i might drop to my knees: 2021 in music
this year, i remembered i love music.
So much of 2020 felt like an endless repeat of the same events, the same tasks: mounting and ceaselessly similar bad news. I was ignoring music recommendations from friends and I played my favorites from 2019 on repeat: 100 gecs, Water From Your Eyes, Short Fictions, Weatherday, Glass Beach. Microphones in 2020 was an extremely bright light in the monotony — funny, maybe, for an album-song that sticks to the same three chords for 45 minutes.
As I prepared to visit Iceland this August, I came into my own again, musically. I was building playlists as the soundtrack to my approaching adventure. The experience rekindled my fondness for seeking out and finding new releases, sharing rising acts with my closest friends, watching artists create and recreate their works before my eyes and ears. Over the last four months, I’ve sped to catch up on everything I’d missed.
why bother?
It can be fun to assign a numeric rating to music, to attempt to quantify the joy a musical work brings me. It’s a fool’s errand, of course, because no one-dimensional score can adequately express a critique of a work, much less situate it in its cultural context with other musical artistry. And rote rankings, such as top 10 lists, would only make sense if all music were vying for the same prize, if I applied the same criteria to every release — as if every song were striving to the same ends. Of course that isn’t the case. There are so many dimensions by which music affects my soul: emotional provocativeness, innovation to a genre, lyrical cleverness, danciness, the capacity to crush and empty me, the ability to elate and raise my mood, and just plain flat-out enjoyment. That’s hardly an exhaustive list; there are so many more facets of the musical effect.
But it’s still fun to play the ranking game, with an ironic wink and a nod. I’m just one person with one reference point and a specific taste that you may not share and that I do not ask you to share. “Y’all know this is just my opinion, right?”
I love these discussions, and hope you do, too. So here’s a top 10 list followed by a generous smattering of suggestions, thoughts, criticisms and lists of new music and musical experiences I enjoyed, thought about and otherwise occupied my soul. I hope you enjoy it.
come along with me~
I made playlists organizing some of my favorite tracks this year, mostly from albums I’m about to mention but also from others, by genre or mood or theme. To start, here are selections from my Top 10 list. Here is some artsy stuff and beautiful vox, some calming tunes, all the maximalist pop to dance yourself mad to, a peek into the year’s greatest emo acts, a small election of experimental rock with Big Sounds, a gaze into the ’gaze of 2021, a huge selection of heavy sounds from screamo to grindcore, some of the hip-hop and R&B that I enjoyed most, a simpler set of “indie”-sounding tracks, my pitiful collection of jazz listens, an overview of this year’s ridiculous British invasion of art rock and nu post-punk artists and, finally, a poptimistic look into our bright future: 2022.
thank you!
I dedicate this list to all my friends who share a passion for discussing, enjoying and sharing music with me and one another, who have offered their thoughts and suggestions on tracks and albums this year, who have thought of me and sent recommendations as they’ve listened to new music this year, who have met up at my house for sick shows at the Paper Tiger or Faust or traveled many miles to catch a concert with me.
Thanks for making this year such a musically rich and rewarding one: Akil, Andrew, Austin, Evan, Lexí, Michael, Quinn, Randi, Tyler, Will.
best in show <3
This is the best of the best. If you seek out nothing else this year, please let it be these albums. In order, top to bottom, ’cuz I ain’t here to waste any time getting to No. 1! Listen along on Spotify with the links, and this playlist of favorite selections.
(1.) Porter Robinson: Nurture
Nurture sounds like overworld music to a JRPG about satisfaction — and not just because the opening track “Lifelike” nods toward the Undertale theme, or “Wind Tempos” takes a cue from LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends.” Porter Robinson offers sunny optimism without rose-tinted glasses. This record is pure bliss as the sun shines on. His lyricism reflects on maturity, on being a creative person, on growing into yourself after dark times and difficult internal struggles, the demands of others whose desires were incompatible with what you know to be. Nothing put a smile on my face, or woke me up in the morning, quite like Porter Robinson could this year. And it is so incredibly dense in its quality. The loving lullaby “Blossom,” the challenging comfort of “Mother,” the dancey exuberance of “Musician,” the life-affirming tracks “Look at the Sky” and “Get Your Wish” and “Something Comforting” — it is all so overwhelming in its positivity, and I do not mean that in some sense of saccharine sweetness, but in its outright virtuous goodness. Nothing makes me want to want life more than music like this and the feelings these tunes inspire. Nurture is an utterly inspirational, beautiful release. It is truly like hardly anything else.
