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The 50 Best Albums of 2017 So Far
By SPIN Staff
It’s safe to say none of us will be nostalgic for the first six months of 2017. Rarely has the national and global situation felt so unpredictable—but great music still comforts, empowers, distracts, and pleasures us, whatever the circumstances. Below, explore 50 of SPIN’s favorite albums of the year to date: Kendrick Lamar in bangers mode, Alice Coltrane’s long-lost spiritual documents, Paramore reunited, Dirty Projectors fragmented, Jlin breaking through, and Mac DeMarco all grown up. Some of these records were written to address the present moment; others were finished much earlier, but in our accelerated new reality, already demonstrate their lasting relevance. These are the 50 Best Albums of 2017 So Far.
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50. Mark Eitzel, Hey Mr. Ferryman
50. Mark Eitzel, Hey Mr. Ferryman
50. Mark Eitzel, Hey Mr. Ferryman
American Music Club leader Mark Eitzel’s latest elder-statesman-y solo album is docile and wise, in a beaten-down, gravelly cynical sort of way. It’s a perfect answer for your post-Leonard-Cohen blues, with a dollop of Greg Dulli sleaze in the husky vocal elocution, especially while he discusses the lapsed lovers whose “heart[s] spill like wine” or just “grow cruel” on you. Or the beatnik-ifed Scott Walker of the late ‘60s when he begins to tell a story (“An Angel’s Wing Brushed the Penny Slots”). Eitzel laughs at the grimmest moments: most notably, in the face of the boatman to the underworld on the album’s immediately indelible opener “The Last Ten Years.”
Throughout most of Hey Mr Ferryman, heavenly choirs or tremulous faux-strings overtake the slumped bar-band rhythm section to exalt his characters’ snide and indecisive pronouncements. Eitzel never has firm enough answers to justify this royal treatment–most of the time, his anti-heroes are past thinking there are any. All they can do is try to articulate the feelings that recur in their cloudy moments of midnight reflection—their urge to push endlessly for enlightenment that never clarifies itself, to find a love that sticks, to find a way out of the eternal “runaround.” –Winston Cook-Wilson
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49. Harry Styles, Harry Styles
49. Harry Styles, Harry Styles
49. Harry Styles, Harry Styles
Like many groups to come out of X Factor, One Direction were assembled from would-be solo artists; despite their harmonies, scripted lad camaraderie, and terrifying sales numbers, the band was always a holding pattern until the boys could return to their solo careers. Zayn Malik, after an acrimonious departure, took the traditional ex-boybander route: getting the best R&B beats money can buy, escaping the band’s pent-up songwriting to relive his past couple years of getting very laid, and being rewarded with radio airplay. Liam Payne, with a Migos collaborations in the works, is angling to join him. Niall Horan and Louis Tomlinson have embarked upon the twin British traditions of becoming a busker with a budget and guesting on an EDM song.
And Harry Styles, as you may have heard, is attempting to be a rock star. Of course it sounds ridiculous; no matter what music they release, with what sugar content, everyone in One Direction may forever remain frozen in the public imagination as moppets with rumpled hair, bubblegum songs a large singularity of preteen fans. And yet someone’s got to manage it, or else we’d have no Beatles, no Michael, no anybody without a perfectly scuzzy, organic past. Every teen idol sounds ridiculous proclaiming their maturity, until they don’t.
Oddly enough, of the five One Directioners, Styles new solo output strays the least from the music the group actually made. So strong is the pejorative of being a boy band that the group progressed from power-pop takes on the Backstreet Boys to full-on, and often-great, Journey and The Who rips with hardly any ado; he was prepping for this moment, if not from the beginning, then at least since he took “Faithfully” to the desert in a leopard coat. But Styles, of course, would rather not be known for carrying on the One Direction sound. Where Zayn spent the months before his album telling the world he has sex, Harry’s run his own yearlong campaign insisting he has cred, culminating in enormous documentary profiles by Paul McCartney and Almost Famous’s Cameron Crowe. “I didn’t want to put out my first album and be like, ‘He’s tried to re-create the Sixties, Seventies, Eighties, Nineties,” Styles told Crowe. “I wanted to do something that sounds like me.”
Read Katherine St. Asaph’s full review here.
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48. J Hus, Common Sense
48. J Hus, Common Sense
48. J Hus, Common Sense
Grime’s crossover success has not typically come on its own terms. Dizzee Rascal, for instance, was a mainstay on the British pop charts when he was making rap music, but didn’t clock number ones until he started making music with Calvin Harris and Armand Van Helden. Roll Deep, the OG grime crew, similarly only reached the top of the pops when they started making pretty enjoyable but very cheesy Eurohouse. This sort of selling out was not an ironclad rule—Wiley hit the top two with “Wearing My Rolex,” a dance song that stayed true to grime—but the path to pure pop stardom for British rappers was pretty clear. Lately, though, a new wave of grime MCs have broken the mold. Stormzy, who once hit the charts with a freestyle, landed a top 10 hit this year with the po-faced rap of “Big For Your Boots.”
More interestingly, though, is Stormzy’s frequent collaborator J Hus, who broke the grime/pop binary with his own top 10 single “Did You See,” which nicks the tones (if not exactly the rhythms) of African pop music. J Hus, who is of Gambian descent, expands this new ground on his debut album Common Sense, which finds room for plenty of Afrobeats-influenced production (“Good Time”), but also garage (“Plottin”) and beats that sound like G-Unit (“Common Sense”). You wouldn’t call it a pop album exactly, but it does what great pop albums do: synthesize a lifetime of influences into a full-length that feels exceedingly now, in the process announcing the presence of a unique new voice. – Jordan Sargent
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47. Gas, Narkopop
47. Gas, Narkopop
47. Gas, Narkopop
Ambient and house music are just different kinds of eternity, and eternity never goes out of style. That’s one reason why Gas sounds as fresh on Narkopopas it did seventeen years ago. Another is the honed skill of minimal-techno polymath Wolfgang Voigt, the Kompakt cofounder who hasn’t exactly been gathering dust alongside his most influential alias. In four seminal ambient house albums as Gas, released between 1996 and 2000 and reissued last year in the covetable Box, Voigt infused the essentially mechanical concepts of The Orb, The KLF, and Aphex Twin with his own pneumatic naturalism, famously inspired by acid trips in ancient German woods. The resultant sound is dense yet vaporous, a liquified forest or a fume given form. Overlapping loops tessellate like canopied leaves, always the same and always changing, while a cardiac kick drum traces the only straight line through edgeless ecosystems.
But there’s a third reason Narkopop doesn’t feel dated: it briskly picks up the less static, more composed gestures that emerged at the end of the original tetralogy, on the effervescent Pop. Instead of a characteristic rustle and thump,Narkopop opens with a massive deconstructed chord, glowering like an alien sunrise. In fact, we don’t hear any textbook Gas until track seven, where wind-infused harmonic material patiently subdivides a shamanic bass drum. A couple of the drone bagatelles, though masterfully realized, break Gas’s signature hypnosis and could be mistaken for any number of Kompakt artists rather than being unmistakably his. But at best, Narkopop faithfully upgrades Gas’s murky fundamentals to HD.
Read Brian Howe’s full review here.
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46. Ho99o9, United States of Horror
46. Ho99o9, United States of Horror
46. Ho99o9, United States of Horror
While it isn’t a definitive artistic statement, United States of Horror is a singular enough debut album to prove this Ho99o9 thing could work. The project finds the New Jerseyan-bred duo switching their focus from nihilistic thrills to brusque, violent assaults against oppressive men in power. Although Ho99o9’s attempts at anarchic subversion have translated better visually, most of the tracks land with blood-curdling effect—like the knives-out power chords of “Street Power.” – Brian Josephs
Read Brian Josephs’ feature profile on Ho99o9 here.
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45. Ryuichi Sakamoto, async
45. Ryuichi Sakamoto, async
45. Ryuichi Sakamoto, async
async is venerated Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto’s first effort in eight years, and offers experiments for any variety of Sakomoto fan. For devotees of his more recent work, there’s a demonstration of his prodigious gifts as an orchestrator—in this case, with making a unmanipulated string section sound like a printer malfunctioning (“async”). There are moments of almost-uncomfortable, John-Cage-ian fragility (the triangle chorale of “tri”), then multilingual vocal sound collages over breathy gusts of synth orchestra (“fullmoon”) or the up-close sound of what sounds like someone padding across a bed of leaves on a forest floor (“walker”). Almost every track here in a mini-concerto for an acoustic soloist and an electronically-realized backing band: usually, heaven-and-hellscapes rendered by layered synths. async is a rollercoaster of stylistic eclecticness and contradictory impulses: everything that makes Sakamoto’s career intriguing, cinematic, and impossible to boil down in microcosm. –Winston Cook-Wilson
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44. (Sandy) Alex G, Rocket
44. (Sandy) Alex G, Rocket
44. (Sandy) Alex G, Rocket
After a rising profile thanks in part to last year’s Frank Ocean collaboration (as well as a strange, rather unexplained name change this April), many wondered if Alex Giannascoli would finally betray his bedroom roots. As theories intensified surrounding the not-so-subtle country and Appalachian influences on singles “Bobby” and “Proud,” things got even stranger with the introduction of AutoTune and experimental hip-hop on tracks “Sportstar” and “Brick.” But when it finally dropped, Rocket proved an almost instant addition to all the weirder moments of the 24-year-old songwriter’s knotty and prolific back catalog. What it lacks in aesthetic consistency, the album makes up for in feel-good throwback—both of his own material directly (“Judge,” “Powerful Man”), and in the effortless influence gleaned from Sparklehorse, Elliott Smith, and others within the album’s immensely diverse 14 tracks. For all its experimental weight (and the absent explanation thereof), Rocket felt like a firm continuation of form for an artist that, even as the acclaim grows, still knows when he’s got something right. – Rob Arcand
Read our feature on (Sandy) Alex G here.
