These aren’t in any particular order. Organised more as a sort-of emotional map. Anyway. Links take you to good songs from the record.
New Levels New Devils – Polyphia
They make math-rock sexy. Which I didn’t think could happen for me honestly.
The way they make their guitars sing? Are you joking? That lead melody on Yas sounds fucking human. The liquidity of the music is like the cadence of a specific voice.
And then effortlessly, seamlessly, they’re bouncing through these summery, glitzy chords on So Strange whilst some total hero called Cuco croons dreamy, indie refrains.
In a year in which I needed to make myself feel cooler than I am a lot, Polyphia knocked it out the park for me.
All at Once – Screaming Females
She plunges depths. Marissa Paternoster’s voice here is incredible. You feel this fire burning from deep within her stomach, rumbling in the lower notes and driving up through those screeching chorus lines, rattling through the thrashing drums and earworm guitar leads.
The momentum is relentless. From the furious Glass House opener, which teases the full weight of its impact until the final burst, through tracks like I’ll Make You Sorry and Agnes Martin which throw you into the cascading, knee-hobbling drums without hesitation, everything drives forward with such self-confidence, such assertiveness that it’s difficult to cut the record short anywhere. Once you’re in you’re in.
Which isn’t to say it’s emotionally one-dimensional. Tracks like Deeply carve out a slower, aching tenderness amidst the heavy drums. But it is to say there’s an uncaring independence buried in the DNA. It is to say the record has a stand-on-your-own-two-feet challenge which ploughs ahead on its own terms without waiting for you to catch up.
After I broke up with my first girlfriend at the tender age of 16, I told myself that I would never let it happen again. I remember telling myself that I didn’t need anyone else, didn’t need intimacy, that I was enough. Not an A+ attitude I know. But it has its upsides.
Annihilation (Motion Picture Soundtrack) – Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow
They bend sound. Look, I know Annihilation was not that good. There are loads of really good reasons why that film did not meet the expectations we all had for it. I do know that. But it lingered with me for a long time. It drove me to go and read Vandermeer’s trilogy of books on which their based. Which, to be honest, aren’t that good either.
But in this sound-track they do magic things. The sound-craft is such that you feel, listening to it, increasingly in the presence of something totally other. Not an-other. Total otherness. The earlier set-pieces like Ambulance Chase harbour eery, unnatural contours. They don’t obey soundtrack rules of crunching crescendo-build. Electronic diversions. Un-natural, unreal echoes.
When that roughly-plucked guitar bursts from the gloom in Disorientated – the first time the team witness the beauty of the Shimmer – it’s startling. It’s startling because it’s the first moment of ‘natural’ instrumentation. An expression of ‘authenticity’: simple, pared-down guitar melody. But what we see is the eco-transreality of the Shimmer. And so our oppositional binaries between the ‘authentic’ and the ‘alien’ begin to fragment.
The track The Alien. A love-it-or-hate-it moment in the film but in sonic terms: sort of religious? The total, mind-bending quality of those synth lines that rupture through the scene. Communion with something incomprehensible. Not an ecology out of other ecologies but total ecology-itself. Total ecology as beyond the limits of our perception. Total ecology as trans-reality neutralising all our modes of meaning, our systems of control, our models of representation.
The human voices sifting in the ash left behind. Re-constituted memories, untethered from structures, from context. Our words ‘true’ and ‘real’ only ever referred to our own senses, our own modes of perception, our own feedback loop. They could never capture this. Not really.
Maybe that’s why eco-disaster is so hard to write about. It implies and inaugurates a transreal realm of unperceived totality, the collapse and birth of an ecology that doesn’t respond to our senses, our language, our representational models, but which exceeds them, annuls them, transcends them. The final track: Annihilation. Thick, heaving, abstract sound that crushes everything else. Relentless and unbounded.
We are so small.
In Another Life – Sandro Perri
He calls it an experiment in ‘infinite song-writing’. Structure that moves sideways rather than forwards. The title track builds on a simple progression. Sumptuous chords soaking up groovy oscillating synths over the top. And the guitar! Sultry and effortless. 24-minutes of playful improvisation over the same basic pattern. Like sinking into honey.
