The Quietus Albums Of The Year So Far Chart 2021

20.

rabrotNorwegian GothicPelagic

Årabrot’s ninth album is as dynamic and unpredictable as ever, stuffed with squalling sex and death anthems that could career off the rails at any moment. Like every Årabrot album, Kjetil Nernes has roped in a revolving cast of musicians, this time including Lars Horntveth (Jaga Jazzist), cellist Jo Quail, Tomas Järmyr (Motorpsycho), Anders Møller (Turbonegro, Ulver) and Massimo Pupillo (Zu), but Karin Park’s influence slices through the noise. Squeezed in amongst the nods to punk, black and industrial metal, anthemic choruses push Årabrot’s sound into new dimensions on ‘Kinks Of The Heart’ and ‘The Lie’, in the snakelike grooves and synths of ‘The Rule Of Silence’. It’s like sherbet for Swans fans.

Danii Leivers

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19.

ColleenThe Tunnel And The ClearingThrill Jockey

Inspired by African and Jamaican musicians’ ethos of maximising creativity with a modest setup, Colleen’s singular sound is informed by principles not the emulating of another’s style. Influences like Arthur Russell, Lee Perry, or even Broadcast appear pleasantly oblique, like a washed-out collage. Following a particular instrumental focus on each album, her eighth centres the organ, enhanced by a carefully reduced set of analogue electronics. With just six items of gear, Schott crafted the most intricate tapestry of minimally composed, contemplative moods with a beating heart underneath.

Danijela Bočev

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18.

Skee MaskPoolIlian Tape

Considering the hundreds of press releases that end up in my mailbox daily, most of them blatantly hyping the next big thing, in the case of Pool, it was really refreshing to just get a totally unexpected new record. The absence of a press release, an industry standard that has unfortunately come to define how most people write about music, opened up a possibility for everyone to develop their own intimate relationship with the record. (I must add this has been the case with most Ilian Tape releases.) Be sure to take 100 minutes off for this one — it’s a beast of a record. You’ll know what I mean when you hear the ’80s hair metal solo in the track ‘Harrison Ford’.

Jaša Bužinel

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17.

Tanz Mein HerzQuattroStandard In-Fi

If you’ve already come across drone-folk monsters France then TMH are their slightly less monofocal cousins, with Mathieu Tilly and Jeremie Sauvage (who also runs the Standard In-Fi label) appearing in both. While France will plough a single furrow for the entirety of a release or a show (thrillingly, I should add), Tanz Mein Herz – who here also include Ernest Bergez (AKA Sourdure), Alexis Degrenier, Guilhem Lacroux, Pierre-Vincent Fortunier and Pierre Bujeau – have a more wide-open sound, while still keeping faith with the hypnotic power of repetition. Even by their, previously excellent, standards, Quattro is pretty monumental – the shortest track is just over seven minutes, the longest clocks in at over 26, but what’s striking isn’t so much duration as the tension between savagery (of the drones and the see-sawing fiddle) and the poise of the milky guitar arpeggios, plunking bass and rumbling drums that draws you in as the grooves intensify and trails of synth start to glow like comet tails.

David McKenna

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16.

Gary NumanIntruderBMG

Intruder is Gary Numan’s nineteenth album. It’s a concept record, sang from the point of view of the Earth itself to the bipedal aliens that crawl across its surface, wreaking irreversible toxic havoc. That sounds a bit pretentious, and maybe it is, but it’s exactly the sort of apocalyptic narrative Numan has been spinning for years now, and the themes are depressingly timely. Fortunately, so is the music. Working with longtime collaborator Ade Fenton, Numan has created a tapestry of atmospheric, claustrophobic and, occasionally, toweringly pissed musical strands reflecting the mood of a heartbroken and livid planet as its colonisers continue to belch fumes in its eyes and chisel at its face.

Marc Burrows

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15.

