Full of jingle-jangle mourning, this is a soulful, charming debut. [Jan 2025, p.39]

That he can still write a timeless folk-rock melody is evident in songs such as "That Day Must Surely Come" and "After The Harvest", but the contemporary pop orthodoxy of the arrangements and production is disheartening. [Jan 2025, p.35]

Even with new elements like the somewhat overly tasteful strings for the title track, the music here retains the fervent intimacy and immediacy that distinguishes Jamieson's songwriting and really ought to win her the breakthrough she deserves. [Jan 2024, p.39]

With what Garba Toure terms their Afro-rock'n'roll dialled down, Paul Chandler and the band's co-production deploys their epic cast as distinct elements in ultimately communal music. The studio sounds packed yet with sufficient space for individual contribution. [Feb 2025, p.38]

Irrefutably the most far-reaching representation of all things Nyro. .... A heavyweight coffee-table book completes a formidable package. [Jan 2025, p.49]

The music flits between rock, folk and jazz, providing an emotional experience that is as affecting as anything you are likely to hear in 2025. [Feb 2025, p.43]

"In My Kitchen" turns on an impressively dexterous, high-speed bar, while "Gwara Gwara" (A Durban dance gone global) is at once euphoric and anxious. [Feb 2025, p.37]

"Bad Apples'" Sonic Youth guitars provide a punkish response to policing following Sarah Everard's murder, while "Company Culture" breathlessly addresses workplace harassment. They boast a grim wit too. [Feb 2025, p.36]

While this is a deeply experimental record, it is also subtly stunning in parts. [Jan 2025, p.31]

So closely and carefully has Brooks shadowed the sounds of those times [1980s]. [Feb 2025, p.33]

A sense of tin-pot invention run through You're Only Young Once. [Review of the Year 2024, p.35]

It lacks that album's [To Pimp A Butterfly] audacious musicality, instead cleaving toward sleekly produced rap that platforms Lamar's fierce but graceful lyricism. [Feb 2025, p.36]

It's a deeply fun record that radiates vivacity and, most endearingly, sounds like a band who still truly love what they do. [Jan 2025, p.35]

A world of suffering and ribald survival breathes here. [Review of the Year 2024, p.34]

It helps that Karen Peris’s voice continues to convey so much warmth and wonder. Likewise, her lyrics captures the tiniest joys of everyday life in modest but very finely crafted songs. [Jan 2025, p.35]

The title, which translates as “breeze”, is a neat metaphor for these eight tracks’ lightness of touch and calm enrichment, whether that’s shivering exquisitely in “Namopi” or tilting at Alice Coltrane’s Kirtan: Turiya Sings with “Rana”, the luminous and trippy, epic closer. [Review of the Year 2024, p.34]

The album is a fantastic ride along well-travelled spaceways, balancing Ra compositions with an eclectic mix of early 20th-century American music. [Jan 2025, p.30]

Drummer Bryan Devendorf’s rippling, muscular runs provide a racing human pulse over the programmed drums on “Tropic Morning News” and “New Order T-Shirt”, enliven the laidback “I Need My Girl” and supercharge “Lit Up” and the conjoined “Humiliation”/“Murder Me Rachael” during a torrid late-set run. He’s The National’s secret weapon, and Rome is his showcase. [Review of the Year 2024, p.34]

There is an innocent, infectious charm and an impressively meticulous attention to detail on stand-out hypnagogic inner-space journeys like “Emotion Engine”, “Forever Chemicals” and “Post-Truth”. [Review of the Year 2024, p.37]

It would be reductive to simply label this as just ambient electronica, even though it fits the bill, as there’s a level of depth, texture and nuance that belies its deceptively straightforward delivery. [Review of the Year 2024, p.30]

If you've ever swooned for the fading-light pastorals of Billie Ray Martin's 4 Ambient Tales, or the elliptical whispers of Stina Nordenstam, this album will feel very comfortable indeed. [Jan 2025, p.40]

More surprising, perhaps, is the gorgeous, toe-tapping soul-pop of “Step Into Your Power”, which brings to mind Matthew E White and may just be the best song Lamontagne has written since 2004’s “Trouble”. [Sep 2024, p.36]

Its songs were built from jams, which lends them a becoming looseness; they’re also rather more Western rock than global pop, and melancholia has made its mark on pastoral-folk opener “Brave Child Of A New World” and the Zombies-ish “Those Who Came Before”. [Dec 2024, p.31]

