Johnny Marr’s fifth solo album finds the former Smiths guitarist sounding more direct, personal and energised than ever. Packed with sharp riffs, propulsive basslines and big choruses, The Age Of Everything is one of the strongest statements of his solo career.
Fat Dog expand far beyond the chaos of their debut on Cancel Me (I’m Tired), mixing dance-punk, pop hooks, techno, psychedelia and darkwave. Energetic, unpredictable and more emotionally open, it proves the South London band have plenty more tricks up their sleeve.
The Afghan Whigs return with a confident 10th album that stretches their familiar soul-rock intensity into darker and more expansive territory. Soft Control balances noir atmosphere, slow-burn drama and sharp melodic instincts while keeping Greg Dulli’s trademark tension firmly intact.
A remarkable archival collection spanning more than 40 years of Steven Hall’s music, My Skyscraper captures the wild spirit of 1980s New York through art pop, acid folk and abstract disco. A late-life breakthrough that turns decades of overlooked creativity into one of the year’s most compelling rediscoveries.
Paul Heaton’s latest starts with a curveball, Can’t Get Next To You, all crunching guitars and fuel-injected drums, as if he’s taken on Durham DIY punks Martha as his backing band, while he sneers about big business vying for scraps of our attention (“Men on bikes are begging you, Just Eat, Just Eat”).It’s swiftly followed by the hoe-do…
James Ford had big ambitions for his second solo album. The Hackney-based musician and producer, who has spent the last two decades making Arctic Monkeys, Pet Shop Boys and Depeche Mode sound better, intended to pick up where his Warp-released Cambridge Scene-inspired ambient debut The Hum left off.Then two Christmases ago, he received a devastatin…
“5am,” Paul Banks sings from the outset on See Out Loud, the lead track of Interpol’s eighth album. It is striking, as there’s always been an unspoken nocturnal feel about the New Yorkers: the darkened, haunted atmospherics of their music; the surreal ambiguity of the storytelling that conjures uncertain images and asks uncomfortable questi…
Described as “a luminous collection of scenes and reckonings”, Love, the seventh and possibly final album from Dexys Midnight Runners if Kevin Rowland is to be believed, continues to display the regained spirit Rowland has shown since 2012’s One Day I’m Going To Soar. If 2023’s The Feminine Divine was all about sex (and without doubt Rowl…
Reacting against the cool deconstructions of Slowdive’s Pygmalion, Neil Halstead spent 10 years making warm acoustic music with Mojave 3. Spanning 1995-2006, the five resulting albums, all reissued, built songs from the ground up rather than dismantling them, a pitch well-established on their serenely sorrowful debut.With Slowdive’s Rachel Gosw…
Evocatively louche and stylishly charismatic, Kevin Ayers sits in the top echelon of 20th century UK singer-songwriters, embodying looser times before earnest fellows bleating behind trimmed beards took over.Picking up from 2024’s previous box, 1974’s Confessions of Dr. Dream and Other Stories marks Ayers’ move to Island with his most fully f…
