50-31 | 30-11 | 10-1

30. Weyes Blood – And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow

[Official site] // [Spotify]

In spite of my overwhelming and undying appreciation for single-paragraph reviews, few things are more stressful than having to explain why an album is good in one sentence. Of course, you could just say: “it’s good”… but that’s boring and, frankly, unconvincing. You could go the opposite route and use fancy words like “enchanting” or “grandiose”, but that’s just…too much. You could, instead, simply repeat the album title: “and in the darkness, hearts aglow”…but that’s…ugh, fine, that’s kind of perfect here. Weyes Blood’s music may be good, enchanting and grandiose, but Natalie Mering’s latest record adds some surprising splashes of darkness to her palette. The album’s themes of loss and loneliness construct a sense of cohesion the slightly subdued theatricality more than welcomes. It’s an experience best experienced more than once, twice or thrice until each note subtly assumes the moment in the spotlight it deserves.

Even though this spotlight may be dim due to the surrounding darkness, “It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody” and “Twin Flame” present wonderfully memorable choruses that demand attention and repeated listens alike. However, the album’s most impressive cut comes in the form of “God Turn Me Into a Flower”: a subdued number that bathes Mering’s gorgeous voice in equally gorgeous doses of ambience, and takes its time unfolding into a truly magical meditation on loss. While I have more than one sentence to explain to you why And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow is worth a listen or sixty-one, the album title speaks for itself. Man, aren’t single-paragraph pieces of music-related writing just the best? –JesperL

29. Imperial Triumphant – Spirit of Ecstasy

[Official site] // [Spotify]

Imperial Triumphant began the last decade as an odd homage to Deathspell Omega; a distorted and appropriated black metal vision which captured the French group’s unique sound better than anyone else (and in many ways better than its primary influence). Heading into this decade, however, Imperial Triumphant is a sonic and aesthetic entity wholly of its own creation, advancing the unified vision it has been building towards since its inception.

Imperial Triumphant has been developing a singular vision: visually and musically conveying the haunting glamor of a retro-futurist New York while exploring themes of inequity, greed, and materialism by way of gilded art deco and Metropolis imagery. The excellent Vile Luxury and Alphaville saw the band solidify its early 20th century exploration by implementing jazz and film scores alongside the golden age architecture. The band’s latest, Spirit of Ecstasy, is the moment when it all clicks. The dissonant blackened-death with jazz and noise flourishes now feels complete; a thoughtful and deliberate sound free of gimmicks, messy references, and homages. It’s both the band’s most vicious statement yet and also its most breathable. There’s a newfound subtle approach that bridges the heavy blackness and experimental sections of its identity, resulting in a much more deliberate and mature record.

Spirit of Ecstasy solidifies Imperial Triumphant as the most forward-thinking and visionary band in black metal today. It’s a record of awe, encapsulating the claustrophobic steel and glass labyrinth of New York via suffocating production and ceaseless chaos. It’s the peak of an already peerless discography, cementing Imperial Triumphant as modern legends. –Xenophanes

28. Shannen Moser – The Sun Still Seems to Move

[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

It is so incredibly tempting to simply make this write-up a collection of my favorite lyrics from The Sun Still Seems to Move. I could pick out essentially any line from any song across Shannen Moser’s opus and make an argument for it to be among the best lyrics of 2022, or even many years prior. That enormous skill set would make a strong enough argument on its own to justify its inclusion on this list, but those lyrics are also combined with one of the most innovative folk albums released in recent history. Now, often the word “innovative” can be mistaken for “experimental”, and while there is certainly nothing wrong with experimentation within the folk genre, Moser’s innovation is purely based on taking the toolkit that many folk artists have and employing it in a way that very few do, wherein Moser takes the traditions of the genre and makes them their own. With the exception of the occasional clarinet, they rely purely on acoustic instruments, including cello, lap steel, and banjo, to create wonderfully beautiful and dissonant soundscapes around the oh-so-masterfully crafted words and stories of their songs. The many abstract soundscapes also manage to create a wondrous warmth, one that is all-enveloping and inviting into Moser’s world. Moser has managed to take tradition and breathe a new, modern life into it.

