60.
A hyperactive, rhythmic-noise-adjacent form of African dance music, singeli music encapsulates the jaw-clenching urgency of gabber, regularly exceeding the speed of 200 BPM. A Tanzanian cultural phenomenon and since recently a hot international export, one of its younger representatives is the 19-year-old Dar Es Salaam native DJ Travella. The tracks found on his debut structurally resemble the productions of his contemporaries from Sisso and Pamoja Records, but are rather more multifaceted and interwoven with a wide array of samples. The most exciting thing about this unapologetically speedy music is the tongue-in-cheek playfulness that emanates from the tracks.DJ TravellaMr MixondoNyege Nyege Tapes
59.
Pimpon, AKA Poland-born, Copenhagen-based drummer and composer Szymon Gąsiorek defies easy categorisation on debut Pozdrawiam. Opener ‘I’ve Made It To Another Station’ sees his autotuned vocals repeat the titular phrase over a bed of field recordings and electronics, the repetition coming across like a musique concrète-tinged reimagining of Sparks’ ‘My Baby’s Taking Me Home’. The collision of avant-garde and pop continues throughout. It’s a pop album, it’s a highly intricate sound art album, and it’s a virtuoso psychedelic percussion album all in one. Flicking audaciously between incessant earworms, massive beats and intricate scrapes and rustles, the antithetical components amplify rather than dilute each other’s impact.PimponPozdrawiamPointless Geometry
58.
There are a lot of releases by Irish collective United Bible Studies, and a lot of stylistic ground covered in their two-decade run to date. A lot of it might reasonably be described as ‘free folk’, which can mean a lot of things – rarely, though, will it sound as lush and plangent as the two sidelong pieces on this cassette released by Cruel Nature. Violin, piano and sax combine for 40 minutes of ambient/jazz/drone minimalism.United Bible StudiesThe Return Of The RiversCruel Nature
57.
Wildly prolific cornetist Rob Mazurek has reduced his output in recent years and it seems to have brought him a renewed focus. His recent work is as good as, or better than, anything he’s done previously. This is the second album with the quartet responsible for excellent 2019 recording Desert Encrypts Vol. 1, with pianist Kris Davis, bassist Ingebrigt HÃ¥ker Flaten and drummer Chad Taylor. The top-notch group sound even more locked in here, operating as a collective to support a riveting consolidation of ideas and strengths by Mazurek. His experiments with wailing vocals, for example, have been unbalanced in the past, but here they make all of the sense in the world, as an extension of ecstatic horn blowing. But the real power is in his jagged yet indelible compositions which form a suite dedicated to his late father, who passed in 2016.Rob MazurekFather’s WingRogueArt
56.
Only Love From Now On is the fifth in a string of near-perfect, roughly album-length releases that kicked off with the release of Both Lines Will Be Blue in mid-2019. I’ve written about Carmen Villain’s aesthetic at length before: “gentle but never wimpy”; “the crossroads of dub, ambient, and new age”; “canyon-esque dub space”. And all of that still applies. What we’re witnessing here isn’t radical reinvention (which is hugely overrated anyhow), but the continued refinement and mastery of a specific milieu, and the judicious introduction of new elements and a new collaborator in Arve Henriksen – who joins Villain on trumpet and electronics along with longtime collaborator Johanna Scheie Orellana on flute.Carmen VillainOnly Love From Now OnSmalltown Supersound
55.
Italian quartet Messa’s first two records were pretty distinctive, pairing gloomy but anthemic doom with droney, ambient leanings, bolstered by the powerful, otherworldly vocals of frontwoman Sara. This third album is markedly more adventurous, however, as you’ll glean instantly from the dazzling opening combo of ‘Suspended’ and ‘Dark Horse’; after ‘Suspended’ begins with a similarly subtle, nocturnal vibe to Jex Thoth’s second album, Blood Moon Rise, it unleashes one of the album’s biggest, most infectious choruses.MessaCloseSvart
54.
Coldplay and Deftones are among the stadium-bestriding influences Porridge Radio’s Dana Margolin has cited for her band’s much-anticipated new album. But the record’s unique innovation is to take these familiar components – firecracker guitars, choruses that flutter gamely in the breeze – and to give them a body-horror twist, resulting in a project that feels simultaneously uplifting and unmooring. It’s like going to a rom-com at the cinema and realising half way in that the director has inserted ghostly images into every frame. A lark of an afternoon is all of a sudden filled with dread. This is not only a testament to Margolin’s gifts as songwriter and lyricist, but also to the uneasy cadences that she injects into her outwardly rhapsodic compositions.Porridge RadioWaterslide, Diving Board, Ladder To The SkySecretly Canadian
53.
