Our recognition of this year's best albums. Journalist Lachlan sifts through offerings of grindcore, neo-classical, post-punk, and many more to give a good estimate of the twenty best albums to be released this year.
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20. Blue Rev – Alvvays
Indie pop shoegaze outfit Alvvays’s Blue Rev marked one of the brightest musical points of the year. The album is bursting at the seams with compact production, dreamy guitar work, and strikingly relieving vocals, painting the cloudless optimism in light of hardship the band has become renowned for. Each ballad is light and full of punch, not all cohering to a single theme or restraining themselves in any other way. Hard to say that a more pleasant pop album came out this year.
19. Melt My Eyez, See Your Future – Denzel Curry
The new Zatoichi persona of Denzel Curry initiates an epic hip-hop album saga that marks a new beginning for the artist. Melt My Eyez runs as a Western film, with Curry journeying through the Morricone-esque inspiration of tranquil and embittered production with looser trap beats than usual. The project is brave, incredibly consistent, and showcases an unabridged Curry whose flow, writing, and presence leads to this being an extremely impressive personal best.
18. The Loser – Gospel
The Loser marks Gospel’s first album in seventeen years, returning to post-hardcore punk in rejection of the contemporary scene. The project bleeds into a variety of grindcore styles, fluctuating between restrained screamo, space-rock, and dark metal. Parallels can be drawn with the likes of Deafheaven’s Sunbather as the contrast within, in this case delicate synth work in the backdrop of heavy guitar and drums and explosively passionate vocals from Dooling, achieve a similarly unique band perspective on a growingly contrived genre of music. The Loser holds up to its name in the sound of a band critically crawling into itself in frustration yet subverts anything defeatist in how relentless and remorseless the core messages regarding social rejection really are.
17. Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers – Kendrick Lamar
How Kendrick Lamar would approach a return to music five years after his Pulitzer Prize winning DAMN. was as unpredictable as when his return would inevitably come about. But dedicating a project to this very absence and his renowned position in music seems fitting. Mr. Morale focusses on the moral shortcomings and imperfections of Lamar, ranging from his arrogance with accepting social change, in the case of growing to accept a gender-transition in his family, to challenging the supposed current omnipresence of cancel culture in music. The degree of conscious hip-hop that Lamar aspires to is as unprecedented as ever here, directing hate and criticism from an internal sphere to the powers that be impacting on him. Mr. Morale is a minimalistic meditation of mastermind being able to live with himself.
16. MOTOMAMI – Rosalía
Catalan artist Rosalia brought the pulse of Latin American influence against more soothing traditional Spanish folk music in an avant-garde juxtaposition on MOTOMAMI. This mixture alternates throughout, with artistic choices adding layers throughout: be it slapping autotune on a street-crowd motivated track or sugar-coating the buttery “BIZCOCHITO” to condemn the objectifying of women in hip-hop. Speaking out against the cultural appropriation surrounding the popularisation of neo-flamenco music, Rosalia controls an essential movement in exposure for blending world traditions in music while remaining true to their cultural significance.
15. Everything Was Beautiful - Spiritualized
Focusing on the lockdown period the world underwent as a result of COVID-19 has been difficult to do subtlety by a number of artist, but neo-psychedelic group Spiritualized find no such issue on their ninth album Everything Was Beautiful. Without dwelling on the good-old-time nostalgia tapped into by other artists, the band treats our collective re-socialisation as an astronaut’s return from space. Continuing such a concept, re-hearing previously taken for granted styles and syntheses as jazz, shoegaze, odd-ball country, and synth-wave all crackle through the radio-interference of our return journey home. How humanly this shared experience is treated relative to a universal togetherness and love creates a compelling listen for anyone.
14. Hellfire – black midi
The theatrical circus voyage of Hellfire allows Black Midi to pick up where they left off with Cavalcade in their mad cacophony of UK art-rock. Each of these ten tracks is scrupulously clever in their musical approach, ranging from the mathematical precision of “Welcome to Hell” to the shifts in orchestration and facetiousness of “27 Questions”. Each member is fully off the leash as Greep at times reaches an alto vocal range and at others proceeds to the borderlines of rapping, Simpson knits together intricate drum sequences, and Picton shines through creatively on much more than simple basslines. The inability to take shelter from this album’s relentless hellfire gives the listener no escape from its constantly rewarding composition.
