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.
TylaTylaFax / Epic
Loaded with catchy, silky hooks and a sleek fusion of classic R&B, Afrobeats and South African amapiano, Tyla’s self-titled debut album is one of 2024’s most addictive pop records. In ‘Water’, it has one of the past year’s most ubiquitous chart singles, centred around the South African artist’s sensual vocals and the log drums that are an ever-present in amapiano music, and the hand of Sammy SoSo, that track’s producer, can be heard through much of this album, providing some additional gloss and unity to proceedings. Further singles like ‘Truth Or Dare’ and ‘Jump’ (featuring rappers Gunna and Skillibeng) already underlined that there’s far more to back up that initial breakout single’s promise, but burrow deeper into cuts like the gentle, sultry ‘On And On’ and the Tems-featuring self-empowerment anthem ‘No.1’, and it’s clear that Tyla’s magnetic personality is on full display throughout.
Lord SpikeheartThe AdeptHekalu
There’s no build up to the intensity on DUMA frontman Lord Spikeheart’s debut solo LP. It opens, with ’TVYM’ at full throttle, a supercharged pummel of noise and Spikeheart’s almighty howling scream. Over the next 12 tracks, which include collaborations with Scotch Rolex, Backxwash and more, the levels don’t drop a fraction as manic beats and sandpaper vocals coalesce into a wave of noise. Even when it slips back to lower tempos, there’s a heaviness to The Adept that hits like a sledgehammer.
MahtiMusiikki 3Riot Season
Following his botanically themed joint record with Circle, 2021’s Henki, Richard Dawson has now shuffled his way into one of their side-projects too, along with his partner and Hen Ogledd/Bulbils bandmate, Sally Pilkington. Which band wouldn’t be improved by adding those two musicians to the line-up? AC/DC? Sugababes? Run The Jewels? Answers on a postcard, please. Anyway, they join Jussi Lehtisalo and Tomi Leppänen from Circle, plus an ex-member of that group, Teemu Elo, and the kantele-playing academic Hannu Saha. ‘Brisahka’ is the gorgeous opening piece on which Dawson’s non-lexical falsetto floats on top of bubbling synth noise and tinkling strings. ‘Ruskoi’ is a touch darker thanks to the regular interruption of distorted thunderclaps and the way it grows more insistently pumping in the second half, almost like John Carpenter playing with Heldon. Chanted group vocals form the spine of the pastoral ‘Hof-falssi’. Again, Dawson can be heard wailing soulfully in the background. ‘Lippa’ provides a nice ambient ending to drift off to. Lovely stuff.
BroadcastSpell Blanket (Collected Demos 2006-2009)Warp
Spell Blanket is great. Not the record that you’d give to new listeners but, for devotees, a cathartic way to put a cap on the band even if it’s not quite the final release – a companion album of older demos, Distant Call, will follow in September. Still, as I said at the top, there’s also a degree of melancholy here. The band’s later works hit around the same time that hauntology was starting to become a thing that people were talking seriously about and Broadcast tapped into that same current, while never quite going down the purely retro “Who remembers lard and space hoppers?” route of some of the latter-day “h-word” artists. For all their mustier reference points, Broadcast were always a band who engaged with the present as well as the past, with Tender Buttons (itself a collection of tracks originally intended as demos to be filled out later) still hitting that sweet spot between retro-futuristic and actually-futuristic. There’s a sad irony, then, that Spell Blanket itself now feels a little like an artefact from a lost future or a dispatch from a parallel world.
Sleepytime Gorilla MuseumOf The Last Human BeingAvant Night
The first album in 17 years from Oakland-based, performance art-inclined, experimental rock troupe Sleepytime Gorilla Museum comes as a pleasant surprise. The band turn in their most varied yet integrated work to date, a fully realised sonic tapestry that unspools like a movie for the mind’s eye, demanding to be played from start to finish with each listen. The band still look like extras from Mad Max and their core sound (Art Bears-style RIO with metal, prog and industrial elements) is recognisably similar to past work, but what’s different this time around is how well all the pieces fit together, and the powerful emotional resonance these songs leave in their wake. Carla Kihlstedt’s beautiful vocals really come into their own here, contrasting perfectly with Nils Frykdahl’s metallic growl. Chamber music miniatures evoking freak show carnivals rub shoulders with industrialised folk drones (‘Silverfish’). Propulsive Sturm und Drang pieces (‘The Gift’) exist alongside dream-like prog-inflected soundscapes (‘Hush Hush’), wild post-apocalyptic almost funk (‘Save It’) and a possessed sounding cover of This Heat’s ‘S.P.Q.R.’. Perhaps best of all is ‘Old Grey Heron’, sung by bassist Dan Rathbun, its opening lyric, “After years of service and distinction, The Old Grey Heron hobbles toward extinction”, evoking a stirring, emotional response not present in the band’s earlier material, for this listener at least.
Skee MaskISS010Ilian Tape
ISS010 is an example of pure techno mastery. There’s been a lot of late 90s/early 00s-inspired techno music around in the past year or two, but nothing comes close to how Skee Mask takes the tropes forged by Jeff Mills, Basic Channel, Ben Sims and other forerunners and fulfils their further untapped potential in unexpected ways. The grooves, pads, chord progressions, even the claps sound familiar, but these tracks could hardly have been produced 25 years ago. It’s their depth and multilayered nature that give them away. Comparable older techno productions with more treble lack the impact and HD quality of Skee Mask’s productions. With intricately arranged, ever-evolving grooves backed by melancholic, dub-wise pads and shimmering sonic flourishes, these tracks are some of his best so far.
Colin JohncoCrabe GéantJohnkôôl Records
Colin Johnco, the co-founder of Johnkôôl Records, is hard to get a handle on, an electronic producer and DJ who also released and was the key collaborator on experimental folk musician Emmanuelle Parrenin’s magical 2022 album Targala, La Maison Qui N’En Est Pas Une. Parrenin returns the favour on the utterly mesmeric Crabe Géant, contributing hurdy-gurdy and “vocal matter” to ‘Ventre’. In fact, Crabe Géant features a thrilling cast of guest musicians, including producer and dancer NSDOS, sax player and Nurse With Wound-collaborator Quentin Rollet, producer Paulie Jan and more. The list of contributors appears to presage a wildly eclectic album; instead they all surrender to the same rich, flowing sound, with each of the long tracks (opener ‘L’Etoile’ is nearly 24 minutes long) combining almost seamlessly.
The Havels, Irena & Vojtěch HavloviFour HandsAnimal Music
Irena and Vojtěch Havlovi seal their forty-year relationship by playing the piano four-handed. Irena sits in front of the instrument, Vojtěch stands behind, embraces her, and plays it. They later repeat this on the organ. I saw this touching performance in Janskerk at Le Guess Who? 2022, and now, the duo has released an album with poignant minimalist and meditative compositions, recorded in Atrium na Žižkově in Prague. It is moving, lyrical and trancelike. The juxtaposition of the subtle sound of the piano with a wall of organ encapsulates a spectrum of emotions. Again, it shows how Havlovi, playing patiently, can draw out incredible beauty.
Spectral VoiceSparagmosDark Descent
Comprised of four lengthy, supremely satisfying compositions, Sparagmos (named after Dionysian dismemberment techniques, if you were wondering) is even more haunting and otherworldly than it’s more combative predecessor. There’s still a primal aggression at play here (check out the ravenous ‘Sinew Censer’) on the whole this album is a lot more atmospheric, with the aforementioned ‘Be Cadaver’ culminating with grandiose, Asunder-esque clean vocals and gigantic swathes of melancholic distortion. ‘Red Feasts Condensed Into One’, meanwhile, eventually disrupts its cavernous blasting by reducing the band’s rolling darkness to sparse, violent stabs, letting the uncomfortably quiet spaces between overwhelm the listener instead. In many ways, Sparagmos is reminiscent of Swallowed’s boundary-pushing (and somehow now decade-old) masterpiece Lunarterial in that it reveals genuinely sinister new avenues of expression within the well-worn genre of death/doom metal, and is easily 2024’s first essential metal record.
