The Best 100 Albums of 2015, Part 2: 80-61

#80: Jenny Hval – Apocalypse, girl

What is soft dick rock? Using the elements of dick to create a softer, toned-down sound. You’re free now, that battle is over, and feminism is over and socialism’s over. You say you can consume what you want now. Merry Christmas. War is over.

#79: Kurt Vile – B’lieve I’m Goin’ Down

A stronger, more focused collection of songs than his previous efforts, B’lieve I’m Goin’ Down finds the former War On Drugs guitarist coming into his own.

#78: Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment – Surf

This is most emphatically NOT a Chance The Rapper album. At all. This was drilled into everyone when Surf was released. Instead, it’s a breezy, soulful hip hop album that Chance just happens to be the vocalist on. Either way, it’s a hell of a way to spend an afternoon.

#77: Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin – The High Country

Hey, remember these guys? They’ve been kicking around the periphery of indie rock since forever. 2015 brings their strongest album in a long series of years, pushing out power pop with a poppy-punk edge like no one’s business.

#76: The Tallest Man On Earth – Dark Bird Is Home

The Dylanesque folkie keeps turning out solid work that bubbles just under the radar. Dark Bird Is Home finds him getting a bit more Paul Simon, and it turns out a bit more romantic than the highs and lows of joy and despair that he’s been known for in the past.

#75: Myrkur – M

Indie popper Amalie Bruun (Ex-Cops) manages to pull off a new persona as the Burzum of the neo-black metal scene. That is to say, she is able to craft an album that is as close to black metal as humanly possible without actually having anything to do with black metal. Sure, there’s the Scandinavian song titles, the occasional chugging riff, and the backbone of screams and blastbeats, but it, like Filosofim, owes much more to dark ambient, goth, and darkwave than anything else.

#74: Prefuse 73 – Rivington Nao Rio

The veteran electronic producer turns in a warm, psychedelic collection of tracks that brings the beat back to his work, something that’s been sorely missing for years. This is an artist who made their bones on fusing hip hop to more stylish electronic elements, and Rivington Nao Rio is a welcome return to that form.

#73: Hop Along – Painted Shut

Painted Shut is strongly dominated by Frances Quinlan’s vocals; once you get over that, though, it’s apparent that the album is at its heart a love letter to the origins of indie rock – your Dinosaur, Jr, your Sonic Youth, your Pixies. Rock n roll is dead? Whoever told you that was sadly mistaken.

#72: Braids – Deep In The Iris

After the emotional apocalypse comes the time of healing; Deep In The Iris is an examination of this state, coming to terms with all sorts of uncomfortable aspects of life and reaffirming that life is there to be lived.

#71: Speedy Ortiz – Foil Deer

An old friend I hadn’t seen in a while asked me if there was any good alternative rock being made these days. Speedy Ortiz is the answer to that question.

#70: Matthew E White – Fresh Blood

In a year where the need to go back to mine fresh sounds flipped the calendar from the chillwave Eighties to the piano-man Seventies, Matthew E White stood as the complicated alternative to the chord-on-chord simplicity of Tobias Jesso, Jr, and the synth-heavy sex jams of modern Tame Impala.

#69: THEESatisfaction – EarthEE

Swampy, psychedelic, and built on a solid foundation of R&B and soul, THEESatisfaction made an album that could easily be the bedroom jam of a whole new generation, if not for the sharply political bent many of the songs take.

#68: Mark Ronson – Uptown Special

The British producer pillaged the back catalogues of The Time, Prince, and James Brown to create one of the funkiest albums in recent memory. Everyone knows “Uptown Funk”, but there’s enough great stuff here to keep the party going all night long.

#67: Bjork – Vulnicura

An exquisite examination of the complicated feelings that churn up in the wake of a messy breakup. At first blush Vulnicura feels subdued; there’s nothing of the far-out musical exploration of her previous albums, and yet under the surface there is a strong reverberation of emotion that haunts the listener well after the record closes.

#66: Jamie xx – In Colour

Jamie xx is 2015’s Ravemaster General, and In Colour is his Mission Statement. Kicking off with the ominous drum n bass percussion of “Gosh”, it whips through a shocking variety of forms before peaking on the summer jam of a lifetime, “I Know There’s Gonna Be Good Times”.