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43. Playboi Carti, Playboi Carti
43. Playboi Carti, Playboi Carti
43. Playboi Carti, Playboi Carti
Atlanta’s least prolific street-rap lightning rod Playboy Carti is emblematic of everything self-appointed rap purists hate. He operates like he’s part of the backfiring, skittish loops that ground his songs, and his inevitable, long “woo, woo, woo” breaks are as crucial to mounting energy as his short, spasmodic verses, consisting almost entirely of things other rappers of his ilk and predecessors have already said. When he explodes into a fast flow to stake his claim as a post-Quavo stylist, it can only last briefly. His relatively reticent delivery is supported by a thick chorus of echoing, unintelligible ad-libs, creating an manufactured image of the crowded studios in which they were likely recorded. In terms of the major documents of Keef-and-Future-inspired “Soundcloud rap” of the past couple of years, there have been few full-length projects so expertly curated, overstuffed with skeletal beats with fake flutes and underwater orchestras that throb cleverly against the emphases of the 808s, brimming over with just the right amount of clutter and entropy. –Winston Cook-Wilson
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42. Jens Lekman, Life Will See You Now
42. Jens Lekman, Life Will See You Now
42. Jens Lekman, Life Will See You Now
What is a Jens Lekman? It doesn’t come in any of the usual colors or shapes. It bristles with complicated angles and mechanisms. It’s hard to immediately say what it does, but it’s so appealingly packaged you want to buy it on sight. It’s a Rube Goldberg contraption made of tinsel and tulle, pinwheels and joy buzzers, duty-free perfume and lavender incense. It spits out isotopes of perfectly eccentric Jens-ness, a rare element that flusters forms, toys with tastes, blithely scrambles cultural registers. The more you describe it, the sketchier it sounds, and this is closely related to what makes it so great.
In a bespoke version of his native Sweden’s romantic-melancholic indie-pop, Lekman upholsters the requisite peppy guitars with glossy samples, pianos, and strings, power-clashing plush tones that distantly murmur of yacht rock and world music, exotica and adult contemporary. He’s a Scandinavian Carmen Sandiego dispatching from Gothenburg and Melbourne and Berlin, crooning well-rehearsed anecdotes in a tenor like expensive lotion. His knowing naïveté has shades of The Magnetic Fields’ Stephin Merritt and The Lucksmiths’ Tali White, but Jens sticks stubbornly in his own category, outlined by his flashing wit, droll charisma, and big world-wandering heart. It’s describable only by additive absurdity—here, he’s like an Afro-funk Paul Anka, there, a postmodern Paul Simon or Balearic beat Boz Scaggs.
Read Brian Howe’s full review here.
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41. Michelle Branch, Hopeless Romantic
41. Michelle Branch, Hopeless Romantic
41. Michelle Branch, Hopeless Romantic
Hopeless Romantic is about love, but it’s not a linear story. There are songs about the failed marriage and the new relationship, and it’s not always apparent which is which. One moment, Branch is blissfully falling; the next, she’s cruelly heartbroken. She crawls on hands and knees. She gets up and runs away. She drinks to forget her ex, and to bed her new lover. (The new Michelle Branch sings about sex sometimes, but never anything you couldn’t play around kids.) She writes like someone who knows she’s made mistakes in love, but she doesn’t waste time blaming herself.
At the heart of Hopeless Romantic is the title track. There’s nothing like it in Branch’s catalog—it’s barbiturate woozy, a true torch song. ”’Cause I’m a hopeless romantic / When I should run for my life,” she moans. “I know you’re gonna eat me alive.” She tries to talk sense into herself, then doubles back: “When will I ever learn? / But wait, I never listen.”
If the new album doesn’t sound like the old Michelle Branch, it’s partly because she’s almost abandoned the acoustic guitar that factored heavily into her early music. During her “dry spell,” as she calls it, Branch didn’t have a band. “I would get asked randomly to do a gig here and there, and it was always like, ‘Well, she doesn’t have a band right now, so she’ll go play acoustic,’” she says. “I’m so tired of playing these singer-songwriter shows with my acoustic guitar. I don’t want any of that referenced on the record, ’cause I don’t want it to feel that way.”
Read Anna Gaca’s full feature on Michelle Branch here.
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40. Mount Eerie, A Crow Looked At Me
40. Mount Eerie, A Crow Looked At Me
40. Mount Eerie, A Crow Looked At Me
After the passing of his wife Geneviève Castrée last July, Phil Elverum was crushed. Following a tortuous battle with pancreatic cancer—much of which was sadly forced into public via GoFundMe campaign to cover treatment—the Mount Eerie songwriter released a statement on her passing, one which included details of a new album he’d made to both commemorate their time together and finally turn the difficult memories into the beginnings of a path forward. “I make these songs and put them out into the world just to multiply my voice saying that I love her,” he shared. “I want it known.”
As the album’s singles slowly revealed via dusty home videos flickering along the shoreside, death was real. We saw its aftermath in mail-order backpacks undelivered, in ashes let loose before sunsets, in the brutal inability to take out the upstairs bathroom garbage for fear of losing what memories were left. For fans of the project—as well as its earlier iteration the Microphones—the pain felt personal. Even if the final result was always more indebted to Knausgaard’s My Struggle than listeners seemed to realize, A Crow Looked At Me revealed some shaky new terrain for the songwriter with a clarity not heard since his K Records days over a decade ago. — Rob Arcand
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39. Charly Bliss, Guppy
39. Charly Bliss, Guppy
39. Charly Bliss, Guppy
Eva Hendricks has an unmistakeable voice, bright and acidic as a sack of Sour Patch Kids. It’s the first thing you’ll notice about Guppy, the debut album from Charly Bliss, but you’ll stick around to hear this Brooklyn-based indie pop quartet attack love, self-deprecation, and ‘90s alt-rock nostalgia with the kind of free-association energy usually reserved for pinball machines. “Am I the best / Or just the first person / To say yes?” Hendricks asks on “Glitter,” over a power-pop chug that, theoretically, ought to be too simple to still work this well. Guppy is sweet, but not tame—it’s music for yanking the loves-me-not petals on a daisy and stomping it under a pair of Docs. No number of repetitions really wears the charm off. –Anna Gaca
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38. Forest Swords, Compassion
38. Forest Swords, Compassion
38. Forest Swords, Compassion
Barnes began work on Engravings, Forest Swords’ acclaimed debut full-lengthfrom 2013, shortly after discovering dub via a CD box set compilation of classic tracks released on the Trojan label. He was an out-of-work graphic designer who’d released the first Forest Swords EP in 2011 as something of a lark, teaching himself to make beats and use digital audio software in his spare time after being laid off from his job at a magazine in the UK. “I was just amazed at how dub sounded,” he said, sitting on a Union Square park bench on the day after the NYC show. “What they did with studio techniques, using the studio as an instrument, using sound as a tool, using space as a tool, and using bass as a tool. And I thought it could be quite interesting to put that kind of spacious bass sound into what I’m doing.”
Barnes designs all of Forest Swords’ album artwork himself, a remnant of his previous professional life. (“My dad always makes a joke that all my fans are designers,” he says with a laugh. “If I can give back to the graphic design community, I’m more than happy.”) The Engravings cover looks like it belongs to an experimental metal band, and many of the songs within are shot through with a dissonance Barnes gleaned from childhood favorites like Deftones and Aphex Twin. There are no reggae upstrokes or toasting MCs, but tracks like “Irby Tremor” proudly identify Barnes as a disciple of Tubby, setting skewed orchestral samples and spaghetti-western guitar against slow and steady basslines that are unmistakably Jamaican.
On Compassion, Forest Swords’ newly released second album, the influence is a little harder to spot. The songs are longer, more circuitous, with an emphasis on drama and narrative that was mostly missing from the A-B structures of Barnes’ earlier material. After Engravings became a critical hit, he took a brief break from making albums, working instead on commissions to score multimedia works: a contemporary dance piece, a sci-fi film shot entirely on drones, and the video game Assassin’s Creed Rogue. Compassion reflects this newly expanded approach, built on a mix of sounds Barnes created electronically on his laptop and arrangements of live instruments. “Panic,” an early highlight, opens like a contemporary update on an Ennio Morricone score, rendering a tense martial atmosphere from rolling drums and processed singing. Soon, the sampled voice of soul singer Lou Johnson breaks through the mix with violent urgency: “I feel something’s wrong / The panic is on.” Barnes’s arrangement, together with a striking video featuring dancers whose faces are always obscured, suggests something more is at stake than the precarious romance of Johnson’s original.
Read Andy Cush’s feature on Forest Swords here.
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37. Syd, Fin
37. Syd, Fin
37. Syd, Fin
With The Internet, Syd sang pleasing neo-soul lullabies that mostly sounded good in ambience. Her debut solo record, though, is a different beast entirely, expanding her set of influences with songs that hang on memorable hooks. “Know” is a Timbaland homage that remembers he was a pop songwriter, not just a director of vibes. “Smile More” applies DJ Screw’s slow-drip to that well-worn neo-soul blueprint in a way that is adroitly languorous, while “Dollar Bills” flips that into a strip club song that doesn’t feel at all like a stretch. Best, though, is the one-minute interlude “Drown in It,” which does aquatic raunchiness as well as Ty Dolla $ign. — Jordan Sargent
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36. Pissed Jeans, Why Love Now
36. Pissed Jeans, Why Love Now
36. Pissed Jeans, Why Love Now
The world of heavy guitar music isn’t known for its sense of humor. You have your bearded metalheads, singing about wizards and spending Friday evenings perfecting the wrist control needed to cleanly execute their lightspeed guitar solos. You have your sloganeering hardcore punks, shouting in unison about the the importance of loyalty to your brothers and the harmful effects of beer and cigarettes. Against this dour backdrop, the Pennsylvania sludge and feedback mavens Pissed Jeans have distinguished themselves by being consistently funnier and more ferocious than their peers, channeling the bludgeoning force of classic Touch and Go and Amphetamine Reptile bands through a swagger and wit that is entirely their own. Why Love Now, the quartet’s fifth album, furthers the argument for Pissed Jeans as one of our era’s best punk bands.