Roc MarcianoMarciologyPimpire International / Marci Enterprises
No stranger to a self-referential album title – see Marcberg, Marci Beaucoup, Mt. Marci and other releases – cult underground rapper Roc Marciano’s latest project is an enthralling trip through lo-fi, low-key beats and his typically laidback, gruff vocal delivery. Like many of his past records, much of Marciology is produced by the rapper himself and folds in samples of, or references to, old jazz and soul records, while the sinister callback to classic Memphis horrorcore instrumentals on the self-titled opening cut is instantly absorbing. Tracks like the Blaxploitation-soundtrack-referencing ‘Goyard God’ (one of two songs produced by Los Angeles-based beatmaker Animoss) and subtly eerie ‘Gold Crossbow’ underline just why Marci is credited as one of the most influential underground hip hop figures of the past decade or so. Perhaps with the release of Marciology, it’s about time he got his flowers more widely.
Hi! CapybarasA/M/Y/G/D/A/L/ASelf-Released
Nothing is hidden on Hi! Capybaras, AKA Kyle Acab’s, A/M/Y/G/D/A/L/A, these haunted synth and spoken word tracks are a portal into private space. Setting reinforces the effect, luminous synths crumpled by tape, sonic comfort food while Leonard Susskind lectures reel off in the background. Through memories of pet snails and youthful misdemeanors, Hi! Capybaras holds a mirror up to past and present in search of a thread. Loss and discovery roll into tender honesty. “Have you ever felt truly, truly, truly alone? I mean like really, truly alone?” They ask on ‘Things That I Wld Tell My Younger Self’. Addressing the listener, the question halts time, fully embroils us with Hi Capybaras!’s perspective. Though stark and ruminating, this is generous music. Its vulnerability lifts facades, shatters the pressure to keep up appearances. Putting it all out there and perhaps offering a glimmer of comfort in the act of sharing.
Judas PriestInvincible ShieldSony
Don’t let the Turbo-esque 80s style intro fool you, as Invincible Shield is another cast-iron ripper – if 2018’s Firepower was a return to form after misguided attempts to go prog on records like Nostradamus, then this one is arguably their most direct, powerful release since Painkiller. Rob Halford is on ridiculously good form, belting out glass-shattering falsetto with the gusto of singers half his age on the anthemic title track. Whilst Invincible Shield wisely eschews most of the experimentation of the band’s recent records to focus on robust sing-along rockers like ‘Devil In Disguise’ or ‘Sons Of Thunder’, there are still a few surprises hidden away here – ‘Escape From Reality’, for example, leans into a more psychedelic, Sabbath-esque sound, whilst ‘Giants In The Sky’ finds new guitarist Richie Faulkner dishing out some smooth flamenco licks in between chugging riffs.
Mdou MoctarFuneral For JusticeMatador
Active since the late 00s, it’s in the last few years that Nigerien rocker Mdou Moctar has really made a claim to be one of the iconic guitarists of his era. Funeral For Justice, his second album for Matador Records, fair teems with delicious riffs, ostentatious solos, sauna-hot tones, all done as the leader of a crack band plugged into his ‘assouf blues meets Billy Gibbons boogie’ vision. He also sings about meaningful things, such as how the French fucked his country up and should get out of it.
Avalanche KaitoTalitakumGlitterbeat
Mixing up the West African folk traditions of urban griot Kaito Winse with the avant-punk of Belgian guitarist Nico Gitto and French drummer/producer Benjamin Chaval, Talitakum is the second album of joyful noise from transnational trio Avalanche Kaito. It is both more cohesive and wide-ranging than their debut, hardened on the road but still crammed with rough-edged vigour. Their sound is a striking, molten blend that sparks and shakes with life. Driven by an unstoppable uplifting energy, this is a record in touch with music’s ritual power.
Sheida Gharachedaghi, Mohammad Reza AslaniChess Of The WindMississippi
The sounds used Chess Of The Wind, heard prominently on the OST, also play an important role in emphasising the gothic ethos of the movie. The shadows are heard in the sounds and voices with invisible sources, such as the coughs and laughter of a supposedly dead character apparently coming from nowhere. Other musical elements fill the silence in the eeriest way, such as the sounds made by the main character’s wooden wheelchair, or the ticking sound of the clock and the clinks of the metal flail which, in the murder scene, are dissolved into the music. These elements represent gaps, silences, or absences: the wheelchair’s sound represents the main character’s pain, and the constant ticking and clinking are shadows of their fear of the supposedly murdered man – even after his death. The sounds, just like the visual elements of the film, are the sonic shadows of the characters, who remain inaccessible throughout the entire film. Aslani’s movie and Gharachedaghi’s score mirror the story and its characters: after decades of dwelling in shadows, they rose from the dead and emerged into the light.
R.N.A. OrganismR.N.A.O. Meets P.O.P.O.Mesh-Key
There is something endearingly uncouth and unselfconscious in the clunkiness of this album that makes it really fucking cool. It is brilliantly odd and lumpen, quite a contrast to the chiselled cheekbones and tweed tailoring Sato wears in the Bandcamp profile photo. I love the distant wailing in ‘Nativity’, which has a similar energy to my neighbour who has no idea the walls are so thin, and who sings with an unencumbered tuneless gusto. ‘Yes, Every Africa Must Be Free Eternally’ is more a nod to early Jamaican dub, with the melodica over chunky rhythms. Despite the many comparisons and connections available – to a certain type of post punk; to private press experiments with tapes and crunchy drum machines; to dub and to Vanity Records – it walks with its own gait entirely, neither one thing nor the other but its own complete self nonetheless. Mesh Key strikes again.
Alison CottonEngelchenRocket Recordings
Translated literally as ‘little angels’, violist and singer Alison Cotton’s Engelchen tells the true story of two Sunderland-born sisters, Ida and Louise Cook, who, using international networks established through their passion for opera, secured safe passage out of Germany and Poland for a number of Jewish people in the years prior to WWII. The term ‘engelchen’ was bestowed upon them by the people they saved, and certainly their story is one of supreme bravery and compassion. Using mournful drones, haunting vocal arrangements and the judicious inclusion of Foley-type sound effects, Cotton communicates not simply the details of the story but the emotional journey of its characters.
Yaya BeyTen FoldBig Dada
Though much of Ten Fold, Yaya Bey’s fifth studio album, was written while she was mourning the death of her father, the rapper Grand Daddy I.U., it’s refreshingly bouncy and liberated. Deeply soulful moments like ‘East Coast Mami’, which opens with a voice note from her late father, and ‘Chasing The Bus’ sit gracefully alongside the elastic dancehall sound of ‘So Fantastic’, also featuring guest vocals from Grand Daddy I.U., and ‘Sir Princess Bad Bitch’, a subtly banging house cut all about self-affirmation. Vitally, the genre-hopping doesn’t feel forced or jarring in any way either, instead providing Bey with perfect foil to exorcise her demons.
Oren Ambarchi, Johan Berthling, Andreas WerliinGhosted IIDrag City
Oren Ambarchi, Johan Berthling and Andreas Werliin don’t make ecological collapse audible. But they do change the way we feel time. Ghosted II stretches the now. For every second of forward momentum there’s an ocean of lateral movement. The trio’s jams are texturally lush and rhythmically intricate, dazzling in the balance and harmony between the three players. They play with time as much as sound. It’s a captivating relationship musically, where separate temporalities congeal into a whole. Perhaps it can chime with ways of thinking about much bigger concerns.
BòscBòscLa Crue / La Grande Folie
When I first heard ‘L’Èrba d’Amor’ as part of Bòsc’s set for the Printemps du bal, it made me feel like I was levitating. OK, so I was coming down with something and starting to feel feverish, but its power undoubtedly translates to the recorded version on the group’s self-titled debut: the mesmerising vocals in Occitan, the wavering drones, the heart-stopping first chord change at 4’48”, the feeling of wanting it to last for an eternity. I don’t think they’d appreciate me focusing on just the one song, though, and with good reason – Bòsc is an all-round beauty.
ThouUmbilicalSacred Bones
Umbilical is as aggressive as Thou have sounded. Gone are the melodious, grandiose ten-minute-plus songs that put them on the doom metal map with 2014’s Heathen. It’s like being trapped in a killing cage with the band. The songs are shorter, faster, sharper, full of straightforward, hard-charging riffs that still retain the layers of texture the band have developed with engineer James Whitten over the years. The (anti) philosophy of Umbilical is clear throughout its running time. Crush the chuckleheads by giving them the ferocity they want. Fight back through self-abuse. It’s an avowedly counter-intuitive solution, perfectly in line with Thou’s ironic, sometimes hard-to-fathom, attitude towards themselves.