(2.) Parannoul, Asian Glow, sonhos tomam conta: Downfall of the Neon Youth
This collaborative LP between three of the best new shoegaze acts in the world — Parannoul (anonymous) and Asian Glow (Gyungwon Shin) make music in Seoul and sonhos tomam conta (Lua Viana) brings her blackgaze from Brazil — knocked me out. Each of these artists made records of their own this year and you can absolutely sense the musical aspects each brings to this knockout release. They bring together the fuzzy soundwalls of shoegaze, elements of black metal, the songwriting and riffy sensibilities of second-wave or “midwest” emo, and bring it all through an intentionally lo-fi filter that makes this sound like you’re hearing the warmest live performance a few rooms over at the house show.
(3.) Home Is Where: I Became Birds
I Became Birds has me so outrageously excited for where this Florida four-piece punk act is heading. Frontperson Brandon MacDonald offers their passionate vocals, hollering imaginative lyrics bordering on free-association, tied by themes ranging from gender transition and the fluidity of queerness, to impressionistic memories of times gone by and times yet had, spiced with the right mix of precision and sloppiness where the music demands slop. This is songwriting that immediately grabs your attention, between Brandon’s riveting harmonica riffs, some extraordinary earworms — the anthemic chant in “Sewn Together from the Membrane of the Great Sea Cucumber” and the taunting sing-song in “Long Distance Conjoined Twins” come to mind — and the practiced screams in “The Scientific Classification of Stingrays” are all unforgettable. Clocking in just shy of 19 minutes, I Became Birds wastes not a second of your time with anything but excellence.
(4.) Midwife: Luminol
Madeline Johnston’s latest EP, Luminol, has brought me to tears on more than one occasion. If there is any “quarantine music” to listen to this year, it is this. Every track is a winner. Consider the lighthouse-beacon of synth in “God Is a Cop” and her elegiac singing, an introspective recognition of wrongness within, and notice how this theme returns in the follow-up “Enemy,” which transfers the siren of synth into a warm, pulsing sensation. See how surprisingly impactful The Offspring lyrics become when the sentence “And it feels like heaven’s so far away” constitutes the sole, repeated line of Midwife’s “2020,” juxtaposing the original mournful statement into a lonely call for help in hopeless times. That loneliness is more explicitly addressed in “Colorado,” a meditation on the physical distribution of community and death. There is so much more to be said about this thematic continuity and the subtle, ebbing flow of moods and conceptual connections between tracks. It is distancing, a product of alienation, yet Madeline offers comfort in her extension of that loneliness to you and I. I adore it.
(5.) Parannoul: To See the Next Part of the Dream
Parannoul, the anonymous Seoul student bringing together other young shoegaze artists across the world, is truly virtuosic in his music-making. This is independent, dorm room-produced, gazey rock music, but the sound is perfectly situated in the genre. Notice the fuzzy and fantastic percussion tones, guitars set just far back enough to permeate your head with walls of atmosphere as inspiring as the beauteous blue sky depicted in the cover artwork. That amazing, whirring synth in “Analog Sentimentalism” brings me back to Dismemberment Plan and so many emo acts before Parannoul. I wish I could opine on the lyrics of each song as a theme; rather, I’ll reproduce what Parannoul posted on the LP’s bandcamp listing:
Through these works, I want to leave a little trace of my own, no matter how stupid and anachronistic dream it may be.
This album can be said to be the answer to my dream. This is an album about a person whose body is an adult but mind is still a child, due to the wide gap between ideal and reality. He believes he is talented, and he thinks he will definitely become a world tour rock star in the future. In reality, however, he had never played a guitar while he was 21, his singing skills are fucking awful, and is below average in height and appearance and everything. How will he react now, who has just faced reality as an adult after adolescence? …
The feelings that I have felt for the past 3 years are also honestly contained. Delusion, Inferiority, Past, Non-adaptation, Escapist, Fantasy and Disillusion, Struggle, Most Ordinary Existence, Lethargy, and Suicide. Only complaints about those feelings are left in this album, and there is no such thing as overcoming them. I can’t give you a sweet word of consolation. I can’t say “It’s gonna be okay someday”. I just hope there will be more active losers like me in the world.
Read this, listen, then read it again. If your heart isn’t broken, I don’t know what to say. I can only hope our sustained attention and adoration can convince this incredible artist of the worth of their own pursuits. Every minute of this hour-long odyssey is worth your time, top to bottom.
