We’ve recently been running a sale on subscriptions to The Quietus that highlights one of the paradoxes of trying to keep our operation going in 2024: it’d take just 1% of our readers joining up to secure the future of the site beyond our sixteenth year. I imagine similar maths work for many of the artists who feature in our halfway chart. Many, if not most, of them are the inverse 1% to those hoovering up all the coin at the top of the current musical ecosystem. Many must look at their streaming figures and think if only 1% paid for our music, life would be a lot easier. With that in mind there is a little lean to remind you that directly supporting tQ, or the artists we write about, has a huge impact on what we, and they, are able to do. Yes, we have this beautiful new website that you’re reading this on, but to continue supporting the kind of artists in our chart (artists that are either ignored elsewhere or suffer from the continuing collapse of the music media) we need to keep asking you to subscribe. So if you can, please do consider helping us to survive and thrive in our current sale – a third off the top Subscriber Plus tier that gets you exclusive music, playlists, essays, podcasts, newsletters, along with the joy of keeping tQ on an even keel so that we can bring you more of the best editorial and discovery on the artists below. 2024 has been an amazing year for albums so far, here’s hoping it continues this way. We hope you enjoy the 100 records on our list. Luke Turner, 27 June 2024.
This chart was voted for by tQ editors, staff and columnists. It was compiled by John Doran and built by Patrick Clarke and Christian Eede.
CuntroachesCuntroachesSkin Graft
Cuntroaches have got personality. You can tell they’re going to provoke irritated, dismissive responses as much as make friends. Dissolving their influences into a sticky bin juice of genre, they breeze past the cerebral – or even emotional – to something almost purely physical. An emetic response to the horror of the world. A filthy visceral convulsion. Noise as joyful purge and liberation. Opener ‘Borborygmus’ is named for the squirming chorus of your intestines. It begins with feedback whistles and alternating bass blurts, like the sluggish footsteps of an approaching giant. Those sounds are overtaken by dubbed-out insect clatter, bringing a momentary atmospheric pause before everything collapses in. It’s hectic and blown out, particularly the monster vocals. Around midway those ominous footsteps return before the all-out chaos kicks up another notch.
MetzUp On Gravity HillSub Pop
Is it time for METZ to drop the full caps? It’s always been such a shouty name. That might have suited their earlier output, which was defined by bludgeoning Jesus Lizard traits, Bleach-era Nirvana-isms and yelling about rats. In recent times, their music has become more sophisticated, intricate and subtle. Don’t get me wrong. It still rocks, just in a more elusive and interesting way than before. Their fifth album’s opening song, ‘No Reservation / Love Comes Crashing’, is a case in point. It’s all about the dynamics, the shifting multiple structures and the exciting drum fills. Apparently composer Owen Pallett plays violin on this maelstrom too. ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’, it ain’t. They keep getting better, do METZ. Sorry. Not METZ. Metz. Whisper it? Ssh. Metz.
Bianca ScoutPattern Damagesferic
Steadily, unselfconsciously, and to a mystifying dearth of general acclaim, Bianca Scout has been fashioning a netherworld, its crevices inlaid with shards of her consciousness. The decade-stretching oeuvre which functions as the visible front for this hidden psychic reverse now comprises six albums, a strewing of singles and EPs, and various music videos and choreographed performances – the latter drawing from Scout’s background in dance. But to know her work, in full (unlikely, since its roots tend to redouble the deeper you dig) or in part, is to remain palpably distant from Bianca Scout, the persona and the person. She expresses herself with a sort of uncanny ingenuousness, a candour which communes with the emotions and perplexes more rational engagement. Revelations promptly dissipate on taking off the headphones, the fog of mystique gathers once more. Which is to say, listeners coming to her work for the first time through Pattern Damage need not feel underprepared; there are no privileged entry points.
Wu-LuLearning To Swim On EmptyWarp
There’s an overwhelming feeling of emptiness that many of us can relate to at the moment – a feeling that weighs heavily in the context of surrounding events, becoming our everyday experience. It’s somewhat normal to be furious yet numb; profoundly sad yet totally void of the appropriate response mechanisms. In both the title and contents of his new EP, South London vocalist and musician Wu-Lu has managed to capture this emptiness, as well as the corresponding impulse to push through and find something to grasp firmly with both hands. Learning To Swim On Empty is intimate in its writing but the recurring motif of water and of drowning and floating which runs throughout makes it a record that holds both listener and artist close, in a compelling way.
