Trying to instil some order into my laptop’s filing system recently I came across the document that John Doran and I put together when we were pitching what became The Quietus 15 years ago this month. It’s quite an odd experience, looking at these paragraphs of SWOT analysis, daft ideas (whatever happened to the planned 12 Inches Of Joy feature?), and determination thrashed out in a kitchen to think just how much, and how little, has changed.
Web 2.0, which we were setting out our stall in opposition to, barely exists in the form that it did then. In our pitch there’s no mention of social media. However, scanning through certain parts stand out: “we will ignore the received wisdom that less is more,” and our plans for in-depth articles and going against the consensus – I like to think that hasn’t changed one iota. Back then, we had no idea if we’d ever get the gig running the site. When we lost our initial funding in September 2008 and carried on as an independent publication, we didn’t think we’d last the year, let alone still be here for another 15. On a personal level, it is quite strange to feel that I’ve now devoted over a third of my time on earth to The Quietus. It has been a life-changing experience, but a tricky one too as we’ve tried to shepherd the site through the many crises that have befallen the media in that time, from the collapse in online ad revenue to the fact that we can’t afford to employ a tech person to modernise the site.
Fifteen years is a long time, and my relationship with music has changed completely in that period. I’ve been struck this year by a sense that as a community of music lovers, many of us have been thinking about our relationship with sound. The re-entry from COVID-19 is ongoing as we all try to work out our comfort zones when it comes to live music and clubs. The cost of living crisis has had a huge impact on what we can afford to do and buy. I’ve also noticed this reflectiveness in some of the best writing about music in 2022. It was in these pages, when Marc Burrows wrote a brilliant Black Sky Thinking article about his weekend at Glastonbury festival, dissecting artistic snobbery and our changing relationship to music as we age. Jude Rogers’ The Sound of Being Human was the essential music book of the year for me, a fantastic deep dive into the psychology, neuroscience and, most importantly of all, personal relationship we all have with music at different points of our lives. Reading Jude’s book was an inspiration as I re-examined my own connection to music as I sink deeper into middle age – up to the knees now, I reckon.
The music industry’s vampiric obsession with youth, and the assumption that music is a ‘youth culture’, can present problems as you get older as you perhaps tend to find that the music you are really connecting with is made by more ‘senior’ artists. If you’re not careful, it can be tempting to fall into cynicism, or an incarnation of LCD Soundsystem’s ‘Losing My Edge’, moaning that things aren’t what they were. Jude’s book emphasised that music is a vital, living essence that changes as we change and what we look for from it evolves. Her words became a key to taking some of the pressure off, to delving into records old and new alike in a different way, taking them at face value, do I like this, or do I not? Does it move me? How does it speak to me now, in this moment, in 2022?
Happily, this has coincided with yet another mast year for the album as a form. I struggled to get my list down from about 30 records as I was filing my personal chart to compiler wizard John. What’s striking looking through the full top 100 is that while some of the artists featured were barely out of nappies when we started tQ 15 years ago, others were then hitting their supposed peak, but have continued to evolve since to great reward. Others were in a period of hiatus or creative doldrums, but have come back with some of their finest work. As ever, we do not seek a defining cultural narrative, a fool’s errand in the current moment. Instead, this list is an explosion of colour, inventiveness and joy. We hope that you enjoy listening to all of this as much as we have.
As we approach our fifteenth anniversary in 2023, I hope that we can continue to keep bringing you the best writing on these 100 artists, and of course so many more to come. This, as ever, comes with a caveat. It is still incredibly tough keeping an independent publication going at the moment. You probably don’t need me to tell you about the various crises currently impacting everything we all love, from cuts to arts funding and vinyl production, to live music attendance numbers still being low. All of this has a severe impact on tQ’s ability to continue in its current form, which is why we are now almost entirely reliant on our subscribers via the Steady platform. The Low Culture and Sound & Vision tier subscribers can now read this 100 best albums of 2022 while listening to huge playlists of all the music featured inside. We’re currently trying to tempt more of you to join them with a special offer of a free month of the top two tiers, which will give you access to our archive of specially commissioned long read essays, podcasts, playlists and special newsletters and, for the Sound & Vision top tier, three exclusive releases by artists we love – find out what you get here, and sign up for the free month here to help us keep on Black Sky Thinking.
Will there be another fifteen years of tQ? With your support, we can make it happen and keep telling the stories of the music we love, whatever age you are. For now, we hope you find music that means the world to you now in the current moment from our chart and, as ever, please do support the artists by purchasing from our partners at Norman Records. Thank you for reading, and keep your eyes peeled for the charts for reissues, tracks and from all our columnists in the coming weeks. All the best to you for the rest of the year.
