Soft Sounds' Top 25 Albums of 2021
Our favorite albums from the last year, now in numerical order!
The Indieheads Podcast is not just a podcast, with a Patreon, with a following on the world wide web. The Indieheads Podcast is an idea, a principle to live your life by, a promise to yourself that today, of all days, you will. You will what? No clue, you figure it out. Anyway, we’ve collected and condensed the last year of music and hot takes from many of our beautiful cast members into this one single place. Here’s our Top 25 Albums of 2021.
25. Nala Sinephro - Space 1.8
It’s hard to believe this ambient jazz suite is the debut recording from Nala Sinephro. At just 25 years old, the London-based harpist composes with the casual genius of those at the genre’s vanguard. Themes and motifs float gracefully across each track, intersecting the numbered trackless with a cosmic sense of exploration. On moments like ‘Space 3’ the frenzied percussion of a Flying Lotus instrumental melds with the lush, spacious atmosphere. Tapping collaborators including Nubya Garcia and Sons of Kemet only further flesh out the rich sonic palate of the record, making it one that is incredibly easy to get lost in; as notes swirl together into a resounding color and pierce through any monochromatic landscape.
— AJ
24. Spellling - The Turning Wheel
The jump from Spellling’s Mazy Fly a mere two years ago to this year’s The Turning Wheel represents an astounding precision of songwriting, lyrical world building, and compositional density. This isn’t to say the former lacked urgency or any impressive merit in its own right, but this new record leaves almost contemporaries looking worse by comparison.
A jazzy, soulful odyssey with dark turns and fantastical visions, The Turning Wheel plays out with cinematic bliss. ‘Little Deer’ opens with nearly a whisper, building to a prayer-like incantation. The writer’s subjects are often unspecified, disembodied concepts: from the idea of love itself down to a wandering emperor penguin. With sweeping orchestration and delicate electronic affectations, songs like ‘Always’ and ‘The Future’ play out with a driving sense of whimsical fantasy. However, on ‘Boys at School’ Chrystia Cabral demonstrates her skill with grandiose, operatic presentation, warping a stripped-down ballad into an ominous cacophony. These hairpin turns and explosive movements contribute to the entire album’s arresting fables that are, in a word, spellbinding.
— AJ
23. Squid - Bright Green Field
There is a lot of current discourse about the growing wave of primarily UK based post-punk bands that have sprung up around Black Midi and the various other Dan Carey protege bands coming out of London, but I think this Squid record does a disservice by exclusively being lumped in with those bands and that scene. Sure: this is some shouty, occasionally proggy post-punk (a genre category descriptor that increasingly means absolutely nothing and everything at the same time), but unlike a band like Geese that still feels completely stuck in the shadow of its influences, Squid do an excellent job of charting their own path on Bright Green Field, an album that gives you the churning post punk grooves the band has become known for while also taking a number of exciting detours and left turns. The band I find myself comparing them to most more than any of their post punk contemporaries is Radiohead, especially on tracks like “2010” and “Documentary Filmmaker” (side note: the new unreleased Squid songs i just heard at their live show sound a lot like these two tracks, and sound really fucking good). But unlike Radiohead, whose art rock auteurism often feels overbearingly meticulous, careful, and exacting, Squid have all of the same high minded ambition but none of the preciousness or delicate touch. They’re reaching for the same artistic heights, but because they have a vocalist who isn’t as pristine and technically virtuosic as Thom Yorke, the freedom granted by imperfection allows them to leave some of the unvarnished edges of their sound intact, like a scrappier, messier, angrier version of the old guard of art rock and post punk they are pulling from.
— Jacqueline
22. Arab Strap - As Days Get Dark
Aidan Moffat has sounded like a jaded man in his late forties since the release of the first Arab Strap album in 1996 when he was in his twenties, so it’s fitting that the band released their reunion album when he actually reached middle age.Thankfully, none of the potency of their sound has been lost in the sixteen years since their last release; Moffat’s lyrics are as trenchant and uncompromising as ever and Malcolm Middleton’s expertly craft instrumentals are still gorgeous in their simplicity. The duo’s sound always felt out of step with their peers, the blend of electronics and organic instruments giving it the quality of almost existing outside of time. As Days Get Dark feels like an album from a band that has been growing and maturing for decades while also sounding like a release from a group that never left. No one else sounds quite like Arab Strap, so it’s wonderful to have them back, releasing music that is as timeless as their best material.
