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Our favourite LP of the moment
In attempting to unpick the much-advertised gothic vampire horror of Jenny Hval's sixth album (and fourth under her own name), Suzie McCracken finds a much denser web of influence, connecting layers of ancient themes — from witchcraft to menstruation — with the pranksterism of conceptual art
In the sixteenth full-length recording from Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Luke Turner finds perhaps their most perfect musical expression of horror, its realism and sense of inevitability overpowering usual tendencies toward the baroque, and a powerful lesson in empathy
In the Mauritanian artist's latest offering, Richie Troughton finds a record set to question our perceptions from the outset, moulding psychedelia into a tradition of folk music, and takes the opportunity to put some of those questions to the artist herself
On the masked producer's first full-length work since 2013, Ben Cardew finds an expansion beyond the usual tropes of Zomby-ism — collaborations unexpected for their results rather than their partners, tracks that play out over the five-minute mark, and the sound of thoughtful deliberation, all contributing to a welcome expansion of the known Zomby universe
In Frank Ocean's long (long) awaited third album, Tara Joshi finds the artist asking questions about the positive and negative effects of the immediacy of our age and is left with her own about expectation and lasting change in the face of its subversion
In Dev Hynes' third album as Blood Orange, Lauretta Charlton finds the adoptive New Yorker in fine cosmopolitan form, the free-flowing quality of his music celebrating a parallel sense of fluid identity and of freedom to be — to construct our own selves, in whichever way we choose
Digging into their third album in seven years, Noel Gardner finds Nails on focused and punishing form – delivering an unapologetic treatise on elitism and an unmixed, streamlined and unrelenting record of distilled extreme metal
Listening to Gold Panda's Japan-inspired fourth studio album Good Luck And Do Your Best, Karl Smith finds not only a more sensitive, atmospheric reflection of the country's cultures than some in recent memory, but also a dream-like landscape that points toward a second source of inspiration
Digging into Klara Lewis' second full-length, Amelia Phillips finds an artist balanced on the knife edge of internal/external experience, and a musical narrative that puts the listener at the subjective forefront even as it details and abstracts the objectivity of the physical world around it
Against all parental advice, Ned Raggett finds communing with Marissa Nadler's Strangers to be an acutely rewarding experience, nodding to the canon of Americana, but stepping out alone into the spotlight of a much broader and conflicted contemporary music landscape
Tristan Bath looks into the sparsely populated world of Jessy Lanza's Oh No, finding a record that manages to be insular without narcissism, that nods to history without being consumed by it, and that's swathed in the light of pop without bowing to its darker contemporary failings
Recorded in sessions open to the public as part of an art installation at Somerset House and released tomorrow as her ninth studio album, The Hope Six Demolition Project is an "abrasively straightforward" follow up to Let England Shake, writes Ed Power.
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