Dali de Saint Paul, Maxwell SterlingPenumbraAccidental Meetings
While Dali de Saint Paul sings expressively in a combination of languages, there are moments throughout Penumbra where her voice explores non-verbal, animalistic sounds: smacked lips, clicks, chirrups, grunts and hisses. On ‘5’, she layers whistles in different patterns and pitches, conjuring a forest teeming with birds. A sense of the pastoral is felt on ‘Interlude’. De Saint Paul’s emulation of a babbling brook matches Maxwell Sterling’s plucked strings, which nod to the world of folksong – even if it’s the same strange corner frequented by Lankum and Shovel Dance Collective.
Anastasia CoopeDarning WomanJagjaguwar
Anastasia Coope’s debut album will no doubt be labelled freak folk, though perhaps vibrational frequency folk might be more suitable given how ghostly it all is. Darning Woman is quaint and pleasingly unusual in its execution, with songs like ‘Sounds Of A Giddy Woman’ and ‘Women’s Role In The War’ seemingly plucked straight from the 1940s thanks to Coope’s uncanny antenna to the spirit realm. Transposed then onto an acoustic guitar and recorded in achromatic lo-fi, it’s the missing link between R. Stevie Moore and Doris Stokes.
Diamanda GalasIn ConcertIntravenal Sound Operations
When I interviewed Diamanda Galás, frequently she gave an audible eye roll at those who criticise her for releasing quite so many live albums. I agree with her that these people are missing the point – with her roots firmly in the jazz, blues, improv and musical traditions of the eastern Mediterranean, the boundary between performance and studio recording is gloriously blurred, as is the case in this elegantly intense follow-up to 2022’s masterpiece, Broken Gargoyles.
Emahoy Tsege Mariam GebruSouvenirsMississippi
It is easy to forget how fundamental the idea of home is and the emotions that this idea can evoke in times of distress. “Clouds moving on the sky / My heart has never stopped missing home”. We can hear the voice of Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru singing these words on the opening track of Souvenirs, a selection of home recordings she made while still home in Addis Ababa during the 70s and 80s, but reflecting on a dangerous period of exile which was bound to come. Later, she wonders, “Crow of the sky / …Let me ask, have you returned / from my beloved country?” The feeling of longing is immense. Her work exists on a threshold between ‘running away’ and ‘aiming towards’.
Erika AngellThe Obsession With Her VoiceConstellation
On The Obsession With Her Voice, Erika Angell creates her own universe out of her ever-changing voice. The Montréal-based artist cloaks her vocals in mystical haze, transforming them into alien reveries; she speaks poetry with scalding clarity; she sings melismatic songs that swirl around lush instrumentals. With this music, she seeks to create not just one world, but a constellation of planets and stars made of glimmering words, electronics and strings. No matter where the music goes, at the heart is Angell’s voice in all its different forms, in the process of being discovered and rediscovered as each phrase passes.
ShellacTo All TrainsTouch and Go
To All Trains is Shellac’s last album. One can employ a certain amount of confidence in the fact. Even in 2024 – a year of holograms on tour, ensembles who exist well across the Ship Of Theseus threshold, and AI being trained on lucrative back catalogues – it would seem certain there will be no cash in posthumous demo collection, no half-finished anthology of songs with a firmament of celebrity friends stepping in on guitar and vox, no banging remix collection. Shellac has reached its terminal station now that Steve Albini is dead; and it feels like much of their music – on this album especially – was ominously predictive of this calamity. Yet their work seems to be saying there is much left to do, like a call to action: make hay while the sun shines, which actually means work while the sun shines, produce good work while the sun still shines. Let us take this opportunity to celebrate a genuinely peerless band who applied the rigorous aesthetics of Adolf Loos’ Ornament And Crime to rock & roll, only to leave it – somehow – more entertaining, more powerful and more life-affirming than ever before.
Kavus TorabiThe BanishingBelievers Roast
Professionally and creatively, Kavus Torabi is living something close to his best life. A disciplined and radical figure who methodically works at his music, writing and visual art; he no longer needs to have a day job to keep body and soul together. He’s based in Glastonbury, where he goes for walks up the Tor. And yet, as his remarkable second solo album The Banishing documents, he’s arrived at this point in the wake of a turbulent time. He has lately experienced schism, loneliness and (his word) psychosis. Underlining just how bad things became, a working title for the LP was Now I’m The Antichrist. If all this gives the impression The Banishing is a confessional album, that’s true, but it’s by no means the whole story. For a start, that description doesn’t map easily onto the album’s sonic palette, which moves from nodding mischievously to In A Silent Way-era Miles Davis on opener ‘The Horizontal Man’ through angular math-rock and swirling psychedelia.
CowerCelestial DevestationHuman Worth
As well as the uncertain technological situation we find ourselves in, Celestial Devastation is also about growing older. As far as kitchen-sink accounts of existential dread go, ‘Hard-Coded In The Souls Of Men’ is one of the bleakest that’s ever been committed to tape. It haunts the psyche from first exposure, thanks to the vividly miserable descriptions in its verses, combined with an irresistibly infectious chorus.
Fer FrancoRitos de PasoSelf-Released
In the process of developing his debut LP, Guatemalan producer Fer Franco described feeling “very detached from expectations,” choosing, instead, to simply enjoy the act of making music. Following his instincts, Franco conjures an endearing listening experience as the sonic sensibilities and structures of Ritos de Paso (which translates as ‘Rites of Passage’) are steered by loosely controlled and masterfully produced explorations that venture towards techno, kosmische music and gorgeous ambient arrangements. There’s an undeniable assurance displayed in Franco’s production on this impressive debut. His attributes as both composer and producer are heard in the unhurried pacing and gradual expansion of the calming ‘Eliminar Lo Innecesario’ (an immediate highlight of the LP). The track effectively foregrounds the brilliant tonal dexterity of the LP, sitting between the compact sci-fi infused ‘Tu Señal’ and the atmospheric pulse running through the dark instrumental ‘Asumir Forma’.
JlinAkomaPlanet Mu
On Jlin’s Akoma, music is continuously evolving. The Indiana-based composer carefully crafts her works, sculpting and chiselling them like a sculpture from marble. As they unfold, they grow into sprawling webs, getting more intricate with each phrase. Meticulous detail has always been the throughline of Jlin’s compositions, and throughout Akoma, she lets the fluidity and ease of her shape-shifting patterns drive her music, exploring the smooth transitions she can make between a variety of different polyrhythms.
Elijah MinnelliPerpetual MusketFatCat
On Perpetual Musket, Elijah Minnelli has ostensibly arranged four folk songs to be performed by reggae vocalists on the A-side, with dub tracks on the flip. The anti-war song ‘Vine And Fig Tree’, which originates in the Old Testament, is handed over to the legendary Little Roy. Contemporary dancehall star Shumba Youth transforms ‘Soul Cake’ – a song from an All Souls tradition once common in the British Isles, where poor people would go door to door, singing and praying for the dead in exchange for food – into a nimble earworm. Earl 16’s stark version of ‘Lifeboat Mona’ – Peggy Seeger’s composition commemorating the sinking of a lifeboat in 1959 and the death of its entire crew – comes with a stamp of approval from Seeger herself, who calls it, in all caps, “JUST RIGHT”. Bristol newcomer Joe Yorke’s brings a sublime falsetto to ‘The Wind And The Rain’, from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.
Quatuor BozziniJürg Frey: String Quartet No. 4Collection QB
In Jürg Frey’s world, stillness is motion. Throughout the Swiss composer’s String Quartet No. 4, Quatuor Bozzini pull their bows so gradually that it feels as if each note is stopped in time. Yet they aren’t: with each reiteration, these tones gradually expand, taking up every inch of the quartet’s wooden instruments. Each slight change feels faint, but they accumulate; it’s like the shifting of a glacier over many years. This is the world Frey has come to embody across his career, and his fourth string quartet continues to explore the engulfing atmospheres he crafts out of thin air.