(6.) The World Is A Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid To Die: Illusory Walls
Illusory Walls is a TWIABP album for TWIABP fans and TWIABP itself. It’s notable for being this third/fourth-wave emo band’s foray into prog metal, an unusual but welcome step for a band that has been around since the first arrival of emo’s revival in the very late 2000s. I’ve been a fan for most of those years, and cannot help but experience this album as a moment of self-mythologizing. In Illusory Walls, TWIABP has erected a monument to the ever-evolving project and straight-up musical institution that TWIABP has become over its decade-plus lifespan across spacey post-rock, straightforward midwest-style emo, spoken word and post-hardcore sounds. The self-referentially titled tracks “Afraid to Die” and “Fewer Afraid” bookend the release, the latter a sprawling, nearly 20-minute odyssey that caps off with a respectful recycling of the final lines of 2013’s life-changingly good LP Whenever, If Ever:
The world is a beautiful place, but we have to make it that way.
Whenever you find home, we’ll make it more than just a shelter.
If everyone belongs there, it will hold us all together.
If you’re afraid to die, then so am I.
These lines, triumphantly recited eight years after they were first penned, utterly floored me. Their repetition was a revelation that left my mouth agape; I was shocked, listening in utter awe, thinking back to every one of my many streams, every rewind of my Are Here To Help You cassette, witnessing their 2014 performance at Austin’s Fun Fun Fun Fest. This is a band that can get away with making music about itself because it deserves to, because this amorphous, frequently changing collection of creative artists has made music so good and so meaningful to myself and many, many others that it appears as self-reflection, not grandiosity.
Personal significance aside, this album riffs, rips and roars.
(7.) BRUIT ≤: The Machine is burning and now everyone knows it could happen again
This year, Bruit out-Godspeed’d Godspeed. There is hardly more to say than that. They hit all the notes you’d want out of a sprawling post-rock album grappling with our rapidly deteriorating climate — down to the field recordings and interview sample about fires and forests — and bring a powerful sense of musicality to the package. This album is not available on Spotify, so it does not appear in the playlists. But it is one I’d not want to excerpt anyway; it deserves the attention of a full listen-through. Strongly consider streaming and buying it on Bandcamp.
(8.) Lingua Ignota: SINNER GET READY
This is a tough one, in so many ways. Just listening to this, you know Kristin Hayter’s vocals come from a piece of extreme emotion — grief, hurt, righteous indignation and retributive violence. There is a ruthlessness in the revenge she seeks.
And you cannot blame her. In a handful of tweets, Hayter indicated that this record’s raw emotional hurt sprung from her experience dating ex-boyfriend Alexis Marshall, the frontman of industrial noise metal band Daughters. In early December 2021, Hayter penned a long explanation detailing the ways Marshall abused, manipulated and violently mistreated her during their relationship. She also discussed it in toward the end of an interview with Anthony Fantano that month. Listening to the album was difficult at first; reading her 6,700-word essay on some of the worst years of her life cast it even further into painful listening territory. I think it’d be inappropriate, on a personal level, to refer back to the biographical background of this album while detailing my thoughts on the music. This album constitutes good, difficult, harsh but beautiful art, and it stands on its own.
In the opening track, Hayter declares “I am incessant, I am the ocean,” before demanding our devotion. The folksy instrumentation — chimes and bowed banjo, bells and piano, the bellowing Shruti box droning throughout — and her lyricism, which frequently trades in the purple-prose proclamations styled after Anabaptist traditions, suggest an Appalachian Protestantism. Hayter meditates on a dark and perverse Christianity, one which appeals to a supernaturally inordinate, divine intervention for thoroughly mortal concerns, an utterly human desire to use means beyond our realm to settle our own scores. Samples sourced from Jimmy Swaggart, the TV evangelist disgraced when one of the prostitutes he routinely visited outed his sinful behavior, implicitly acknowledge the contradiction or hypocrisy at the heart of appealing to the source of creation and love to beg for an act of righteous violence. (A TV interview with a sex worker involved in Swaggart’s scandal is played at the beginning of “MAN IS LIKE A SPRING FLOWER,” itself a prolonged consideration, through serial metaphor, of the unbridled and dangerously untamable fixtures of being human.)
