The somber mood is finally blown away by Crazy Horse-style closer "So Long" as The Lumineers churn into intriguing new territory while doggedly holding onto their entrenched melancholy. [Apr 2025, p.35]

Paradise... brims with life and imagination, humming with the brilliant paradox of a communal spirit imbued with Ahmed’s creative imprint over every note. [Feb 2025, p.32]

A charming, confident voyage through sonic moods he's explored throughout his career. [Apr 2025, p.27]

An album that feels comfortable and confident, and made by a group of people who have found their own idiosyncratic rhythm. [Mar 2025, p.32]

The closing "That Way My Garden" typifies playing of purposeful spiritual strength, crashing through into some great beyond. [Apr 2025, p.28]

Even on songs which tap into more difficult territory, such as "When Your Heart Is Broken", he delivers it with such a seamless knack for melodic songcraft, that he even turns heartache into foot-stomping riffs and sing-along choruses. [Apr 2025, p.30]

It's a good snapshot of how Hecker approaches such [soundtrack] commissions. But it also suggests there's an occasional paucity of ideas here. [Apr 2025, p.31]

These songs should reach and endure far beyond their context, as they're extraordinary even by Isbell's standards. [Apr 2025, p.31]

Is by turns light, sunny and soulful, if a bit self-satisfied in places. [Feb 2025, p.34]

Boldest of all is the grimy techno pulse and bass thrum of "Lake Disappointment", which pulls off a stylistic switch while maintaining the winningly smoky atmosphere of the album as a whole. [Mar 2025, p.31]

Darkside opens up on Nothing with a playfully weird set of baroque pop that takes in bluesy '70s skanking and cavernous grooves. [Mar 2025, p.31]

Its watery, dreamlike soundscapes are totally immersive on one of those records that - temporarily at least - can make the cares of the world seem to melt away. [Mar 2025, p.29]

A bewitching album. [Mar 2025, p.31]

Just as the absence of the usual guitar fireworks allows the group vocals and rhythmic elements to come strongly to the fore, the shift away from the original's angry spirit opens up a richer well of feeling in Moctar's pleas for a more just world. [Feb 2025, p.37]

Lonesome sounds, but comfortably familiar. [Feb 2025, p.34]

They're lean and immediate in nature, with melodic ease that belies lyrics awash with loss, uncertainty, regret, overwhelm and defeat, feelings that sit on the surface, undisguised. [Mar 2025, p.40]

Curlicues of psychedelia also lap intermittently at the edges, once again making for a gloriously idiosyncratic listen. [Jan 2025, p.41]

There are a number of lovely themes that repeat through “Unraveling In Your Hands”, though its central phase – an unrelenting, hypnotic stream of shivering strings, tiny flecks of light dazzling as you plunge deep into the repetition, while following a snaky melody through the thickets – is certainly unforgettable. [Jan 2025, p.33]

The inconsistent textures, pace and flow of the album all point to a band still trying to work out who they are. [Feb 2025, p.37]

Hood's gift for the character study abundantly justifies the extra room to roam, and the ambitious arrangements spanning folk to jazz to electronica are fleshed out by a stellar cast of collaborators. [Feb 2025, p.35]

An album replete with a rich, warm vibe that is more country-soul than punk rock, with swirling organ prominent in the mix. [Feb 2025, p.43]

He's delivered 12 songs of poignant autobiography rather than nostalgic wallowing. [Mar 2024, p.41]

He's unafraid to risk sentimentality in his quest for real feeling. At the end of a vexed, troubled third album, it feels like a hard-earned affirmation of his roots, people and community he's still a part of and still committed to. [Mar 2025, p.30]

The real keeper here the brooding, seven-minute "The Old Homestead", as cryptic as anything he'd written since "the Last Trip To Tulsa". [Mar 2025, p.53]

Though former folk musician Jiha employs electronic means to embellish her pieces, its' her yanggeum, a hammered dulcimer, teasing out "Grounding"'s gentle melodies and hypnotising ius with a metallic tapping throughout "Breathe Again"'s gentle breeze. [Mar 2025, p.37]

His songwriting's as powerful and moving as ever, with all the darkly comic touches he excels at. [Feb 2025, p.33]

This is the kind of record that Albini's notoriously no-frills production style served best: a brooding and intense post-punk, equal parts visceral and cerebral. [Mar 2025, p.32]

What may be The Wombats' most plain fun album to date. [Mar 2025, p.41]

The Delines' sixth and finest album to date. .... You'd have to reach for the likes of Bobbie Gentry's Patchwork or Rickie Lee Jones' Pirates, or indeed a film like Robert Altman's Raymond Carver amalgam, Short Cuts, to find a world so rich and intimately strange. [Feb 2025, p.40]

Even more impressive [than 2022's Versions Of Modern Performance]. [Feb 2025, p.35]

A set of soft-focused pip imbued with simple but stickable hooks and emotional honesty reminiscent of Brendan Benson or Elliott Smith. [Feb 2025, p.34]

On this hometown stop with his Quartet he parallels Monk's freaky, aslant piano attack in the serpentine stutter of his alto intro to "Rhythm-A-Ning", followed by quick, clenched phrases like compressed planets. [Jan 2025, p.32]

Impressively, the lustrous-voiced Reid has changed tracks without derailing the train. [Feb 2025, p.39]

Weirdest of all is "Don't Forget Jayne", where JBL freaks out over a wonderfully odd fusion of Taylor's disjointed samba drumming and Wener's smooth jazz guitar licks. [Mar 2025, p.34]

