An annoyingly good crop of songs, and a deceptively simple album which modernises blues and soft rock in an interesting way.

Favourite Song: Slow Dancing In a Burning Room

Best: Waiting On the World to Change, I Don't Trust Myself, Belief, Gravity, The Heart of Life, Vultures, Stop This Train, Bold As Love,

Worst: Dreaming With a Broken Heart

Linkin Park's return shows that they didn't exactly learn too much from their time away. Production wise it's just too clean and it's lacking those scratchy electronica bits and bobs which are heavily present on their first two albums which, in my opinion, separates them from other nu metal bands of the time (but this has been an issue since post-Meteora so it's unfair to pin it solely on this album). Regardless, some fun cuts and a couple of good standouts amongst the ... read more

A pretty rudimentary pop album with glimpses of personality peeking out when Carpenter stops writing like a Disney star.

Favourite Song: Fast Times

Best: Read your Mind, Already Over, how many things, Nonsense, decode

Worst: Bad for Business

Produced far too cleanly to illicit any visceral emotions, but some occasional decent introspective lines can be found within, and it's an EP which will serve as a time capsule for Bassett's position at the peak of a strange love triangle.

Favourite Song: Secret

Best: Set Me Free

Worst: Crisis

ANTONOFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF! LEAVE THE POP GIRLIES AND START PRODUCING FOR OTHER GENRES! BASTARD!

Lamar's most stripped effort ends up being one of his most resonating. The homebrewed feel to the album truly is wonderful, taking me back to the GKMC days, and there are some brilliant passages within some of the songs. Plus the production is brilliant - it's probably his most simple album to date in a production sense but the beats are still masterfully crafted. And yes, Antonoff is ... read more

Image and Death & Romance are laced with ear crack, I demand a breathalyser test for my ears.

So I was hilariously late to this album, mainly because I was not a fan of Mercurial World. On their debut album I felt that the duo kept making the same song, and took synth pop to a seriously dull level. On Imaginal Disk however, they find their infectious pop hooks, they find their production diversity, and most importantly, they find their true sense of musicality. The two aforementioned ... read more

Imogen Heap please platonically marry me so that I can learn all of your trade secrets in production and become the next electronica based art pop mythological legend.

Imogen Heap refuses to make bad music and it's slightly infuriating.

Favourite Song: Breathe In

Best: Let Go, It's Good To Be In Love, Must Be Dreaming, Psychobabble, Only Got One, Shh, Hear Me Out, Flicks, The Dumbing Down of Love

Worst: Maddening Shroud

Menacing, a tad grizzly, yet still cool, Let Love In thrives on its gothic undertones and Caves' fascinating vocals.

Favourite Song: Red Right hand

Best: Do You Love Me?, Loverman, Jangling Jack, Thirsty Dog, Lay Me Low, Do You Love Me? Pt. 2

Worst: I Let Love In

The Bon Iver return is short, but so endlessly refreshing and warm. Three pretty much perfect songs in what they're trying to do, and the best acoustic guitar work on an Iver album since For Emma. After i,i's slightly disappointing status, SABLE is hopefully a sign of better things to come soon, in terms of vocals, direction and emotionality.

Favourite Song: THINGS BEHIND THINGS BEHIND THINGS

Best: S P E Y S I D E, AWARDS SEASON

Worst: ...

Tyler the chameleon adapts yet again, answering the question of 'what if IGOR was a tried and true hip hop album?' with the manifestation of CHROMAKOPIA. It's a pretty personal album which carries the running theme of Tyler's mother revealing to him that his father wanted to be in the picture, but his mother chose to shun him away, making for some great intimate tracks such as with Like Him, alongside some IGOR-esque storytelling moments aside from that narrative like with ... read more

Hazy and dreamy, until you get to Lazy Eye. Then it's transcendent.

Favourite Song: Lazy Eye

Best: Melatonin, Well Thought out Twinkles, Checkered Floor, Future Foe Scenarios, Waste It On, Rusted Wheel, Three Seed

Worst: Little Lover's so Polite

She may favour horniness over depth, but at the very least she's a better summer breakout 'pop girly' than Gracie Abrams.

Favourite Song: Sharpest Tool

Best: Taste, Please Please Please, Good Graces, Bed Chem, Espresso, Juno, Don't Smile

Worst: Dumb & Poetic

WE THE GREEP MUSIC!!!

Relentlessly horny and proficiently bizarre as a turning point from black midi, The New Sound feels at times like an expansive dive into the gloriously demented musical mind of Geordie Greep, and at other times feels like an LP equivalent repayment of all of his years at music schools - in the sense that sometimes it's technically brilliant and interesting but lacks the heart that black midi's stuff had. Holy, Holy is certainly one of the best songs not just of ... read more

The production is unsurprisingly amazing, the singing is unsurprisingly beautiful, Ellipse is just let down by some quirky ill fitting lyrical choices and a real lack of oomph compared to Speak For Yourself's track list. I think that this is potentially the prettier album compared to the former mentioned, but the former mentioned is much more infatuating and wildly otherworldly in most of its approaches. Nonetheless Heap is a mastermind.

Favourite Song: First Train Home

Best: Wait It ... read more

About as mediocre as a remix album usually is. Only a couple of the songs are truly reworked upon and enhanced, the rest are pretty generic and ruin BRAT's foundations by thrashing around in the shallow end of the pop pool. It does however make me appreciate BRAT much more now compared to my initial thoughts on said album.

Favourite Song: I might say something stupid

Best: Talk talk, Everything is romantic, Girl so confusing, I think about it all the time,

Worst: 365

I love the moments of lonely and depressive clarity that i'm Wide Awake occasionally generates and there's some really great songwriting to be found, but personally it wouldn't be my go to indie folk album. As folk albums can have a tendency to do some of the songs do blend a bit too much. Still, it doesn't dissuade from the emotions seeping out from this at every second.

Favourite Song: We Are Nowhere and It's Now

Best: At the Bottom of Everything, Old Soul Song, ... read more

The 2020's have been a fantastic time for pop artists who failed to initially get huge mainstream radio play, but have now suddenly become the chart toppers of their generations. I think Roan has certainly made herself one of the most prolific of these revivalists and it's great to hear that there is a reason as to why her profile has suddenly been boosted - the reason being her music is pretty great. 80's throwbacks, catchy campy choruses and lots of tightly intimate passages ... read more

Fetch's more undeveloped and samey counterpart.

Favourite Song: Scar

Best: Code, Puzzle, Flipside, Hex, Seeds

Worst: Case D

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Meteora is a lesson in the art of improving upon a debut: heavier songs, better production, more meaningful lyrics and bearable rap sections (aside from Nobody's Listening), and to top it off, having a song which is unrecognisable from the usual Linkin song making formula, which then ends up in my opinion being the best song from the band. To some this may feel like an assorted collection of potential AMV song picks, but to others, ... read more

Guys with guitars be like 'I listened to In Utero once, here's my alternative rock album' and then sometimes they actually make a pretty good album.

I originally caught Wunderhorse off of 'Teal' which led me to the promising Cub, but now with Midas they're finding a stride in their own little pocket of the British indie rock scene. Compared to their contemporaries in the likes of Fontaines, Foals and several others, they just seem to have a knack for fun yet ... read more