Luke Turner, November 2022
This chart was compiled by John Doran, and built by Patrick Clarke and Christian Eede. Ballots were taken from Robert Barry, Bernie Brooks, Jaša Bužinel, Patrick Clarke, Christian Eede, Noel Gardner, Ella Kemp, Sean Kitching, Jakub Knera, Anthea Leyland, Jennifer Lucy Allan, Peter Margasak, David McKenna, JR Moores, Mariam Rezaei, Alex Rigotti, Kez Whelan and Daryl Worthington
Autopsy sound rejuvenated musically as well as sonically on
Morbidity Triumphant, with the album offering some of the most ravenous material they’ve dished out in years. It may not reinvent the Autopsy sound, but it’s refined it to a diamond-sharp degree; the riffing and deranged lead guitar are both consistently imaginative, writhing around in a surreal and unpredictable manner and making faster tracks like ‘Final Frost’ or the barnstorming ‘Maggots In The Mirror’ sound utterly feral in execution. New bassist Greg Wilkinson (of Brainoil fame, not to mention Deathgrave, Graves At Sea etc) already sounds right at home, bringing a powerful amount of low-end to lumbering, doomy cuts like ‘Flesh Strewn Temple’ and ‘The Voracious One’, or the deliciously Iommic riff that closes ‘Born In Blood’. It’s not only impressive that Autopsy are still here 35 years after their inception, but still managing to release records that can easily stand up to their cherished classics. A triumph indeed.
Though Digga D’s
Noughty By Nature throws together delicious R&B licks and samples Robert Miles’ ’90s trance classic ‘Children’ (!), gospel singing and ’00s hip hop breaks, it feels profoundly of the now. Outlining a new chapter in the UK drill rapper’s life,
Noughty By Nature embraces his hometown of London while also throwing in guest appearances from Liverpudlian MC Still Brickin’ and US rappers B-Lovee and Moneybagg Yo. Full of energy and passion, and finished off with polished production and sharp lyrics, Digga more than proves his place amongst his US and UK contemporaries, whilst staying true to himself.
More than heavy, the sole collision of Cheb Terro’s rubber-tongued, staccato flow and DJ Die Soon’s venomous grind goes hard as hell. Rapping mostly in Arabic, Terro’s occasional English outbursts come across as emphatic punctuation – exclamation points in the form of ‘FUCK MONEY’ and ‘FUCK THE POLICE’ that more than get the point across for those of us who don’t speak his native language. Released a year after Terro’s untimely passing, there’s a real sense of snuffed talent here. The dude was special, his chemistry with Die Soon equally so. Maybe I’m selfish, but I want volume after volume of this. Thankfully, this slim LP is nothing if not endlessly replayable – an essential transmission from a truly unique artist gone too soon.
American Rituals is about as up my strasse as it’s possible to be – bare-bones vocal constructions and vernacular post-punk influenced by deep listening, and minimalism, basically. Consider that this might appeal to fans of Steve Reich, Michelle Mercure and Ut, and you should start getting the picture of the sound world contained. There’s something deeply foundational about the instruments Cheri Knight uses, and the lexicon in particular – primary colours, prime numbers – that assemble the tracks’ structures. There’s also nothing extraneous. Knight made the tracks on this album, which have previously been scattered among a variety of compilations, in the early ‘80s. At this time she was part of the lesser-known DIY scene around Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, where she studied composition. She worked with Pauline Oliveros, performance artist Linda Montano, and later in the alt-country band Blood Oranges, before moving into flower farming.
Dale Cornish genuinely surprised me here, with acoustic guitar-playing and singing folded in among the thickets of his signature electronics. I love surprises, so this is probably my favourite Cornish album, ever. I particularly love the framing – because what is traditional music of south London in this day and age? Cornish’s answer is this, his own collection of urban folk music – harsh electronics; the sound of clubs from the other end of an alleyway; bedroom monologues. It works best if you think of it in terms of Harry Smith’s archetypes for his
American Anthology Of Folk Music, i.e. there are ballads (the stuttering finger picking and slow drawl of ‘Norman Lewis’), social music (the click n’ slap electro minimalism of ‘Great Storm’) and songs (the radar pulse and dry half-rap of ‘My Geography’).
On
The Swan, Nwando Ebizie mines her own Nigerian identity, and in particular being Igbo, but uses this as a portal to further discovery, with references to neuroscience, Black Atlantic rituals, and science fiction, querying strictures we might find ourselves smarting under.
The Swan is an act of reclamation – of rituals and collective ceremonies that are being corroded by rampant capitalism and an internet culture that presents as empowering, but actually trades on fragmentary rhythms. And fragmentary rhythms are all over this record, with ‘Battle Cry”s brass plunging us into a whirlpool of collective experience, picking us up and sweeping us along to ‘I Seduce’, with its darkly satirical narrative of girls from a future society stumbling upon the “manosphere,” wondering what women must have done to be so hated, with a sense of rage crackling above muffled, driving percussion.
