Kristin Hayter was better known before 2022 as Lingua Ignota, which since 2017 has been a watchword in razor-sharp noise performances that revealed the ongoing trauma of domestic abuse that Hayer is a multiple survivor of and used Catholic-tinged religious imagery from her youth in an attempt to exorcise it. In 2021 Hayter revealed that her ex-boyfriend Alexis Marshall (Daughters) was one of these abusers, for the two previous years; among the horrifying list of acts of abuse, he at one point sexually assaulted her so badly that she suffered permanent spinal injury. This was the impetus behind 2021’s noise masterpiece Sinner Get Ready, but after touring behind it Hayter realized that she didn’t want to relive the trauma night after night in her performances. Hence the switch to Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter. SAVED! is completely unlike anything that came out of the Lingua Ignota project, except for the religious imagery. Analyzing her use of religion to keep herself afloat for these last several years, the album takes the form of shakily recorded evangelical folk songs, but played in such a way that draws out the folk horror aspect of them. The term “holy terror” doesn’t examined enough, but SAVED! is precisely that: equal parts the ecstacy of being in the light of God and the terror of the promise of hellfire, it delves deeply into the skin-crawling nature of religious belief and the fire-and-brimstone preaching of American pastors. It’s deeply disturbing, which you would expect from a woman who entitled her 10,000 page MFA thesis Burn Everything Trust No One Kill Yourself.

It’s Lindsay Powell’s show but it’s Backwoodz‘s party. The Brooklyn R&B singer invites a wide variety of her label mates to an album of slinky, noir production that showcases the quieter side of underground NYC hip hop. Her previous album, 2020’s Demisexual Lovelace, was more pop-centric; Plus One, by contrast, fits in much better with the sound everyone else is bringing to the table. It helps, of course, that the album is bookended with billy woods – more is always appreciated.

A rare mixture of modern crunchy indie production and soaring classic gospel soul, Durand Jones’ debut is thrilling and moving. As a tribute and an examination of the personal and political in terms of his hometown of Hillaryville, LA, a town given over to freed slaves as reparations after the Civil War. As a working class town it has seen its share of triumphs and tragedies and Jones chronicles them here with the eye of a historian and a lover. He’s already produced three fine soul records with his band The Indications; here he steps out on his own to show the full range of his impressive talents.

Rappers over 40 have been a thing of late, knocking the idea that hip hop is of necessity a young man’s game and showing that MCs with age and the unfortunate wisdom that comes along with it are just as compelling as the latest sing-song drop out to grace the Billboard Hot 100. Kool Keith is even older than people like billy woods and Conway the Machine – the man turned 60 this year, and his pedigree stretches back to the early Eighties (or ‘the late 20th Century’ if you want to feel old). His rhymes and flow are not 60, though; he’s proven himself consistently to be one of the great MCs of hip hop history, spry and ageless, a never-ending machine of erotic interests, champion-level boasts, and verses about basketball. Real Bad Man, a producer who’s come up in recent years to start maybe rivalling the Alchemist in terms of output, provides the exact right backing scenarios for him.

In the last couple of years Home Is Where have gone from better-than-average emo to being a weird hybrid, a mutation of the Plague Years that is neither emo punk nor experimental indie but something both within and beyond. Fitting, for a record about breakdown and resilience, and the fractured nature of modern American life.

What were your first musical memories? It’s always interesting to think back and realize what stuck in your head from your early childhood, what still remains with you from the storms of adolescence, what music you thought was the greatest stuff ever made in college is still on that list years later. My first musical memory is of my grandparent’s living room and their rough grey couch; on the radio (London’s Best Rock, FM96) is Dire Straits and “Money For Nothing“, when it was still ‘new rock’. Again is Daniel Lopatin’s own interrogation of his early musical memories, ranging from clean Eighties synth ballads to scorching Nineties alt rock. All of it is filtered through the tools that have become familiar through the course of several albums, and through his work producing albums like The Weeknd’s Dawn FM and Soccer Mommy’s Sometimes, Forever. You’ll recognize an arpeggio or a tone from R Plus Seven and then suddenly an old pop line will reveal itself. There’s a sense that anything can happen throughout the record, which can feel ominously overwhelming at times. As a response to the content-driven emptiness of modern digital existence, it’s clear that this is the point.