13. Darklife – death’s dynamic shroud
Vapourwave titans death’s dynamic shroud depart slightly from their production conventions on Darklife to manufacture the richest electronic album of the year. Sampling remains divergent in the amalgamation of strings, pop, hard rave, upon many other factors into a gripping experience unique in its own hard-to-pin beauty. Even compared to last year’s Faith in Persona, the group decides to tone down break-neck paces for more focused elements of glitch-pop and blues-disco. The emotional and aesthetic impact merits upmost acclaim.
12. I Love You Jennifer B – Jockstrap
Georgia Ellery and Taylor Skye combine as Jockstrap for one of the freshest debuts in experimental pop of recent years. Through often implicitly disturbing song-writing and gorgeous siren vocals, each track of I Love You Jennifer B offers something very different in speed, instrumental presence, and depth of production. Running from the fidgety drums and alarm-beat of “Neon” and “Jennifer B” respectively to the absurdist climax of “50/50”, Jockstrap successfully attribute staggering musical labels to situationships, taboo emotions, and generational toxicity carelessly. The sonority of talent here rings in your ears long after listening.
11. Cheat Codes – Danger Mouse and Black Thought
The underground hip-hop producer-rapper collaboration exists on fabled charts today, but Danger Mouse and Black Thought step up to blindingly fill its prestigious standard. On Cheat Codes, affable comic book samples and unmistakable New York quality of production meets veteran Roots MC in one of the most fluid and accomplished collaborations of the year. Every feature, bar MF DOOM, fill their roles incredibly well, with the likes of A$AP Rocky, Joey Bada$$, and Raekwon harnessing the album’s beat-and-bar purpose excellently. The bread-and-butter basics of rap feel more alive than ever.
10. RENAISSANCE – Beyoncé
Following up to her acclaimed Lemonade, Beyoncé considerably changes up her sound and base genre in an extraordinary musical renaissance. The disco and dance focussed RENAISSANCE progresses from banger to banger in hotly empowering fashion, with crystal clear production complementing Beyoncé’s pellucid and effortless vocals. Snippets of R&B also shine through what was intended to be an escapist opportunity for fans, into the vibrant, confident, and undaunted figure of Beyoncé Knowles.
9. Natural Brown Prom Queen – Sudan Archives
Violinist and singer Brittney Parks comes through with the best R&B album of the year under Sudan Archives on Natural Brown Prom Queen. The expressiveness of every track manifests in rejection of presumptions and stereotype: racially, “beautifully”, generationally; to become the Natural Brown Prom Queen. Toe-tapping percussion combines with dynamic string performances and occasionally concealed synths to funnel the energetic and captivating personality of Sudan Archives. Smoothness is the binding element to the project, without a single jarring or poorly placed note on the face of this fantastic album.
8. I Didn’t Mean to Haunt You – Quadeca
I haven’t heard an album explore death as interestingly as I Didn’t Mean to Haunt You in recent times. To explore the circumstances of a ghost looking back over its previous life, Quadeca blends his art pop of hollowed production and bursts of lavish flashes of life with hauntingly sensitive and emotive emo rap to establish one of the most original pieces of the year. The album is defined by its audaciousness in design and execution, overstepping artistic expectation to every degree possible. Quadeca uses his underdog position to stun the listener. I can only highly recommend listening to this album to tap into the aspects of its hard to define sentiment.
7. Ugly Season – Perfume Genius
The beautiful vocals of Michael Hadreas take on a bewitching rouge ugliness on Perfume Genius’s Ugly Season. Significantly more bare than last year’s Set My Heart on Fire Immediately, the album gentle moves through silence with fleeting engagements of strings, woodwind, and tainted mezzo-soprano vocals to rougher, less refined ends than usual. Among each song’s internal journey, the title track promotes a ghostly reggae sequence that superbly goes against anything expected of this artist. The subtleness and modesty of this project only adds to its undefinable mystery and seduction.
6. Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms, and Lava – King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard
With each of the six band members championing one of the seven Greek Modes in writing, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’s environmental focus on the end of the world takes a nature-centric turn both in content and musical composition. Individuality shines through this jam-based album, as Mackenzie’s soft vocals, Walker’s tantalising guitar, Harwood’s thick basslines, Cavanagh’s ever-impressive drumming, Kenny-Smith’s utilisation of the saxophone, and Craig’s key and guitar progression, amongst everything else each member is accountable for, all meet for seven awe-inspiringly colossal tracks. From the reggae fusion opener “Mycelium” to “Gliese 710”’s crumbling doom rock closer, Ice/Death convincingly holds King Gizzard’s best content to date.
5.
Fossora – Björk
Working as a contrast to 2017’s Utopia, Fossora sees Bjork champion woodwind and drum beats along with her staple vocal harmonies and versatile electronic vigour. Dedicated to the role and importance of her home in Iceland, the album thematically turns to isolation, introspectively musing over her heritage with respect to family, “Her Mother’s House”, and nationally, “Sorrowful Soil”. Literally sprouting from fungal origins in the musical stripping back to, relative, basics. The layering throughout is rich and fertilely generates a masked ball of unabridged talent. Fossora is a stone-cold masterpiece and isn’t higher only due to its slight inaccessibility.
4.
Aethiopes – billy woods
The illusive underground rapper Billy Woods teams up with producer Preservation for a display of archaeological hip-hop that compounds the best rap album of the year. As Woods collects personal anecdotes as if they were fables of Zimbabwean, Ethiopian, and other African nations’ history, his writing is uncharted in analysing parallels with African American culture today and the scathing retribution against the intrusive white man in both contexts. Preservation’s production immersively builds on these themes, choosing cow bells, traditional Ethiopian jazz, and motor-engine harmonica over any more conventional beat-bases. The marriage of the two is indisputably effective, with every second of this track-by-track history lesson opening the listeners eyes and ears that bit more with every visitation.
3.
Ants From up There – Black Country, New Road
Earlier this year I read that this album is to our generation what Arcade Fire’s Funeral was to millennials, and I quite liked that. It’s that degree of significance that deservedly lands Ants From up There at the top of our list. Carrying the vague and unattainable ideal of post-punk on their backs, the instrumental showcasing here is stunning. From the sensually led saxophone sequences to the penetratingly simple and melancholic guitar passages, an incredibly honest emotion is weaved throughout. This certainly extends to vocal and lyrical attention, as Wood scrupulously powers through self-criticism and shame to unspoken exchanges of confused and unfit love shared to some degree in every listener. While it’s not short of imperfections, the embracing of these only helps to confirm its position as an instant British indie classic.
2.
Diaspora Problems – Soul Glo
Soul Glo come through with some of the hardest most unadulterated punk for years on Diaspora Problems. Jordan’s vocals hellishly scream about the brushing-your-teeth regularity of police brutality, ironic conception of the US being at the helm of social justice, and turns a cynical eye to what reactions currently meet such topics. His two bandmates Guerra and Stevenson blisteringly meet this call to arms with a non-stop intensity of drums and guitar. Altogether the album riots and chews itself up without pause and provides every last aspect of what “punk” really should look like. The opening bong hits are mental too fyi.
1.
Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You – Big Thief
There is so much that can be said about this twenty-song indie-folk epic. Dragon New Warm Mountain is Big Thief’s opus, fine tuning and perfecting elements the band had already seemingly mastered over their previous four albums. Lenker stars at the centre, with incredibly emotive song writing that manifests differently on every track. Comparing the mixed-optimism and sadness of the opener “Change” to the near Silver Jews country rock of “Blue Lightning”’s closer, the album reads as a loving parent painting the joys and truths of the Universe to their child as a bedtime story. The scale of success on this project is astounding, and something that can mean something different and immensely personal to every listener is a very special project indeed.
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