2022 has been a landmark year for the Indieheads Podcast/Soft Sounds team. We looked to the past on series like 5 Morons v. Maroon 5 and Best New Pod, discovered a bunch of new guys on our mainline episodes, and finally made strides in talking about new music again on our new series FYC. You know, the thing we started this podcast to talk about. And speaking of new music, we all loved a lot of albums this year, as here are our Top 20 Albums of 2022.
20. Holy Fawn - Dimensional Bleed
Holy Fawn faced a uniquely volatile risk of “sophomore slump” accusations following 2018’s instant-scene-classic Death Spells. In committing to that album’s reinvigoration of early-aught’s post-rock dynamics, the band could have exposed those devices for a crutch, yet to reject the hallmarks of their sound entirely would have only read as a self-conscious reaction against Spells’ breakout success. Intermittent material such as 2020’s The Black Moon EP and lead single “Death is a Relief” did little to dispel those concerns, proving the band had mastered their sound without showing they had anywhere else to take it.
Dimensional Bleed, then, arrived in full as a deceptively challenging statement, with the band adopting a new songwriting philosophy concerned with imperceptible shifts in dynamic texture, smoothing their quiet-loud-quiet structures into at-times inscrutably sleight sonic gradients. This formal language, while disarming at first, proves a distinctive reward relative to the band’s back-catalogue. One need only pay close attention to the sparkling contrapuntal nuances on standout “Lift Your Head” or the serpentine post-metal of “Sightless” to understand that while the band has left their mammoth volumes behind, they remain capable of mining greater depths than ever, complemented by Ryan Osterman’s ever cosmogenic, grief-stricken lyricism. Holy Fawn have long been adept at evoking a towering ocean storm, but on Dimensional Bleed, they finally learned to move with the tides. —Lily
19. MJ Lenderman - Boat Songs
It is, admittedly, a bit tricky to see the forest for the trees when it comes to Boat Songs, the third solo album by Wednesday’s MJ Lenderman, something which the band itself playfully acknowledged. A good chunk of the conversation on this album, at least in our circles, focuses on songs like “Hangover Game” (about buying fake Jordans and finding kinship with His Airness over a love of drinking) and “Dan Marino” (about seeing the Dolphins legend at a Harris Teeter, dismayed over losing his place on cereal boxes to Tom Brady). This is something I gave a lot of focus to when I covered Boat Songs in our Q2 favorites article, and in my defense, that still applies; the jokes still land eight months later, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing about this album. But in revisiting Boat Songs in recent weeks, the pain at the core of the album has made itself clearer and clearer. “I always see the corner, but still I stub my toe,” Lenderman sings on “Under Control,” revealing that behind all the jokes and booze and pro wrestling references is a young man with a wounded heart and a preternatural gift for making all that heartache sing. Or, in other words, an heir apparent to the legacy of Jason Molina. So it’s best to take Boat Songs on simple terms: the earth is round, Jackass is funny, and this album is very, very special. —Zach
18. Sudan Archives - Natural Brown Prom Queen
What makes up a person? Is it the places they come from? The music they turned to in their most formative years? The things that set them apart from everyone else? The answer, for Sudan Archives, is all of these—no factor more important than another, all intersecting with each other. The violinist who made a critical splash on Athena in 2019 uses her second LP to fully explode her sound to explore these polyphonic answers in full, transforming Natural Brown Prom Queen into a sprawling journey through early 2000s pop, hip-hop, trap, and indietronica that—like Sudan—feels like it can be anything and everything all at once. She can go from the bouzouki-led prom night gear shifts of the title track to the brash brag rap of “OMG BRITT,” or the melancholic thirst-ridden funk of “Freakalizer” to the ripped-from-2002-R&B-radio jam “Yellow Brick Road.” She can jump from narratives of colorism and natural hair to somber tales of homesickness, or teleport listeners from Cincinnati to LA in an instant. The more Sudan traverses each of these modes with finesse without ever sacrificing the double album’s flow, the clearer it becomes why she puts the bold thesis “I’m not average” toward the front of this sophomore album: because she spends the entire record proving she’s right. —Natalie
17. Dust Star - Open Up That Heart
One of the band breakups I was most bummed about in the 2010s was Cende, a their only album, #1 Hit Single, was such a perfect mixture of jangly indie rock and power pop. It’s hard to put into words why this album resonated with me, as maybe it tickled my power pop nostalgia or maybe the album just simply hit, that’s all. But thankfully, Cende’s frontman Cameron Wisch is back with a new band with Sirs’ Justin Jurgens, and much like #1 Hit Single, Dust Star’s Open Up That Heart is an album that simply just hits. Though this time, the power pop influence is much more on the surface this go around, as the fast-paced jangle is mellowed out a bit and a lot more crunchier. But don’t mistake mellower for a lack of energy, as this album is packed to the brim with great Cheap Trick-esque hooks and melodies, but with a scrappier, rough around the edges punch that charms as much as it delights. —Matty