Marion Cousin, Elöise DecazesCom a lanceta na mãoPagans/Le Saule/La République Des Granges
Com a lanceta na mão is the latest album in Marion Cousin’s series re-envisioning the traditional music of Spain and Portugal. Cousin’s affection for Iberia is genuine and long-standing, and has also seen her collaborate with Spanish artist Borja Flames as June Et Jim and, more recently, Catalina Matorral. This time her peregrination has taken her to the Tràs-os-Montes province in the northeast of Portugal, and she’s recruited Arlt’s Eloïse Decazes, a long-term friend, as a companion (on previous releases she’s worked with duo Kaumwald and cellist Gaspar Claus). As with the previous instalments, it’s an album of folk songs that barely feels like a folk album at all. For each new region and dialect, Cousin, with the help of her collaborators, concocts a new musical language that both suits and subverts the source material. Here, singing together and playing all the instruments (synths, guitars, concertina, piano, tapes and more) they invite you on a delightfully rocambolesque trip that takes in off-beat, discordant keyboard lines, brittle machine beats and wildly pitch-shifted guitar. Apparently, the pair have often been told that they have similar singing styles and I must admit they’ve long been twinned in my mind. They use this closeness to their advantage here, singing in unison to create a hybrid Cousin-Decazes voice or circling each other, as they do to exquisite effect on ‘A Fonte Do Salguirinho’.
VerracoBreathe… GodpseedTimedance
Breathe… Godpseed, which manifests a familiarly radiant and sharp vision of contemporary dance music typical of Timedance, the label releasing the EP, sounds like the product of a painstakingly long process, but it does not feel overcooked or overburdened with ideas. What inspires me about Verraco is how he uses sound design tricks explored on earlier releases and meticulously explores them in detail. The signature polished squeaks, high-pitched beeps and blips, Shepard tones and cyborgian vocals are all there, but they are levelled-up, more powerful and multidimensional.
Kali MaloneAll Life LongIdeologic Organ
All Life Long eschews the electro acoustics of recent albums Living Torch and last year’s epic Does Spring Hide Its Joy in favour of the organ dirges of breakthrough record, The Sacrificial Code. The pieces on All Life Long (with its unexpected echo of Lionel Richie) were written, performed, and recorded between 2020 and 2023. Some of them first appeared during the 2021 Variations Festival in Nantes, France, as part of a live-streamed performance by Malone and her now husband Stephen O’Malley, accompanied by the Macadam Ensemble. Their combined efforts focused on heavy-hearted, sustained notes which seemed so tied to the pandemic. Now repurposed, these carefully intoned shifts are allowed to hold court for lengthy periods. Giving us space and time to sit and consider the softly undulating nuances that creep into our attention throughout All Life Long.
Keeley ForsythThe Hollow130701 / FatCat
Despite gorgeous foghorning synths right across the album’s palette, it often comes off pure ancient. Opener ‘Answer’ and then title track ‘The Hollow’ both lean hard on the sense (though not the specific content) of medieval music. Choir. Deep-piped churchy organ. Low bowed strings. Overlaid vocal patterns. But halfway through the song ‘The Hollow’, still less than ten minutes into the album, Forsyth lurches up an octave to repeat over and over as an intense mantra – “Shake my life out of my mouth”– and we have been dropped (without parachute or sleeping bag) into a profoundly wild place, dizzying, rootless in rural northern England, in those othered hilly spaces between the great industrial cities.
Lola De La MataOceans On AzimuthSelf-Released
In 2019, Lola De La Mata was in a restaurant when a staff member plugged in the restaurant’s electric piano without checking that the master fader was at 0, which resulted in a deafening noise that would leave her dealing with catastrophic tinnitus and vertigo. Alongside her recovery, over the next five years she combined artistic exploration alongside her recovery, including a groundbreaking collaboration with audiologists in New York that probed our very conception of tinnitus itself, and now emerges with a record that not only distils the complexity and nuance of its subject into an immediate and engaging listen, but also represents a major breach in the stigma that still surrounds hearing loss in the musical community.
Lori GoldstonConvolutionsNyahh
The word convoluted denotes a thing or idea that has been bent so much out of shape that it is now hard to follow or trace back to its original form and this, for me, isn’t really a useful way of describing the beautiful, rolling, not in any way difficult music contained on this album. Originally the word meant (and still does to a much lesser degree) two or more things that have been twisted together until they become one and it’s via this interpretation that we’re getting somewhere useful. In 2022, the cellist Lori Goldston played a series of gigs across the Republic of Ireland, improvising as she went, drawing on her background in various folk, rock and classical traditions, rolling them gently together, to create sublime pieces in the moment, recorded and edited by her driver (and temporary label guy) Willie Stewart of Nyahh Records.
