11 November 2026
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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Eventual third album from the rock giants, a mere 17 years after Use Your Illusion
5.8
Let's get right to it: The first Guns n' Roses album of new, original songs since the first Bush administration is a great, audacious, unhinged and uncompromising hard-rock record. Read Review
The music toggles between two primary modes: grinding industrial rock and keys-and-strings balladry. Read Review
The songs are epic, long-winded, cleverly stitched together, and subject to constant mood-swings - much like Rose himself. Read Review
These aren't songs, they're suites, energetic and skittering and unpredictable hard rock hydras cut with miasmic industrial grind, stadium rattling metal solos, electronic drift and hip-hop churn. Read Review
So rather than taking popular music one step forward, it's an unashamed Nineties rock album, hence the grunge tinge to Shackler's Revenge and the gigantic ballads Street Of Dreams and There Was a Time. Read Review
The stomping of an imperial army on the march? Or a nod to the self-serious metal monoliths of the '90s - less hair and more scare, perhaps? Read Review
Chinese Democracy's Finnegans Wake-esque gestation means that each track is dense, heavy and will take multiple listens to unravel. Read Review
Clearly not the greatest rock album ever made, but nor is it an absolute and utter failure. Read Review
Woefully flabby in places... but there are still enough momentary flashes of the old steel that made the Appetite for Destruction so good. Read Review
Packs both volume and aggression, but its pleasures are buried in the rubble of 14 different studios and a surfeit of Nine Inch Nails-style industrial rock Read Review
It would be a miracle of Sistine proportions if this album amounted to anything coherent and consistent since 1991. Read Review
The only laughs are unintentional Read Review
Let it be known: ‘Chinese Democracy’ is not the disaster it could have been. Not quite. Read Review
Guns N' Roses: Chinese Democracy
Django Django Doveland
Django Django would appear to have refreshed their approach and challenged themselves to try out previously unconsidered melodic avenues The Arts Desk
Print edition only Uncut
Gilla Band Pugnello
Somewhere amidst the anarchy of Pugnello, there are gems waiting to be found. Unearthing them is well worth your time Still Listening
Greg Freeman All Set The Bone
Existentialism has a sound (and it’s hard to ignore) with Greg Freeman’s introspective All Set The Bone Still Listening
U2 Carnaval de Luz
Carnaval De Luz finds U2 50 years after their formation with the same four members and the same desire to shake things up. The album provides a convincing answer to the question of why they keep doing what they do XS Noize
Fontaines D.C. Dopamine Chamber
Fontaines D.C. push deeper into synthetic territory on Dopamine Chamber, balancing stadium-sized melodies with restless experimentation and darker texture Record Collector
They sound ambitious and engaged in their 50th year, swinging for the fences and hitting more targets than not. There’s still some gas in the tank Record Collector
La Roux Old Flames
Print edition only Record Collector
Back with her first new music in six years, La Roux's new sound explores facets of R'n'B and Europop to varying degrees of success The Skinny
La Roux turns to 90s R&B on a fourth album shaped by the end of a 17-year relationship, finding room for new beginnings beneath its layered production Still Listening
Print edition only Rolling Stone UK
Devastating moments are dressed up with warm production and kinetic 00s R&B in the now quiff-less singer’s grownup fourth album The Guardian
Elly Jackson returns with heartfelt pop songs about breaking up, resentment, vulnerability and all that entails musicOMH
Ditching erratic experimentation for an ambient concept, the indie shapeshifters' sixth album is their most coherent in years musicOMH
Doveland sounds less like a reduction of Django Django’s musical vocabulary than a more relaxed demonstration of how much they possess PopMatters
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
Rosalía Lux
Kendrick Lamar Damn.
D'Angelo And The Vanguard Black Messiah
Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds Ghosteen
Spiritbox Tsunami Sea
Self Esteem Prioritise Pleasure
Hayley Williams Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party
Bob Dylan Rough and Rowdy Ways