16. Cheem - Guilty Pleasure
As pop punk has its moment again in the mainstream, most of it has focused on the genre’s heyday in the late 90s and early 2000s. But Connecticut band Cheem look ahead of the 20 year cycle of nostalgia and give their take on the genre’s emo phase in the mid 2000s, with their latest album Guilty Pleasure largely drawing upon bands like Fall Out Boy and Panic! At The Disco. While the latter’s debut album occasionally played with electronica influences to mixed results, Guilty Pleasure is much more brazen about the non-rock genres it pulls from, incorporating nu metal verses, jungle beats and new wave-esque rhythms while retaining the signature snottiness and sticky sweet melodies of that era of pop punk. All of this is then finished off with thick hyperpop sheen, leaving us with a record that feels like entire Fueled By Ramen catalogue, past, present and future, rolled into one. While its breakneck pace and overall gaudiness can be a bit much for some pop punk devotees, Guilty Pleasure proves to be a rewarding listen for those attuned to the extremely online age. —Matty
15. Weyes Blood - And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow
“For softness is great and strength is worthless. When a man is born, he is soft and pliable. When he dies, he is strong and hard. When a tree grows, it is soft and pliable. But when it's dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death's companions. Flexibility and softness are the embodiment of life.”
- The titular Stalker from the film Stalker (1979)
And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow — in addition to being one of the only good pieces of art about the pandemic — is also a moving tribute to the very idea of softness as a virtue. Not softness as a synonym for weakness, but softness as ultimate strength. This is an album about submission, not in the sense of subservience, but submission as the ultimate act of being at peace with one’s tiny role in a much larger web beyond our comprehension, surrendering yourself to the flow of the universe. What makes this record special is not just the plainspoken way it speaks to the wreckage left behind by the last two years of chaos and upheaval, but also the way it uses metaphors like romantic relationships as a way to view personal struggles as a microcosm for the humanity-wide ways that we flail about for control and hurt our fellow man when “the person on the other side has always just been you”. It can be easy to minimize the romance oriented parts of this album as trivial boy trouble songwriting, but the interpersonal dynamics of this album are just as crucial as the big sweeping statements about society. The romance of And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow is secretly a Neo / Trinity-esqe prism through which to view all love between all kinds of people. She brings this home big time on the record’s unbelievable closer “A Given Thing”, which is essentially her version of Björk’s “Undo”. “We’re all so cracked after that”, and as much as trying to pick up the pieces can feel impossible, the great power of this album is the way it reminds you love is always right at your fingertips. It costs you nothing, it’s a given thing. —Jackie
14. Hurray for the Riff Raff - LIFE ON EARTH
Towards the end of LIFE ON EARTH, Alynda Segarra sings, “It’s been a terrible news week.” And how. There has always been a vital, furious political current in Segarra’s work as Hurray for the Riff Raff (see: “The Body Electric,” 2017’s The Navigator, and their 2015 op-ed in The Bluegrass Situation). But LIFE ON EARTH grew only more urgent as the year wound on; “SAGA” was already crushing before the Supreme Court moved to overturn Roe v. Wade, and now it seems nearly unbearable. On this album, however, Segarra made room for themselves in the frame, writing about dodging an ex on “PIERCED ARROWS,” praying for protection on “JUPITER’S DANCE,” and interrogating their own behavior on the searing “POINTED AT THE SUN.” There’s a reason that, eight albums in, Segarra considers this album a second debut - they’ve never been this vulnerable on record, and it lends a whole new dimension to their artistry. On LIFE ON EARTH, Segarra is all too aware that the wolves are closing in, but they know the way out: run. Run fast, run far. Life on earth is long, and only growing more precarious by the day, but if you surrender to apathy, you’ve already lost. —Zach
13. Katie Dey - Forever Music
I often think about what I’ll leave behind when I die, because I’m often forced to confront the fragility of my very existence in so many aspects of my personhood. This is one of several refrains that swims through my thoughts as a woman, as a trans woman, as a disabled trans woman, as a depressive disabled trans woman, as I take the medication that so tenuously keeps me afloat—that could become too expensive or restricted at any moment—as I repeat another refrain: “stay pretty girl.”
