JAWs 2022: Best debut

Hello and welcome to the first instalment of this year’s maybe-annual JAWs!

Here are your questions:

Who Are You?

I am johnnyoftheWell!

How Are You?

I am well. I am in a cafe procrastinating an essay deadline and stressing about my laptop battery, which is not long for this world. How are you?

How Was 2022 For Music?

2022 was(/is!) pretty awesome for music! There have definitely been a few lulls, but I’ve had an overall great time digging up silly treasures, listening to people’s recs and just following them trends (which has been a good deal more fruitful than in previous years lemme tell ya). 2022 is good!

What The Flying Frick Is A JAW?

One of my best features tbh, but also um, it had a definite phrasing and I forgot it. (This one’s for you, Cimnele:)

It might have been an acronym for something like Johnny Awards Winners or Jackpot Ablutions from the Well, but I think in my head at the moment it’s a syllabic abbreviation from Jotw AWards or maybe JotAWwww. It is absolutely not an initialism – say Jay Ayy Double-you out loud and I will slap you and eat mx. 

tl;dr it’s a nice way to spotlight some year highlights that I think deserve to be spotlit. 

I’m not posting a full list from the year or declaring an AOTY at this point because the Cram is still in session and the early bird is still a silly scrawny animal with un-nutritious worm takes, but that’s no reason not to flag up a few gems! This will take place across a handful of dedicated categories, which are in absolutely in no way related to or inspired by the recently-discontinued SMAs (Sowing Music Awards).

What JAW is this JAW?

The first JAW to be given this year is for Best Debut LP! This year had a ton of highlights from artists still in their earlier phases of their careers, and I wanted to take the chance to foreground a few who have potentially just dropped their first landmark. It is the first JAW because debuts come first. We’re on LPs earlier because this made it somewhat easier to organise nominees. Let’s feckin’ go! 
 

Nominees for Debut LP of the Year

Chat Pile – God’s Country

Noise rock / sludge metal

Chat Pile have been a site treasure for a few years now, in part due to a site alumnus in their ranks, but mainly because the sludged-out noise rock of their early EPs is Sputnik catnip for all the right reasons. God’s Country doubles down on all the strongest (read: nastiest) qualities of their sound and has quite rightly rocketed their career; I’ve read about it everywhere from the Guardian to the smelliest basements of Discord servers I keep forgetting to leave. There’s an approachability of sorts to these song’s visceral performances and focus, but this is belied by the vast rage and horror that permeate last every second; some things demand too much urgency to be anything but visceral or focused. Get it all on the bulldozing “Why”, a leftfield contender for the year’s most iconic political anthem, or on “Tropical Beaches, Inc.”‘s neck-rending beatdowns. One of this year’s defining breakthroughs.

 

Della Zyr – 비타민과 우려 (Vitamins and Apprehension)

Shoegaze / emo

This rather lovely record from an entirely fresh Korean solo project has been something of a RYM exclusive in terms of exposure. I’m usually reluctant to trust that site on anything at all involving shoegaze, but it does pay to keep your eye on the ball sometimes: there’s a lot going on here that I found incredibly refreshing. It’s a joy to hear a musician so keen to foreground acoustic guitars in shoegaze, and these songs’ wistful progressions and midwestern inflections feel expansive and organic to the point that they’re virtually antithetical to the claustrophobic bedroom-boundaried muchness we’ve seen so much of this year. Definitely a name to watch.

 

Dissidente – The War On Two Fronts

Melodic hardcore / Skate punk

Thunder out the gates! It takes a lot for a hardcore band to bring a fresh touch to this particular brand of techy vitriol, but I’d say this has the convenient side effect of making it incredibly easy to distinguish between which bands have the bite and energy it takes, and which are pushing rope. Dissidente are on it – with their sharp songwriting, tastefully kinetic fretwork and unflinching penchant for heaviness, there’s a real spark throughout their firework of a debut. As a proud skate punk adherent and lifelong Gemini, this one came with my name on – bring on both those fronts!

 

HAAi – Baby, We’re Ascending

Techno / breakbeat / trance

This Aussie DJ has been on the London circuit for a while now, but this is the first she’s dropped in the way of an original longboi. Alternately pensive and kinetic, she covers a broad range of styles, bangers and dazers alike, with a deceptively unified vision – every standout track will have at least one counterpart that sits best in sequence. She does come close to losing her thread at points, but the highs are far and away euphoric enough to make up for it. It’s rare to hear a rainy-day album that makes for such good dance music, but this album is full of mercurial potential and I cannot wait to hear how HAAi translates this across future such oddities and elations. 

 

Hinako Omori – A Journey… 

Ambient / new age / field recordings 

This was a lovely surprise when it materialised into word-of-mouth discourse back in mid-springtime; Hinako Omori is a fresh, clear voice in a style more inclined than most to the oblique banality of distant echoes. Her brand of serene ambience and wholesome melody scratches similar itches to the ever-prolific Claire Rousay, arthouse treasure Tujiko Noriko at the peak of her powers, and (one supposes) her wistful highness Julia Holter at her most diffuse; she’s seems set to earn a firm fixture in those ranks. A Journey… is the kind of debut that attracts instant investment to its creator’s potential – amidst all that floaty drift lovely loveliness is a strong knack for space and contour, the former spread all over the gorgeous centrepiece “Will You Listen In” and the latter refined to a keen edge on the pop-adjacent “Heartplant”. Omori comes close to perfecting a vision of delicate, wavering expanse at points on this record and is very much one to watch hereon. 