SquidBright Green FieldWarp

The best thing about Bright Green Field – and Squid in general – is how fun it is. There is a tendency with similar post-punk acts to be dour or morbid. There is nothing wrong with that. The themes that they write about are generally downbeat. But Squid manage to inject bouncy rhythms to their tales of modern living. After the scene-setting forty-second opening track ‘Resolution Square’, ‘G.S.K.’ comes at you with lumbering rhythms and roguish guitars. Think The Fall covering ESG and you’re on the right lines. Over this, drummer and vocalist Ollie Judge shouts “As the sun sets on the Glaxo Klein / Well, it’s the only way that I can tell the time” after which huge funky horns explode from the speakers before a jaunty, yet incredibly catchy, guitar motif appears, disappears, then reappears. It sets the tone for the rest of the album.

Nick Roseblade

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14.

Eimear Reidy Natalia BeylisWhose Woods These AreSelf-Released

The day after I got my jab I felt a bit washed out; nothing serious, but enough to make me shrink from any, well, serious listening. This album was a salve, it got me out of bed into clothes and out of the house for a walk. Beylis picks out simple piano and organ lines, an easy fluency that caresses the resonant warmth of Reidy’s cello running breathy and low. These three tracks are about trees, prompted by Robert Frost’s ‘Whose Woods These Are’, which moved into the public domain this year. Beylis and Reidy imagine a utopia where the trees go public domain (imagining the disintegration of land ownership by proxy). There is much space to breathe here and those who crave more might be similarly settled by hearing the seasons unfurl in the monthly sessions Laura Cannell and cellist Kate Ellis are recording and releasing throughout this year.

Jennifer Lucy Allan

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13.

Jane WeaverFlockFire

Flock is the 1990s as taped-from-the-TV versions of Naked and KLF vanity projects, the ticking beats of Trans-Europe and Trans-American compilations, Suede’s electric grimoire, Beta bandaids, The Family of God LP and the collective psyched-out idiocy on Ochre Records, Giant Steps from various switched on Scouse and Wool bands, Superfurry animism, Broadcast’s divinations into the underground currents of Eurofilm, Stereolab laying down their subliminal grooves akin to an amped-up Philip Sidney gig, and a Krautrocksampling Cope acting as underground cheerleader. Interesting, offbeat people doing their thing, in other words. And Jane Weaver is one of them.

Richard Foster

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12.

Black Country, New RoadFor The First TimeNinja Tune

Just the six tracks in total, there is an air of familiarity to For The First Time. Rather than a collection of new music, the band have recorded the best songs from their live set into one cohesive and satisfying package. (With the notable exception of ‘Track X’, which has been part of Wood’s solo live set as The Guest occasionally for some time.) Indeed, for the indoctrinated, this debut is low in surprises, but the songs are very sharp and done a great justice by the production. It’s rare that a band this noisy, an album where chaos reigns, is recorded with this much clarity. There are so many different musical ideas, and none of them get lost along the way.

Cal Cashin

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11.

The ArmedULTRAPOPSargent House

It’s a mark of The Armed’s deftness and intelligence that their fandom can remain both obsessive and inclusive at the same time, never bordering on the weaponised toxicity that has scarred ‘Stan’ culture elsewhere online. What elevates The Armed from the enjoyable to the essential, however, is the extraordinary strength of their art. The driving force behind all their fans’ energy is music that feels genuinely vital. ULTRAPOP is an attempt to take the intensity of the hardcore music the band grew up on, and by injecting it with modern pop’s forward-facing maximalism, up its energy even further still, emerging with a brand new genre from which the album takes its name. In the process, they’re gleefully undercutting the hypermasculine nonsense that can sometimes dog heavier music. Sneer at their ambition if you will, but they’ve succeeded in that mission. ULTRAPOP is as bold, dynamic and addictive an album as you’ll hear all year.

Patrick Clarke

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10.

Godspeed You! Black EmperorG_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END!Constellation

Split into four tracks – two twenty-minute passages of dense instrumentation with equally dense titles (the record opens with ‘A Military Alphabet (five eyes all blind) (4521.0kHz 6730.0kHz 4109.09kHz) / Job’s Lament / First of the Last Glaciers / where we break how we shine (ROCKETS FOR MARY)’), and two shorter cuts – G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END! is ironically the group’s least dystopian record to date. Church bells chime under layers of driving guitars and militaristic drums, and amongst the AM radio static that fills the background, there’s birdsong and, whisper it, a sense of hope. As the album’s opening track comes to an end, it’s punctuated by distant explosions; they could be gunshots, but also, they could be fireworks.