The notion that 50 Foot Wave exist as a channel for music deemed ‘too weird’ for Throwing Muses is one that persists in writing about them, but is really rather misleading. 2020’s
Sun Racket deployed a similarly rough-edged sound and largely mid-tempo songs, but
Black Pearl ratchets up the noise element a little further, creating a hazy, heat-saturated and impressionistic sound world that is aptly expressed in the album’s cover with its lush vegetation encircling the sky as the sun begins to rise. This album is too much of a piece to be picking out favourites, yet it is also one whose subtleties really reveal themselves on subsequent listens. Go on, dive in. Soak up the heat, discover what’s hidden underneath the overgrown foliage. You know you want to.
Bringing together Tangerine Dream-like, Krautrock synth odysseys and nods to the ambient and jazzy D&B of LTJ Bukem’s Good Looking Records in the mid-to-late ’90s, Texan producer Gi Gi’s latest album was said to be pieced together through a patchwork sampling process. Cuts like ‘Got Away Dub’ and opener ‘Dawn Song’ are replete with colourful, Balearic goodness, while ‘Two Ones’ finds natural bedfellows with the ambient breakbeat and jungle currently being pushed by artists from the 3XL and West Mineral Ltd. stables like Exael and Pontiac Streator.
On her debut album for Stones Throw,
Maloo, Canadian artist Maylee Todd delivers science-fiction soul music that borrows from undersung electronic greats. She rolls out a soft rug of synth tones to croon placatingly atop, the same cute sounds that throwback new-age artists were working with. Tracks like ‘Age Of Energy’ and ‘Tiny Chiffon’ make the hypnotic world of Hiroshi Yoshimura more bubbly without losing its sense of whimsy, and the latter portion of the album gives way to Mort Garson-like synth calligraphy.
The appeal of
Hellfire is that there is simply so much to it. Littered with alluring antagonists, absurd anti-heroes and a byronic narrator to match, it’s a joy to find yourself lost in the Grand Guignol of the London group’s latest opus. Each track Geordie Greep pens is a tilted vignette, an obscure and compelling short story – if
Hellfire be the modern depiction of eternal damnation, it certainly retains the absurdity that it has had for all time. But perhaps most importantly, musically, the album is a righteous maelstrom, a demon-stration of what this group can do when they allow themselves to be let off the leash. It’s not just the skronking US Maple guitars, the cathartic squawking Aylerisms of the saxophone breakdowns, or the sheer mania of the best rhythm section operating in the world today. It’s also the softer touches too: caresses of slide guitar and piano trills that colour in the album’s quietest moments – the devil is all too often in the detail.
Loraine James pays homage to the very nearly criminally overlooked work of late composer Julius Eastman on
Building Something Beautiful For Me, an electronic music album that continues his radical, minimal legacy, while Anglifying some of his messages. Like Eastman, James often stitches social activism into her music. Her album
For You And I (tQ’s 2019 Album of the Year) was a grimy, glitching pressure release of skittish beats and underdog anger.
Building Something Beautiful For Me is a gentler listen by comparison, with some anger still there – just distilled into something more gleaming and triumphant. Her hypnotising chimes recall the holographic, mesmerising dream loops of Oneohtrix Point Never, while her flattened, low key vocals and loops for days conjure up solo tracks from another working class provocateur, Hackney’s Dean Blunt.
Gosha Hniu, Staraya Derevnya’s driving force, enlisted the musical aptitude of ten accomplices for the group’s eighth release,
Boulder Blues. These contributions range from drums (Andrea Serafino) and bass clarinet (Yoni Silver), to choir (Dasha and Masha Gerzon), “objects” (Hniu) and, the Bergman-referencing credit of “cries and whispers” for Galya Chikiss. This ought to give some clue as to the tone: it’s not the poe-faced approach of some experimental compositions, there seems to be genuine joy in the performances of these merry pranksters. Musicians often speak of being conduits for sounds.
Boulder Blues appears to have emerged out of something deep, timeless and possibly mineral.
With the exception of ‘Flight To Sodom’, which is four minutes of psychedelic electronic (heartbeat beats; delayed keyboards, choir-like choral bits), each song on
Regards is less a song than a collection of moments which generally fade into or out of those bookending it. In this way, the album is a faithful take on Bogusław Schaeffer’s avant-garde compositions, and the album picks up where Matmos’ last record, the three-hour
The Consuming Flame, left off. Sure,
Regards clocks in at a relatively brisk 40-ish minutes, but it’s not 40 minutes of neatly wrapped two-minute Ramones songs. Instead, it’s 40 minutes of songs like ‘Flashcube Fog Wares’, a shifting phantasmagoria of mechanistic feedback that sounds like having one’s brain pulled out through one’s ears. Which I mean as a compliment.