And because it seems criminal to leave here without at least one lyric, I’ll supply my favorite, the simple yet profound opening lines from “Oh my God”: “I know that life’s not one linear / Seamless destination / Leaning towards a pillar moment / Saying you ended up just right.” –dmathias52

27. Porcupine Tree – Closure/Continuation

[Official site] // [Spotify]

There’s something beautiful in just seeing the reunion of Porcupine Tree in 2022. After all, with Steven Wilson’s career (mostly) taking off and Gavin Harrison doing his (outstanding) thing as a part of King Crimson, it was entirely possible another album wasn’t in the cards for the group at all. Yet Closure/Continuation is more than just the sound of perseverance or return to form — although in both brevity and quality it does generally outclass 2009’s The Incident.

Mixing the heavy, hard-hitting sounds of Fear of a Blank Planet on tracks like “Harridan” and “Herd Culling” with the brighter, stripped down emotional heft of acoustic-leaning tracks like “Dignity” and “Love in the Past Tense”, Closure/Continuation shows that Porcupine Tree are not only able to flex those dormant musical muscles, but to continue building them and using them with an ear tuned for precision. It’s that precision that really sets Porcupine Tree apart — integrating emotion into a piece centered on heaviness and technicality or building a poppy hook into a melancholy dirge like “Chimera’s Wreck” to create that something “more.” At this point in the discography, that may not be a surprise, but after thirteen years, such a continuation is worth heralding — and encouraging. –Thompson Gerhart

26. Daniel Rossen – You Belong There

[Official site] // [Spotify]

One of the most famous craft beers ever is Heady Topper, a double IPA brewed in Waterbury, Vermont, known for spawning the “New England” style of IPAs now much more heavily represented by drinks hazier in appearance and sweeter in taste than their common ancestor. Heady Topper is unusually “complex” in terms of how many different miniature sensations hit the tongue, and it ultimately evokes within one’s mouth the feeling of sipping the sap of a living tree. This is what is important about Daniel Rossen’s You Belong There: not any particular iteration of its mercuriality, such as this or that pause or elongation or time signature shift; nor Rossen’s inimitable voice per se, his way of projecting light pain and inwardness; nor that drummer Chris Bear sounds so brilliantly as if he were both generating the pace and responding to it; nor the rustic mystery of the album’s swinging folk guitars and clarinets, their tone, tempo, and dynamics always perfectly hitched to Rossen’s lyrical abstractions; nor any other such quality that might point our focus to one element of songcraft over another; nor any of these other little things; no, nothing at all, nothing definitively at least, should prove to the listener that they belong right there within and alongside Rossen’s prog-folk masterpiece but that when they first taste it on their tongue it should taste as a living tree would. –robertsona

25. Gospel – The Loser

[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

On some level, things are exactly as they seem: Gospel is very likely in the running for “band with greatest proportion of fans who have used this website” and The Loser assuredly and enthusiastically punctures a seventeen-year studio silence with only a small side serving of {insert preferred nitpick here}. Their union of raw screamo frenetics and fiddly prog is mined; the intensity-as-emotion burnout of the former and the stuffy formalism of the latter is, respectively, avoided and occasionally glanced off of. Boom, list placement explained.

