaming. [Sep 2025, p.29]

There's barely a track above three-minutes as it charges along with spiky intent, bursting with energy. [Sep 2025, p.32]

While the earlier albums had a rich dramatic and conceptual structure, things feel looser thus time round. [Sep 2025, p.39]

Short and sweet, with an alluringly timeless analogue feel. [Oct 2025, p.32]

A set of songs about romantic love, self-love and self-actualisation whose confident arrangements sacrifice none of the intimacy of Duffy's earlier work. [Sep 2025, p.32]

Their ability to turn despair to joy even stretches as far as being able to turn a song called "Everybody Dies" into a thrilling, fuzzed-out blast. [Sep 2025, p.39]

Although this LA-based Chinese-Icelander gas woven a loose temporal theme through the loungey chamber pop of her third album, it's the waspish lyrical sting in the tail of these songs that sets her apart. [Oct 2025, p.29]

The decades since Fogerty first recorded these tracks have perhaps cost him some of the high top and low bottom ends of that distinctive half-drawl-half-snarl with which a California kid reinvented himself as some Southern swamp monster, but across “Legacy” he sounds generally in vigorous form, verging in parts on the downright feral, and he is surely entitled to what is as much a vindication as a celebration. [Sep 2025, p.30]

A bell-bottomed soft-rock glaze courtesy of Greg Kurstin that gives their new songs real heft - "Bloom Baby Bloom" splits the difference between Spinal Tap and the Carpenters - but leaves some tumbling along like Elton John offcuts. [Oct 2025, p.35]

As the title wryly suggests, they work as an ambient field, though the pairing of soft-chiming strings and vaporous synth drone in "Mossy Stump" makes it a standout. [Sep 2025, p.31]

They still sound epic and unusually angry. [Oct 2025, p.31]

When delicate motifs from accordion, harmonica and piano join her softly plucked acoustic guitar it can make for a sweetly seductive sound, but just as often her vocal melodies meander without leaving a mark. [Oct 2025, p.31]

Snipe Hunter is Childers' familiar reconciliation of the raucous and thoughtful, and possible his most accomplished to date. [Oct 2025, p.24]

His playing is smart but no flash, though he does show off his six-string chops with some acid blues bending on "rock And Roll". [Oct 2025, p.24]

A beautifully structured 11-song suite of jazz-inflected folk, check-shirted country-pop, confessional indie and more; the sound of a slight hangover clearing on a sunny morning. [Sep 2025, p.37]

So Long... is deeply rooted in west Coast sunset pop, more Fleetwood Mac than Del McCoury, although her guitar picking is always precise, imaginative, and, on "The Highway Knows", utterly joyful. [Oct 2025, p.35]

Nadler's richly layered vocals are especially enthralling whenever she applies her featherlight delivery to ideas and images that subvert her music's surface appearance of serentiy. [Sep 2025, p.33]

These 16 ineluctably lovely songs are his most personally reflective for some time. they're also among his most structurally straightforward. [Sep 2025, p.33]

Album opener "Garbage Dream House" is a scene-setter - somehow both ominous and joyful with its grinding, melodic riff, robotic bleeps and orchestral outro. [Sep 2025, p.37]

Campbell respects the original material's emotional temperature but glams it up with fizzing synths, strobe-light bass and woozy rhythms. [Sep 2025, p.27]

All pleasant enough, but much like its predecessor, Flux suffers from too much frictionless filler and too few actual dancefloor bangers. [Sep 2025, p.31]

There are a few dated misfires here, but overall, All The Young Droids is a warm-hearted, playful and sporadically dazzling tribute to the futurist dreams of yesteryear. [Jul 2025, p48]

Boldly treads a more adventurous path. [Sep 2025, p.32]

This is an explicitly fallen world and yet, with its "Super-8 mote" and "temples of tragic skyscrapers", one of strange Lynchian wonder. [Jul 2025, p.31]

The results are inevitably polished - but, crucially, never overly so. [Sep 2025, p.28]

Anhedönia's gifts for storytelling - part Flannery O'Connor, part David Lynch - are compelling enough, but the music is equally stunning, a mix of shoegaze, gothic country and doom metal. [Sep 2025, p.29]

