SealionwomanNothing Will Grow In The SoilThe state51 Conspiracy
Dark fables of sex and death offer a useful place to start with Sealionwoman. A London-based duo of vocalist Kitty Whitelaw and double bass player Tye McGivern, this pair are doing something entirely new by tapping into a rich seam of traditional folk. Their first album, 2018’s Siren, was all at sea, and set adrift, if you will. For the followup, Nothing Will Grow In The Soil, they’ve crawled onto the dark, desiccated land, and everything is firmer, harder, dryer.
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.
NonpareilsRhetoric & TerrorMute
Nonpareils is Aaron Hemphill’s solo project, which he launched several years after leaving Liars. His second album, Rhetoric & Terror, takes its name from a chapter in a book by Giorgio Agamben titled The Man Without Content. The book, published in 1970, raises questions over whether art has become detached from its existential purpose and hollowed out into mere logic and form. In some ways, this record reflects both – partly engaged in the amorphous subconscious and partly tapped into structure and form. Although presented as a departure from his more conceptual debut, Scented Pictures, this album displays its same idiosyncrasies. Long, drawn-out vocals act like a sedative, and the same penchant for disjointed composition is retained. Most of the album is subdued, but on some tracks, you might find light rippling through the forest trees.
ClairoCharmClairo
On Charm, Claire Cottrill continues to veer away from her initial sound and public image, and ventures further into her love of older recording styles, landing on something that’s rather peerless in this moment – especially from an artist who has flirted with mainstream pop success. On the record’s lead single, ‘Sexy To Someone’, Cottrill once again flexes her knack for catchy, relatable songwriting. “Oh, I need a reason to get out of the house,” she lilts in the chorus, harkening back to a bedroom pop theme of fantasising about what life could be like out in the world, if one were not too cloistered or timid to pursue their yearnings. Whereas previous album Sling burrowed into secluded introspection, Charm finds Cottrill remembering she is still young and doesn’t wish to cut herself off from the bewildering sparks of human connection, be they romantic or otherwise.
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.
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.
Jacken ElswythAt FargroundsWrong Speed
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. Jacken 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.
DialectAtlas Of GreenRVNG Intl.
Beneath the surface, each of Andrew PM Hunt’s past albums as Dialect was informed by a sense of ecological anxiety and existential dread, as if reflecting the groans and pains of a world dying in slow motion. With Atlas Of Green, he steps far into the future, hitting fast-forward on our imminent disintegration, skipping over the conflicts and decay of a post-apocalyptic landscape and diving into another life that comes after it. There, a young musician named Green pieces together myth and music from the remnants of our long forgotten society. The songs flow into one another as if forming a continuum: the boundaries between them imperceptible, the shifts from melody to melody and from theme to theme instead entrusted to mutations within each of their bodies.
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.
ShellacTo All TrainsTouch & 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.
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 self-awareness around the weight of her material reads in how she tempers her delivery. Filthy Underneath sees Shah experimenting with her voice. Though it has never wanted for strength, there is a new kind of abandon in the way she bellows on the chorus of ‘Topless Mother’. ‘Greatest Dancer’, meanwhile, has her reaching for the heights of her range, the softness of her voice paired against opalescent synths and driven by propulsive drums, fully echoing the out of body experience she sings about.
Oranssi PazuzuMuuntautujaNuclear Blast
Muuntautuja, the title of Oranssi Pazuzu’s sixth album, is Finnish for ‘shapeshifter’, a simple phrase that so elegantly describes the band’s bizarre sound that it’s a wonder they haven’t used it before. Starting out as a particularly adventurous avant-garde black metal band, their sound has gradually morphed into increasingly unrecognisable shapes on subsequent releases, with the progressive black metal of 2013’s Valonielu blossoming into full-blown space rock madness on 2016’s breakthrough Värähtelijä, stepping far beyond the confines of even the most out-there black metal acts to deliver some of the most genuinely disorientating psychedelia to ever emanate from a metal band.
Perhaps this was the perfect time for them to use this title however. Even for a band so prone to shapeshifting, Muuntautuja still feels difficult to pin down, feeling less like a metal record and more some unknowable Lovecraftian creature, dancing around the very peripheries of your simple human consciousness, flickering in and out of the shadows without ever giving you a proper glimpse at it. It’s a record of contradictions, in some ways – compared to the unfettered sensory overload of Värähtelijä, Muuntautuja feels almost understated. Yet it bristles with a subtle, serpentine intensity that’s just as attention grabbing as before, if not more so. The squelchy electronics that featured so prominently on 2020’s Mestarin Kynsi return here, but they too have shifted into even weirder forms.