Yet when I look back on 2022, my warm feelings for The Loser could scarcely owe less to the ways it so gamely upholds their lofty reputation. Speaking as a newcomer to the band, this album packs a truly impressive level of pick-up-and-play value for, hell, post-hardcore in general, let alone the follow-up to an underground classic as entrenched as The Moon Is A Dead World (which, whoops, I think I prefer this to). The knotty, single-serving exclamations here form something more like a collection of short stories than a flowing, grandiose epic, each new track a fresh, unencumbered chance to appreciate the songwriting and musicianship on display (Vincent Roseboom, everyone). Jeopardized mythos aside, a second album can show listeners that your debut may have put your best foot forward, but it still ain’t the whole story. With two chapters now to their name, it’s a pleasure to see an album like The Loser marking the first steps in a while towards the legend of everything we know Gospel can be. –Nic Renshaw

24. Elder (USA-MA) – Innate Passage

[Official site] // [Spotify]

In hindsight, the mixed reception which greeted Elder’s 2020 LP Omens feels like a testament to the band’s greatness, more than anything. After all, every other record since their rough-around-the-edges debut has been released to sweeping acclaim. As such, Omens marked a rare misstep, and it’s notable that, even as that album doesn’t live up to Elder’s lofty standards, most of the group’s competitors in the stoner-meets-prog sphere would presumably be delighted to affix their name to it.

Innate Passage only brings all these musings into even starker relief. It is, after all, a triumphant revival of Elder’s near-impervious usual standard of quality. If that makes Omens look even weaker by way of comparison, well, the more obvious takeaway is that this band is just really good at what they do. Their newest effort is a logical progression, an extension of the collective’s journey ever further in the world of prog, executed nearly perfectly. Innate Passage is still heavy, sure, and it retains some residual fuzz to remind of the musicians’ stoner/heavy psych roots, but its lithe jams at least as kindred to groups like Hallas or even Wobbler as to Colour Haze or Khemmis.

I won’t make the claim that Innate Passage is Elder’s best (it’s plenty easy to make a case for a bunch of their LPs), but it’s indubitably a smooth record which is comfortable in its own skin. Elder have evolved, but they play their new style with supreme elegance and grace. The most remarkable takeaway from a listen to this album is how quickly and effortlessly the tracklist glides by, despite an average track length of nearly eleven minutes. That’s great songcraft, and whether or not Innate Passage represents Elder’s final form or the band keeps shapeshifting, it’s a good bet to expect we’ll keep getting quality music from them. –Sunnyvale

23. SOUL GLO – Diaspora Problems

[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

God, for what now feels like an agonisingly slow set of years, the lard-brained online hivemind’s interest in exposés of late-stage capitalism and its assorted American-flavoured evils has maintained near-exclusive focus on the handkerchiefs-first-apocalyptic-declines-second Americana mop buckets of Lana del Rey and Brandon Flowers, feat. occasional hip-hop topic record. Forget fighting fire with fire; we’ve been stifling desperation with despair and the upshot has somehow enshrined a blunt-nibbed pastiche of self-pitying cliches as Music’s Greatest Voice against an epoch of vast institutional distress. Our fair website has indulged this wearisome drain-circling as much as any and, as such, it gives me great joy to affirm from its soapbox that thank fuck 2022 has finally restored a prominent spotlight to the weaponised fucking rock music of the likes of Chat Pile, Petrol Girls and of course SOUL GLO. No more eulogising-present-day-tragedy bollocks: violent, acerbic, invigorating protest music is finally back [in our attention] with flesh, fire and iron.

SOUL GLO’s ballistic words-per-second hardcore is remarkable for a slew of reasons, chief among which is the way it spreads its incandescent fury in equal measure with the biting, unifying joy of anger-in-solidarity. Diaspora Problems isn’t an angsty work of internalised frustrations or limp individual ineptitude as per, say, last year’s Illusory Walls; its entire scope is as perlocutionary as it is testimonial, and it feels practically destined to bring people together. Every facet of these tracks’ frankly rapid energy levels imbues their treatment of structural inequality, snakey liberal complicity (eek.) and naked racism with a kinetic imperative to do something. Don’t just stand there — dance! Don’t just dance — protest! Don’t just protest — well, if you follow this all the way through to the frontman Pierce Jordan’s more radical conclusions (“I’m so bored by the left, protests, and reluctance to militarize / No one’s left blind by eye for an eye unless you make the same mistake twice”), then God guide your bricks.

