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Pet Shop Boys: Nonetheless
New album: Mixing simplicity and lavish orchestration and a classic 80s synth-pop that made them so successful, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe return with their first LP for fours and one of their best for some time, with yet another traditional single-word title
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Iron & Wine: Light Verse
New album: A poetic latest release indeed North Carolina’s Sam Beam, packed with beautiful lyrics and melodies, articulate alternative folk, rock and country with flavours of Paul Simon and Cat Stevens, filled with vivid fictional and personal insights, desperate characters and wide-eyed optimists, heartache, tears and laughter including an appearance by Fiona Apple
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All aflame: St. Vincent - All Born Screaming
New album: Annie Clark’s follow-up to 2021’s 70s-inspired Daddy’s Home is a striking, stylish self-produced LP, with a rawer, starker edge, fierce guitars, a theme of characters pushed between their true selves and how they’re perceived, an includes guests Dave Grohl and Cate Le Bon
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Lynks’ debut LP: Abomination
New album: After a series of entertaining singles, the flamboyant, often masked south London artist Elliot Brett’s debut LP is full of bounce and thrust – a humorous, witty, catchy collection of stylish synth-electro-pop mainly about gay sexual adventures in the city
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A new twist: Taylor Swift: The Tortured Poets Department
New album: The American omnipresent megastar returns with a surprise but also widely well-received 11th LP – a twisting, voluminous collection of 31 songs (Anthology version) of luxuriant pop, but packed with extremely caustic, often brilliantly dark, cutting break-up lyrics
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Lucy Rose: This Ain't The Way You Go Out
New album: The English singer-songwriter returns with her fifth LP, following 2019’s No Words Left, with a triumph-against-adversity comeback of beautiful piano-based songs fuelled by difficulty and yet also hope
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Grace Cummings: Ramona
New album: Slow, inexorable, compelling beauty in the powerful voice of the Melbourne singer-songwriter and actor, here, following 2022’s extraordinary Storm Queen, with a less raw, more lavishly orchestrated sound and grandeur, to express themes such as grief and self-destruction and emotional violence
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English Teacher: This Could Be Texas
New album: An outstanding debut LP – subtle, original and experimental – by the Leeds quartet of Lily Fontaine, Douglas Frost, Nicholas Eden and Lewis Whiting, packed with intelligent, tender, rich, thoughtful, observational metaphor, and broad, inventive instrumentation
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Fabiana Palladino’s debut album
New album: This striking pop debut with a retro sound, at times evoking sounds of Janet Jackson and Prince, harking back to the late-70s and smooth sheen of the 80s mainstream, has been gestating for 13 years by this seasoned session musician
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Dana Gavanski: LATE SLAP
New album: Deftly original, wry, humorous, gently dreamy, brilliantly oddball folk-pop by the London-based Canadian-Serbian artist in this third LP with a theme of tenderness in a desensitising world, playing out tensions between negative cynicism and despair against positive openness and trust
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Jane Weaver: Love In Constant Spectacle
New album: A gorgeous new LP by the Merseyside artist, with her distinctive blend of tender, melancholic synth-pop, but here also some avant-garde jazz and gently surreal, newer pastures of otherworldly, vivid psychedelia, and a first guest producer in the form of the excellent John Parish
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Vampire Weekend: Only God Was Above Us cover art using a 1988 photograph by Steven Siegel
New album: The now New York trio of frontman and songwriter Ezra Koenig, Chris Baio and Chris Tomson return with a fifth LP and the first since 2019, a clever, often self-referential collection of engaging art pop that echoes familiar styles with the new
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Empress Of: For Your Consideration
New album: This fourth LP by the Honduran-American producer and singer-songwriter Lorely Rodriguez displays sparkling elasticity of sensual voice, playing with crisp, innovative electronica, R&B and rhythms across songs in English and Spanish
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Beyoncé: Cowboy Carter
New album: A big, bold rhinestone-studded musical statement from the US megastar, delving deep into country & western territory and cross-pollinating with pop, soul, rock and R&B, with added Beatles, and guests including Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson and Miley Cyrus on this whopping 27-track LP
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Elbow: Audio Vertigo
New album: The Bury-formed band of Guy Garvey, Craig Potter and co return with their 10th LP, one particularly marked by experimental styles, thunderous rhythms and adventurous sounds, sometimes reminiscent of Peter Gabriel
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Julia Holter: Something In The Room She Moves
New album: One of the most inventive, experimental musicians around, the Los Angeles artist returns with dream-like songs of gentle pitter-patter percussion, woozy bass, flute, whispered vocals, atmospheric, tinkling synths, and twittering woodwind summoning a surreal, twilight feel
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Gossip - Real Power
New album: After 12 years away, the American pop trio of the irrepressible singer Beth Ditto, multi-instrumentalist Nathan "Brace Paine" Howdeshell and drummer Hannah Blilie return with set of punchy, candid, personal disco-punk-pop bangers, and produced by Rick Rubin
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The Dandy Warhols - Rockmaker
New album: Flamboyant yet droll, swaggering, fuzzy, sizzling, meaty, dark’n’ dirty rock in this 12th studio LP from the veteran Portland band fronted by Courtney Taylor-Taylor, here joined by guests including Pixies’ Frank Black, Slash and Debbie Harry
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Dan Boeckner’s debut solo LP, Boekner!
New album: The Canadian indie-rock veteran of Wolf Parade, Handsome Furs, Divine Fits, Operators, Atlas Strategic and more releases his first solo LP, a scintillating synth-sheen, autobiographical sci-fi cityscape of alt-pop with shades of early 80s Bowie
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New album: After 2022’s acclaimed Topical Dancer with Charlotte Adigéry, the Belgian musician returns with a charming, quirky electronica LP dedicated to his Hong Kong-born Chinese mother, Yu Wei Wun, and a celebration of that territory’s culture
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