Vicious Creature is more compelling than Mayberry's Chvrches material, but may not be thrilling enough to take her where she wants to be. [Jan 2025, p.39]

Long respected for looking beyond the 12-bar rut that blights much of the genre, Bibb has rarely sounded so articulate and inspired. [Review of the Year 2024, p.27]

Singer-guitarist Taylor Goldsmith and his drumming brother Griffin laid down Oh Brother’s basic tracks by themselves, and the foregrounding of their live-off-the-floor parts adds to the immediacy of Taylor’s narratives. [Nov 2024, p.33]

With its detours into glam, Southern rock and pristine ’70s-style balladry, Ramble & Rave On! often feels like a celebratory jukebox of everything Gabbard holds dear. Fabulous fun it all is, too. [Dec 2024, p.33]

They show little interest in shaking up the formula they established with 1982’s mighty Roman Gods. And that’s just fine given the lusty energy that frontman Peter Zaremba and guitarist Keith Streng muster up on the memorably greasy “The Consequences”, the self-explanatory “Wah Wah Power” and other time-defying displays of undimmed bravado. [Jan 2025, p.34]

He’s got a trippy sense of humour (sampling a bong hit on “MORBUD4ME”), but there’s a pervasive melancholy running songs like “In The Clear” and “Gild The Lily”, as though what he leaves behind is just as important as what he discovers on that endless highway. [Jan 2024, p.40]

The early-’60s soul-jazz strut belies the emotional purpose of career-spanning songs. Van’s voice and heart are unaccustomedly youthful and light seeking a West Country grail in “Avalon Of The Heart”. [Oct 2024, p.40]

A remarkably cohesive and dynamic record that oozes flair, and feels like something of a hybrid between a solo offering and an ambitious group project. While it may escape easy categorisation, it’s unquestionably the most progressive and expansive record White Denim have made to date. [Review of the Year 2024, p.20]

While the music has incorporated a more expansive but similarly idiosyncratic palette. Fripp-esque sustain, synths and drum machines colour a beautifully constructed record that brings to mind Aztec Camera’s High Land, Hard Rain or Scritti Politti’s Songs To Remember. [Nov 2024, p.40]

In Dreams picks up the thread they’ve been weaving since their 2018 comeback, not too different from their ’90s form: shimmering, chipped guitars; resigned, mumbling vocals; a vague sense of astral longing. [Dec 2024, p.35]

Tuttle takes the krautrock flavours even further, with hypnotic Tangerine Dream-ish accents cohering around Michael’s manic melodies. It ends up sounding like nothing else in either Chapman or Tuttle’s respective oeuvres – and there’s where the magic lies. [Sep 2024, p.34]

There are ambiguities and contradictions, ecstatic visions and crises of faith. And a quest, not for some imagined grail, but for earthly and private resolutions. All fixed to music of the exquisite variety, from radiant acoustic studies to billowing symphonic pop. [Dec 2024, p.24]

He’s a figure of Springstonian heft in his native Australia. Fever Longing Still, his first album of new material this decade, further demonstrates that the rest of the world’s obdurate indifference is entirely its own loss. [Dec 2024, p.36]

“Flowers For The Unsung” teases out some quietly pretty melodies. However, the freeform avant approach of the album is not always an easy ride; the wildly experimental playing makes it a constantly surprising listen but often one that is very heavy, dense and a little overwhelming. [Review of the Year 2024, p.28]

Even if the orchestrations on their first album together are more sentimental than cinematic, father and son harmonise gloriously, finding new emotions within 20th-century standards. [Review of the Year 2024, p.31]

There’s determined strumming amid “Daily Ritual”’s Americana and “Mother Natures Scorn”’s a muscular if unplugged Mazzy Star, but the title track’s almost as ethereal as its title, while “Delilah”’s waltzing, sepia psych exploits John Barry’s Midnight Cowboy theme. [Review of the Year 2024, p.35]

It is noticeably better – cleaner, heavier, less muddy and filled with audacious surprises on headphones. Yet there’s no disguising the curiously wayward nature of these compositions. .... The full, six-disc boxset is an impressive package, drawing together vocal-less backing tracks, scrappy but revealing early demos and some superb 1973 BBC sessions. [Dec 2024, p.53]