Boris and Uniform were both on tour together when the pandemic ended things abruptly. Rather than drift apart, the two bands worked on a collaborative record instead. Bright New Disease is the outcome of this pairing, a album comprised both of blistering hardcore and doomy, goth passages that play to the strengths of both bands. The key theme that runs between both the loud and the quiet parts is the intense sense of frustration that bleeds through. It’s a pandemic album, after all.

The National’s music has always been older than its years, often delving into the depression that settles in on middle aged men caught between the glories of their past and their uncertain future. First Two Pages Of Frankenstein follows this same theme, but it’s more personal for Matt Berninger now; you get the sense that the men staring sad-eyed in giftshops or lying in the ocean making ocean sounds aren’t characters anymore, they’re him. These tales of sad old men wouldn’t be worth anything without the band, of course. Fresh off the career-reset, cottage-core defining one-two of Taylor Swift’s Folklore and Evermore, the Dessner twins Aaron and Bryce go back into National mode in fine form, knocking out 11 tracks of moody, stylish backings for Berninger’s despairing musing. Taylor herself appears on “The Alcott” – the least surprising guest appearance of all time – and Phoebe Bridgers arrives for two tracks as well. The problem with The National, of course, is that they aren’t exactly breaking new ground; like AC/DC in their prime though, you come to realize that innovation is often times beside the point.

There’s always been something more than a little pagan about English psych, which makes sense when you consider it, I suppose. It is the country of druids and Stonehenge, after all. Few records have really driven this point home as well as Genog. This album functions as a dark soundtrack for world of dense, knotted forests and the thatched-roof villages that huddle at the fringes of them. The villagers light candles to gods in supplication for protection, while older, nameless gods cavort in the darkest parts of the forest. It’s psych folk, in other words, but it’s mixed with heavy amounts of Krautrock and drone work, and the folk reaches beyond the mere English to embrace Irish, Swedish, and German traditional influences as well. If you need to sacrifice a goat in the dead of night while wearing black hooded robes, Genog might as well be the album you put on.

A re-release of 2014’s Haxan Cloak-produced I Shall Die Here with the unreleased Earth Triumphant appended to it. The deal here is that Earth Triumphant is the original version of the stuff that would appear on I Shall Die Here before the blacker-than-the-void stylings of the Haxan Cloak veered it in a different direction. It’s a noise crown jewel, one that gets better with this remastering and remapping.

It’s literally what it says on the tin: music that doesn’t work as background music at all. Foreground Music is a loud, straight-from-the-garage collection of buzz and fuzz that taps into the anxieties of the 21st Century and concludes that the only way to fight back is to crank the volume knob to a Spinal Tap-approved 11. Maybe it feels like end of days, but tomorrow sure keeps on coming.

Pounding, stridently queer post-punk that dismantles the male gaze, deconstructs binaries that don’t fit into the modern world, and, if it’s doing its job properly, will make you a little uncomfortable. “Oh honey, I’d love to be gay,” Róisín Nic Ghearailt says at the beginning of “Bisexual Anxiety”, “or straight, even. Well…not really.” It’s the center rallying cry of the record – the music as fluid as their sexuality, a sharp take on riot grrrl that subtracts the crypto-TERF politics of the subgenre and stands defiantly on its own.

Two of NYC’s best underground MCs team up with The Alchemist – honestly, what else do you need? Ok, a few more things. First, the sign of a great Alc collab is that his thick-sampled production never overwhelms the MC; here, both MIKE and Wiki easily hold their own despite the gorgeous, slow burn beats Alc spins up. Second, both MIKE and Wiki work in step with each other, like a lyrical dance; neither tries to take over from the other, as though both get that this is a split collab, each verse in conjunction with the last and the next. Finally, both manage to balance the political and the personal without ever getting preachy on the former or mawkish on the latter.

