H.A.Q.Q by Liturgy
The whole thing rolls and buckles and shakes you. And the pretentiousness is obviously off-putting. But to me there are tracks here that genuinely feel like they’re reaching for some transcendent religiousness. The harps bubbling underneath the cascading, pounding drums on God of Love, the trilling guitar lines like some sort of demented choir of cherubim. It’s completely fucking wild. I just didn’t think I’d like a genre called ‘transcendent death metal’. And yet here I am, with my whole fucking room vibrating.
Designer by Aldous Harding
More than anything, Aldous Harding is funny. She is by far (and according to Spotify) my favourite artist of the year. I discovered The Barrel along with its beautiful, bizarre music video first, and then found myself chewing through her entire discography. The sadness of Party is still here, but on these tracks it’s found hand in hand with a surreal, wry humour. Like Aldous is sort of daring us to translate her strangeness. Her smile bubbles through the instrumentation. It’s in the groove of a track like Designer, the guitar trills on The Barrel and even in the plodding piano keys of Damn. You can go through every track on this record and find lyrics which stubbornly refuse to make sense. And she doesn’t give a fuck. That’s the magic and majesty of her craft. The less they make sense the more the words hold this mysterious, druid-like wisdom.
Norman Fucking Rockwell by Lana Del Rey
This is album of the year right? And she’s finally getting the praise and recognition as one of the most important artists of our generation. And you know what my hot take is? The greatest is maybe the most? important? climate change? song from a pop artist? we’ve had? this decade? Obviously Lana Del Rey is the perfect voice to express that looming sense of dread around a totalising digital ennui. The last lines of that track are so perfect. The elision of climate catastrophe and cultural vacuum. The teetering on total despair before the numbness of the live-stream settles in. I think she might be the most important artist of the 21st century so far. I think if you want to understand the terrifying stillness of digital reality, of consumer-culture, of homogenised desire, then Lana Del Rey is a great place to start. That’s my hot hot take anyway.
Flamboyant by Dorian Electra
God this album is so good. Dorian Electra lets you into their world across these tracks and demands that you have a good time. The artful deconstruction of gender conformity is effortless. Tropes of patriarchal masculinity re-configured as queer sexual pleasure in tracks like Career Boy and Daddy Like. And the production. There’s bits of SOPHIE here, there’s bits of bubblegum pop, there’s bits of J-Pop. But that’s all secondary to the totally unique, idiosyncratic world that Dorian forges. Sometimes revelling in total pop-pleasure, and sometimes veering towards violent, complicated noise-work. Emasculate has a sensual, heavy bassline carrying their thickly charged voice, steering towards a chorus of total hedonistic distortion. Screeching, atonal synth lines rip through a sound design of whips, moans and heavy breathing. It’s intoxicatingly sexual, violent and kinky. And the title track. Is so perfect. Their voice literally oozes sex. The dreamy landscape those synths low in the mix craft. Then the burst of serotonin in the chorus. It’s pure, melodramatic, cinema-screen pop. Listen to the album. Watch all of their videos. Get with it.
PROTO by Holly Herndon
I saw Holly Herndon perform live this year and it was the best gig I’ve ever been to. Given that her interest is so rooted in AI music, and that the centrepiece of PROTO is itself a piece of software, it’s incredible how joyfully human her live sets are. The very human choir stood together in total, improvisatory harmony, lifting each other up and revelling in the bright togetherness of them on that stage. When the chorus of voices, some human and some not, sing together on Frontier, it’s like I’m projected to some post-apocalyptic future state. AI robots and humans emerging out of underground bunkers together to rebuild a new society.
She dreams in future tense. And the future she sees isn’t one of dystopian suffering. It’s a future of co-habitation. A future of uncertainty, sure. Definitely some tracks on PROTO come laden with a deep, haunting despair (did you know that the Mars Rover, prior to its deactivation, sang itself happy birthday every year? all alone? on a planet devoid of life? out loud? to itself?). But primarily a future in which the human voice is celebrated in its ability to co-operate, to twine itself around another on a track like Canaan (Live Training). SPAWN (Herndon’s AI companion at the centre of this record) shouldn’t be taken as a warning of future replacement, but as reification of the coalescent beauty that humans singing together can birth. That’s what I saw up on the stage anyway.