The lack of connection over the last two years has clearly marked Iceboy Violet’s debut mixtape. The unsettling distortion and death-like tempo on ‘Atone//Blankface’ is drenched in desolation, as is the skittering and minimalistic, Space Afrika-produced ‘Urban Ambiance’. The isolation goes much further back than the pandemic though: the mixtape delves into issues of race – like the loneliness of growing up in a predominantly white area as Violet did as a teenager in Halifax – and art too: when you’re making music the mainstream can’t define or describe yet in a hinterland of rap, electronica, grime and noise, where is your place? That place is still undefinable and, as you’d expect from Violet’s work to date, that’s just how they want it.
Wildly prolific cornetist Rob Mazurek has reduced his output in recent years and it seems to have brought him a renewed focus. His recent work is as good as, or better than, anything he’s done previously. This is the second album with the quartet responsible for excellent 2019 recording
Desert Encrypts Vol. 1, with pianist Kris Davis, bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten and drummer Chad Taylor. The top-notch group sound even more locked in here, operating as a collective to support a riveting consolidation of ideas and strengths by Mazurek. His experiments with wailing vocals, for example, have been unbalanced in the past, but here they make all of the sense in the world, as an extension of ecstatic horn blowing. But the real power is in his jagged yet indelible compositions which form a suite dedicated to his late father, who passed in 2016.
With
Targala, la maison qui n’en est pas une, experimental folk artist Emmanuelle Parrenin has completed the ‘house’ trilogy that began with 1977’s
Maison Rose. Released in March, it deserves a lot more attention than it has had so far, because it is at the very least the equal of
Maison Rose. Were it just to feature the billowing, raga-ish folk of ‘La Rêvelinère’ and ‘Entre Moi’, which are woven from the same flaxen thread as much of the 1977 material, it would already be a wonder. But there are also signs that the techno experiments over the years (which include a collaboration with Etienne Jaumet, who also appears on the album) have left their mark – there’s an increase in bass weight in places, while ‘Delyade’ is run through with a steady synth pulse – and she gives free reign to her psychedelic impulses on ‘Epinette Noire’, with its spiralling sax and backwards-sucked percussion.
Following last year’s
Rings, Nikolaienko has recorded an album that’s like an archaeological excavation in musical terms, referring to prehistory and its imaginary soundtrack, as well as visits to a wild forest and a museum of curiosities. The aqueous electronic passages remind me of the achievements of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and the innovative solutions devised in the 80s by experimental studios in Cologne or Warsaw. Sometimes there are melodic outlines reminiscent of the hauntological expeditions and trance-like repetitions that can be found in early Sun Araw records (‘Tryglodydes’). Alchemical combinations of musique concrète, samples, synthetic parts with fairy-tale melodies (‘Muzak For Mesozoic Showreel’), and sound-art (‘Dark-Archeo’) produce a varied, fascinating and original music narrative.
Scottish producer Hudson Mohawke delivered stellar LP
Cry Sugar whilst his classic track ‘Cbat’ was simultaneously being spun into a viral ‘perfect-rhythm-for-a-shag’ TikTok-athon. From sexy maximalist synths and expansive orchestral landscapes to donk riffs, vinyl trickery and slippery hip hop beats, there’s very little
Cry Sugar doesn’t play with. It popped up as a solid soundtrack to many festivals over the summer, neatly riding the line between appealing to Gen Z EDM DJs, with just enough cheeky business for sample snitches, and heads that remember ‘wonky’ from the first time round.
Although gently augmented, Manja Ristić’s field recordings are the focal point on
Him, Fast Sleeping, Soon He Found In Labyrinth Of Many A Round, Self-Rolled the title inspired by a Gustav Dore illustration for Milton’s Paradise Lost. Every sound she chooses has weight, it matters, and asks us to contemplate what it means to us. Rasping groans and whines, ominous feet in the gravel, on ‘Jarbol’ the clank of a cable hitting a flagpole alongside a seismograph troubling bass drone. Her assemblages of nature and electronics are doomy, they feel like they darken the room. A heaviness akin to staring into the night, triggering all the self- and world-reflection that comes with it.
Brian Leeds’ debut on Anthony Naples and Jenny Slattery’s ever-reliable Incienso label, Plonk, is something of a departure from the ambient music explored on his last album. It’s also certainly not a return to the dubbed-out, lo-fi house music, infamously tagged as ‘outsider house’, that came before it. Frequently eschewing easily definable 4×4 rhythmic patterns, or any kick drums at all for that matter, Plonk‘s ten tracks intersperse thrilling nods to trap and drill music with more placid moments, such as the helter-skelter, clanging synths of opener ‘Plonk I’. It’s the most wide-reaching entry in Leeds’ discography yet.