#65: Faith No More – Sol Invictus

The legendary funk-metal band came back strong in 2015, putting together a record that had all of the wild freedom of their best albums with only a slight blunting of their edge. While there were better comebacks in 2015 (more on this later) there were few that were as animalistically satisfying.

#64: The Sword – High Country

While previous efforts from retro-minded stoner metal demons The Sword were largely based around blissed-out riffs on old Black Sabbath tracks, High Country expanded their pallet to include some breezier stuff from the Seventies – Styx and Blue Oyster Cult, mainly. More rambling than their older stuff, and a bit more fun.

#63: The Sonics – This Is The Sonics

As the sheer force of their primitive, pounding rock and roll pummels you into submission, take the time to appreciate that these men are in their seventies.

#62: Built To Spill – Untethered Moon

The first Built To Spill album in a long while to feature more than one stellar track, Untethered Moon constitutes something approximating a return to form. At the very least, Doug Martsch is still wailing on that guitar in a manner that can only be considered his own.

#61: Napalm Death – Apex Predator – Easy Meat

The grindcore legends return with more grindcore. What else were you expecting? They’re the best, and this is why.

The 100 Best Albums of 2015: Part 1, 100-81

#100: Sunn O))) – Kannon

The drone-doom-noise band finally follows up 2009’s transcendental Monoliths and Dimensions with a more immediate and visceral trio of noise-soaked dread.

#99: Rose McDowall – Cut With The Cake Knife

If you ever missed spiky, snotty Eighties pop, look no further.

#98: BC Camplight – How To Die In The North

Velvety and yet dangerous, like the upholstery on a late-70s vintage Buick.

#97: Lupe Fiasco – Tetsuo & Youth

He’ll spend the rest of his career living down his ill-fated sophomore album (he recently grudgingly encouraged the destruction of physical copies of it) but Tetsuo & Youth shows where his career should have gone.

#96: Thee Oh Sees – Mutilator Defeated At Last

Six albums, five years, and a couple of big lineup changes finds John Dwyer’s day job band rocking out bigger and harder than ever before.

#95: Destruction Unit – Negative Feedback Resistor

Blown-out industrial noise-punk, like Big Black with a better appreciation for depth.

#94: No Joy – More Faithful

The alternagaze duo returns for a murkier, more complex record that plays directly to their strengths.

#93: Hot Chip – Why Make Sense?

A strong mid-career album for the veteran indie-dance group, with solid grooves and a touch of early 90s UK rave.

#92: Carly Rae Jepsen – E-MO-TION

An 80s banger of a pop record, once you get over the essential Robin Sparkles nature of E-MO-TION it becomes a great soundtrack to an energetic night.

#91: Prurient – Frozen Niagara Falls

A double album of shapeable, moldable pure sound from longtime noise artist Dominick Fernow.

#90: Echo Lake – Era

This record is liquid, in that the sound expands to fill whatever room you play it in. Expansive dream-prog with an ambient touch that is deft and subtle.

#89: Alabama Shakes – Sound And Color

Brittany Howard looks a third grade teacher and sings like the Goddess of Soul. The band is okay too.

#88: Ghostpoet – Shedding Skin

Mercury Prize nominated UK hip hop artist goes full out in an amalgamation of grime, U.S. hip hop, and electronic influences.

#87: Mount Eerie – Sauna

The calmest, quietest sense of dread you may ever experience, and something of a comeback for the former Microphones frontman.

#86: Zun Zun Egui – Shackle’s Gift

A truly world-reaching experience, the Bristol band draws on a number of diverse influences to create hard-hitting, crunchy songs that are close in approximating rock n roll.

#85: Belle & Sebastian – Girls In Peacetime Want To Dance

The band takes a hard skew towards dance pop on their umpteenth album, bringing some much-needed fresh air into their act.

#84: EL VY – Return To The Moon

A meeting of the minds between indie stalwarts The National and Menomena, EL VY is one of the rare side projects that hits all the same pleasure buttons as their respective member’s day jobs.

#83: The Roadside Graves – Acne/Ears

This is a rustic country album, if it were made by a less-crappy Gaslight Anthem, or if The Men took the folk-country side of New Moon and ran with it. Which is to say, it’s as Jersey as anything else you can name.