— Ethan
21. Wild Pink - A Billion Little Lights
Wild Pink’s music is at once gentle and electrifying. A Billion Little Lights furthers the band’s experiment in marrying traditional Americana with the sensibilities of modern indie rock and third-wave emo. Listening to the album feels like looking out the window of a moving vehicle, with a pastiche of scenes and lives blurring together, woven across a tapestry of tall grass and rushing water. Originally intended as a double album mapping a great stretch of the American west, this record benefits from an intimate focus and pointed songwriting. The band finds new ways to make pedal steel feel poignant and pulls every drop of pathos from each note played. While it might not initially sound more complicated than their previous work, repeated listens (and an excellent live recording recently released) cement this as their most fulfilling work yet.
— AJ
20. Strange Ranger - No Light in Heaven
As I write this, Christmas Day is about to be over. I spent much of the day editing part one of our AOTY podcast, but before I locked in and got to work, I decided to put on the music video for Strange Ranger’s “It’s You” and before I knew it, I was a mess. Tears I couldn’t control rolled down my eyes, as I thought about my girlfriend and the three years we’ve been together, pretty much entirely long distance. There’s been a lot of ups and downs in this relationship, and I occasionally have troubles articulating how much she means to me. No Light In Heaven feels like a condensed emotional journey of these past four years I’ve known her. As vocalist Isaac Eiger continues to desperately sing variations of “It’s you” as the noise swelters around him, he evokes his own “you” as much as everyone who has ever had a “you” in their life.
— Matty
19. Faye Webster - I Know I’m Funny haha
Faye Webster just has an honest voice. What I mean by that is, when she sang about needing to get out more on 2019’s Atlanta Millionaires Club, it didn’t sound like a put-on or a wink. It sounded like she was genuinely trying to get herself to leave the house for once. This lends her a certain gravitas that’s beyond her 24 years, but it doesn’t reduce her to a sad sack on-record. She’s more like your funniest, most anxious friend: self-aware, but not precious about it, earnest, but not saccharine, and willing to laugh at herself just as much as she is willing to indulge her pity. It’s enough to make you lower your guard just enough for her music to really get under the skin, and this works to make I Know I’m Funny haha, released just in time for the summer doldrums, a kind of culmination of her skills to this point. While still primarily in the laid-back mode of AMC, there’s an intangible something that makes it feel like she’s truly made the leap. It feels deeper, somehow, the music more assured and Webster’s lyrics more cutting: a couplet like “The last words he said, ‘There’s other things out there to see,’/And then he left me for someone who looks just like me” from “Sometimes” can knock the wind out of you if you aren’t careful.
If I were to try and sum up this album in just two songs - a disservice, mind you, this is an album that deserves to be heard as a whole - I’d reach for the title track and “Cheers.” The former is a song that would have fit snugly on AMC, with prominent pedal steel and lines about cursing out your former landlord and the kind of guitars the guys in Linkin Park use. The brilliance is in the titular phrase, and especially that sharp little “haha” that Webster tosses off: in context, it could be a genuine laugh, a stab at self-deprecation, a defensive response, or all of the above. Then there’s “Cheers,” the album’s lead single and its major outlier. Pitched against an uncharacteristically-gritty rock backdrop, Webster’s voice picks up a new tension as she sings about a relationship in stasis, straining tighter and tighter with every chorus. It hints at a breaking point that never quite arrives, but that represents something new and surprising in her repertoire. The songs exist at opposite poles, but it speaks to Webster’s constant growth as an artist that they coexist. She’s funny ha-ha, sure, but she’s also funny laugh-to-keep-from-crying, and that’s exactly what makes her, and this album, so special.