Katie Dey’s latest has hung over my entire 2022 because nothing else has captured the sheer weight, struggles, resilience, and supportive comfort that forever music manages. Stripping away much of the vocal effects that defined the Melbourne singer’s earlier music, Dey’s fifth album is a profound exercise in vulnerability, a reckoning with the factors that impede your very subsistence and a plea to endure as best you’re able all the same. It’s the ways forever music starkly reflects the former that especially resonated with me—Dey’s voice at its barest on “impossible” grappling with the very possibility of survival in fraught circumstances, or the soft vocoder effects nestled around the impassioned cries for contentment on “happy girl.” And it’s the catharsis of finding whatever solace can be attained that makes the album a balm for the wounds it tends to—the amplified bursts of longing consuming everything else on “real love,” or the piercingly direct sentiment of the album closer: “rot with me.” As painful as listening to forever music could be while living so closely to its lyricism, seeing these pieces of me in it brought the embrace of recognition I needed above all else—the knowledge that there would be a forever in what I could bring, so long as I had others to rot with. And, with time, I found myself repeating another refrain, at my rawest, to myself and those I hold closest, whenever we need it most: “one more step, girls, be valiant.” —Natalie
12. Osees - A Foul Form
This got on the list because of Gavin and he isn’t gonna write about it. Here’s what I’ve been able to find on Twitter about Gavin’s thoughts on this album and Osees/Thee Oh Sees in general:
—Matty/Gavin
11. PENDANT - Harp
When I listen to Harp, I feel like I’m transported to a certain time period. Not a year, or an era, but literal specific time in the day. The in-between hours I call them, when you’re deep into dusk but nowhere near dawn. If you’re awake during this time, there’s really only two things happening: you’re either wrapped up in thought about everything that has and will ever happen to you, partying, or some combination of the two. In the last year or so, I’ve been going out a lot more than I did before, even pre-pandemic. I’ve learned a lot about myself in this last year and a half, and Harp was the perfect album for me as I became more aware of this new era of my life. So whether I’m sitting in regret, or relief, for making it through to this next part of my life, or I’m simply just feeling like a crazy ass white boy, Harp is an album that feels like it was specifically made for me and me only, and truly those are the most special kinds of records you can find. In an era of mass consumption, when you find that one record that cuts through the noise and speaks to you, you’ll never want to let it go. —Matty
10. Young Jesus - Shepherd Head
What dignity does our belief in a higher power allow us? What can we hope to see at the end of it all? How can we learn to toil through our everyday grief in service of greater good? What does our existence amount to as we put ourselves to face directly towards the infinite? What good is an eternity if we cannot experience the whole of emotion, all the pain along with the purity? How do we harness our emotions in a manner which breeds positivity within the world? How can we seek calm in understanding that we do not have greater control over that which crashes into us most directly in this universe? Most importantly, how can we answer these sorts of questions with emo and house music in a manner of twenty-eight minutes? —Rose
9. Bill Callahan - YTI⅃AƎЯ
There’s an old chestnut that says art is intended to hold a mirror to the world. By that token, the picture Bill Callahan paints on YTI⅃AƎЯ is bleak. The inverted world suggested by the title is eerily similar to our own, one where good people die before their time, bowevils ravage the harvest, and the coyotes at the door grow bolder and bolder every day. If he hadn’t already named an album Apocalypse, that would be an apt title for this one, and not just because it’s the heaviest album he’s made since that 2011 masterpiece. After breaking a half-decade hiatus with Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest, Callahan’s music has become, if not cozy, then certainly more comfortable in its own skin; one need only look at Gold Record’s reworking of the Smog standard “Let’s Move to the Country” to see the proof. YTI⅃AƎЯ, by contrast, is thrillingly unsettled—when a feeling overtakes Callahan at the start of “Everyway,” he can’t tell if it’s a disease or simply a new idea. His lyrics are grislier than they’ve been in some time, conjuring shipwrecked survivors up to their elbows in horse blood, dead seagulls, and whatever the hell is going on with “Drainface.” As it escalates, album centerpiece “Naked Souls” morphs into something feverish and monstrous, a call-and-response hymn for the endtimes that ranks among Callahan’s very best works. He’s never been an upbeat songwriter, but at times, YTI⅃AƎЯ is a verifiable danse macabre.
