Hot Chip’s Freakout/Release is an extraordinary display of synthpop versatility and invention, born of collaboration, improvisation, and the psychological mess of lockdown.
Alpha Games is a superb return to form for Bloc Party, much-awaited, and an excellent entry to a fantastic and idiosyncratic discography.
U2’s Pop offered a challenge to the short-circuited cultural certainties and held possibilities of cultural critique and reassessment, of a broader landscape.
The first album in four years from the British pop aesthetes sounds distinctly like Saint Etienne, which is ironic given some of the source material.
Saint Etienne’s Bob Stanley talks about their new LP I’ve Been Trying to Tell You, vaporwave, and how to be cool in your middle age.
Stats' Powys 1999 features songs that feel like they're gliding on a dance-rock groove, even when they actually aren't. The music is catchy and clever and always glossy.
Hot Chip's contribution to the perennial compilation project Late Night Tales is a mixed bag, but its high points are consistent with the band's excellence.
From Renegade Soundwave to Renegade Connection, electronic legend Gary Asquith talks about how he continues to produce infectiously innovative music.
Featuring a litany of otherwise-forgotten budget bin purchases, Martin Green's two-disc overview of coulda-been Britpop contenders knows little of genre confines, making for a fun historical detour if nothing else.
Alice Ivy walks a fine line between chillwave cool and Big Beat freakouts, and her 2018 debut record was an electropop wonder. Now, in the middle of a pandemic, she tries to keep the good vibes going with a new record decked out in endless collaborations.
Not even a "deluxe" version of Between 10th and 11th from the Charlatans can quite set the record straight about the maligned-but-brilliant 1992 sophomore album.
The brilliant London trio Benin City return with the hard-hitting new track "Hostiles" that articulates what it means to be Black in the 21st century.