Leaving politics aside for one second (psych, off pops your privilege), Diaspora Problems is an extraordinarily tight record that lands blow after body-blow across breakneck songwriting, dynamite performances and a borderline disconcerting knack for individual moments of impact. Its threshold for tongue-in-cheek is extant (WHOGONBEATMYASS etcetc.) but less of a ploy for novelty and much more a caustic side-effect of Jordan’s incendiary cynicism; the boundaries of his irony are marked with razor wire. This makes it all the more impressive that the band’s flirtations with such features as trap breakdowns, languorous death growls, and a full-on singalong finale (horns ‘n all, baby) sit so resolutely on the earnest side of the line. Diaspora Problems simply does not miss — which makes it all the more disconcerting that it sets its aim right between the eyes. –John J[otW]

22. The Callous Daoboys – Celebrity Therapist

[Official site] // [Spotify]

Oxymoronically, it can sometimes be all too easy to forget what an album actually sounds like once you’ve heard it hundreds of times. Obvious example: Converge’s Jane Doe. To the uninitiated, the Bannon-Ballou opus exudes such levels of mathematical aggression as to make it near unlistenable; and yet, for the veteran listener, those jagged edges become smoother and subtler, softening into creamy cushy cathartic bliss. Sure, that underlying carbomb of an LP is still there — I have the scars to prove it — but experience lends it a shiny new tint, coating the memory of the original experience (and often for the better).

The same goes for Celebrity Therapist. Initially, the Daoboys’ sophomore effort presents as batshit-and-fruitloops-all-over-the-fucking-wall levels of crazy. Upon closer inspection, however — someway, somehow — it works. Don’t get me wrong, the bats, shit and loops certainly remain present and accounted for, even after dozens of listens, it’s just that the willy wonka mishmash of melody and dissonance that the 7-piece run with here becomes far more decipherable than first impressions would suggest, coalescing beautifully with a bit of patience. The rapid-fire rainbow-hued synths that grace the one minute mark of “Title Track”? Brilliant! The supple sax that sneaks in on “What is Delicious…”? Chef kisses for everyone! That cool thing that “Star Baby” does? Very cool indeed! What’s even cooler, mind you, is that the more you put in, the more of these weird, wonderful nuggets of goodness the Daoboys let you take away. With each spin, the genre-staple chuggas and skrees become secondary to these endlessly-adorable moments and, as a result, the record’s loveliness soars skyward. That these unholy sonic marriages work at all, let alone as well as they do, is not just a testament to the sublime songcraft the group possesses, but (even more so) to the sheer bloody cheek and charisma with which they present each gleeful stylistic switcheroo. Clearly their cups spill over with love and passion, fueling everything that Celebrity Therapist is, and with more than enough to go around — no matter how many times you go back for seconds. –AsleepInTheBack

21. Cloud Rat – Threshold

[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

You don’t need to make an effort to be pissed off your fucking body these days, and nobody has materialized my inner hell better than Cloud Rat this year. I swear to God I’d throw every you-know-who that you can think of at the mosh pit and let ’em have it. Plain and simple. Yeees, yes, yes, let them cross the threshold of pain, I’d say; we’ll provide. Nothing like a good punch of uncooked grindcore to the guts to fix the world, and if that doesn’t work, well, nothing will, but at least good times will be had, don’t you agree? That’s what I like about Cloud Rat. They are the easy way out of a shitty day. They make you feel invincible, taller, stronger. Listening to Thresholds on the way to work doesn’t motivate me to work harder, it makes me feel like I’m gonna burn the goddamn office with an atomic fart. It’s empowering music, inspiring, thrilling, rejuvenating. Mental viagra for the flaccid masses. They don’t have a bass player, they were probably killed during practice one day. This is their third album, or the fourth one, I don’t know, they probably had ten more before this one, but half of the tapes were burnt during the recording. The studio too, it sits now on a pile of ashes, where the celestial mice still gnaw at what’s left. Cloud Rat, ladies and gentlemen. Tell your enemies. –Dewinged