But even with this edge restored, YTI⅃AƎЯ remains rooted in the concerns that have animated Callahan’s music since Shepherd. The theme of many of these songs - sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit - is family, and the lengths to which you’re willing to go to protect it. He advocates for surviving the day in whatever way you can, losing yourself in nature, listening to the music of the planets and forgetting how to talk. Amidst the horror, he finds room for some of his most off-kilter jokes yet: come for the bone-dry delivery of “at least we’re all in this horse together” on “Everyway,” stay for the “N***** in Paris” interpolation on “Naked Souls” that’s so far out of left field it makes left field look like right field. He even found time to write “Natural Information,” one of the precious few Bill Callahan songs that can be accurately described as buoyant. “If you were a house fire, I’d run in to save the cat,” Callahan quips on “Last One at the Party,” and that’s YTI⅃AƎЯ in miniature: no easy resolutions, but dangerous, funny, and deeply heartfelt. —Zach
8. Animal Collective - Time Skiffs
Animal Collective are an institution. If you’re in with them, you’re all in, and if you aren’t, you probably can at least understand the mindset that leads a person to becoming a devotee. With institutions, you generally don’t expect much in the way of new revelations, some new unlocking of what you loved about a band. And in truth, Time Skiffs is not that. It’s an embrace of all the interests the group seemed to have there from the beginning, made much more exciting in their vibrant stream of chilled out dad psych jams. It’s exactly what you’d expect, and if you’re all in, you don’t feel like asking for much more. —Rose
7. billy woods - Aethiopes
Billy Woods is one of the greatest contemporary rappers—there, we got the obvious out of the way. Aethiopes is a culmination of a decade of work unraveling history from its monolithic state and drifting into the present, a work portraying an artist so cosmically in-tune with his many worlds, both of the ancestral plane and the modern being. It’s a towering achievement of a voice that’s delivered time and time again, year in and out, with no signs of slowing down—not that anyone would want him to. —Dylan
6. Ethel Cain - Preacher’s Daughter
What is there left to say about this record? Specifically, what more is there left for me to say about this record, the person who loved it so deeply and immediately that I pretty much became America’s Ethel Cain expert. I’ve had someone who forgot my name refer to me as the “Ethel Cain lady”, to give you an idea how much of my time I’ve spent this year evangelizing for Preacher’s Daughter both online and offline.
I also don’t have much else left to say about this album because it does such an effective job of speaking for itself. Preacher's Daughter is an immersive and cinematic concept album that has a crystal clear sense of place and theme; while smartly keeping the narrative contained to loose vignettes. To use another favorite of mine Frank Ocean as a cross genre point of comparison, songwriting wise it’s her Blonde and Channel Orange at the same time: at once a series of character driven short stories of romance, heartbreak, family drama, and grisly horror that each tell a self-contained narrative on their own. Stacked up together, they form an exercise in cryptic meta-commentary that digs all the way under the surface of its plot to her deepest insecurities and loneliest thoughts, revealing so much while keeping her cards close to her chest. To try to plot the minute-by-minute details of the character Ethel Cain’s murder like Charlie Kelly on the whiteboard is to miss the point: it’s not the what of Preacher’s Daughter that matters as much as the who, how, and why. It’s an album that speaks deeply to the experiences of trans women, but also all women, men and non-binary people, queer people, people who live in small towns, people who have a complicated relationship with their religion, sexuality, or family (or all 3). It’s an album for anyone who has ever “felt so alone out here,” for anyone who has ever “put too much faith in the make believe,” for anyone who can relate to feeling like “it’s just not my year, but I’m all good out here.” It’s both universal and specific, completely iconoclastic in the context of the pop world and yet totally accessible for anyone not steeped in the more experimental genre influences she draws on. It’s already one of my favorite albums of all time, but my thoughts about this album represent only one sliver of the multitude of different experiences and feelings it yanked out of the huge number of people who connected with it this year. Preacher’s Daughter may not be for you, it may feel a bit long winded if this kind of slow moving pop ballad melodrama isn’t your bag, but I promise it’s worth giving a shot. If her rapidly escalating stardom is any indication: there’s a pretty damn good chance it’ll sink its hooks into you too. —Jackie
5. Alex G - God Save the Animals
Secular artists reconfiguring the markers and aesthetics of Christian music isn’t a new concept. From big-name folk singers to underground experimental Bandcamp collectives, it’s an approach with its own rich, diverse history that has as much to say about the subject matter as it does the artists making it. And, if Alex G’s latest is any indication, it’s territory that still has grounds for exciting new mining—in part because it leans into his inclinations for being a freak more than ever.
