60.
‘TREASON’, with fellow noise artist and Deathbomb Arc label mate Lana Del Rabies, deconstructs elements of mid-00s metal with slowed down industrial techno for a pairing that results in nonsensical glitchy screams. At no point does Friday settle on one particular sound or way of expressing herself. A slow burner can suddenly turn into a frenzied panic or a hectic scream can mellow out into a calming wave. This is what keeps DEATH DRIVE moving towards what you would expect to be its eventual doom.Debby FridayDEATH DRIVEDeathbomb Arc
59.
With its roots in a series of solo, improvisational shows he played with a Buchla synthesiser in support of The xx back in 2017, Crush is a departure from the prog-esque, live band-oriented sounds of Floating Points’ 2015 debut album. Those shows, in front of 20,000 people each night, saw the producer making some of the most “obtuse, strange” music he’s ever played in front of audiences, a stark contrast to the “melodic and slow-building” sounds he expected to come out of his set-up warming up for a band like The xx. Crush is shot through with the influences of UK garage and IDM that have no doubt informed Shepherd’s musical upbringing, setting his sights back towards the dancefloor while instilling a new sense of urgency into his oeuvre.Floating PointsCrushNinja Tune
58.
Whilst the band have never tried to hide their admiration for classic acts like Morbid Angel et al, what’s remarkable about Hidden History is just how futuristic it all sounds. Rather than just shameless retro worship, Blood Incantation have tapped into a truly timeless sound and are boldly taking it to places that no other band has dared to before. It’s technical without ever being overly flashy, visceral without becoming exhausting and psychedelic without being gaudy or tacky.Blood IncantationHidden History Of The Human RaceDark Descents
57.
Why Hasn’t Everything Disappeared is a meeting of minds in Bradford Cox and Cate Le Bon (who sits not only in the seats of harpsichordist, mandolin player, ‘false’ chorister and lender of Telecaster, but also in that of producer – a fact joyously clear to the ear). And if the end times are upon us, then we may as well appreciate what we can of their strange beauty.DeerhunterWhy Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?4AD
56.
For some years now there has seemed to be a kind of back-and-forth contest between Matmos and the UK’s Matthew Herbert over who can produce the most abstrusely conceptual piece of dancefloor-friendly musique concrète. One will make a record entirely from sounds captured during surgical procedures, the other from an entire food chain. Next we get an album generated from parapsychology experiments, from a single pig, from a washing machine, from a fighter plane over Libya… In each case, the record is both made possible by – and its intent somewhat undermined by – the quasi-infinite malleability afforded to sound by digital technology. After all, if you can make anything sound like anything, then the only thing to make your audience aware of the carefully-thought-out programme is the sleeve notes. It becomes the equivalent of a work of art that remains impenetrable without the wall text in the gallery.MatmosPlastic AnniversaryThrill Jockey
55.
Anima Mysterium makes you engage with its cryptic nature without necessarily giving you any answers. Yugen Blakrok isn’t trying to sell you the myth or the mysticism of astrology et al, it’s just a sphere she exists within; it’s the space she views the world from. She doesn’t explain the codes, she only presents them. And she subverts and mutates rather than pandering to expectations of what a TDE-cosigned rapper ought to sound like. In that way, she stands in a lane disinterested in the fads or fashions of the west – and she’s all the more intriguing for it.Yugen BlakrokAnima MysteriumIOT
54.
Treanor embraces bass and breaks, often with greater gusto than his first three 12-inches might have led one to expect. He is a greatly skilled programmer who walks that thinnest of lines – music that confounds obvious ideas of what dance music can be, while still being possible to actually dance to – with nous comparable to Aphex or Squarepusher, or fringe footworkers such as Jlin and DJ Paypal.Rian TreanorATAXIAPlanet Mu
53.
Oli XL’s whimsy is simply a way to deal with representing a crippling sense of self-doubt in a moment where young men’s sincerity is often rejected within artistic circles. Perhaps the internet has revealed just how common these feelings are, which has in turn rendered their discussion obsolete. In order to communicate these feelings in an engaging way, millennials have created a whole language of memes that have progressively become more abstract as new memes are built on the old ones.Oli XLRogue Intruder, Soul EnhancerBloom
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Abdu AliFIYAH!!!Self-Released
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Ifriqiyya lectriqueLaylet El BooreeGlitterbeat
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Raised by a family of actor/musicians, Eilish and her brother lace the songs with pop culture references and a sense of drama. ‘Xanny’, for instance, reprises Bacharach’s ‘Alfie’, in a soporific, distorted showtune, while ‘Wish You Were Gay’ links Joan Jett-style glam footstomping to a delicate chorus. “To spare my pride / Don’t say I’m not your type / Just not your preferred sexual orientation,” Eilish sings, with mournful deliberation. ‘Bury A Friend’, the album’s stand-out track, develops the theme of darkly, dysfunctional friendship, with her vocodered voice looped through effects and filters.Billie EilishWhen We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?
Lucy O’Brien
More: Buy from Norman Records
49.