— Zach
18. Lucy Dacus - Home Video
In a moment where the cultural zeitgeist is obsessed with the labels of trauma, identity, and vulnerability, without considering the baggage and chaos that accompanies their weight, Dacus’ songwriting prowess draws from the technique of understanding. Her characters are openly flawed, engaging in universal symbols of arrested development and personal entrapment, the longing in her ballads marked with a searching for the tethers between people, for unraveling the influences of estranged parents, first romances, unrequited loves. Homely and human, gritty and quiet, the eleven tracks on Home Video are full of those who wish they wished for more; who know their goal but not how to get there; who recycle their own failures out of ignorance, stubbornness, uncertainty. Dacus’ own yearnings for her true self, a messy amalgamation of sexuality and spirituality, relies on a collage of isolated experiences with these flawed individuals, passing in and out of her life, ghosts who she invites to haunt her.
— Dylan
17. The World is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die - Illusory Walls
More than any of the memetic notions of insurmountable difficulty might have you believe, the prevailing element of FromSoftware games is the notion of persistence in the face of adversity. This is the kind of thing you can only learn from sinking dozens of hours into just the opening area of Yharnam in a first play-through of Bloodborne (as I had done this year), needing to internalize when to run straight through areas too overwhelming to overcome and when to face your fears with fight in your blood.
This has long been a running thread in the lyricism of The World Is A Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die as well. So, naturally, it felt only fitting that they incorporate their love of the Dark Souls games into their latest album Illusory Walls as a means of finding new depth in their ethos as a band. Winding associative songwriting about mental health, exploitative pharmaceutical companies, and working underpaid in a capitalist hell-scape are nestled into striking prose poetry that ties these concepts into associations with the First Flame and song titles like "Invading the World of the Guilty as a Spirit of Vengeance." And yet, the album feels undeniably like TWIABP's — in its fixations, as well as its lyrical callbacks and continuations from prior records on tracks like "Died in the Prison of the Holy Office" and the cathartic 20-minute-long closer "Fewer Afraid." And like its predecessors, Illusory Walls ultimately comes down on the proactively comforting note of its band's name — finding beauty and acceptance among the wreckage. In complicating the challenges that one can face, TWIABP only makes the comfort in those closing lines more resonant than ever.
— Natalie
16. Home is Where - i became birds
I’ll admit that earlier in this year, when I first chose to blurb about Home is Where for our quarterly, I kind of half-assed it. I was afraid of pushing ahead any of my own misinterpretation of the band’s work, something which I didn’t fully understand at the time, even as someone who was the target audience for this kind of thing. After seeing the band live opening for Glass Beach, however, two things are very clear:
A. Brandon Macdonald’s intentions as a songwriter are incredibly clear, more so than most.
B. I love every idea she has here.
I Became Birds finds the in-between point of the more charming, unsophisticated textures of folk music (primarily via good old-fashioned harmonica and singing saw solos), forcibly welding it to the more vibrant and rebellious sounds of HIRS-esque hardcore punk (but don’t call it folk punk!), filling out a record that manages unparalleled variety for a runtime of only nineteen minutes, and making it well worthy of its place as a front-runner for the newly vitalized microgenre of fifth-wave emo. Macdonald’s writing on transition manages to be some of the best statement-making I’ve seen, boiling down the difficult-to-describe abstractions of it into evocative phrases that capture your imagination by virtue of how simply they manage to make it all read. The writing of theirs that I relate to the most, though, is from a song that isn’t even on the record, but instead a newer cut I saw them play live, “Names”.
“I’m a woman, suck my dick.” As with all the best writing on I Became Birds, it’s a statement that’s messy, beautiful, and impossible to misinterpret.
— Rose
15. Dean Blunt - BLACK METAL 2
If you’ve read any of my writing or listened to this podcast, you know I’m a huge Dean Blunt fan. I think he’s one of the defining musicians of the century so far, as his approach and philosophy to making music and art, especially as a black man from the UK, have made some of the most deeply moving & thought-provoking records ever, including my favorite album of all-time, 2013’s The Redeemer. While not as bold and experimental as the original BLACK METAL, BLACK METAL 2 doesn’t have to be. While BLACK METAL was critically acclaimed at the time in certain circles, and helped lead him to collaborate with mainstream artists like A$AP Rocky and Frank Ocean, it should have been bigger, as his latest album’s overall tone is that of defeat. Blunt is an artist who's been broken down, chewed up and spit out by the industry. And yet, he offers his most accessible album yet in spite of this, once again reminding listeners that no one else is able to conjure up a sonic vision like him.