Mitski’s sixth album, Laurel Hell, was almost the end. Named for thickets in the Appalachians you got stuck in and died, it was the result of mounting commercial expectations and its subsequent pop demands. It was good – it is Mitski after all – but there was something cold and calculating about it. She’s been open about feeling alienated from her own music and regretting her use of her own name to release it. Her fanbase has developed into, for lack of a better term, ‘insane cult’, making her concerts high energy but a harrowing experience for the artist. After a ‘contract renegotiation’, she indicated that she was back in the game once again, a statement that eventually led here. The Land Is Inhospitable is roomy in a way that Mitski hasn’t really been before; these songs fully inhabit the wide-open spaces that she frames them in, letting the air in in a way that speaks more to Mazzy Star than it does to city pop. It’s as though her sharp-edged pop songcraft sense has been beaten out with a hammer, upcycled into a record more well-travelled. Having opened the window, she know escapes through it to wander the earth. Oddly it reminds me of REM’s last great record, New Adventures In Hi-Fi, not on a strictly song-by-song basis but in the concept that both are albums obsessed with movement, travel, and exploring places previously unknown.

It is indicative of the state of poptimism in 2023 that one of the breakout stars of the pandemic era moved into loud, brash (but still poppy) alt rock. The indie world has been all-in on 90s alt rock for a while now (see: Snail Mail, Hop Along, Soccer Mommy, Diet Cig, etc. etc.) but pop singers straight outta Disney have been sailing off into that ocean as well. There were hints of it on her fresh-faced debut (“brutal“, “good 4 u“) but pretty much all of GUTS is slathered in the ghost of Celebrity Skin-era Courtney Love, with a zanier, more manic (and ultimately cleaner, of course) energy.

Hallucinatory jazz built out of experimental wandering soundscapes. It’s layered and dreamy; instead of breaking away into lengthy solos, each player builds in their own pieces until the piece moves of its own volition. It plays much like the group went on extended lysergic jams, cut them into sections, and then fit the pieces together like a puzzle.

Max Clarke is a guy you could potentially write off by simply calling him “retro.” He does cultivate a certain sound that hearkens back to when pop rock songwriters in the mid-Seventies started getting a little clever with their sound (like if Alex Chilton went a little soul/disco). He also picked up on those same Seventies era songwriters love of going long. Very long. 2020’s Nobody Lives Here Anymore was as thick a double album as you could have asked for in the days where we were urged to stay at home and, thus, tasked with finding things to do. Cut Worms, his eponymous third album, is as short and snappy as that one was long and thoughtful. He brings out the Brian Wilson influence that he’d sort of hinted at before and makes it strut across the stage, crafting song after song that feature barbed hooks just right for getting stuck in your brain.

I didn’t get to a lot of metal this year. I mean, I listened to the big ones, like Tomb Mold and Cryptopsy. But I don’t have much in the way of obscure one-person black metal acts as I have in past years, acts like Feminazgul and Panopticon and Thy Catafalque. Liturgy, though, was one I zoned in on straight away. Hunter Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix is infamous/legendary for having outsized ambitions that they actually have the talent to achieve. 2011’s Aesthethica was arguably the peak of Brooklyn black metal, and their gonzo releases in the years since have gone beyond, for better or for worse. 93696 definitely falls in the former camp. It’s still based in Hunt-Hendrix’s concept of transcendental black metal, which I used to underpin a novel which I am shopping around and may never actually see the light of day. It’s a fascinating juxtaposition of their stance on metal and the more traditional Norwegian model of black metal, and its subtlety informs 93696 perfectly.

Grim, trad-tinged slabs of hip hop beatcraft over which Buffalo MC Che` Noir lays honest to God bars. Buffalo has been a hotbed for hip hop in the last five years, which is only unlikely if you’ve never been to or lived near Buffalo. Big Ghost Ltd’s production has a classic sound that allows Che` Noir to pound out this bassy, prime-Nineties flow that scratches an itch you might not have known you had.