Rəhman MəmmədliAzerbaijani Gitara Volume 2Bongo Joe
There is a lot of colour crammed into this compilation. Just listen to ‘Qoçəlı̇’, an escalating dense cascade, a display of virtuosity; he plays spasmodically over synth lines and then erupts into a percussive trance. Faster ‘Yanıq Kərəmı̇’ has the rhythmic freneticism of singeli, but in the accumulation of synthetic primitive beats, the guitar cuts through clearly, in jazz scales, to the fore. ‘Xarı Bülbül’ is more march-like; the guitar does not attack so vigorously; instead, it weaves expressive phrases, distorted until it starts to resemble an entirely different instrument. ‘Qoca Dağlar’ and ‘Uca Dağlar Başında’, are arrangements of repeatedly performed Azerbaijani songs, while in ‘Leylı̇can’, the musician jumps into higher registers, where his grandstanding soloing impacts more decisively.
MIKE, Tony SeltzerPinball10k
Arriving off the back of a majestic, prolific run in recent years that took in, among other releases, 2023 standouts Burning Desire and Wiki and The Alchemist collaboration Faith Is A Rock, MIKE is at his breezy best on this link-up with Brooklyn beatmaker Tony Seltzer. It helps that the producer serves up a set of brilliantly buoyant, almost psychedelic trap beats for MIKE to let loose on, but there’s a palpable sense of fun running right through the record’s nimble 21-minute runtime as the rapper switches between various flows that are equal parts reflective and self-aggrandising, while also welcoming the likes of Earl Sweatshirt and Jay Critch into the fold.
Yes IndeedKing Of BlueMeaksuma
Yes Indeed is the duo of Laurie Tompkins and Otto Willberg, and King Of Blue is their second release. Some abstract funk theorising takes place in a compact space here, sketch-like at times but never stuffy or hifalutin. Willberg is a double bassist and Tompkins a man for the electronics by reputation, though there certainly seems to be some frazzly guitar clamouring for position here on ‘Double Doors’ (Brian May goes funk, alarmingly) and the title track, whose four minutes are also marked by gaseous space shimmer and keyboard chords which are possibly being played by nature, like windchimes. It’s a great release all round for fans of synths getting put through the wrongness mangle, what with the haunted-house vaporwave stylings of ‘Dream Spot’ and the spandex-stretchy heroic jamming of EP closer ‘Fudge Sun’.
Julia HolterSomething In The Room She MovesDomino
From the opening few seconds of Something In The Room She Moves, there is an inquisitiveness, a playfulness. The disparate sounds of ‘Sun Girl’ are strewn around the room and the voice acts like a magnet gathering treasures together, drawing them closer until they form twinkly ornaments over the strong bodied voice, synth, drum and bass. A dreamy vocal floats around at head height like layers of beach bonfire smoke at dusk. Then back to glissando sliding bass interlude with avant-jazz vocalised flute. The voice-magnet pulls in improvised calls, in and out of focus the gravity gives way to end somewhere new: a lullaby. Muted brass on ‘This Morning’ sits with a soft intimate voice and ethereal piano, conjuring a space somewhere between a sunlight-dappled forest clearing and an underground piano bar. Each move feels like a final cadence, slow and deliberate.
Kim GordonThe CollectiveMatador
If you’re expecting noise and provocation à la Sonic Youth and Kim Gordon’s trademark deadpan drawl, you’d be right. But The Collective goes so far beyond this. In a way, it’s dumb to expect the Kim Gordon to simply give us more of the same. In the follow-up to her 2019 debut solo record, Gordon continues her partnership with producer Justin Raisen, known for his work with the likes of Charli XCX and Lil Yachty. And in this unexpected collaboration, we get a record that flirts with trap and alternative hip hop, grinding, twisting and contorting Gordon’s wordplay and hooks to echo the brutality of our everyday.
VanishingShelter Of The OpaqueThe state51 Conspiracy
Changing landscapes and our relationships with them are at the heart of Shelter Of The Opaque: as places evolve, where do we fit into those, and how does it affect both our sense of self and our relationship to the past? The passage of time also runs throughout the album. The start of the unsettling track ‘Castling’ recalls Gareth Smith’s roots in Hull, the call of home feeling ever present as he seeks to understand his past in the context of the present. The song is also one of several on the album that explores climate change too: the drones on the track sound like an electronic sea of sorts, and one that threatens to subsume its surroundings at any moment. An underlying ticking beat stresses how time is running out for the planet.
CaveiraFicar VivoShhpuma
There are moments on Ficar Vivo which sound like pure electricity, buzzing through wires. It’s just electric guitar, bass, drums and sax, but it feels like you’re being sucked in, past the microphones and the instruments and their pick-ups, deep into the cables and the circuitry, as if the current itself ran straight into your auditory nerve. Rattling around with the capacitors and the diodes, these tiny little components, somehow this impossibly vast soundstage opens up. It’s like Ant-Man in the Quantum Realm. The tiniest spark becomes a forest fire, raging across the landscape, the earth left scorched and ruined in its wake. Time and space lose all meaning here.
PercThe Cut OffPerc Trax
Human voices fractured amidst metallic textures are a constant presence on The Cut Off. There’s something in the water at the moment that means ecclesiastical-sounding choral music is being used as a sonic hue all over the shop, including here on the anxious and prangy ‘Heartbeat Popper’, fractured voices in the midst of eddying rumbles and hums, as if a space army choir were rehearsing on a mission to the farthest realms of the cosmos. ‘UK Style’ sounds like a fashion branding bellend being chewed up by a sweat shop sewing machine. Yet Perc’s skill with tone and depth in the sounds he’s making mean this doesn’t just come across as mere “Makes U Think Yeah” critique of capitalism’s impact on the human blah blah, the sort of thing you might find in the more unimaginative realms of legacy industrial. Instead, there’s a real joy to how this music works.
Tony NjokuLast BloomPRAH
If you use Ableton, you will be familiar with the soundtrack to the search for the perfect sound: a middle C, hammered over and over by five billion different instruments. Narrowing the scope to a single category makes it no less overwhelming; peruse the options filed under ‘piano & keys’, and you will hear that fucking C note until it bores itself into your brain and you’re clamouring for something fresh. Then you reach ‘Childhood Home Piano’, and you stall when you hear the sample: a key, pressed in the distant vestiges of a memory, its grainy echo pulling you into an inexplicable warmth that compels you to sit in its sediment forever. On his new EP, Last Bloom, the way Tony Njoku captures the piano is like basking in that specific sample. He engineers the instrument to highlight the warm crackles of the keys, as though they’ve been baked into the music for centuries.
Charli XCXBratAtlantic
Two years on from Crash, an album that was at the most polished, mainstream (outright pop) end of Charli XCX’s oeuvre, we have Brat, her eighth record. She’s now into her thirties, a hardened veteran of a game that fetishises new teenagers (especially young girls) every month. Yet it was stupid to doubt her. There’s no let-up, no reconfiguring into a carpool lane. There’s nothing ‘mature’ about the sound of Brat, thank god. What she’s done (presumably freed from contractual pressure, though this is still a major label project) is re-embrace the skeezy late night clubland Charli, open the throttle and push the pedal to the floor. Brat feels years younger than its predecessor. From top to tail, emotionally, as well as in these mid-2020s dancehall dynamics, she smashes her surroundings apart. It’s an ‘unleash the beast’ kind of a record, especially in how it sold itself early doors.
Mary HalvorsonCloudwardNonesuch
Cloudward probably won’t jump out to familiar listeners of Brooklyn-based jazz guitarist Mary Halvorson’s previous albums as being particularly unusual in her catalogue. However, it’s probably the first where she sounds fully immersed in her band Amaryllis, which she originally composed music for in 2020 during the pandemic. Now, she finds herself still writing for the band, and the results are rich and increasingly organic-sounding. With the album a means to articulate the process of her band re-emerging after the pandemic, the cadence of the record seems to replicate the sound of the city’s life gradually blossoming out into the streets.
