50-31 | 30-11 | 10-1

10. Rolo Tomassi – Where Myth Becomes Memory

[Official site] // [Spotify]

On March 2, 2018, the heavy music/core-sphere collectively lost their minds over Rolo Tomassi’s coming-of-age release Time Will Die And Love Will Bury It — an album that purportedly elevated them from cult status to masters of their genre-spanning scene. I say ‘purportedly’ not because there is any doubt in my mind that this is true, but because on that same day, I was re-reviewing Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago for probably the third time, somehow unaware of Rolo Tomassi’s existence — let alone the fact that they were exploding in my backyard. Despite several interventions over the next few years by friends-who-care in an attempt to turn my attention towards this magnificently mathy/metallic/hardcore act, it was somehow 2022’s Where Myth Becomes Memory that marked my first real introduction to the band — and finally, I’d like to join my cohorts in saying: holy fucking shit. In other words, Rolo Tomassi has a new disciple.

Where Myth Becomes Memory represents the ideal intersection between beauty and aggression. Listeners who can rightfully declare themselves fans already know this, but I’m still marvelling at the way the band effortlessly swivels between the shimmering and resplendent (consider “Almost Always”, replete with its breathtaking pianos and rapturous crescendo) and the nakedly aggressive (those blood-curdling shrieks in “Cloaked”). Rolo Tomassi have reached a point in their songwriting where these transitions are seamless, and executed with such bold and unwavering confidence that it feels like they’ve honed their craft to perfection. Where Myth Becomes Memory is a tour de force of aesthetics that should exist in conflict but instead reside in perfect harmony together. Whether it’s the way that “Mutual Ruin” pivots from raw screams and Al Pott’s insane drumming to a tender, reflective oasis of Eva Korman’s clean vocals, or the way that “Drip” seems to embody everything on RT’s musical spectrum all at once, Rolo Tomassi have taken a vast range of sounds, along with their varying intensities, and blended them into a singularly gorgeous and destructive force. It speaks volumes about this band that, nearly two decades into their career, they’re still finding ways to captivate new audiences whilst loyally serving their original fan base. Where Myth Becomes Memory is the sound of a group doing things their own way, refusing to yield, and only becoming more powerful. It’s like an avalanche — this incredibly powerful act of nature that’s capable of wiping out anything in its path, yet it’s stunning to behold. Either way, when there’s an avalanche coming, it’s best to be in-the-know rather than listening to Bon Iver with headphones on. Lesson learned. –Sowing

9. Yeule – Glitch Princess

[Official site] // [Spotify]

For an album that starts with a glitchy spoken word wow-so-pretentious-yet-cool song and closes with a (bonus) track that no sane person will ever listen to in full, Glitch Princess is surprisingly, uh, good. Its facade of artsiness and complexity is artsy and complex in and of itself: while Yeule’s songs take plenty of unexpected twists and turns, all of these explorations of unique avenues are sensible and wholly gratifying. It reflects not merely its creator, but manages to explore and embody the very multifarious and flawed nature of anyone willing to listen. It cries, it destroys, it bangs, it fucks. –JesperL

8. City of Caterpillar – Mystic Sisters

[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Young, hungry DIY upstarts with existential crisis and time to spare turn in a genre-busting debut album, a couple of demos, and call it a day. It’s the mid-oughts. Their scene-building one-off casts no long shadow on popular culture but does invoke the frenzied whispers of moldy basements and online forums, where file-sharing obsessives and the internet presence of the malcontent extend the shelf life of bands whose whole thing depends on the cathartic vestiges of counterculture youth captured just-so. They might even be actually very good musicians. They’re name-checked by your favorite bands, end up on a few (maybe many) ‘Best Of’ genre lists, and start to leave an impression years after their barely-splash masterpiece held the attention of a couple dozen kids in a basement. They might even make a Sputnikmusic end-of-decade list, because.

What more did we really expect from City of Caterpillar? Their arc tracks the familiar path of many bands to come before and after their time, expected of a scene as volatile and impermanent as screamo — “post-hardcore” if you’re nasty. The band’s nervy blend of post-rock and emo had the air of true experiment and youthful ingenuity, a kind of “innocent, raw emotion” that couldn’t (maybe… me, three years ago: “shouldn’t“) be recaptured. Whether City of Caterpillar was worthy of the accolades for its quality felt secondary to its use as a signifier, motioning to new inspirations and avenues for the shape of punk to come. What more did we really want from City of Caterpillar?

