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Our favourite LP of the moment
In a record both timely and timeless, Franklin Fisher, Ryan Mahan, Lee Tesche and Matt Tong have tapped into something both immediate and primal. Their most politically-drenched record to-date, The Underside of Power, Karl Smith argues, is also proof of their quality as musicians
The third album from Perc takes his brutalist techno sound and places it in the historicism of the machinic modernist utopias of the 20th Century. An era, argues Bob Cluness, that for all its chilling monstrosity, has now been usurped by a techno dystopia more terrifying
In Ryuichi Sakamoto's first solo album in eight years, and first since his recovery from throat cancer, Karl Smith finds a record concerned with the varied states of human life and a sprawling piece of music less fixated on the task of world building than the more daunting prospect of penetrating the complexities of our own universe
In The Moonlandingz first full-length offering as a non-fictional outfit, Brian Coney finds a record that refuses to wear only one mask – futurist without revivalism, acerbic but with swagger – and throws off with gusto any accusations of the term side-project
In the sixth release from Jaime Fennelly's Mind Over Mirrors project, expanding from a solo effort to a collaboration on five fronts, Karl Smith finds a work of folkloric mythology both saturated with history and necessary at our present moment
In Sam Shackleton's latest offering, Joseph Burnett finds a record occupying two spaces simultaneously – pushing both the legacy of Coil's post-industrial pagan folk tradition and testing a sense of "what might have been" for mid-to-late 00s dubstep
In the fourth (and supposedly final) instalment of Mick Harvey's Serge Gainsbourg albums, Jeremy Allen finds a fitting culmination to an unprecedented 22 years of dedication to the deceased French icon – not just a satisfying end, but a promising jumping off point, too
In The xx's third full-length effort, Luke Turner finds an album seemingly more geared toward the televisions syncs that catapulted their once affecting minimalism to ubiquity – a record more about treading old ground with heavy boots than the light touch their debut promised
In Brian Eno's latest foray into ambient music – a generative piece of, quite literally, endless possibility – Andrew Lindsay-Diaz finds an answer to cynical critics of the genre, and a piece of work very much right for the present moment
The nihilistic bombast and bluster that is the noise of Hey Colossus showcases a disparate cache of men desperate to beguile, bewilder, and laugh at the demise of all around them – including themselves. Brendan Telford looks at this bludgeoning compilation that spans the band’s brutal, mystical history
In the French electronic duo's third album, Jeremy Allen finds not only a a work that sets right any misstep that may have occurred between 2007's † and the present day, but also a potent commingling of their anachronistic mechanical workings with a touch of the human hand, reaching out
Alluding to 70s American jazz fusion, contemporary musical counterparts and the uncanny absurdity of David Lynch, in Innercity Ensemble's third full-length album, Tristan Bath finds a counterpoint to mainstream safety and the latest chapter of an irrepressible Polish musical resistance
In Oscar Powell's debut full-length, Rory Gibb finds confirmation of both the diagonal honcho's sense of humour and the curiously un-psychedelic quality of his music, as well as a new kind of inscrutability, rooted in detachment where previously it had been the product of anonymity
In the latest incarnation of DVA, a veritable Janus of culture, Ben Cardew finds a record out on its own, confounding as it is rewarding, weaving a complex sonic atmosphere framed by anxiety — at odds with categorisation but very much in line with reality
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