50-31 | 30-11 | 10-1 | EP/Live/Compilation

10. Hail the Sun – Divine Inner Tension

[Official site] // [Spotify]

I’m going to say something that shouldn’t actually be controversial, but will inevitably cause a bunch of people to lose their shit: Divine Inner Tension is Hail the Sun’s best work.

[long awkward silence]

“Ye speaketh blasphemy, ye corpulent mammalian sea creature!”

Yes, I do. Shamelessly.

I’ve said this before, but it took a lot to bring me to listen to this album. I refused to listen to the singles. I refused to have anything to do with the rotten cadaver of the genre Hail the Sun had been pigeonholed into. “It all sounds the same anyway!” was the chant I told my friends about the singles that kept dropping. “They’ve peaked! They’re on the decline!” is what I kept saying to myself to justify my refusal to give Divine Inner Tension a chance.

It didn’t matter that I have a deep-seated respect and admiration for Donovan Melero as a musician and seemingly good dude. It didn’t matter that of all the “swancore” bands out there, Hail the Sun had actually put out the most consistent music. It didn’t matter that — while they hadn’t quite achieved the highs of Wake — Culture Scars, Mental Knife and New Age Filth were all very good records. All that would come of a new album in the age of aging guitar-wankery bands would be more guitar-wankery, loopy song structures and high-pitched vocals. Besides, my heart would probably be broken by one of the members being a groomer or something equally nefarious anyway.

When the album finally released though, I said, “To hell with it,” and gave it a spin. Turns out it was the best decision of my entire musical year. Because in a landscape and genre that has been so oversaturated with bands and already has its fair (albeit rather stale) share of impressive music, Divine Inner Tension is one of those rare albums that deserves the overbearingly overused cliché of being referred to as a masterpiece.

I could probably spend the rest of this write-up just talking about “Tunnel Vision Alibi”, which achieves the kind of equilibrium of heavy, catchy, energetic and emotional that is almost impossible — and while I personally think it is one of the greatest opening tracks that has ever graced an album, it is such a small fraction of what this album represents for Hail the Sun as a band. This isn’t technical wizardry for its own sake anymore. Hail the Sun don’t have to prove that they know how to play their instruments better than you or demonstrate just how talented they are — it’s a known fact — and that liberty has given them the freedom to put together some of the most focused and refined music this subgenre has seen in years.

The album goes from one captivatingly picturesque scene to the next — the hypnotizing guitar work and ultra-catchy hook in “Chunker”, the vulnerability and raw emotion of “60 Minute Session Blocks”, the loopy roller-coaster ride of “Maladapted”, and the absolutely batshit “Tithe”. Throughout the thirty-nine minute runtime, Divine Inner Tension never becomes boring. Every soaring melody, every hook, every breakdown is written to a standard that has been long abandoned by other bands in this field — all without being overbearing or reserved only for the elite.

Yes, Wake was a masterpiece in its own way, and I cannot take that away from Melero and co., but it was a masterpiece for the hyper underground audience they were playing for. Divine Inner Tension is for you and me and the world, and it is the unbelievably difficult accomplishment of balancing accessibility, beauty and technical mastery that stands this album above the rest. –Manatea

9. Horrendous – Ontological Mysterium

[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

This album is the modern day version of Symbolic, and no, I will not elaborate. All you need to do is listen. While these guys don’t blatantly worship Death, Horrendous definitely have influences and feel like spiritual successors. Chuck would be proud. –Asmodeuss1990

Agreed about this being a modern-day Symbolic for sure. These guys are definitely the best spiritual successors of Death around. Album riffs so hard; it gives me goosebumps with every song. –Frost15

I definitely knew I was in for something with “The Blaze” — which I loved — but man, there are some incredible riffs and seriously intense moments on here. While I definitely don’t agree with Horrendous being the successors to Death, the incredible “Cult of Shaad’oah” makes that take not totally out of the question. –BillyBrill

Awesome record. If you’ve jammed the past two Horrendous records, you mostly know what you’re in for: colorful, progressive death metal inspired by the ’90s prog death greats and adjusted for modern times. Shit rules. I like that they’re still building on their sound without taking misguided and unnecessary risks, and my only criticism remains the same: I wish they’d go a bit heavier with the production and in general. –grandfather

8. Wednesday – Rat Saw God

[Official site] // [Spotify]

To get the obvious out of the way, “Bull Believer” is on the shortlist for Song of the Year. To listen to it is to love it. It’s incredible.