Daytona – Pusha T
He dares us to look back. God this record is so goddamn good. Everything about it, the punchy, consonant-heavy flows, the springy, imaginative production. A BBC review of this record snootily remarked that Pusha T’s constant glorification of his drug dealing days was ‘distasteful’. Which is entirely to miss the point. And is so BBC almost to the point of parody.
First the voice. Just listen to it. Each syllable makes my teeth shake. The production is orchestrated such that it puts Pusha centre-stage, ensuring each vocal punch hits just-exactly right. His personality shines out completely. Playful, dark and with an all-knowing cynical eye. Makes me grin just thinking about it.
Then the production. If anyone is missing the old Kanye then a trip through some of these tracks won’t do any harm. The bouncy piano riffs on Hard Piano concoct such a playful, menacing ground for Pusha to bounce from, and when the hyper-pop hook emerges it drives the whole track forward with this restless, euphoric glow. In fact the whole run here from Hard Piano to Santeria is utterly addictive. The creativity that is happening: the sticky bassy groove on Come Back Baby and the beautiful, mystical, gold-soaked hook on Santeria.
All of it amounts to a mythologising of Pusha T’s narratives, crafting this sonic realm in which his stories of dealing drugs can be seen as what they are: part of a cultural fabric foreign to most of us, foreign especially to the BBC. He challenges us to deny the omni-presence of narcotics in all industries, whilst indicating the specific ways in which they exist and are perceived within hip-hop and black cultures.
On Come Back Baby: ‘Real n***as bring balance to the game I’m in (yuugh) / Can’t escape the scale if I tried, interstate trafficking’s alive!’
OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UNINSIDES – SOPHIE
She sculpts plastic. And there’s a lot I want to say about SOPHIE. About the way she crafts sound in an utterly idiosyncratic way, blending hyperreal pop melodies with crunching neo-industrial programming. About the way she explores the functionality and aesthetics of commodity with both an irony and a deep earnestness, a deep sincerity.
Does the mass-commodification of music inevitably lead to a bland, hyperreal culture? Once neo-capitalism seeps into the machinations of music production then it’s inevitable certain signifiers will float to the top and find themselves – detached from anything real – circulating around endless, similar tracks. Words and tropes that reference nothing, connect to nothing, mean nothing. Culture reduced to empty signification, empty models of reality, representing nothing.
But. SOPHIE’s music is simultaneously pure ‘spectacle’ and pure ‘anti-spectacle’. On the one hand, tracks like Ponyboy and Faceshopping urgently defy standardised norms of profitable pop-music. Heavy, industrial sounds crush space under overly glitzy pop-patterns. The heaving mass of dirty industry beneath the shimmer of pop culture, pop music, pop life. But on the other hand, something like Immaterial does the opposite. Something like Immaterial fulfils the categories and models of pop-music so fully, so successfully, so winningly that you can’t help but love every note.
Maybe our consumer demand that pop music exists as pure aesthetics, pure appearance, is an unconscious rebellion against the insipid aesthetisication of everything else. Like we’re taking up the weapon of consumer-capitalism and subverting it’s oppressive functionality by exaggerating it ad infinitum. If you’re going to treat as like brain-dead, passive consumers then FUCK YOU that’s how we’ll act, to the nth fucking degree! Fucking feed me! Feed me until I’m fucking sick! Give me the most spectacular, unreal, reality-television-show world that I can imagine!
The televised advert for a Volvo XC60: ‘To feel, to really feel, is a rare thing these days’
Future Me Hates Me – The Beths
She picks at scabs. Finds beaming joy in it. There’s undeniable craft here, across this entire record. Those guitar harmonies on the opening track. That understated chorus line on Not Running. It’s such a tight, accomplished debut that it feels as if The Beths have been around for years. Or it would. If it wasn’t for the fact that the whole thing is laced with this wondrous, sneering youthfulness.
It’s in the sunny, carefree cynicism of tracks like You Wouldn’t Like Me. Almost as if she’s laughing as she winks to camera. Not as nice as you think I am. I can relate to that. It’s in the way she coats her self-deprecating words of the titular track with glossy vocals and tight, sticky guitar riffs. She takes pleasure in fucking up. She takes pleasure in knowing that she’ll look back on this moment with rolling eyes and sighs of what-did-I-think-I-was-doing?
