Linkin Park – ‘One More Light’ Review
Linkin Park have always leapt between genres throughout their 17-year career, and on electro-rap albums like 2010’s ‘A Thousand Suns’ their sound drifted far from the classic nu-metal of 2000…
Album Reviews
Paramore – ‘After Laughter’ Review
Emo kids’ eyeliner will be even smudgier than normal this week, because on their fifth album Tennessee alt.rockers Paramore have finally fully ditched the serrated guitar-driven angst and the baggy…
Harry Styles – ‘Harry Styles’ Review
So here it is, the album every One Direction fan has been breathlessly waiting for and the album that everyone else has been kinda interested in, y’know, just to see…
Paul Weller – ‘A Kind Revolution’ Review
It’s 40 years since Paul Weller first sang about “the young idea” on The Jam's 1977 track ‘In The City’, but as he approaches 60, the passage of time has…
PWR BTTM – ‘Pageant’ Review
Nobody does fun quite like PWR BTTM. The New York duo of Liv Bruce and Ben Hopkins throw glitter and wild shapes on stage, and not one of their spirited…
At The Drive In – ‘in•ter a•li•a’ Review
Bands reunite for all sorts of reasons, but At The Drive In’s has never really been clear. Their much-ballyhooed Coachella comeback in 2012 was bloodless enough to be upstaged by…
Mac DeMarco – ‘This Old Dog’ Review
From the outside, Mac DeMarco has always been nothing but a baseball cap-donning, gap-toothed prankster. Prone to fart jokes and wacky, ironic Coldplay covers in the middle of one of…
Kasabian – ‘For Crying Out Loud’ Review
Guitarist and primary songwriter Serge Pizzorno has described Kasabian’s album as more “simple” than their previous work. It’s hard to imagine a pleasure more simple than ‘Club Foot’, a 2004…
Gorillaz – ‘Humanz’ Review
“It’s America that made Gorillaz,” Damon Albarn said recently. The animated band’s four albums have so far sold 16m copies worldwide – more than Blur – and that’s largely thanks…
Kendrick Lamar – ‘DAMN.’ Review
Faith, p***y and politics – the mind of Kendrick Lamar is a hectic, action-packed place. The triumphant Compton MC might have cut down the number of tracks on his fourth…
While She Sleeps – ‘You Are We’ Review
It always feels like While She Sleeps got a little lost in the British metalcore uprising over the last decade. While contemporaries and fellow Sheffield lads Bring Me The Horizon…
Maximo Park – ‘Risk To Exist’ Review
Trump’s quasi-fascist Presidency-for-profit, Brexit’s lies, Tory election fraud, the cruelty of austerity, Syria – with the world going to hell in an ‘I’ve Spent The Public’s Millions Golfing At Mar-a-Lago’…
Tinie Tempah – ‘Youth’ Review
Tinie Tempah is UK rap’s nice guy done good. He’s the charmer who grew up on a London estate, cut his teeth on pirate radio and struck gold with ‘Pass…
Little Dragon – ‘Season High’ Review
You could be forgiven for expecting Little Dragon’s fifth album to sound kind of strained. When the Swedish electro crew announced ‘Season High’, their follow-up to 2014’s Grammy-nominated ‘Nabuma Rubberband’,…
Actress – ‘AZD’ Review
Darren Jordan Cunningham has been making boundary-pushing electronic music under the Actress name for well over a decade. His last album, 2014’s ‘Ghettoville’, was a dark, glitchy and soulful triumph.…
Blaenavon – ‘That’s Your Lot’ Review
Blaenavon have always had time on their side, which is just as well, because they’ve taken rather a lot of it to release their debut album. The Hampshire trio first…
Future Islands – ‘The Far Field’ Review
For ‘The Far Field’, Future Islands’ fifth album, the Baltimore trio find themselves in an unfamiliar position. For the first time in their 11-year career, they are making new music…
Father John Misty – ‘Pure Comedy’ Review
From sombre singer-songwriter through to perky freak-folk wanderer, and now a sassy amalgam of US shock-comic Louis CK and singer Warren Zevon in a silk smoking jacket – or, in…
Mastodon – ‘Emperor of Sand’ Review
Metal needed this album. It needed a record that’s doomy, heavy and magnificently multilayered, and Mastodon’s seventh album is exactly that. “‘Emperor Of Sand’ is like the Grim Reaper,” says…
Lydia Ainsworth – ‘Darling Of The Afterglow’ Review
As the clanging keyboard chords that open ‘The Road’ ring out like sinister church bells, it’s clear that Canadian composer and songwriter Lydia Ainsworth’s second album is going to be…
The Shins – ‘Heartworms’ Review
‘Heartworms’ feels like a pretty accurate way to describe a collection of Shins songs: sweet, indie-folk numbers that burrow inside you, find their way to your vital organ and prod…
Hurray For The Riff Raff – ‘The Navigator’ Review
Hurray For The Riff Raff are one of those bands who’ve gone about being quietly spectacular for the past decade or so, never quite troubling the mainstream but ploughing on…
The Moonlandingz – ‘Interplanetary Class Classics’ Review
If The Moonlandingz sometimes seem so ludicrous it feels like they’ve stepped from of the pages of a particularly surreal story, it’s because they have. Starting life in the imagination…
Formation – ‘Look At The Powerful People’ Review
“I don’t think we’re a political band, but if someone’s gonna start bringing bulls**t you’ve got to stand up for yourselves,” Will Ritson, frontman of south London dance-punk agitators Formation,…
Creeper – ‘Eternity, In Your Arms’ Review
It’s not unfair to say that rock, as a genre, has been slightly uninspired for the last couple of years. Even its brightest stars – Bring Me The Horizon, Twin…
Spoon – ‘Hot Thoughts’ Review
Austin, Texas, veterans Spoon operate in a strange world, enjoying non-stop critical acclaim while being a thousand miles from actual stardom. Metacritic’s most well-reviewed band of the ’00s (ahead of…
Zara Larsson – ‘So Good’ Review
Zara Larsson matters because she’s a new pop star with an exciting voice, both literally and figuratively. When she sings, the 19-year-old Swede sounds youthful but not too pure –…
Circa Waves – ‘Different Creatures’ Review
Anyone who heard Circa Waves’ 2015 debut album ‘Young Chasers’ probably wouldn’t expect them to return with an awful lot to say about the world’s big issues. It was perfectly…
Methyl Ethel – ‘Everything Is Forgotten’ Review
Oh look, a psychedelic rock band from Perth who began life as their frontman’s home recording project before being fleshed out into a live outfit and making waves on the…