Richard TeitelbaumAsparagusBlack Truffle
Suzan Pitt’s 1979 film Asparagus is a surreal animated odyssey, like Georges Franju redrawn in the style of 60s underground comix. The soundtrack, by Richard Teitelbaum, is possibly even stranger: a shimmering, swelling Polymoog jam that drifts through twinkling tones like images from a dream. The composer himself apparently compared it to Ravel, but you’ll get closer if you try and imagine Suzanne Ciani and Terry Riley trying to reconstruct the haunting organ music from Carnival Of Souls. Somewhere amidst the cosmic soup you can also hear instrumental contributions from George Lewis, Steve Lacy. Steve Potts and Takehisa Kosugi, though not all of them are easy to discern. It’s a heady brew, but amongst the swirling suspensions and nightmarish fever dreams, there’s also this deep sense of yearning; a kind of cosmic oceanic feeling not a million miles away from early Tangerine Dream or Eberhard Schoener, and even, yes, a certain lush impressionism summoning up the horny spirit of Ravel.
Arab StrapI’m Totally Fine With It👍 Don’t Give A Fuck Anymore👍Rock Action
What if I told you that despite the album being called I’m Totally Fine With It 👍 Don’t Give A Fuck Anymore 👍 , it’s clear from both content and delivery that Arab Strap are not fine with it and very much do give a fuck? Would that shock you? Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton care – a lot. But then, they always have. Even at their most debauched, soaked in booze and self-loathing and hedonistic ennui, at the heart of it, they cared. That’s a huge part of what made even the bleakest of their pre-retirement tracks not just bearable, but compelling, affecting, endearing. Here, they care, so they regret; they care, so they fear; they care, so they hurt. They care, so they’re really pretty angry. Maybe angrier than they’ve ever been on record. They’re practically raging from the jump.
DJ Anderson do ParaísoQueridãoNyege Nyege Tapes
Often characterised by eardrum-punishing levels of distortion and rowdy vocal delivery, Brazilian funk has been gaining a wider, more global audience in recent years. Sitting at the more underground, less bass-boosted end of the sound is producer DJ Anderson do Paraíso, who hails from Belo Horizonte. Queridão, his first album, is a mind-bending trip through dissonant, macabre melodies and minimalist beats, its use of silence and space just as effective as everything that is actually present. With the help of a wide cast of guest MCs and vocalists, the producer builds a bonkers sound world that is part-haunted house, part-classical concert hall, with its employment of choirs, strings, bells and atonal pianos through the record. Queridão, its title a reference to his local status as the “dearest”, is a compelling, menacing listen unlike much else you’ll hear this year.
Schoolboy QBlue LipsTop Dawg Entertainment
Having opted to step away from the rat race of chasing Spotify streams and hype via an endless cycle of mixtape and album drops – this is Schoolboy Q’s first studio album in five years – Blue Lips was well worth the wait. The US rapper sounds more mature and self-assured than ever before as he reminds us of the promise that earned him so many fans when first breaking out on Top Dawg Entertainment, while also taking boldly pushing boundaries. There’s a deeply psychedelic, serene quality to much of the production (see cuts like opener ‘Funny Guy’, ‘Blueslides’ and the jungle-referencing ‘Foux’), tracks often flowing seamlessly from one to the other as Q flits between exploring the peaks and troughs of rap stardom, and the expectations that come with it, with frequently dizzying honesty.
M.L. DeathmanAcid Horse 23Tesla Tapes
Acid Horse 23, recorded at the three-day word-of-mouth Acid Horse event organised by tQ co-founder John Doran and Strange Attractor’s Mark Pilkington in a pub near the Alton Barnes White Horse in rural Wiltshire, is trippy in the literal sense, eclectic in its incorporation of shamanic Balearic beats and swirling samples; spectral psychedelic house music that takes you through liminal spaces and those where incompatible worlds collide. Occasionally the ever-building drones have a disconcerting effect akin to the eerie work of The Haxan Cloak, while with a sample of the writer Anaïs Nin reading from her diary, the recurrent line “I remember my first birth in water, I sway and float”, sounds beguiling and haunting. So too does the sound of the Acid Horse crowd, cheering in the background at the same moment.
Pet Shop BoysNonethelessx2 / Parlophone
What makes Nonetheless stand out is Neil Tennant’s thin but still lovely voice: an instrument of always-surprising emotional complexity. Over Chris Lowe’s oomba-oomba electro-thud and a complementary string section of ‘Feel’ he offers a series of confessions before the big one: multi-tracked Tennants intoning “I will never let you down!” Like hero Dusty Springfield, he can’t speak his mind without worrying if he fucked up. On closer ‘Love Is The Law’, his usual preoccupations coupled with a man’s normal anxieties about ageing produce a grand ballad that would make an appropriate career closer.
Goblin BandCome Slack Your Horse!Broadside Hacks
Recorded thanks to the generosity of friends with a start-up production company, you can feel a sense of urgency to this slender debut record, the sound of the London trad collective straining to demonstrate all of their many sides. An opening rendition of the country dance ‘The Black Nag’ has a lolloping intensity. ‘The Brisk Lad’ casts a deep theatrical gloom. A sprawling medley of ‘Birds In The Spring’ and ‘May Morning Dew’ is transfixingly beautiful. ‘Turmut Hoer’, recorded hastily by just vocalist Rowan Gatherer and violinist Alice Beadle while they waited for the rest of the band to arrive, and the old humorous song ‘Widecombe Fayre’, are joyously off-kilter. Lead single ‘The Prickle Holly Bush’, the best of all, reaches all-out glory by its final crescendo.
Helado NegroPhasor4AD
An oscillation between control and disorientation continues throughout Phasor (the album’s title refers to a numerical vector for oscillation in physics and engineering). Hewing closer to the former is when the record is at its strongest, exploring the world of a character seeking connection but far from reach. “Quiet light / Pushing too far / It’s all gone”, he sings on ‘Best For You and Me’ as a pretty, bright piano line circles a light-footed beat. In ‘Colores del Mare’, filtered and agitated drums, toy-keyboard notes and claps bounce around the mix like a ball around a box, rattling the surfaces, threatening their integrity. It’s one of his best works for a decade.
SenyawaVajranalaThe state51 Conspiracy
If Senyawa’s last record, 2021’s Alkisah, dealt with themes of power, its follow-up, Vajranala, is an attempt to understand the root of that power. The duo have always held an interest in the connection between humanity and nature, and on this latest record, in particular, they explore how, over centuries, the natural world has shaped our society, the knowledge systems from which power derives, and why that still resonates today.
Guðmundur Steinn GunnarssonStífluhringurinnCarrier
Each of the two movements on Stífluhringurinn, named after a hydroelectric dam in Reykjavík, has a four-part structure that gives each sound a moment of dominance, and the second movement reverses the order of the first because we should consider it to be walking down the other side of our initial ascent of the titular dam. The piece was written for the Caput Ensemble, a group operating at a very flexible size between maybe two and 20 players since 1987. Here, I think there are about a dozen musicians working with Guðmundur Steinn Gunnarsson’s graphic, screen-based, animated scores. Premiering in 2019, plans to record the work were frustrated by COVID-19 and a later, more granular and editorial version has emerged which has also allowed producer/engineer The Norman Conquest a little freedom to add some further finesse to proceedings too. The ensemble largely comprises strings (bowed and plucked instruments), brass, recorders and harpsichord, with some percussive sounds working around and within.
Harry Górski-BrownDurt Dronemaker After DreamboatsGLARC
Harry Górski-Brown plays several instruments on his debut tape, but leaves the songwriting to others: its first seven tracks are from the Scottish Gaelic folksong canon and the eighth and last is a live cover of ‘I Wanna Fight Your Father’ by Irish viral rap duo The Rubberbandits. In this, and by sprinkling moments of text-to-speech voice offering metacommentary on the album as it progresses, the Glasgow-based musician seems intent on having the ancient and the modern confront each other, with buoyant and bibulous results.
Beth GibbonsLives OutgrownDomino
Beth Gibbons, like a monk who repeatedly disappears and then reappears from sannyasa, is ready to give us the earthly understanding of our futility that we all need — her memento mori. Like the ferocious bitterness and dialled-up heat of Portishead’s second album, which countered Dummy’s icy, moonscape terrain, Lives Outgrown contains that same degree of emotional urgency. But it is less focused on the warped ways of the world and instead on the ways of the body and mind seen through the passage of time. It’s a hitherto unseen emotional cadence to Gibbons and it’s beguiling because it’s so personally revealing.