SipaningkahLangkah SuruikChinabot
Currently based in Jakarta, Sipaningkah, aka Aldo Ahmad, looked back to his roots, and the Minangkabau culture from the area in West Sumatra, Indonesia, where he grew up, for Langkah Suruik. Alongside playing traditional instruments, he also invented his own, called the “Tasauff”, inspired by different Minangkabau stringed, drum and gong instruments. Langkah Suruik flies relentlessly forwards from this base of tradition and invention. First track ‘Imbau’ opens with a screaming horn, a juddering statement of intent for the album’s charge through undulating and unrelenting rhythm, ruptures of harrowed strings and, on the closing two tracks, Sipaningkah’s voice for two meditative songs which soothe the fierce energy accumulated until that point. Shuddering electronics enter on occasion, such as the queasy synthesis on ‘Maharam’, while ‘Hantaran’ unearths something suspiciously close to minimal techno in Minangkabau percussion patterns. Sipaningkah locates the future in tradition and vice versa. He shows Minangkabau music isn’t static, it’s ripe, ongoing, in dialogue with the present and capable of springing remarkable surprises.
Inter ArmaNew HeavenRelapse
Wisely choosing not to replicate their last record, New Heaven is easily Inter Arma’s coldest, most dissonant and uncompromising album so far; if ‘Sulphur English’ sounded organic and expansive, this feels more metallic and claustrophobic by comparison, with the churning title track recalling the cavernous depths of Portal more than the expansive sonic vistas the band used to explore. Inter Arma have never shied away from expressing their love of death metal, but it’s written throughout this record like a stick of Brighton rock, with songs like ‘Desolation’s Harp’ coming across like a sludgier Immolation, all angular, fiddly riffs and dense walls of blastbeats. New Heaven is still very much the work of the same band, however. At little over 40 minutes, it’s their shortest full-length yet (even briefer than the single song EP The Cavern), but still manages to convey the same sort of cinematic sonic journey, with the record’s B-side delving into much more sombre territory.
Zofie SiegeGems In DirtNuova Materia
On ‘Inquipit’, the opening track on Zofie Siege’s Gems In Dirt, jaunty flutes dance around melancholic lute strums, the bounciness gradually subsiding and congealing into a sombre tapestry. On second track ‘Doors Leading to The Empyrium’, a sinister rhythm enters an increasingly nocturnal soundscape. Later, on ‘Spit And Speeches On Stage’, a cackle announces a descent into a freefall of croaking brass and tick tock strings. Originally released as a download in 2021, Gems In Dirt is France-based Siege’s second solo album. It’s unplaceable music, lush and menacing, pastoral and ominous all at once. Acoustic instruments duel with synthetic so it’s tough to tell where one begins and the other ends. There’s singing occasionally, but it’s buried, more a haunting than a top line. Although containing hints of dungeon synth, as well as the medieval realms conjured by Richard Dawson on Peasant, Gems In Dirt feels like a private fantasy that’s remarkable in scope. A hermetically-sealed Danse Macabre manifesting through your tape deck.
Chelsea WolfeShe Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To SheLoma Vista
Chelsea Wolfe’s music has always been admirably vulnerable and honest, qualities that are in even greater abundance on her latest album than they have been on her previous releases. The metaphysically themed She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She is dominated by loud guitars and feels incredibly abrasive, not least because it follows an album of acoustic folk songs. It deals with how personal change can be achieved by our present selves communicating with our past and future ones.
Al WoottonLifted From The EarthBerceuse Heroique
Also known as one third of the Holy Tongue trio, Al Wootton is a unique character in the wider UK scene, a contemporary dub innovator who prefers to keep a low profile, staying under the hype radar and catering to the in-crowd. His ethos, reflected in his curatorial philosophy at the Trule label, belongs to the underground of the 2010s, favouring obscurity and esotericism, the opposite of what’s been trending in recent years. Lifted From The Earth, his instalment for BH’s tape series, provides some of the most transportive electronic music of the year so far. His aesthetic is indebted to the UK bass continuum (Smith & Mighty, Adrian Sherwood, African Head Charge and other On-U Sound protégés), and his mastery of dub techniques is jaw-dropping, with infinite snare delays, heavily reverberated synth bleeps, vaporous percussion, and echoing siren-like voices that immerse the listener in a hypnagogic state. His spacious free-form compositions plunge you into the darkest corners of your inner self but occasionally they also show you the light, as on ‘First Words After Sunrise’. There is a mystical dimension, a revelatory potential hidden in his sound, evoking a sense of appreciation for being just an infinitesimal particle of this vast universe.
