30 May 2025
Here's how it works: The Recent Releases chart brings together critical reaction to new albums from more than 50 sources worldwide. It's updated daily. Albums qualify with 5 reviews, and drop out after 6 weeks into the longer timespan charts.
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Eighth studio album from the American-Scottish alt rockers influenced in part by singer Shirley Manson's hip replacement surgery
7.7
NEW With their eighth album, Shirley Manson’s gang channel a more optimistic outlook, and display some of their most profound songwriting to date Read Review
NEW Manson and the band have created something profound — a record about pain, survival, and the beauty that can emerge from broken places. It doesn’t just prove the old saying about suffering and art — it makes it sound like a revelation Read Review
NEW Garbage grasps the fact that existence in such a complex world can actually be reduced to a simple choice between loving and hating. Here is your soundtrack to that world, perhaps unsurprisingly it rocks righteously Read Review
NEW Even when the sonic mood broods on "Radical", the optimistic sentiments (quoted in the album title) reflect a creative force in rude force. Print edition only
NEW We get bouquets as well as barbed-wire. Print edition only
NEW There’s so much packed into Let All That We Imagine that it would be easy to feel overwhelmed Read Review
NEW These 10 tracks will undoubtedly please longterm fans, even if there's little here that doesn't revisit already well-trodden ground. Print edition only
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Smerz Big City Life
Similar to Charli xcx, Smerz’ downtempo songs might be more revealing than their anthems The Line Of Best Fit
The Norwegian duo’s second album builds an art-pop opera set to the pace of an urban existence Paste Magazine
There is a sense of the onlooker, the bystander, to Big city life, like watching youthful memories pass by from a high altitude. Big city life tells a bittersweet story but does so with such elegance and attitude that it affirms the life it describes God Is In The TV
Big city life further proves the duo have carved out their own lane in a blossoming scene that continues to propel them forward onto the forefront of the eccentric and eclectic Under The Radar
The album captures a specific kind of contemporary attention span: fractured, fleeting, slightly numb. It’s sparse, suggestive, and pointedly uninterested in conventional structure The Quietus
The Norwegian duo’s slinky postmodern pop album approaches you at a party and whispers: Want to go somewhere even cooler? Pitchfork
‘Big city life’ captures the chaos and wonder of city living with precision and dynamism. Flitting between the glamorous and raw, the album thrives on contradiction, delighting in camp spectacle and coarse truths Clash
caroline Caroline 2
With a suite of mini-symphonies that boasts no shortage of surprising, mesmerizing epiphanies, the London musicians fully embrace their role as UK post-rock’s preeminent sentimentalists Pitchfork
caroline 2 is a remarkable second album from one of Britain’s greatest bands. Throughout the album, the exquisite way in which this album is crafted adds so much to songs that are already awash with beauty and romance The Quietus
Ezra Furman Goodbye Small Head
These are songs of healing, but the kind of healing that makes you question your own reality Spectrum Culture
Garbage Let All That We Imagine Be The Light
Manson and the band have created something profound — a record about pain, survival, and the beauty that can emerge from broken places. It doesn’t just prove the old saying about suffering and art — it makes it sound like a revelation Clash
Matt Berninger Get Sunk
Following his intimate, ruminative solo debut by five years, the bittersweet Get Sunk finds the voice of the National, Matt Berninger, in a slightly brighter, more appreciative - or at least curious - state of mind All Music
Paradoxically exciting and narcotic at the same time, it runs the gamut from spare experimental folk to crushing noise All Music
Sports Team Boys These Days
Sports Team might be singing about life’s limited options, but their sonic ones vastly overcompensate The Independent
Each song is gloriously cinematic, intoxicatingly unexpected and truly powerful, even in its quietest moments Far Out
Since we've been around, that is. So, the highest-rated albums from the past twelve years or so. Rankings are calculated to two decimal places.
Kendrick Lamar To Pimp A Butterfly
Fiona Apple Fetch The Bolt Cutters
Spiritbox Tsunami Sea
Kendrick Lamar Damn.
D'Angelo And The Vanguard Black Messiah
Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds Ghosteen
Self Esteem Prioritise Pleasure
Bob Dylan Rough and Rowdy Ways
Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds Skeleton Tree
Frank Ocean Channel Orange