It’s at a crossroads between being many things: a moving resurrection; an impressive display of a talent we didn’t think we’d hear again; a slightly shambolic jam sesh; and more. Its coconspirator too often wears her sincere giddy passion for Mitchell on her sleeve (she may as well say “it came true” at some point), but it’s surely at least in good faith.

It’s a shame nothing about it screams new pop culture staple the way the movie does. There are fine moments, but the highs don’t rise enough to offset the lows.

They have managed to recapture the magic that permeated their best material and made it so imminently replayable. This is a bold move that should be celebrated, and more importantly, it should be emulated.

Yes, The Ballad of Darren is Dad Rock. Fairly enjoyable Dad Rock, true, and still a record hundreds of bands can only dream of making, but one that would likely fall by the wayside if anyone else had made it. Is this bad? Not really, and if anything, it proves that Blur can transition gracefully into old age.

While Clarke remains tethered to his sources, he still manages to flap his way toward the sun. In this version of the myth, his wings hold up, his father congratulates him, and the gods give him a brief yet sincere ovation.

My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross, in turn, shows Anohni pivoting between stunningly direct and entrancingly oblique manifestos. A listener is left voyeuristically spellbound, striving to reconcile what they’ve encountered with the life they’re currently living.

The resulting album is at once a hodgepodge of ideas and a collection that is bound together by vintage synth tones NV and Deradoorian’s desire to explore the possibilities of their collaboration. It’s an entirely unpredictable but indefinably enlivening listening experience.

Overall, I Don’t Know is a formidable leap forward for bdrmm and needs to be seen as one body of work that veers this way and that, but always with a purposeful forward motion.

But The Greater Wings, for all its inevitable connotations, is not a downer. It’s a beautiful testament to life and to the people we love and that keep us going, physically and spiritually. It’s also a testament to moving forward with grace and strength, and rediscovering that longing to live.

Musically, the deft fusion of the delicate and the hearty reflects Harvey’s thematic explorations; the production is full of strange quirks, whether found sounds or unusual effects that are sometimes inserted and not repeated. The effect is that the music feels both hazy and alive, evoking the Orlam world in its strange splendour.

Once again, Sternberg’s irrepressible, impossibly human spirit shines through the darkness. This is the ultimate power of I’ve Got Me: the majority of songs here focus on negative experiences, but the feeling coming out the other end of listening to it is one of uplift and renewed resolve to make something of one’s life. It’s what makes the album sound both modern and timeless.

Taken as a political, activistic, and aesthetic hybridization, Reed and Nehill’s work is fiercely confrontive, a treatise on humankind’s penchant for cruelty, its evolutionary missteps, but also its opportunities for redemption.

It’s noteworthy that this latest record is on par with those two [Soundtracks for the Blind and The Seer] in quality, because it marks his largest leap forward in a long time. By imagining a future without himself, Michel Gira has opened up an eternity of possibilities. He’s let the light shine in – and that is deeply moving. He’s found peace.

With Feed The Beast she has neither progressed past that nor become a lost cause.

the whaler will make you furious; it will make you feel and assuredly interrogate your own heart. That’s emo music, and it is most definitely Home Is Where.

3D Country is a fun album, and it gives the band a more definable personality – even if it’s bonkers.

Boris’ expansive approach acts as a foil to Uniform’s tense restrictions, and it really shouldn’t work as well as it does. And yet it does.

Overall, it’s a wild, violent, voracious record, and one of the group’s best.

Sigur Rós have already proven themselves across their lengthy career, and now, they’re peaking their heads out yet again and making clear they shouldn’t be counted out.

This album finishes right when it needs to. Any longer and there might be a genuine risk of someone having a hernia from all the physical carousing. As it is, we leave this magical island fully refreshed and filled with self satisfaction.

The 10-song, 34-minute project crescendos, Powers perfecting his multifaceted craft while forging one of 2023’s more hypnotic sequences.

This collection of radiant jangle pop songs, burdened by nostalgic love and depressive yearning for something real, ultimately loses its luster. Everything else blends into one garbled, hazy murmur that ensues without much variance.

Squeezing 11 songs into 26 minutes is no easy task but somehow Feeble Little Horse manage to give each gem a personality and identity.

Joy’All feels so light that, despite some of its heavier themes and perfectly-enjoyable atmosphere, it sounds like it’s a couple seconds from simply evaporating, effervescent, like the bubbles from your Jack & Coke.

In short, it’s an album so attuned to the dualities of life, that it ultimately says something profound and essential about how we exist and move through this world.

Double and triple albums naturally sprawl, yet there’s an unexpected compactness to PARANOÏA.

It appeals instantly with its impactful and unforgiving sonic palette, but feels much better when we delve in deeper and engage with the emotion of the words – and for that we must leave rationality at the door.

Thematic and lyrical motifs find repetition throughout the album like a musical director slowly pulling the strings together.