New album: This dynamic, evocative new LP by the Bournemouth electronica artist comes exactly a year after his surprise album Love + Light
Read moreDaniel Avery: Together In Static
Daniel Avery: Together In Static
John Grant: Boy From Michigan
John Grant: Boy From Michigan
New album: The American’s newest LP is his most autobiographical to date, filled with trademark electronica sounds, but an overall mellower sound than previous, smoothly produced by Cate Le Bon, coloured by childhood recollections
Read moreHiatus Kaiyote: Mood Valiant
The third album by Hiatus Kaiyote
New album: This wonderful third album by the Melbourne band is a free-flowing beauty - like a butterfly garden of jazz, soul as well as Brazilian influences from time spent with veteran composer Arthur Verocai and Amazonian indigenous Varinawa communities
Read moreLoneLady: Former Things
LoneLady - standard bearer for brilliant electro-pop
New album: A wonderful new LP by Manchester electro-pop artist Julie Campbell, created in the 18th-century Somerset House shooting range studios, with sparkling numbers that perfectly combine influences from Cabaret Voltaire to Neneh Cherry
Read moreGarbage: No Gods No Monsters
Garbage are back with their first album for five years
New album: Shirley Manson and co return with their seventh, a double LP filled with banging cyber-punk anger, dark, seething, atmosphere, politics and personal battles. It’s one of their best since the 90s and stylistically includes echoes of Roxy Music, Depeche Mode, New Order and The Human League
Read moreLoraine James: Reflection
Loraine James’s third album, Reflection.
Album review: Restlessly imaginative, with arrhythmic oddness, jittery beats, sounds and disembodied voices, spoken word and trap-hop, this experimental electronica album by the London producer by is an candid expression of the mind in 2020 lockdown
Read moreCHAI: WINK
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
Read moreGary Numan: Intruder
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
Read moreGruff Rhys: Seeking New Gods
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
Read moreSophia Kennedy: Monsters
Sophia Kennedy’s Monsters - impossible to control or define
Album review: An unholy, beguiling and at times mischievously brilliant mixture of pop, Tin Pan Alley, vintage showtunes, hip hop, abstract electronica and horror film culture, the Baltimore-born, Hamburg-bred artist is just as impossible to define as to not enjoy
Read moreJulia Stone: Sixty Summers
Julia Stone’s Sixty Summers
Album review: Third album leaning towards quirky, intelligent and inventively experimental pop by the artist from Sydney with oodles of brass, drums and funk guitar and electronica – by Annie Clark aka St Vincent and Thomas Bartlett
Read moreMarianne Faithfull with Warren Ellis: She Walks In Beauty
Poetic ends: friends Marianne Faithfull with Warren Ellis
Album review: Alongside music by the Australian composer and musician, the iconic singer recites well-known poems from Coleridge, Keats, Wordsmith and more, with addition sounds by friends Nick Cave, Brian Eno and cellist Vincent Ségal
Read moreArt D'Ecco: In Standard Definition
Art D’Ecco’s In Standard Definition
Album review: A stylish and charismatic glam-rock electro-funk-disco pop second album, echoing everything from early 70s Bowie or Bolan’s T-Rex to 80s synth New Romantics, by the wonderful Canadian androgynous singer
Read moreCaoilfhionn Rose: Truly
Caoilfhionn Rose
Album review: Sounding like a sunlit landscape of whispering grasslands, this beautiful mix of folk, jazz, ambient electronica and gentle psychedelia comes with the pure, soft, soaring voice of the Manchester singer-songwriter
Read moreMatthew E. White and Lonnie Holley: Broken Mirror: A Selfie Reflective
Matthew E. White and Lonnie Holley
Album review: This first collaborative release between the Virginia songwriter, producer, and founder of Spacebomb Records and the Alabama sculptor is an experimental fusion of jazz, funk, electronica and exclamatory spoken-word observation
Read moreLa Femme: Paradigmes
La Femme’s third LP
Album review: The French band’s third album is an attractive, energetic mix of classic vintage sounds from 60s candy floss pop to 80s synth new wave, instrumentals that could TV themes, whispery and sensual hip hop, disco and dash of rave
Read moreXiu Xiu: OH NO
OH NO …
Album review: This 12th album by the Californian experimental electro-pop, postpunk band led by Jaime Stewart may be the most unusual of year, an oddball set of diverse duets with many guests that sometimes has the melodramatic quality of later Scott Walker
Read moreFloating Points, Pharoah Sanders and The London Symphony Orchestra: Promises
Promises more than fulfilled
Album review: This transcendent, astonishingly beautiful work, from a five-year collaboration, culminates in genre-spanning exquisite music over nine continuous movements that could easily top the best of the year
Read moreTune-Yards: Sketchy.
Sketchy: Tune-Yards
Album review: Rhythmically complex, and restlessly clever, the latest release by California’s Merrill Garbus and Nate Brenner wrestles with a variety of issues from gentrification to gender privilege and climate disaster
Read moreHannah Peel: Fir Wave
Circularities and patterns in nature: Hannah Peel’s Fir Wave
Album review: The electronic music composer’s mesmeric LP is inspired by the cyclical and fractal patterns of nature with access to and reinterpretations of the original music of the celebrated 1972 KPM 1000 series: Electrosonic, the music of Delia Derbyshire and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop
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