The Murder Capital may have arrived with a shout and a fist but they’re soaring now with nuance, ideas, a whole lot of heart and the first great guitar album of 2023.

Song to song, it’s genuinely exciting to see where JPEGMAFIA might go next, and you never quite know what to expect. JPEGMAFIA’s third album is his most accomplished record yet.

They’ve [experimental sonics] been added to the steadfast elements that make The National so good: clever turns of phrase, genius storytelling, Bryan Devendorf’s marching-band drums, delightful arrangements and piano and brass that work well together.

It is its author Kieran Hebden's best work to date and confirms the prolific young soundmeister as a major talent.

That's not to say there's not some exceptional music on this record, it's just once again the impact of the best moments is dulled by the inclusion of some indifferent electronic compositions.

The Lost Tapes is no barrel-scraping… it's more dark magic straight from the source.

Though ‘Comfort To Me’ retains The Sniffers’ talent for a rowdy rock’n’roll track – the largely instrumental ‘Don’t Need A Cunt Like You (To Love Me)’ blazes in and out of view with one-and-a-half minutes – it also shows a more reflective side to the band amid the silliness.

There’s no sense of bet-hedging in its lengthy runtime and no real filler. It’s the sound of an artist in his imperial phase doing as he pleases without needing to try too hard: not just a low-key flex, but a richly entertaining listen.

They find a balance with the old xx though. Fragility and self-doubt are still themes. Indeed, the highlight is Romy’s pensive, vulnerable ballad ‘Performance’.

After a foray into a different sonic world, on Swift’s return to pure pop she still shimmers.

Deafheaven’s brilliance has long been hung upon the pursuit of a truth, like documentarians before they hit the edit suite. These songs are filthy, dank, often devoid of light, but like a weed emerging from a pavement’s crack, there’s something resembling hope there. A suggestion that maybe there’s something more.

If you want it to be, it's brilliant. It's also a record so ambitious, so angry, and so mad-as-a-goose that there are otherwise intelligent people who will hear it once and straight away deem it an interminable racket. [30 Apr 2005, p.61]

It's like 'Pet Sounds' born and raised in the Bronx. [26 Mar 2005, p.51]

Encasing the malaise and drudgery of the last two years and preserving them in dark grey ash, ‘Pompeii’ captures a distinct sense of isolation without explicitly spelling it out. There’s much to excavate here.

This time round, the humour is more subtle but the observations on life, and increasingly death, are no less keen.

What this collection of songs from his mid-'90s creative purple patch shows is that few people in recent times have done sadness so exquisitely.

The blurred lines are kinda the point and half the fun. But now The Moonlandingz have turned fiction into semi-reality by making their debut album... and it’s brilliant.

Ultimately, what these songs leave is a feeling that, for all the album’s brilliant shine, experimenting with darker styles might not go amiss for what’s next.

Every bit as stark, foreboding, but utterly singular as 'Tilt'. [6 May 2006, p.33]

Davidson’s Working Class Woman is smart, intriguing and deserves to be heralded as one of the year’s most inventive releases--Lord knows she’s worked hard enough for it.

Their most intriguing, beautiful and dazzling record to date.

'Source Tags And Codes' comes with an albatross-like weight of expectation round its skinny neck - yet happily, it's supported by a band who have grown to match it.

If you really want a definitive collection of Ice-T's work, go and buy his albums 'Power' (1988) and 'OG - Original Gangster' (1991). This is not to criticise this greatest hits package, which, technically, does a decent job of presenting an overview of his illustrious career. However, when you have an artist like Ice, with such an impressive body of work, you have to come with more than 17 tracks.

‘Model Citizen’ is the work of a band who are absolutely for the now. Mom, this pop-punk thing definitely isn’t just a phase.

It all adds up to the most serene, stylistically varied album Marling has ever created.

Smother is deeply sad and lonely, but still a barbed invitation to intimacy; like Coleridge's albatross, an extraordinarily elegant, stunning, (near)-perfect portrait of how terribly bad decisions can turn out.

It’s unlikely that you’ll often listen to it in one bout, but whether beguiled one day by its exotic petals and blooms or the next by the less showy trees in the background, Have One On Me is an Elysian record that you’ll return to again and again.

Opener ‘Shots Fired’ is a signal that Megan is not messing around. ... Yet it’s not long before she returns to the salacious songs that we all love Megan Thee Stallion for. ... For all the sex positivity and club-ready anthems, though, there are glimpses of that tone was first introduced with ‘Shots Fired.’