Praised as he is, much of the criticism levied at the indie singer-songwriter’s past records has been that his penchant for diversions into noise rap or experimental electronica don’t organically fit into his albums (Agree to disagree, as one of his strengths as an artist is that even his most tender music always feels positioned just at the edge of an uncanny portent, but I digress). God Save The Animals circumvents this by leaning into Alex G’s freak tendencies from the very beginning, while deliberately implementing religious references and iconography throughout its lyricism. “After All” begins the album with a woundingly pitch-shifted hymnal, while “S.D.O.S.” depicts the voice of God as a low, glitchy, omnipotent voice of terror. Alex G’s work on this record proves to be so consistently, unabashedly weirder than in recent years—full of throat-shredding screams, warped VST string plucks, and apocalyptic synth clarion calls—that his eventual stripping down of sound on “Miracles” arrives like a retroactive mission(ary) statement for how intent and execution all intermingle. Religion, Alex G seems to be saying, is as strange and terrifying and silly as the tools he uses to fuck around in the studio—but that doesn’t lessen the grip faith can be had on those who use it as their guiding light. Even if that guides them to put the cocaine in the vaccine. —Natalie
4. Big Thief - Dragon New Warm Mountain, I Believe In You
It would be tempting to read Big Thief’s freewheeling experimentalist epic, Dragon New Warm Mountain…, as their most carefree and pastoral effort yet. It is, of course, a road trip album, capturing the ambiences and energies of its many recording locales (New York, Arizona, Colorado, and California) as it goes. But within the luxuriant musical chicanes of the band’s physical journey lies an emotional topography suffused with more pointed anxiety than they’ve expressed to date. Where Big Thief were once content to revel in the inarticulable questions and sensations of the universe, the economic and interpersonal instabilities brought about by the pandemic appear to have instilled an urgency for answers within the collective. Even the album’s most ecstatic moments, like the soaring shoegaze jam “Little Things,” are wrought with insecurity and hurt: “I was inside of you,” bandleader Adrienne Lenker intones, “where are you now?”
Elsewhere, allusions to the present moment abound. Lenker invokes “the new disease” and “making do with an internet signal,” gestures that reframe more sedate moments such as “Wake Me Up to Drive” not as portraying a band on a cross-country rumspringa, but four people urgently on the run from a global catastrophe that has forced them to confront who they really are to each other. Comparisons have been made to The White Album, but at the core it reads more as their Rumours: a band in crisis channeling acts of militant self-examination into works of sublime pop songcraft. When Lenker begs for approval on the cacophonous “Love Love Love,” the plea is not to a lover but to her bandmates, a bracing admission of platonic codependency. Dragon is, above all, a chronicle of the band’s attempts to survive in a new world, together and apart. “I believe in you, even when you need to recoil,” she reassures on the title track. This tension between communion and separation is what the album’s wandering structure speaks to—the ebb and flow of people being imperfect together.
By the album’s end, the band arrives upon a renewed sense of comfort with this flux, if only for now. Fittingly, this takes the form of a question: in the album’s last seconds, a room mic catches drummer James Krivchenia asking, “what should we do next?”—an expression of equal parts possibility and uncertainty. From the right angle, a question can feel like a prayer or a threat. On Dragon New Warm Mountain, Big Thief manages to make theirs feel like both. —Lily
3. Tomberlin - i don’t know who needs to hear this…
This album does not begin: first it teeters and peers over the edge of beginning – stepping hesitantly forward with a series of false starts. On, “easy,” Sarah Beth Tomberlin carries the nervous weight of someone starting the first sentence of a difficult conversation – one that they know they have to have but one with an unknown outcome. Usually the intro of an album is all about confidence, about projecting the vision of your music in such a way that it immediately sets expectations and whisks you away into the album proper, and instead every time “easy” feels like it’s about to swell up towards the sky, the string section is deflated like a sad balloon and she crashes back down to earth.
In Dyl’s very eloquent and moving writeup of the album, they identify it as a “getting your shit together” album, an uncommon trope in rock and roll. Specifically, this is an album about when you start to take those first steps of getting your shit together and it suddenly makes you realize that the person you’re with is maybe a step behind you in the shit together department, and navigating the emotional minefield created by that widening gap in emotional maturity. As she puts it on the closing track “and what I really wanted to be / is everything you weren’t for me.”
