Review: Gracie Abrams's The Secret of Us gets served up as a special edition here and it marks her most expansive album yet. This ambitious project shows her growth as both a songwriter and vocalist and adds in already assured fan favourites like 'That's So True' and 'I Love You, I'm Sorry (Live From Vevo).' The record finds Abrams collaborating once again with Aaron Dessner and she also worked with her best friend Audrey Hobert on several tracks. Together they reflect the urgency of recounting a meaningful night to a close friend with live experiences over the past year shaping its narrative and sound. A nuanced pop album with plenty to explore.
Review: Pioneering Japanese psychedelic rock Acid Mothers Temple & the Melting Paraiso U.F.O. (AMT) were formed in 1995. Their relentless output has spawned various offshoots over the years, such as Acid Mothers Temple & the Cosmic Inferno and Acid Mothers Temple SWR, synthesising and alien cosmo-grammar in sound, one that perhaps only the most acid-casualtied tongues can interpret or speak. Now present through Rolling Heads comes their latest album for 2025: Holy Black Mountain Side comprises three psychedelic pieces, reticulating a series of recording sessions held down between 2021 and 2023, at one point reinterpreting a traditional folk song, and throughout enlisting guest bass from Taigen Kawabe of Bo Ningen. Each record comes wrapped in unique artwork by lead improvisor Kashiwagi Ten, adding an extra layer of veiled mystery to each: no two records are visually alike.
Review: Having celebrated his 50th birthday late last year, Ryan Adams has naturally been in an introspective mood. It makes sense, then, that the long-serving rock/country fusionist should offer up an album made up entirely of covers of songs by other artists that have in some way inspired him over the years. Generally gentle, with string-laden, largely acoustic arrangements, Changes features some genuinely brilliant interpretations - as well as some surprise ones. For proof, check his piano-and-strings wander through 'Panic' by the Smiths, a wonderfully heartfelt rendition of 'Don't You (Forget About Me)' by Simple Minds, a country-folk take on the Rolling Stones 'Sympathy For The Devil' and a lilting, poignant Prince cover ('When Doves Cry', which comes complete with extended harmonica solos and some genuinely lilting strings).
Review: Aesop Rock has long thrived on twisting the ordinary into the uncanny, and his latest full-length after 2023's irony-packed Integrated Tech Solutions hears him deepen that fascination. Examining the unseen mechanisms that guide daily life - dream logic, half-formed memories, fleeting emotions - he now blurs the lines between perception and reality with densely packed verses and meticulous self-produced beats. A brooding, cinephilic album recalling the atmospheric street wiles of filmmakers like Wong Kar Wai, the playful 'Send Help', contemplative 'Movie Night' and dusky 'Black Plums' chart strange emotional terrain, brought to life through warped sonic forensic architectures and sharp lyrical precision. Joined by Lupe Fiasco, Armand Hammer, Hanni El Khatib, Open Mike Eagle and Homeboy Sandman, the album pivots constantly, driven by intuition but grounded in detail Speaking on the record's emphasis on public bareness, Rock remarks on 'Checkers', a song "about the neighborhood outside your home being the great leveller. You can't show up feeling one way because the world will show you otherwise."
Though My Eyes Go To Sleep My Heart Does Not Forget You
To The Lonely Sea
Waiting For The Dawn
Review: British-Bahrani composer and trumpeter Yazz Ahmed has long been one of the most unique artists within the UK jazz scene, frequently producing music that draws on the Arabic side of her heritage (she even went as far as commissioning a unique 'quarter-tone' flugelhorn in order to play 'blue notes' not found in Western jazz and classical music). Even so, A Paradise In The Hold - her first studio album for nearly six years - is a startling concoction. Drawing influence from ambient, dub and electronica as well as jazz and Arabic music, it features Ahmed's first compositions for voice. Frequently haunting, immersive, and quietly exotic, the album sits in a unique sonic space that's never less than beguiling and intoxicating. Award nominations await!
Review: Alabaster DePlume's latest album is a meditation on self-worth and healing, drawing from his poetry book Looking for My Value: Prologue to a Blade, he crafts 11 tracks that feel deeply personal yet universal. His saxophone, sometimes fluid, sometimes jagged, acts as both voice and emphasis on the likes of opener 'Oh My Actual Days' swells with sax and Macie Stewart's ghostly strings, a slow march toward reckoning. 'Thank You My Pain' turns its mantra-like refrain into a rhythmic meditation on discomfort. 'Invincibility' lifts into choral release, a breath after holding under water. The instrumental 'Prayer for My Sovereign Dignity' is an anthem for self-possession, while 'Form a V' channels the discipline of jiu-jitsu, inviting confrontation. Unlike his past, more improvisation-led works, this is tightly composed, arranged and produced by DePlume himself - and the result is direct, unflinching and deeply felt.
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