If Dogsbody was the sound of the group thrashing with the passion, Pirouette retains the passion but turns the spasms into solid dancefloor moves. Queer as hell, hornier than anything else you’ll hear this year, and formed of so many explosive moments you’ll wonder that the people on the floor don’t break their ankles while they’re dancing.

Shoegaze has been in revival mode for so long that we’re inevitably approaching the backlash portion of the cycle. Before we send the genre screaming back into the void for another decade, though, let’s all acknowledge that Bugland, a collaboration between Montreal’s Jasamine White-Gulz and producer extraordinaire Fire-Toolz, is one of the finest moments of this revival wave. Imagine the Chemical Brothers producing Slowdive and you wouldn’t be far off.

From The Private Collection is like the chicken and the egg. Is it’s Saba’s deceptively sharp, ostensibly laid-back flow that makes this collection a winner? Is it No ID’s production, a throwback to ’90s/’00s jazzadelic sampling and funk-soul bedrock, that does the job? The answer, as always, is: it’s the city of Chicago that takes it over the edge.

The void is no longer Montreal rapper Ashanti Mutinta’s enemy. Instead it is a tool to be used to better call forth the anger and despair that strongly informs her music. Her previous records were all about bringing down the hammer with enough force to kill. On Only Dust Remains, she wields it with more precise purpose, allowing subtlety to be her guide, rather than the endless flames.

The middle class is dying, and on Richard Dawson’s latest he crafts a careful, detailed eulogy for it. End Of The Middle is an album of contemplation and despair, studded with the quiet turmoil that characterizes life between the very rich and the very poor. As society inevitably divides into Marx’s two diametrically opposed, armed, hostile camps, Richard Dawson writes the finale for those who used to live in the middle between them.

In our second Hounds of Love Move entry, we have longtime dark folk wizard Marissa Nadler, whose Sacred Bones recordings have been a consistent presence for at least ten years, more if you were lucky enough to clue in to her earliest works. Her last album, The Path Of The Clouds, found her moving in more Neil Young directions, all rustic gothic landscapes and buzzy, tight songcraft. New Radiations finds her instead making impressionistic brush strokes, implying drone and doom records through slow, stately art pop. Like Jenny Hval’s record, it casts its arms wide, layering instrumentation into wide-lens discovery, gorgeous old soul pop music played through a battered cassette player where the batteries are winding down to death.

The Swedish punk band has long extolled the satirical virtues of being a lowlife, banging out song after big bop song about the life of a punk rock loser. viagr aboys takes this up a notch, with Sebastian Murphy going full-on over-the-top hilarious in a lot of places. He’s subscribed to your mom’s OnlyFans in order to see her flabby gibbly bits. He got monkeypox in the ’90s. His girlfriend is jealous of a thousand-year-old bog woman. It’s all bizarrely relatable, in that life is absolutely absurd and sometimes the only thing you can do is revel in it.

Sometimes bands go on and on, releasing album after album until their legacy becomes their late-period attempts to recapture the glory of their youth. Sometimes, though, bands come together with something that reminds you of exactly why they were such an influence in the beginning. Instant Holograms On Metal Film is the latter, the sound of a band coming back fifteen years later and picking up exactly where they left off. The world changes, but after a while it changes in such a way that a new Stereolab album sounds perfect for the times, rather than rubbing against them.

If Live At Bush Hall showed a path forward for the post-punk act turned chamber pop ensemble Black Country, New Road, Forever Howlong began the likely lengthy process of actually traversing it. Bereft of frontman Isaac Wood since four days before the release of Ants From Up Here, the group have expanded into three rotating vocalists. The sweeping, orchestral music they crafted for Ants remains, but now it meanders, taking trips through florid, blossoming gardens and replacing the band’s former teary-eyed anxiety with a gentle, folky atmosphere that wouldn’t be out of place in the creative heights of the late ’60s.

I saw someone refer to Deftones the other day as coworker music. That’s supposed to be a derogatory term, of course, but it actually makes a bit of sense here. Deftones have been around forever, being one of the first popular bands of the cresting nu metal scene in the late ’90s, and chances are one of your coworkers actually is a big fan. Successive generations have picked them up because they are less himbo-esque than a lot of those bands, and they’ve successfully kept up an air of mystique even when the band members themselves are basically coked-out working class dudes, like kitchen staff that managed to learn to play their instruments well enough to get by. Private Music continues the winning streak they’ve been on since forever, tuning their sound a bit more toward shoegaze/dreamy pop metal than the gritty riffs of their last album. It’s the same trip they’ve been on all along, but it somehow never manages to get old.

The Men have spent a long time moving within the divide they’ve created, one where Buzzcocks-era punk rock exists comfortably beside doomy alt-country made beneath darkening skies. Buyer Beware turns the clock back to the early ’10s, presenting the most punk rock Men that they’ve been since Open Your Heart came out on Sacred Bones. It’s scuzzy and smoky, the sound of a band finding themselves in a dank underground club and proceeding to tear the walls down and bury themselves and their audience with the sheer force of mosh pit explosions.