NaemiDust Devil3XL
Pulling together an array of influences loosely fixed around the ambient music world, as well as an extensive cast of collaborators, each new cut on Dust Devil, Naemi’s debut album proper, beckons us down a different curiously psychedelic avenue. Opener ‘It Feels So Good’, featuring a tantalising vocal turn from Erika de Casier, draws on tranquil ‘new age’ synths, while Perila guests alongside meditative emo guitar strums on LP highlight ‘Day Drifter’, one of the tracks here that perhaps best follows a standard ‘pop song’ structure. ‘Couch Angel’, another standout which welcomes Arad Acid and Huerco S. into the fold, harks back to reverb-drenched 90s shoegaze, all galloping drums and mumbled, buried vocals. With additional references to trip-hop, glitch-ridden IDM and lounge music following through the record’s remainder, Dust Devil is an unorthodox, but deeply comforting, listen.
British Murder BoysActive Agents And House BoysDownwards
These recordings on British Murder Boys’ debut album hit like the gut-troubling, sub-bass fists of a sonic pugilist. The battery of drums that comprise ‘It’s What You Hide’ gyrate like a wheel coming off its axis, and the rasp of blistered synthesis and chest-rattling bass beats on ‘It’s In The Heart’ are a joyous ode to military grade knob-twiddling. Their palette has changed a little though. ‘Killer I Said’ is a dubby affair that continues the conversation with Northampton’s Reducer. The viscous, gangster-limped cadence hauls itself into a space cleared by the snare’s reverberating “Kah” but it’s the hit of the low end that cements its place in your memory. High-pass filters are swung left and right, as if Surgeon has taken Adrian Sherwood’s mixing desk out onto the high seas.
PersherSleep WellThrill Jockey
From soup to nuts, the debut album proper from Blawan and Pariah’s Persher project is a curdled morass of spoiled riffage. A fucked, cursed, post-whatever-the-hell heap of derangement. Straightaway, Sleep Well is flat-out unhinged. That’s recognisable within seconds. But the real news here is that ‘unhinged’ is simply Persher’s baseline, their bare minimum. As the record progresses, their commitment to pushing beyond that – to pursuing maniac mode as a persistent escalating musical state of being – reveals itself layer by layer, track by track. It’s a hoot.
Jane WeaverLove In Constant SpectacleFire
Weaver’s latest album continues on from her recent work with an added introspective gravity. After the vibrant, kaleidoscopic arrangements of Flock and Modern Kosmology, Love In Constant Spectacle surprises with more subdued arrangements, peppered with acoustic instruments. She is hardly starting from scratch, incorporating hallmarks of her style to make the album feel like part of the arc her recent work has been progressing on. Her distinctive choices in drum styles – motorik versus jazz – continue to swap places throughout, and the palette of her synthesisers and guitar effects colour much of the album.
Fat White FamilyForgiveness Is YoursDomino
As well as growing lusher, Fat White Family’s sound has become denser on their latest album thanks to several layers of carefully constructed multiple instrumentation, so pieces like ‘Polygamy Is Only For The Chief’ sound like a Prince impersonator fronting Depeche Mode. “Did you ever get the feeling that nobody’s listening for a very good reason?”, it asks. More people than ever might be drawn into listening now that, for instance, ‘Feed The Horse’ has a soaring chorus that would be suitable emanating from the mouth of Charlotte Church. The equivalent on ‘What’s That You Say’ is the catchiest earworm they’ve ever created.
Martha Skye MurphyUMAD 93
Um was not created in a vacuum and Murphy does not project the callowness of a debutante or arrive half-formed exhibiting potential. It’s a record made by someone who sounds like she’s been making records for years and, in a roundabout kind of a way, she has (and not just with any ragtag and bobtail, either). Moreover, her remarkable, fragile soprano, offset with bursts of operatic ululations, is tempered by the extraordinary production on the album: a combination of herself, Ethan P. Flynn, and the mixing nous of Marta Salogni. The sonic evolution of ‘Kind’, which toys with abstraction before bursting into a chime-garnered ball of combustion, best exemplifies the talent on offer.
Nadine ShahFilthy UnderneathEMI North
There is a fine line to tread in any creative labour when opening up about your personal struggles. It’s delicate work to find how much honesty resonates with an audience and what becomes alienating. Nadine Shah navigates this rough terrain on her fifth album, Filthy Underneath, a record which deals with how, in a few very short years, she coped with the death of her mother, substance abuse, a suicide attempt, recovery and the end of her marriage. Any one of these topics could be completely overwhelming for listener and artist alike, but Shah’s control of the narrative makes her songs sound more confidential than confessional. She exercises the same incisive observational skills that she applied to songs about social unease and toxic relationships when she turns the lens on herself, as willing to be cutting, critical and humorous when she is her own subject.
The Dengie Hundred With Gemma BlackshawWho Will You LoveTain
Who Will You Love is Owen Lawrence’s sixth release as The Dengie Hundred; all sound somewhat different, but – invariably – deeply spartan and shiverworthy. That sensibility has precedent in certain pockets of 90s slowcore and post-rock, 80s peculiarities like Deux Filles, and various musicians who carried the dub torch while not making dub music per se. With The Dengie Hundred, a name taken from a small quasi-coastal community in Essex, there is something like a psychogeographic element: Lammas Land, an album of two side-long tracks released only five months before Who Will You Love, is inspired by the Walthamstow Marshes near Lawrence’s house. An A4 insert with the LP features writing, also on the Marshes, by Gemma Blackshaw, an art history professor specialising in Vienna; Who Will You Love expands on this by enlisting Blackshaw as the album’s vocalist.
Eric Chenaux TrioDelights Of My LifeConstellation
For Delights Of My Life, Eric Chenaux is joined by fellow Canadian musicians Philippe Melanson on electric percussion (Bernice, Joseph Shabson, U.S. Girls) and longtime collaborator Ryan Driver on Wurlitzer organ, as the trio expand the palette of the lead musician’s oddly welcoming strangeness with loose, wandering experimentations and open-ended structures, holding time in newfound ways. Often bleary-eyed, slow and sleepy, it’s the audio equivalent of hitting the snooze button on your phone’s alarm clock as you slip back into a dream state, drifting into a world beyond temporal constraints where that precious thing – time – is immaterial, giving yourself permission to just be.
Bill Ryder-JonesIechyd DaDomino
Like its predecessors, Iechyd Da is thematically centred on The Wirral, and because it was made during the pandemic, when he rarely left the town, the relationship between it and his work became even more tightly intertwined. It contains ‘A Bad Wind Blows In My Heart Pt. 3’, a sequel to the two-part composition Ryder Jones’ 2013 debut album proper was named for, and a number of more subtle lyrical easter eggs. Specific characters who he wrote about on the first album reappear on the second – such as the Anthony of Iechyd Da’s ‘Thankfully For Anthony’, the same as the earlier LP’s ‘Anthony & Owen’.
MilkweedFolklore 1979Broadside Hacks
Folklore 1979‘s lyrics are lifted almost entirely wholesale from an issue of The Folklore Society’s academic journal, which Milkweed came across when a fan – who, incidentally, makes wands for a living and who they’ve never seen since – dropped a tote bag full of issues round their home. They picked one at random, chopped it up and put it to weird earworm melodies, fed it through a meat grinder of experimental production, and ruthlessly edited it down to just over ten minutes of running time. Occasionally, the album evokes experimental hip hop as much as it does folk music, although they outright reject any comparisons. They, for now, have coined the term ‘slacker trad’.
Einstürzende NeubautenRampen (apm: alien pop music)Potomak
If Einstürzende Neubauten were waging a war against sleep back in the 1980s, then on their latest studio album, they’re waging one against brevity. Rampen (apm: alien pop music) is a double album that’s almost prog-like in its dimensions. 2020’s Alles in Allem was compact and punchy, whereas here we have something sprawling and cosmic – or even kosmische – with a sense of stately grandeur that comes from hanging around for 44 years and defying incredible odds. If albums can be likened to novels, then Rampen is a bit like Ulysses in that it’s nourishing, complex, thrilling and frustrating, and an absolute bugger to finish in one go.