But Rat Saw God is bigger than just that one track that gets all the shine. In fact, “Bull Believer” and opener “Hot Rotten Grass Smell” would probably trick you into thinking that Wednesday are about to take you into a far more abrasive journey than you’re really in for. While the opening pair of tracks are the obvious highlight in part because of their naked terror, the rest of Rat only occasionally wallows back into such dark and horrifying territory, being much more akin to spacing out from a porch on a bright summer day. That’s not to say their brand of Americana garage rock with a grungy twang is an entirely breezy listen, but rather that Karly Hartzman and company are just as willing to linger on the smaller, goofier moments as they are to have a sonic bloodletting. “TV on the Gas Pump” is basically a Rorschach test of tiny vignettes where you can make as little or as much sense of them as you’d like; “Chosen to Deserve” is an extremely roundabout way of saying, “I got better” in response to terse recollections that could just as easily pile on the dirt. The little hitch in her voice is bound to irritate some, but lends a credibility and weight to her words, as if she herself is making sense of their grander meaning in real-time alongside us. –Odal

7. Slowdive – Everything Is Alive

[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

The world has changed significantly in the six years since Slowdive’s return to the fold, and shoegaze is again at the forefront of innovative rock music. While to any other legacy gaze act this would be a heavenly alignment of the stars, to Slowdive, that means it’s time to reshuffle the deck. For an album that often serves as a decisive blend of every electronic, psychedelic, and gazey notion Slowdive ever had, Everything Is Alive rarely feels that artificial. Rather than crushing their magic into a dense monochromatic paste for 2017’s Slowdive, or distilling genres into separate beakers in a lab and mixing them into the coldest tracks of Pygmalion, their newest release feels like the first genuinely organic musical chimera they’ve shaped from the ground up.

Each track starts as a very direct (often titular) concept, such as “shanty” or “the slab”, and evolves from there. The best songs add layers of washed-out guitars and electronic ambiance until they become an aural blanket—comforting, unfussy, and much friendlier than Slowdive’s usual walls of sound. The soft aura of “prayer remembered” is genuinely potent and unique in their catalog — as is the uplifting electronica tingling through “chained to a cloud”. Each song exists on its own merits in a way Slowdive have never captured before.

In this way, Everything Is Alive is less monolithic than their prior works — it’s a ‘song album’, if you will — but the kind that tours you around serene, magical worlds one after another. Some of them you simply won’t want to leave. It’s also a victory lap for the band — if last album was a reunion, this release is a true reinvention of Slowdive — and one that points to even greater adventures to come. –neekafat

6. Jeromes Dream – The Gray In Between

[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

The logical conclusion to the work Jeromes Dream started with Seeing Means More Than Safety, The Gray In Between features the best dynamics out of any of their albums. Amidst the 24 minutes of carnage are habitual blueprints — gut-wrenching screams, knotty rhythms, punishing riffs, and noisy textures — along with an appreciable emphasis on integrating melody and atmosphere. Consequently, the record near-perfectly treads the line between familiar and fresh. This can be attributed in part to producer Jack Shirley (Deafheaven, Loma Prieta, Joyce Manor), whose work empowers Jeromes Dream to retain their quintessential extremity while expanding their signature sound beyond its usual borders. –Koris

This absolutely rocks — so much better than any skramz thing I’ve heard the past few years. –loveisamixtape

Most consistent and thought-out recorded from the Jeromes Dream crew. I like LP and Presents a lot, but this feels more like a realization of their sound. –NarlusKing123

5. JPEGMAFIA and Danny Brown – Scaring the Hoes

[Official site] // [Spotify]

Sometimes I wonder if I really ‘get’ Scaring the Hoes or if I am merely following the general hivemind of a certain brand of internet music snobbery that usually insists upon itself that it doesn’t exist. Maybe I’m inducing too much of my own internet life when I say that it does kinda feel a logical conclusion for the nearly two decades of osmosis I’ve had from the likes of Sputnikmusic, last.fm, RateYourMusic, Anthony Fantano, AbsolutePunk, and countless band- and genre-specific subreddits. Contrary to what my Sleep Token blurb earlier in this list would suggest, I have plenty of music credibility. I have called albums “LPs” and also, at one point or another, stolen the aux-cable to play Death Grips like the true genius that I am.

