Violator is Depeche Mode's most mainstream, chart-climbing album. Although it contains only nine tracks, half of them are tailor-made for the dance floor. This album was conceived when dance-club DJs were gaining recognition alongside original composer ...

The critical and commercial triumphs of Portishead, Tricky and Roni Size have established Bristol as a centre of slow-burning creativity, but it was the staggering impact Massive Attack made with their debut album which first put the West Country town on ...

With their third album, the Beasties transformed themselves from smart-ass punks with hip-hop tones into a playful live funk band with some solid rhymes, assisted by the extraordinary keyboardist "Money" Mark Ramos Nishita. A couple of tracks look back to ...

Depeche Mode's lyrical content, at times impossibly contrived, is a potential source of frustration. "I don't want to start any blasphemous rumours/ But I think that God's got a sick sense of humour/ And when I die/ I expect to find him laughing", goes ...

Not every band would kick off their third album with a slow, six-minute trudge characterised by descending guitar lines, mournful melodica, and a frontman that sounds not so much suicidal as already decaying. Interpol, however, have never been shy of bask ...

It's that old story: unknown British band gets an American hit single, gets huge off the back of that one song, and the success ends up destroying them. Fortunately, Oxford quintet Radiohead were the exception that proves the rule. Radiohead's albatross w ...