Honeys and King of Jeans, the band’s previous two albums, each opened with a shitkicking anthem; “Bathroom Laughter” and “False Jesii Part 2” are still the most reliable moshpit starters in their set. (Full disclosure: My band has played on the same bill as Pissed Jeans before.) Why Love Now, by contrast, begins with a lurch. “Waiting on My Horrible Warning” is both immediately recognizable as Pissed Jeans and unlike anything else in their catalog, riding a throbbing, nearly industrial groove for four minutes while frontman Matt Korvette subjects his voice to contortions that are even more grotesque than usual. Lyrically, the song is a spiritual sequel to “Goodbye (Hair),” the balding man’s lament from King of Jeans, except that now, instead of documenting the effects of time on his deteriorating looks, Korvette is staring further into the future, toward geriatric care facilities and the abyss that lies beyond. “I’m waiting to locate my terminal deficiency,” he sings. “Waiting to have my children come and visit me.”
Read Andy Cush’s full review and our March cover story on the Philadelphia punk rockers.
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35. Run the Jewels, RTJ3
35. Run the Jewels, RTJ3
35. Run the Jewels, RTJ3
“No struggle feels futile to the one who’s struggling,” musician Tunde Olaniran wrote in his 2015 sci-fi short story “Little Brown Mouse.” Describing a mouse drowning in a container slowly filling with water, Olaniran used the bleak sentiment to show how no amount of scurrying could stave off the animal’s death. Like the best science fiction, Olaniran’s writing presaged a fraught political reality unfolding in new, horrific ways with every day. Forget the protests and the so-called truth—the country will be in the hands of a man who believes nuclear threats are playthings.
Still, the fight goes on. Killer Mike and El-P, both of whom are in their 40s, are still working out the point of struggling when it feels like your head is under water. But their anxiety manifests itself in extraordinary ways: Since linking up for 2012’s R.A.P. Music, Run the Jewels—a miraculous late-career team-up—have risen as the greatest exemplars of righteous chaos since Ice Cube dapped up the Bomb Squad. Their sonic superheroism—they sound like barrel-chested Robin Hoods —and comic book imagery have given them a mythological sheen, but the duo have always grounded themselves via booming production, Mike’s sonorous presence, their willingness to fuck you up. The chest-beating bravado is never that far from mortality–they’ve rapped about friends who passed away from lung cancer, and made videos meditating on police brutality.
At the start of 2014’s RTJ2, a riled-up Killer Mike promised to “bang this bitch the fuck out.” At the beginning of “Down,” which opens up RTJ3, he broods as he looks backward—“I hope with the highest of hopes that I never have to go back to the trap / And my days of dealing with dope”—before El-P raps that he “came from feeling what a pure absence of hope can do.” The opening lines’ stark contrast illustrate a focal shift–where RTJ2 positioned pugilism as necessary protest, RTJ3 tests the limits of that worldview. Their sound is still thrilling, but it’s an album made by men who have watched lives crumble despite willful rebellion and are picking up the pieces to continue fighting, even as the cycle is doomed to repeat itself.
Read Brian Josephs’s full review here.
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34. Allison Crutchfield, Tourist in This Town
34. Allison Crutchfield, Tourist in This Town
34. Allison Crutchfield, Tourist in This Town
Allison Crutchfield’s first full-length album as a solo artist opens with a resigned and comforting sigh. It’s a prologue that sounds like an elegy: “When the light we once saw in each other flickers and fades,” she sings, “When the two of us become one in a completely different way.” A muted organ enters, then fades. Crutchfield’s voice rises up with brilliant finality: “Our love is unquestionable / Our love is here to die.” With that line, her intent is clear—her solo debut is about finding yourself alone.
Until now, Crutchfield was best known as part of a group—the band she co-fronted, Swearin’, and P.S. Eliot, her old band with twin sister Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee. Town is an autobiographical breakup record–it marks the end of Swearin’, as well the end of Crutchfield’s relationship with former bandmate Kyle Gilbride. When talking about the album, Crutchfield sounds sheepish admitting it: “It’s such a cliché,” she told Paste, “there’s just no getting around it.” Thankfully, Crutchfield is too observant and too self-possessed to fall into the kind of traps the more uncreatively heartbroken do. Though it runs just 33 minutes, Tourist in this Town feels like a road trip movie, a scrapbook of mixed emotions compiled from postcard-sized travel diary entries.
Where Crutchfield’s last solo project, 2014’s Lean Into It EP, submerged her vocals in blurry synths, most of the songs on Town are spacious and crystal-clear—befitting an artist so sure of her vision that she decided how many tracks her album would have before she started writing it. “Mile Away” is both an electrified rumble and an incisive dismantling of someone else’s ego; “Charlie” is a sweet-and-sour love song edged with nostalgia and longing. The exception is “The Marriage,” a minute-long twee-punk shakedown that reprises the album’s opening lines with a renewed confidence. It’s reminiscent of Crutchfield’s old work with Swearin’, though she’s now accompanied by current boyfriend Sam Cook-Parrott of Radiator Hospital as she sings, “My love for you is unquestionable / My love is infinite.” If his appearance in the narrative feels unexpected, well, Crutchfield thought so, too: “I felt like, ‘I really shouldn’t be dating anybody right now,’ but I also feel like this [new] relationship feels big and important. It was a lot of back and forth in my brain.”
Read Anna Gaca’s full review here.
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33. Migos, Culture
33. Migos, Culture
33. Migos, Culture
When Atlanta’s Migos released “Versace” in 2013–and in the following year, in which the trio’s unmistakable triplet raps began to rule hip-hop on a global scale–it was hard to predict that their most commercially successful moment would come years later. At a glance, they had all the trappings of a flame destined to burn quickly and brightly, with their particular charm that could only endure via anthemic, in-the-moment repetition. By mid-2015, with post-“Versace” hits “Fight Night” and “Handsome & Wealthy” in the rearview, it seemed that Migos might have hit a wall. None of the songs on their delayed studio debut, Yung Rich Nation, broke the Hot 100, even as the group’s Takeoff rapped that the next thing they dropped would “have everybody screaming ‘pipe it up,’” on the album single of the same name.
But later that year came “Look at my Dab,” a song about their hometown dance craze that brought them back on the charts. Now, the trio has ascended to astronomical heights thanks to an even more potent meme, one that has more to do with their actual music. The ubiquitous, sticky first two lines of “Bad and Boujee” have provided fodder for infinite parodies over the past few months, as well as the standard dance videos. Today, as the group’s long-delayed second LP Culture materializes, “Boujee” is the No. 1 single in the United States. “Versace,” though unforgettable as the group’s breakout hit, peaked at No. 99.
Despite the twisted path the three Migos’ careers have followed, it would be easy to draw a connection between the two songs: When Offset raps “smoking on cookie in the…” and “cookin’ up dope in the…” on “Bad and Boujee,” he uses that same flow, the one which made the “Versace” chorus such a sensation. Then again, it’s also the pattern that grounds something like 90% of Migos songs. It’s fair to wonder what, exactly, “Bad and Boujee” has that “Pipe it Up” or “Handsome and Wealthy”—or even lesser-known tracks like “Pronto” and “Cocoon”—didn’t. Is the key to the song’s success really in the music, or is it thanks to the ravenous meme opportunists that pinpointed the natural comic timing in its first two lines, and ran with it from there?
Read Winston Cook-Wilson’s full review here.
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32. Spoon, Hot Thoughts
32. Spoon, Hot Thoughts
32. Spoon, Hot Thoughts
“Coconut milk, coconut water, you still like to tell me they’re the same–who am I to say?” Britt Daniel sings over disco-punk drums and a moiré pattern of overlapping studio effects on “First Caress,” the fourth song on Spoon’s kaleidoscopic ninth studio album Hot Thoughts. Delivered with the rakish assurance that Daniel brings to all of his material and punctuated with a couple of Elvis Presley uh-huhs for good measure, the line almost sounds like a taunt to the listener. Can you believe we’re getting away with this, it asks, singing about coconuts and still making it sound like rock’n’roll?
It’s the most memorable lyric on Hot Thoughts, if only by dint of its silliness. And according to Daniel and drummer Jim Eno, it almost didn’t make the record at all. “Jim at one point was just like, ‘Do not take that line out. You’re not gonna take that line out, right?’” Daniel explained in a delightful interview at Stereogum. “Because sometimes I hear a new demo,” Eno elaborated, “And a line’s different. So sometimes when I’m listening to a song I’ll be like, ‘Hey man, leave it. I love this line… DON’T change it.’”
Read Andy Cush’s full review here.
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31. Real Estate, In Mind
31. Real Estate, In Mind
31. Real Estate, In Mind
For nearly a decade, Real Estate have made music as blissful and unhurried as a cat lolling about in a sunbeam. Their endless reserves of tranquility have led to being labeled as a “chill” band, a disservice to the power of a calm state and the humbling moments where one takes a deep breath instead of capitulating to anxiety. Such a wandering, euphoric heart might bring be perceived as a lack of inspiration, but nevertheless they’ve stood their ground: “Our careless lifestyle / It was not so unwise.”
Their new record, In Mind, is their longest yet, and their first without founding guitarist Matt Mondanile, who left the band amongst mysterious circumstances. Mondanile was the group’s flashiest musician, as we learned with each Ducktails release; the division of labor within a band can always be picked apart, but he seemed at least largely responsible for their roaming, rheumy guitar lines and jingle-jangle melodies. Within circles overly attuned to the shifts in indie rock personnel, the loss of all this might’ve been as devastating as, say, the absence of Amber Coffman’s voice in Dirty Projectors.
That makes it a little surprising how much the band managed to stay the course, both in sound and temperament. Those indelible guitar lines are still front and center, ably replicated by Martin Courtney and new guitarist Julian Lynch, with the remaining members—now a five-piece featuring contributing keyboardist Matt Kallman as a full-timer—making only the subtlest adjustment to their steadfast mission statement. These are songs about passing the days in satiated comfort, appreciating the surrounding nature, waiting for inspiration to reveal itself amidst a pattern of monotony, the idle pleasures of daydreaming.
Read Jeremy Gordon’s full review here.