#82: Wilco – Star Wars

The veteran alt-country band keeps that train a-rollin’, not letting age or maturity get in the way of a good rock n roll hook. It may be “music for dads with receding hairlines” as Shameless put it, but it rocks all the same.

#81: Insect Ark – Portal/Well

Dana Schechter creates a bedroom electronic record that shifts and transforms as much as it makes a serious attempt to claw up your face and wriggle into your ear.

Meek Mill – Dreams Worth More Than Money

★★★

Nah, nah, it’s okay. It’s pretty basic hip hop for 2015, the big problem is that Meek has one setting, and that’s YELL INTO THE MIC LIKE IT JUST KILLED HIS FAMILY. “Lord Knows” is a great opener, the rest of the album is just okay, nothing special. Drake’s verse on “R.I.C.O.” is decent, but not worth nearly killing your career over.when he doesn’t tweet about the album.

Let’s all take a moment to reflect on that, actually. Meek shot himself in the foot and lost a (admittedly pretty small-time) rap beef to Aubrey “Jimmy The Wheelchair Kid” Graham over the fact that Drake didn’t tweet about Meek’s album coming out.

Like, holy shit. It really is 2015, isn’t it?

Actually, one other thing. Swizz Beatz’s chopped-up break on “Classic” is about as good as it gets. That’s a good image for the album, come to think of it: shiny production from some great producers that’s brought down as soon as Meek starts yelling about whatever.

Vince Staples – Summertime ’06

★★★★☆

In the summer of 2006 I had been married for nine months, was living in the St. Catharines equivalent to the hood, and was contemplating a move to Toronto.

In the summer of 2006 Vince Staples was 13, living in Long Beach, and being introduced to a series of heady firsts: first love, first time with drugs, first exposure to gangbanging. Summertime ’06 is the story of that summer, replete with mentions of moving drugs, falling in love, having to deal with the death of friends, and feelings of being out of control and suicidal. As a document of growing up black in Greater Los Angeles, it rivals good kid m.A.A.d. city, although it lacks that album’s dense lyricism and grander sense of purpose. It’s an honest surprise coming from Vince Staples, who first came into my consciousness via “Epar” on Earl Sweatshirt’s self-titled debut EP. His mixtapes have always been solid although fairly uneventful; his real strength only began to glimmer on the features he had on Doris, Earl Sweatshirt’s first full-length. For a guy who at the age of 18 had yet to think of himself as ever being a rapper, Vince Staples is possessed of a good flow and a coherent sense of himself in service to the album as a whole.

He’s aided by the production of course, in this case a three-way meeting of the minds between No I.D., DJ Dahi, and the inimitable Clams Casino. They eschew fashionable trap beats in favour of filtered, flayed, fucked-up sampling and synth work. Clams Casino is especially in fine form: “Norf Norf”, “Summertime”, and “Surf” are perfect examples of his drugged-out, crawling style of beat, and Staples sounds suitably pensive and moody on top of them. No I.D. – Kanye West’s mentor and one-time in-house producer – creates a lot of the rest of the album, and tracks like “Lemme Know”, “Jump Off The Roof”, and “3230” are among the best beats he’s ever produced. “Jump Off The Roof” should be singled out all on its own; Staples rides the beat effortlessly and makes losing your mind and contemplating suicide seem like the best idea ever conceived.

I’m a sucker for coming-of-age stories, and on Summertime ’06 both the storyteller and the medium come together in a way that comes along very rarely. Staples brings street-level imagery but does it in such a way that it never feels forced or cliche. It’s foremost an admission of having lived what he says, and a look back on his whirlwind gangsta adolescence with the immediate nostalgia of being twentysomething and the wide-eyed shock of a survivor. The production team teases out these images and feelings with the deft touch of mastery, adding gravitas to what could easily have been overblown and annoyingly over-the-top. Easily one of the best albums of the year, and one of the best hip hop albums of the decade.

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Future – DS2

★★

So, what’s the point of all the praise that’s been heaped on Future, exactly?