BégayerÉvohé BègueMurailles Music / Via Parigi / Le Saule
Bégayer draw attention to the illusory nature of recorded music, producing a deliberately rough-edged collage pieced together from multiple sessions and spanning different recording media: improvisations “for isolated instruments and voices” captured on cassette tape, digital recordings of instrumental improvisations and further overdubs (you can listen to the raw materials, or work-in-progress, on Préambule Bègue albums on their Bandcamp page). Diverse moments, environments and sonic qualities are made to coexist; they’re stitched together, layered and mixed to create an ambiguous, phantomatic space in which you’re aware of the joins but the spell, somehow, still holds. It’s also notable that the band’s yowls and twangs and rumbling rhythms aren’t captured at all cleanly – a lot of the material is muddy, ultra-distorted and full of clicks and other incidental noise. But it’s all assembled in a way that makes total sense for the band and their surreally swampy vision. Évohé Bègue is a welcome reminder that there is no such thing as objectively ‘good’ sound, there is only what works.
Sunburned Hand Of The ManNimbusThree Lobed
It’s only taken them a good 30 years but they’ve finally done it. Sunburned Hand Of The Man have made an alarmingly listenable album. Don’t get me wrong. Michael Ball won’t be airing any of these tunes as the newly appointed host of Radio 2’s Sunday Love Songs. ‘Ishkabibble Magoo’ could get played on the folk show, mind. That one’s adapted from the Franklin’s Mint repertoire of revisiting founding member Phil Franklin. He also sings ‘Lily Thin’ which is inspired by Sun City Girls’ version of an old Younes Megri song. And if you’d told me it was performed by SCG’s own Alan Bishop (aka Alvarius B), I’d have been fooled.
Suburban LawnsBabyRubellan
Although this later, more dance-oriented material, from LA-based punks Suburban Lawns was included on Futurismo’s 2018 album reissue, that quickly went out of print, with copies currently fetching close to £100 on Discogs. Those tracks were omitted from Superior Viaduct’s 2021 reissue, leaving some of the Lawns’ best material largely unheard by contemporary audiences until now. Produced by IRS Records’ Richard Mazda, who also worked with Wall of Voodoo, The Fall and The Birthday Party, the EPs five tracks are all noticeably longer than the two-minute numbers that comprise their debut LP. Like their earlier material, the Lawns’ brilliant female vocalist, Su Tissue (Susan McLane) sings on all the best tracks and arguably should have sung on all of them. ‘Flavour Crystals’ is the pick of the bunch, an infectious, loping dub-like bass, spacious with Tissue’s echoing vocal and a cascade of tinkling ivories, this still sounds fresh over forty years later. ‘Baby’ and ‘Cowboy’ are great too – the former a tight, rhythmic loop of rattling percussion and Tissue’s uber cool, laconic vocal, and the latter (at 4.30 by far the longest track they would ever record) a gorgeous, dream-like haze shot through with her largely wordless vocalisations. These tracks really deserve the attention of post punk fans who might have missed them until now.
FauneDes FantômesStandard In-Fi
Faune are a duo of Jacques Puech and Guilhem Lacroux from the ever-brilliant French folk scene that has been delivering some of my favourite records of the last few years. Like trad folk sharpened on a knife block; like medieval troubadours who’ve heard Desertshore; like the cover to Airs & Graces crossed with Henry Flynt. While you’re in this cosmos, make sure you also check out this recent release from the same label by Johana Beaussart – a strange and wonderful narrative song suite that sounds little like anything else.
Sunna MargrétFinger On TongueNo Salad
Icelandic artist Sunna Margrét knows how to experiment in texture. On the songwriter and producer’s debut album, Finger On Tongue, she explores different ways to distort her voice and instruments as free floating elements that somehow still end up in each other’s orbit. From the way Margrét layers her vocals across tracks to the multilayered backgrounds she builds with synths to varied resonances she pulls from the percussion, every song is woven as a slightly different fabric.
Imperial ValleyIVFolded Time
The fourth outing for Richard Skelton’s Imperial Valley project continues the artist’s focus on ‘projective ethnography’, which has something to do with ‘imaginary’ field recordings that are supposed to conjure some aspect of depression-era America. IV is comprised of a single track, ‘This Machine and Power Age’, thirty-eight minutes of foreboding, gloomy drones dragged roughly through a black terrain. It’s a far more acoustically-minded work than its three predecessors, preferring to eke out despair from the glacially-drawn strings of a violin or cello, sharp edges lost to a fashionable din of reverb and delay.
