Time is a horrifying process, a socially constructed measure of how long we spend facing our collective terror of aging and decay. Its inescapable mearch towards the perpetual unknown renders us helpless to its results and our sense of control has never been lesser than it is at the present moment. That’s why us at the Indieheads Podcast have dedicated ourselves to not worrying about any of that whatsoever! Instead we’re celebrating the coming of spring with a collection of our favorite albums from this early part of the year, plus some extra wildcards picked up along the way.
Animal Collective - Time Skiffs
Animal Collective learned how to breathe again. Even as an ardent defender of the band's 2010s output (yes, even Painting With), one thing that got sacrificed with the urgency of that decade of AnCo was the breathing room that gave much of their early records their life. But, for everyone who spent the last couple records bemoaning the sonic equivalent of burritos flung against windshields, Time Skiffs—the group’s eleventh studio album—proves they're still capable of letting their music gracefully unfurl.
What emerges most from listening to Time Skiffs in relation to the last ten years of main AnCo releases is the patience. "Strung with Everything" lets two full minutes of ambience pass before it properly kicks in. "Prester John" spends half its length on a single melody before revealing its de facto refrain. "Cherokee" gently gallops along until hitting a repeating passage that gradually builds not with speed, but with pure passion. "Passer-by" and closer "Royal and Desire" move more leisurely than anything under the Animal Collective moniker since the days of Feels. Though there are upbeat and direct moments on the album—namely the opening one-two of "Dragon Slayer" and "Car Keys," as well as the rapid-fire hocketing of "We Go Back"—there are scant few tracks here that rush by without letting you savor the moment. As podcast member / fellow AnCo expert Rose put it in her excellent piece about the record, Time Skiffs—in its patience—encapsulates a passage of time inherently laced into the record. That of its band members aging, of the years of development these songs took from their earliest live configurations. Even "We Go Back" eventually slows to a crawl in its outro. In going backward in time, we relish in the gifts of its passage—slowly, we can breathe it in. — Natalie
WILDCARD: The Angelic Process - Weighing Souls With Sand (2007)
Sometimes you happen upon an album that is so abundantly in your lane, so abundantly a foundational influence on what you consider to be your lane, that you feel like an idiot for wasting however-long having not heard it before. I’ve had this experience a number of times, the latest being Georgia proto a-whole-bunch-of-future-subgenres duo The Angelic Process. Their final album and magnum opus, 2007’s Weighing Souls with Sand, is a crushing and expansive lo-fi odyssey that would feel at home on a lineup next to, well, just about any up-and-coming “loud pretty guitars” band of the current moment, despite preceding them all by a good ten to fifteen years.
Between its monolithic production, lead singer Kris Angylus’ pleadingly-high vocals, and the band’s premature demise (Angylus passed away in 2008), Weighing Souls feels eerily out of place, a transmission from another dimension that could have been made at any point in the last 30 years, yet could only have been made by one band. This quality is amplified by its free-wheeling relationship to genre. The album displays a stylistic freedom and confidence far beyond its time, bearing flavours of Slowdive, first-wave black metal, late-90’s industrial music, and even the likes of mid-period Deftones at any given moment. Each track soars and churns through their many movements, and the whole makes for an inscrutably evocative listening experience through its epic length. I may have been fifteen years late, but even the briefest survey of the present moment in heavy music shows that The Angelic Process’ resurgence is right on time. — Lily
Bat House - Twenty Mule Team
Bands reinventing themselves and their sounds is nothing out of the ordinary. And yet, something about Bat House's third album Twenty Mule Team makes the act of reinvention all the more exciting. The Boston group has kept the same three core members over its lifespan, but lineup changes with their drummers led to their style shifting with each release, from math rock to gradually more experimental psychedelic fare. It's that drive toward experimenting and changing, as well as being between drummers for this album, that makes Twenty Mule Team electrifying. From the warped funk loop, drum machines, and heavily processed vocals of opener "Fuck," it's readily apparent that this record is a bold new direction for Bat House.