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30. Jacques Greene, Feel Infinite
30. Jacques Greene, Feel Infinite
30. Jacques Greene, Feel Infinite
The word “producer,” in the context of dance music in 2017, usually brings to mind a solitary man or woman, cranking out tracks with a MIDI controller and a laptop full of softsynths. The Canadian musician Jacques Greene, who releases his excellent debut full-length Feel Infinite today after a string of EPs and singles, is a producer according to that definition, but also in a more old-fashioned sense of the term. Greene’s music, which draws from the pulse and enveloping warmth of house and the twitchy rhythms and infrared timbres of the UK hardcore continuum, is immaculately arranged: low-pass filters slowly open and close, arpeggios twirl into the forefront of the mix and then retreat, a scorched-sounding square wave disintegrates just as a snatch of sampled vocals emerges to take its place. Each element takes up just enough space to distinguish itself without muddling the others.
The music on Feel Infinite is the most stylish and best-sounding I’ve heard so far this year, with textures so rich you sometimes forget they’re composed entirely of synths and samples. Listening to it, you get the sense that if Greene were born a few decades earlier, he’d be a louche studio wizard, conducting a grand disco orchestra like Cerrone or Quincy Jones, rather than taking furtive stabs at electronic music with the rudimentary hardware available at the time. Beneath his meticulous productions, there’s a yearning for sweaty transcendence that will appeal to fans of Jamie xx, an artist with which Greene has more in common than an affinity for sunny percussive sounds. But while the In Colour producer often seeks to capture huge collective euphoria–“All Under One Roof Raving“–Greene’s music is more interested in the heat between two bodies, whether they’re circling each other on the dancefloor or groping in the back seat of an Uber on the way home.
Read Andy Cush’s feature on Jacques Greene here.
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29. Sorority Noise, You're Not As ___ As You Think
29. Sorority Noise, You’re Not As ___ As You Think
29. Sorority Noise, You're Not As ___ As You Think
Coming from a genre notorious for glorifying teenage angst and spite-ridden suicide, Sorority Noise really only found themselves when they stopped wishing they were dead. In 2015, the band evolved past whiny pop-punk provocation on Joy, Departed, where they added heavier chords, heart-wrenching lyrics, and just enough strings. But maturity comes with setbacks, and for frontman Cameron Boucher, the recent deaths of two friends—one to suicide, one to a heroin overdose—sent him spiraling into anxiety and depression. “It’s hard to tell someone how much you love them when they’re not around anymore,” he told the Fader. “These songs made it permanent for me.”
On new album You’re Not As _____ As You Think, the band behind the tortured, wry “Art School Wannabe” now meditates on that permanence, dramatizing the slow process of recovery. The album starts with Boucher spending sleepless nights struggling with the same “plaguing” issues that drove one friend to suicide. Too grief-stricken to attend the funeral, Boucher instead stays quiet, looking back at the homes of the departed to reflect on his own selfishness. “And I swore I saw you in there / I was looking at myself” he shouts, struggling to detach his own agonizing perspective from a narrative that isn’t really his.
Read Rob Arcand’s full review here.
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28. Sampha, Process
28. Sampha, Process
28. Sampha, Process
In prior interviews, Sampha Sisay made it clear that he was content with being a supporting player, a lane in which he proved himself reliable. Guest spots on songs like Drake’s “Too Much” and Solange’s “Don’t Touch My Hair” were accentuated by the sanguine humanity in his British, lilting singing voice that hovers above silent prayer. His finite range managed to locate the endpoint of a boyish naivete, the moment where happiness is no longer a neutral state but a respite to be fought for.
Despite this naturally reserved quality, his debut album, Process, proves that a tempered wistfulness is ripe for lead material. Though the album title can be taken as a nod to the artistic process, the project concerns itself with the immeasurable distance between pain and acceptance of an end goal foisted upon you by the universe. Sampha’s mother, Binty Sisay, passed away from cancer in 2015, and his father was taken by the same cruelty in 1998. He’s also been dealing with a mysterious lump in his throat that’s remained undiagnosed by doctors (“Every time I swallow, I feel it,” he told Nylon).
Read Brian Josephs’s full review here.
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27. Julia Holter, In the Same Room
27. Julia Holter, In the Same Room
27. Julia Holter, In the Same Room
If you think about the lengthy tour cycles independent artists embark on these days–for either the love of doing so, or at least the love of breaking even–it’s hard to not imagine even the most diligent, happily nomadic acts becoming bored with some of the material they run through every night. However, it’s undoubtedly a puzzle to figure out ways to revise and revamp old songs without subverting the original spark that gave them power. For many artists, finding an inspired way to treat their compositions as fluid templates while still rendering a convincing version of The Song becomes a frequent creative exercise.
To pay tribute to artists attempting this exercise, Domino Records has launched Documents, a series of live-in-studio performances with little to no touch-ups, aiming at encapsulating the sound of a live band at a particular, slightly unstable point in time. Los Angeles singer-songwriter Julia Holter and her band were the first to formally accept the label’s challenge, and luckily, In The Same Room, her new Documents full-length, finds her quartet of choice at the peak of their working relationship. Their relationship toward the material seems both effortless and appealingly restless, as the band’s arrangements push and pull between fairly faithful, if slightly more agitated, renditions and radical reinterpretations of songs from three of her studio albums: Loud City Song, Tragedy, and Have You in My Wilderness. (Sorry, Ekstasis fans.) But what they all do, without fail, is to invest much of this material with a provocative energy that is discrete from Holter’s studio recordings. Ultimately, this energy results in In the Same Room being as crucial an entry into Holter’s still-unblemished catalogue as any of her proper LPs.
Read Winston Cook Wilson’s full review here.
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26. Father John Misty, Pure Comedy
26. Father John Misty, Pure Comedy
26. Father John Misty, Pure Comedy
Josh Tillman, aka Father John Misty, is something of a rarity—a bona fide indie rock star in an era where the relevance of what we call “indie rock” has largely diminished, whose mouthy interviews and louche affectations have won him as much attention as his actual music. Contemporary culture has produced no shortage of successful musicians, but not a lot of interesting ones, and Tillman has hipped himself to a game that rewards artists who seemingly go out of their way to not be boring.
Emerging from the agrarian dreamscape of Fleet Foxes, where he played drums, Tillman rocketed to notoriety following a majestic late show performance of “Bored in the USA.” Finally more than “the guy from Fleet Foxes with a solo record,” Tillman presented as an immediately charismatic hirsute lounge lizard, drolly pacing the stage like a Great Man with a lot on his mind. His breakthrough album, I Love You, Honeybear, paired lovey-dovey flutterings over his wife with cynical appraisals of human nature and homey, flowering instrumentation, as if Gram Parsons was conducting an orchestra. His lyrics could be a little abrasive, but the music was unavoidably seductive, and darker thoughts usually gave way toward optimistic views of how love could be enough to overcome the bullshit of modern life.
Read Jeremy Gordon’s full review here.
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25. Actress, AZD
25. Actress, AZD
25. Actress, AZD
AZD, Darren Jordan Cunningham’s fifth album of experimental club music under the Actress moniker, waits for about four minutes before introducing its first beat. That might not sound like a very long time, but it’s immensely satisfying when the hissing techno drums finally kick in halfway through second track “Untitled 7,” the album equivalent of a floor-filling transition in a DJ set. Rather than let the rolling rhythm carry him and his listeners toward oblivion for a while, Cunningham cuts the drums after just one minute, reducing “Untitled 7” back to the bouncy unaccompanied bassline that comprises its entire first half. After another minute, the throbbing kick drum returns to the mix, but just as it makes its re-entry, the song fades out and draws to a close.
Actress has built an entire career on beguiling and occasionally frustrating his listeners in this way. His first records arrived about a decade ago, just as the dubstep phenomenon was exploding into the global underground, and were lumped in with the genre mostly by virtue of timing, location (Cunningham is based in London and hails originally from Wolverhampton), and a shared nocturnal atmosphere. And while it’s true that Actress sometimes draws from the same murky Jamaican bass and 2-step twitch that animated dubstep, he’s just as likely to channel the rhythmic rigor of techno, the swing of Chicago house, the loping swagger of classic East Coast hip-hop, or the washy embrace of ambient music. Ultimately, Actress isn’t defined by allegiance to a particular genre, but Cunningham’s singular evocation of contemporary urban life: sometimes oppressive, others meditative, situated somewhere between the Hazyville of his debut and the Ghettoville of his moribund fourth album, filled with the churn of heavy machinery and thick clouds that look like natural fog one day and automobile exhaust the next.
Read Andy Cush’s full review here.
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24. Feist, Pleasure
24. Feist, Pleasure
24. Feist, Pleasure
“This is a hard left,” she told The New York Times about Pleasure, her first new album in six years. Pleasure isn’t really one either, though—it’s as skeletal as advertised, further reversing the sharp turn of Feist’s mid-’00s, back to her core sound. The fuzz and buzz of early releases “Century” and “Pleasure” have stuck Feist with inevitable PJ Harvey comparisons, but the seeds were there as far back as The Reminder’s cover of Nina Simone’s “See-Line Woman.” “The Wind” sets Feist’s dry-air backing vocals to their natural metaphor; the high lonesome “I Wish I Didn’t Miss You” and sedate Americana-via-Canada cut “I’m Not Running Away,” aren’t determined so much as circling warily around the same thought for so long it might as well be determination.
Feist wrote the album during a period of depression—in interviews she talks around but never quite about it, which is generally how it feels—and that sense of aimless exhaustion pervades the album. The self-affirmation of “Get Not High, Get Now Low” has a palpable faking-it-till-you-make-it. “Lost Dreams” wanders between rock-star gravitas (particularly “I am a dreamer,” delivered with unplugged swagger) and sprawling melancholia. The tension is haunting, not that Pleasure is sedate. The title track, with its twists and turns and pleasure-yawps, sounds fun largely because it sounds spontaneous.
Read Katherine St. Asaph’s full review here.