Shovel Dance CollectiveThe Shovel DanceAmerican Dreams
Shovel Dance Collective’s raison d’être is to find hidden queer histories, feminist narratives and the stories of working people in old English, Irish and Scottish folk music. Into that bargain, they have exhumed plenty of misery lurking in the soil, with songs encoded with fascinating information; sonic documents that are their own kind of archeology. Passed down through oral tradition, and inevitably refashioned over the years, the haunting palimpsests of experience linger in these songs like ghosts. The collective have become adept at tapping into the bleakness, but also drawing out the hope and humanity.
It’s fair to say The Shovel Dance has more in common with the shovel than the dancing of its title. Transience is imprinted into the DNA of the songs, and while we all know life is short, it used to be shorter. In the mid-nineteenth century when some of these tunes were modified into the formats they largely exist in now, the infant mortality rate was as high as four in ten in London (the city where these nine musicians base themselves). Ergo, the likelihood of the shovel coming for you before any dancing was only just short of probable.
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, head-banging, 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.
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.
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 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.
Xiu Xiu13″ Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto With Bison Horn GripsPolyvinyl
According to Xiu Xiu, the two motivating forces behind 13″ Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletti With Bison Horn Grips were “the destruction of previous aesthetic notions, as well as the band’s recent move from Los Angeles to Berlin”. It’s a typically Xiu Xiu mix of high drama and self-deprecation, but feels very true of the record, which reflects both a deliberate decision to try a different sound, and the more subtle, almost subconscious switches that can come from a change of location and perspective. Expansive post rock opener ‘Arp Omni’ aside, the album is industrial pop music, heavy synth glam, big riffs and capital letters.
The perennial Xiu Xiu inflections are present – sweetness delivered with a screeching bite, Jamie Stewart’s quiver-to-bark vocal jumps – but the positions are shifted. The tentative, whispered beginning of ‘Sleep Blvd.’ feels like familiar territory, but when it explodes it extends to richly defined heights: a vocal chorus, a guitar chorus, a counter-chorus, a glistening electronic spiral. ‘Pale Flower’ is similarly far-reaching, structured less like a pop song but still grounded by an irresistibly melancholic chorus line. Each song is densely packed and dazzling, but sharper and more ambitious than ever – a credit to band member Angela Seo’s production and John Congleton’s mixing. It’s not surprising that Stewart acknowledges the influence of iconoclasm in general, and Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral in particular on the production, which shines like deep-set chrome.
MoinYou Never EndAD 93
Moin’s third full-length record sees a sharp retooling of their arsenal, as they fundamentally alter the way they use the human voice. The album is rife with collaborations. Where before samples were murky, ambiguous and hard to place, the vocals here are the result of different artists and writers interpreting the trio’s cold world and embellishing it with their own words. Half of the songs on You Never End are made with vocal collaborators, and the collaborators are always placed front and centre of their tracks, rather than just allowed to become another layer of the miasma.
You Never End entered the world on a maudlin, rainy Friday, and this no doubt amplified its power. Grainy, gravelly, gristly, this abstract rock album emphatically gives a musical vocabulary to the exhausted and confused. That doesn’t make it a dreary, miserable listen though. Far from it. From immensely satisfying Fugazi-like guitar licks, to powerhouse drumming that makes even the most abstract sections groove, You Never End is a liberating listen, and perhaps the most modern guitar album of the year.
Tristwch y FenywodTristwch y FenywodNight School
Tristwch Y Fenywod forge a combination of primitivism, musical minimalism and hypnotic trance. The music takes on a slightly tantric, and almost disco flavour. Apart from the band’s lyrics in Welsh, what’s new is that the members are switching to instruments they mostly didn’t play before in other projects. Leila Lygad, a vocalist before, plays drums. Gwretsien Ferch Lisbeth created an instrument consisting of two Russian zithers with a contact mic in the middle, each tuned differently. Only Sidni Sarffwraig plays on her usual instrument, the bass, but it’s reduced to a minimum here. No deep, boomy sound, but rather sharp and minimalistic pulls. The music sounds metallic and dry, with no manufactured depth. Just the simplicity of a roadside troupe playing their songs, which should only be taken as a compliment.
The band’s debut album is mysterious and intriguing, with gothic atmospherics intersecting rumbling repetition, sometimes kept in a steady, obscure, slightly disco mood. The somewhat magical lyrics combine social aspects, feelings of loneliness, relationships, or elements of magic in everyday life are hidden behind this esoteric music. It sums up a surreal contemporary fable about despair and the inevitable end. Accompanied by a steady trance, sacred-sounding strings, and a slightly funereal-sounding bass, they weave a magical tale set in a fantasy land in which language makes this musical story unique.