Here he bans repetition of verses and choruses, compacting a double album's detail into 40 minutes. [Feb 2025, p.35]

Mostly, on Friar Tuck, that leads to an exhilarating 40 minutes. It doesn’t have the madcap range of 1991’s Peggy Suicide or the following year’s Jehovahkill, records on which Cope explored the rough and ready, first-take ethos he’d discovered on 1989’s Skellington and 1990’s Droolian, but these 12 songs are brimming with a breezy vitality that’s not always been present on Cope’s epic releases over the last couple of decades. [Jan 2025, p.28]

In the past few years Hayden and McLoughlin have teamed up with Richard Chamberlain in Schisms. Their ultra-lo-fi fuzzball psychedelic improv can be exhilarating, but exists on a very different planet (or at least in a far muggier climate) than the exquisite acoustic snowglobe of Cold Blows The Rain. [Jan 2025, p.24]

As with most ambient works, English's LP plays best as a set piece, through gauzy, soft-gushing epic "V" is a particular beauty. [Jan 2025, p.34]

These songs often have a conceptual bent - take the lyric of "Last Scene Of All", collaged together from fragments of Shakespeare plays - although Lewis' vocal, a world-weary baritone with shades of '80s Scott Walker, ensure they slip down fairly easily. [Jan 2025, p.39]

Despite the number of musicians there is a more focused feel to tracks like "Eye For Keys" and even a drop of trippy folk on "In The Tall Trees." Fans of Comets On Fire will find much to enjoy. [Feb 2025, p.39]

An album that is as imaginative as it is innovative. [Feb 2025, p.39]

The outcome isn't exactly surprising, as it falls in line with a relatively recent explosion in modular exploration (see Bitchin Bajas, Caterina Barbieri) but at times it is very beautiful. [Mar 2025, p.32]

These days Chacon can't stop telling it like it is - and long may he do so. [Jan 2025, p.32]

The current lineup lacks that ritualistic Jamaican component - the nyabinghi-style conga playing of the late Pablo Gonsales and the Skatalites-influenced sax of Mike "Bammi" Rose - but there are still great moments. [Jan 2025, p.32]

A slippery amalgam of Chicago house, Detroit techno, acid house grooves and sleazy electro-pop. Delirious fun it is too. [Jan 2025, p.32]

Pursues the vibe [heard on 2022's We've Been Going About This All Wrong] further, enjoying a kind of midlife techno-goth glow-up, on tracks "Idiot Box" and the incendiary "Indio" coming on like a female-fronted Future Islands or Pet Benatar joining Curve. [Feb 2025, p.43]

The Purple Bird is a consummate listen-through that makes highlights hard to pick but "Boise, Idaho", a yearning beauty with a fine arrangement and hints of Glen Campbell, is one. [Feb 2025, p.30]

Hiatt has rarely rocked harder than on Forever. Yet those moments are also smartly tempered by songs that sometimes flirt with '80s psychedelia ("Ghost Ship") and the kind of country-roots balladry with which she first made her name over a decade ago. [Jan 2025, p.34]

At other times he falls back on elegantly vintage-clad pastichery, but then the stomping baroque pop duet of "I Gotta Limit" and the sun-dappled wistfulness of "To Live For What Once Was" prick up our ears once again. [Jan 2025, p.31]

Only an underpowered "Nightclubbing", slathered in hair-metal guitar-rock slammers dilute an otherwise exhilarating night of impressively gutsy jazz-metal bruisers. [Feb 2025, p.39]

Just gorgeous. [Jan 2025, p.40]

Folk bends under their queries, but doesn't break. [Jan 2025, p.31]

In returning to their foundational style, Tunng sound as full of surprise and mystery as ever. [Jan 2025, p.41]

C Duncan's fifth album, like Ricard Hawley's catalogue, is imbued with an old-fashioned, Technicolor warmth. [Feb 2025, p.34]

Their playing is more expressive as ever. Happily, the maturation of Larkin Poe's sound coincides with a step forward in songwriting. [Feb 2025, p.39]

Five tracks of interlaced and overlapping open tunings and drone where individual parts shape the eloquent whole, to irresistibly radiant effects. [Jan 2025, p.31]

It's four-square Manics Big Music, with James Dean Bradfield's guitar especially eloquent, echoing Keith Levene's sour whine on the title track and beautifully relaxed on "Being Baptised"'s Smith-like elegy. [Feb 2025, p.37]

A richly inventive trip made off the usual musical map. [Feb 2025, p.43]

Lankum producer John 'Spud' Murphy helps bring form to these candid candlelit songs of rapture and reflection, while guests include Cormac MacDiarmada and multi-instrumentalist Anna Mieke, whose strings prove gently transportive. [Feb 2025, p.40]

Lower fused dream-pop, experimental hip-hop, indie sludge and illbient, with texture and production effects crucial. ... Best are the wonky blues-hop of "Pompeii Statues" and "Hope For The Night Time", which suggests the raspy-voiced Booker joining a lo-fi Mercury Rev on Spacebomb. [Feb 2025, p.33]

They take a clear delight in topping their scrappy indie-pop tunes with folk-rock vocal harmonies. [Jan 2025, p.34]

This debut LP often sounds familiar but never in the same way too often. [Feb 2025, p.33]

These 10 sheeting, luminous soundscapes lean into the band's considerable pop smarts as well as their soundtrack and post-rock mastery. [Jan 2025, p.39]

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]