Time-served Carll fans may lament a relative lack of his signature snarky wordplay, but it turns out that sincerity suits him just as well. [Sep 2025, p.29]

"Slow Rise (To The Middle)" reels from the crush of diminished expectations amid instrumental interaction as heady as Oliver Wood's lyrical musings. [Sep 2025, p.39]

The New Eve Is Rising is a confident, adventurous debut, intuitive yet purposeful and full of reinvention’s promise. [Aug 2025, p.34]

They keep everything buoyant, even when the songs aren't so strong. .... A more psychedelic take on "Found A Job" is the pick of the alternative versions, while an August 1978 live set from new ork's Emtermedia Theater is reliably invigorating, if not quite as vital as the CBGB stand unearthed for the Talking Heads: 77 box. [Sep 2025, p.50]

The music is so lovely, and the lyrics so smart, you're reassured that all hope is not lost. [Sep 2025, p.38]

Real-life challenges also inform fromtman John Pelant's plaintive delivery of lyrics such as "Hold On To Tonight", mourning late loved ones, and "Ring My Bell"'s plea for emotional connection. [Sep 2025, p.37]

With its scratch groove and percussive shuffle, "Back At The Start" is about as busy as they get, but it's a masterclass in the persuasive power of less is more. .... For the most part, Crown Of Roses succeeds via its concentrated hush, a rootless simmer that suggests the imminent arrival of a full storm. [Sep 2025, p.32]

An a cappella "I'll Find A Way" provides clearest evidence, but their talents stretch beyond voices. [Sep 2025, p.31]

Haines' references are as forensic as ever. .... Buck, meanwhile, rolls out his repertoire of languid 12-string jangles, swaggering glam riffs, psychedelic phrasing and jittery feedback. [Aug 2025, p.31]

What an incredible head-spinning trip this album is. [Aug 2025, p.26]

Though her songs deliver a sugar rush and some soar like helium balloons, they're anything but insubstantial. [Sep 2025, p.31]

Taken on their own, they're slight. The cumulative intensity of the album, though, is something else altogether. [Sep 2025, p.37]

The recordings capture the band at a satisfyingly burly midpoint between Lemmy's punchiest moments on Hawkwind's Warrior on The Edge Of Time and Motörhead's eponymous debut the following year. [Sep 2025, p.46]

The songs are worthy heirs to that heritage [Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd]. [Aug 2025, p.79]

Another chip off the old block. [Sep 2025, p.31]

The result is a fun mix of over-the-top hard rock, self-reflection and self-aggrandisation. [Aug 2025, p.29]

The recording quality isn't the great, but the Family sound like the funkiest, most exhilarating house band you ever heard. [Sep 2025, p.47]

While clearly a cathartic outing, most of it slips into pretty formulaic and repetitive territory. [Sep 2025, p.29]

Still only 26, Marten's writing is a strong scaffold for an experienced live studio band, whose every flourish (the irresistible keyboard arpeggio on the breezy "Crown" is a particular delight) add depth to her words. [Aug 2025, p.33]

Lord Huron's fifth album lives up to its title, cranking up the celestial jukebox and filling the room with a breezy, blithe spirit. [Aug 2025, p.33]

Dan Wriggins brings some of Lambchop's pained soul-baring to his vocals, and the band give him plenty of space while keeping songs interesting and dynamic. [Aug 2025, p.31]

Chaimbeul brings a seriousness to her music, her smallpipes conjuring a range of intense drones and hypnotic ululations. The Pipes, though, are just the frame fir a deeper dive into Gaelic tradition and folklore. [Jul 2025, p.26]

Teems with compelling, trademark narratives full of vivid characters. .... There's a weight to his voice that lends these tales even more authority. [Jul 2025, p.31]

Singing in a voice rich with the patina of experience, there's a universal wisdom to songs such as "New Religion" and "Home Is A Song", on which she's joined by Anais Micthell. [Jul 2025, p.26]

Birch's approach is intimate and dreamy. [Aug 2025, p.28]

