39.
South African experimentalists SPAZA sound equal parts incantation and cosmic message, with shades of Arthur Russell in their rolling congas and staccato strings. A trip, for sure.SpazaSPAZAMushroom Hour Half Hour
38.
Shellac of North America played their first Peel Session in 1994, three months before their first album, At Action Park, was released on Touch And Go. Of the four songs they played for BBC radio, only ‘Crow’ made it onto the debut, with ‘Canada’ and ‘Disgrace’ ending up on Terraform in 1998 and ‘Spoke’ only surfacing on Excellent Italian Greyhound in 2007. The second part of the album is more of an honorary Peel Session, given that it is an eight-track live album recorded in front of an audience at Studio 4 of Maida Vale. According to Ken Garner’s very useful book The Peel Sessions, after the DJ died unexpectedly in October 2004, Rob Da Bank hosted his show for the rest of the year, “using Peel’s already planned running orders, and already commissioned or recorded sessions” which included this blistering December 1 set. The band dedicated the session “and probably the rest of our career” to the DJ. The undoubted highlight is a strident but poignant ‘The End Of Radio’, complete with alternate lyric: “John Peel was a hell of a man.”ShellacThe End Of RadioTouch & Go
37.
Spanish band Altarage revel in the maelstrom of their chaotic metal, and their third album is a swirling pool of noise you’ll never escape. ‘Urn’ takes us on a journey of discovery, beginning on a calm note before the silence is broken to reveal an inner horror, with vocals dredged from the very pits of hell. ‘Hieroglyphic Certainty’ pulls us into the abyss with fiery guitars, and its scant running time is unnerving: there’s the nagging thought that this terror will never end, and Altarage play with this feeling deftly, creating a moment of relief before dragging us back into the whirlpool of horror.AltarageThe Approaching RoarSeason Of Mist
36.
Coming quickly off the back of 2018 album Sweetener, thank u, next finds Ariana Grande delivering further on that previous LP’s promise. Swapping the balladeering and guest features of past records, thank u, next feels more carefree and vibrant, with Grande linking up with frequent production collaborators Max Martin and Tommy Brown and delivering some of the year’s best pop music in the process.Ariana Grandethank u, nextRepublic Records
35.
The music on Plasma Splice Trifle is relaxed, confident and expertly assembled. The three musicians play cheerfully with a roster of wild and cosmic sounds – to their evident pleasure. But the album is more than an exercise in mutual admiration. It channels uninhibited psychedelic joy directly into the listener’s head. Astral Social Club and Grumbling Fur have experienced a meeting of minds, and it is a pleasure to enter their collective headspace.Astral Social Club Grumbling Fur Time Machine OrchestraPlasma Splice TrifleVHF Records
34.
With the frantic call and response of ‘Habeebee Hooa Jooani’, the heavy gothic rock of ‘Mabbrooka’ and the ten and a half minute dancefloor banger ‘Galoo Sahara Laleet El Aeed’ that fuses Banga chants to Depeche Mode-like darkwave and trippy acid techno, the music of Iffriqyya Electrique is a thing in itself. Neither post-punk with world music textures nor any attempt at an authentic representation of pure Banga, it’s a genuine collaboration between French and Tunisian musicians from very different cultures, creating something new while finding exciting common ground.Ifriqiyya ElectriqueLaylet El BooreeGlitterbeat Records
33.
While the higher end of the guitars and electronics ring in your ears, the bass notes are hitting at your central nervous system, stimulating your fight or flight response. It’s not to say that the music sounds panicky, but Four Bibles has energy. It has frazzled electric undercurrents, as on ‘(Decompression)’. Some of the tracks, like ‘Confession Bay’ and ‘Babes of Plague’, combine that frazzled energy with traditional enough song structures to play at being pop songs that could blot you out with noise at a hairpin turn.Hey ColossusFour BiblesALTER
32.
Anima Mysterium makes you engage with its cryptic nature without necessarily giving you any answers. Yugen Blakrok isn’t trying to sell you the myth or the mysticism of astrology et al, it’s just a sphere she exists within; it’s the space she views the world from. She doesn’t explain the codes, she only presents them. And she subverts and mutates rather than pandering to expectations of what a TDE-cosigned rapper ought to sound like. In that way, she stands in a lane disinterested in the fads or fashions of the west – and she’s all the more intriguing for it.Yugen BlakrokAnima MysteriumIapetus Records
31.
The result of ‘Cuz I Love You’, ‘Exactly How I Feel’ featuring Gucci Mane – a welcome surprise – and ‘Better In Colour’ was me pretending I was in a modern rendition of Dreamgirls, hairbrush and all. A match made in thicc heaven, ‘Tempo’ features hip hop royalty Missy Elliot, two of the most notable artists to preach self acceptance, telling negative individuals to do one while twerking. “If you see a hater, tell ‘em quit” is something we all need to hear and practice.LizzoCuz I Love YouNice Life
30.
An exercise in rigorous minimalism, Environment employs a necessarily limited palette. After ‘Act’, you’ll have heard nearly every sort of sound, tempo, and approach you can expect to. What saves the album from being unbearably austere or monotonous is the way MY DISCO attack with nearly every single sound they employ. If not exactly violent, each carries with it the threat of violence, and with that comes tension.My DiscoEnvironmentDownwards
29.