Various ArtistsGhana Special 2: Electronic Highlife & Afro Sounds In The Diaspora, 1980-93Soundway
While typically brilliant, Ghana Special 2 is unusual for a Soundway African music compilation in that most of the music contained on it wasn’t actually made in the country name-checked by the title. After earlier anthologies focused on Ghanaian innovations and developments in rock, highlife and funk, this essential release looks in part to the diasporic Ghanaian communities to be found in Germany during the 80s and early 90s. The amazingly titled subgenre of burger highlife – from the German for citizen, rather than the tasty, corner-free circular slab of food – is a delicious revitalisation of an entire sound, a document of a well established West African form synthesising seamlessly with disco, boogie and new wave.
BIG|BRAVEA Chaos Of FlowersThrill Jockey
Quietness is a key part of BIG|BRAVE’s latest LP, A Chaos Of Flowers – the sparse ‘Chanson Pour Mon Ombre’ is the first time the band have employed acoustic guitar, and drums are more often scuttling brushes than big thumping stomps. As with their The Body collaboration, Robin Wattie’s vocals are clear and deliberate. There’s still plenty of loudness too, however. The songs swim among big dark waves of rumbling, lurching guitar.
What’s ultimately changed is what BIG|BRAVE are doing with sonic extremes on A Chaos Of Flowers, rather than the existence of those extremes at all. The record’s most intense moments are often its quietest – the largely ambient ‘A Song For Marie Part III’, for instance, where a sparse melody sweeps wraith-like above deep bass, and which was actually recorded during the sessions for previous record Nature Morte. It’s a record that twists the listener’s expectations from high and low volume.
William DoyleSprings EternalTough Love
Springs Eternal arrives ten years after William Doyle’s breakthrough under his East India Youth moniker. If his restless approach to influence has become a constant signature, and exhausted its initial thrill, then try not to be surprised by the start of the album’s second track, ‘Now In Motion’. Out of a beat-machine click rips a brash blues riff, Doyle’s guitar and voice clearer than ever while chanting the song’s title like a mantra. The coda slides into a funkier shuffle, crescendos in strands of distortion, then plays straight into ‘Relentless Melt’, all sliding riffs and wandering bass lines as if written by an introvert Josh Homme.
Perhaps this is a more immediate record than past Doyle efforts. It’s certainly more earnest (and his work has been increasingly so since 2021’s Great Spans Of Muddy Time). Vocals sit higher in the mix than ever, instrumentation is bright and forthcoming rather than buried within itself, and there’s an emboldened feel to his lyrical tone. “You could have it all if you want,” he teases on ‘Surrender Yourself’, a mathy lump of 00s indie rock that imitates an advert for an off-world escape plan (“Do you want to augment it with us?”) as bending guitar notes scrape the bottom of the song. ‘Eternal Spring’ opens like the nightmare-funhouse bounce of Billie Eilish’s ‘Ilomilo’, but swaps its sense of submersion for a more reserved new wave bop, with straight acoustic strumming patterns and a pretty hook floating above Doyle’s strut.
Still House PlantsIf I don’t make it, I love uBison
If I don’t make It, I love U, Still House Plants’ third album, often resembles This Heat’s Deceit via Hyperdub compilations and Tilt-era Scott Walker. The pitch-black industrial drumming and fractious guitar clangs elicit the measured brutality of Swans and the totalism of Glenn Branca, underpinned by the metallic hypnosis of New York no wave group Ut. It’s all these things rolled precariously into one, dismantled and reassembled by virtue of instinct and genuine emotional release.
But the playful polyrhythms sound like an accidental scratch in the groove from Jeff Buckley’s Grace. You can feel a subconscious assimilation of early 00s R&B mixed with slowcore and Midwest emo. It’s comparable to a no-wave D’Angelo or Lauryn Hill. Here, Still House Plants embrace, rather than shun, sounds absorbed from childhoods spent in working-class environments.The record integrates skeletal post-rock with soul and jazz, all of it deconstructed by a presiding impulse to blur lines between terms or genres, allowing it all to collapse and collide. It’s harmony clashing with disharmony, the musicality of concrete sound.
GnodSpot LandRocket Recordings
For those who know Gnod as purveyors of the sort of music that suits getting blasted and waving your arms around, latest album Spot Land might at first come as something of a shock. 2022’s Hexen Valley was a trans-Pennine bad trip with hints of the later Fall-era’s sludgy intensity but with (given the title, appropriately) bad-vibes murk, as if Mark E. Smith and co’s Salford Van Hire transport had veered off into the brown gurgle of the River Calder after a gig at the Trades.
Its successor is an almost bucolic contrast, a wander up to the Tops on a rare bright May spring day. Yet this isn’t a radical departure based on being bereft of ideas, but a dramatic evolution of Gnod’s sound that retains every ounce of their inquisitive nature and desire to progress. This richly textured album is an exercise in refinement; perhaps not minimalism, but certainly distilling the essence of Gnod to five tracks that within their quiet oddness lies as much (and perhaps even more) power as when the band are at their glorious noise rock biker-gang full-throttle excess.
Arooj AftabNight ReignVerve
The title of Arooj Aftab’s latest album might suggest we’re about to plunge down the tenebrous spiral staircase of the soul. But there’s also a lightness of touch that infuses Night Reign, even lifting us up at times. These are deep, emotional, sometimes bruising songs, though the insinuation of total darkness belies the exquisiteness of its spiritually rigorous forty-eight minutes.The darkest hour is just before dawn, goes the old proverb, and at the conclusion of songs like ‘Last Night (Reprise)’ or ‘Na Gul’, there’s a sense of emerging into a new day following a passing storm, where the senses are awakened and everything feels fresher and more alive. That’s not to say there’s no mournfulness. ‘Saaqi’ is a soundscape rendered almost funereal with Aftab’s rich, dolorous tones stretching it out into infinity, but Night Reign is more crepuscular than anything, where night and day come together, and sex and death are never far removed from one another. Her cover of ‘Autumn Leaves’ exemplifies that smoky, jazzy, sensuous danse macabre.
Tashi WadaWhat Is Not Strange?RVNG Intl.
On What Is Not Strange?, Tashi Wada’s music curves, steepens and plateaus like a trail on the way to a vista. The Los Angeles-based composer’s drones continuously evolve; his fractured melodies stop before they’ve started or swerve into unexpected directions, collecting surprises along the way. Throughout, Wada uses an 18th-century tuning system developed by music theorist Jean-Philippe Rameau, which coats his glistening drones and broken-down songs in dissonance, and he works with vocalist Julia Holter, percussionist Corey Fogel, violist Ezra Buchla and bassist Devin Hoff. The alternate tuning allows for his music to expand beyond just the conventional stylings of his keyboard, while his collaborators help each track grow into kaleidoscopes built from the shards of each musical phrase. More than anything, though, What Is Not Strange? is an album about choosing one winding path and following it – even if it ends up somewhere previously unknown.
Wada wrote the music for What Is Not Strange? while processing a time of life transition, during which his father, the artist Yoshi Wada, passed away, and his daughter was born. The resulting music embraces the cyclical nature of life: its darkness, its light and everything in-between. The album itself operates in a broad loop. It begins in a space of wonder, flows into the shock of grief, plunges deep into the pain of uncertainty and re-emerges at last with a sparkle of hope.
Jacken ElswythAt FargroundsWrong Speed
Jacken Elswyth’s new solo album comes from a space somewhere on the borders of reality. A banjo player and, just as importantly, an instrument maker, Elswyth’s solo work has developed alongside her role in the nine-piece Shovel Dance Collective, undoubted folk stars of the 2020s. The Shovel Collective’s music is riotous, joyful and haunting, made within a collaborative framework that creates room for looseness, spontaneity and happenstance. Elswyth’s solo work has the same characteristics. Her playing is commanding but open and relaxed, resulting in some startling accounts of traditional music, and improvised tracks that explore the character and feel of the instruments Elswyth constructs.
At Fargrounds brings together music from across the Western folk tradition, from bluegrass to the Scottish tune ‘A Fisherman’s Song For Attracting Seals’, to ‘The Sussex Waltz’. But the banjo has wider associations, originating in West Africa and brought to the USA through slavery. The instrument is a powerful cultural tool, entangled in the dark roots of American society. Elswyth’s playing expresses a history of connection and consequences, where music cannot be seen as local, or played as parochial heritage, but can only be understood through its links to global injustice. Elswyth’s album is sophisticated and accomplished, a folk thesis for our times. It is a significant achievement, clever and thoroughly enjoyable, brimming with atmosphere, energy and fantastic tunes.
