‘Trench’ is the mature and well-crafted Twenty One Pilots album to date, achieving tonal coherence and with some of the best production in current alternative music and an intriguing dystopian narrative thread running through it.
Conor O’Brien oversees another gentle expansion of the sonic terms of Villagers with the project’s beguiling fifth album ‘The Art Of Pretending To Swim’.
It took Jungle a long four years to make, but ‘For Ever’ is little more than a holding pattern after the success of their debut.
Death Cab For Cutie’s ninth album ‘Thank You For Today’ does what it does extremely well, but 20 years into their career, it suffers from an almost total lack of surprise.
The Internet’s fourth album ‘Hive Mind’ sees each member’s talents are rendered in the service of the others, making for a record that’s at the peak of contemporary R&B.
After the harrowing self-doubt and heartbreak of ‘Dirty Projectors’, David Longstreth emerges into the light of hope and new love on ‘Lamp Lit Prose’.
Kamasi Washington’s latest epic double-album ‘Heaven And Earth’ is another artistic triumph, the band-leader executing ambitious arrangements without irony or pretension.
‘ye’ is archetypal and iconic in its own way – but it makes for kind of a dreary listen, a word usually applied last to anything Kanye West produced.
On ‘Midnight Marker’, Shy Layers makes clear use of his visual artist ethos to present us with a sort-of muzak of excellent craftsmanship.
Alex Turner has certainly split the Arctic Monkeys fanbase with ‘Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino’, one of the strangest and most divisive albums to come from a major artist in a very long time.