Let’s be serious here for a moment. Atlanta’s Nayvadius DeMun Wilburn is about as meat and potatoes as you can get in hyped-up hip hop. He’s a man of simple pleasures. Like A$AP Rocky, he’s all about pussy, money, and weed, although with Future you replace the weed with lean, a southern cocktail made out of codeine-based cough syrup and soda. He’s also a man who’s gritty from the streets: he came up from poverty, cooking crack and slinging it on the corner to fund his original mixtapes (such as 2011’s Dirty Sprite, with which DS2 shares a name). So what, though? Most middle-tier and entry-level rappers rap about women, drugs, and platinum whips, and most of them claim to be from some form of grind or hustle. Pretty much any of them could have written a song like “Trap Niggas” or “Rich $ex”, or especially “Slave Master” (’cause he’s got a new whip, geddit?). His flow isn’t particularly interesting, especially when you take into account that he doesn’t change it up from song to song. He puts a light AutoTune on his voice, making it glitch underneath; it’s interesting at first, but “at first” was two albums ago. T-Pain actually called him out on not using AutoTune correctly (!) back in 2013, and very little has changed since then (except that a whole host of aspiring mixtape rappers are doing the same thing).

Young Metro’s production doesn’t add much value either. It’s straightforward trap music: tension in the kicks, clattering hats running under everything, simple samples, menacing atmosphere. It’s what damn near everyone is using for hip hop right now, meaning that, combined with Future’s straightforward lyrical content and flow, DS2 sounds like everyone’s mixtape, minus the DJ signatures. “Kno The Meaning” manages to drop the beat here and there for some moody piano passages, but that’s one track out of 90 some-odd minutes; the rest follow the same pattern of moody, no-frills flow over moody, no-frills beats. It was fun and novel four years ago, but literally every up-and-coming rapper has done it to death now.

For me, DS2 cements Future in my mind as a singles rapper. Any of these songs would make a decent individual track, but put together as a whole they become oppressive and honestly boring. I’m pretty sure I’ve heard a dozen mixtapes this year that sound just like it, and Future’s seeming inability to come up with memorable hooks kills it quickly. He’s like Bad Company or Sham 69: after a couple of tracks, you’ve heard everything, so why bother?

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Sleaford Mods – Key Markets

★★★☆

What is punk? What has punk ever been? There’s a lot of confusion on this particular topic these days, I find. There are people out there who honestly believe that punk requires distorted power chords played fast in a very short period of time. Hardcore fans think that only hardcore is punk. Pop punk fans think you need a Warped Tour berth in order to make it in punk. Kids have grown up immersed in skateboard commercials and Tony Hawk video games and so associate the sounds pioneered by Adolescents and Bad Religion as being quintessentially punk. Alternately, kids grew up crying about being “friendzoned” and bored in the suburbs and so think of The Wonder Years and The Hotelier (to get some recent examples in here) as being purely punk. The effect is the same: it requires loud distorted guitars and standard verse-chorus-verse structures, like it’s fucking Blue Oyster Cult or something.

People get weirded out when I tell them that Wu-Tang was punk. The whole thing about punk is an ethos. That’s it. It has nothing to do with the music, and that should be patently obvious to anyone who has listened to Devo, the Slits, the Ramones, and Oingo Boingo back to back. The Clash weren’t punk because they sounded a certain way, and neither were the Ramones. . Punk means doing it your own way, without any regard for what the “industry standards” are, and it often means doing it on your own, without much outside help, because the industry is centered around what already sells, not on taking risks. The Ramones banged out three chords in a garage and got together with a lot of like-minded bands to create their own movement, outside of the Eagles and disco and whatever else was popular in 1977. The hardcore bands from the 1980s got together in basements and abandoned spaces and played to people who were just like them – the fringes of society and other hardcore bands. They did so completely outside of the frame of reference of acceptable label-based music and did their own thing. The Wu-Tang Clan share a similar story. Hip-hop was getting big before 1993, but it had a certain sound that needed to happen in order to get record deals and promotion. The Wu didn’t want that sound, so they did their own thing: RZA produced dusty, chopped-up, menacing tracks over which the others spat complicated, gritty stories that felt like more literary versions of the accepted gangsta music coming out of the West Coast. They made their own sounds, crafted their own image, and forced the industry to come to terms with them. In doing so they molded the shape and sound of their genre for years to come, much as the Ramones and the Clash did in the late 1970s. In other words, the Wu? Punk as fuck. The bands who adopt an image and a sound to get record deals and Warped Tour slots? About as punk as Donny Osmond.