20. The Smith Street Band – Life After Football

[Official site] // [Spotify]

On their 6th outing, the Smith Street Aussie gang go spring cleaning, stripping out everything from their sound superfluous to the wholesome M.O. set by opener “A Conversation with Billy Bragg About the Purpose of Art” i.e. let’s have a goshdarn great time on this planet while we still can. Track times are trimmed, production pumped up and lyrics goof-ified x10 in the pursuit of the leanest, simplest and most unashamedly uplifting LP of the band’s career. Singalongable forever, quotable essential, ALL CAPS always: it demands all of these things, listener participation made mandatory, through joyously quintessential Smith Street jamming and their catchiest songwriting to date (I will still be humming along to “Everyone is Lying to You For Money” on my deathbed at this rate jesus hecking christ). Even its cutest, quietest moments (e.g. “Black T-Shirt” and the affecting ode to self-love of the closer) feel placed just-so, avoiding the 36-minute romp becoming tiresome whilst never detracting from the overall big vibes and giddy energy. Hand on heart, I’ve not had this much fun with a Wil release since 2011’s No One Gets Lost Anymore, nor been so eager to hit rewind after each and every listen, which, I hope, tells you all you need to know. –AsleepInTheBack

19. Skullcrusher – Quiet The Room

[Official site] // [Spotify]

Sonically and lyrically, Skullcrusher’s Quiet the Room is an album almost entirely devoid of specifics that benefits from its own ambiguity. It eschews clear folk structures and diaristic reminiscences for hazy ambient production and spare words shrouded in mystery. Despite its very personal context — the album is at least in part about frontwoman Helen Ballentine’s own identity — the album isn’t as personally revealing as its description might suggest. Usually, this is where I’d make some trite point about the artist seeking, through her art, to render the personal as universal — about the way the sparseness of Ballentine’s words, and the lightness of her songwriting, enable her to do so. But that isn’t the point. The point is a celebration of Skullcrusher — of Ballentine’s ability to imbue substance into such delicate songwriting, especially of the kind on this album, characterised as it is by repetition (both within and across tracks) and slow, patient chord progressions. Because despite these — and despite the album’s lack of specificity — Quiet the Room is not only thoughtful, but intricate. Lyrically, it weaves a narrative in which our songwriter-protagonist, across the span of the album, learns to embody herself, whatever that means to you. Where words fail, it allows itself to fall back on the feel of it all. In this way, the album is almost entirely fuelled by pathos — but this shouldn’t be mistaken as any sort of failure. There’s a simplicity to Skullcrusher’s music, but also a headiness, and Quiet the Room is as evocative as an album gets, whether it’s heard as intended — as an album about the complexity of childhood — or as something else entirely, as it’s likely to be. And for the third time around, despite the modesty of her sound, Ballentine proves herself more than worthy of the Skullcrusher name. –BlushfulHippocrene

18. Billy Woods – Aethiopes

[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

billy woods’ very first utterings in the haunted spaces of Aethiopes hold a demonstrable power over the listener, sending unwashed dilettantes like myself straight to Wikipedia when he mentions Mengistu Haile Miriam by name, and speculates as to whether the security-laden property next to woods’ childhood house in Zimbabwe belonged to the ex-dictator of the (mind the paradox) People’s Democratic Republic of Ethiopia after having fled the country which he and his cronies had terrorised.

When you start to unpack What’s Really Happening on Aethiopes, you’re inevitably left wondering just how this pile of dictators, crackheads, colonisers, gangbangers, jilted lovers, tourists, high school students, and you-get-the-fucking-picture ever fit in that suitcase in the first place. Not to mention the institutions that surround them, the history that contains them, and the finer details that our poet’s poet manages to braid into their tales, paint flaking from the walls, bones cracking, a rotten stench’s sickening warmth as it crawls down your esophagus. DJ Preservation synthesises with woods’ visceral prompts with a gleefully morose hand. Screeching horns add a palpable tension to the confrontation at the core of “No Hard Feelings”, the languid stylings of “Doldrums” extend the quiet minutes of reflection before a drug deal into an eternity, and the discordant piano stabs that close out “HAARLEM” have a convulsive violence to them.