From the clutches of despair – failed recording sessions that left the group stripped of morale – comes a triumph of modern indie rock. Billboard Heart lives in the same general milieu as one-off delights like Rolling Coastal Blackout Fever and Pure Bathing Culture. It feels like the Platonic version of what those bands were going for, though, a perfect encapsulation of a certain time and place that ends up tasting both sweet and savory simultaneously.

The return of classic hip hop acts can be just as dicey as the return of classic rock acts. Consider for a moment that Will Smith also came back with a new album this year – and the less said of it, the better. Unlike the Fresh Prince, though, the Virginia Beach coke barons of Clipse never went Hollywood, and they still had something to prove. Pusha T had spent years as the President of G.O.O.D. Music, ducking out just before Kanye went truly insane, but Malice found God as a preacher, became No Malice, and has been M.I.A. since the duo’s last record, Til The Casket Drops. That wasn’t a particularly strong record either, so the stakes for Let God Sort Em Out were high. The pair delivered perfectly, though, bringing a set of hard-edge coke raps over slamming production and stringing along a whole host of guests, including Kendrick, Tyler, and The-Dream, that prove that the game missed them just as much as they missed the game.

Produced by M. Ward – there’s a name out of the ages – Valerie June’s latest is a tour de force of country soul, with a snappy rock ‘n’ roll attack straight out of the late ’60s and a strict avoidance of contemporary Nashville pop twang. Despite this it is very poppy, a collection of tight songs, sticky hooks, and a classy layer of polish on June’s voice. Also of note is that there’s very little negative energy present on the record; it’s as joyful as a summer day, a record that’s just as necessary on those bleak winter days as it is on the knockout summer nights.

It feels unfair that Open Mike Eagle has never gotten his flowers, but the best thing about him is that he just keeps going. The secret to success, or at least to staying sane, is to just keep doing it until other people have to pay attention. Neighborhood Gods Unlimited is his best album to date, and it probably won’t make him a superstar, or even a star. Someone is paying attention out there, though, and as time goes on it feels like more people are in that camp. He makes music for himself, and his friends, and people who are into a particular nerdy niche of hip hop. It helps that the album is about the shattered attention span of modern existence, which feels about as topical a theme as you can imagine in the Big 25.

Loud guitars, loud feelings, and loud melodies: Raspberry Moon is the epitome of shoegaze cranked to the very edge of the amplifiers. It’s power pop at its core, slathered in distortion and surrounded by a haze of smoke. There have been lots of great romantic albums over the years, but not one quite like this since the mid-’00s. Yearning is coming back into fashion, or so rumor has it, and as such Raspberry Moon is positioned to be the Great Yearning Album of the late ’20s.

Jazz-rap has its own particular sound now. Most of the time it’s people rapping semi-conventionally over beats that feel like the groovier parts of ’70s jazz records, a la The Alchemist. Sometimes, though, there are artists who remember that jazz is supposed to be dangerous. The rich got ahold of it and dressed it up in a tuxedo to clatter away in the background of fundraiser events, but it was once the sort of thing that they got scared of. People are taught square dancing in the northern United States and Canada because Henry Ford got concerned that the youth were getting into jazz instead of more traditional (re: white) forms of music. Jazz-rap has associated itself with the toned-down part of the genre, for whatever reason – being more chill, laid-back, respectability politics, you name it. WRENS, like Moor Mother, seek to recapture the danger of jazz and hip hop simultaneously. The instrumentation is chaotic, jagged; the rhythms dig in relentlessly and the brass flashes like lightning in a catastrophic storm. Ryan Easter, meanwhile, delivers his lines like he’s half-chewed them first, spitting out grave pronouncements and the occasional burst of humor like they might be the last things he ever says.

Everything that people accused Turnstile of this year – making hardcore palatable for a wider audience, trading in big loud hooks, being generally great – was actually what Militarie Gun were up to. Grounded in singer Ian Shelton’s tumultuous lyrics, song after song of feeling like you’re at the bottom of the pit when you should be hovering several feet above it, the band kicked up a massive joyful noise. Every song feels like it’s on the verge of exploding, aggressive but vulnerable in a way that makes the fragility underlying everything all the more apparent.

As another of our list entries states, “to have loved and lost is the same thing as nothing at all.” It may be true, in that you have to have loved in order to gain both heartbreak and experience, but at the same time it can be such an ordeal. Michelangelo Dying is the product of a storm of heartache, written across Europe and North America but finished in its spiritual headspace, the California desert. A lot of it feels like it lives in the Bowie world post-plastic soul, when he and his sax were bleeding into disco but took a left turn somewhere around Berlin.

Trauma lasts a lifetime, and while therapy can help, it usually doesn’t cure anything outright. Working it out through art works the same way. A Sober Conversation is Brian Christinzio’s way of trying to work through the trauma of being sexually assaulted at a sleepaway camp as a young teenager. It’s the sort of heavy burden that could feel like a huge drag, but the album is played musically light, even when the subject matter is darker than midnight. Christinzio’s sense of humor keeps things moving, providing the same suicide-with-a-smile feeling as Billy Joel’s The Stranger, ’70s singer-songwriter exploration with a modern twist.

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