S.L.F by Aisha Devi
When I saw Aisha Devi perform this year alongside Holly Herndon and Jlin, it felt sort-of religious. The way she uses sound, relying on deep, bass rumbles and otherworldly synth-snarls. Devi seeks out enlightenment in dark, moody electronica. She caters for self-discovery in sound. Somebody tells you on Uupar-Theory that you can walk through walls. The clack-clack sound like walls breaking down. Then this patient, thick, rolling rumble like a storm from which emerges static bolts, hazy electronic stabs. The kind of stabs that become a synthetic, nightmarish fog of moving noise on the closing track. It feels like the backdrop to the coolest movie you can think of. Like Die Hard. Maybe not as cool as that.
Die a Legend by Polo G
Look I’m not going to try and pretend I ‘get’ Chicago Drill. Nobody needs that. I can watch as many videos as I like, read as many articles and listen to as much Chief Keef as I can, and there will still be this deep gulf between me and somebody like Polo G. But I’ve listened to this record a lot this year. The existence of the record is itself a political act. Someone who has grown up in poverty, in a life of degradation and violence, has created something which operates entirely according to its own rules. There’s no attempt here to conform. The production might lean into more melodic textures than other drill records, but that only serves to make the whole thing even more idiosyncratic. And drill music from all around the world seems to have that same tendency, that same raw and brutal honesty which, although often present as violence, can also loom up as a deep forlorn-ness.
This is How You Smile by Helado Negro
Definitely the nicest record of the year. And not nice in a soft and cuddly way (though not TOTALLY unlike that either). Nice in a smooth, meandering way. Nice in the way an unlatched canoe might drift down a slow-moving river. His voice sort of melting over these gentle guitar riffs, never asking too much of you, never demanding your attention. It’s totally blissful and sweet. A little shady patch of softness in a year that has felt quite rough.
U.F.O.F by Big Thief
The landscape of U.F.O.F is thick with mystery. It’s the sort of landscape where fables take place, where the supernatural sits. Adrienne Lenker kisses pools of water hidden behind rocks in dappled light. Her panicked, furious scream wakes you up in the middle of the night as it rips through a track like Contact. The whole thing wallows in this gentle, sun-soaked fog that’s capable of holding fragile, close-up tenderness and menace simultaneously. Like wandering through a wood, knowing that soon it’ll be dark and you’ll be fucking lost, but right now just enjoying the way the sun looks through the trees.
THE QUANTA SERIES by K A R Y Y N
It’s like watching home footage disintegrate. Like holding a flame underneath a photograph and letting it burn holes. As a Syrian-American who lost relatives in Aleppo, as a descendant of survivors of the Armenian genocide, K A R Y Y N traces a brutal, violent heritage here. In BINARY she whispers over heavy nervous breathing sounds that merge into fearful industrial noise. There’s something of Kate Bush; that focussed interest on the voice not just as a vessel for authenticity, but as a plastic material to be sculpted, wrenched and distorted. Un-c2-See sits at the centre of the record. I replayed that track endlessly this year. She crafts this ghostly, half-remembered choir from duplications of her own voice. There’s a sense of time eternal, of a moment enacted out repeatedly forever. And those voices gently build around each other, swelling with gesture before suddenly this radio transmission, stuttering vocal loop leaps out, spiralling upwards and outwards in desperate escape. ‘I will be the one who guides you’ she says. And her voice ripples. And for a moment it feels hopeful.
Pony by Orville Peck
Orville Peck is the sexiest man you’ve never seen. It’s impressive how attractive a voice can make someone. But just listen to his crooning, rumbling notes here and you’ll see what I mean. And there’s the sort of yearning here that seems to sit so naturally at that intersection with country and queerness. A celebration of transitoriness. The melodrama of a song like Hope to Die is moving because of its reach, because of its performative gesture. Orville Peck is a performance. The closing track is a lullaby to a lover. It’s an ode to saying goodbye, to moving on, to leaving something behind. The performative signifiers of cowboy masculinity rerouted here not as satire, but as authentic queer expression. The more melodramatic each song is, the more that yearning feels like a desperate rallying cry for a space outside the norm. He’s also really funny. So that’s a plus.