Mike Vinti

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9.

Sons of KemetBlack To The FutureImpulse!

Whilst much of Sons Of Kemet’s prior material was shaped live, finding its final form in sweaty venues, that has simply not been the case with Black To The Future for fairly obvious reasons. Whilst there are moments of fizz, pure energetic zip, the album as a whole is more meditative. For the most part, Shabaka Hutchings favours clarinet over saxophone, welcoming brass contributions from the likes of Steve Williamson, Kebbi Williams, and Cassie Kinoshi of SEED Ensemble. In this slight transformation, though, nothing has been lost. Tracks like ‘Never Forget the Source’ and ‘Envision Yourself Levitating’ reach slow sprawling ecstasy through patient constructions. The latter especially, sees Hutchings’ woodwinds and Kebbi Williams’ tenor sax dovetailing around Theon Cross’ wilting brass bassline daintily in pursuit of the absolute. It’s transcendent stuff.

Cal Cashin

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8.

Divide & DissolveGas LitInvada

The 90 seconds or so of pastoral sax dappling which opens ‘Oblique’, thus the album, is like something you might expect to find on the ECM label. The guitar and drums, when they enter, are decidedly less so: Reed’s riffs don’t drone, exactly, but seem to melt into each other while sucking all the oxygen from the room. Nehill plays like a jazzer tasked with flattening their kit, snares leading a merry – if non-linear and skull-jabbing – dance. D&D’s drummer has an especially singular technique, a Neubauten-like leaden clang cutting through ‘Prove It’ (this may to some extent be credited to Gas Lit’s producer, Unknown Mortal Orchestra frontman Ruban Neilson) and ‘Denial’ wielding cymbals like ancient weapons during its seven and a half-minute journey.

Noel Gardner

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7.

Arap StrapAs Days Get DarkRock Action

There’s a funny thing that happens on As Days Get Dark. Wretched misdeeds and thoughts slip more thoroughly into the third person. There’s a sense of remove. Aged, the lecherous scumbags seem more pathetic than ever. They’re much too old for wherever they are and whoever they’re creeping, just barely louche at best. You can almost smell the flop sweat of the dude in ‘I Was Once A Weak Man’ as he tries to convince himself that his behaviour isn’t deeply, deeply embarrassing – at minimum. Other tracks are nightmarishly parabolic. A grease-stained god of nocturnal dalliances sweeps up the nightlife in ‘Here Comes Comus!’; doomed foxes seek refuge; the past haunts a train traveller in the first-person ‘Sleeper’. Is it possible there are lessons to be learned here? Maybe even a little bit of wisdom?

Bernie Brooks

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6.

Gazelle TwinDeep EnglandNYX Collective

Deep England takes its name from a strain of identity diagnosed by academic Patrick Wright as “this deep-frozen English nationalism.” It unfolds like chapters in a bedtime story that’s taken a plunge into the uncanny, as Elizabeth Bernholz deploys a shifting palette of wind instruments, textured shrieks, horror-movie FX, and lurching techno. Chiming church bells usher in opening track ‘Glory’, which quickly whips itself into a terrible rhapsody of female voices, like the ghosts of England’s unresolved sense of self swirling through all at once. The folk horror sensibility that infuses the record is acknowledged directly on ‘Fire Leap’. This is a spectral rendering of the fertility song from The Wicker Man – one that makes the original sound like a Teletubbies singalong by comparison.

Ed Power

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5.

MicrocorpsXMITALTER

Alexander Tucker has innovated a novel way of processing signal on XMIT, cutting and splicing segments of speech into time-stretched non-sequiturs, a disquieting technique used to effect, for example, on Simon Fisher Turner’s outing, entitled ‘OCT’. ‘ABII’ with Astrud Steehouder elasticises the album’s most classical vocal elements, whilst orphan electrics are set to gurgle and bray in the background. Nik Void’s contribution, ‘ILN’, is the record’s most straight-ahead knees-up, an analogue, heavyweight raga built for the world’s abandoned dancefloors. At its best, XMIT nods adroitly to Radiohead’s woofer endangering ‘Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors’, and adeptly advances the wild forward/backward vocal simultaneity of ‘Everything in its Right Place’.

