#090: Julie Christmas – Ridiculous and Full of Blood
Released June 14th, 2024 on Red Creek Records
A full-on post-metal explosion sold by the quirks of Julie Christmas herself. There’s noisy sludge-metal exercises jutting up against more standard alt-metal fare, all of which is supported by the real draw, the sprawling space-metal journeys that bring Christmas together with her Cult of Luna collaborator Johannes Persson to rip a hole into the next dimension over.
#089: Wendy Eisenberg – Viewfinder
Released September 13th, 2024 on American Dreams Records
Like Eisenberg herself delves into on the opener, “Lasik”, Viewfinder came about after laser eye surgery left her able to see clearly for the first time in her life. However, seeing clearly doesn’t always mean seeing clearly; in the liner notes she mentions that writing Viewfinder allowed her to “comfort [herself] with the notion that loving something does not require that what is beloved be understood.” Through this lens, the constantly moving, undulating fusion of raucous jazz and post-rock coheres, becomes knowable.
#088: Vera Sola – Peacemaker
Released February 2nd, 2024 on Spectraphonic Records
There are nepo babies, and then there are nepo babies. Yes, Vera Sola’s real name is Danielle Aykroyd, and yes, it’s *that* Aykroyd. A trip through Peacemaker, though, shows that it really doesn’t matter what her last name is. This isn’t some Gracie Abrams faux-Bridgers knock-off shit. Aykroyd is a stellar songwriter in her own right, and the new textures she brings to her second album, including a brass section, sweeping strings, and a flare for the orchestral that manages to nestle in well with her hushed pop-folk vocals, bring everything to life in a big way.
#087: Jack White – No Name
Released August 2nd, 2024 on Third Man Records
Jack White started off as a punky blues afficionado with a penchant for bucking trends and doing his own thing. He’s since become a rock institution – the fate of all rebels – but he’s still capable of ripping a hole in your face and pouring in pure distilled rock ‘n’ roll. He hasn’t sounded as loud or on the edge since the last White Stripes record, and while the drums on all of his solo albums will always sound just a little *too* professional for my taste, he’s hooked the guitar up to a wall of amps the size of which wouldn’t be out of place on the northern border of Westeros.
#086: Font – Strange Burden
Released July 12th, 2024 on Acrophase Records
The Austin band careens through genres as though through a dream, flitting from disco to pulsing pop to downtempo alt to wall-of-sound slabs of noise in the time it takes for your eyelids to flutter. It might be too chaotic a record for some, but we need more than just 12 solid songs that all sound vaguely the same on one album.
#085: claire rousay – sentiment
Released April 19th, 2024 on Thrill Jockey Records
Emo-ambient documentarian claire rousay has made a name based on connecting the sounds of everyday life with the uneasy emotions of the human soul. Sentiment finds her doing a similar thing, but in her rediscovery of pop music from her youth. Fragments of conversation and the lull of empty houses and quotidian experience meld into sparse guitar and vocals that yearn for belonging and being while being tied into the machine-driven present.
#084: Chat Pile – Cool World
Released October 11th, 2024 on The Flenser
The central conceit of Chat Pile’s second album, “The world is fucked and it’s not getting unfucked soon” (as the Antlers put it once) is not exactly a novel idea. You can get the gist of it simply by turning on the news, or going outside. The squalid post-hardcore framing that Chat Pile puts around this concept, though, renders it horrifying all over again. It’s uncompromising, grueling, and stuffed wall-to-wall with perfect, riff-blasting interplay between guitar and drums. The world is collapsing, but damn does that collapse sound good.
#083: 1999 Write The Future – hella (˃̣̣̥╭╮˂̣̣̥) ✧ ♡ ‧º·˚
Released February 9th, 2024 on 88rising Records
The question went around upon hella’s release – who the hell are 1999 Write The Future? As it turns out, it’s everyone involved in Asian-American hip hop collective 88rising, from Sean Miyashiro on down. This debut record comes across like a mixtape, bouncing ideas off the wall in a hectic fashion and cramming more stars into the proceedings than Oscar night. They don’t all land, but when they do they land with aplomb.
#082: Full of Hell – Coagulated Bliss
Released April 26th, 2024 on Closed Casket Activities
The purest distillation yet of the intersection of grind, powerviolence, and sludge that Full of Hell have spent years perfecting. The band’s various winning collaborations have expanded their horizons straight through to the blackness of space, and now they’re making good on that wide field of vision. It’s 25 minutes but it feels like there are entire lifetimes of heaviness compacted into it.
#081: Hana Vu – Romanticism
Released May 3rd, 2024 on Ghostly International
Romantic, yes, but also possessed with a vision that goes widescreen, L.A.’s Hana Vu present’s an entire diary’s work of soaring pop rock that resembles her contemporaries but rises above them through the sheer strength of youth and vitality. Everything is uncertain, the future is a black hole, but Hana Vu’s voice says nuts to all that – we’re here, and we’re here to stay.