Make a Wilderness by Jonny Nash
That piano thud on Shell is Lynchian. Dreamlike landscapes woven out of translucent, ominous gauze. Like the character on the album cover, it’s like we’re wandering into a dark place. That space which hands at the edges of a nightmare. The sonic palette confuses string and voice so that each note under the water appears like a ghostly ripple at the top. It’s the sort of ambient music you put on and wonder half an hour later why you’re nervously watching the shadows under your door.
Titanic Rising by Weyes Blood
Weyes Blood came through with a nostalgia-heavy, thickly-textured wonder this year. And I think the title of the album is great. Someone told me they thought it sounded like a rollercoaster ride but to that person I say fuck you get some artistry. The image of that huge ship floating back to the surface, its inhabitants alive and the music still playing. Resurrected memory. The Beach Boys influences on Everyday give it this wild, sepia-stained celebration. Like looking at footage of your teenage choreography to your favourite band. A track like Movies leans into that haunted, desperate yearning to be more like those projected visions. Her voice brimming with a steady, rapturous devotion. ‘The movies I watched when I was a kid’ she says, ‘don’t give credit to the real things’. And the way the whole track rises with this thick, heady instrumentation, swelling with her need, her craving, her yearning, til that last soaring crescendo. It’s fucking beautiful.
Tears of Joy by MIKE
It’s like reading someone’s diary, or going through their old home videos. The lo-fi production houses his voice and sometimes blurs the line between his words and the notes. It’s difficult to say what’s sampled and what’s recorded. These gloomy instrumentation sources that sound as if re-routed from a broken television late at night. And then moments of half-forgotten wonder. His grandma listening to a song she used to love on Ain’t No Love, her voice and his slowly slipping into muddy forgetfulness but here for the moment, at the front of memory. If you try and hold onto these tracks too hard they’ll slip through your fingers. Better to just let them come as they are, and let them drift away as they want.
MAGDALENE by FKA Twigs
One of my favourite artists of all time delivering something of total, singular vision. Everything, down to the album cover, feels totally unique and rooted in Twigs’ own identity. home with you will stay with me as one of my favourite tracks this year. That journey from crackling, misty, confusing breath to pure yearning in the chorus. There just isn’t really anyone like her, is there?
Agora by Fennesz
Christian Fennesz is an emotional hedonist. The way he drenches all of his tracks in unashamed, majestic feeling. The way he slyly details the contours of his sonic waves to pull on intricate heart-strings. There is the sense, in all his music but particularly on Agora, that something monumental is taking place. Something sometimes laden with religious effervescence, like on the opening track, and sometimes overwhelming dread. Rainfall sees these swelling vocal loops, guitar riffs and other instrumental lines drowned in brutally muddy, unforgivingly violent noise. It’s like hands reaching out from mud to try and claw their way to light, only to be sucked down into digital, suffocating depths. And when they do break through, when the guitar notes manage to pierce the fog, you feel as if shone upon.
CALIGULA by Lingua Ignota
I spent time this year trying to persuade certain people to listen to this record. It’s a difficult thing to put into words what makes this record what it is. The craft is out of this world. The way she combines classical orchestration with heavy, electronic manipulation, driving all of it through this bottleneck of metal and screamo. The album is a testament of abuse. It’s a curse on all men. It’s a terrifying, horrendously agonised summoning. When she screams you feel your whole body screaming with her. It’s something to sit down and encounter in one go. Leaves you feeling heavier, a new part of yourself wounded and left open.
Loom Dream by Le1f
And at the end of the last track on Loom Dream there’s a ringing sound. It peers out of the mix slowly, getting louder and louder until, by the end of the track, it’s all that’s left. And suddenly it sounds like an alarm? Like a warning? It’s like coming up from a dream, in the closing moments of an album that seems to celebrate nature and organic growth. On Mimosa, Leif uses found-sound of forests full of rain, footsteps and gentle voices on leaves, slowly surrendering them to woozy, sage-like ambience. He takes pleasure in the total-nature force of life. Sometimes tracks move quickly, joyfully enacting the journey from root, to shoot to leaf. But that alarm at the end wakes you up and leaves you a little nauseas. Industrial apocalypse on the way. Something like that, at least.