Throughout the record, Hayter demands God to murder, by any means, the object of her ire, pleading that her worship is so great as to warrant this punishment. For this she is rebuked and admonished. She recognizes the involuntariness of the abuser’s behavior and nevertheless demands penitence for her suffering at the threat of retribution — God’s will be done, no wound as sharp, no pleasure in this year — before reflecting on the fiery violence that constitutes human life and gives herself to the dream of paradise, juxtaposing her own refrain “Paradise will be mine” with a CNN interview of a Covid-19 denier who insists her faith will protect her from the coronavirus. It’s not a move that undermines the album or its thesis; it acknowledges the appeal and pitfalls of fire-and-brimstone faith. As Hayter explained to Fantano in their discussion, in recent years she has returned to, fled, and continued to flirt with her Catholicism, or some perhaps heretical variation of the institutional faith.
No longer shall I wander.
Ugliness my home,
Loneliness my master;
I bow to him alone.
(9.) SeeYouSpaceCowboy: The Romance of Affliction
SYSC’s latest full-length is densely packed with hits. Frontwoman Connie Sgarbossa’s lyricism touches on classic skramz touchstones of longing and self-doubt, with a queer perspective on romantic love and a truly heartwrenching emphasis on self-destructive behaviors including drug abuse and substance addiction. There’s really heavy stuff behind the drapery of mallcore screamo revival — a sound that is admittedly not for everyone, but if it might be for you, then this is the album to find out with. Peep the singles, each one was excellent, and the music videos were fantastic too. Shouts out to SYSC for putting on the wildest show I attended this year, too, and If I Die First for such a great opening set and for Lil Lotus’ great feature on the The Romance of Affliction’s final, eponymous track. Also, both Connie and Taylor are absolute heartthrobs. Clap-clap.
(10.) Dijon: Absolutely
I’m on the fence about including this one in this section because, of all these releases, it is the weakest album when taken as a whole. But when Dijon hits, it Absolutely hits. “Big Mike’s” and “Many Times” are incredible bops, though, and if “The Dress” does not inspire you to love, I’m not sure what could. Hate to offer a compliment sandwich, but the album is simply uneven in its quality. Despite this, Dijon makes for an easy, enjoyable recommendation.
blogworthy goodtunes!
And now for the best of the rest! Rather than ranking these, I offer them to you in alphabetical order and propose, through the links embedded, a favorite track or two for your listening pleasure.
100 gecs: mememe
Yes, the single, no, you’ll never really know, know-know-know.
The Album Leaf: In an Off White Room
This EP is a welcome embrace of ambient electronic music-making. “Project Loop” will put a smile on your face, “Glisten” will lull you into a nap that stretches until you’re woken by the warmth of “Six AM.” Enjoy the ride.
Allison Lorenzen: Tender
Allison Lorenzen is making dark, noisey, lilting pop music in Denver, Colorad. See how she blends the brooding synth of collaborator Midwife with her yearning, lifting voice in “Chalk.” It brings tears to my eyes. Midwife contributed to nearly half the tracks on the albums, and they are all excellent works of music, but I’d be remiss not to bring attention to Allison’s talent for making slow dream pop that invokes powerful senses of longing, nostalgia and desire for what you cannot bring yourself to name. If you enjoy Grouper, bend an ear for Allison Lorenzen.
Asian Glow: Cull Ficle
The lowest-fi of these lo-fi, Seoul’s Asian Glow really knows how to blow out a tune. The opener, “Circumstances telling me who i am,” really summarizes the experience. Stick around for rough-around-the-edges math rock licks and gorgeously fingerpicked guitar accompanying mournful vocals that drip with atmosphere.
If you, like me, cannot get enough of these folks, fret not: Asian Glow released an EP on Halloween titled lines between the doorframe, which I’ve not listened to enough to offer a reasoned write-up, but am excited to dive into. They just don’t quit.
dltzk: Frailty
This digicore wizard’s second LP under the name dltzk (“delete zeke”) of 2021 is a masterclass in boppin’ pop production. dltzk takes the most alluring aspects of mumbly Soundcloud-published bedroom pop and rap vocals, and combines that with a sample-heavy, glitchy, hyperpoppy angle yet manages to rein it all in for some very groovy assemblages. There are so many fun moments on this album, plenty of pauses for slower and more contemplative tunes, and these really refreshingly dancey breakcore segments that pop out from nowhere — point is, it’s hard not to have a good time with dltzk on blast.
Floating Points + Pharoah Sanders + The London Symphony Orchestra : Promises
A dreamy, intriguing melody across nine iterations. The horns, the omnipresent strings. You will not tire of the same harpsichord hit no matter how many times you hear it in this 46-minute runtime.