So, Sleaford Mods. The Nottingham-based duo are not at first glance very punk, for the reasons outlined above. They most assuredly are, however. In 2015 they make what can be tagged as hip-hop, but hip-hop in 2015 sounds unlike this. 2015 hip-hop requires 808 bass, trap rolls, aggression, menacing string stabs, and a minimalist sing-song sort of flow that comes straight outta Soulja Boy. Sleaford Mods utilize drums and bass, often cut live, crafted in a vision of hip hop seen through the eyes of English rockers. That’s pretty much it in terms of instrumentation – no samples, no semi-automatic gunfire-type hi-hat fills, no deeply booming bass. Over this stark arrangement, Jason Williamson spits off-kilter rants about capitalism, unemployment, shitty living conditions, live shows, the failures of the record industry, and how, after seeing the Von Blondies, he wouldn’t fuck around with Jack White. All of this is rendered in an East Midlands accent, like Mark E. Smith had grown up listening to rap in the Nineties. It does not sound like anything that should be on anyone’s radar, and yet, much like Death Grips, it is.

Death Grips, the leading light of the not-at-all-a-movement punk-rap movement, are noise terrorists, playing not only with their sound but also with their label and with audience expectations. Sleaford Mods keep it more working class than that delivering the goods without making it flashy or more complicated than it needs to be. Key Market is even more straightforward than their previous album, 2014’s Divide and Exit, and this proves to be both a blessing and a curse. While the no-frills arrangements allow Williamson’s personality to really come to the forefront like never before, it makes the album sound musically like an updated version of The Fall. That said, of course, there’s nothing particularly wrong with taking your cues from both hip hop and The Fall, leaving Key Markets as an exciting, bewildering album that shows off the band’s talents at blazing a new punk trail.

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Spring Roundup, 2015

For those albums I’ve been too busy to get to in the first third of 2015, an accounting, or at the very least a terse quip.

Ghostpoet – Shedding Skin ★★★☆

A rather different and not altogether unsatisfying followup to 2013’s Some Say I So I Say Light

Jeff The Brotherhood – Wasted On The Dream ★☆

Weezer without the charm, early heavy metal without the bite, it just makes me miss Be Your Own Pet all that much more.

Lightning Bolt – Fantasy Empires ★★★★

Noise for people who need structure.

Twin Shadow – Eclipse ★

He was always a weenie. Now he’s a weenie with major label money.

Hey Rosetta! – Second Sight ★★☆

Much like a big bubble of pop, shiny on the surface but vanishes into air if you look at it the wrong way.

Natalie Prass – Natalie Prass ★★★

It’s pleasant enough but I don’t get the high praise and hoopla behind it. Maybe like Andrew Bird if Andrew Bird was an inoffensive little major label folkie.

Napalm Death – Apex Predator – Easy Meat ★★★☆

Evolved grindcore, which is to say it’s what I expect out of a Napalm Death album.

A Place To Bury Strangers – Transfixiation ★★

The former Loudest Band In New York just doesn’t seem as loud or as vital anymore.

Screaming Females – Rose Mountain ★★★

A progression but not a peak, the sound of a band trying to find its way forward.

The Pop Group – Citizen Zombie ★★

As I said weeks earlier, not every halfway-famous band from the 1980s needs to keep putting out records. Sometimes you should just let your legacy stand on its own.

Built To Spill – Untethered Moon ★★★☆

That dictum doesn’t apply to bands from the 90s, though, as many indie darlings of that time – Dinosaur Jr., Superchunk, Pinback, et al. – seem to have figured out the knack of being consistently great.

Dutch Uncles – O Shudder ★★☆

Nice enough pop rock, but the singer’s voice makes me want to gargle razor blades.

Echo Lake – Era ★★★☆

Moving, euphoric, and pretty much exactly like their first album.

Lady Lamb – After ★★★☆

Quirky indie rock with enough gain on the guitars to give it some heft. Surprisingly good.

Matthew E. White – Fresh Blood ★★★☆

Like Tobias Jesso, Jr, Matthew E White is a reborn Seventies piano man looking to channel heartbreak into soaring pop. Unlike Tobias Jesso, Jr, Mr. White can do more than just plunk rote chords on his chosen instrument.

Cannibal Ox – Blade Of The Ronin ★★

Fourteen years later, and this is what we get. I guess I know how Guns ‘n’ Roses fans feel.