They've added influences from '80s Brit-funk ("Just Can't Wait") and '90s R&B ("My Father In Heaven") to timeless psych-soul ("Together We Are"), joining up the dots across the black music diaspora. [Aug 2025, p.33]

There's a level of quality control on this project, overseen by [Mute Records founder Daniel] Miller, that still allows Stewart to probe and provoke, but this time the medium of his message is more palatable. [Aug 2025, p.31]

Trumps her three EPs by virtue of its consummate, maxi-pop plushness and the honest realisation of its concept. [Aug 2025, p.39]

It's an eclectic yet assured record that sounds like someone taking stock but using that solid foundation as a springboard to leap forward musically. [Aug 2025, p.31]

If his guitar reminds of anyone, it's David Grubbs - similar threads of notes that then tangle together into thickets - and Grubbs appears on this album, too. [Jun 2025, p.41]

Moisturizer is a bold, confident blast fuelled by the security and invincibility of a deep love. [Aug 2025, p.23]

Landscape From Memory surges and pulses with emotionally charged, meticulously detailed, luminescent electronica that never panders to the gridded restrictions of conventional techno. [Aug 2025, p.37]

It's often raw, venerable, painful stuff, as on the impassioned charge of "Breathe", but it's also peppered with moments of joy. [Aug 2025, p.39]

While the warm melodicism of "Dime Amiga" and the soulful "Ando Con Miedo" respectively suggest Gruff Rhys and Panda Bear as kindred spirits, folk rhythms define the exuberant centrepeiece, "La Lucia". [Aug 2025, p.39]

The highlights are "TH", "RL", "KTYWS" and "WAL", which all dig deep into Quincy Jones=style late-70s boogie and disco: a riot of rubbery, pitchwheel-assisted synth basslines, smart horn stabs and Cleo Sol's flirtatious, harmony-laden vocals. [Aug 2025, p.37]

These septuagenarians have made a Doobie Brothers album that sounds like it was recorded by their much younger selves, and the passing years haven't blunted their vibrancy. [Jun 2025, p.36]

Bold and Breathtaking [Jul 2025, p.26]

Bob Dylan brings a smoothly elegant croon to Ray Noble's 1930s standard "The Very Thought Of You" one of his strongest ever vocal performances. Paul McCartney, meanwhile, largely plays second fiddle on the self-penned "My Valentine". [Aug 2025, p.37]

Here they have shuffled back a few years from the disco and jazz-funk infusions of 2021's Private Space to a more sun-dappled classic soul sound. It suits them perfectly too. [Aug 2025, p.32]

In both rhythm and spirit, Yowzers is slippery and free. Yet where the record coalesces into songs, it tends to speak the raw, direct language of soul music and the blues. [Aug 2025, p.36]

With echoes of Rickie Lee Jones and Gram Parsons at times, it all feels deceptively effortless. [Aug 2025, p.39]

Thoughtful sixth album, which sees the songwriter wrestle with the growing challenges of life as she enters her early thirties. [Jul 2025, p,27]

They lurch with satisfying abandon through funereal Slint-like post-rock to unashamedly slovenly pixies-ish riffs to splenetic blasts of screaming hardcore and staccato math-rock scrapes, as Zak Bowker intermittently makes his strangled screams heard above the maelstrom. [Jun 2025, p.41]

The musicians' off-the-cuff interaction animates cartoonish songs like the boisterous "Burgundy Suit" and the woozy "Sharktooth", but Mccaughey's flights of fancy occasionally tumble into relatable coherence. [Jun 2025, p.35]

Eight tracks range from menacing, acid rain drone to jagged rhythmic gut-punches. Here they summon the raw energy of The Young Gods in their prime, hobbling through grey ruined cities that have dominated our news-screens in recent times. [Jul 2025, p.33]

Pramuk takes listeners on a rich inner-space odyssey. [Aug 2025, p.37]

The result is a rich, expansive yet considered album of indie rock meets shoegaze. [Aug 2025, p.32]

I Quit is at its best when the trio juice up old tactics with a jolt of the new. [Aug 2025, p.31]

Revelatory. .... The set offers great insight into Springsteen's creative process. [Aug 2025, p.50]