I spent a lot of time this year in taxis at 11am driving across town to some flat or house or carpark and thinking to myself: Why am I doing this? Will I feel pleased with myself tomorrow? And you know, usually I didn’t. But most of the time I had a lot of fun. Nothing like a Home Bargains carpark at 11pm. Nothing like it at all.
Double Negative – Low
They speak with ghosts. Too much to be captured in words here. Something too heavy to give itself up in some list on a blog nobody reads.
But this is the only record I listened to this year that grabbed me by the neck and made me listen all the way through. Something unforgivable finds itself communicated here, something unique to this time, to right now, to this digital landscape.
More to come on this. Stay tuned.
TABOO / TA13OO – Denzel Curry
He rises above. Founder of the Soundcloud Rap scene avoids the pitfalls of his followers. Your favourite elements of that scene – rumbling trap and springy, shout-out hooks, combined with perfected lyricism, hard-edged content.
And, to me at least, it genuinely sounds like something brand new. Curry bounces off the moody basslines and thick, trap rhythms to find tricky, complicated flows. He flips from dreary sing-song hooks to machine-gun volleys of plosive-filled barrage with liquid ease. But it’s not smooth. There’s a rage here, snarling underneath the surface through the first chapter but unleashed more and more violently as the record moves on.
If there is a narrative here its one of facing up to the social abstractions and categorisations consumer-culture attempts to place on us. Particularly on artists. Particularly on black artists. On Percs Curry sneers at the Soundcloud Rap aesthetic the industry wants to box him into: ‘I should rap about some lean and my diamond cuts / Get suburban white kids that want to hang with us’. To exist within neo-capitalist machinations is to be consumed. And in order to be successfully consumed you need to accrue recognisable, easy-to-swallow signifiers. Unhinge your soul. At other points Curry is more despairing. On Clout Cobain he breathes a heavy, mournful realisations about burgeoning success:
‘I don’t even know what to feel, they don’t even know what’s real / Dry tears with a dollar bill, I’m out tryna make a mill’ / Oh, why you wanna take my soul? I’m yelling out “hell no!”
We reach no soft resolution. There isn’t one to be had. Black Metal Terrorist concludes the record on a knotty, furious, triumphant note: ‘Fuck everybody, I murder you idiots / I am a little perfidious, fuck a civilian we’re not equivalent’ over sharp, rattling trap-stabs.
Baudrillard on terrorism: ‘the only non-representative act. It aims at the white magic of social abstraction by the black magic of a still greater, more anonymous, arbitrary and hazardous abstraction: the terrorist act’
Curry doesn’t stake out a distinct, different path to the one laid out for him. This isn’t some Disney show landing on a find-yourself morality. His violence isn’t introspective. His words flurry out to the world at large, randomly bombing the entire system and everyone inside. Everyone is an enemy. Arbitrary terrorism as the perfect response to arbitrary organisation, arbitrary categorisation. The unhinged rage here is radical in its randomness. By ruefully evading definition at all, paths at all, identity at all, Curry enacts a terrorist violence on the entire thing.
Room 25 – Noname
She gleefully subverts. Words spilling out from her, thoughts careening like boats on choppy water. It’s heavy micro-politics moonlighting as something easy-breezy over impossibly sticky jazz instrumentation. And you watch her perform live and there’s this open-eyed wonder to her. Not naïve, the opposite. Stunned at the attempts to put her down. Completely thrilled at her own breezy confidence. Just happy to be here, with you, doing what we’re doing now.
How do we get outside of the structures that neutralise our attempted subversion? How do we form communities when the networks that allow for signals to be raised to one another defuse their genuine humanity before they even get there?
Evade record labels? Form marries content, you can’t help that. The subversive-ness of the lyrics difficult to detach from the subversive-ness of the record as commodity. Which is to say it subverts classical definitions of neo-commodity through Noname’s self-release. And the fact that anyone can access it immediately, for free, wherever you are in the world. There’s something radical there, hopefully anyway.
Dead Magic – Anna von Hausswolff
She summons storms. Not storms that buffet white picket fences. Not storms that drive pedestrians into gently-lit coffee shops. But storms that wrench tectonic plates out of place. Storms that suck everything out from the inside and leave you wondering how you ever lived before.