There’s at least a fistful of reasons to enjoy each track on its on terms, but Aethiopes‘ most remarkable achievement is the clever assemblage of its grander narratives. woods is literally operating at historic scale here, assembling a litany of people, places, and events that each tell part of the story of the African diaspora. Sometimes the references also operate at scale, as when the triangular trade that sealed the fates of so many is invoked. Other times, woods supplies contrast to the cold narratives that can be wrought by Big Picture History by demonstrating the differences among his subjects, simply by placing their stories next each other. On the one hand, it amplifies the inaccuracy of lumping all these disparate groups together and labelling them a collective “black people”, and on the other hand it substantiates the breadth of generational trauma wrought by colonising forces on a truly global scale.

I won’t pretend that I understand the many nuances of Aethiopes‘ messaging, but I know for damn sure that I’ve already ruined one dinner party since its release by holding forth on the historic import of gin and tonic. I only wish more lyricists displayed such literary prowess, because I’d happily be debarred from potlucks indefinitely if this sort of depth was the standard. Wait, he released another album this year? Peggy, cancel my eight o’clock. –MiloRuggles

17. Meshuggah – Immutable

[Official site] // [Spotify]

As can be expected after 30-plus years of forging their archetypal djent/groove metal sound, an album name like Immutable does little to belie expectations. Listeners will be pummeled with a relentless barrage of fiercely palm-muted riffs, atonal solos over top molasses-thick syncopated rhythms, and yet another master class from drummer Tomas Haake (look no further than “Phantoms”). Nevertheless, the Swedes continue to innovate and integrate new ideas on their tenth album without eschewing their roots. As is tradition, Immutable‘s first half is stronger. “Broken Cog”‘s and “Ligature Marks”‘ slow-burning, sinister atmosphere is sublimely heavy, “Light the Shortening Fuse” and “God He Sees in Mirrors” have impeccable architecture (with some of my favorite passages spanning the band’s discography), and there are refreshing moments of respite adroitly placed in album apex “They Move Below”. The tremolo-picked “Black Cathedral”, another instrumental, is an enjoyable experiment in black metal dissonance whose motif segues into “I Am That Thirst”, but could have benefited from further development or exploration. Perhaps this explains why the songwriting arrangements feel a bit more predictable in Immutable‘s second half, although there are still plenty of potential harbingers here that we can expect to hear in future records. I also enjoyed Jens Kidman’s consistent performance — his bellicose shouts weaving in and out of each channel in “The Faultless” complements the instrumentation’s frenzied discord in what is an indisputable banger. Overall, while there are the typical quibbles about muddy production (why are the crash cymbals mixed so low?) and some predictability-by-precision in its second half, Immutable is a deservingly laudable record. –Jom

16. Wild Pink – ILYSM

[Official site] // [Spotify]

On previous albums, the sonic world Wild Pink have become masters at crafting frequently transcended the band’s actual songs. This world was warm, seemingly boundless, with an atmosphere light enough to allow anyone to drift off. On ILYSM, this world remains very much intact: moreover, the album plays to this ethereal experience’s strengths and enhances the near-weightless feeling all throughout. Somewhere in the one-band’s land between dream pop and americana, each song reshapes looming tragedies into delicate melodies while allowing potential disaster to spiral beyond undefined confines. Soft whispers permeate each corner, padded with fuzzed out strums and calm patterns. Wild Pink’s world is expanding, and it’s a wonderful sensation. –JesperL

15. Jenny Hval – Classic Objects

[Official site] // [Spotify]

