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]