The group hasn't lost their knack for killer hooks amid all the distortion and experimentation. Standout cut "R U Afraid" hinges around a stunning Deradoorian-esque harmony and washed out guitars, lacing its lyrics about reuniting with loved ones in the afterlife with a moving sense of serenity. "Watch" similarly circles around a refrain to allow its instrumental to build with each pass, and "Fat Bear" nestles its dueling vocal refrains against a winding guitar riff. No matter what turns it takes, Twenty Mule Team is an immensely compelling listen in the same way Spirit of the Beehive's ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH is: it feels like the album can go anywhere with each new track. Given Bat House's arc as a band, it feels like the possibilities ahead of them are endless as well, like they too can go anywhere from here. — Natalie
Black Dresses - Forget Your Own Face
Now two albums deep into their “dead band” era, Black Dresses followed 2021’s triumphant hail-mary resurrection Forever In Your Heart with an album of near-opposite intent. Where FIYH fused the band’s most industrial metal-tinged productions yet with enormous hooks that strained towards a bittersweet hopefulness, its follow-up, Forget Your Own Face is pure glitched-out rage. At only 20 minutes long, the album feels nearly three times that length, seeing noise-pop duo Ada Rook and Devi McCallion pull off impossibly fast-paced song structures at a perpetual-redlining volume. It is as loud and dense as they have ever been as a unit, putting the likes of Hell is Real and Thank You to shame in terms of rapid-fire intensity and songwriting acrobatics, to say nothing of how their peers fare by comparison.
It is among their most lyrically confrontational projects too, with Devi and Rook lashing out against a murderer’s row of verbal targets (their fanbase, their imitators, themselves, and even Rupaul for good measure). The disarmingly candid anger never comes off as aimless or suffocating, however, thanks in large part to being cushioned by many of their most infectious quotables yet (“no choice but degenerate f*ggot mode,” “t-shirt slogan, I’m a meme I know it,” “perfect blue, put my PayPal in a coffin”). Black Dresses have always been a band concerned with finding slivers of joy within the furthest reaches of human misery, and Forget Your Own Face is among their most accomplished, frenetic, and miserable joyrides to date. If you’re stuck in hell, you might as well try and have fun while you’re there. — Lily
Paul Cherry - Back On The Music!
Paul Cherry yearns for a time. A time he was not born in but desperately wishes he could find a way to travel to. For Cherry, the key to this time lies somewhere in a pre-breakup, late period Steely Dan album, with Back on the Music! as his attempt to reverse engineer this musical movement in an attempt to travel back to the era it was made in. But while Walter Becker and Donald Fagen made a career out of creating weird little guys, Cherry is one. Take "It Happens All The Time", a song inspired by Cherry's self-admitted status as a huge gossip and how it came back to bite him in the Chicago music scene. But while Becker and Fagen were able to create some distance from those weird little guys they made up, Cherry doesn't have that privilege. While it does create a bit of whiplash to see this music language repurposed, there is something admittedly kinda thrilling about it, as you can't fully gawk at this guy making bad decisions, because inside us all sometimes is a weird little guy with poor judgment. — Matty
WILDCARD: The Dismemberment Plan - The Dismemberment Plan Is Terrified (1997)
The Dismemberment Plan's music always comes back to frontman Travis Morrison beating himself up. This often comes in the form of being figuratively roughed up as on Emergency & I's self-critical "The Jitters," or in the elaborate metaphors of debasement on "I Love A Magician." But, halfway into the band's sophomore record The Dismemberment Plan Is Terrified, Morrison makes it exceedingly literal on "One Too Many Blows to the Head," wherein he describes being beaten to a pulp in a boxing match.
