Your Custom Text Here
Ed O'Brien: Blue Morpho
New album: Emanating from a period of dark depression during lockdown 2020, the Radiohead guitarist’s solo album is a meditative, soothing, catharsis piece, beautiful uplifting at times, found through experimental rock, jazz, drone, psychedelia, and of course, a flavour his career band
Read more
Part Two favourite albums of 2025 collage
Welcome to the second part of Song Bar favourite albums of 2025. There is also a first part and a third part this week. There is no countdown nor describing these necessarily as “best” albums of the year, but they are chosen by their quality, originality and reader popularity
Read more
The Antlers: Blight
New album: New York singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Peter Silberman, joined by drummer Michael Lerner, returns with a supremely stripped back, soothingly soft sounding, minimalist release of quietly sung numbers, but with a hard-hitting subject – contemplating our passively destructive tendencies of absent-minded pollution, unwitting wastefulness, and the inadvertent devastation of the natural world
Read more
The New Eves: The New Eve Is Rising
New album: Experimental, eclectic psych-folk influenced in part by Cale-era Velvet Underground, Raincoats and Slits proto-feminist post-punk a dash of the village fete arts-and-crafts Midsommar look all conjure up in this exciting, passionate, theatrically entertaining debut by the Brighton quartet
Read more
The Moonlandingz: No Rocket Required
New album: Seven years since their last LP together, and many different projects in the meantime, Fat White Family’s Lias Saoudi and Eccentronic Research Council’s Dean Honer and Adrian Flanagan return with their clever, witty electro-dance satire on a dystopian world, with guests including Iggy Pop, Nadine Shah, Jessica Winter and actor Ewen Bremner
Read more
Songhoy Blues: Héritage
New album: The Malian band return with a vibrant fourth LP exploring their desert musical roots with more of an acoustic and intricately rhythmic sound than their previous more electrified, distinctive African blues-rock, and includes an appearance on vocals by Rokia Koné and other more traditional instrument guest musicians
Read more
Moonchild Sanelly: Full Moon
New album: Always infectiously fun and effervescently charismatic, the blue-haired South African star’s third LP bursts with witty, sex-positive braggadocio, sung in Xhosa and English, and spanning the rhythms and sounds of Johannesburg and Durban with electro-pop and cross-genre dance
Read more
The final, posthumous SOPHIE album
New album: This posthumous and final album by the extraordinary, innovative, experimental electro-pop and trans artist Sophie Xeon, who tragically died in 2021, is here finished by co-producer Benny Long and with a huge cast of guest vocalists, but also leaves the question of how much more there could have been
Read more
Yannis & The Yaw: Lagos Paris London
New album: An EP rather than LP, this project by the Foals frontman Yannis Philippakis is still a high five of top-quality Afrobeat, crossover funk and rock rhythms and riffs, drawing from sessions with the late great drummer Tony Allen
Read more
KOKOKO!: BUTU
New album: The brilliant band from Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo return with an LP inspired by the vibrant nightlife of that city, the titled translated as ‘the night’ in Lingala language, featuring rawer, more electronic sounds and the commanding lead of vocalist Makara Bianko
Read more
Marika Hackman: Big Sigh
New album: This visceral, hypersensitive, alternative folk-pop fourth album by the Hampshire-born singer-songwriter digs deep and dark into the psyche through personal crisis and relationship trauma as one of her best to date
Read more
Arlo Parks’ second album My Soft Machine
New album: After the acclaimed Mercury Prize-winning 2021 debut Collapsed in Sunbeams, the much anticipated follow-up by the now LA-based British artist is filled with poetic self-reflection, intimate, intelligent, gentle pop-soul, but at times falls short of that debut’s initial impact, edge and melodic power
Read more
Dave Okumu & The 7 Generations: I Came From Love
New album: A rich, complex and brilliant release about black history, identity, and channelling the idea of ancestry by British singer, songwriter, producer and guitarist joined by a stellar cast of fellow artists, including Wesley Joseph, Tom Skinner, ESKA and Grace Jones
Read more
Perfect texture blend: Graham Coxon and Rose Elinor Dougall
New album: Fantastically original, eclectic and melodious eponymous debut by the duo of Blur’s Graham Coxon, and ex-Pipettes’ Rose Elinor Dougall, packed with an indefinable mix of indie pop, folk, post-punk and much more in a free-flowing tapestry of sounds and textures
Read more
Let’s Eat Grandma: Two Ribbons
New album: Released back in April, an enthralling, experimental, emotional electro-pop perspective of the last three turbulent years by the Norwich duo Jenny Hollingworth and Rosa Walton, produced by David Wrench
Read more
Alvvays return with their third album, and first since 2017
New album: Delayed by floods, theft, and the pandemic, the Toronto band fronted by singer-songwriter Molly Rankin and guitarist Alec O’Hanley make a triumphant third album return with uplifting and melancholy dream-pop indie filled with jangly inflections of The Smiths, shoegazey MBV, loud-quiet Sonic Youth and romantic Belinda Carlisle synth pop
Read more
New album: This third LP by the Australian artist typifies her intelligently written, nuanced, taut, intensely performed dream pop and alt-country, packed with confessional hidden narratives and subtleties, her expressive, fragile voice with stripped back accompaniment
Read more
Moonchild Sanelly
New album: Stylish, charismatic, sexy, with a unique mix of South African dance music – gqom, amapiano, hip-hop, jazz and electronica, with a persona somewhere between Eartha Kitt, Nicki Minaj or Doja Cat, the starry, blue-haired Port Elizabeth-born rapper, model and designer’s fabulous second and double LP is all about ‘baddies’ and personal empowerment
Read more
Darkly beautiful: Damon Albarn’s new album
New album: The frontman of many bands from Blur to Gorillaz returns with a new solo album suffused with slow beautiful, tender melancholy, falling piano chord progressions, jazz elements, electronica, gentle beats and wistful images
Read more
This week’s selection …
Album reviews roundup: This week’s selection includes a surprise but strong return for the Aussie rockers, three innovative debuts in in hip hop, pop and folk, and an outstanding series of instrumentals by a Welsh guitarist
Read more