Jaubi + Latarnik + Tenderlonious: Nafs at Peace
The clarity in this release is unbelievable. A Pakistani group performing jazz with a perspective and instrumentation that mixes their Southeast Asian locale with a sample-heavy, occasionally synthy and even rock-esque direction and influence that I find exquisite.
Lost Girls: Menneskekollektivet
I Love Jenny Hval. She can basically do no wrong. Hval and Håvard Volden teamed up this year to offer us an electronic art-pop wonderland of very long tracks, with a side of cerebral monologue giving plenty to chew on. Its danciest moments promise a real good time.
NANORAY: Zapper
Zapper is some hyperpop, breakbeat wizardry. Be in a high-energy state of mind because that’s what this demands of you, but it also nourishes and propels you like a cannon — a “SALMON CANNON.”
NEUPINK: NOT WITH MY BLOOD
This nasty, acidic electronic dance music makes me want to get up and stomp a hole into my floor. Or fight a boss battle.
Nouns: Lonely Place of Dyin
A person dear to me said this EP contains all I love in music, and she was damn right. Nouns’ first release in eight years constitutes just 24 minutes of the most raw, gutwrenching reflections on a friend’s death I may have ever heard. The loud-soft-loud dynamic is so impactful in these two tracks, and vocalist Hunter Clifton Mann’s exhausted, defeated and utterly devastated cries of anguish at the end of “Dustin” — I can hardly remember your face. I miss my friend. — bring tears to my eyes without fail.
Consider too that this is not mere upset and tribute; “Sadakiyo” repeatedly implores us to search for those reasons to hang on to living despite the evident and omnipresent difficulties in doing so. If this resonates with you, and i hope it does, read the band’s tribute to Dustin Montgomery and so many more friends lost on the EP’s bandcamp page. A dear friend told me this record contains all I love in music, and she was damn right.
Sega Bodega: Romeo
The production on these tracks is out of this world. This sophomore LP is the first of Sega Bodega’s work I’ve listened to and I love how he straddles the line between club- and even radio-friendly melodies on the one hand, and touches of hyperpop-adjacent bass and voice modulation on the other. Don’t miss the Arca feature.
Sloppy Jane: Madison
Recorded in Virignia’s Lost World Caverns between 3 p.m. and 8:30 a.m. over two weeks — hauling a piano up and down 200 feet of stairs each day to take advantage of the 98% humidity and resonant cave walls — Madison is probably the most effortful album on the list. The labor paid off, because we are treated with lush and boisterous outcries of chamber pop music, downtempo piano ballads under tragic narrations, jauntily sung stories of domestic violence contrasting the dark subject matter with a comic retelling and more. Some songs are annoying though. There’s such a thing as too artsy with insufficient payoff. In my opinion.
sonhos tomam conta: hypnagogia
If Viana’s wierd was a mix of murmur, song and yelling, hypnagogia this is where we hear her true blackgaze chops come out. I’m talking mixed-back screams a la Sunbather, breaks into clean and dreamy clearings and the occasional blastbeat toward the album’s back end. A real treat bordering, at times, on scream but always slinking back into something softer and more sentimental than mere aggression.
sonhos tomam conta: wierd
Lua Viana, the Brazilian artist behind sonhos tomam conta, brings a darker, more metallic edge to the fuzzy and overwhelming shoegaze genre. Between murmured lyrics and singing to implore your soul, you’ll find expressive and snarled yelling propelled by doubletime drumbeats and soaring electric guitar melodies. But don’t expect to get burnt out; for every punchy, quick “o ar nos meus pulmões,” you get a calming “apatetico.” The pacing is impeccable.
Spellling: The Turning Wheel
A funky fusion of pop music sensibilities, strings and plucky, frolicking melodies lay the groundwork for Chrystia Cabral’s unique and compelling voice. The chamber music instrumentation really is a joy. For me, this wasn’t the easiest to listen to in one sitting. But returning from time to time for these artful works is so pleasant. Just, how sultry, y’know?