For this reason, Is Terrified, which celebrated its 25th anniversary this year, is far more crucial to understanding the gist of The Dismemberment Plan than it's often credited for. Skewing more toward post-hardcore than the D-Plan records that followed, Is Terrified never veers from its unified vision of an album entirely devoted to its vocalist self-deprecating at every possible turn. Fan favorite "The Ice of Boston" suitably fits the tone in its narrative of isolation and internal loathing on New Year's Eve, but the deep cuts are just as vital. The stabs of disdain and futility at the end of each verse on "Bra" grow more and more desperate until Morrison's final piercing scream, and "It's So You" undercuts its tasteless postmortem jabs with a last line that reveals just the pathetic way Morrison views this track’s character. The record builds to the most atypical song in the band's career, "Respect Is Due," folding back in on itself via its muted riff and contradicting venom over the span of twelve minutes. But its trick lies in its culmination—a gaining intensity as repetitions of "If I ever would let down the walls / That protect me from you / I would say respect is due / But not in this lifetime" crash down over several minutes, until finally dissipating with one last yell. In repeating these words, Morrison gives the entire conceit of the album away in its closing moments: the vitriol and self-beratement of the rest of the record renders one incapable of true vulnerability and meaningful connection. As The Dismemberment Plan continued to chip away at this idea through the increasing vulnerability of Emergency & I and Change, it becomes hard to see Is Terrified as anything other than a major piece in what made the band as adored as they are. — Natalie
Ethan P. Flynn - Universal Deluge EP
Universal Deluge, the latest EP from producer and songwriter Ethan P. Flynn, is a showoff of all the potential the UK wunderkid has, though despite being labeled as his first "finished" project, it's a package that's bundled haphazardly with little precision. Yet, in the first person character portraits Flynn has put together on tracks like "Father of Nine" or "Vegas Residency", you understand why he's been able to command the attention of collaborators like FKA twigs and Black Country, New Road, as his blend of naked emotions, experimental pop beats and freak acoustics is instantly gripping. Even if it doesn't all come together, watching Flynn attempt to put into place these scattered pieces of music is simply thrilling. — Matty
Guerilla Toss - Famously Alive
Guerilla Toss’ ever-forward pacing work ethic has allowed their style to simmer down over the years from the raucous exuberance of their early noise rock era into something slowly more approachable, to the point where one may have worried that they’d run out of tricks by the time they reached the point they’re at now. While they have indeed pushed themselves into a realm that may feel at first like a predictable continuation of the extended psych jams of 2019’s What Would the Odd Do?, the band has proven once again that they’ll evade any sort of need for the word “predictable” in the first place. Famously Alive is, on some level, the most excitingly elusive record the band has made to date, a delightful charcuterie board of weird sounds that, when put together, can provide a truly measured listening experience. As with every record, the band clocks their pace in under forty minutes and makes good use of it immediately, this time with the opening duo of “Cannibal Capital” and “Famously Alive”, the former feeling like a near one-to-one analogue of Odd’s “Land Where Money’s Nightmare Lives” in its mazy autotune arpeggiation and the latter playing as a jacked up punk raver, an in-between point of the band’s rowdy early material and the tight rhythms of their DFA-era material. If these two openers serve as the solid footing on which one enters, then the remainder of the album is where the band’s playful streak flares up quite quickly. Songs quickly throw idea after idea at you like a good dozen cartoon pies to the face, and you really start to wonder if this is all a bit around the point you hear the opening of “Excitable Girls”, which sounds like a deconstructed version of “Jack and Diane”. For a first time listen it is, to say the least, overwhelming. But as you sit with it more, you start to enjoy it less on the level of a collection of songs, as with other Guerilla Toss releases, and as a purely sound-forward piece of holistic art. It’s simple, it’s silly, and it’s confounding. Sometimes that’s just what you want from a group! Any gripes I could have probably won’t matter because, as always, the band will be on to the next thing before I know it, there to confuse and delight me again. — Rose
Jana Horn - Optimism
I first encountered Optimism, the debut album from Texas’s Jana Horn, under what were probably ideal circumstances to do so: in the early hours of the morning, still halfway between sleep and waking. On first blush, Horn’s dry, sometimes-cryptic songs kept ducking and weaving away from any interpretations I could think up while still attempting to shake the rust off. And over repeat listens, these ones in a much more lucid state of mind, that impression was both solidified and subverted. Even though things came a little more into focus, I still couldn’t tell you what “Changing Lines” is about, say, or what Horn is getting at with lines like “down to the molecule, opposites exist/and to exist depend upon their opposites/what God is not, He is.” What I can tell you, though, is that Optimism is one of the finest albums of the year so far, an unassuming, yet striking set of songs that unfolds more with each play. Not unlike last year’s terrific debut from Renée Reed, it takes time to get to the bottom of Optimism, but it rewards that close attention in full.
