Earl Sweatshirt and The Alchemist along with Mike and Vince Staples (on occasion) make an album that is like sap. it leaks, percolates into gaps: the gap between consciousness and subconscious, night/day, joie de vive/joie de ***-it-all (i don't know the french term for this feeling).

I doubt anyone will be in a hurry to file this as either the weakest or the strongest Blonde Redhead record, but it might just be the most traditionally pleasant experience they've put their name to.

All in all, these more "experimental" tracks had some very pleasant surprises, with "Golden" including sax leads and Clementine singing in a whispery register that falls outside of her usual belting.

It’s another worthy addition to a burgeoning discography. It’s a wonderful feeling when an old favorite is still in a groove and pumping out quality music after so many years.

Sticking to the slowlane and sanding down jagged edges has done wonders, giving VOID much more space to breathe, its dripping atmosphere thereby safeguarded, and preserved yet further by excellent pacing and pristine production.

While not without its songwriting inconsistencies, The Enduring Spirit has the supreme merit of forging ahead and exploring new prog(ish) territory, unafraid to take risks or sow distrust and confusion among the more conservative fanbase.

Occasionally, it becomes exhausting, making it hard to finish listening V in one go. Nevertheless, when it clicks, it definitely sparks joy.

Ctrl is a Facebook-photo album of opinions and behaviours that probably shouldn’t be broadcasted online. It’s also an assembly of tracks that prevail as mantras of self-affirmation, and it balances the two sides of its character with an awareness that feels like an accident, though it's welcomed all the same. But even if we disregard what it all means, these tracks are still jams, tunes, or any other blasé term people attach to music that you can throw away your dignity to.

The band (and mix) sounds healthy and reinvigorated, the tracklist covers a fair range of sounds, and at the end of the day, it's still every inch a Baroness album.

The record showcases their most cohesive and potentially most versatile stylistic palette to date. Returning fans will find the likes of “softscars”, “ghosts” and “bloodbunny” full of familiar glitchy flourishes, and “inferno” within a stone’s throw of Serotonin II’s understated reveries, but there’s a much more ‘physical’ presence to the music here.

This record is definitely a step in the right direction and has some of their most refined and exciting tunes to date. It doesn’t dethrone shutdown.exe, but its ambitions and consistency make it an excellent entry, with fans sure to lap it up.

Nas sounds as energized as ever in his current era and he’s dealing some serious bars across the 15 tracks composing Magic 3. At the same time, it sounds as if the Hit-Boy partnership is finally losing steam--something evident in a record that is stretched thin (cough 15 tracks) and inconsistent, capable of reaching commendable heights and consequently worrying depths.

There’s no other band out there that can write such hopeless lyrics while also managing to make me feel so alive.

Following the explosive opening, there are a fair few standout tracks and moments in the likes of "Chasing the Drum" and "Tioga Pass", but the stylings and influences begin to blur together into something of an easy-listening haze, the sequencing becomes a bit stop-start, and momentum flags.

The good-not-great quality of much of The Land… is at once its strong and weak point, enhancing the highlights but exposing concrete shortcomings. Simultaneously, this album is a highly productive move for Mitski, opening up a wide array of new possibilities for future endeavours.

On SOUR she was a budding superstar; on GUTS, her sound has fully bloomed.

Bird Machine impresses both as an unexpectedly resurrected album with that classic Sparklehorse feel, and as a distinct entity which sees the project move in a comparatively polished and refined direction. Even without the mournful context of its release, it’s one of the best indie albums of the year.

everything is alive feels practically self-contained, like a Slowdive record blissfully unaware it is a Slowdive record, most likely for the better. Simultaneously, the fact that everything is alive could have been a very different album is hard to dismiss. The songs that contain explicit traces of this minimal electronic framework are easily the strongest cuts and, most importantly, feel like a productive midway point between “Slowdive Slowdiving” and whatever Pygmalion worshippers keep hoping for.

Perfect Saviors probably could have been the quote best rock album ever. It should have been bigger. It should have been better. It could have been everything.

Appaloosa Bones demonstrates that Gregory Alan Isakov remains standing as an essential voice in the folk scene.

Not that his previous POP songs weren't POP, but never before has he sounded so confidently chart-ready in a chorus of his. Likewise, "Justify Your Life" features trip-hop beats, slabs of chillwave layers, and a reverb-full soundscape in an uncompromisingly banging way.

Blackbox Life Recorder 21f / in a room7 F760 ends up a glorified, if very welcome, double-single as such: its satisfaction lies less in an end-to-end listen and much more in the binge mileage of its cornerstone tracks. Aphex Twin's sound is in as vitalised as it's ever been, but this release also suggests that a little contortion is more vital to his matrix than some may have thought.

Pure Music is transparently imperfect but remarkably enjoyable, while showcasing a lot of creativity, delivered in a spirit of wild abandon. True to form, Strange Ranger aren’t resting on their laurels. Who knows where they’ll go next.

At once exquisitely beautiful and deeply tragic, and imbued with a bucolic sense of a rural England full of villages and country lanes and woods and fields, I Am Not There Anymore is a journey that you won’t readily forget. Flaws and all, it’s both a worthy comeback for an excellent band and one of the year’s finest releases.

This record nourishes Oxbow's most morose tendencies more generously than ever, and the fruit they bear is oh-so-flatteringly proportioned.

The Ballad of Darren presents itself as probably the most humble collection in the band’s catalog. With considerable pretentiousness stripped off, we catch a glimpse of sustained vulnerability rarely seen on their records. The sound is familiar, yet miles away from previous efforts.

As a piece of esoteric yet engrossing art, I Inside The Old Year Dying marks one of Harvey’s finest creations yet.

It may not contain anything that the casual Swift listener or average radio-goer will be breaking down doors to hear, but with Speak Now (Taylor's Version), she delivers an admirable and very intimate effort that will be extremely rewarding to her most devoted fans.