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23. Sheer Mag, Compilation LP
23. Sheer Mag, Compilation LP
23. Sheer Mag, Compilation LP
Before Sheer Mag announced their upcoming debut album, they collected their three excellent EPs—simply titled I, II, and III—into what might still be the year’s best rock album. Enough words have been spilled about the Philly punk band’s appeal: riffs for days, enough hooks to make Max Martin smile, firebrand, in-your face vocals from undeniable singer Tina Halladay. They make music meant to be heard while drinking seventeen beers during a barbecue; they sound like Thin Lizzy covered by the most hotshit garage band alive. It was true when the EPs were released separately, and it’s still true now. Crack open a cold one and turn it up. –Jeremy Gordon
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22. Arca, Arca
22. Arca, Arca
22. Arca, Arca
While Alejandro Ghersi already had amassed production credits ranging from FKA twigs and Kelela to Kanye by the time he turned 25, it was his work on Björk’s emotionally laden Vulnicura that served as Arca’s coming-out moment. During a rapturous and heart weary set by Ms. Guðmundsdóttir at Carnegie Hall back in 2015, said coming out was sartorial, Ghersi changing from a tough black leather jacket outfit to a plunging little black number over the course of the night, showing that even as an accompanist, Arca himself was an artist in constant flux, toggling between the masculine and feminine, refined beauty and spurts of noise.
Ghersi’s own work has reveled in gnarled electronic noise, a sound informed by both gender fluidity and John Carpenter’s The Thing, the grotesque overshadowing its gorgeous moments, body horror trumping body love. Jesse Kanda’s cover visuals of flesh matched the music within: bulbed, blackened, ghoulish and distorted. But for Arca’s self-titled third album (and first for XL), Ghersi’s own visage is front and center, and the first sound audible is his own voice. It’s his first time trusting that instrument; on “Piel,” it’s a castrato that quivers in the silence, soon in duet with lancing white noise and foreboding bass. His voice traces a melodic contour not unlike “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” as rendered at Mulholland Drive’s Club Silencio, singing of sloughing off old skin.
Peeling back the density and obtuseness of Xen and Mutant, Arca is his most engaging, emotionally draining and confrontational album to date. Arca’s hallucinatory production chops have never been in question, but in nudging towards actual songs as they do here, they find their most effective juxtapose, by turns seductive and fraught with every breath. In Arca’s wedding of voice and electronics, Ghersi most closely resembles Björk, who encouraged him to sing on his own music. Even without that knowledge, the catch in his throat on “Coraje” echoes hers on Vespertine’s “Cocoon” and on the spare “Anoche,” he renders the sentiment of “I Miss You” en espagñol, cooing for a love he misses, though hasn’t met him yet.
Read Andy Beta’s full review here.
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21. Jay Som, Everybody Works
21. Jay Som, Everybody Works
21. Jay Som, Everybody Works
Melina Duterte isn’t a belter; she delivers lyrics like gentle mantras, as if their repetition might produce a self-induced hypnosis, encircling herself in a world of her own making. “Sharing art, it’s not for everyone. I’m still working on that,” she recently told Pitchfork. And you could listen to Everybody Works, her debut album as Jay Som, a hundred times and still not feel as though Duterte is quite ready to completely open up. “Once, I was very brave,” she sings on the particularly confessional “(BedHead),” over a bed of murky, muffled guitars. “I stepped on the stage / It took my breath away.”
Nonetheless, here she is. Jay Som is Duterte’s one-woman band, whose breakout moment came in 2016 with Turn Into, a collection of songs that bubbled up on Bandcamp and turned their creator into a rising indie star. Turn Into was reissued by Polyvinyl, who also released Everybody Works, billed as Jay Som’s first full-length. Both albums were recorded by Duterte at her Oakland home, though Turn Into is so thoughtfully constructed it’s hard to hear it as a mere test run, despite its billing as a collection of demos.
But Everybody Works deserves the “real album” tagline, resisting the clichés of “bedroom pop” while holding tight to its introspective melancholia. Duterte’s lyrics are uncomplicated, but they speak to the kind of emotional quandaries that can be tough to put into words. Occasionally she sings to someone specific, maybe a lover, maybe a false friend: “You lie and you make believe / You can hide but you can’t deceive / I can’t tell you anything” (“The Bus Song”). More often, she attempts to describe what emotions feel like from the inside: “You’ve got me running in circles / My thinking pattern fades / Pull yourself away” (“One More Time Please”). There’s a humor to it, as when she sings, “My promises were never meant / I guess I’ll never feel okay” (“Everybody Works”), like an adult’s resigned nod to American Football’s classic anthem of teenage emotion.
Read Anna Gaca’s full review here.
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20. Japandroids, Near to the Wild Heart of Life
20. Japandroids, Near to the Wild Heart of Life
20. Japandroids, Near to the Wild Heart of Life
There are Japandroids fans who talk about their memories of the band like veterans reminiscing about fighting in the Great War, and that nostalgia is not easy to dismiss. Japandroids took the most elemental rock tropes and blew them up big enough to cover skyscrapers. Their songs evoked Manichean worlds where the girls were mostly good but sometimes very bad, where the alcohol was always flowing and the music was a vessel to emotional states both deeply sad and blindingly alive. Standing in the pit with your boys, your boys’ boys, the boys leaving town and the boys coming back, screaming along until your feral alcoholic state broke—it was a lot, and not for nothing could they be seriously referred to as a safe space for male friendship.
The five years following 2012’s Celebration Rock saw vast demand for a new record, even as their kind of rock—inspired by muscular, masculine riff factories like Thin Lizzy and AC/DC—rapidly ceded cultural relevance to more politically valuable genres. But Japandroids fans will be happy to know that Near to the Wild Heart of Life is a Japandroids album, pushed to 11 even in the quiet moments: towering riffs played on maxed-out amps, drums hit with due diligence, big whoa-oh harmonies, passionate, evocative rock n’ roll songwriting about girls and alcohol.
Japandroids always walked that Springsteen-paved line between corny and genuine; they tilted toward earnestness because of guitarist Brian King, whose boyish, spirited voice sold his ideals like someone confiding secrets after a few rounds. The first verse on the album–“The future’s under fire / the past is gaining ground / A continuous cold war between my home and my hometown”–either forces an eye roll or sucks you all the way in. If you’re even a little on board with this type of music, your heart will be fully invested by the second verse in second song “North, East, South West,” where King sings, “Hot and heavy when I hit the hay / in N-O-L-A, USA,” the band chanting each letter like cheerleaders heading a rally. Their insistence in making this kind of music carries no trace of self-consciousness, or self-deprecation. They remember a really important thing: This music stays powerful only if you never break kayfabe by admitting the obvious, which is that it can feel occasionally silly to be an adult drawing passion from rock n’ roll about girls and alcohol.
Read Jeremy Gordon’s full review here.
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19. Perfume Genius, No Shape
19. Perfume Genius, No Shape
19. Perfume Genius, No Shape
Did we ever settle on a definition of “chamber pop,” the genre that, for a minute, defined any indie band who were friends with a violinist? Arcade Fire aren’t chamber pop anymore. ANOHNI moved on with her life. Beirut is a country.
But in 2017, chamber pop seems like as good a phrase as any to describe Mike Hadreas’ new album as Perfume Genius, the weird, dense No Shape. However nebulous its relationship to actual pop music, “chamber” undoubtedly implied intimacy, along with audio fidelity. The opening seconds of No Shape are gently plinking piano and tape hiss, seemingly unfiltered; when I first played it on headphones I turned around to try and find the piano, like a true rube. Hadreas wants you to recognize his raw sincerity right upfront, which is no surprise. His first two albums, 2010’s Learning and 2012’s Put Your Back N 2 It, were filled with delicate, emotional piano ballads, many that started out sounding a lot like this.
In 2014 Perfume Genius went pop, relatively speaking, with Too Bright, a breakthrough collection of glitter and synths anchored by the towering, myth-making “Queen.” The dazzling power of that album’s biggest songs (shoutout to “Grid”) tended to obscure how much of it was, still, essentially delicate piano music. Hadreas doesn’t let listeners get much more than a minute into No Shape before he lets them know that era is over, in a huge, crystalline, in-case-of-emergency-break-glass crash on the opener, “Otherside.”
It’s the first of several dramatic set changes that punctuate No Shape, whosedocumented resemblance to David Bowie’s soundtrack for Labyrinth makes more sense the longer you listen. Hadreas tries all kinds of things he hasn’t up til now: a gentle calypso tide pool on “Just Like Love,” glassy trip hop on “Die 4 You.” “Run Me Through” dips into something like Amnesiac-era Radiohead. Hadreas even sounds a little like Thom Yorke, though you’ll never hear alt-rock’s mope king moan, “Pitted, deep lined eyes / Rough as last night.”
Read Anna Gaca’s full review here.
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18. Pile, A Hairshirt of Purpose
18. Pile, A Hairshirt of Purpose
18. Pile, A Hairshirt of Purpose
After three great albums that spent much of their runtime in violent catharsis or stumbling toward it, A Hairshirt of Purpose, Pile’s sixth full-length overall, is comparatively gentle and sprawling. Much of the press narrative around the record centered on singer and bandleader Rick Maguire’s sojourn from the twangy and ambitious post-hardcore quartet’s native town of Boston to houses in Tennessee and Georgia, where he wrote it. It’s a kind of Walden-esque story of creativity let loose in nature and isolation that Maguire scoffs at now. “I was just kind of sleeping and watching TV and eating ice cream. But whatever. If people want to say I was doing some Justin Vernon shit in the woods, that’s fine,” he said jokingly in a SPIN profile. Still, Hairshirt has an otherworldly beauty that previous Pile records only hinted at; songs that might have previously come equipped with power chords and thundering drum fills are now filled with harmony vocals and gently thrumming clean guitar. When the heaviness finally arrives, on highlights like “Texas” and “Fingers,” it’s powerful enough to sustain longtime fans through the rest of the album. –Andy Cush
Read our profile of Pile here.
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17. Dirty Projectors, Dirty Projectors
17. Dirty Projectors, Dirty Projectors
17. Dirty Projectors, Dirty Projectors
Dirty Projectors is a breakup album, hence the beard, burrowing into the circumstances of this dissolution with a biographer’s unsparing eye. It’s also a stunning record, including some of the best music the band has ever made. The trademark obnoxiousness of Longstreth’s melodic sensibility—an obnoxiousness I and many others have found wonderfully appealing—is located within compositions more sumptuous and sprawling than previous works, while still finding room to get a little weird. It’s also the loneliest record they’ve ever made, both in sound, theme, and scene.