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 2024
- Ex-Easter Island Head – Norther
- Tristwch Y Fenywod – Tristwch Y Fenywod
- Moin – You Never End
- Xiu Xiu – 13″ Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto With Bison Horn Grips
- Mohammad Syfkhan – I Am Kurdish
- Still House Plants – If I don’t make it, I love u
- Rafael Toral – Spectral Evolution
- Shovel Dance Collective – The Shovel Dance
- Oranssi Pazuzu – Muuntautuja
- Nadine Shah – Filthy Underneath
- Shellac – To All Trains
- Fat White Family – Forgiveness Is Yours
- Dialect – Atlas Of Green
- Jacken Elswyth – At Fargrounds
- Charli xcx – Brat
- Tashi Wada – What Is Not Strange?
- Clairo – Charm
- Nonpareils – Rhetoric & Terror
- Gnod – Spot Land
- Sealionwoman – Nothing Will Grow In The Soil
- The Body & Dis Fig – Orchards Of A Futile Heaven
- Bill Ryder-Jones – Iechyd Da
- William Doyle – Springs Eternal
- Róis – Mo Léan
- Einstürzende Neubauten – Rampen (apm: alien pop music)
- Naemi – Dust Devil
- Milkweed – Folklore 1979
- Elijah Minnelli – Perpetual Musket
- Eros – Your Truth Is A Lie
- Xylitol – Anemones
- Arooj Aftab – Night Reign
- Eric Chenaux Trio – Delights Of My Life
- Roc Marciano – Marciology
- Lorenzo Abattoir – Mess (Akt. IV)
- Wu-Lu – Learning To Swim On Empty
- Chrystabell & David Lynch – Cellophane Memories
- Water Damage – In E
- Jane Weaver – Love In Constant Spectacle
- Senyawa – Vajranala
- Mary Halvorson – Cloudward
- Guðmundur Steinn Gunnarsson – Stífluhringurinn
- Hamish Hawk – A Firmer Hand
- Kendrick Lamar – GNX
- Holy Tongue Meets Shackleton – The Tumbling Psychic Joy Of Now
- Saagara – 3
- Harry Gorski-Brown – Durt Dronemaker After Dreamboats
- Fievel Is Glauque – Rong Weicknes
- British Murder Boys – Active Agents & House Boys
- Quatuor Bozzini – Jürg Frey: String Quartet No. 4
- Kim Gordon – The Collective
- Schoolboy Q – Blue Lips
- DJ Anderson do Paraíso – Queridão
- Persher – Sleep Well
- Erika Angell – The Obsession With Her Voice
- Wendy Eisenberg – Viewfinder
- Laura Cannell – The Rituals Of Hildegard Reimagined
- Big Brave – A Chaos Of Flowers
- Mach-Hommy – #RICHAXXHAITIAN
- Cower – Celestial Devastation
- MIKE & Tony Seltzer – Pinball
- Uniform – American Standard
- The Cure – Songs Of A Lost World
- Martha Skye Murphy – UM
- Underworld – Strawberry Hotel
- Blood Incantation – Absolute Elsewhere
- Caveira – Ficar Vivo
- Bòsc – Bòsc
- Dengie Hundred With Gemma Blackshaw – Who Will You Love
- Mdou Moctar – Funeral For Justice
- Rosso Polare – Campo Amaro
- Skee Mask – ISS010
- Alan Sparhawk – White Roses My God
- TOMO – Vielle Electronica
- Sahra Halgan – Hiddo Dhawr
- Helado Negro – Phasor
- Sleepytime Gorilla Museum – Of The Last Human Being
- Fred Moten / Brandon López / Gerald Cleaver – The Blacksmiths, The Flowers
- Thou – Umbilical
- Geordie Greep – The New Sound
- Judas Priest – Invincible Shield
- Traüme – Wrzask
- HI! CAPYBARAS – A/M/Y/G/D/A/L/A EP
- Ka – The Thief Next To Jesus
- Teho Teardo & Blixa Bargeld – Christian & Mauro
- Brama – Brama
- D’En Haut – D’En Haut
- Vanishing – Shelter Of The Opaque
- Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Wild God
- MAVI – Shadowbox
- Bianca Scout – Pattern Damage
- Peace Talks – Progress
- Daast – SS24
- Sex Swing – Golden Triangle
- Five Green Moons – Moon 1.
- Christoph de Babalon – Ach, Mensch
- Thurston Moore – Flow Critical Lucidity
- Chelsea Wolfe – She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She
- Faune – Des Fantômes
- Able Noise – High Tide
- Fergus Jones – Ephemera