When we open there’s a feeling for a moment of soft luxury. Her voice shimmers over lazy organ intervals, rocking to and fro on dreary, gentle waves. And then something shudders. Something in the depths, terrifying from underneath our feet and growing wilder and wilder, throwing us from drum to drum, crushing us beneath pounding, relentless organ notes.
Something sort of dreadful about. Something ominous and unforgiving and relentless. Magic’s last gasp. Something like that.
I’m All Ears – Let’s Eat Grandma
Their eyes burn. On their debut, Let’s Eat Grandma wrought a child-like nursery quality with dark, sinister monster-under-then-bed mood. The looming threat beneath the porcelain. Here they pull it to the extreme. Tracks like It’s Not Just Me merge sparkly, squeaky synth patches with deadpan, mournful vocals. Vocals that reek of wisdom. Vocals that sound young in pitch but which in everything else, in timbre, in the way they curl round the end of lines, creak with a sort-of battleworn maturity. On Ava they glide over simple, aphoristic piano chords, gentle admonitions to an invisible friend. We-told-you-so nursery rhymes.
I made my second piece of work this year. It was about death. I told everyone it was about advertising but I think I lied. I listened to Ava a lot whilst writing it. I have a bad feeling all my work might be about death. About trying to find moments of divine revelation. Moments of objective transcendence. Some meaning amongst a fragmented, indifferent landscape. Something to deflect the thoughts of meaningless, endless death.
‘Why dyou take it as final? When you’re starting to spiral? / Girl, why can’t you see?’
Maybe it was just about adverts after all.
Whack World – Tierra Whack
She goes wide. Fifteen tracks, each a minute long. An audio-visual project executed with such finesse, such craft, such perfectionist mentality, that there is no response adequate other than open-mouthed wonder. The perspective is panoramic. Singular characters caught in snapshots, encrusted with their own idiosyncrasies, flitting past and surrendering only a minute of their story before vanishing forever. Some of them are funny. Some of them are really sad. In fact there’s a sadness running through the concrete here. A sort-of loneliness. Fifteen characters all side by side by totally separate, totally isolated in their sonic idiosyncrasy.
It catches you off-guard. She swings effortlessly from banal micro-detail to looming, opaque intensity. On 4 Wings we’re focussing on fried chicken. The specificity, intimacy, of her order. ‘I’m not perfect, but I improvise’ she says, over forlorn piano keys.
And I’m on my own in Exeter performing to a room of seven people. And they will file out of this room in forty minutes time and forget me by next week.
And I don’t know what I’m doing. I have no idea what the point of this, of me, really is.
Devotion – Tirzah
She holds us close. There is a strangeness here. A sort-of off-kilter distance peeling underneath the warmth. The discordant cluster of piano keys on Affection. The cultic, repeated refrain in Do You Know. Intimacy is not transparency. She knows that you can spend your live encrusted against somebody else and there will still be parts that go unknown. There will still be secrets.
Sometimes I only feel close to someone when I’m having sex with them.
I don’t know how true that is. But a lot of the year has felt like that. Is it such a bad thing?
Portrait with Firewood – Djrum
He cracks bones. Harsh, crunching snaps rumbling out of delicate piano improvisation loops. And if Djrum’s music here is a response to Marina Abrahomivic’s The Artist is Present, then he has a darker, knottier take on human coherence than her. Abrahomivic’s work seeks the human in a dialectic between silent eyes, an open-ness to the other who is simultaneously seeing us. Djrum’s dialectic is not so smooth. Underneath the soothing mists of the first two tracks there are wounds oozing resentment.
From the gloom comes a stampede. First as half-forgotten jungle rhythms, then as rippling dubstep crunch and techno drum. On tracks like Creature, Pt. 2 the forlorn ache gives way to relentless, distraught polyrhythms, disrupting our mood, forcing us to re-calibrate again, again, again. Tracks like Sex elude towards Djrum’s complex vision of intimacy. The sex felt here is not so clean as staring into someone else’s eyes. There’s a desperation, a restless anxiety. People digging into each other’s skin to find something that they know isn’t there. Sex as siege. Sex as looting. Sex as useless banditry.
