The Quietus albums of the year chart returns, with our favourite 100 records released in our tenth anniversary year. Read the countdown and find out how you can support us in our work bringing you the best new music
2018, in case you missed the memo, marks a decade since The Quietus launched as a digital websheet. As ever, back in January, we probably thought ‘what if this is the year that music goes crap?’ Thankfully, against a wider climate that just gets ever bleaker, music has rewarded us with the best birthday present it could, for this year’s top 100 albums of the year curiously feels like the ‘most Quietus’ we’ve ever done. What, exactly, this site is all about remains something of a mystery, even to us after a decade producing it, but that’s sort of the point. We’re not really fussed by hype and trends or a desperate desire to be focusing on the next hot thing – that sort of thinking is what has got the music media and industry alike into bother again and again. Instead, we focus on the marginal and ignored, the New Weird scenes of the world in a list compiled by the Quietus HQ crew Anna Wood, Christian Eede, Patrick Clarke, John Doran and myself, with help from our various genre columnists.
Indeed, it’s fair to say that this list is a counterblast to the algorithmic systems of music discovery that increasingly shape our culture, largely to negative effect. When we started The Quietus way back in 2008, that technology was in its infancy and the threat to the leftfield was arguably a conservative media landscape. In 2018, technology that gives people what it thinks they want doesn’t even flicker as it pushes people into bland aesthetic and stylistic corners. The whole joy of modern music, we believe, is that artists as diverse as Yves Tumor, Tropical Fuck Storm, Senyawa, Xenony, SOPHIE, Guttersnipe, Skee Mask and Miss Red make for thrilling bedfellows.
The other crisis posed by our New Tech Overlords and the dictatorship of algorithmic code is, of course, financial. Not only do Spotify and YouTube fail to adequately compensate artists on the margins (do use the Norman Records links to buy the music you find and love), Google and Facebook now absorb 90% of the advertising revenue that used to fund the media that is such a vital part of the cultural ecosystem. We have not escaped this, which means that the end of the 10th year of The Quietus sees us not exultant at a triumphant decade, but relieved that we’ve made it this far, and concerned that the future for online publishing is far from rosy. Even the price of a (London) pint a month will help us to bring you 1,000 more albums of the year over the next ten years to 2028.
As ever, then, if you can afford to help us carry on bringing you music that continues to amaze, thrill, dazzle and give you the fackin’ ‘orn like the 100 records below, click below and donate to keep The Quietus alive. Thanks for reading, we hope you find many treasures in this, tQ’s albums of the year 2018.
The sheer range of what Maryam Saleh, Maurice Louca and Tamer Abu Ghazaleh are trying to combine on Lekhfa – trad chaabi, mahraganat, Nile Delta psych, classic Egyptian pop, Middle Eastern jazz, smoky trip hop, dubby electro pop – should make it sound like a mad man’s breakfast, but the assured, enticing, head-spinning tunes on offer tell a completely different story.
Listening to Murmurations, there’s an element of the uncanny valley manifesting at times – the idea that you’re listening to something that’s not actually human, but is trying its hardest to mimic us.
On Omegaville, Anthroprophh keep pushing and pushing, laying on one oppressive and opaque layer after another, and delving further and deeper into their only semi-imagined dystopia. There is another of those pauses before ‘I’, a track on which they intensify their assault once more with a colossal roar, the precursor to the outer reaches.
Lala Belu is at its best when you can sense its creator’s joy at returning to what he does best. Nowhere is this more palpable than on heart-in-mouth closing track ‘Yefikir Engurguro’, a solo coda that sounds like heavy tears of happiness falling on the keys of a piano.
In a time when cultural identities are being bludgeoned into an amorphous monolith, too often defined only in contrast to an equally nebulous otherness, Le Kov invites us to reclaim our diversities, revitalise our imaginations. Past, present and future intersect.
‘Slowly, Slowly, Up Into The Rain We Fell’ is a 25-minute instrumental piece in which keyboards blurrily harmonise, like a choir in the next village over, and quasi-percussive clanks arrive and depart. ‘Crummock Water’, the aforementioned C90 side-filler, is the most intense of the trio, spiralling keys building to a peak at around 15 minutes and drums featuring for the first time.
