A wonderful balance of melody and ferocity, their tunes tap into a wide-eyed joy at the heart of their rage. Serrated guitar noise and complex vocal parts mix with an adrenaline-rush rhythm section in concentrated blasts. It goes straight to your head.

The dark alchemy of Waterslide – named after one of the art-pieces Margolin painted during lockdown – ultimately flows from the manner in which it slithers under the skin even as it engages with that part of your monkey brain that enjoys a zinging pop song. ... As with much else here, the moment is beautiful and ugly and extraordinary.

Ghosted is a record which depends on its cumulative effect. And in doing so, it reveals there’s the potential to find endless movement in even the most rigid structures.

Air feels like a swan song for a gorgeous world in peril.

It opens with a piano motif that could’ve come straight from Chris Martin’s candle-scented fingers. The matching vocals are so annoyingly whispered, they practically qualify as ASMR. Halfway through, the song changes tack and starts courting the modern market for anxiety pop. ... More specifically, it makes you think, “Does this sound like a needy Mercury Rev, a ham-fisted Grandaddy, or Wings without the easy-going self-awareness?

All the pieces constitute a splendid array of transnational collaboration, a brilliant collage of ideas.

When It Comes is a very balanced record that shows the artist standing on solid ground, in comfort with herself, and ready for a further creative take-off. A soothing and pleasant listen.

One of the purest, most ferocious, most generous albums I’ve heard. A simple offering, and an outright masterpiece of emptiness and full-to-bursting-ness at the same time.

This album is too much of a piece to be picking out favourites, yet it is also one whose subtleties really reveal themselves on subsequent listens. Go on, dive in. Soak up the heat, discover what’s hidden underneath the overgrown foliage. You know you want to.

Characteristically, she doesn’t offer up any concrete solutions on Everything Perfect is Already Here. Instead, by listening to her music, and how she weighs every element with equal care, we’re able to stop and begin to find gratitude for the moments we might have once ignored, however fleeting they may be.

Ultimately, Midnight Rocker is a worthy, maybe even essential, addition to both Horace Andy and Adrian Sherwood’s massive catalogues. It’s not perfect, but there’s a strange vitality in its imperfection, and that energy, that vitality – whatever it is – is incredibly compelling.

Funny, weird, irreverent, a bit messy in places, Wet Leg’s debut feels like a rollicking night out at your local indie disco compacted into thirty-six brisk and breezy minutes. Across a dozen by turns funny and fraught tracks, the highs and lows of twenty-something life are captured with zinging joie de vivre.

An important component to the Paraorchestra’s practice is melding analogue, digital, and assistive instruments. The results, as heard across these eight ambitious compositions, are completely spellbinding. ...

Despite this slightly bathetic penultimate track, however, Whatever The Weather is an excellent, and at times thrilling, exposition of a particular side of James’ music-making, a strange and alien concoction that reels you into its jellied depths.

There’s no clever foreshadowing here, and the real-time emotions make the death of the relationship so much more powerful. Both she and we got something terrific out of it.

All the material contained within is new, and very good. The bands are in fine form, building on their former forms.

The approach behind Two Ribbons is omnivorous, forming a vibrant kaleidoscope that fluidly twists between genres. ... Despite its more gentle touch, the album’s spirit remains restless, transmogrifying.

It is certainly a dizzyingly contagious collection of songs that benefit from main man Dan Bejar’s scattergun technique of song selection. Not for him, the smooth transition from song to song, building neatly to a gentle climax. It is in his blood to unhinge the casual listener and provide a shifting backdrop for his lively lyricism.

With less decay and bleed coming from the guitars, Sonancy benefits from a greater degree of separation in its instrumentation. Consequently, every track gets to breath. There’s little stifling claustrophobia at play here and much like the psychedelic experience, the music reaches and stretches out for a greater truth and space.

What we're witnessing here isn’t radical reinvention (which is hugely overrated anyhow), but the continued refinement and mastery of a specific milieu, and the judicious introduction of new elements and a new collaborator in Arve Henriksen.

The highs here hedonistically bounce around big beats, and the ease in which Rosalía can rap coolly about her status and influence is just as easy as you get wrapped up in it. ... Sadly, Rosalía does not find a way to organise her many ideas well. The tracklist’s brisk changes in energy and awkward hard endings deny any chance of momentum-building.

Although occasionally straying a bit too close to generic Afro-rock, the group still manage to keep it all on the right side of the classic sungura sound before mixing it up a bit on the final track.

There’s no obvious world-building or self-contained story to give Frank the pomp and circumstance you might expect from a major breakthrough rap record in 2022, but he doesn’t need one. The subtlety and detail of his songwriting does that on its own. The world is his for the taking.

[Jenny Hval's] most straightforward record to the date, full of colourful and warm sounds – as well as one of her finest pop tunes.

A good album, but one better suited to a former time.

His third album may not perform the economic miracles of the second, but it’s a powerful addition to Stromae’s canon and a beautiful gift to the world.

The songs have all benefitted from these unexpected levels of time and space to add additional material and occasional re-writing. Pulling from the twin pressures of studio time and commercial schedule combined to give the songs a sense of gentle completeness.

In its fullness and emptiness, all at once, Limbs is an album that dares the listener not to fall for it. Keeley Forsyth is a world builder and Limbs is an outstanding record.