— Matty
14. Spirit of the Beehive - ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH
Listening to ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH feels like slowly watching nostalgia tear itself apart, yet build itself back up at the same time. You take one look and this personification of nostalgia appears to be going through some Cronenberg body horror shit. And on another look, it appears totally normal, yet something feels off. In this uncanny valley is where ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH spends most of its runtime, but it’s the moments of true, unmistakable humanity that sneak in throughout the track list that make SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE’s fourth LP one of the most thrilling albums of the year. Simply put, once it grabs you, it’ll never fully let itself go. Long live the new flesh.
— Matty
13. Wednesday - Twin Plagues
Sometimes a record just has your number and knows exactly what you want, like when a cat is scratched in the right spot and cannot help but purr. The best version of that is when the album knows things you want that you didn't even know you wanted, and that’s exactly what the indie rock / country / shoegaze blend of Wednesday does for me. The way this album blends heavy shoegaze, alt country twang, and indie rock ala Hop Along and Snail mail is just… a perfect combination. Chef’s kiss. But what makes this album more memorable than its instantly appealing sound is the lead singer / songwriter Karly Hartzman’s intensely evocative lyrical style, which is so specific and cutting and playful at the same time. From the moment I heard lines like “You soon seem to be wearin' thin / And my Dad picked a Dallas Cowboys urn to put your ashes in” and “I cannot figure what I meant / by living all those ways I did,'' I immediately felt like I understood the world this album comes from, what this place Karly comes from is like, who Karly is and the kind of life she’s lived and the people she’s met along the way. Wednesday is easily one of my favorite new-to-me artists of 2021 – this album sank its hooks into me right away, and the more I returned to it, the more I found to love about it.
— Jacqueline
12. The Armed - ULTRAPOP
In lieu of extensively detailing how cool The Armed are and what their music sounds like to you for the third time, I present a brief series of quotes from the press cycle for this album which presents their motivations better than I can:
“The goal was nothing short of creating literally the most invincible, ridiculously jacked, healthiest, disgustingly hot band of all time.” - Dan Greene in Interview Magazine, discussing The Armed’s workout regimen for ULTRAPOP.
“You know, what better way is there to reclaim power from the world’s villains than to use their tactics in service of making the greatest art of all time?” - Dan Greene in Interview Magazine, discussing the band’s self-labeling as “pop”.
“But the mystery wasn’t, and isn’t, supposed to be solved,” he continues. “The Armed is a big group of a lot of people. Sometimes, some of those people write music. Then sometimes, different people end up performing it on the record. Then, a different configuration of people will play that song live. It’s not supposed to be the conspiracy it ended up being. It’s just not a very typical arrangement for what most people think of when they think of a ‘band.’” - Adam Vallely in New Noise Magazine, discussing the band’s rotating lineup.
“I was doing 40 ounces a day.” - Clark Huge in Stereogum, discussing his daily steak intake for the band’s workout regimen.
“...maybe this will finally convince Lou Reed to do a collaborative album with The Armed. The long rumored Lulu sequel, you know.” - Chris from Metz in Gear Gods, discussing the band’s insistence on using headstockless guitars.
— Rose
11. Black Midi - Cavalcade
Black Midi had a simple sales pitch for you with Schlagenheim: Here is Black Midi, a band full of young musical savants that’s found the alchemical in-between point of a whole swathe of rock genres from the past forty years. It all seems relatively simple now, in retrospect, when put up against their follow-up, Cavalcade. Their sophomore album takes the successful formula of their previous music, and in a sort of cartoonish way, immediately opts to throw it out completely for something even more bewildering. Out with the chunky riffs a la “bmbmbm”, in with the dynamic palette of brassy horns and saxophone. Gone is the band’s tendency to send every song’s volume into the red when tension is needed, in comes the moments of genuine, sincere quiet.
Listeners might be taken aback by the fact that this band could make a song like “Marlene Dietrich”, and only further confused when that song lands on the same album as circus music prog-rock nightmare “Hogwash & Balderdash”. The word “cartoonish” seems to be the driving mode at hand from start to finish, the record beginning with a melody that sounds like it could be Looney Tunes background music and ending on the kind of “well, guess that’s it!” flourish that’d be accompanied by a coyote holding up a sign reading “FIN”. The new sales pitch for the band is as follows: Here is Black Midi, a band full of young musical savants...you don’t know where they’re going with this one either, do you?