A previously unreleased version of Dylan’s “She Belongs To Me” mesmerisingly set to the narcotic pulse of The Velvet Underground’s “All Tomorrow’s Parties”, a take on country tearjerker “Oh Lonesome Me”, weirdly reminiscent of Leonard Cohen. .... The set ends with Ferry’s first new song in a decade ["Star"]. .... Its smouldering brilliance sounds less a postscript to everything it follows than a new beginning, Ferry nearing 80, still alert to the sound of tomorrow calling. [Dec 2024, p.90]

Freshness shines through on this vivacious eight-track recording of 17 songs, here reproduced in flawless quality – all analogue, promises Young, who mixed the record with Stills. It sounds like a dream. [Dec 2024, p.47]

This new pin-sharp remaster of Talking Heads: 77 emphasises the freshness of the whole endeavour. .... But the real find of this Super Deluxe Edition, and the main justification for its existence, is a previously unreleased live set, forged in the white heat of CBGB on October 10, 1977. Taped a month or so before the performance featured on Side One of The Name Of This Band Is Talking Heads, it underlines what an incredible live band Talking Heads were from the get-go. [Dec 2024, p.44]

The final 25-minute-long “Fünf” is most thrilling, revealing what “Animal Waves” could have been had they not been drifting in different directions in the studio. [Dec 2024, p.47]

Created in a similar manner [to 2023's Curyman], Curyman II is every bit its equal. If anything, Verocai’s arrangements feel more baked-in this time, shaping the melodies and hugging Rogê’s playfully darting tenor and fragile falsetto. [Dec 2024, p.30]

Ballads Of Harry Houdini brandishes a sharper focus than many of its predecessors, with “Barfighter” and “Devil Tongue” bristling with tension and those signature guitar lines that move like wreaths of smoke. [Review of the Year 2024, p.34]

The early US albums are particularly punchy, while Beatles ’65 makes an interesting counterpoint to its corresponding European release Beatles For Sale, and this version of A Hard Day’s Night includes four George Martin instrumentals. [Review of the Year 2024, p.43]

This LP could serve as a document of an improvising four-piece at its best. [Review of the Year 2024, p.32]

Now in her seventies, her voice is deeper than it once was, but it remains an instrument of impressive power. [Review of the Year 2024, p.27]

Arnold sings the heart out of her own standards – “(If You Think You’re) Groovy”, “Angel Of The Morning” and a triumphant “The First Cut Is The Deepest”. No “Tin Soldier”, though. [Review of the Year 2024, p.27]

Woof has to be one of the weirdest debut albums of the year, a record that throws everything at the wall in the conviction that some of it will stick and so what if it doesn’t. [Nov 2024, p.34]

This is another set of brilliant, beautiful, occasionally frustrating songs themed around ideas of ending and death. [Review of the Year 2024, p.24]

It might seem late in the day to be claiming they’ve hit their stride, but Too Cold To Hold is the sound of a differently aspected and ultimately more satisfying Warmduscher. [Dec 2024, p.39]

This new 2024 remix by Paul Hicks and Dhani Harrison brings the album into greater relief when compared to previous releases: the orchestral arrangements are brought out of the murk, Harrison’s vocals are clearer and sharper, and the album’s peculiar air of dry, ascetic starkness is increased. .... Rather than being driven by a holier-than-thou smugness, this is an album whose wracked, painful honesty and sense of deep disappointment rivals that of John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. [Review of the Year 2024, p.42]

The fuzz-furred riffs of “Edin” and “Sicarus” are infectiously sharp, backed up by satisfyingly heavy rhythmic ballast, and Corgan’s voice, often underrated, is stronger since the strangulated edges loosened with age. [Review of the Year 2024, p.35]

Though producer David Holmes’ disco rhythm tracks sometimes mask it, Come Ahead now addresses addiction and injustice in expansive stanzas. [Review of the Year 2024, p.35]

Seed Of A Seed is simultaneously more confident and more jittery than its predecessor, as though absolute candor was her ultimate musical ambition: the more uncertain she is about something, the more certain she is that she wants to sing about it. [Review of the Year 2024, p.28]

If 2021’s Homecoming marked Du Blonde’s transition from the psychedelic experimentalism released under her birth name to a take-no-prisoners glam-punk persona, its follow-up is that of an ascendant star honing her craft. [Dec 2024, p.33]

