This has been my first full year of writing this blog. It started as something to do during Covid and I never thought it would be running this long. I can’t thank you enough if you’re reading this. I just know that it means the world to me that you are. The feedback I’ve gotten has made it all worthwhile. Thank you all.
This is the end of year write up. These albums have made a tough year better so I’m delighted to be sharing them with you. It has veered heavier than expected, but I guess that’s just how things go.
As always there are albums that deserve to be here that haven’t made it. Death Cab for Cutie, Placebo and Hot Chip released their best albums in years. Dawnwalker and Birds in Row were both great and there’s probably another ten I could swap in on any given day, but these are the ones settled on. Albums are in alphabetical order.
A.A Williams
As the Moon Rests
Post Rock
Second albums are supposed to be difficult but I’m not sure anyone told A.A, or if they did, she didn’t listen. As the Moon Rests is such a self-assured record. It takes her delicate post rock sound and refines it, made bigger with a metal edge. Not in a Metallica sort of way, just the riffs are fuller and take up more room in the mix. They sound huge when the album gets loud and it’s hard not to smile when it all kicks in.
The orchestration works better this time too. A.A started her musical career as a cello player so this blending fits so well, the strings fitting perfectly with the more traditional guitar parts. Her voice remains a clear standout and brings a fragile beauty that can also hold its own against the louder songs.
I’ve had to ration how often I listen to this album, every time I finish it I want to just start again and I’m afraid it’ll overplay it.
The song I’ve picked to share could be a Bond theme in an alternative universe.
Cult of Luna
The Long Road North
Post Metal
It’s inspiring watching bands that have been around a long time -1998 in CoL’s case – deliver what may be the best album of their career. On the Long Road, the band have opened the full palette of their sound: there’s a space and light here that’s been missing from their sound for a while now.
Johannes’s incredible roar is still front and center, but the introduction of a clean vocal and Mariam Wallentin’s guest spot stops him from overpowering the album. An unexpected appearance from Colin Stetson further adds to the mix, with his dissonant saxophone adding the feeling of unease.
What CoL have done here is incredible, for an album this heavy – and to be honest, this long – to hold my attention for 70 minutes is a testament to how good this album is. This should go down as one of the best post metal albums of all time.
Daniel Avery
Ultra Truth
Electronica
I’m still not sure why Ultra Truth connected with me the way it did. This album has a lot of very chilled out tracks on it and that’s not something I unusually enjoy, but this Ultra Truth grabbed me from the first listen.
From the slowly dissolving piano keys of the first track to the more upbeat tracks like Wall of Sleep, Ultra Truth just takes you on a perfectly produced, perfectly sequenced journey that keeps you glued to your headphones. The faster tracks, like Higher, have a touch of Underworld about their breakbeats, which I really love.
I’m a sucker for 90’s breakbeats but this album has far more range than that. From the Andrew Weatherall tribute, Lone Swordsman, to subwoofer threatening track, Chaos Energy, there’s a lot of different styles represented here and all delivered flawlessly.
This is a fantastic album and one you should hunt down if you’re an electronica fan.
deathcrash
Return
Alt rock / Indie
I guess we should start off with just how much like Slint deathcrash sound. They sound a lot like Slint. But! Slint broke up a long time ago and Deathcrash make this sound their own.
So, obviously as a Slint fan, you know what to expect here. Slow tempos, songs driven by the bass and drums with the guitar used as an accent until it gets noisy. The mumbled, spoken word vocal that breaks into singing when the song needs it. It’s all here.
Return builds so much atmosphere with so little instrumentation. Everything sounds so fragile, even when they’re rocking out. It gives the album such a light touch, even at its heaviest moments.
This is a brilliant debut album; it may not be the most original thing you ever hear but that’s not the be all and end all of music. Once you accept that, Return stands out as the fantastic album it is.
Holy Fawn
Death Dimensions
Alt metal / Shoegaze
Holy Fawn made quite a splash with their debut album, it came out of nowhere and slowly but surely, by word of mouth, made a lot of people sit up and take notice. While some bands may have folded under this pressure, HF somehow managed to take their sound and hone it to perfection.
The band have always tried to sidestep their genre tags by saying that they play “loud heavy pretty noises”, and it sums them up perfectly. They play a mix of shoegaze and metal that, while full on, has very little of the musical aggression found in traditional metal. Instead of that aggression, Holy Fawn use that wall of sound, that intensity to envelop the listener to emotionally drag them along with the band.
While I have talked about this album having polish and being pretty, that may give the wrong idea. HF have an edge. Those guitars get very loud and when they need to dial things up they use a blackened/screamo vocal. It should be far enough down the mix not to be off-putting to the casual listener though, if you can listen to Alcest you’ll have no problems here.
This is one of those albums that leave you amazed at just how much the band has improved in such a short time.
