Gorgeous ambient vistas, akin to getting lost on a summer day. Every time you think you’ve settled into what it is, the soundscape shifts and you enter a new phase, something that unlocks another part of your inner landscape. Cantu-Ledesma is a Zen practitioner and believes in music as a gift, which makes this set of suites the best thing you can give yourself for Christmas.

The sea claims every sailor’s life eventually. Sometimes, though, it will torture you a little first: shipwreck you with other dying men, all of whom will watch each other die while dreaming of survival. It’s the sort of cheery concept album that John Darnielle would come out with, only this time it’s a full-on musical with assistance from Lin Manuel-Miranda. Luckily it’s also one of the better albums in recent memory under the Mountain Goats name.

The So-So Glos frontman put out a lot of music this year, the pinnacle of which is Victory Lap, a busy slice of prime power pop dealing with a heavy topic. In 2023 Alex Levine was diagnosed with a rare salivary gland cancer, and proceeded to write over 50 songs detailing his experience, inner turmoil, and the events surrounding his battle with cancer. Conor Oberst appears on the ripping single “Queen Victoria,” chipping in after Levine proved to be the motivating factor for Oberst getting his shit together to do Five Dice All Threes last year. There are four other albums, and although they’re all worth it, it should be noted that Future 86 almost appeared here instead. The overall coherence of Victory Lap marks it as the winner, though.

Toronto’s Raf Reza has lived in disparate locations across the planet, but on Ekbar he explores his Bangladeshi roots through a lens of dub and breaks. Through snippets of film and folk music, he interrogates the way in which the arrival of the internet has wrought changes in Bangladeshi culture and manages to put your sound system to the test at the same time.

McKinley Dixon has been spreading haunted Southern-tinged hip hop for years now, but Magic, Alive! takes everything that’s made him great in pieces previously and packaged it all together. It feels like an intricately written collection of short stories revolving around three kids whose best friend dies, and the things they do to pay tribute to him and try to bring him back, non-corporeally, into the fold. As the lines of hip hop continue to blur, Dixon grabs modern jazz and drags it in over the border, adding to the rich canon of jazz rap while planting his own flag in it, taller than anyone else recently.

Life has been hard for Tor Maries of late. Between her own health problems and losses of those close to her, it’s been all dark clouds – darker, even, than England usually gets. Metalhorse proves the resilience inherent in dealing with the hard knocks the universe deals you, and sets it in that most English of places, the decaying, nearly empty fairground. It’s a tightly wound middle finger to everyone who tells you to just fall back and die when the worst happens.

At it’s core, Last Leg Of The Human Table is midwestern emo, but it’s chopped up and sauteed with elements of shoegaze, slowcore, and ’90s alt rock to the point where you sometimes forget that’s essentially what you’re listening to. Nostalgia, but for effect rather than bait.

Cutthroat isn’t as innovative or novel a post-punk record as Drunk Tank Pink or Food For Worms were, but it doubles down on what makes shame work so effectively. It’s more straightforward, but it also makes the case that shame deserve to be much more widely known than they currently are.

Ten years after their last collaboration, the two Chicago avant-jazz groups get back together to make one of the finest ambient/jazz crossovers of the decade. Instruments diverge, re-merge, and then melt together at will over the long, slow changes of each piece. The rare set of lengthy meditative pieces that won’t put you to sleep after a time.

The perfect soundtrack to a lost Tarantino heist movie, The Budos Band’s seventh album gets funky with drums and trumpets, blending jazz, funk and soul into a blend that will get your bank robbery fantasies moving rapidly. Moves relentlessly and when the brass strikes it’s like lightning from a clear sky.

Tough, tightly-wrought alt-country that tells great stories with barbed melodies, which is really all you should want out of great alt-country.

An album centered around the concept of duality, with each song being twinned with another on the album in some way. The Liverpool band combine aspects of noise, dub, electronic, and punk to create an ever-shifting but often awfully familiar set of songs that seem to loop over themselves, begging you to play the record again and again to tease out new aspects.

The definition of “understated,” Luminescent Creatures presents a series of gorgeously realized near-ambient songs inspired by the creatures found in the waters off the Ryukyu Archipelago. She encountered them while diving without equipment, taking herself down as far as she could go on a single breath. The album crackles quietly with pianos, woodwinds, and percussive charms, delivering meditative soundscapes that unfurl in new ways each time you listen to them.

Her latest album marks a return to the journaling-via-sound collage process that claire rousay is most known for. It makes a little death a shockingly intimate picture of her daily life, her friends and family, using field recordings gathered from quotidian existence. Around it she wrings pathos from a wide variety of quiet instrumentation, ranging from piano to lap steel and woodwinds.

It’s a collaboration that should not work on paper. Chat Pile is a hardcore band with a penchant for loud environmental horror. Hayden Pedigo is a guitarist best known for crafting expansive ambient Americana that reflects the wide open spaces of his home. They could not be more disparate, but on In The Earth Again they prove that the only limit to what can be done is the human imagination.

The second trip by billy woods, ELUCID, and the Alchemist didn’t prove to be as good as their first – but Haram was one of the top ten hip hop records of the decade, and it’s hard to improve upon perfection. Even as Alc seems bent on spreading himself thin enough that you can see right through his production choices, Armand Hammer display their strengths on track after track, rising above to spin rough poetry out of the dreamlike atmosphere.

Always mysterious, always controversial for seemingly everyone, Hayden Anhedonia followed up her last album, Preacher’s Daughter, with a bleak, powerful new chapter rich in an atmosphere of dread and despair. Despite that, it also manages to be oddly uplifting, as though it’s only once death arrives that ascension can truly begin.

A mixture of jangle pop, indie rock, and post-punk that keeps a hard center while allowing their explorations to get downright weird in places. Their lyrics and melodic expression are in keeping with modern post-post-punk bands but their meanderings delve often into the depths of older forms that have been passed over, music that was at one time edgy and cutting-edge in the late ’80s and the early ’90s. Rather than just being another Yard Act re-do, Ringlets hold a lengthy conversation with what it means to be alternative in our hoary old age.

Folk music like the first rays of light filtering through the window after a long night of disjointed sleep. Nadia Reid’s voice is one of the clearest, finest instruments operating in folk today, and on Enter Now Brightness she wields it with precision control, in a way that should evoke deep jealousy in anyone paying attention.

Showbiz means leaving your home to be at the beck and call of others for an extended period of time, giving yourself over to entertainment. You entertain them for so long you feel like you lose a part of yourself, and then you come home. Everything is the same, but at the same time different; the people you knew have had lives that diverged from yours, the neighborhood has changed, and you look at them all in a completely different way. This is the essence of MIKE’s Showbiz! Like so many albums before, it examines the dividing line between leaving home and coming back again, but with the eye for detail that has marked MIKE out as an MC to be reckoned with.

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