Tyler, The Creator – Cherry Bomb

★★☆

In the run-up to his new album, Odd Future leader Tyler, The Creator promised everyone a new Tyler, one who was more mature and willing to go forward. This was by and large greeted with muted enthusiasm, since the OF schtick has worn a bit thin in the years since the world picked up on Bastard. Bastard was fresh and exciting; Goblin dropped off after a couple of listens: the best that could be said for Wolf was that it was hit-and-miss. With Cherry Bomb Tyler had the opportunity to step forward and take his game to the next level.

Sometimes he does that, but a lot of the time he doesn’t.

“DEATHCAMP”, the opening track to both Cherry Bomb and Tyler’s chaotic Coachella set, is a great kick-off. The N.E.R.D. vibe that he nicks here is no accident; in the middle of his second verse he raps “In Search Of… did more for me than Illmatic“. It’s a line that marks a clear divide between him and the old guard of hip hop, and it reminds me of an uncomfortable conversation I had not long ago where I discovered that there was, in fact, such a thing as dad rap. Then “BUFFALO” comes on and it’s about as perfect a Tyler track as you can get. After that, though…

As it turns out, Tyler’s take on maturity is that it involves R&B tracks with some off-kilter melodies. “FIND YOUR WINGS” is where he tries this and fails; “FUCKING YOUNG/PERFECT” is where he manages to pull it off. The noise that makes “DEATHCAMP” so much fun is taken to its extreme on “CHERRY BOMB”, which sounds like nothing so much as an early Wavves track, from back when he thought that heavy clipping made tracks sound cooler. As an artistic statement I think that “CHERRY BOMB” succeeds, but taken into context with the rest of the album it highlights the biggest problem: everything here feels completely unfinished. God knows no one was rushing Tyler to complete the album; either he felt he needed to compete with Earl Sweatshirt or he actually thought that a badly mixed, unmastered album made for good hip hop.

The other problem, of course, are the lyrics. We were promised maturity, and what did we get? Liberal use of the word “faggot” despite the slow-crawl backlash he’s received against it, and cringe-fests like “Blow My Load”, which finds him writing lyrics like he’s still 16. In a way, he is. He’s still that kid from the promo shot of Pitchfork’s “/b/ Generation” article, flashing his dick to the photographer with his friends around him. Earl has started the path to being a grown-ass man – a bitter one, to be sure – but Tyler is still running around like it’s 2010 and Odd Future is still the Next Big Thing. I mean, sure, he managed to get both Kanye and Lil’ Wayne on “SMUCKERS”, but who still takes the guy seriously at this point? Far from being OF’s breakout star, he’s seen his star eclipsed by both Earl and Frank Ocean, and he’s not doing anything to try to change that.

Everyone knows that when you hit the drinking age in America, it’s time to leave /b/ for better forums. Everyone except Tyler, anyway.

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Earl Sweatshirt – I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside

★★★★

Earl Sweatshirt – the son of South African poet Keorapetse Kgositsile – has come a fairly long way from when he jerked off to videos of Asher Roth eating apple sauce at the age of 16. Those were of course the heady days of L.A.’s skater-rap collective Odd Future, when Tyler, the Creator still packed an emotional punch and Frank Ocean was just the group’s hook man. Since then, he was ushered off to a boarding school halfway across the planet by his worried mother, UC law professor Cheryl Harris, was the subject of a wide-reaching internet meme (“Free Earl!”), came back and released one of the best hip hop albums of 2013, Doris.

Two years later the scene is different. Tyler fell off, and Frank Ocean has become a breakout star in his own right after channel ORANGE conquered airwaves across the globe. Earl dropped the fact that he had a new album coming out in our laps about a week and a half before it actually happened, giving up the weird, slow-pitched single “Grief” as a sample. “Grief” is divisive in its oddity: down-pitched drums, draggy samples that resemble witch house instrumentals, and lines about drinking and drugs that are more “coping with depression” than they are “partying every night”.