Contrary to the arty obliqueness of previous records, the album offers personal details that are almost painful to hear. There are reconstructed arguments between the two, along with disclosures that sound like printed facts. On “Up in Hudson,” a gorgeous, unwinding song with the most transfixing drum patterns of the band’s discography, Longstreth coos about wanting to “slightly domesticate the truth / And write you ‘Stillness Is the Move.’” There are references to Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood and once-fashionable hang spot McCarren Park, as well as the aggravatingly trendy Ace Hotel, where Longstreth sings about staying during a separation. (Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon recently sang about staying there, too, which I suppose now makes it the default personal retreat for all depressed indie luminaries.)
Longstreth resists the idea that the lyrics are strictly diaristic, but it’s impossible not to read between the lines. Elsewhere, he’s happy to withhold explanation: Asked about the recurring references to God and spirituality on the album, and if he experienced a religious awakening, he says, “I was going through some shit,” and punctuates his answer with an affable nod. Throughout our conversation, this is a recurring affectation, along with a big, broad smile that flashes across his face whenever he takes a second to collect his thought before answering. I’m not sure I’ve ever met anyone cheerier when talking about an album that chronicles a failed relationship.
Read our full feature on Dirty Projectors here.
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16. Future, FUTURE
16. Future, FUTURE
16. Future, FUTURE
Upon the release of Hndrxx, his second release in as many weeks in February, Future said that it was “the album I always wanted to make.” If so, it argues that Future has long imagined himself as melodically-driven crossover star consumed by love and heartbreak. Frankly, he’s better at applying his songwriting talents to straight-up rap songs, but Hndrxx is nonetheless an interesting experimental document that has a number of songs that stand up on their own merits. “Use Me” is a gasping power ballad sold by a very convincing vocal performance, while “Incredible” and “Testify” place him within the context of straightforward pop songs. The album blooms fully, though, on “Fresh Air,” which has a beat that sounds like something Kingdom would make for Kelela, but a huge chorus that could rip radio wide open. –Jordan Sargent
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15. The xx, I See You
15. The xx, I See You
15. The xx, I See You
I See You, the xx’s first album in a little over four years, does not herald a new direction for a group that stumbled into one of the defining sounds of a generation. Instead, the trio finds a fairly happy medium between the quiet intimacy of their pioneering debut record and whatever else may lie in front of them. This was the riddle that Jamie xx, Oliver Sim, and Romy Madley Croft needed to solve. Their self-titled first record—with its sparse, cold arrangements and lyrics that read like instant messages—was, even by the band’s own admission, an accidental miracle, and thus impossible to replicate.
The album was so singular that its aesthetic trickled up to the very top of American pop. The Drake and Rihanna duet “Take Care,” one of the best songs recorded by either artist, lifted an entire Jamie xx production for its beat, but it was the emotionally vulnerable conversation between the two that felt like a direct reference to the animating thesis of the xx. You can still hear the group in the most contemporary of pop songs: Drake and Rihanna recorded a “Take Care” sequel, “Too Good,” that cemented their place in Drake’s vast universe of influences; Kiiara’s “Gold,” with its clicks and pops floating in empty space, is an exact re-imagination of the group’s first album as radio pop; gnash’s “i hate u, i love u” is another hit that, like The xx’s early songs, feels like a text message exchange between teenagers set to music.
That legacy felt like a burden on Coexist, the xx’s half-step of a second album. The record proved that the magic of their debut couldn’t be repeated, but the band wasn’t able to push through to the next level. There were hints at what would eventually be the basis of Jamie xx’s solo work—techno rhythms, a wisp of tropical synths—but they hewed too closely to the sound of their debut but without the memorable songwriting.
I See You is still distinctly and deeply an xx album, but in the gap between albums the group has found a way to move unmistakably forward while still sounding like themselves. “Say Something Loving,” the second single, is a prime example. Sim and Madley Croft trade sentences over spidery guitar lines, but their singing is clearer and more throaty. Jamie xx contributes drum fills that nod subtly towards EDM, and a fleeting vocal sample—“before it slips away,” lifted from the Alessi Brothers’ 1978 track “Do You Feel It?”—seems intended to haunt the song. Tension is built, but not exactly resolved—much like their first record, but with a different energy. On “A Violent Noise,” Sim and Madley Croft are foregrounded as always, but the track conveys its emotion—“Every beat is a violent noise”—most deeply via Jamie xx’s production, which is at once shuddering and shot through with a bright synth tone that connotes an optimistic strength.
Read Jordan Sargent’s full review here.
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14. Slowdive, Slowdive
14. Slowdive, Slowdive
14. Slowdive, Slowdive
Given the goodwill that they’ve generated since disbanding—the well-regarded reissues, documentaries, and legions of younger bands hailing them as influences—it’s easy to forget how badly Slowdive’s first run as a band ended. Their second album Souvlaki is now as much of a shoegaze ur-text as any My Bloody Valentine recording, but at the time it was just a mostly notable for the fact that it was made in a cannabinoid haze, in part, with Brian Eno. Following the release of that record, they drifted further into that stoned ether: According to the liner notes for a reissue of their third album Pygmalion, they were asked to deliver a pop record by the head of their label, and decided to do the exact opposite, releasing nine tracks of heavenly kosmische and ambient electronics—its opening track “Rutti” was over 10 minutes long.
Then in February of 1995, the band—absent drummer Simon Scott, who left after feeling out of sync with the spacey new direction—released Pygmalion, a vaporous collection of electronic pieces. Previous albums had already made them scapegoats for everything the music press saw wrong with the subtle emoting of the shoegaze scene, but their newfound abstraction was a bridge too far for those who’d stuck around until that point. Their label Creation Records dropped them in the week following its release. One review suggested they “work on their headstone.” And so they did, ending the band shortly thereafter. When guitarist Neil Halstead moved from the home where he worked on much of the record, he left almost all of his clothes drying on a line outside and never came back for them.
For the band to return to the title Slowdive after 27 years—a name also used on their first-ever release—suggests that, like for many bands who make eponymous releases deep into their career, the record is a reset button. Perhaps as a result, Slowdive feels simpler too. With all that the band has attempted over the course of the near three decades since their initial formation, they could have made just about anything. They’ve written opiated balladry, ambient techno, even oozing drones, and turned rock band instrumentation into jetstream engines. But here, the songs are conspicuously stripped down—lyrics are legible, guitars sound like… guitars. It’s an approach they haven’t really taken since their very first recordings, from the Slowdive EP through Just for a Day. The chiming drive of lead single “Star Roving” is so bare and uncomplicated that it feels more like the current generation of reverb-hazed indie bands than much else in their catalog (just search Twitter for “SlowDIIV”).
Because how intent they seemed on pushing at the borders between rock and electronic music during Pygmalion, and how charmingly amorphous and hard to grasp Souvlaki remains over 20 years after its release, it could be easy to takeSlowdive as a retreat. But its surface-level simplicity only serves to highlight how experimental the band are as songwriters. Their best moments felt sort of like sleepwalking, linking together fragmented emotions and shattered scenes with vaporous chord progressions and a thick reverb mist. That’s why it makes sense for Slowdive to have cosmic rock songs (“Slomo”), minimalist piano dirges (“Falling Ashes”), and heavenly C86-isms within a few tracks of one another. When was the last time a daydream made much sense?
Read Colin Joyce’s full review here.
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13. Priests, Nothing Feels Natural
13. Priests, Nothing Feels Natural
13. Priests, Nothing Feels Natural
Anyone who’s said “at least a Trump presidency will make punk rock great again” hasn’t been paying attention to Priests, the D.C. band who’ve been releasing ferocious, funny music attacking late capitalism and its discontents since 2011. They’re best known for their lapel-gripping mix of claustrophobia and confrontation; brought to life, any given Priests song paces around the cage and shakes the bars.
This gripping quality is communicated most visibly by singer Katie Alice Greer, who yelps, shrieks, and chants her way through choruses designed as self-aware tantrums, demanding someone answer for this mess they’ve put us in. But Priests is very much a collective project, driven equally by Daniele Daniele’s urgent drumming, Taylor Mulitz’s post-punk bass lines, and G.L. Jaguar’s sinister guitar tones. On Nothing Feels Natural, their long-awaited debut full-length, each band member pushes themselves to new levels—something Daniele characterizes in a 36-page (!) interview zine accompanying the record as “the reach,” the “exposed vulnerability” that surfaces when someone struggles to carry out something new and just barely makes it.
The reach is all over Natural, which displays influences from the Raincoats and Shopping to krautrock and Portishead. For Daniele, this meant exploring more dynamic drumming styles; for Jaguar it meant turning down the distortion and focusing on single notes instead of chords. Songs like “Appropriate,” “Pink White House,” and “Puff” cover familiar territory, shouting down Burger King, Wheel of Fortune, and an American dream replete with palm trees and SUVs. “Pink White House” is peak Priests—clever and dystopian, slick with B-movie horror lines like “you are just a cog in the machine / and I am a wet dream / soft and mean.”
But where previous Priests songs rarely made it past the three-minute-mark, an extended bridge gives it a sense of space. Similarly, the second half of “Appropriate” descends into deconstructed no-wave chaos, with Luke Stewart pulling pure agony out of improvised saxophone. The jazzy flourish reappears on an ambient mid-album interlude, and the tail-end of kitchen-sink disco groove album closer “Suck.” (We saw it coming with Downtown Boys and Bueno and Pill but could it be that, in Alan Vega’s wake, sax is back in punk?)
Read Nina Mashurova’s full review and our January cover story on the activist rockers in an unsettled D.C..
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12. Phoenix, Ti Amo
12. Phoenix, Ti Amo
12. Phoenix, Ti Amo
The summer is never as good as it should be, but that doesn’t mean we can’t try. Enter Phoenix, whose new album Ti Amo is a breezy ode to the season best spent chasing something, whether it’s a late night or a love life. Recorded during a period of turmoil in their native France, Phoenix found a way to stay lively and starry-eyed when the world is closing in; the romantic, inclusive vibe of songs like “J-Boy” and “Fior di Latte” counteract the received wisdom that we have to get grimmer in grim times. A beautiful album like this might not turn back the tide on its own, but it’ll remind you of how the world should be. – Jeremy Gordon
(Phoenix’s ‘Ti Amo’ is out June 9, and we assure you it’s good. Read our June cover story on the band while you wait.)
