Xl Vinilo y CD

Review: Many critics have been quick to praise Arca's latest album (her fourth in total), highlighting the startling vibrancy and accessibility Barcelona-based Venezuelan's latest work. Where she was once renowned for wilfully challenging experimental sounds, "Kick I" combines her long-standing lo-fi noisenik instincts in ear-catching leftfield pop vocals, fiendishly heavy beats variously influenced by dancehall, reggaeton and Kuduro, sparkling bursts of kaleidoscopic synthesizer sounds, and bass beefier than a herd of highland cattle after a few months on industrial strength steroids. As a result, it's an album that beautifully balances ear-catching attractiveness with serious dancefloor grunt and just the right amount of experimental noise.

Review: Yaeji's latest offering is a perfect tightrope walk between dreamy pop, DIY house and plenty of the Korean American artists own unique sound designs. It is starkly emotional and demonstrates a lightness of melodic touch that is beautiful to experience. Introverted and perfectly poised for self reflection, the album is an essential audio partner for these strange and unsettling times in which we live. There are darker moments of experimentation, but always balanced with improve jazz or lighter moments that lifts the mood. It's perfectly time during an era when we can't be back in clubs, and is her strongest work by far.

Review: Given his innate ability to craft intensely atmospheric and often fundamentally unsettling music, it seems apt that Thom Yorke has finally got around to producing a film soundtrack. It's fitting, too, that said soundtrack is for Luca Guadagnino's weirdo remake of 1977 Italian horror flick "Suspiria". Yorke nails the brief, delivering a string of chilling, otherworldly instrumentals that not only draw on his well-established love of dark ambient and gruesome electronica, but also foreboding neo-classical movements and sparse, wide-eyed arrangements. There are a smattering of superb vocal moments, too, with recent single "Suspirio" - described by one broadsheet reviewer as "the saddest waltz you'll ever here" - standing out.

Review: It's taken a while, but finally Thom Yorke's impressive third solo album, "ANIMA", is available on wax (and in a fetching shade of orange, too). A future classic that continues the legacy he started with XL Recordings back in 2006 (with his solo debut The Eraser), ANIMA is well worth picking up, as Yorke and co-producer Nigel Godrich offer up evocative, off-kilter songs built around the twin attractions of the Radiohead man's distinctive vocals and skewed backing tracks rich in layered electronic noise, body-bending sub-bass, discordant synthesizer parts and intriguingly jaunty drum loops. Highlights are plentiful throughout, from the creepy, lo-fi ambient swirl of "Last I Heard (...He Was Circling the Drain)" and "Dawn Chorus" (a blissfully dewy-eyed early morning soundscape), to the low-slung, post-trip-hop hum of "I Am A Very Rude Person" and the fizzing, jazz-fired thrust of "Impossible Knots". Melancholic, yes. Deep and self-effacing, of course. Nihilistic, not really. Percussive futurist sub-pop is back.