Optimism is Horn’s second attempt at crafting a proper debut album, having dismissed the first for sounding too good, too polished; the second time was the charm. While the opening seconds of “Friends Again” suggest a stark, unadorned affair, the introduction of a horn in its verses hints at the gentle embellishments that Knife in the Water, Horn’s backing band for the sessions, provide. These simple additions - an electric guitar dancing at the edges of “Time Machine,” an organ providing a lift to the title track - do well to augment the main attraction: Horn’s songwriting. Reviewers have drawn comparisons between her style and that of Leonard Cohen, Yo La Tengo, and Raymond Carver (a professed inspiration of Horn’s), but more than anything, I hear a lot of Apocalypse/Dream River-era Bill Callahan in Horn’s writing. There’s a similar unconventional tack to their storytelling, I think; in much the same way that you can’t always crack Callahan’s prose to find his meaning on the first try, it can be tricky to get your bearings inside Horn’s narratives. The ambiguity suits her well, especially on the album’s clear centerpiece, “Jordan.” It’s a dreamy outlier from the rest of Optimism, a complex, Biblical song that Horn told the Guardian frightened her when she had finished it. But its inclusion serves to show all of the facets of her talent, and if Optimism is any indication, she’s somebody who will be worth watching for quite some time. — Zach
Huerco S. - Plonk
Over the past few years the Kansas-based producer has subtly become one of the more prolific figures in experimental electronic music, whether through his own music or from the work his West Mineral label has done highlighting like-minded artists in Ulla, Uon, and Mister Water Wet. Returning to releasing under the main Huerco S moniker, Plonk is a beautifully weird triumph, a masterclass in layered composition. Textures ooze out of every pore, styles interchange seamlessly between and within tracks, leftfield club hits fused tightly with abstract sound collage. The impossibility of deciphering its minutiae is ironically the album’s greatest strength, focused chaos, disorganized wonder. Plonk on, plonkers. — Dylan
Hurray for the Riff Raff - Life on Earth
In a lengthy Instagram post accompanying the release of LIFE ON EARTH, Alynda Segarra drove straight to the heart of their eighth album as Hurray for the Riff Raff: “What end of the world? Apocalypse? It’s ongoing. We are here.” It’s an idea that casts a long shadow over their latest record - when they sing “life on earth is long” on the album’s wrenching title track, it sounds like a curse. And yet, LIFE ON EARTH is also a record about resilience and survival, finding the reasons to carry on in the face of both personal heartbreak and global catastrophe. “There is still so much Sunshine and Starlight for us to cherish in this beautiful and terrifying LIFE ON EARTH,” they wrote, and their spectacular new album captures the beauty and the terror of modern existence without turning away from either. It is, in their words, about “this journey of, ‘You’re still here.’” LIFE ON EARTH is an album about hardship, but it’s about radical joy, too, about stopping to take in the beauty of it all while you still can. This world may be broken, and only getting more broken by the day, but Segarra knows that’s no reason to stop fighting, stop living.
While talking to Rolling Stone, Segarra said that “what I was taught is the honorable thing to do as a musician is to reflect the times, and these are the times.” This is a thread that extends at least as far back as “The Body Electric,” the inverted, revisionist murder ballad from their 2014 breakthrough Small Town Heroes, and reached full flower on 2017’s still-stunning The Navigator, an album informed by their coming of age as a young runaway and which turned them, for a time, into an activist. It’s something that remains prominent in their songwriting: “SAGA,” for instance, was inspired by the Christine Blassey Ford hearings, and the Guthrie-indebted “PRECIOUS CARGO” tells the story of a detained immigrant Segarra met while volunteering with Freedom for Immigrants and features a recording of his voice. But for the first time, Segarra is writing about themselves, too. They aren’t interested in playing the savior anymore, and this has unlocked a new dimension of their art. “PIERCED ARROWS” is a breakup song, “JUPITER’S DANCE” is, in Segarra’s words, a “protection prayer,” and both rank among their finest songs. It’s no wonder that, this deep into their career, Segarra considers LIFE ON EARTH a second debut, more or less, but it may be easier to call it what it just might be: their masterpiece. — Zach
WILDCARD: Medicine - The Buried Life (1993)