We then watch her steady herself, getting her feet under her and growing her confidence and clarity bit by bit as these patient and intimate folk songs build on top of each other. She learns to find that love within herself, and the album grows in strength around her, adding layers of instrumentation until it reaches the monumental payoff of “stoned” and “happy accident.” These songs would be highlights if nestled into a more traditional indie rock record, but in the context of the uncharted journey this record takes you on from start to finish they have a far more immense weight to them.
The album’s greatest attribute is embodied by the almost 4th wall breaking thesis statement on its final track: “sometimes it’s good to sing your feelings / even when you don’t know / the next line line or how it goes.” It has a sweeping arc that is precision calculated every step of the way through, but every single line unfolds with such train-of-thought candor that it sounds like it's all just spilling out of her in one unedited session. —Jackie
2. Alvvays - Blue Rev
Alvvays are at their very best. To ask what it means for a band to be in this imperial phase is to ask the question of what we love about them, to understand what defines the ever-invisible line between an Alvvays song and a perfect Alvvays song. I’ve harped again and again on this concept of “the craft,” that exhaustingly indefinable quality which separates the bands we remember from those who merely strive for adequacy. Alvvays have the craft. So how do they use it?
In short, they iterate. We can use the language of comparison to say Alvvays songs “sound like” The Smiths, Tame Impala, Deana Carter, but it fails to define the means by which these individual GACT strands intertwine themselves into the full genome of newness. We can use our colorfully descriptive adjectives to talk about the way the band has perfected upon their blend of dream pop, shoegaze, just plain old pop music, but it fails to capture the same essence of that which makes their album stand so tall. Blue Rev is a record made by people who love music so deeply they want to make something which can sit firmly next to that which made them want to make it in the first place.
It is an album which shamelessly namedrops Belinda Carlisle before quoting her wholesale, one which echoes the chords of the past in service of now, an act of the most absolute and deep-seated devotion you can give to that which inspires you. I recognize, in part, that the language I use here sounds reductive, but to understand why I speak of it this way you have to understand that I come to it with that same sort of love. Blue Rev is made by people who see all which came ahead of them and ask “What’s our role?” It’s good enough to make me want to ask the same sometime. —Rose
1. Kali Malone - Living Torch
Kali Malone’s Living Torch, the best album of 2022, defies expectations. Her last drone-led masterwork, The Sacrificial Code, was a feature-length coronation as one of the most thoughtful and talented ambient artists of the moment. With this new pair of compositions, Malone eschews the familiar wall of sound found within that dark, pipe organ work for an experimental mix of minimalist tradition and arresting atmosphere.
The two halves of Living Torch comprise thirty three minutes of slow-motion spiral; where the maestro’s hand commands the listener to ease into the breathy patterns of ‘I’ making way for the thundering arrival of ‘II.’ At any given moment, you’d be hard pressed to identify the instrument composing such aberrant sounds — the experience is often akin to staggering through an ornate hallway lit only by a flickering flame. But in each moment, one can subtly feel the guiding light of Malone’s composition. Every inhale gives way to negative space that feels genuinely as revelatory as the succession of notes before it. Even in moments of relative silence, the music itself remains intact; uncoiling and unraveling in controlled descent.
In redefining her own suite of sonic tools, Malone encourages the audience to follow along with insatiable curiosity. Living Torch is the most evocative work of the artist’s young career, conjuring tenebrous scenery with exquisite precision. Even on repeated listens, the journey through these soundscapes feels rewarding. The rise and fall of wavering synths give birth to blown out bass notes like waves crashing on a moonlit cliff face. It is the steady presence of the composer that becomes most surprising: the music on Living Torch can feel as if it is often creating itself out of necessity.
But this paradoxical experiment reveals the genius of Kali Malone’s experimental work, for she remains always in control. The meditative ambiance of this record allows listeners to get lost, if they so choose, or tune in for a deeply focused examination of each spectral performance. Regardless of your intent, we arrive together. Each moment carefully considered, but organic. Time, after all, is the thing. —AJ
If you’d like a bite-sized dive into our Top 20, peep the Spotify playlist below:
And as a bonus, we asked our Discord (which you can join by supporting us on Patreon for as low as $1/month) members what their favorite albums of the year were. Here’s how their Top 12 shook out:
Big Thief - Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You
The Weeknd - Dawn FM
Alex G - God Save The Animals
black midi - Hellfire
Soul Glo - Diaspora Problems
billy woods - Aethiopes
Ethel Cain - Preacher's Daughter
MJ Lenderman - Boat Songs
Nilüfer Yanya - Painless
Beyoncé - RENAISSANCE
Chat Pile - God’s Country
Rosalía - MOTOMAMI