— Rose
10. Fire-Toolz - Eternal Home
Every year there are a slew of albums that get called “mind-blowing”, “forward thinking”, “one of a kind”, etc – and every year so few of the artists given these plaudits actually deserve that kind of hyperbole. But when I tell you that the new album from Fire-Toolz is unlike anything you’ve ever heard before, I really fucking mean it. Eternal Home is a whopping 4 disc album, a total of 25 tracks that pulls from metalcore, shoegaze, emo, ambient, and even IDM, and blends it all together into a constantly evolving prog/vaporwave soup. All you need to know about the music of Angel Marcloid, the one woman creative force behind Fire-Toolz, is that she once said in an interview “I don’t ever remember thinking ‘I want to start playing music.’ I feel like in the womb I formed as a MIDI keytar synced with a pissed-on-by-a-cat JP8000 spray-painted in iridescent glitter to where most of the keys stick. I heard a lot of muffled prog-rock prior to being born. It leaked into me and just made me who I am.”
Some music is a lot, but this album is the most, a roller coaster of experimental sonic landscapes, abstract noises, and genre reference points intentionally designed to make your head spin. But, at least for me, it wasn’t at all tiring or difficult to get through, and not once during my first listen of the 25 tracks did I find myself bored or checking out. This album is quite an undertaking, even for those with adventurous music taste, and inherently won’t be for everyone, but if you’re at all like me, you’ll be cackling with glee like an evil witch for the entirety of the runtime saying things like “I can’t believe she’s done this”. There are so many insane moments that happen during the 78 minutes of Eternal Home that I could make myself dizzy just trying to describe half of them to you, but I promise that:
1. You seriously have never heard anything like this, even if you are very familiar with the music this project draws from.
2. This album never repeats the same idea twice, and will always find more ways to surprise you as it goes on.
The two most pop-accessible tracks on the album don’t come until disc 3, and are immediately followed by the industrial IDM song. I had a coworker call Eternal Home a “comedy album”. Another friend called it “music from a nightmare you’re having where Sonic the Hedgehog is ordering you to kill your parents, and you’re a child so of course you’re going to listen to Sonic the Hedgehog”, but that’s exactly why it rules and you should listen to it.
—Jacqueline
9. Porter Robinson - Nurture
There are times in your life when the light of joy goes out, when the feeling that the things you once had relied on to bury yourself into fail to provide the same escape they once did. Even the little worlds you constructed in your head hardly feel like the same refuge they once could have proven to be. In essence, the joie-de-vivre has been lost, and you don’t know what can really bring it back. Porter Robinson understands this feeling well, and in finding its return, he managed to make a work of art that captures the feeling of rediscovering that same joy perfectly. Nurture, his first record in about seven years, is a record that feels like watching a spring field in bloom, wind gently guiding it along, achieving a sense of naturalism that feels like a genuine feat for an EDM record. In adding light touches of life that come with its more tactile instrumentation and vocal production, the record manages a holistic sort of serotonin rush feeling that few other records this year manage to match.
Take “Musician”, the record’s last major single and easily its best tune, an easy-going head rush of sampled vocals, tapped together kicks, and vocaloid-inspired vocal delivery. Even if you’re not someone who’s tapped into the artistic mindset, you can still empathize with every word Porter is saying when he asks, “Can’t you feel what I’m feeling?” Between this and the other thirteen tracks here, it’s an almost overwhelming whole product, one which really tries to push the listener to understand and connect to the emotions at hand by the means of the oldest method of musical connection in the book: Room-filling, resonant choruses. If Nurture can’t win you over by making you mainline pure exuberance for an hour, it’ll at least certainly try its best. On some level, that effort is its own hard-won victory.