Water From Your Eyes: Structure
This Brooklyn duo remains criminally underrated. Nate Amos offers his music for your softest dances, while Rachel Brown lends their voice to lift you gently in the songs, and ground you with their two poetry interludes. Moving compositions, the lot of it.
honorable mentions, by genre/mood, kinda
art rock/post-punk explosion, which happened for some reason
Black Country, New Road: For the first time
Dry Cleaning: New Long Leg
Gustaf: Audio Drag for Ego Slobs
Nation of Language: A Way Forward
Squid: Bright Green Field
electronic, digicore, hyperpop
Arca: KicK iii
carbine: [assorted singles]
Iglooghost: Lei Line Eon
Kendall :3 : dirt
hip-hop & rap
Armand Hammer: Haram
Baby Keem: The Melodic Blue
Genesis Owusu: Smiling with No Teeth
Little Simz: Sometimes I Might Be Introvert
Mach-Hommy: Pray For Haiti
R.A.P. Ferreira: the Light Emitting Diamond Cutter Scriptures
Tyler, The Creator: CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST
emo & indie rock
Listen to my emo and indie playlists on Spotify!
Harmony Woods: GRACEFUL RAGE
Helen Paradise: External World
Kora: Renacer Pt. 1
The Ophelias: Crocus
postcard nowhere: self
Ratboys: Happy Birthday, Ratboy
snow ellet: suburban indie rock star
Sun June: Somewhere
Worst Party Ever: Dartland
experimental rock enormity
The Body + BIG|BRAVE: Leaving None But Small Birds
Godspeed You! Black Emperor: G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END!
Kadavar + Elder: ELDOVAR - A Story of Darkness & Light
King Woman: Celestial Blues
Otay:onii: Ming Ming
Panopticon: …And Again Into the Light
Rhododendron: Protozoan Battle Hymns
jazz, ambient, soft sounds
Atli Övarsson: Wolka
BADBADNOTGOOD: Talk Memory
Ill Considered: Liminal Space
Nala Sinephro: Space 1.8
metal/skramz/whatever-core/heavy music
The Armed: Ultrapop
A Continent Named Coma: Regressor
Capra: In Transmission
Death Goals: The Horrible and The Miserable
Dreamwell: Modern Grotesque
For Your Health: In Spite Of
Frontierer: Oxidized
Glassing: Twin Dream
The Grasshopper Lies Heavy: A Cult That Worships A God Of Death
Invent Animate: The Sun Sleeps, As If It Never Was
Kaatayra: Inpariuip
Karloff: Karloff
Knocked Loose: A Tear in the Fabric of Life
Knoll: Interstice
life: coma garden
Silent Planet: Iridescent
So Hideous: None But a Pure Heart Can Sing
Static Dress: Prologue… (Comic Book Soundtrack)
To Be Gentle: Dooms of Love
Votto: Quindi noi sbagliando facemmo giusto
Youth Novel: Youth Novel
poppy pleasantries
Listen on Spotify! (Except dariacore is only on Bandcamp.)
aldn: greenhouse
Arlo Parks: Collapsed in Sunbeams
Jhariah: A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO FAKING YOUR DEATH
leroy: dariacore
Olivia Rodrigo: SOUR
Safety Town: Fake It
PinkPantheress: to hell with it
disappointments </3
Maybe I just need more time with these. But on first pass, and second, and in some cases third… I simply wasn’t feeling it. This section and the next are so you have ammunition to hate me with.
Converge + Chelsea Wolfe: Bloodmoon: I
Sounded like a match made in heaven, right? But it really wasn’t special, I felt no spark. Hope Bloodmoon: II is better!
Corbin: Ghost With Skin
Bring Back Spooky Black!!!!
Deafheaven: Infinite Granite
This is a great band that makes good music, but it doesn’t make new music in the genres I like the most anymore. Shrug!
Grouper: Shade
This is a great artist that makes good music, but she didn’t really move me this time around.
Foxing: Draw Down The Moon
There were days I sang Foxing’s praises from the rooftops, evangelizing The Albatross and Dealer to everyone I knew. This is not the sound I fell in love with. I wish ’em the best.
Japanese Breakfast: Jubilee
What a fun live concert! What an underwhelming studio album.
Kero Kero Bonito: Civilisation
Not exactly a new release, as it compiles previously released material from EPs. But I’m just not into it.
Lucy Dacus: Home Video
“Zzz” is how I felt listening to this, and falling asleep standing up in the front row of her concert this year.
Sufjan Stevens, Angelo De Augustine: A Beginner’s Mind
Listen, idk what’s wrong with me, but Sufjan just isn’t doing it for me these days. I feel like I’m losing my mind. This is Advanced Hating.
sorry but idgi ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
these releases were celebrated buuut i think they’re kinda bad! sorry but idgi!! and that’s all i can say about that, really. this section and the previous are so you have ammunition to hate me with.
Low: HEY WHAT
Portrayal of Guilt: Christfucker
Turnover: Glow On
’Til next year!
