Sound the trumpets. These are the Quietus albums of the year, as voted for by staff, columnists and regular writers of this site. It’s an absolute peach of a list. My PayPal account is already sobbing tremulously at the thought of the number of digital downloads, tapes, CDs and vinyl LPs it’s going to have to process because of this bountiful inventory. If time is on your side, do spend a few hours listening to entries that are unfamiliar to you – I can guarantee you’ll find a batch of records that will turn your head and at least a handful that will permanently penetrate your heart and mind.
I went out for a coffee with my girlfriend this week, simply for the pleasure of sharing a slice of cake and having a chat. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d been afforded the luxury of communicating at length without the sole aim being to discuss fears regarding elderly relatives, finances, employment, schooling, health, climate, COVID and so on. After a pleasant 40 minutes we both said, “We should do this more often!” But I think we’re both aware that circumstances are stacked against it happening again for the time being so fraught is the current moment.
During this oasis of a conversation my girlfriend asked me, “What’s going on in the world of music?”
And boy, what a question it was. From my Terminator-style drop down menu – which also included “Steve Albini’s commendable but way overdue mea culpa”; “COVID’s exposure of damaging fault lines in DIY communities”; “The recent failure of the Spotify cloaking device revealing it to actually be Titan’s Eternal-Deviant warlord Thanos” – I selected, “Adele versus independent music.”
Despite us coming at the subject from pretty much opposing corners, after a few minutes of nuanced debate we found that actually we were pretty much in agreement with one another where it counted, unlike, it seems, literally everyone else who discussed it on my Twitter feed. Constructive solutions were actually relatively easy to locate (although maybe less so to implement, with neither of us being on the board of directors of Columbia Records). Thinking back on it afterwards, this exchange reminded me of the Quietus itself. What Luke and I and the rest of the Quietus team have with you, the reader, is a bona fide relationship; many of you have been with us for 13 years now. And those who are reading this chart for the first time? Well, you’re just as welcome, all you need to possess in order to be part of this family is an open mind – there is literally no other bar to you joining in. It also made me think about how lucky we are to still have this space to encourage serious, nuanced, cool-headed debate about culture, as I’ve never felt further away from the polarising rage sauna of Twitter or the atemporal, amoral dunce-churn of Facebook. Truly independent digital spaces for the dissemination of information and the promotion of sincere debate about music and art that aren’t in some way influenced by commercial interests are an absolute rarity in 2021. When Luke and I started this site in 2008, the field felt overcrowded with peers, rivals and well-established sites; today there is barely anyone else left but us as a truly independent digital voice supporting the international counterculture at this level, such has been the vicious erosion felt by our industry over the last few years.
To me, the site turning 13 is a big deal because it symbolises the fact we have left childhood behind and moved into adulthood. I hope, now more than ever, it’s clear that we’re in this for the long haul and for the right reasons. Luke and I have grown up with the site, we have learned how to do this in real time and in public, but it’s a process that isn’t yet over. I want to look forward to the next 13 years, to how much further we can progress, all of the new culture we will discover and support, not to mention all of the challenges this will bring. I wanted to shout loudly about all of this on our actual birthday, September 1, but couldn’t as the site crashed for the entire 24 hours. Sadly, it was only the first of several total outages that month. What should have been a joyful occasion for us was marred by high existential anxiety; for the first time since our inception we hadn’t been able to publish new writing due to the extreme age and instability of the website.
While the subscription model we introduced just over a year ago stopped us from having to shut down immediately and allowed us to navigate the sudden and near complete collapse of advertising revenue, we still face an even larger existential threat due to antiquated technology and a long failing website. It turns out that you can’t run a title like the Quietus as if it were a fanzine and that actually we needed full time tech support all along, something we were never able to afford. It’s too late for that now anyhow, our current site has long since passed the point of being repairable. All we can do is to keep our fingers crossed that it will keep on going for the time being, patching it up and rebooting it when it goes offline, hoping that each new outage isn’t ‘the big one’, while we desperately try to raise money in order to finance a new home for us and our huge archive. And for this we really need your help.
In 2022, we need to double the number of people who subscribe to the site in order for us to survive as a fully independent site. It would mean a great deal to us if you would consider signing up today. It’s not a ‘money for nothing’ deal; the perks are fantastic and substantial (there are up to 60 of them per year!) and include exclusive music, essays, podcasts, playlists and newsletters. And if you sign up before Christmas, the top tier is currently nearly 40% off in price!
As the site comes of age we are committed to nurturing serious essay writing that has clearly defined creative and practical aims (and please don’t take this to be a polemic; we’ll be announcing a series of high profile investigative features in the new year). But on top of this we have committed to publishing even more joyful writing, more writing with a strong authorial voice, more weird writing that skilfully unseats or unsettles the reader in psychological terms in order to make them look at well loved cultural artefacts as if for the first time ever, more writing that simply thrills, and more writing that skilfully defines emerging scenes with new producers globally. Also, we definitely want to publish more funny writing as it feels like elsewhere, every aspect of music writing has to be ultra-serious lest a joke be misconstrued or, more likely, perniciously interpreted as being problematic.
We understand that these goals are difficult to achieve; it has never been harder for younger writers to give expression to their unique voice. There is an amplification of the anxiety created by BTL culture, which has all but the most iron-nerved writers on edge and clamping down on their most creative tendencies, bleaching themselves out of the story in order to (notionally) protect themselves from social media opprobrium… and I would include myself among their number some of the time. But we need to make a stand against this poor habit of second guessing in journalism, as it has injected an almost cosmically bland level of faux objectivity into modern writing.
Here at the Quietus we lament the rise of a situation where the noisiest clout-seekers with views held in extreme ill faith; bitter over the hill mansplainers; the disingenuous who luxuriate in elective incomprehension, leaping to the most uncharitable reading of every sentence they encounter; disgusting racially motivated cranks; those who have made it their mission to threaten the safety and peace of mind of members of any marginalised group; the thuggishly entitled cults surrounding pop titans dangerously enraged by anything less than a 100% positive Metacritic score; those who cannot see any kind of beautiful painting without dragging a filthy thumbprint across it, and so on, are allowed to guide the discourse surrounding music to a frightening degree.
And with your help we will continue to offer an alternative
John Doran
This chart was compiled by John Doran and built by Patrick Clarke and Christian Eede. Ballots were taken from Robert Barry, Jaša Bužinel, Patrick Clarke, John Doran, Christian Eede, Noel Gardner, Ella Kemp, Fergal Kinney, Sean Kitching, Anthea Leyland, Jennifer Lucy Allan, Peter Margasak, David McKenna, JR Moores, Eoin Murray, Stephanie Phillips, Luke Turner, Kez Whelan and Daryl Worthington
