(Alexandra Pollard)The album is packed with personal confessions for the fans – “Arianators” – to pick over. It’s a bit Jazzy but it works. It’s hard not to consider his timing for this release, just three months since the 25th anniversary of Illmatic. Taping lyrics into my phone is quicker, it’s saved and ready to go. Sleaford Mods are on a roll. After years making peace with drift and uncertainty, she’s never sounded more sure of anything. Log in to update your newsletter preferencesPlease

(Elisa Bray)This endlessly fascinating artist’s seventh, full-length, album The Practice of Love is just as considered as 2016's Blood Bitch, examining one’s role in humankind and on Earth, and probing that favourite of pop-song themes: love. Above all, he is conscious of what family means to him, and so bookends the album with a poem from him to his mother Jean, and one from his mother to him.

Yet for all its darkness, Beneath the Eyrie is brimming with the kind of melody that we expect from these indie-rock giants from the late Eighties. It’s often bleak and experimental: Cox’s vocals burst through like distorted, burbling fragments of static, or appear muffled amid the instrumentation.

Take the title track, whose spoken-word monologue morphs into a recorded conversation in which a woman discusses how childlessness in her late thirties affects her place in society, over the sparsest electronica. Then she growls like an Icelandic volcano preparing to disrupt western civilisation until we sort ourselves out. It's a style that makes fans of vintage engineering wince, but snags the ear like a fishhook. Organs crop up throughout, evoking both Renaissance music and a fairground attraction. Her Medusa’s stare – witnessed at her live shows as well as in her music videos – has become the stuff of legend.
(Ellie Harrison)A heftier sound is never at the cost of melody, which shines through in Thomson’s vocals, the rest of the band’s backing falsetto, and the searing blues grooves stamped all over Future Dust. (Elisa Bray) It’s layered with whimsical flutes, intricate guitar picking and sombre bass lines that meander with casual abandon. It’s a thrilling work. The emotional cohesion the record loses in its shifting cast of singers/songwriters/genres it makes up in DJ-savvy textural variety. “I don’t want to flip the page/ Of my negative script,” he intones on the final track, but there’s just a hint that he does. Slide guitars give way to violas, which usher in eerie synths. He likes the basic sound of a formed beat with effect-less bass or guitar over the top. She embraces her pain, and as a consequence is able to let it go. By the end of the album, he sounds like a figurehead for the hopeful future.At her best, Sigrid throws out precision-tooled high notes like icicle javelins into vast, blue Scandi-produced skies. The production here is superb.

There’s some of that, as vocalist Jason Williamson skewers documentary-makers who take advantage of the poor in “Kebab Spider” – “the skint get used in loo roll shoes” – but elsewhere this is a record that expands the idea of what Sleaford Mods could be. We would like to show you a description here but the site won’t allow us. will be published daily in dedicated articles.

(Roisin O'Connor)The record frequently switches in tone: Banks can be both formidable and vulnerable, accusatory or filled with regret. It is the perfect upbeat end to an album of polished pop. “I’ll change them all day long, mate,” Talbot says.

Dave spends Psychodrama addressing issues caused by the generations who came before him. “Smile on my face doing it.”Just three weeks ago, he and wife Beth welcomed daughter Frida Ray to the world.

“Wake Me When it’s Over”, the third track on In the End, could be “Zombie”’s twin. Perky opening track “Forgot That You Existed” is a syncopated snigger, on which Swift shrugs off old grudges and breathes a sigh of relief in doing so. A must-have for anyone who has a heart. (Jazz Monroe)BMTH frontman Oli Sykes wants to assert the fragility of the boundary between love and hate. Due to the sheer scale of this comment community, we are not able to give each post The downbeat “Once” forgoes easy Noel-bashing for a mournful glance at the years when the pair were still speaking (“I remember how you used to shine back then... but you only get to do it once”). Echoing similar movements seen in recent years, such as Fannie Sosa and niv Acosta’s “Black Power Naps” exhibition – which speaks to and hopes to remedy the socio-economic problem of higher rates of sleep deprivation among black people – the album has a calming, blissed-out quality, with its layers of sound and enveloping harmonies.
Not Waving, But Drowning has an emotional intelligence that shows just how strong Carner is when he’s at his most vulnerable. (Alexandra Pollard)One could argue that there’s too much eclecticism here – that if this really is Crow’s final LP, she perhaps could have gone for something with a more singular sound. By the end of all that, you feel like they deserve a pint. There’s an interior dialogue throughout, which is sometimes more intriguing than musically engrossing. It couldn’t be more timely. Maybe drunk-dialling isn’t always such a bad idea. The title track is pure euphoria, as restless synths of a Utah Saints or Orbital rave break into swelling bass and melody. She banged a cast iron radiator with a spoon to celebrate the echoes and curves of essential pipework: “I put all the hard plumbing on the outside.