The Mercury Music Prize has been going since 1992, and no matter what the naysayers say (nayingly) it's not without merit, as this selection of tracks from winning albums can testify.

Stop everything, carefully place valuables and breakables on the nearest level surface, and drop everything else, because Belle & Sebastian have released a first taste of forthcoming album Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance, that's...

It's great to hear old voices doing new things, and doing them as well as Jack Adaptor do on J'Accuse! - with an impressive freshness and intelligence.

What happens if you take the opening track from each of 20 albums and construct a playlist from them, then take the closing tracks from the same 20 albums, and create a playlist out of...

RRP is proud to be one of the blogs hosting the Alternative Top 40, run by Universal-Horse. The Alternative Top 40 is a great way of discovering music you might not have heard elsewhere.

There's a lot to like about Mechanical Bride, the new song from Futsu: the twin vocals; the organ bubbling gently or loudly at all the right times; the, ah, interesting and colourful video. These are...

Crocodile Vs. The Mutant Alligators From Space is a five-track EP full of great melodies, often backed with equally great harmonies, played with energy and verve.

Alone in Time is the second album from Chicago-based band Foreign Shores. Recorded, mixed and mastered by guitarist Nick Reuille, it's a beautiful mix of the best of the band's shoegazing and dream pop influences,...

Taste Me is the new track from Kettering Britpoppists and dreamy-sound makers Neighbour. Its breathy vocals and an easy vibe that's somewhere between baggy and Britpop give it an early 90s reviving feel.

Describing themselves as what happens 'when Ghinzu hangs out with Goose', Belgian duo Shakes have got a slinky electro thing going on their debut song Life is a Fiction. Remixes and more songs have been...

Lazy Line Painter Jane itself is undoubtedly the pick of Belle & Sebastian's 1997 EP output, featuring a glorious guest vocal, swirling organs, guitars turned up, and a noise and energy that the band had...

In n Out comes with a groove and synth clashes that wouldn't sound out of place about half way through the first tape of an early Now That's What I Call Music compilation, while also...

Something Missing's sad, lonely guitars and melancholy lyric are just right for when you want to capture that feeling of alienation and a sense that all is not quite well

Over the course of its 13 tracks, Hold/Transfer navigates a path through shoegaze, dream pop and a whole field of beautiful textures; if this is the noise Bono doesn't want to have to push through,...

Watergun, the debut single from Birmingham-based band The Jacarandas, is a delightful moment of indie-pop jangle that occupies space somewhere between the heady 80s indie-pop days and the sounds of the 60s that informed that...

It's all indie tweeted yesterday about a list of great opening tracks that they put together in July. There are some gooduns on their list, but it inspired me to go one better. And then...

If you're going to give your new album's lead single the same name as another band's song, it doesn't help lessen the confusion any when you also make the album name the same as another...

I don't usually post two tracks by the same group in such a short time, but no sooner had I posted Sing To You than Dark Train pulled it back from Soundcloud. But fear not,...

Picnic By The Motorway is not one of the poppy, "attractive in an obvious sort of way" songs on Coming Up. It's probably the least new-Suede song on the album. And yet it was one...

Tiny Tears is the crowning moment of the orchestral feast that is Tindersticks' second album: strings have seldom wept so sweetly, or contrasted so dramatically as here with Staples' gravel-tones and the warbling organ.