What a load of pretentious wank.

Scaring the Hoes is awesome because it bangs. It’s as simple as that. Whether or not you get all the knowing winks and references to terminally online culture is entirely beside the point. The impressive thing here is the picture that is painted from the thousands of snippets and odes to Being Online, the endless rabbit holes are merely additional fun. Living up to its namesake, Scaring the Hoes is an adversarial, maximalist collection of songs that practically defy scrutiny as much as they invite it. This isn’t to rally some anti-intellectual discourse around an album that is certainly more than deserving of an extensive deep dive, so much as to say it’s okay to not care why the curtains are blue and to instead focus on just how cathartic it feels to punch a hole in the drywall next to them. Some people will really scan a tracklist that includes titles like “Steppa Pig” and “Jack Harlow Combo Meal” and then push their glasses up their nose to say, “Um, actually, Danny Brown’s voice is too low in the mix.”  –Odal

4. Sufjan Stevens – Javelin

[Official site] // [Spotify]

It’s insane to think there was once a time where Sufjan Stevens’ hype rode on the prospect of the man recording an album about each of the 50 states. Fast-forward nearly two decades and that experiment’s patriotic pageantry has long been supplanted by music as a means of therapy through an endless barrage of rough patches. In 2023, his leaky faucet kept running: Javelin comes to us by way of the loss of his partner, Evans Richardson IV, whose death doubled as long-speculated, closely-withheld confirmation that Stevens himself is gay. As if the ramifications of coming out in mourning weren’t enough on his plate, the summer months saw him hospitalized with the debilitating autoimmune disorder Guillain-Barré syndrome. These events can’t be extricated from how Javelin launched — an artist so encouraging of empathy deserves at least some of ours — but make no mistake, its praise is more than a pity party or a consolation prize; the album is indubitably the most concise and thorough synthesis of Stevens’ career-spanning, disparate artistic visions.

Its songs string together the rustic, intimate coziness of his stripped-back, acoustic eulogizing, the studio opulence of his busy, orchestral compositions, the aloof wayfaring of his atmospheric wanderlust, and the wonky extravagance of his electronic efforts — existing no longer as separate faces of the man’s ambitions, but a cross-bred hybrid tailor-made to elicit the weepiest of hallelujahs in misty-eyed solidarity. In fewer words: Javelin falls graceful as a feather… and lands with the momentum of a cinder block flung off a skyscraper. Bearing naked anxieties and impressionable yearning with a blunter stroke than ever before, the album exorcises a lifetime of suppressed worry and delayed mercy, condensed into a profoundly beautiful, bittersweet, and stirring 42 minutes. If Javelin doesn’t go down as Stevens’ crowning achievement, it’s only because his body of work is too esteemed to override so quickly. –ashcrash9

3. George Clanton – Ooh Rap I Ya

[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

One of (if not the) most ill-conceived arguments I have ever had was proclaiming that the SEGA Dreamcast would be more popular than the Sony PlayStation 2. Granted, I was like eight years old, but my convictions were as strong as they had ever been on the playground podium, right next to other such riveting discussions like “What if Super Saiyans were real?” and “How does everyone seem to have an uncle who works at Nintendo?” I was wrong, of course. In fact, I was so wrong that the Dreamcast did not usher in a golden age of gaming, but, in fact, it nearly closed the doors of SEGA themselves due to its colossal lack of sales. This would be a mark of shame and another feather in the cap for my schoolyard rival, who would constantly argue that Mario was better than Sonic and that Sonic was stupid because he didn’t wear any pants — a salient point for which I had no answer.