Rafael ToralSpectral EvolutionMoikai
Spectral Evolution is the nature fixation of nineteenth-century Romanticism updated for a time when soundscapes can seem increasingly surreal: when rainforest sounds can come from phone speakers and birdsong can be heard over traffic. Rafael Toral’s music is wide, it’s huge, it’s environmental. But it’s not about the sublime – at least not as it’s typically thought. Spectral Evolution doesn’t reflect the awe in canyons, mountains and wide-open spaces. It doesn’t evoke huge things, but the inundation of little things. A world that can seem clearly demarcated visually, getting blurry when you only hear it.
“You can look at seeing, but you can’t hear hearing,” wrote Marcel Duchamp on one of the notes in his Box of 1914. The aphorism gets at the peculiarity of sound. You can see someone hearing something, perhaps startled, headbanging, blocking their ears. You can even listen to the same sound. But can you ever hear what someone else heard, how they heard it? On Spectral Evolution, Toral bridges that gap through a beautifully harmonious cacophony.
Mohammad SyfkhanI Am KurdishNyahh
Mohammad Syfkhan’s impressive debut solo album, I Am Kurdish, was recorded in County Wicklow with musicians including County Sligo saxophonist Cathal Roche and Cork-based cellist Eimear Reidy. The record takes his domestic influences and fuses them with music from beyond those regions, from North African folk rhythms to Turkish psychedelia. It’s a glorious alembic not bound by borders, where Syfkhan himself brings a cultivated exuberance to his playing that belies his vintage.
The title track, of course, deals with identity, and I’m reliably informed that Syfkhan writes about the tragedy he and his family experienced when war broke out in Syria, while also using the song to give thanks for having come through the horrors of a decade ago. Though more importantly perhaps – given that so many of the people who hear it won’t understand it either – ‘I Am Kurdish’ bangs (albeit in a dignified, upstanding kind of a way – these songs rarely exceed 120 BPM, though that doesn’t mean they’re not engineered to make you dance). Rooted to a sonorous bass drum, the chords of ‘I Am Kurdish’ or ‘Az Kardam’ levitate around the same bass note, as Syfkhan’s vocalese alternates with the bouzouki, breaking out all by itself and striking up a memorable motif. Opener ‘Do You Have A Lover Or Not’, a song written by Radwan Abdullah, should almost certainly inspire people to rise from their seats and move to the Dabke rhythms regardless of their relationship status.
Ex-Easter Island HeadNortherRocket Recordings
On their previous, highly rhythmic album, Twenty-Two Strings, Ex-Easter Island Head pushed their musical boundaries, creating polyrhythmic structures and rushing motorik compositions. This evolution in their sound, reminiscent of the Glenn Branca Ensemble, among others, is further showcased on their latest release, Norther. After eight years, the band, now a quartet with the addition of Andrew PM Hunt (AKA Dialect), continue to draw from their unique methodology of playing guitars with mallets and sticks, painting sonic palettes at the intersection of minimalism and ambient music.
Across the record, they show how single and simple patterns repeated ad infinitum offer the potential for highly developed suites. One idea is soaped up into infinite layers creating sonic forms; poignant pieces brilliantly played by eight hands. Standing, as it were, in opposition to rock’s impetus, the band concentrate on individual phrases, which gradually develop, demonstrating the incredible beauty and possibilities of the electric guitar sound stripped of its rock ethos. They delve into the subtleties of sound exploration by attaining exceptional levels of sensitivity combined with fractious arrangement in order to showcase emotional beauty in a post-minimalist way.
The Quietus Albums Of The Year So Far 2024
- Ex-Easter Island Head – Norther
- Mohammad Syfkhan – I Am Kurdish
- Rafael Toral – Spectral Evolution
- Jacken Elswyth – At Fargrounds
- Tashi Wada – What Is Not Strange?
- Arooj Aftab – Night Reign
- Gnod – Spot Land
- Still House Plants – If I Don’t Make It, I Love U
- William Doyle – Springs Eternal
- BIG|BRAVE – A Chaos Of Flowers
- Various Artists – Ghana Special 2: Electronic Highlife & Afro Sounds In The Diaspora, 1980-93
- Einstürzende Neubauten – Rampen
- Milkweed – Folklore 1979
- Bill Ryder-Jones – Iechyd Da
- Eric Chenaux Trio – Delights Of My Life
- The Dengie Hundred With Gemma Blackshaw – Who Will You Love
- Nadine Shah – Filthy Underneath
- Martha Skye Murphy – Um
- Fat White Family – Forgiveness Is Yours
- Jane Weaver – Love In Constant Spectacle
- Persher – Sleep Well
- British Murder Boys – Active Agents And House Boys
- Naemi – Dust Devil
- Beth Gibbons – Lives Outgrown
- Harry Gorski-Brown – Durt Dronemaker After Dreamboats
- Guðmundur Steinn Gunnarsson – Stífluhringurinn
- Senyawa – Vajranala
- Helado Negro – Phasor
- Goblin Band – Come Slack Your Horse!
- Pet Shop Boys – Nonetheless
- M.L. Deathman – Acid Horse 23
- Schoolboy Q – Blue Lips
- DJ Anderson do Paraíso – Queridão
- Arab Strap – I’m Totally Fine With It Don’t Give A Fuck Anymore
- Richard Teitelbaum – Asparagus
- Mary Halvorson – Cloudward
- Charli XCX – Brat
- Tony Njoku – Last Bloom
- Perc – The Cut Off
- Caveira – Ficar Vivo
- Vanishing – Shelter Of The Opaque
- Kim Gordon – The Collective
- Julia Holter – Something In The Room She Moves
- Yes Indeed – King Of Blue
- MIKE & Tony Seltzer – Pinball
- Rəhman Məmmədli – Azerbaijani Gitara Volume 2
- Quatuor Bozzini – Jürg Frey: String Quartet No. 4
- Elijah Minnelli – Perpetual Musket
- Jlin – Akoma
- Fer Franco – Ritos de Paso
- Cower – Celestial Devastation
- Kavus Torabi – The Banishing
- Shellac – To All Trains
- Erika Angell – The Obsession With Her Voice
- Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru – Souvenirs
- Diamanda Galás – In Concert
- Anastasia Coope – Darning Woman
- Dali de Saint Paul & Maxwell Sterling – Penumbra
- Thou – Umbilical
- Bòsc – Bòsc
- Oren Ambarchi, Johan Berthling And Andreas Werliin – Ghosted II
- Yaya Bey – Ten Fold
- Alison Cotton – Engelchen
- R.N.A. Organism – R.N.A.O. Meets P.O.P.O.
- Sheida Gharachedaghi – Chess Of The Wind
- Avalanche Kaito – Talitakum
- Mdou Moctar – Funeral For Justice
- Judas Priest – Invincible Shield
- Hi! Capybaras – A/M/Y/G/D/A/L/A
- Roc Marciano – Marciology
- Spectral Voice – Sparagmos
- The Havels / Irena & Vojtěch Havlovi – Four Hands
- Colin Johnco – Crabe Géant
- Skee Mask – ISS010
- Sleepytime Gorilla Museum – Of The Last Human Being
- Broadcast – Spell Blanket
- MAHTI – Musiikki 3
- Lord Spikeheart – The Adept
- Tyla – Tyla
- Imperial Valley – IV
- Sunna Margrét – Finger On Tongue
- Faune – Des Fantômes
- Suburban Lawns – Baby
- Sunburned Hand Of The Man – Nimbus
- Bégayer – Évohé Bègue
- Al Wootton – Lifted From The Earth
- Chelsea Wolfe – She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She
- Zofie Siege – Gems In Dirt
- Inter Arma – New Heaven
- Sipaningkah – Langkah Suruik
- Lori Goldston – Convulsions
- Lola De La Mata – Oceans On Azimuth
- Keeley Forsyth – The Hollow
- Kali Malone – All Life Long
- Verraco – Breathe… Godspeed
- Marion Cousin & Eloïse Decazes – Com a lanceta na mão
- Wu-Lu – Learning To Swim On Empty
- Bianca Scout – Pattern Damage
- Metz – Up On Gravity Hill
- Cuntroaches – Cuntroaches