There is a line in “Grief” that I find more interesting than the rest: “Step into the shadows, we could talk addiction”. Keorapetse Kgositsile published a poem in 2002 entitled “Random Notes To My Son”, and the first part reads “Beware, my son, words / that carry the loudnesses / of blind desire also carry / the slime of illusion / dripping like pus from the slave’s battered back / e.g. they speak of black power whose eyes / will not threaten the quick whitening of their own intent / What days will you inherit? / What shadows inhabit your silence?” For Earl, the silence lies between the lurching, chopped-up beats on this album, and the shadows are legion: the rigours of touring, the rootless, homeless feelings he has now, the steady toll of liquor, drugs, and casual sex, the death of his grandmother in 2013, the feeling of distance he has now from his former Odd Future compatriots. His verse on “Mantra” says a lot: “You know you famous when the niggas that surround you switch / And if they hated in a passive tense / And now they hound your dick / And you ain’t ask for this / Now you surrounded with a gaggle of a hundred fucking thousand kids / Who you can’t get mad at when they want to pound a pic / ‘Cause they the reason that the traffic on the browser quick / And they the reason that the paper in your trouser’s thick”. His lost feeling comes up on “Faucet” when he says “I don’t know whose house to call home lately / I hope my phone breaks, let it ring”. “Inside” talks about how he missed the first big wave of Odd Future’s popularity: “Got a tape? Catch a wave, now you in the industry ocean, missing out on your boat / I been figuring out my own fish, home gets distant”. It’s a lonely, paranoid sort of existence, although in the end, on the last lines of “Wool”, he talks about the $50 bills falling out of his pocket like baby teeth and makes disparaging comments about not caring about what the “loser niggas” are doing.

Earl handles all the production here as well, aside from some very limited work from fellow OF alum Left Brain. It’s all very rough and lo-fi, as though the beats were hand-crafted in a dank hotel room somewhere on the road. This is a compliment, of course; too often people feel that hip hop production has to be slick, and there is a loss of authenticity along that route. These beats are real – cut-up, stained with whatever drinks were spilled on them, smelling like used latex and day-old ganja. They’re beats that are lived-in, used and abused, and they fit the shadows that Earl has taken to inhabiting perfectly.

I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside is a grimey, depressive album that sounds like the courtyard of a trashed motel after the lights go out. After the high-concept jazz-funk of To Pimp A Butterfly and the balls-out maximalist experimentalism of The Powers That B, it’s actually really refreshing.

Death Grips – The Powers That B

★★★★

Death Grips are less a musical act and more of an experimental piece of performance art with a noise-hip-hop component. Having built a rapid and rabid following since their debut mixtape Exmilitary, the group has followed a narrative that seems more punk rock than anything else. Signed to Epic, they wallowed in major label cash so much they named their debut The Money Store, and proceeded to shop around a wilfully noisy, alienating album whose sole concession to mainstream hooks was the paranoid “I’ve Seen Footage”. They quit touring abruptly to work on the follow up, No Love Deep Web, which they released to the internet without asking their label for permission first (also, the cover art was the title written on one of the group member’s penis). After Epic dropped them they released a third album, Government Plates, and managed to wind up on another major label, this time Capitol’s Harvest Records. After announcing a double album, they self-released the first disc, Niggas On The Moon, and then announced that they would break up after the full release of the second half, Jenny Death. This spawned the invigorating-and-then-annoying “Jenny Death When?” meme, spurred on by the band itself when it was revealed that the tracks on an instrumental self-release, Fashion Week, spelled out “JENNY DEATH WHEN”.

It’s Jenny Death Now, finally, and the meme can finally die. The Powers That B is a fitting “end” to the group’s legacy, a double-disc set of the best stuff they’ve ever committed to digital space. Niggas On The Moon, which has been out since June of 2014, is easily their most experimental work, played entirely on the Roland V-Drum and featuring Bjork vocals as “found sound”. Stefan “MC Ride” Burnett sounds more lost and paranoid than ever when the layers of heavy noise that characterized their previous work are stripped away. It may be, as some have opined, “shouting hobocore”, but his drugged-out rantings and fractured, angry, politically-charged viewpoint seem even more on point with the eerie instrumentals present on the first disc. The second, the long-awaited Jenny Death, brings the group back full circle to the punk rock sampling days of Exmilitary. Here the guitars are live, churning against the industrial-noise soundscapes and jutting off sparks. “I Break Mirrors With My Face In The United States” sums up the bands aesthetic in the best way possible; “Inanimate Sensation” and “On GP” bring out a newish direction in their sound, making them seem simultaneously more relatable to more normal metal sounds while showing off their stark divide even more. “Death Grips 2.0” ends the album with savage beats that trip over themselves, like drum n bass tracks that have been rammed together and looped. The title is fitting, since the day Jenny Death leaked the group hinted that they might make some more music after all. If they continue on with the progression that they have shown here then I’m all for it – Jenny Death shows a band still willing to play games with the major label world and confound expectations.