George Clanton constructs a monument to this period of time, where AOL discs littered the ground and Beanie Babies were a wise investment strategy. Ooh Rap I Ya is not merely a gesture at nostalgia as a concept, but rather complete and total immersion of that cusping millennium zeitgeist bathed in the warming glow of a CRT television set, recontextualized by with the clarity and obfuscation the ensuing decades would bring. It’s less “being young is cool and awesome” and more “zoning out to N64 skybox compilation videos wondering if I’ll ever be able to buy a house.”

The fact that a lot of this sounds like old video game music is hardly a revelation, but Ooh Rap I Ya basically scrambles my brain its kaleidoscopic Clinton-era imagery that it can really be hard to import how well it succeeds in feeling like those things without ever being like a cheap imitation. Lead single “I Been Young” sounds like a warped version of The Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony” — a song itself with a lot of cultural baggage and meaning — that snowballs that feeling of, well, bittersweet triumph into full-blown Matthew McConaughey-pounding-on-fifth-dimensional-walls-in-Interstellar levels of longing.

Plus, it sounds like a Dreamcast instead of a PS2. So I was right. Fuck you, Stephen. –Odal

2. Avenged Sevenfold – Life Is But a Dream…

[Official site] // [Spotify]

Change in a band’s life is almost inevitable; however, such a significant turning point is quite rare to be witnessed. Up until now, the American band in question have dabbled in metalcore, hard rock, and heavy metal genres, but their releases always felt tedious to me. After a long, seven-year period, they came out with Life Is But a Dream… and my jaw simply dropped… because Life Is But a Dream… is distinctly a great avant-garde metal album! Musically, it’s a diverse record, blending thrashy and heavy metal riffs, and features blues, jazz, funk, electronic, and symphonic musical elements as well. However, it’s not (only) its diversity that is the most convincing characteristic, because in my opinion, what truly makes an avant-garde album valuable is that, despite its “strangeness,” it’s accessible and captivating for anyone — and incidentally, we witness exactly that here. –garas

1. yeule – Softscars

[Official site] // [Spotify]

Yeule, like many in our generation, is a product of the internet. They found solace in burgeoning online communities while domestic life was routinely shaken up, and have grown to filter the absolute madness of modern youth into their artwork. Whereas many who’ve come dangling similar aesthetic threads of gothy, e-girl, emo whateverness before would intentionally mash genres just to see sparks fly, the blurring of genre lines in Yeule’s music has always been rooted in something far deeper and instinctive.

Face it, Gen Z bathes in a waterfall of unfiltered music from the moment we get sick of our parents’ taste. Thus, artists like Yeule have benefitted from boundless influences scattered across genres, the world, and time. I suppose the most impressive thing about softscars is that all of its elements not only hold together, but create a transcendent and unified sound that Yeule is perfectly suited for. As they twist their usual glitch-pop into something crunchier and catchier, softscars compounds their accessibility without losing an ounce of emotional wallop, crafting an album that would captivate in an arena just as it would on your bedroom record player. In this way, the spirit of the ’90s Alt Rock Gods has been resurrected through Yeule, a software update made all the more necessary and righteous by the fact that past idols like Billy Corgan probably have no idea what ‘non-binary’ even means.

And this is personal conjecture (from this non-binary critic), but Yeule blurring the lines between genre and gender seems to be no coincidence. Our need to classify things continuously limits the artist — and ourselves — to expectations that often turn into judgments when unmet. If our music is moving so fast that we’re running out of words for it, that’s a good thing. Music provides a world where visual conformity to standards of attractiveness, style, and gender are meaningless, where pure concepts can be communicated through tone and timbre. In many ways, it provides true freedom to artists that paint with sound, and audiences seeking an escape from the physical aspects of their life. On softscars, it’s a freedom that Yeule expounds upon. –neekafat

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As is tradition: thank you to SandwichBubble for once again helping us with the Community feature’s artwork! An additional thank-you to all those who volunteered to write for the community feature (and/or graciously allowed us to use your sound-offs or comments!). Lastly, thank you to all those who submitted a ballot for the 2023 feature — and to everyone in the community for making our slice of the Internet a delightfully unique place for camaraderie. Best wishes for 2024!