The singer-guitarist somehow manages to deliver passages of remarkable intimacy within this sonic immensity, as if the sounds were an externalisation of the ravaged psyche he first exposed on the 2014 modern-day landmark Lost In The Dream. [Dec 2024, p.39]

Kim Deal’s solo debut is sonically wide-reaching yet still intimate, exemplified by one of its best tracks, “Are You Mine”. Pensively dreamy, the tune pairs Lynchian doo-wop with an alt.country twang. .... The title track is a stunner too, all swelling strings and booming brass that brings to mind Scott Walker’s avant-pop. [Dec 2024, p.33]

Whatever reductions Kinawuka and his producers may have made in regards to the music’s breadth, the songs on Small Changes more than compensate for that when it comes to depth. Nor is there anything small about the emotions they contain or the pleasures they evoke. [Review of the Year 2024, p.37]

It’s a tough balance to pull off, but it works seamlessly, and is clearly the result of a band who intuitively understand the dynamics and pull of the dancefloor as much as they do the art of crafting pop, art-rock and the odd indie banger. [Nov 2024, p.43]

Arrangements are denser and somehow tenser than the relaxed studio recordings, with “Partition” building to a fervent drone and “Natural Information” riding a wild groove kept in check by Callahan’s steady vocals. [Oct 2024, p.33]

Cannell makes good on the promise in that music, interfacing with Bingen in convincing ways, her bass recorder and harp improvs. Warped by delay, both are paced and wild, chimeric and oneiric. [Dec 2024, p.33]

It’s a compelling set, from the menacing “Flowers Like The Rain” and quasi-hardcore of “Six Six Seven (Monsieur Faux Pas)” to the gluey, narcotised “Bring It On”. [Oct 2024, p.40]

The 11 songs form a pensive biography of sorts, though perhaps only intermittently about Sid himself. [Nov 2024, p.37]

There are a few stumbles into the synth-pop abyss, but this material feels somehow less galling than examples from Western Europe or the USA, as though the evident excitement in exploring new technology gifts the songs a certain, welcome, naiveté. Even The Forest Hums really kicks into gear when we hit the Kyiv underground of the late ’80s and early ’90s. [Dec 2024, p.52]

Efterklang deal exclusively in Big Music and there are plenty of stirring passages – “To A New Day” could be Take That; Mabe Fratti provides cello – and it all flows, rather too safely, at a steady pace. [Sep 2024, p.30]

Agreeably gruff-voiced, world-weary, Yello-ish electro-ballads dominate, but too many lyrics strain for portentous poetic melodrama, accidentally invoking Father Ted’s “My Lovely Horse” instead. [Nov 2024, p.34]

Aged 91, Nelson brings gravitas to any lyric, the more world-weary or wistful the better, and these covers fit him like a glove. [Dec 2024, p.36]

The familiar finger-picking textures and soft-sung romantic paeans of 2019’s Cala have been superseded by an almost ghostly atmosphere, as echo-swathed, lysergic-sounding reveries evoke spellbinding romantic visions. [Dec 2024, p.37]

An exploration of what common ground there might be between it and Prophet’s usual métier of deadpan country rock. It turns out to be substantial, as does this album, from the shuffling Colombiana of “Betty’s Song” to the drawling Tom Petty vibes of “Sally Was A Cop” to the near Glen Campbell-ish “Red Sky Night”. [Nov 2024, p.41]

Echoes of Conor Oberst abound but the tunes lack the same charm, with even covers of Spacemen 3 (“Sound Of Confusion”) and Townes Van Zandt (“No Place To Fall”) unable to keep ears pricked up. [Dec 2024, p.37]

Johnny Marr, straps in for the mellow acoustic “Solitary Confinement”, a standout amid many high-calibre moments. [Dec 2024, p.37]

It’s an album that is as broken as it is beautiful, a balance that Elverum appears to be gleefully embracing. [Dec 2024, p.28]

“You Possess Me” and Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” are out-and-out power ballads, while the ramshackle roar of another cover, The Undertones’ “Teenage Kicks”, is arguably closest in spirit to what went before. [Nov 2024, p.40]

The result is a revelation. “As Above So Below” and the joyous, sax-assisted “Love Weapon” positively glow, Clément’s gentle chanson like a golden cord that guides you through their labyrinthine twists and turns. [Dec 2024, p.35]