There’s a violence here. The violence that often lurks around intimacy, around the desire to know someone utterly, to peel back their skin and leave them raw, leave them transparent. It’s a violent thing to do, I think.
Golden Hour – Kacey Musgraves
She shakes her head when she laughs. Sort of confused and nervous at the same time. Standing in the doorway. How many times have we done this? Met for just these few hours? Like… a year’s worth? Two year’s worth?
Even through my laptop speakers her voice is bright. It’s like she’s in the room. Winking knowingly at these two breathless naked bodies on the sheets. I haven’t been listening to the lyrics but I do now.
‘Hope my tears don’t freak you out / They’re just kind of coming out / It’s the music in me / And all of the colour’
She can take an idea and dig deep into its ambiguity, without surrendering to either side. Most of the music here gleams with a surface level sunniness. But it’s sunniness nestled in a cynical awareness of the end-of-all-things. That golden mean held so well by country music: not naïve, but not defeated either. The sense in which moments, people, relationships are beautiful not in spite of, but because they don’t last. The rusty halo brought by finitude.
She shakes her head when she laughs. Gets dressed slowly. Leaves footprints in the drive.
El Mal Querer – Rosalia
She storms ahead. The situation on this record is unforgiving; noisily clustering authentic, flamenco tradition with eclectic, modern scenography, and putting middle fingers up at anybody suggesting it might not work. She samples Justin Timberlake. And it really fucking works.
There is something radical is a fusion of traditional musical gestures with modern sonic form. The stripped back production on tracks like De Aqui No Sales re-contextualises Rosalia’s authentic, incredible, vocal melodies. Traditional art-forms emerge from authentic, emotional urgencies and needs, specific to environments and cultures. Commodified pop music recycles fabricated moods and empty, untethered signifiers.
When Rosalia merges the two she lets us re-discover authenticity in both, as traditions emerging from older specificities find new vocabulary, and newer musical signifiers allow their contours and textures to shine with new content.
Joy as an Act of Resistance – IDLES
They hurl words. When I first listened to IDLES, I was a little… nervous? I think too often those musical environments for me have appeared in hyper-masculine environments that have felt unsafe to me. Have felt like places where I don’t fit in, where if I move in the wrong way I’ll have words hurled at my chest.
But that is down to me, and the places I grew up through. I’ve learnt to love IDLES over this year. Their performance of Danny Nedelko on Jools Holland really won me over. The fury and the animalistic vibrancy with which they electrified the studio never broke into antagonistic violence. Joy can have violence insofar as, in its uninhibited expression, it defies the structures and models which attempt to codify our feelings in the environment around us. The joy that IDLES express, combined with the all-out political rage and non-aesthetic means of expression, is a direct challenge to the empty models of joy promoted via consumer-culture today.
We will enjoy ourselves in our own way. We will enjoy ourselves without consumption. We will enjoy ourselves and scream at the same time.
There’s hope in that, I think.
Safe in the Hands of Love – Yves Tumour
He shatters glass. There’s a feeling of cascade here. Thick, complicated noise on Economy of Freedom to ecstatic, clustered instrumentation on Noid. The appearance of a dream. The sort of dream which teeters on insomniac nightmare without taking the full plunge. Plunging to the depths of sadness in an attempt to explore routes out, ladders out of mines, ropes thrown over chasms.
God, the sadness of a track like Lifetime. It harries you. ‘How I miss my brothers’ over pleading violin lines and clattering, unstoppable drums. And then straight into the rain-soaked, heady mist of Hope in Suffering (Escaping Oblivion and Overcoming Powerlessness). The violence of that voice behind the word ‘gouging’, violence that summons storms of noise, violence that lives in the gorgeous bassy synth lines rumbling through the cracks.
Hope is not something gentle. Hope is not some butterfly stumbling last out of Pandora’s Box. Hope is not some sweet and delicate flower. Hope is angry, hope is relentless, destructive.
You Won’t Get What You Want – Daughters
They preach nightmares. The first time I listened to this album I got three tracks in then turned it off and sat in silence for the rest of the journey home. And not because of its abrasiveness. Not because of that. But because of its hypnotic gravity. The fear that if I kept going, I’d stay there, in that nightmarish space, for longer than I’d like.