— Rose
8. Lingua Ignota - SINNER GET READY
With the recent revelations of Kristin Hayter’s horrifying relationship with Daughters’ frontman Alexis Marshall, it feels almost tasteless to say the entire perception of SINNER GET READY has transformed tenfold. The record itself remains as harrowing and raw as ever, and Hayter’s choice to swap out her usual industrial noise palette for strings & pianos is an astounding achievement. Yet it’s impossible to ignore that something darker has revealed itself-- the music itself stands as its own prayer, it’s own tome of survival and resistance, and for Hayter to share such gut-wrenching art with the world is such a privilege. To be a fan of this album, a fan of her music, almost feels guilty— yet she shares this music, in all its devastation and sorrow, its anger and healing, with the rest of us, and for that there is nothing but gratitude.
— Dylan
7. Grouper - Shade
While the music of Liz Harris aka Grouper is often classified as “ambient”, and certainly takes inspiration from ambient music’s focus on atmosphere and texture rather than traditional pop song structure, I think that framework can be a very limiting and narrow way of discussing what makes the music of Grouper so special, especially the newest full length album Shade. On a very superficial level, Shade shares the characteristics of many other Grouper releases: a collection of delicate, intimate ballads centered around acoustic guitar strumming and Liz’s voice that should especially appeal to fans of the 2008 Grouper album Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill. What makes Shade so special is that it manages to encompass so many of the different eras and styles of Grouper as a musical project under one roof, and places these ideas in conversation and sometimes even conflict with each other.
Rather than using lo-fi or hi-fi production consistently throughout, the fidelity of the recordings on Shade is a constantly evolving equilibrium that the album is playing with – an axis upon which the music is constantly shifting back and forth. The album starts out in the most fuzzy, distorted and distant place possible on “Followed The Ocean”, a song that sounds you’re listening to it being played from a speaker the bottom of the ocean while you stand on the beach, but that moment is immediately put in stark contrast with the second track, “Unclean Mind”, one of the most clearly recorded, accessible, and downright catchy songs in the entire Grouper discography. While many albums in Grouper’s discography are locked in one very specific, intimate setting or mode of recording, the songs that make up Shade were written across a much wider span of time as usual, in a number of different places – leading to an album that feels more deliberately constructed, than any other Grouper release while still maintaining that magic sense of intimacy that ties them all together. It’s too early to tell whether I think this is the very best Grouper album, but the way it manages to hit all the beats of what fans want out of this musical project while also very subtly deconstructing and re-imagining the trademark Grouper style makes it one of the most essential works of the Grouper discography and this year in music overall.
— Jacqueline
6. Dreamwell - Modern Grotesque
Can those who face trials most grotesque find any form of hope? The question is never explicitly asked on skramz outfit Dreamwell's breakthrough record Modern Grotesque, but it hangs over the album's harrowing narratives of disorder, detachment, and demise. And it lingers in the band's refinement of their sound — a frenzy of pulverizing riffs and blast beats and screamed vocals one moment, before falling away into clean tones and singing that represents a different side of that same torment.
Where the album suggests a possible answer to that question — of the concept of a bittersweet end to that despair — comes in the form of its sequencing. Marked by passages of effortless transitions (notably in its opening and closing spans), Modern Grotesque weaves in and out of its Flannery O'Connor-inspired stories about queer/trans revenge and familial abuse and twists on Biblical tales with the whine of a guitar or the emphatic land of a cymbal crash, building to whirlwind tracks like standout "Sayaka" or starkly pulling away to songs like "Plague Father; Vermin Son" for optimal contrast. At the end of it all, however, is “Sisyphean Happiness,” which lends a relatively hopeful outlook for every central figure on the album with its refrain: “There’s something to be said / About the way we learn to die / Finality as an enemy / Instead of a chance to start again.” The end is inevitable. It’s only what we see in its promise that determines what we make in its aftermath.
— Natalie
5. Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders & The London Symphony Orchestra - Promises
The rhythm in life comes in cycles and repetition, the abundance of time crashing against all of us like a wave and receding back into the sea. The natural balance of human life is in accepting these cycles for what they are, relinquishing ourselves to their power and finding ourselves within the great timeline. Such is the power of Promises, which can only be described simply as Life Music. Over the year, Sam Shepherd’s has carefully, gradually brought his Floating Points moniker into the pantheon of great contemporary electronic composers, and now he finally cements himself with the help of another towering titan; Pharoah Sanders, a living legend from the golden age of spiritual jazz, now reasserting his prowess and introducing a brand-new generation to his decades of work. Listen closely to Sanders’ deft saxophone notes and you can hear him channeling the spirits of Sun Ra and the Coltranes, a window into the past and a beacon into the future, of beauty and empathy, of unity and grace. A gift for all time, Promises nurtures and replenishes the soul, and immediately stands as a timeless, classic work.