 

Saya Gray – 19 MASTERS 

Psychedelic folk / indie folk 

“Welcome to my world” states Saya Gray in Japanese in 19 MASTERS’ three-second opener, a gesture of invitation that will be (one assumes intentionally) lost on the majority of her audience. It’s the first of many moments of playful obliqueness that chart the record’s deeply fascinating interplay of candour, guardedness and often entirely original creative flourishes – slide guitar trades off against synthesised blips and distorted electric guitars on the record’s biggest downer; a few tracks earlier, a goofball flirtation with autotune yields to an unlikely rap feature, which in turn yields to a morose set of gothic vocal harmonies; the centrepiece track is essentially one spellbinding verse followed by the most cryptic of all lulls. This is held together by quite possibly the sharpest songwriting I’ve heard this decade: Gray is an almost brutally succinct writer, to the point that these tracks resemble personal excerpts rather than ‘songs’ proper. The manner in which her intricate arrangements and shapeshifting vocal strategies tease out such nuance from song-cores as flat-handed as Don’t call me and I haven’t had a good day in two weeks has to be heard to be believed. One of the year’s best sleepers, without a doubt. 

 

Scarcity – Aveilut

Black metal / atmoblack / drone

I’ve had an unusually good haul of black metal keepers this year, and while I have a far higher hit ratio with smartly-executed cheap thrills (Saidan, Sigh, Asunojokei) than cumbersome, self-serious exhibitions of kitsch (Blut Aus Nord, White Ward, Krallice), Scarcity caught me off-guard with one of the strongest offerings I’ve heard from the atmospheric arm of the genre in a good while. This record plays with space and tension with pinpoint sensitivity to the tiniest hints of development, as keen to drone as to power off into intricate contortions of dissonant tremolo melodies. Like any good drone record, these sections are never just a means to an end –  “IV”‘s glacial ebb is just as gratifying as a moment of respite from “III”’s freneticism as it is titillating as a stage-setter for the spellbinding finale “V”. Similarly, the creeping introduction “I” is a glorious piece of guitarchitecture that frames the record with the same sense of immance as slowly-spreading cracks across a frozen lake. Aveilut really needs to be taken as a whole though, and while I don’t expect the chilly gravitas of its atmosphere to be imitated any time soon, I would certainly love to hear more bands trying next year.

 

Shygirl – Nymph 

R&B / hip-hop

This record has been so obviously a long time coming that I’m almost reluctant to declare it a debut at all, but technicalities are technicalities: Shygirl, well established though she be, has finally seen fit to drop a full record, and we are much the better for it. I think the broadness of this one’s appeal has a real edge to it: go into Nymph from any pop or hip-hop background whatsoever and you’ll struggle not to feel at least a little catered to at some point here. Its versatility does feel more mixtape than album, and Shygirl’s explicit lyricism and lip-biting delivery do border on shallowness from time to time, but anyone hungry for depth or coyness will find this well complemented by the fluency with which she reels through styles. It takes a thoughtfulness of sorts to command this many good hooks across this many guises; while jarring at first, the distance between these tracks (“Little Bit” into “Firefly” in particular) turned into a firm point of intrigue with the benefit of a couple of listens. Nymph is a deceptively addictive patchwork of post-shower steaminess, and boy do I like being given fresh reasons to get clean. 

 

TDJ – TDJ123

Trance / Dream trance

I feel a little awkward to have fingerpointed Nymph for shallowness when this, right here, is the record of 2022 for immaterial immediate candyfloss vibrations. Take everything tolerable about contemporary dream pop, transpose it to an unpretentious unbeat dance setting and, well, there you have dream trance. It’s catchyprettylovely and build for good times, not serious critique. That said, there’s a beautiful immediacy to those gossamer  vocal melodies, by which I mean that a lot of these hooks are straight EDM rehoused in a lusher  e t h e r e a l setting (“Sway (The Places She Goes)”, oh baby) …and doesn’t that sound great? Thanks to its exquisite but edgeless production, TDJ123 is all cookie, no cutter (we do not talk about the alt rock misstep “Underwater”). For movers and shakers who need a little soothing. 

 

The Podium

Bronze 

HAAi – Baby, We’re Ascending (tie)

Scarcity – Aveilut (tie)

 

Silver

Chat Pile – God’s Country

Gold

…and the JAW for Best Debut LP 2022 goes to:

 

Saya Gray – 19 MASTERS

Well, it wasn’t for a lack of stiff competition but there is no doubt in my mind that Saya Gray dropped this year’s standout debut and a firm candidate for AOTY whenever that gets awarded. It isn’t quite a perfect record, but it’s one of the most confident first moves I’ve heard from anyone in a hot minute, and a much-needed breath of fresh wind through the lank unwashed hair of the post-Boygenius therapy circle that has somehow come to pass for contemporary folk. Saya Gray brings personality, heart and craftiness to the table in spades – far as I’m concerned, the future is all hers. 

Thank you for tuning into JAW #1 2022!

More is to come – watch this page!