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#78: Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment – Surf

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#77: Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin – The High Country

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#76: The Tallest Man On Earth – Dark Bird Is Home

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#75: Myrkur – M

#74: Prefuse 73 – Rivington Nao Rio

#73: Hop Along – Painted Shut

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#71: Speedy Ortiz – Foil Deer

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#70: Matthew E White – Fresh Blood

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#69: THEESatisfaction – EarthEE

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#68: Mark Ronson – Uptown Special

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#67: Bjork – Vulnicura

#66: Jamie xx – In Colour

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#65: Faith No More – Sol Invictus

The legendary funk-metal band came back strong in 2015, putting together a record that had all of the wild freedom of their best albums with only a slight blunting of their edge. While there were better comebacks in 2015 (more on this later) there were few that were as animalistically satisfying.

#64: The Sword – High Country

#63: The Sonics – This Is The Sonics

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#62: Built To Spill – Untethered Moon

The first Built To Spill album in a long while to feature more than one stellar track, Untethered Moon constitutes something approximating a return to form. At the very least, Doug Martsch is still wailing on that guitar in a manner that can only be considered his own.

#61: Napalm Death – Apex Predator – Easy Meat

The grindcore legends return with more grindcore. What else were you expecting? They’re the best, and this is why.

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#100: Sunn O))) – Kannon

The drone-doom-noise band finally follows up 2009’s transcendental Monoliths and Dimensions with a more immediate and visceral trio of noise-soaked dread.

#99: Rose McDowall – Cut With The Cake Knife

If you ever missed spiky, snotty Eighties pop, look no further.

#98: BC Camplight – How To Die In The North

Velvety and yet dangerous, like the upholstery on a late-70s vintage Buick.

#97: Lupe Fiasco – Tetsuo & Youth

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#96: Thee Oh Sees – Mutilator Defeated At Last

Six albums, five years, and a couple of big lineup changes finds John Dwyer’s day job band rocking out bigger and harder than ever before.

#95: Destruction Unit – Negative Feedback Resistor

Blown-out industrial noise-punk, like Big Black with a better appreciation for depth.

#94: No Joy – More Faithful

The alternagaze duo returns for a murkier, more complex record that plays directly to their strengths.

#93: Hot Chip – Why Make Sense?

A strong mid-career album for the veteran indie-dance group, with solid grooves and a touch of early 90s UK rave.

#92: Carly Rae Jepsen – E-MO-TION

An 80s banger of a pop record, once you get over the essential Robin Sparkles nature of E-MO-TION it becomes a great soundtrack to an energetic night.

#91: Prurient – Frozen Niagara Falls

A double album of shapeable, moldable pure sound from longtime noise artist Dominick Fernow.

#90: Echo Lake – Era

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#89: Alabama Shakes – Sound And Color

Brittany Howard looks a third grade teacher and sings like the Goddess of Soul. The band is okay too.

#88: Ghostpoet – Shedding Skin

Mercury Prize nominated UK hip hop artist goes full out in an amalgamation of grime, U.S. hip hop, and electronic influences.

#87: Mount Eerie – Sauna

The calmest, quietest sense of dread you may ever experience, and something of a comeback for the former Microphones frontman.

#86: Zun Zun Egui – Shackle’s Gift

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#85: Belle & Sebastian – Girls In Peacetime Want To Dance

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#84: EL VY – Return To The Moon

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#83: The Roadside Graves – Acne/Ears

This is a rustic country album, if it were made by a less-crappy Gaslight Anthem, or if The Men took the folk-country side of New Moon and ran with it. Which is to say, it’s as Jersey as anything else you can name.

#82: Wilco – Star Wars

The veteran alt-country band keeps that train a-rollin’, not letting age or maturity get in the way of a good rock n roll hook. It may be “music for dads with receding hairlines” as Shameless put it, but it rocks all the same.

#81: Insect Ark – Portal/Well

Dana Schechter creates a bedroom electronic record that shifts and transforms as much as it makes a serious attempt to claw up your face and wriggle into your ear.

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