I am an absolute freak for noise. I didn’t start this way, but over time I became more and more drawn to the harsher sounds available to me in my listening rotation, because it’s frankly more exciting than that which can easily be blended into the background, meaningful attempts at drawing beauty and emotion from the static and spittle. Of my recent discoveries in that realm, The Buried Life is the one that most immediately managed to shock me. From second one, the album pounds upper frequencies into a fine paste, putting them in service of some joyfully melodic ear-splitting. The record manages to even take the base elements of shoegaze, a genre I’m normally poised against, and, in combining them with these more jarring musical tones, make a record that’s not just textural, but made entirely of these visible elements of texture. The songs here crawl from the primordial fuzz from which they were born into exactly what I'm looking for: Simple, noisy fun. — Rose
WILDCARD: George Michael - Listen Without Prejudice, Vol. 1 (1990)
George Michael was on top of the world, and to hear him tell it, he hated every second of it. Three years after Faith made him one of the biggest pop stars alive and became a critical and commercial smash the likes of which had seldom been seen in a post-Thriller world, Michael was dissatisfied. He could remember the exact moment he realized something had to change: “We [opened] the Faith tour in Japan, which was fine because they are reasonably quiet and they listened to the music. But then we went to Australia, and the roof came off the first place we came to. The screaming. I thought, ‘God, it is happening all over again… I’m not going to have a chance to really sing.’ And I realized I had to do it for 10 months.” After working double time to shed the image his teenybopper past in Wham! had given him, he now felt obliged to reinvent himself once again. To that end, Michael informed his label that he would not make any promotional videos for his sophomore effort, nor would he appear on the album’s artwork. When videos were made, he didn’t physically appear in them, and in the iconic “Freedom! ‘90” clip, touchstones of the Faith era were destroyed onscreen. All this led to an album whose title was like a thrown gauntlet: Listen Without Prejudice. You could call it the prototypical “difficult second album,” and with its themes of disillusionment with the industry, you’d not necessarily be wrong. But to dismiss it on those grounds would be to deny a work that is, at its best, Faith’s equal. He proved he could conquer the charts, and Listen Without Prejudice proved to any remaining doubters he was more than a pretty face for the boys at MTV; he was a legitimate artist, one of the great pop stylists of his generation.
Serving as producer and writing every track, just as he did on Faith, Michael intentionally crafted LWP as a more austere work than its predecessor, the themes and melodies darker, his words given more focus than before. This is sometimes to the album’s detriment: the dour Stevie Wonder co-write “They Won’t Go When I Go” feels even longer than its five minutes, nearly killing the album in the cradle after the exuberant “Freedom! ‘90” and by itself justifying claims that Michael’s hubris had oustripped his considerable talent. But when this shift in focus works, it works. The brilliant lead single “Praying for Time” is as relevant to the society of 2022 as it was to the society of 1990 - it’s what “Imagine” would be if “Imagine” were a good song. “Waiting for That Day” functions almost as a response to Faith’s “One More Try,” a similar event viewed from an older, wiser, less volatile perspective. And where Michael once sneered at an ex-lover on the nasty “Look at Your Hands,” the stunning “Cowboys and Angels” finds him navigating the dangers of a real life love triangle with grace and poise that the former song entirely lacked. This is, in some ways, a more cerebral work than Faith, itself already smarter than the average pop blockbuster, and that may have led to its more muted reception. “Praying for Time” topped the Billboard chart for just one week, and of the remaining singles, only “Freedom! ‘90” would make the top ten. Following an album that spawned four number ones and two more top five hits, Listen Without Prejudice could only be seen as a failure. Years later, Michael would sue Sony Music on the grounds that they failed to fully support him as an artist, and he would never again reach the commercial heights he scaled at his peak. But with Listen Without Prejudice, he answered one of the questions that seemed to be haunting him, one he voiced on the album’s closing track: “Don’t people change?” George Michael could, and it suited him beautifully.