The latest jerk in Shit And Shine’s, uh, eccentric aesthetic trajectory is pretty accurately charted by the geographic markers dotted over their last two LPs. If 2020’s Malibu Liquor Store was a trip way out West which left the mind puddling drip by drip under the intolerable Cali sunshine like the ice bucket at some hooting backwater cookout, Phase Corrected opener ‘North Atlantic’ barrels in with slamming waves of heavily distorted bass which would topple an oil rig. Vacation over. Now back with long-term partners in piss-wringing label Riot Season, Phase Corrected might just top their previous release for the imprint – the pathologically unfriendly Goat Yelling Like A Man – in the meanness stakes.Shit And ShinePhase CorrectedRiot Season
52.
Although it was a compilation album of instrumentals, Alabaster dePlume’s last record, For Cy & Lee, would prove to be his breakthrough. Perhaps it’s because of the immense soothingness that that album, released just a month before the first coronavirus lockdown, provided to so many. He follows that record with GOLD, which also concerns human connection but reaches moving new heights as it delves deep into the joys of communal music-making. Long and sprawling, packed with collaborations with other musicians, live recordings and dePlume’s trademark rambling monologues, its beauty and positivity is overwhelming.Alabaster DePlumeGOLDInternational Anthem
51.
The notion that 50 Foot Wave exist as a channel for music deemed ‘too weird’ for Throwing Muses is one that persists in writing about them, but is really rather misleading. 2020’s Sun Racket deployed a similarly rough-edged sound and largely mid-tempo songs, but Black Pearl ratchets up the noise element a little further, creating a hazy, heat-saturated and impressionistic sound world that is aptly expressed in the album’s cover with its lush vegetation encircling the sky as the sun begins to rise. This album is too much of a piece to be picking out favourites, yet it is also one whose subtleties really reveal themselves on subsequent listens. Go on, dive in. Soak up the heat, discover what’s hidden underneath the overgrown foliage. You know you want to.50 Foot WaveBlack PearlFire
50.
Songs of all flavours – flex songs, sex songs, heartbreak ballads and lamentations towards fame – are all given level standing on MOTOMAMI. The highs here hedonistically bounce around big beats, and RosalÃa can rap just as coolly about her status and influence as she can get you wrapped up in it. Even the most by-the-numbers reggaeton cut, ‘Chicken Teriyaki’, is contagious, and finds space to nod at the album’s inner conflict: “Yeah, fame’s a prison sentence,” she raps, “but tell me what other girl’s gonna buy you dinner?”RosalaMOTOMAMIColumbia
49.
Three Sexual Pieces For Violin shapeshifts from gritty, forlorn textures into bittersweet reminiscences, foregrounding the ever-changing voice of a solo violin. Composer Rufus Isabel Elliot writes fleeting feelings that violinist Harry Gorski-Brown illuminates in textured blips of sound. The album, which features three pieces written between 2018 and 2020, tells stories about sexual intimacy using text scores that capture the essence of each piece through short phrases to create moods through abstract ideas rather than conventional melodies and rhythms.Rufus Isabel Elliot Harry GorskiBrownThree Sexual Pieces For Solo Violin (This And This And This)Self-Released
48.
At the core of Skinty Fia is Fontaines D.C.’s reckoning with their Irish identity. The title is the anglicised version of an Irish expression that drummer Tom McColl’s great aunt – one of a rapidly dying breed of Gaeltachts who speak Irish as their first language – was fond of. It translates loosely as “The damnation of the deer,” recalling the now-extinct Irish giant elk, and can also be used as an expletive roughly analogous to “for fuck’s sake.” The album opens in Irish with ‘In ár gcroÃthe go deo’, which translates to ‘In our hearts forever’, the title repeated in a choral chant in the background through the entire song. That song is also a clear indication that the album is quite some step forward instrumentally too, a pounding industrial beat fizzing its way in under the elegiac choral refrain at the song’s halfway point.Fontaines D.C.Skinty FiaPartisan
47.