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11. Drake, More Life
11. Drake, More Life
11. Drake, More Life
Pop music, at least its apex, is the province of the audacious, from Elvis twisting his hips, to Prince, Madonna, and Janet Jackson rearranging sexual norms, to Missy Elliott writing hooks consisting of gibberish and backwards vocals. The best pop stars do things we don’t expect because they are also things we can’t conceive. In this grand lineage, I submit a Drake album featuring a song titled “Madiba Riddim.”
I’m kind of kidding, but as Drake continues to cement himself as a generational star, it’s worth taking stock of the exact nature of his audacity as a pop musician, the divisiveness of which seems to track exponentially alongside his commercial success. That audacity, of course, is his abandonment of the American rap/R&B binary and embrace of the pan-global sounds of the black diaspora: grime, afrobeats, dancehall, and house music, at least so far. This voyage was charted in earnest on last year’s Views, which sported only three hits—“One Dance,” “Controlla,” and “Too Good”—that were each tethered to dancehall. In the case of “One Dance,” it was mostly a spiritual connection, but it was more direct with the other two, which respectively sported snippets of vocals from Beenie Man and Popcaan to go along with obvious aesthetic inspirations. On More Life, his new 22-track… whatever, Drake uses those three records as a launching point for a far superior follow-up that stands as the opus of the second phase of his career.
The divisiveness of Drake’s evolving discography stems from a question that may provide enough debate fodder for decades to come: Is he more omnivore or carnivore? Is he sampling the sounds of the world and returning to those that he likes best, or is he hunting prey and picking their bones clean? This question is complicated and speaks deeply to our times, hitting themes of appropriation, gentrification, and identity. It’s also a specific moral question within the strict context of the music industry, one which is impossible for outsiders to answer, though Drake has not yet been accused of pillaging by his collaborators or sample sources. Instead, the argument against Drake is the opposite—that he’s too close to the cultures that inspire him, a smothering and clownish presence who is less his own man and more of an actor playing dress-up with slang.
If all of that can be put aside, the question is also an artistic one. Is Drake good at it? Does his tourism actually result in music you want to listen to? This question is as divisive if not more than the other one, but More Life makes a strong argument for Drake being the best sort of pop star, one who uses his power as an incredibly famous musician to synthesize and codify the vast world around him into a consumable and replayable product that brings people together and pushes them apart in equal measures.
Read Jordan Sargent’s full review of ‘More Life’ here.
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10. Mac DeMarco, This Old Dog
10. Mac DeMarco, This Old Dog
10. Mac DeMarco, This Old Dog
By this time next month, one thousand publications will have run one thousand more articles reiterating what a chill, happy, generally gnarly dude Mac DeMarco is. Over the last few years, DeMarco’s success has been abetted by his loosey-goosey character and appetite for activity, strengths in an era where artists show less personality than ever, and where websites are always in need of material to fuel traffic. So Mac will cover Limp Bizkit in concert, eat hot wings on camera, get interviewed by his mom, troll his bandmates with a billboard–all of these experiences fun, engaging, and above all, consumable.
Perhaps this omnipresence seems excessive. But the irony of this innately viral persona is the innately thoughtful quality of his music, which largely rejects the infuriating cliche of a happy, chill (and white, and straight) guy just having a good time without you being a bummer about it. DeMarco is not Magic!, insisting on a path of least resistance—along with your unquestioning consumption of the music, of course—in a complicated world. This Old Dog, his latest, is primarily concerned with aging and real-deal maturity, not necessarily the expected subject material from a man once filmed putting a drumstick up his asshole. But it’s always been that way: A song like “Rock and Roll Night Club” was a nice gag, but his calling cards were heart-on-sleeve, starry night ballads like “Ode to Viceroy” and “Still Together.”
The content comes with a slight change in sound: Gone is the rinky-dink, pealing electric guitar tone that colored his early records, replaced with an acoustic instrument, recorded as if he’s in the room with you. There’s also prolific use of a CR-78 drum machine set to cruise, the steady motorik rhythms pushing him toward a more reflective space. He sounds comfortable, lived-in. The turned-down mood is a natural extension of his theoretically “chill” ethos; if those earlier records were music for summer barbecues, this one is for the post-sunset denouement, when the party has withered away to the last few people, content to sit around the dying fire and talk about the serious things, probably while very drunk.
You get a feel for this vibe at the start of “This Old Dog,” which begins at an already languid tempo before immediately slowing down, his voice going resin-thick as he sings about appreciating the life he’s lived. If a 26-year-old referring to himself as an “old dog” seems precious, remember Neil Young was just 24—and so much more—when he dropped the heartbreaking “Old Man,” a song about imagining your whole life going by while feeling unsatisfied, a mood Mac is eager to avoid. He’s playing more with synthesizers, too, and dusky textures fog up songs like “On the Level” and the heartsick “For the First Time.” On the latter, he sings about reuniting with his girlfriend after a long absence, an optimistic flutter in his voice: “I’m not trying to forget her / Just understand how I’ll be feeling / On that day / It’s just like seeing her for the first time again.”
Read Jeremy Gordon’s full review here.
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9. Hurray for the Riff Raff, The Navigator
9. Hurray for the Riff Raff, The Navigator
9. Hurray for the Riff Raff, The Navigator
Alynda Segarra’s beginnings—as a transient singer-songwriter hopping freight trains to New Orleans—feel like a scene from an America that hardly exists anymore. On The Navigator, the Hurray for the Riff Raff bandleader blends her vintage sensibility with a story both timeless and politically current: the loose, quasi-autobiographical coming-of-age of a Puerto Rican-American girl called Navi. Her smoky voice and exacting lyricism shine on the bittersweet “Hungry Ghost” and the haunted, bluesy protest song “Rican Beach”: “First they stole our language / Then they stole our names / Then they stole the things that brought us fame.” The Navigator wraps on “Pa’lante,” a three-part ballad of immigrant sorrow and pride that samples the Puerto Rican-born poet and activist Pedro Pietri. Segarra’s work has never dug deeper or come through with more conviction—and when she does fall back on familiar folk roots, her vulnerability only makes resilience more plain to see. –Anna Gaca
Read our as-told-to essay on music activism from Alynda Segarra here.
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8. Kehlani, SweetSexySavage
8. Kehlani, SweetSexySavage
8. Kehlani, SweetSexySavage
Kehlani Parrish is a 21-year-old singer from Oakland, though she is no stranger to the mechanics of the industry. She was courted by major labels, and recorded on one’s dime, before most fans knew who she was. She signed a deal prior to the spring 2015 release of her breakthrough mixtape, You Should Be Here, and long before it was nominated for a Grammy. (Streaming services don’t belie this narrative, advertising the record as self-released.) Last year, she collaborated with golden boys like Zayn and Charlie Puth, and was given a slot on the Suicide Squadsoundtrack, which immediately birthed “Gangsta,” her first charting hit, if an unrepresentative one.
This is a more old school form of artist development, and Kehlani’s new album SweetSexySavage (released last Friday), is indeed a blow for a different kind of time-honored sort of ethos, one where songs that feel animated by a voracious musicality lunge at you aggressively with hooks. This can be seen most readily in a few of the album’s pre-release singles, “Distraction” and “Undercover,” which move diligently from smooth verses to tension-building pre-choruses, to big, blooming hooks. The album’s stunner, “Piece of Mind,” features a chorus so immediately engaging that the song instantly feels like a standard.
Still, though her songwriting is out of step with many of her peers, SweetSexySavage, which was written and produced largely with industry veterans Pop & Oak, is a distinctly contemporary album that is in conversation with trendy, critically acclaimed R&B. “Keep On” has the liquid groove of a Kaytranada record, but with audibly played bass (you can distinctly hear the strings squeaking) that gives it a meaty bottom end. “Everything is Yours” is a gaping, rattling FKA Twigs-esque composition that briefly disguises itself as a sugary song in the vein of The-Dream, while “Too Much” schools a legion of Aaliyah imitators by writing a skilled homage to one of her pop smashes (“More Than a Woman”) instead of simply fetishizing her discography’s mind-bending minimalism.
Read Jordan Sargent’s full review here.
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7. Jlin, Black Origami
7. Jlin, Black Origami
7. Jlin, Black Origami
Jlin is more than footwork. During a recent set last week at Chicago’s Smart Bar, the Gary, Indiana-based producer drew a crowd from disparate music scenes in the city; local progressive club kids were joined by older house heads and techno DJs. It’s rare to find a musician whose work can connect with such a broad array of listeners, but the producer (born Jerrilyn Patton) has quietly gained an international following by defying the sometimes rigid expectations and parameters of the footwork genre in which she’s most often associated. Her music is weird and oftentimes uncomfortable. Sometimes it’s not even danceable, which works in contrast to footwork, a genre tied as much to a unique style of dance as it is to a particular sound. Patton is not creating for dance floors so much as she is for herself, and this creative drive comes across in her records and EPs that should appeal to listeners hungry for an experimentalist’s mind.
If earlier releases Dark Energy and Free Fall showcased a producer wrestling with overflowing ideas, Black Origami, Patton’s latest album, is a clear and refined next step. Patton intersperses pieces of other genres, including industrial, New Age, and world music, in her new collection of songs. She has also smoothed out the abrasive edges that overwhelmed her earlier releases, while allowing her aesthetic signatures—from glitchy vocal samples to unusual time signatures and rapid percussive syncopation—to coalesce into a singular voice. In Black Origami, one hears the future of progressive club music. It is bold, precise, cross-cultural and far more intelligent than waning genres both outside (like rock) and inside (think tech house or even traditional footwork) the dance music world.
Read Britt Julious’ full review and check out our May cover story profile of Jlin.