— Zach
Raum - Daughter
A droning sonic eulogy. The second installment in the collaborative project between Grouper’s Liz Harris and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma finds the ambient titans paying tribute to their late friend Paul Clipson, evoking a vast lethargic wasteland of memory and grief. Interspersed between celestial drones and endless loops are analogue remnants-- maxed out projectors, tape recordings, fading memories of voices from another time, or another dimension. Intended as one long extended piece, Daughter almost plays like a greatest hit, pitch-perfect mood and haunting atmosphere not unlike those conjured worlds that Harris and Cantu-Ledesma have spent decades constructing and perfecting. A dream-state, a soul-altering trance, a transcendental meditation on the passage between this world and the next, reflecting on who (and what) we leave behind-- beauty, grace, love in all things. — Dylan
Underoath - Voyuerist
With the sasscore revival in full swing and Underoath on the creative back foot after 2018’s middling radio-rock pivot Erase Me, it felt as if the world was openly goading the band into returning to their roots. The kids, after all, were coming up from behind, threatening to outdo the Florida metalcore veterans at the sound they almost single-handedly defined in the mid-2000’s. Faced with the same people who were raised on them now serving as labelmates and competitors, the band’s latest, Voyeurist, sends a necessary and long-overdue ultimatum: “We can still do this better than anyone else.” It rises to this task and then some, handily leapfrogging past “return to form” status right to a standard on par with the band’s nigh-unrivaled run of classic albums.
As Underoath enter the third act of their careers, Voyeurist acts as a kind of greatest hits for itself, drawing on many of the band’s long-standing signatures while infusing them with an undeniably contemporary energy. “Damn Excuses” and “Cycle” are restless drop-tuned incinerators that rival any of the band’s most infamous barn-burners in sheer pound-for-pound heaviness, the latter even incorporating a shockingly-not-song-ruining(?!) Ghostemane feature for good measure. Meanwhile, the vast, meandering “I’m Pretty Sure I’m Out of Luck…” and “Pneumonia” take their penchant for electronics-drenched post-rock to immense new extremes. The band even provides a successful reinvention of its Erase Me era, with “Thorn” and “Take a Breath” incorporating stadium-ready hooks into the band’s ever-inventive sense of linear song structure, while showing that vocalists Spencer Chamberlain and Aaron Gillespie remain a one-of-a-kind salty-sweet powerhouse.
For long-time diehards such as myself, there could hardly be a better start to the year than Underoath asserting that they can not only be great again, but that they are—and always have been—essential to the modern metal landscape as we know it. Song after song, Voyeurist proves it in thrilling and unpredictable fashion, pointing to the band’s future just as much as it looks back. 25 years into their tenure, most bands could only dream of being so exciting. — Lily
WILDCARD: Water From Your Eyes - Structure (2021)
One of the albums I wish I got a chance to talk about more often last year was Structure, the latest album from NY experimental pop duo Water From Your Eyes. When pressing play on the album for the first time, you might accidentally think you’ve stumbled upon an unreleased Weyes Blood song. “When You’re Around” is maybe one of the best love songs I’ve heard in some time, yet it was written while the members of Water From Your Eyes were going through an actual romantic breakup. As I struggled in my relationship late last year/early this year, I kept going back to “When You’re Around” as an attempt to remind myself of the feelings I once felt for my partner, even knowing the backstory of the song. It’s a song so good that you almost forget that you’re able to dive into an album that’s structured more like Age of Adz than Front Row Seat to Earth, as immediately as the album transitions into “My Love’s” you’re thrown into Rachel Brown and Nate Amos’ harsh reality of buzzsaw synths, cheap MIDI effects, and car speaker-destroying bass. — Matty
Wednesday - Mowing The Leaves Instead of Piling ‘em Up
Why cover? To cover a song is to take on an act of blasphemy, to believe that you, the individual or band, can hope to recreate even a fraction of the original spark of the artist who made it. To make a covers album is to commit to that act ten times over, in the hopes of showing others the DNA of your own art at a molecular level. On that second task, Wednesday’s covers album succeeds handily. In last year’s stellar Twin Plagues, one could hear the trademark fuzz of groups like the Smashing Pumpkins and Medicine, the weary tones of classical country acts like Gary Stewart or Roger Miller (or newer fare like the best Cooley songs on Drive-By Truckers releases), but to hear the band perform musical cosplay with their songs in a way that still feels distinctly their own is a delightful surprise in itself. Wednesday doesn’t seek to recreate the individual spark of these songs (though I will say the “She’s Actin’ Single” cover comes quite close) as much as emulate it with their own fire. Why cover, then? Wednesday’s answer is simply: because they’re damn good at it. — Rose