— Dylan
4. Billie Eilish - Happier Than Ever
If you stare at the current pop charts for too long, you’re probably apt to either go blind or turn into a frothing-at-the-mouth Twitter stan account that posts things like “she ENDED all the other girls with this one!!!”. For the sake of your own mental health, it’s better to instead carefully engage only from time to time, observing the machine from the outside and taking time to enjoy the few truly great works that appear in the space. For some pop stars, a similar kind of disillusionment has become an art form, one which creates a whole genre of records coming to the same conclusion: This stuff is tiring. And nobody seems to be more burned out on the whole affair than Billie Eilish, the young talent who was immediately heralded as a grand savant by every industry standard bearer imaginable, even when she herself didn’t want that kind of recognition.
So of course, in this state, she turned to the time-honored tradition of rapidly ascendant, but creatively frustrated songwriters, making a record that loudly proclaims, “I don’t want this!” Happier Than Ever lands among the finest of this micro-genre of records, showing Eilish as she turns her bite outwards to all the outward forces trying to prey upon her: Stalkers hounding her 24/7, the men who’ve abused her in their personal relationships, the body-shamers trying to push against her own idea of positive self-image, or even just herself, trying to struggle past trauma and hold onto a more ideal future self to look forward to.
Even without all that overwhelming internal commentary buried within, though, Happier Than Ever is an incredible pop record to observe, easily the best thing released within the genre this year. Where her first record opted for murkier, bass-driven compositions that had varying degrees of success, this album chooses instead to let the melodies guide the songwriting, lending to a greater variety within the record’s sound as well as songs that are, for their subject matter, just exciting to listen to. Look at the much-discussed (at least within our little circle) pairing of “Oxytocin” and “GOLDWING”, the former aiming for the kind of pulsating rhythms of WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP-era material and doing it better in spades, and the latter brilliantly chopping up Billie’s performance of a classical chorale into an equally engaging, fluttering little beat that proves to be a fitting backdrop for her usual lilting cadence of hook delivery. All throughout the record are back to back runs of songs like these two, moments where Billie Eilish proves that she’s not simply the pop star the industry needs, but perhaps one that’s smarter than any of the same taste-makers who heralded her arrival would be willing to give her credit for. Like her, I’m sure you’d want to tune it all out, but this album orders your attention. As the bizarre Twitter types like to say, that’s the tea.
— Rose
3. Low - HEY WHAT
In 2018, 25 years into their career, slowcore legends Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker charted bold new territory into Low by introducing an element previously unseen in their music — burying their spare melodies in an ocean of noise. That album, Double Negative (produced by Ones and Sixes collaborator BJ Burton), was released amid a tumultuous era of political unrest and unease about the future that waited ahead. And its sonic approach made one thing clear: living through that time was just as chaotic, cacophonous, and unnerving as the band's auditory conceptualization of it.
Three years later and there now emerges a new kind of political and social turmoil, along with an upending of even the everyday life that existed during Double Negative's release. With life even more dire than it had been in the recording of that prior album, Low have tweaked their sound even further to render their follow-up HEY WHAT its own unique time capsule. The abstraction of dread via enveloping noise from Double Negative is now nestled into the structural core of the band's instrumentation — guitars distorted beyond recognition. The vocals, previously submerged and obfuscated of clarity, are hauntingly clear in the mix. It's the combination of these two approaches — the starkness of Low's slowcore origins with the harshness of Double Negative — that gives HEY WHAT its own distinct identity. If Double Negative was an album that sounded like the lack of coherence that fueled social uncertainty, HEY WHAT is the sound of a life that is frightening in how vividly aware it is of its own disarray, distressingly clear about how far gone things have become.