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6. Paramore, After Laughter
6. Paramore, After Laughter
6. Paramore, After Laughter
Paramore are a new band—again. With their fifth line-up change in as many albums, they have lost bassist Jeremy Davis and restored founding drummer Zac Farro to their internal dynamic. The successive shift in sound is, fittingly, a rhythmic one. Guitars, synths, and drums all share the traits of percussion; together they feel like a series of incredulous blinks fluttering across the songs on After Laughter, their first record in four years. The steel drums that introduce the opening track and lead single “Hard Times” merge with an identical guitar line to form a pattern of pulsing, primary colors. It’s the band’s brightest, most animated album. The sound is crisp, every layer discernible, lacking the blurs and reverberations that constitute traditional rock production and instead drawing from the rhythmic separations that characterize ‘80s pop and freestyle.
As much as this approach could be credited to Farro, whose drums alternately prop the songs up at acute angles or melt into dense fills, much of the initial groundwork was laid by guitarist Taylor York on their previous, self-titled 2013 album, where he became one of the band’s primary songwriters. After founding guitarist Josh Farro departed in 2009, York’s songwriting revised Paramore as a pop-rock band more about texture than riffage. His guitar parts feel like fractions drawn from broader rock compositions, loose pieces for which there is no original puzzle. Consider the guitar line from that self-titled album’s hit single “Still Into You,” which climbs in perpendicular fits throughout the song. Its qualities are both percussive and vocal, so that singer Hayley Williams, instead of shouting over a flood of guitars, is responding to and weaving her way around the overlapping rhythms. What other bands would consider peripheral details and embellishments are central to York’s compositions.
On After Laughter, York’s guitar work seems newly descended from Lindsey Buckingham, another guitarist who builds entire songs out of flourishes. He etches precise arabesques all over “Told You So” and “Forgiveness,” giving the songs an elusive, mercurial shape reminiscent of Fleetwood Mac’s Tango in the Night. “Forgiveness” in particular is one of the band’s best songs, their gentlest and most buoyant kiss-off, floating somewhere above the resentment and sadness it conveys. “You want forgiveness,” Williams sings, York’s guitars encasing her voice in a kind of cosmic shimmer, “but I just can’t do it.” “Musically that’s the world I envision myself living in as a person,” Williams told Zane Lowe last month, describing After Laughter’s vivid soundworld. “It’s a fun one…and I feel like a lot of people want to feel like that.”
Read Jordan Sargent’s full review here.
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5. Future, HNDRXX
5. Future, HNDRXX
5. Future, HNDRXX
“Mask Off” is a bit of an unfortunate success. A cut off Future’s rustic self-titled album, the meme-inspiring anthem overshadowed HNDRXX—Future’s finest album. Arriving a week after his self-titled effort, HNDRXX is the most potent sampling of Future’s multifariousness. This thing sounds like the classic JoDeCi forgot to make, with Future the wounded Lothario (“My Collection”) and Future the haunted soul (the 7-minute album closer “Sorry”) dilating themselves with the coolness of melting ice. “Fresh Air,” the best song of the album, boasts a hook that exhales like a lavender-scented wind tunnel—it didn’t chart, but serves as a creative masterpiece nonetheless. –Brian Josephs
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4. Julie Byrne, Not Even Happiness
4. Julie Byrne, Not Even Happiness
4. Julie Byrne, Not Even Happiness
Sometimes, simply pairing the right voice with the right reverb can create a song’s power. There have been endless notable examples since the effect came to prominence in 1950s pop music—at first, there were the evocative echo chambers of Johnnie Ray’s “Cry,” Elvis’ “That’s Alright (Mama),” and Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams.” Over half-a-century later, indie-pop fans got the dreamy discographies of Beach House and Lana del Rey—and now, they have every song on NYC-dwelling singer/songwriter Julie Byrne’s plaintive sophomore album Not Even Happiness.
A frequent misconception is that any music that courts a “folk”-related designation is, by default, unadorned: a document of raw performance. In the indie-rock-adjacent world of “folk,” at least, that’s often a lie: The intimate quality of the recording is an aural illusion carefully created through ProTools treatment. Not Even Happiness is primarily a duet between solo voice and acoustic guitar, but it takes place beneath a canopy of mountainous, lovingly-shaped reverb. The effect blurs the sharper edges of the strings, winds, and synth blots that lurk low in the mix to build tension in Byrne’s couple-chord songs; it sometimes renders her lyrics, which read like fragments from journal entries pieced together at random, unintelligible.
But swept up by this sheen, Byrne’s voice–at turns as husky as Victoria LeGrand’s, as agile and lilting as Julia Holter’s–has a corporeally pleasing effect. (Listen on good headphones, and you may feel a warm, ASMR-like sensation creep across your scalp.) The beauty of the vocal texture often supersedes Byrne’s meditations on relationships just beginning or gently unraveling, and how alternately frustrating and invigorating any private search for cosmic meaning can be. At the cathartic moments when her lyrics do drift to the forefront, Byrne often descends to booming low notes, conjuring Leonard Cohen’s phrasing in both word and melody ”I traveled the country and I carried no key,” she solemnly declaims in the middle of “Sleepwalker,” the album’s highlight; later, on “All the Land Glimmered,” she dwells in her rich contralto range for most of the song, while discussing a search for the divine: “I was in my heart and I answered me.”
Read Winston Cook-Wilson’s full review of ‘Not Even Happiness’ here.
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3. Thundercat, Drunk
3. Thundercat, Drunk
3. Thundercat, Drunk
While his virtuoso bass work appears more subdued, Drunk stands as Thundercat’s first great solo album because of how he confidently places his perspective front and center. It helps that it’s actually compelling, too: A cat-owning nerd mining from deep sadness, Thundercat manages to express psychedelic ecstasy (“Let Me Show You” with Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins), quotidian pleasures (“Beat your meat, go to sleep” are some of the album’s first lyrics), and grief catharsis (the soaring “Jethro”) with equal high fidelity. He’s not as much of an overwhelming personality as he is a distant cousin inviting you to this shamanic space. In Drunk, a work of hard-fought joy, this focuses proves to be refreshing, a reprieve from the world that rests outside of its 51-minute runtime. — Brian Josephs
Read our interview with Thundercat about ‘Drunk’ here.
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2. Alice Coltrane, World Spirituality Classics 1: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda
2. Alice Coltrane, World Spirituality Classics 1: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda
2. Alice Coltrane, World Spirituality Classics 1: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda
Listening to the music as an outsider to that community, you sometimes feel you’ve wandered into the ashram unbidden, a situation that might be discomfiting if it weren’t for the nearly overwhelming warmth and joy with which the performers perform their material. Luaka Bop clearly approached the question of releasing the compilation to an audience so divorced from its original context with careful consideration: The label worked with Coltrane’s children Ravi and Michelle and her longtime engineer Baker Bigsby to secure and remaster the original tapes, and the compilation’s liner notes include a lengthy interview with a musician and ashram resident alongside more purely musicological writing.
And frankly, the music inside World Spirituality Classics 1 deserves to be heard. The ashram tapes are the only known recordings on which Alice Coltrane used her singing voice, an instrument as restrained and plaintive as her harp and piano are wild and expressive. “Om Shanti,” the second track and the first to feature Coltrane the singer, is transfixing. Accompanied at first only by stand-up bass and her own organ, she sings a lilting bluesy tune, sounding almost amused at the beatific atmosphere she’s managed to conjure with just a few simple elements. Halfway through, the ashram singers join in wailing call-and-response, sounding like spirits beckoning Coltrane to join them in some nether realm. But the singer’s unflappable calm prevails: as the music around her becomes haunting and cavernous, her voice never rises above a conversational patter.
The compilation’s eight tracks run from between four and a half and eleven minutes in length, tending toward the longer end of that spectrum. Many of them are bifurcated in a manner similar to “Om Shanti.” One half might feature a vocal solo from Coltrane or another singer, the other hypnotically repetitious Vedic or gospel chanting. These chanting sections will be familiar to listeners ofRada-Krsna Nama Sankirtana, Coltrane’s 1975 album of devotional songs, but the addition of the compilation’s other most distinctive instrument gives them a new otherworldly glow. Coltrane frequently plays an Oberheim OB-8 synthesizer, a hefty piece of analog equipment that was state-of-the-art at the time. Her favorite mode of expression on the OB-8 is a huge, arcing glissando, sliding continuously from somewhere near the bottom of the keyboard’s range to somewhere near the top. These figures often loom behind the proceedings like futuristic monoliths. They recall Coltrane’s ability on the harp, like her husband’s on the soprano sax, to play shimmering arpeggiated lines so smoothly that the distinctions between pitches seem to break down entirely. Thanks to the electronic capabilities of the OB-8, they actually do.
Read Andy Cush’s full review here.
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1. Kendrick Lamar, DAMN.
1. Kendrick Lamar, DAMN.
1. Kendrick Lamar, DAMN.
The salvation of the New Testament is preceded by the judicious wrath of the Old—the stories of genocidal floods, generational curses, violent plagues, and God’s righteous judgment. Kendrick Lamar has never shied away from fire and brimstone, but he’s now particularly fixated. On his new album DAMN., he agonizes over losing his fortunes like a modern-day Job, and declares himself an Israelite, doomed to wander the earth. “We are a cursed people,” his cousin, Carl, intones before the album’s centerpiece “FEAR.,” citing the Old Testament’s Book of Deuteronomy. It’s a foreboding subtext, but the pieces have fallen together. When Kendrick proclaimed on “The Heart Part 4” that something was coming on April 7, many expected a new album. Shortly before midnight, the country found out Donald Trump had ordered an airstrike on Syria, tempting a world war.
To Pimp a Butterfly, Kendrick’s prior opus, was praised as The Album We Needed after visual evidence of anti-black violence became ubiquitous on our televisions and Twitter feeds. But Kendrick’s body and blood were washcloths to absolve too many listeners of American sin, regardless of how many admitted it. Two years later, his altruism and dedication to blindfolded communal uplift have thinned. “I tried to lift the black artists,” he raps on “ELEMENT.,” “but it’s a difference between black artists and wack artists.” Later on “XXX.,” a father of a recently slain son asks Kendrick for spiritual guidance only to hear him rebuke Christianity for violence: “Ain’t no Black power when your baby killed by a coward.” Even Bono appears on the hook as a tortured apparition—his yuppie humanitarianism has no place here.
Read Brian Josephs’ full review of ‘DAMN.’ here.
This post The 50 Best Albums of 2017 So Far first appeared on SPIN.