Ryan Alexander Diduck

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4.

Black MidiCavalcadeRough Trade

David Lynch likened creative ideas to fishing – you wait and when they start biting, it’s showtime. Keep in the shallow waters and you’ll catch the small ones. But “down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.” Creatively sincere, their instincts radically open, black midi pack a bucketful of pretty big catches on Cavalcade. The concept revolves around a series of third person narratives where each tells their oddly allegorical story in a procession. Each track is a universe of its own, doing what art should do: using its own virtual space as an experimental testing ground to try those limits of taboo and impossibility that remain limited IRL.

Danijela Bočev

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3.

Loraine JamesReflectionHyperdub

Like Loraine James’ last album, Reflection is dizzying in scope. James re-imagines classic elements of dance and club with drill, R&B, grime, dub, electro and trap. Drill and R&B feel more predominant here than the other genres this time round, something James herself feels has seeped more into her work after a time spent listening to both forms throughout the early part of 2020. Her last album, whilst not overtly political, explored what it was like to be a queer, Black woman from a working-class background in a rapidly disappearing area of London. Here, there’s more of that too but with a greater urgency and boldness, like on ‘Simple Stuff’ and album centrepieces, ‘Insecure Behaviour and Fuckery’ (which features Nova) and ‘Black Ting’ (made with frequent collaborator Le3 bLACK).

Elizabeth Aubrey

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2.

William DoyleGreat Spans Of Muddy TimeTough Love

Although 1960s girl groups don’t immediately spring to mind when listening to William Doyle, there’s something about the emotional honesty of some of the lyrics and singing on Great Spans Of Muddy Time that recalls how groups like The Ronettes, The Girlfriends, or The Crystals could sing songs wreathed in uncertainty and doubt, using plain language in a heartfelt, direct delivery. In the stunning lead single, the compact, kaleidoscopic pop symphony of ‘And Everything Changed (But I Feel Alright)’, the passionate repetition of the line ‘I feel alright I believe’ in the chorus suggests a narrator trying to convince him or herself of something; the word ‘believe’ can imply both conviction and faith/uncertainty. The sense of pain or anguish just lapping at the edges of the music is used to great effect on Great Spans Of Muddy Time, sometimes even wordlessly. In the introduction of ‘And Everything Changed (But I Feel Alright), just before Doyle starts singing, the intake of breath seems more in reaction to pain, rather than in readiness to sing.

Will Ainsley

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1.

Sleaford ModsSpare RibsRough Trade

When else in history have the purportedly censored sounded so unbearably loud? Political correctness – that fusty old Enlightenment idea of making an effort to treat people fairly and equally – is castigated as the worst possible tyranny imaginable. Any act of human kindness, however great or small, is dismissed immediately as “virtual signalling”. Not even Marcus Rashford can save us now.

This is the sorry state into which Sleaford Mods’ latest album announces itself like a punch in the belly from a stubbly stranger outside the small Sainsbury’s. Recorded quickly under lockdown, the music feels urgent in an almost skeletal way. The very bass lines themselves groan and sigh with both exasperation and aggression. Crucially, they still contain just enough swing to get the old hips swaying from side to side. The beats are harsh, icy and precise, with extra electronic embellishments used slyly and sparingly. There are barnstorming guest performances too, from Billy Nomates and Amy Taylor from Amyl & The Sniffers.

As for Jason Williamson’s always engrossing lyrics, there is little point in quoting any of these gems directly. They might look great on paper but they have to be heard first-hand to be properly enjoyed and absorbed. A large part of the pleasure of hearing any Sleaford Mods album is in the sheer accumulation of Williamson’s poetic dismay, as well as the perfect positioning of a particularly cathartic rant or foamy mouthed slur.

The Quietus Albums Of The Year So Far 2021