On In Free Fall, composer Maya Shenfeld unites punk-inspired feedback with glowing electronics and classical forms. It’s her debut solo album, but it’s built on years of exploration across musical genres. While she’s a classically trained composer living in Berlin, her musical interests have strayed from that path and ventured into more experimental and noisy territory. In Free Fall, whose name comes from a Hito Steyerl essay that describes the feeling of a loss of stability, sees her searching for the middle ground between those musical practices, looking to dissolve the boundaries between them. What unites all these different ideas is Shenfeld’s tireless interest in musical texture. The music she writes here is polished but amorphous, made of undulating masses of sound that swirl around each other.Maya ShenfeldIn Free FallThrill Jockey
45.
One of the most ingenious representatives of forward-thinking Latin American- and Afro-Mexican-influenced club sounds of the past decade, SUBREAL label co-founder Marco Polo Gutierrez meticulously constructs every minute detail of his polyrhythmic grooves while always retaining an air of hip-shaking propulsion. Heavily relying on syncretic synthesis, Cruda is a study in exploring texture and rhythm along with dancefloor ambitions. Its arrangements centre on spiralling interplays between synthesised and acoustic drum skin timbres and dynamic low frequency modulations. The melodic dimension of his productions is usually less prominent, relying merely on digital flutes, ghostly pads, glitchy and bubbly pulses, and occasionally gloomy synth stabs backed by a sinister forest ambience.Siete CatorceCrudaSUBREAL
44.
Boutique vinyl fetishist label Castles In Space is home to some of the most lovingly packaged, homespun electronic music ideas out there at the minute, and so is the ideal label for The Sound Of Science’s eduphonic synthucation project. Songs about supermassive blackholes, photosynthesis and the periodic table of elements which call to mind Kraftwerk, Severed Heads, Patrick Cowley, Bruce Haack and even Fat White Family are raised way beyond mere hauntological pastiche by Dean Honer and Kevin Pearce’s undeniable electro pop chops. And that’s before we get to the wonderfully illustrated booklet.The Sound Of ScienceThe Sound Of ScienceCastles In Space
43.
Omertà ’s second release, Collection Particulière, which features Jérémie Sauvage of France on bass and Jonathan Grandcollot on drums, is avowedly a ‘pop’ album, defined by the latter’s “streamlined” drumming style and the greater clarity of singer (and visual artist) Florence Giroud’s cool, but not affectless, vocals.OmertCollection ParticulièreZamzam
42.
The five tracks that comprise Nocturnal Trance are deceptively detailed, with the album’s washed-out sound belying a wealth of rich, textured soundscapes. Repeated listens to swirling, curiously meditative sonic vortexes like ‘Poisonous Dark Apparitions’ will reward the patient listener with all manner of hypnotic and oddly beautiful layers, all working in tandem to create an oppressively macabre ambience. It helps that there’s a keen, if subtle, melodic sensibility here too. If you’ve got any interest in lo-fi music at all, not just black metal, don’t miss this.CANDELABRUMNocturnal TranceHell’s Headbangers
41.
Kelly Lee Owens’ career as an artist has developed in tandem with, geopolitically speaking, a whole host of nightmare bullshit. And while she’s touched on these troubled times before, LP.8 is the first of her records to really mirror them in feel – the hope and beauty, the exhaustion and melancholy – as well as in content, and the result is stunning. This thing she’s made with collaborator Lasse Marhaug is unafraid and untethered and honest. It is by far her best record.Kelly Lee OwensLP.8Smalltown Supersound
40.
Werk are the trio of Mariano Sandoval, Iván Tovi and Alejandro Coll, and Angirú, a word which translates to ‘soul companion’ in the Guarani language, feels like the most important tape in the world right now. It’s centred around Sandoval’s playing of the arpa Paraguaya (Paraguayan harp), which threads together nature recordings and speech from members of the indigenous Guarani, Pilagá, Qom and Wichà communities from Formosa, a region close to the border between Argentina and Paraguay. Those spoken sections come from WhatsApp audio chats Sandoval had with people from those communities, in particular answering questions around what music is and what it means to them. Flurries of speech, sometimes unfurling naturally, others hooked into loops, weave through the lamenting harp plucks and strums. Occasionally the three players lock into magical grooves under the words, Tovi adding subtle synths while Coll adds Charango, an Andean instrument from the lute family, to ‘Lunas De Monte’.
