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Wolf Alice - Blue Weekend
Album review: Grasping mainstream pop and rock with cleverly constructed styles and influences, a shrewd, highly polished new LP from the London indie band 2018 Mercury prize winners, jumps from soft, whispery piano ballads to big guitar bangers
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Japanese Breakfast’s Jubilee
Song of the Day: This third album by the American alt-pop singer-songwriter Michelle Zauner is full of tasty textures and ethereal melodies, inspired by the likes of Bjork, with songs, as she says “about recalling the optimism of youth and applying it to adulthood”
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Jorja Smith’s new release Be Right Back
Album review: It’s about the voice. A classy, silky smooth minimalist new mini-album of eight songs heralds the return of the 23-year-old soul and R&B singer-songwriter from Walsall, following up from her acclaimed 2018 album Lost & Found
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Reason To Live by Lou Barlow
Album review: The veteran singer-songwriter, previously of Dinosaur Jr., Sebadoh and The Folk Implosion, returns with a melancholy but still joyously uplifting new solo album of lo-fi indie folk, acoustic guitar, jaunty and poignant numbers
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Bachelor’s debut album Doomin’ Sun
Album review: Melina Duterte of Jay Som and Ellen Kempner of Palehound join forces in an excellent, symbiotic debut album of intelligent lo-fi indie of light and shade, joy and melancholy, dark humour, wiry guitars and lovely melody
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Beautiful and strange: Long Lost by Lord Huron
Album review: Serene, dreamy, beautifully melodic alt-country-folk by the Michigan-bred, LA-based group, their fourth and perhaps best yet album is awash with road imagery, rich cinematic inserts and classic retro guitar sounds
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Black Midi’s Cavalcade album cover looks as it sounds
Album review: The British quartet’s second album after 2019’s Schlagenheim continues their boundary-pushing direction of frenetic, eclectic mix of the avant garde – jazz, funk, prog in a skilled delirium of wonderful compositions
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Mdou Moctar: Afrique Victime
Album review: Superb new release by the Tuareg songwriter and brilliant guitarist based in Agadez, Niger, bringing new songs about the life of the Saharan region from traditional tender ballads to rocking dance numbers
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Robert Finley shows it’s never too late …
Album review: This fabulous third LP by the 67-year-old soul singer is produced by The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach, and filled with gritty, goosebump moments, his soaring and tender delivery bringing out every emotion
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Wink is Chai’s third studio LP
Album review: Cheeky, squeaky and quirky pop from the Japanese quartet of Mana, Kana, Yuuki, and Yuna from following their previous LPs Punk and Pink which were much more, punk, Wink has a theme of feeling uninhibited and free
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Sounds of an approaching apocalyse - Gary Numan’s Intruder
Album review: With his trademark sci-fi dystopian sound, the electro-pop veteran, who has rekindled his career of late, returns with doom-laden concept album about climate change seen from the point of view of Earth itself
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Olivia Rodrigo is Sour about being a teenager and her her ex …
Album review: Brimful with anger, jealousy, and melancholy, an impressive debut LP by the 18-year-old American actress and singer-songwriter is startlingly mature, fuelled by a heartbreak, and mixes punk rage with power-ballad slow-boil spite
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Still growing: Flora Fauna is Billie Marten’s third album
Album review: We’ve previously highlighted her single, Garden of Eden, and the singer-songwriter from Ripon in Yorkshire’s third LP of folk-pop lives up it with its hushed, intimate vocals and an understated maturity that echoes Fiona Apple and Billie Eilish
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Gruff Rhys – Seeking New Gods
Album review: This seventh solo album by the Super Furry Animals frontman set out as conceptual biography of East Asian active mountain volcano Mount Paektu, but this piano-led set of songs with a 70s psych-pop grandeur also has personal elements, and is produced by Beastie Boys producer Mario C
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Declan O’Rourke’s seventh album, Arrivals
Album review: Released last month, and produced by Paul Weller, this gorgeous set of songs by the Irish folk singer-songwriter’s seventh album paints vivid pictures with superb musicianship and stories of personal narrative and protest
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Matt Berry’s latest LP. If Francis Bacon had painted the Elephant Man.
Album review: Like a boy in a music shop let loose with all the toys, a thoroughly enjoyable and musically impressive psych-prog journey full of sonic humour and riffing adventure in this latest LP by the popular British comic actor
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Paul Weller’s Fat Pop is an album of catchy singles
Album review: Woking’s finest returns with his own lockdown LP after 2020’s acclaimed On Sunset, and this 16th solo LP is a fun bag bursting full of catchy melodies and fabulous toe-tapping pop tunes
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Sons of Kemet: Black to the Future
Album review: A wonderful return by the pioneering UK-based jazz quartet after 2018’s acclaimed Your Queen is a Reptile, here with fuller compositions and arrangements, and featured vocalists including Kojey Radical, Moor Mother, Angel Bat Dawid, Joshua Idehen and D Double E
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St Vincent: Daddy’s Home now …
Album review: This superb new LP by Annie Clark is inspired by the look, sounds and feel of grimy early 70s New York, creating a work of of sleazy sophistication, the sounds of electric sitar, a Steely Dan, and an edgy joke title referring to the release of her father from prison
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Dodie’s debut album Build A Problem
Album review: Intimate, delicate, often whispered and candid, the debut album from the 25-year-old Essex singer-songwriter and YouTube star Dodie Clark magically minimal through subtle cinematic arrangements of strings, piano guitar and clarinet
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