There’s something about the funky syncopation between the two and their slightly punky sensibility that elevates GA-20 way above so many dreary blues revivalists. [Oct 2022, p.29]

This fully formed debut is incontestable evidence of an important new act. [Sep 2022, p.30]

Natural Brown Prom Queen revels in ear-catching beats and hooks while still maintaining Parks’ mile-a-minute rate of musical ideas. [Oct 2022, p.34]

Album highlight “Understood” sounds particularly Young-like here too, but elsewhere Martsch sounds confident in his own skin, merging interlocking layered guitars, subtle melodic touches and licks that veer from crunchy to blissed out. [Oct 2022, p.26]

Together they make smart but unstudied pop music, as invigoratingly weird as it is instantly winning, stuffed with gleefully incompatible styles and with a broad emotional range. [Oct 2022, p.31]

Her flow has a bratty edge and unhurried, authoritative core, capable of Philly soul sweetness on “Lo Rain”, or riding low, squelching beats on “IDGAF”. ... Meanwhile, “Let Me Be Great” isa pan-African firework display celebrating her rooted rebirth. [Oct 2022, p.34]

The xx duo eagerly depart from the templates that have served their band so well, thereby imparting Hideous Bastard with a spontaneity that complements the courage and candour in the lyrics. [Oct 2022, p.34]

Worth the price alone is the inclusion of their peerless ’97 Nurse With Wound collaboration “Simple Headphone Mind”/“Trippin’ With The Birds”, half an hour of sublime Neu!-sozzled psych as Steven Stapleton caresses the ’lab’s “Long Hair Of Death”. [Oct 2022, p.48]

Opener “Globe” is a bubblegum headrush: giddy, kinetic, punctuated by smile-inducing cries of “you got this”; “Champagne”, with its shared bassline, a bittersweet mirror image. The skittish “TV Flicker”, inspired by a sudden family bereavement, breaks the mould somewhat, adding range to the mix. [Oct 2022, p.33]

"Living Torch I" is gentle and organic, a hypnotic four-note refrain offering some of the spiritual uplift of her organ work. The shorter "Living Torch II" presents something like the same ingredients, but strafes them with electronic attack. [Oct 2022, p.33]

Art Moore conjure up some compelling scenes on their debut. [Oct 2022, p.25]

There’s a strong Big Thief vibe to tracks like "Lot's Wife" and "Silsbee" - named after the small town where the album was recorded - but Why Bonnie have a more traditional concept of melody, best expressed on the excellent "Sharp Town". [Oct 2022, p.36]

Although his dabblings in bluegrass pastiche are less convincing elsewhere, it’s all shot through with characteristic, likeable idiosyncrasy. [Oct 2022, p.36]

If the reggae-metal of "I'm Insecure" is a little club-footed, the charisma of her delivery still wins through. [Oct 2022, p.31]

Her candid, self-interrogating lyrics and glassy, soulful voice take centrestage. [Oct 2022, p.29]

Tracks such as "My Name is Blank" capture the album's essence - a middle ground between metal and punk - on a record that barely lets up for a single second. [Oct 2022, p.25]

Beyoncé's seventh solo album is a flawlessly structured feast. [Oct 2022, p.25]

The likes of “Casting A Spell” and “You May Leave But This Will Bring You Back” reassure that Burnett’s formidable facility for waspish wordplay remains intact. [Oct 2022, p.26]

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]