Meghan Remy is an exile by choice, a permanent resident of this pirated country for the cause of love. A citizen of Doug Ford’s and John Tory’s Toronto, she has made a name for herself through strange art-pop that obscures as much as it illuminates, full of fuzzy lo-fi bangers that weave narrative and political polemic together in an uneasy balance. Now, to mark the occasion of motherhood, she’s traded that all in for slickly produced hi-fi R&B and pop that cherrypicks lovingly from the canon of Eighties pop that has been such a continuous mine for the last fifteen years. The result is surprisingly effective, given that when experimental artists go straightforward it’s usually a crass cash-in (see Liz Phair, Jewel, etc.). It’s probably because she maintains her eye for reflection and identity, unchanged despite the movement of life and the world around us.

My grandmother once turned her nose up at a punk rock band I was listening to and then proceeded to tell me that punk and rap were once the same thing. Atlanta post-punk band Algiers have managed to find this mythical fulcrum, combining a gritty streel-level rhythm section with those sharp, angular second wave guitars. The cover tells you the real strength of the record, though: the band shows themselves as capable of putting together excellent sounds but choosing guests like Backxwash, billy woods, and Zach de la Rocha brings them to a completely new level.

When the long-running neo-psychedelic band got together in 2019 to write and develop material for a new album, they ended up with enough songs to easily do two. The pandemic just made the split easier. The material that would be easier to record remotely was chosen for Time Skiffs, the well-regarded return-to-form record that came out in 2022. The stuff that was looser, jammier – stuff that would require playing together in person, specifically – was kept aside until such a time as they could safely get together and jam it out. That time is now, and that record is Isn’t It Now? The difference is obvious. Time Skiffs was more self-contained, like the band took previous ideas on what it meant to be AnCo and packaged them into (remarkably good) songs. Isn’t It Now? has the hallmarks of old AnCo, though – the spacey interior exploration, the cohesive blend of the paranoid and the lovely, the lengthy lysergic sessions that are like the Dead, if they had come about in an even newer and stranger age than the one they’d formed in.

As of right now, Arcade Fire is probably dead. While the allegations against Win Butler did not achieve the horrifying level of members of Daughters, PWRBTM, Anti-Flag, or the shit that has come out of Kanye West’s mouth, his odious behaviour and sexual abuse accusations are enough to bury the band – especially given that the heart of Arcade Fire has always been a sort of winsome purity, an earnest ‘us kids’ mentality that stood against the encroaching darkness of the world. Win’s younger brother Will got out beforehand, likely because he knew and saw the writing on the wall. He claimed it was because both the band and he had changed – and this is quite true – but the timing is interesting, at any rate. His solo work beforehand has shown that he was definitely a secret weapon in the AF arsenal, but this new collaborative effort brings out what Arcade Fire could have been, in the aftermath of their explorations with arty dance-pop on 2013’s Reflektor. AF went in the direction of LCD Soundsystem, but Will Butler + Sister Squares takes the Bowie influence that was rife through that album and runs with it. It’s equally fragile and searching, unsure of whether to move but doing so anyway, a psychedelic art pop confection that opens the way for wanting more.

Slowdive’s comeback has been the textbook example of how to re-achieve relevancy in the 21st Century. It helps, of course, that they never displayed anything but integrity in their original run, choosing to release their last album, Pygmalion, in 1995 even though it was both great and obvious commercial oblivion. It also helps that 1993’s Souvlaki is one of the pillars of shoegaze alongside My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless. Like many albums of the last couple of years, the recording sessions for everything is alive were interrupted by COVID, and a pair of family deaths and a brief spell of substance abuse cast a pall on the affair once it was underway. The band managed to dig light out of grief, though, and their fifth album is a slow meditation on life and love, and its fleeting nature. Structurally it’s as minimal as it gets, but within those basic frameworks are subtle movements that betray an immense range of gestures.

Polly Jean Harvey was last seen slagging on the Hope Six Project in Washington D.C., for reasons explicable only to her. Exhausted in the wake of the world tour behind that album, she had a moment where she wondered if she should continue making music at all. She turned instead to this gnarled, insular, pagan-weird record based on a poem she wrote. The production is minimalist, almost ambient at times, with Harvey’s voice striking through as the sole lead instrument. It strips the modern world from her songs and places them in a quasi-medieval realm, albeit one with synthesizers lurking in the woods. It’s an about-face from the brash alt-rock of her last two releases, and a welcome one.

1 2 3 4