1 July 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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12th release from the electro-pop veterans
6.5
Depeche Mode's electro arrangements, every sound altered and treated to create a unique sonic palette, shows up the imaginative constraints of most guitar-based rock. Read Review
It’s just a damn fine record, possessed of the kind of unshowy high quality the Basildon band have seemingly actively opposed in the past. Read Review
A record that is far better than a band’s 12th studio album has any right to be. Read Review
You could roll your eyes and complain that these guys are still pimping teen angst in middle age, but really it sounds more like it’s matured into the longest-running mid-life crisis ever. Read Review
Anyone looking for the bangers of yore will be disappointed, but the suggestion that Depeche Mode have lost it is merely a blasphemous rumour. Read Review
They don’t always get the balance right between new and old, but this suggests an exciting old age. Read Review
The days of earth-quaking, Zeitgeist-shifting Depeche Mode awesomeness may likely be behind them, but that doesn't make Sounds of the Universe any less worthy of the band's legacy. Read Review
Comes on a bit softer, with less industrial guitar clang and more of chief songwriter Martin Gore's dreamy atmospherics Read Review
Less industrial guitar clang and more of chief songwriter Martin Gore's dreamy atmospherics. Read Review
True to the band's advancing years, however, there's a bit too much padding in the middle of the album. Read Review
While there's nothing new, they're still an unstoppable force of nature. Read Review
Sounds like a time machine back to the Eighties. Read Review
A compromise between Depeche Mode's anthem-wielding, arena-filling guise and a desire to make more contemplative, esoteric electronica. Read Review
Depeche Mode: Sounds Of The Universe
Loyle Carner hopefully!
The sounds are slightly different here than on previous albums and his tentative sojourn into singing is a success because his voice connects as easily as his rapping does Albumism
Lorde Virgin
Lorde trades in her secrecy and mystique for a tremendously healing, desperately relatable record that cements her mark as her generation’s defining artist Northern Transmissions
On the uncomfortable paths of the 28-year-old’s fourth album, slam-dunk bangers are substituted with reinvention and restraint surrendered through hushed, reflective, and carnal synth-pop vestiges Paste Magazine
The New Zealand pop star chips away to reveal her purest self on her fourth album NME
For Lorde, it's an opportunity to reclaim something she thought she had lost long ago, but has always been within her: her true self Exclaim
Frankie Cosmos Different Talking
Different Talking introduces some novel elements to the Frankie Cosmos sound, but despite that, their core identity remains intact Spectrum Culture
U.S. Girls Scratch It
Musically Scratch It will probably be the least memorable in U.S Girls’ discography and aside from ‘Like James Said’ and ‘Bookends‘, the relatively thrill-less album does sort of fly by unnoticeably, made worse by the weak closing track No Fruit God Is In The TV
Lorde may not break entirely new ground on fourth album Virgin, but its warmth and texture make it consistently compelling and quietly brilliant The Skinny
yeule Evangelic Girl Is A Gun
A sun-drenched pop album — perhaps the pop record of the summer Under The Radar
The album is a hesitant step in the right direction for the singer Slant Magazine
Virgin is Lorde at her best yet as an affective poet and, frustratingly, at her most tamed as a digital sound designer The Line Of Best Fit
The New York band’s sixth LP feels like a scaled-up team effort. The newly expansive sound suits Greta Kline’s hard-won self-knowledge Pitchfork
Lorde’s fourth album returns to the digital, physical sound of Melodrama. While rooted somewhat in her past, it’s a gritty, tender, and often transcendent ode to freedom and transformation Pitchfork
Her fourth album celebrates the messiness of being human – and is also her most compelling and revealing musicOMH
BC Camplight A Sober Conversation
It’s perhaps the finest release of his career from start to finish, and that’s beating some stiff competition 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