On Pale Bloom, Davachi returns to her hometown without luggage and pays a heartfelt homage to the revered teacher who enlightened her. She doesn’t do it with an ambitious postmodern masterpiece nor a grand symphonic tribute, but alone on the vast emptiness of the stage. Just a soul and a piano.Sarah DavachiPale BloomW.25TH / Superior Viaduct
28.
Teeth of the Sea have excelled themselves on this highly rewarding record. Their collaborators – Chlöe Herington and Katharine Gifford as well as Magaletti, and the production skills of Erol Alkan – has given them a new polish, a sophistication, even. While there was never any doubting their psychedelic influences and their way with a groove, Wraith offers something more. Full of variety and unpredictability, like the best science fiction it maps out a dreamworld of our times, a tonic against the deathly thoughts of the small hours.Teeth of the SeaWraithRocket
27.
Elsa Hewitt’s tracks are like images of the floating world. Blissed out and effervescent, synthesized marimbas and the plucked strings of infinite lyres cascade against fragments of voice, more breath than tone. Programme percussion, like a myriad tiny machines in intricate concert, whirrs and clatters up close in the mix, lending everything in its path an inexorable, unquenchable bounce. You could call Citrus Paradisi vaporwave – it certainly is both vaporous and wavey – but there’s none of the arched brow and conceited pose of that meme-cum-microgenre of the late 00s. Instead this feels more like bubblegum pop from an alternative timeline in which Seefeel and Ryo Nagamatsu were on Top of the Pops every week.Elsa HewittCitrus ParadisiERH
26.
The album’s closing tracks – ‘Inertia’ and ‘Vertigo’ – push the LP back into the unknown. The shadowy vocals of the latter suggest a step away from the gloom that runs through much of the album’s first half, but the extended runtime of the record’s closer creates a kind of auditory purgatory, fluctuating between moments of redemption and retribution. A deep and engrossing listen, Devil’s Dance is unapologetically murky.OssiaDevil’s DanceBlackest Ever Black
25.
In Eton Alive we hear one of the finest political lyricists of the time turning inwards as he still follows a rich and empathetic way, dealing with highly relatable issues around the terrible behaviour patterns that are imposed on men by the patriarchy as much as they are on anyone else. This is exactly the sort of conversation that we need to hear men having in this day and age as we work on reconfiguring what masculinity is and can be. As Williamson has it, once again in ‘Negative Script’, “it’s hard work being kind”.Sleaford ModsEton AliveExtreme Eating
24.
John Cage always said Christian Wolff was the most ‘musical’ of the New York School experimentalists. This two disc set from Sub Rosa reveals the Burdocks composer at his most tender and reflective. Played with great sensitivity by Apartment House’s Philip Thomas, these twenty-three mostly short, bruised fragments toy with space and silence, melody and memory like a kitten with a ball of yarn. The influence of Erik Satie is acknowledged by several of the titles and it is with that distinctive mischief and elegant wistfulness of the great velvet gentleman of Arcueil that Wolff leads us, teasingly, across the piano keyboard. Best played with the windows open to mingle with the street noise.Christian WolffPreludes, Variations, Studies And Incidental MusicSub Rosa
23.
The one-time Camberwell Composers Collective co-founder has produced an electronic soundtrack of dizzying intensity, like EDM with all the macho drops and pumping bass stripped out, still left with all of its thrills, its high-wire fervour, its maximalist delirium. This music plunges the audience immediately and forcefully into Kayla’s emotional world.Anna MeredithEighth Grade OSTColumbia
22.
Treanor embraces bass and breaks, often with greater gusto than his first three 12-inches might have led one to expect. He is a greatly skilled programmer who walks that thinnest of lines – music that confounds obvious ideas of what dance music can be, while still being possible to actually dance to – with nous comparable to Aphex or Squarepusher, or fringe footworkers such as Jlin and DJ Paypal.Rian TreanorATAXIAPlanet Mu
21.
MSYLMA’s voice drips with sadness, anger, despair and hope, each line delivered in a wash of reverb and echo to make matters all the more otherworldly. To delve into Dhil-un Taht Shajarat Al-Zaqum is to submerge oneself into a dream world, drifting along or swallowed whole by Myslma’s bold combination of ragged electronics, subtle melodies and impassioned delivery. On ‘Li-Kul-i Murad-in Hijaa’, this explodes into a cosmic vortex as free-form drums, crackling guitar and buzzing bass all collide like a hurricane sweeping down on a house.MSYLMADhil-un Taht Shajarat Al-ZaqumHalcyon Veil
20.
It might be tempting to label International Teachers Of Pop escapist, but that does them a deep disservice. This is a deeply English-sounding record, and a clear product of a country that’s sinking further into despair; just because they don’t make some lame attempt to capture our complex national decline, that doesn’t mean they’re burying their heads in the sand. The joy on this record is a defiant one, a call to dance in the face of depression, in the knowledge that though nothing can be fixed, we can still have an excellent time when we all get together. ‘After Dark’ begins the record with an invocation – you’re fed up, it tells us, but the Teachers Of Pop are having a party.
