With the successes of Vienna and its follow-up, Rage in Eden, Ultravox's position in the music scene was unassailable, further fortified by frontman Midge Ure's foray into solo-dom with the summer 1982 hit cover of the Walker Brothers' "No Regrets." The band's "Reap the Wild Wind" followed it up the U.K. chart that fall, a taster for the band's sixth album. And what a portentous taste it was. While "Wind" buffeted and whooshed once again around nostalgia for a past never lived, "Hymn" (its melody lifted from "Mourning Star" by Ure's last band, the Zones) wrestled with faith in a faithless age and prayed its way up the chart later that fall, while the dirge "Visions in Blue" saw the spring caught in its icy grip.

Making a welcome return to the quirky pop stylings of her breakthrough period as Marina and the Diamonds, Marina Diamandis strikes a balance between that era's wit and energy and the introspective balladry of her later work on her fifth set, Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land. Though not as sprawling as 2019's double album Love + Fear, Ancient Dreams takes a similar approach by thematically splitting itself in two, dividing pain between existential crises and internalized heartbreak. For fans of her earlier LPs, the electrified half of this effort is a nostalgic delight, immediately reviving the trademark vocal cadence and lyricism of Family Jewels and Electra Heart on the opening title track, a pulsing standout that sounds like Muse's "Uprising" colliding with Britney Spears' "Womanizer."