Jenny Hval “once again” interrogates the Self and the mechanics of one’s art on her eighth solo album, Classic Objects. But as with every new Hval album, the stress is on the quotations, for this gifted songwriter continues to be an inventive one, teasing new angles out of her observations and the genres that accompany them. In its gentle way, Classic Objects is something of a revelation in Hval’s discography, with music as airy and meditative as any she’s written, and whose meandering structures belie sharp pop instincts at every turn. These are inviting spaces in which she explores the totems of her songwriting and their vulnerability in public forums, the contradiction of writing for an audience when imparting one’s own experience. The fixations remain on autonomy and fate, seemingly endless fountains that Hval tends and dispenses with clarity and inimitable melodic sensibility, the portrait of a philosopher as a pop star. –plane

14. Rosalia – MOTOMAMI

[Official site] // [Spotify]

I have been trying to figure out how to write about MOTOMAMI for months. Despite putting a lot more effort into it in the past few years, I still know next to nothing about perreo, aka sandungueo (a style of reggaeton and form of dance that emphasizes the dembow and heavy movement for the hips), so maybe that’s why I love this so much. Not that I’m not interested in plenty of other reggaeton, but if you look at my past reviews, it will be very obvious that it is not my area of expertise. What I do feel confident in is most everything else this album covers — pop, R&B, hip-hop, and EDM (in the literal sense, not the “big room house and brostep” sense). I’ve heard thousands of hours of artists failing to effectively work within those genres, usually when it is not something that they have already had a lot of experience in. Rosalía is not a total stranger to any of them, but this is definitely her first big step into that field, and she knocks it out of the park with every single track.

What excites me most is how much of this album is clearly created with the intention to dance or at least with blatant inspiration from dance-oriented genres, like most of the ones I mentioned knowing something about earlier. For example, there’s the slow form of “COMO UN G” and “G3 N15”, the mid-to-fast-paced “DELIRIO” and “CHICKEN TERIYAKI”, and even the outright frantic “CUUUUuuuuuute”, which conveys deconstructed club better than any other even semi-popular post-SOPHIE track I can think of. It’s extremely difficult to balance out different paces like this all together on one project without awkward beginnings and abrupt stops — many, many popstars have failed — and even more so to do it while working primarily in genres you have only touched on previously — and yet, against the odds, this completely works. I’m all for artists taking left turns; it’s always interesting if not frequently successful, and music like this is exactly why I always give these kinds of projects a try. The tracklist somehow flows perfectly, even though if I described any one track and then described the next, it wouldn’t make much sense. It feels like a scattershot collection of random songs that somehow aligned just right to hit every target, even though I know that Rosalía is not one to disregard sequencing. Her last album was divided into very deliberate chapters, so it’s clear she understands the importance of the form, and each time I listen to MOTOMAMI, it makes more and more sense. And the performances on each of these songs really prove just how diverse of a songwriter and vocalist she is, without a single moment I would point out as bad and hundreds I could point out as good, shifting from casual and low-key to operatic and incredibly sincere even within individual songs. These lyrics are beautiful as well. I don’t speak enough Spanish to understand most of the phrases without looking at translations, but they are centered on change, sex, and empowerment, and sound gorgeous to my admittedly untrained ear. “HENTAI” is a good example: these longing words are sung in such a sincere, soaring tone that any non-Spanish speakers who haven’t heard of the track title before would have no idea everything about it was so aggressively horny, and the rapid-fire drums in the last half would probably shock them (I know they shocked me, and I love that kind of thing).