Um Dada sees the wealth of experience and the weight of history that Mallinder can summon to hand. And while there are no new artistic or aesthetic territories being staked out in his return to solo production, the album, with its mix of past structures and contemporary vision, sits at a weird juncture in the dance music terrain right now, being too abrasive and knowing for the lo-fi tech-house crowd, but too funky and colourful for the grimdark industrial warehouse techno scene. Instead, Um Dada just happily exists on its own whimsical terms, happy to play and dance to its own machines and hardware.Stephen MallinderUm DadaDais
48.
John Cage always said Christian Wolff was the most ‘musical’ of the New York School experimentalists. This two disc set from Sub Rosa reveals the Burdocks composer at his most tender and reflective. Played with great sensitivity by Apartment House’s Philip Thomas, these twenty-three mostly short, bruised fragments toy with space and silence, melody and memory like a kitten with a ball of yarn. The influence of Erik Satie is acknowledged by several of the titles and it is with that distinctive mischief and elegant wistfulness of the great velvet gentleman of Arcueil that Wolff leads us, teasingly, across the piano keyboard. Best played with the windows open to mingle with the street noise.Christian WolffPreludes, Variations, Studies and Incidental MusicSub Rosa
47.
The seven tracks on 7 Directions run together, mainly, and you can lose track of where you are as you listen. Are there underlying patterns? The design on the cover – based on a symbol in cosmology that denotes cycles, movement, connection, life – suggests so. It shares ground, maybe, with Gabriel Roth’s 5 Rhythms, a process of dance and meditation where you might feel anger, fear, joy, compassion, sadness. There is a plaintive echo on ‘V’ that makes you feel like a cold cavern has opened up in your chest; the sharp jabs of vibra-slap and the shallow panting (one of very few organically human noises on the record) on ‘II’ can induce a giddy panic, a feeling that you are being hunted; there’s tumbling, reassuring softness on ‘VII’: you can’t pull it apart or translate it as easily as that though, there is no formula or rigidity.Nkisi7 DirectionsUIQ
46.
Every new Lana Del Rey album offers a trademark sense of hazy lust that few have been able to emulate. On Norman Fucking Rockwell!, this identity grows stronger, as Del Rey’s storytelling firmly addresses the men who might not have wronged her yet, but could damage many girls of this world. Her syrupy tone makes for a cohesive product, one that emanates a homogenous warmth – but still one that’s so welcome.Lana Del ReyNorman Fucking Rockwell!Polydor
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and departt from mono games’ 18-minute duration runs the gamut from threatening-aura electronics – the type subjecting a putative crowd of sweatjuiced ravers to would be frankly sadistic – to pulsating turn-on-a-sixpence breakbeat overload. ‘Lassanamae’ drops a semi-whispered monologue over an increasingly frantic digital drone, concluding with a mutter of “you fucking idiot”; ‘That Hyde Trakk’ employs various tropes of ‘90s jungle, from the percussively tricksy builds to the deviation into wide-eyed ambient chords, before it all goes loco with some snare-rattle tearout biz that would have been called drill & bass in 1997.LOFTand departt from mono gamesTri Angle
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Seven Horses For Seven Kings is frequently terrifying, building and releasing tension in the same way a well put together horror narrative might – something that scores of LPs have attempted in recent years, but few successfully pull off. And like all the best horror stories, Richter’s work possesses a dark sense of humour. It bubbles up from time to time, relieving tension, allowing the listener to breathe, to recalibrate, before disembodied voices or piercing tones or fleshy burbles ratchet up the tension once again. In fact, the album’s first moments are sublimely silly.Black To CommSeven Horses For Seven KingsThrill Jockey
43.
Given that $hit And $hine put out, on average, two or three albums a year, it’s never actually that clear, which version of the provocative DIY group you’re going to end up with… the post-Butthole Surfers and Killdozer acid swamp rockers go digital; the glitchy IDM button pushers; the ketamine psychosis take on bass music; the actually quite nifty house music makers… It’s also never exactly clear which of the many fine underground labels they patronise is going to get the really crucial release. This year, Riot Season win the top prize with Doing Drugs, Selling Drugs which sounds like the pounding inside of Julian Cope’s head as he tries to watch three cult biker movies back to back on a PCP binge.hit And hineDoing Drugs, Selling DrugsRiot Season
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This is arguably the band’s most ambitious record to date, doing away with the throaty bellows of yore and opting for crisp, theatrical and expressive vocal harmonies instead, whilst broadening their already weird take on doom and sludge metal to encompass even more noise and psychedelia. Opener ‘Chaos Reigns’ makes these changes clear from the off, building swiftly from Merzbow-esque scree into a dense and ominous, but soaring and anthemic doomscape.GholdINPUT>CHAOSCrypt Of The Wizard
41.
Fyah moves between – and absorbs elements from – pretty much every genre you can think of; so while it’s always going to filed under “jazz”, to allow one’s perceptions of what Cross is doing to be limited to any one stylistic box would be tantamount to ignoring the sense of possibility that courses like oxygen through his music’s respiratory system.Theon CrossFyahGearbox