Satan in the Wait has this sing-song, endless quality to it. Sirens floating in a circular, non-stop halo around your head. The whole clusterfuck of instruments here combine into something impossibly terrifying, impossibly dark, impossibly unbearable.
And I’m walking back from Manchester City Football Club where I’ve been teaching eight-year-old boys pulled out of school to become professional athletes. And the walk is one hour long and I can’t afford the buses it would take to get home. And it’s raining.
And I’m so fucking angry. Angry with the rain and the kids and this stupid city that is so fucking ugly. And I realise that this is the only record I have saved onto my phone.
Daughters want to make me hurt. Not hurt in a way that feels dangerous. But hurt in a way that feels like a release. Like puncturing a swelling with a sledgehammer.
I feel better when I get home. Just about, anyway.
Gave in Rest – Sarah Davachi
She breathes. The drones here feel vocal. Davachi shifts her focus away from bare, singular instrumentation to broader sonic palettes. Piano keys and drawn-out, scratched-on strings as ghosts, as ancient, forgotten souls. They surrender every ounce of texture. She drew inspiration from church music. It’s in the cadence of the shifts.
I spent a long time on my own in the house this year. One of my favourite things to do was lie on the sofa and put Gave in Rest on loud, balancing the speaker on my stomach.
I could feel it in my bones.
Nothing is Still – Leon Vynehall
He sketches time. It sounds stupid but I think it might be true. Everything that sat in my stomach this year and made me heavy can be found in this record. Sonic fossils buried under sand.
I find Christmas difficult because I look at my Dad a lot and I can feel the first pull of present-moments turned to memory.
Anyway.
Be the Cowboy – Mitski
She looks back over her shoulder. Observes an imagined life. A life of attempted disconnect, attempted cool, attempted distance.
‘I’ll call you, to see you again, so I can win, and this can finally end / Spend an hour on my make-up to prove something / Walk up in my high heels, all high and mighty / And you say hello, and I lose’
Turns out you can’t live like that.
I’m worried that I defuse emotions too quickly these days. My brain makes rapid calculations with such instinctive, protective urgency that I don’t have time to get hot, to get connected, to feel how I’m meant to.
Lost a job in March. Add the money you were saving for April. Take away costs for travelling that weekend. No problem. Looks like I’ll be alone this weekend again. Need to get work done anyway. Spend less money. No problem. Dad tells me he has cancer. He’s getting older. Probably curable. If not, people die. No problem.
‘Does it smell like a school gymnasium in here?’ she asks. Memories slowly fading into dust. I watch them dance together and she whispers something in his ear but I don’t know what it is.
I’m haunted by the thought of death. It’s at the root of everything now. Each night plagued by the same rattling insomnia. And once those floodgates are open, each present moment becomes soaked.
‘To think that things could stay the same’
Turns out you can’t live your life like that.
Compro – Skee Mask
He reaches out to us. Hands appearing in the mist. Figures barely seen through snowstorms. The cover says it all.
The restrain here is thrilling. Thick, heady atmospheres that break suddenly into knotty drums and slow-moving synths loops.
I don’t have much more to say. Not much more at all.
Singularity – Jon Hopkins
He looks skywards. The musical landscape rumbles and gleams. Those same idiosyncratic sonic gestures that forged a darker, moodier space on Immunity now turn their gaze skywards. The way he constructs thick, electric blasts of raw sound in Emerald Rush as relentlessly ascending arpeggios. Not neat, not carefully placed, but delightfully messy, beats spilling over in crystalline arrhythmic spools. DNA multiplying, cells dividing, stars exploding.
And the gentler moments. Sonic yearning for religious ecstasy. The rippling choir on Feel First Life emerging from the astral mist. Beyond the excitement of Creation as a verb is the slow serenity of Creation as a noun. Creation as a state of total connection. Creation as a state of being held.
Maybe it’s all a bit naïve. I get that. Catch me on a bad day and I’ll probably tell you Singularity has a sort-of tacky ideology running through the chords.
But when the music fades I can hear my own breath amplified in earphones.
There must be more than this, I think. Oh please.
Please, let there be more than this.
vandal 