Top all of that with the sampling (Burial, Soulja Boy, Daddy Yankee, and Big Ben — yes, the clock — among others) and the collaborations (the best Weeknd feature since “Crew Love”, a prominent credit for the underrated Tokisha, an uncredited bridge from James Blake, and a rumored Frank Ocean appearance), and there’s a recipe for something that I guess I was destined to love. It’s not that I can’t find things to say about this. I could keep listing off random things that she did right here and annoy the people kindly compiling this list for free. I just have a hard time writing something that does justice to a project like MOTOMAMI, where each listen feels fresh, beautiful, intricate and surprising. As much as I regret not having a wider understanding of the often marginalized genres that make up a majority of this (you could write books on how much effort has been put into the racist and classist censorship of reggaeton), and as much as I hope that my doing so from now on will expand my understanding of this to much deeper levels, I don’t think that any number of hours listening to anything else will ever make this stop sounding like magic. –Kirk Bowman

13. Gaerea – Mirage

[Official site] // [Spotify]

There is something special when experiencing a creative peak, as if for a brief moment, we were in tune with the universe, traveling without moving to places where only the soul can reach and comprehend. With Mirage, the Portuguese blackened quintet took their music to one of these singular spaces, refining and enhancing it, much like a skilled craftsman who learned to make better use of the tools he already had. Gaerea’s black metal formula didn’t take an unexpected turn or morph into a different creature; it simply perfected itself, evolving into a new higher stage. And that my friends is something to behold, if only for the ambitious display of vitality of someone who rejects stagnation. Songs like “Memoir”, “Deluge”, or “Arson” express this sense of accomplishment magnificently by exploring multiple contrasts and dynamics within a consistent yet flexible sound palette that never becomes unbalanced or out of orbit. It is a testament to creativity and songwriting prowess which firmly places Gaerea among the key players in the blackened industry. –Fernando Alves

12. PUP – The Unraveling of PUPTheBand

[Official site] // [Spotify]

Let’s transfer any skepticism to its final resting place and just admit it: the production on PUP’s whacky fourth LP is neither as bad as its loudest critics declare, nor as natural as a PUP apologist like myself would have you believe. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, it’s time to discuss what makes The Unraveling of PUPTheBand such an unhinged joy to listen to. How did this exuberant mess barely miss a spot in the top 10? For starters, it’s as darkly hilarious as anything they’ve ever done: the noise-punk reference in the snotty opening piano ballad of “Four Chords” will fondly be remembered as one of the all-time greatest PUP moments. And of course, they couldn’t help but throw in an intentionally pointless 9-second sampling to close that track’s story arc. Why the hell not? Despite being so fuzzy and chaotic, The Unraveling of PUPTheBand works weirdly well as a concept album (read: a strange and vibrant musical circus). This collection of tunes is different enough to spark debate — it sounds more like a live album, a unique touch to be sure — but it’s the same DIY, supercharged PUP that won us over with their unique charm from the very start.

Oh, and it’s also been a popular go-to as a shower companion around these parts. It’s been said that our very own Johnny sometimes geeks out as he shouts along in isolation, gripping a bar of very elegant soap as his microphone — especially to the ridiculously upbeat chorus of “Waiting.” –Atari

11. Gang of Youths – Angel in Realtime

[Official site] // [Spotify]

After a massively praised breakout album, bands always face a challenge, with the pressure to change enough to stay fresh while not completely annihilating the formula which got them into an enviable spot. Australia’s native sons Gang of Youths were in that predicament following 2017’s Go Farther in Lightness, and they’ve responded admirably. While Angel in Realtime veers away (mostly) from the Springsteenian bombast of its predecessor and leans into the unexpected influences of traditional Pacific Islander music, at its heart, this is still the same peculiar spirit on display: ragged, heart-on-sleeve lyricism with a clear, ambitious belief that music can and should mean a lot. This maximalist approach pays dividends, even as Angel in Realtime forms a concept album of sorts reflecting on the complex life and recent death of the frontman’s father. The album is touching (“You In Everything”), rocking (“The Angel Of 8th Ave.”), and thoughtful (“Forbearance”), but most of all it’s simply a life-affirming journey through dark times. Angel in Realtime might be more subdued and less immediate than its acclaimed predecessor, but it’s another gem which demonstrates how effective rock music can be as a vehicle for thought and emotion. As a wise man once sang, say yes to life, and I can’t think of a more fitting coda for this album’s message. –Sunnyvale

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