From the pronounced dead-center-in-the-mix vocals among the stuttering guitar samples on opener "White Horses" to the gradual wave of noise that overtakes the initially sedate "Disappearing," these two opposing approaches are what drive most of the propulsion and conflict on the album. Low's lyricism, too, feels more distressed and strained than ever, immediately apparent from the album's first lines ("The consequences of leaving / Would be more cruel than if I should stay"). The dizzying swirl of all this comes to a head on two key tracks on the record: centerpiece "Hey" charting an interpersonal conflict that ultimately gets swallowed up in an evocative production-heavy soundscape, and closer "The Price You Pay (It Must Be Wearing Off)." Toward the end of the latter track, there's a pivotal moment where both Sparhawk and Parker are overtaken by a swirl of compounding noise and vocal effects, only for the clarity to suddenly return, both voices harmonizing, piercing through the haze. We're left aware, in that moment, of the all-too-human aching among the noise, the discordance that soon after closes its maw around them once again.
— Natalie
2. Japanese Breakfast - Jubilee
Jubilee might be the weakest Japanese Breakfast record to date, which is to say it’s still great and one of the best albums of the year. The opening track “Paprika” is probably the best Japanese Breakfast song, a rousing expression of the catharsis of performing live music. On the flip side, the closing track “Posing For Cars” is another career highlight, starting out a minimal ballad before exploding into a guitar solo for the back half of the song. As for the tracks between, there’s lots of good stuff in there too. Some of it poppy and immediate, some more ambient and takes a while to grow on you. But overall, it’s cool to see an artist like Michelle Zauner who has not only grown in popularity with each passing year, but taken advantage of the resources and opportunities allowed by her growing profile to create inspired art across several mediums.
— Will
1. Black Dresses - Forever In Your Heart
How does one even begin the challenge of making art of real value in the year 2021? How do you attempt to make something beautiful that says something meaningful about being alive in a world so consistently cruel and senseless and without purpose? Is it possible to make art that accurately reflects this place we find ourselves in without just miring ourselves in misery porn? Is transcending even possible? Or is trying to find catharsis just an act of hopeful escapism? How does one, in the words of Devi on the first song on this album, “make something beautiful with NO hope?”
This is the existential question running throughout Forever In Your Heart, the new album from the Canadian noise pop duo Black Dresses that surprise dropped in early 2021. The group helmed by Devi McCallion and Ada Rook officially broke up in 2020, citing online harassment directed at Devi regarding very personal and confessional lyrics from earlier Black Dresses songs as the reason the group was disbanding, but less than a year after that announcement they returned with Forever In Your Heart, hilariously clarifying that “We’re no longer a band unfortunately. Regardless, we’ve decided to keep putting out music.”
The music within Forever In Your Heart is sonically far from what you might typically conjure in your head as “beautiful music”, a unique post-genre fusion of harsh noise, nu-metal, and industrial electronics all funneled into (somewhat) pop structures with rap like cadences and frequent howling screams that may take some getting used to if this kind of musical and emotional extremity isn’t your usual cup of tea. But to only acknowledge the abrasive harsh outer edges of this work is to miss the incredibly vulnerable and intimate beating heart at the core of this project. Despite how much of Forever In Your Heart Devi and Rook spend lamenting the fact that “Building it out of ashes / Building it out of trash it's all we've got left”, despite how much of the album is devoted to the seemingly endless amounts of pain that exist within themselves and the world around them as they live on a planet where the very atmosphere feels like it’s “stitched together by everyone’s pain”, this album arrives at an answer to its own question of how we are supposed to continue on that only feels so simple and trite because it’s true: love, love is the only answer.
It all comes back to a lyric from the last song on their previous album Peaceful As Hell, “And it's true we're broken / But we blend in with all of this debris / So long as we're together / Hell's the safest place on Earth for us to be”. We may be broken people living in a broken society, but within each other's arms true salvation is possible. With someone by your side who understands you, who sees the world in the same way you do, and sees you exactly the way you see yourself, suddenly the world becomes a little less scary, suddenly the task of pushing this boulder up the hill forever feels a little less daunting. More than their music is about how hard it is to be trans, more than their music is about the end of the world, the music Black Dresses is about the special bond that Devi and Rook share, which comes through stronger than ever in every little joke and behind the scenes moment that gets left in this record. It’s about the two of them finding each other, artistic soulmates and best friends, and achieving something neither of them could do on their own. And the result is something brilliantly beautiful and human, even amid the intentional ugliness.
— Jacqueline