“Love Resurrection” exhibits a more redemptive, albeit Yazoo-like energy. Later work, too, is transformed, with “Filigree”, from 2013’s The Minutes, now a poignant piano ballad and B-side “Tongue Tied” (from 2002’s Hometime era) getting the electronic polish it deserves. [Nov 2024, p.40]

Nina Nastasia’s contributions to “Iron Bones”’s Enomeets-Yorke somnolence reminds us how Strawberry Hotel, like so much of Underworld’s catalogue, frequently renders the prosaic romantic and the banal consequential. [Dec 2024, p.34]

She presents another batch of intimately detailed songs – from the anxious ballad “Dreaming Of Falling” to the exultant rocker “Driver” – in sturdy, string-accented settings that seem wholly unified with her intentions. [Nov 2024, p.43]

A strong start to a (hopefully) fresh chapter. [Dec 2024, p.37]

The expansive Pomegranate sees Parks explore a swirling, neo-psychedelic landscape, against which she sets husky, whispering vocals that can’t help but recall Mazzy Star. There’s some great, imaginative songwriting here. [Dec 2024, p.37]

Simple, graceful, moving, tender. [Nov 2024, p.26]

Presented largely stripped of 1967 production values – acoustic folk with a bit of reverb – but still sound innately lysergic. [Sep 2024, p.33]

Public Service Broadcasting devote a concept album to the tragic aviatrix’s final voyage, this time overlaying their soundscapes not with samples but with her writings brought to life by actors. These retain our interest more than some of the music they punctuate. [Nov 2024, p.41]

A serrated synthesis of goth, industrial and synth-pop conducted at a histrionic intensity, 13” Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto… sometimes feels deliberately difficult. But it is also inspired enough to be worth the effort. [Dec 2024, p.39]

Nothing here matches the astonishing brutalist bubblegum of her 2018 debut, but on tracks like the soaring “Love Me Off Earth” you can still feel the unearthly radiance of this vanished star. [Dec 2024, p.39]

He’s less distinctive-sounding on the Oasis-style anthemics of “Got To Let You Go” and “Never Said Goodbye”, however. The boyish high register of Bugg’s voice lends itself most effectively to a certain ’60s beat group sound, which helps “All Kinds Of People” and the La’s-style rumble of “Breakout” get pulses racing more effectively. [Dec 2024, p.32]

The Prodigy are an influence on tracks like “So What” but the sound of KLF and Underworld underpins “Sicko” and “I Can’t Lose You”, while Madonna’s ’90s collaborations with William Orbit are in the background of several tunes. [Dec 2024, p.33]

Martin’s work as The Bug has always dealt in heaviness, but Machine is particularly inspiring for its lethality, its intensity. [Dec 2024, p.32]

An album of beautiful songs that sound like something you might get from an unusually upbeat Leonard Cohen. [Nov 2024, p.43]

Despite the obvious threads, songs as good as “Nullspace” and “Soonish” transcend any cynicism, and you’re left bathing in a welcome optimism. [Dec 2024, p.35]

It is difficult to argue, however, that the second batch of Pixies records have been as thick on quality. It’s a trend that The Night The Zombies Came does little to buck – though the spectacular surf-psychedelia of “Motoroller” could have made Bossanova, and the glorious thrash of “Oyster Beds” snuck onto Trompe Le Monde. [Dec 2024, p.37]

There are writing collaborations with the likes of the Chemical Brothers on the beautifully woozy and remarkably tender “Ballad (The End)”, which further serves to hit home the increasing breadth, scope and versatility Owens possesses in her far-reaching electronic compositions. [Nov 2024, p.41]

A record that pivots around like the Minutemen; delivered with a verve that comes with a clarity of identity. [Dec 2024, p.36]

Sitting somewhere between alt.rock, indie-pop and a singer-songwriter album, it’s a neat balancing act that feels personal and intimate yet also sonically ambitious. [Dec 2024, p.37]

Bleed is more about wayward drift than some of The Necks’s most-loved albums, like 1999’s Hanging Gardens, but there’s tenderness in its seeming austerity, and beauty in its chill. [Nov 2024, p.40]

Loaded with guests, from Slash to Tom Morello, it’s no-frills hard rock which, while occasionally a little dated and clichéd, still has plenty of fizz to it. [Nov 2024, p.40]