BROCKHAMPTON are a musical prospect for the times we live in, and you can take that statement in the spirit it was delivered in. Rocked by abuse allegations and the departure of the ‘talented one’, the once cocksure self-proclaimed “best boy band since One Direction” have since revealed themselves to be angst-beset Radiohead fans (‘Tape’ samples ‘Videotape’ and the guiding sonic influence on the album was, apparently, Kid A). But should we be surprised when a band led by a musician called Kevin Abstract end up appearing much less neatly and clearly defined than they originally appeared? Either way ignore the terrible gospel choir-featuring ‘San Marcos’ and what you have here for the main part is a clutch of brilliant songs.
Mr Dynamite combines something genuinely sinister with a sense of fun, and far from being a whimsical side project for its members, it can be regarded as a landmark release for all of them.
As news of our ongoing ecological collapse becomes ever more intensely bleak, Richard Skelton continues to fragment and minimalise his music, on this still potent album exploring drones made from sine waves and the frequencies of threatened glaciers.
Scented Pictures is an album of two distinct moods, the more Madlib-beats-and-weird-noises side (high mark ‘Ditchglass, They Think’) gradually giving way to calmer waters. The switch comes on the relentless and potent ‘Invisible Jets’, which sounds like his former group’s pop screamer ‘Mess On A Mission’ being put through a turbine somewhere in the bowels of a dank and gigantic dam.
Robinson has created a sound world that feels palpably healing. This is an LP that feels very much needed. An evocation to dance: not into oblivion, but forward to the light.
After a series of Hidden Reverse-aligned reissues on Dais – ELpH vs Coil’s Worship The Glitch; Black Light District’s A Thousand Lights in a Darkened Room and Coil’s Time Machines – cosmic synthesist Drew McDowall is back to releasing original material. On listening to The Third Helix it becomes clear that the former Coil and PTV member has lost none of his ability to create intensely disorientating and bliss-inducing soundscapes.
An eclectic, shimmering record of beautiful, smooth and most of all powerful soul and R&B. Dizzy Fae’s debut is supreme.
Bliss Signal holds much in its heart for fans of either genre; swelling crescendos of sound build tension and sorrow in equal measure during ‘N16 Drift,’ echoing the best of dark ambient electronica while ‘Floodlight’ is an unusually bright song filtered through an atmospheric black metal beginning. The album is experimentation at its finest and a successful venture for the creative minds behind it.
The latest project from restless experimentalist Richard Youngs, Amor’s Sinking Into A Miracle is a wistful and necessarily optimistic dance record, one that does a more than worthy job at appropriating the heady spirits of classic New York dance parties such as The Loft and Paradise Garage, while injecting it’s slow-building grooves with distinctly Glaswegian DIY funk.
The original impetus for the record came out of sessions for some commission work and was inspired by concepts of quantum physics, black holes and space.
Radwan Ghazi Moumneh paddles his craft out even further from the shore, this time with the aid of a 15-piece Egyptian orchestra and Sam Shalabi of Land Of Kush and Dwarfs Of East Agouza. They reimagine the standard ‘Ya Garat Al Wadi’ blissfully as the more currently resonant ‘Wa Ta’atalat Loughat Al Kalam’ or ‘The Language Of Speech Has Broken Down’.
In a way, it’s an album about “taking back control” – but rather than being about sovereignty, this is taking back control for us. Indeed, lyrically it teems with references to seizing hold of the narrative, calling the marginalised to arms – “every ghetto youth must take back him crown / just ride if you’re down, this fight is right now”, and, “I wanna see you in rebellion”.
Landfall is not so facile as to treat the terrible storm as a simple metaphor. Sandy is more real than that. Rather, Anderson’s words, and the sometimes surging, sometimes steady music from which they intermittently surface, find in Sandy the means to explore what is taken from us, how we experience it, how we understand it – or do not.
This is an album about political and personal power, although there are no slogans or pontifications. The most explicitly political track, ‘Distribution Of Care’, has no lyrics at all – just four minutes of tense strings and rolling beats. But the key to the power in Power is in Lotic’s acceptance of what they can and cannot control, specifically in their journey of transformation and gender fluidity.
Things start in a familiar yet very satisfying post-krautrock muscular Moog workout along the lines of Zombie Zombie or Emperor Machine before blasting off into lesser occupied space. A strong melodic instinct married with the booming synths of Gary Numan’s Pleasure Principle and, more recently, the modular ecstasy of James Holden And The Animal Spirits animate tracks such as ‘Sun’ which, in other hands, could be lifeless electronic experiments.