Trust in the Lifeforce of Deep Mystery – The Comet is Coming
The way the sax carves out these rivers of melody over looming synth pads. Some vast expanse of sonic terrain carved out in electronic brush, occupied by cosmic, sci-fi jazz. The slow tempo grooves and desperate timbre of the sax hint towards some cataclysmic moment of apocalypse. And then there’s a track like Summon the Fire which electrocutes you out your seat and rattles its way into your bones. Crowds of people dancing their hearts out as the world around them burns. The three musicians here exist in total harmony. Electronic music, psychedelia and jazz blend to discover cadence in each other. New cosmic resonances received from far off planets. Just in time before the one we’re on combusts.
One Life by Malibu
Haven’t stopped listening to this EP. Often when I write about something I find I drift away from it for a while. But with One Life I just keep coming back. The final track is so overwhelming and so gut-wrenchingly beautiful. Feels like spending a whole night staring at the sea.
Crushing by Julia Jacklin
What a legend Julia Jacklin is. I mean I’ve not met her so I don’t know for sure. But the person who wrote the tracks on Crushing is the sort of person I reckon I’d like. Maybe she wouldn’t like me(?) That’s okay. Not everyone does. The review I wrote of this record has everything I want to say about it. So just read that I would.
Resonant Body by Octo Octa
Every one’s a banger. It’s dance music given a spiritual, upward-searching flair. Woozy synth chords backdrop ecstatic, looping waves and heavy, crashing drums. You can go from a proper one-two like Move Your Body or Spin Girl, Let’s Activate! into a dreamier, eyes-closed-and-let-the-music-wash place in Deep Connections. More than anything, Octo Octa want you to have a good time. And that pleasure in communal music is a political act, or it can be. On Power to the People, at the album’s close, that 90s style synth riff chugs on again and again over found-sound of an old ACT-UP rally. And then there’s a crowd of people. And they’re chanting together until the music’s stopped. And it’s just them left.
The Oldest Sons of the Oldest Sons by Fluorescent Lights
When Dave Harrington’s guitar lines bubble out of the fog on the opening track. Those flute-like synth sounds slipping between the piano keys on Our Earlier Years. Those misty voices over thick, twanging guitar notes on Epitaphs. The record drifts slowly through its sequencing like driving home for Christmas. But along the way there are these headlight moments, these collisions zones between Benjamin Jay’s woozy pop-ambient sensibilities and Harrington’s focussed, driving guitar riffs. It’s something to really sink into. Lying on the sofa when all your housemates are out.
Morbid Stuff by PUP
There is a lot of pleasure to be taken in spite, I think. Maybe I just spent a lot of my early teenage years in my own head, devising smart comebacks I’d never say to bullies, or thinking up new ways to get revenge on someone who had slighted me. And the quips I would come up with, looking back, were deeply uncool. And the fact is, there is something uncool about pop-punk as a genre. But hot damn I love this album. I love the self-hatred in the disgustingly catchy title track. I love the depressed spiral of self-pity in Scorpion Hill. It’s self-aware, catchy, pop-punk that makes you feel great. The production is on-point. The vocals are charged. The lyrics are the sort of quips I needed when I was fourteen. And the whole energy of the project is totally addictive.
Hi, this is Flume by Flume
The stuff Flume can do with sound. I suppose like a lot of people, I lost interest in Flume with his last few records. But here it’s like he’s booted up a whole new laptop. He warps trap beats with gnarled synth sounds on Ecdysis, he remixes SOPHIE’s Is it Cold in the Water? with this electrifying, mind-shattering implosion of high-pitched static, and manufactured, dystopic voices. And then a track like Vitality, which effortlessly glides through a whole catalogue of sonic disruptions, collisions and eruptions. That clanging, industrial sound that rips through the second half. It’s the same excitement here as when I heard SOPHIE for the first time. Listening to sounds I’d never heard before, scouted out and mapped. And there are bangers too. High Beams man. The JPEGMAFIA track. They go off. More than anything, it just sounds like he’s having fun. It sounds like he’s taking joy in discovering new sounds, new directions, new sonic terrains. More please.
vandal 