King Hannah
I’m Not Sorry, I Was Just Being Me
Indie (ish)
One of the strangest things about this album is that I have no idea what genre it is. I’m Not Sorry covers a lot of ground over its run time.
Depending on the song it can be anything from sounding like the Cowboy Junkies to Portishead to shoegaze to 70s rock, to the Twin Peaks soundtrack with a dash of Mazzy Star. This album should be a mess but somehow it works perfectly.
It sounds glamorous, like the soundtrack to some classy nightclub scene, until you realise that on a song like Go-kart Kid, that they’re really singing about go-karting at their Gran’s. That kind of sums the album up, it sounds classy but the lyrics are playful and a little goofy, but with a dash of tenderness.
The song, Ants Crawling on an Apple Stork, is one of the best reflections on being young and carefree I’ve ever heard.
I’m Not Sorry is such an unusual album, and all the better for it.
Knifeplay
Animal Drowning
Indie / Shoegaze
Kinfeplay are a band with their roots firmly in the 90s, taking their influence from that era’s shoegaze bands, as well as more unexpected acts like Pavement and R.E.M.
Animal Drowning is a lush album: the production makes the songs shine and stops the noisier sections overpowering the quiet. Tj Strohmer’s delicate vocals are always high enough in the mix to carry the song, but down far enough in the mix to add texture more than meaning. It’s a very tricky thing to do right and here it sounds great.
And that’s the key to this album, it sounds great. The songs are distinctive and don’t all mush together. The band make unusual musical decisions that help build a distinctive sound which never comes off as tryhard. There’s a beautiful orchestral touch to the album with the brass and strings, making everything sound richer and bigger. The delicate parts shimmer, the loud parts shake the room.
While you can hear the band’s influences, it never feels like imitation. It feels like the album just unfurls as it needs, taking the band wherever they want to go without putting limits on themselves.
Oahk
Tiny Husks
Indie Rock
It’s difficult to talk about this album without mentioning the pain that inspired it. Oahk is Bryan Ziolkowski, who has used Tiny Husks as a way of working through two failed pregnancies. As that might suggest, this album is light on dancefloor fillers but if you need some music to curl into, this will help.
This is an amazing album, filled with delicate indie songs, with beautiful shoegaze textures but with veins of anger running through it. Tiny Husks, the title track, has a touch of The Antlers about it. Bryan’s delicate falsetto drifts through the song but it turns to a harsh vocal as the emotion in the song builds giving the song a gut punch.
Burning Bone feels claustrophobic – the slow build is all consuming. While it never breaks into the wall of noise that you might be expecting, it doesn’t feel like a let down: more like a release rather than a catharsis.
It’s an intense album, but it’s never overpowering, this isn’t misery porn. It’s just raw emotion. Even if you didn’t know the backstory, I think this would land just as well as one of the better indie rock albums I’ve heard.
Rolo Tomassi
Where Myth Becomes Memory
Post hardcore
One of the best things about making these lists is getting to reconnect with albums that have fallen out of listening rotation from the beginning of the year.
I did like this album, I gave it a great review but it felt that it was missing something, some spark that the last two albums had in buckets. Over the months I realised that Where Myth is a great album, but it perfects Rolo’s sound rather than changing it.
This is a band distilling their sound and focusing on what they do. The quiet songs are the best the band have done. Almost Always, the album opener gives me goosebumps every time. It and Closer are probably the closest the band will ever come to a power ballad, but in no way feels like watering their sound down.
It’s probably unfair to start talking about the slow songs. Rolo are one of the UKs best heavy bands and the hardcore songs on here hit just as hard as they always have. The band have become more confident. The way they switch between pretty and vicious is amazing, with the song Drip being one of the most aggressive things I’ve heard in ages.
Rolo have been going since 2005 and it’s great to see them finally getting the recognition they deserve.
Zeal & Ardor
Zeal & Ardor
Black Metal
This was make or break for Manuel Gagneux. His first album (and the ep before it) had been a success, but was there life in his fusion of blues, gospel and black metal? Or were Z&A destined to be a novelty act?
This self-titled album more than makes the case, not only for how viable this sound is, but that Manuel will hopefully have a long career ahead of him.
This is a take-no-prisoners album. The opening line is “Run while you still can” and the album just goes for the throat from there, built on bedrock of aggressive metal and Gagneux’s incredibly strong blues voice. Golden Liar is a clear highlight – sung clean, it puts Gagneux’s voice front and center and it soars. Church Burns is a face melter (no pun intended).
This album blends its disparate genres into something unique. Black metal shouldn’t be able to blend with gospel or blues, or even soul on one particular stand out song, but somehow this alchemy works.
Zeal & Ardor is one of the most unusual metal albums of the year, but it’s also one of the best.
The ways of exile 