A couple of fashionable reunions and perhaps a hearty helping of friendship later, we receive this immaculate, raucous fucking thing. The grievances that inspired the wayward rock of yesteryear have magnified on Mystic Sisters, and the intervening decades have drawn City of Caterpillar into a more fraught and frantic shape. They have become better writers, improving the basic quilted patterns of their early compositions for writhing, textural angles, with all the expected complexity and pretensions on display. But perhaps the best addition, and most welcome, is its screwball energy. There’s a real sense of gothic humor that animates Mystic Sisters, and it’s this surprisingly pleasurable twist to the formula that elevates City of Caterpillar’s return from the simple, well-trodden grim gravitas of their peers into something truly, inexplicably vital. –Lewis

7. Chat Pile – God’s Country

[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

Wanna hear something fucked up? Well, here it is. This be that mangled carcass music for the masses, that splattered-splintered hockey mask aesthetic perfected, a meat hooks dug deep deal, quite ripped-flesh, very stretched-taut, such terror-catchy, all the crimson-captivating. Inner demons stripped bare, flayed track after track after track, the full bloody hell of it, now exposed, gashing, gaping, gawking, grimace. An anthem for those still grieving, still clawing at the walls in disbelief, still pounding, pounding, pounding, then failing, silently, and screaming. More screaming than you’d think. Societal murk, too, dredged up, dug out, just there, staring right through you, all the guilt and the tragedy, writhing, wretched, hideous. True. It’s all true. And all of it — the whole fucking fiendish nightmare — is set, just so, to the catchiest, crushingest, most mega brilliantest noise-sludge-riff-fuck-fest ever ever ever ever ever. For this is the real American horror story.

I had originally intended to hijack this blurb, shamelessly, for a multi-para self-involved spiel on how Chat Pile’s immaculate debut single-handedly reignited my (as of late) dwindling passion for music, slapping some sense of urgency and joy back into the once rewarding discovery process that I’d fallen unexpectedly out of love with, and that — in acknowledgement of that welcome kick in the teeth — I’d therefore crown this 40 minute nugget of tumultuous wonderfulness as one of the greatest records of the last ten years (which, for what it’s worth, is all true). On reflection, however, that hijack attempt just didn’t sit well with me. God’s Country is utterly brilliant in its own right, not as a means to any end, like all the best art, and deserves to be written about as such. How doggedly it commits to its morbid vision, and how drop-dead disgusting (relatable) the resultant cesspool is, is perhaps best evidenced by the fact it appeared on more staff ballots this year than any other album on this list, despite the apparent eclecticism within our cohort. Through said horrid (real) vision, it connects: through violently vivid songwriting, effortless pacing, cataclysmic instrumentation, decade-defining vocal performances and (most importantly) the defiant, desperate heart and fury burning beneath it all. For all this and more, God’s Country and Chat Pile urgently demand your attention, now, and I hope for years to come. It is the real deal. They are the real deal. Just listen. –AsleepInTheBack

6. The Wonder Years – The Hum Goes On Forever

[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

I’m tempted to turn this blurb into an extended rant about the magnetic riff in “Wyatt’s Song”, but I’d be downplaying the truly jolting impact The Wonder Years have had on my life. Unlike my old high school favorites like Blink-182 and The Ataris (gasp!) who coast on the fumes of nostalgia, the Philadelphia legends have nearly redefined the term ‘longevity’ for the genre. It’s hard to believe this is the same group that was singing about beer, sex, and mountains of leftover pizza crust throughout 2010’s heavily college-themed The Upsides. I’d wager many of us have done a lot of growing up along with The Wonder Years. I know I have. Age has been creeping up on me fast since The Greatest Generation first sunk its claws in me, still just a confused kid living in a subpar apartment. I was already a fan of the band prior to that album, but the completely draining and alarmingly real lyrics of “Passing Through the Screen Door” sealed the deal: this band would hold a special place in my doubtful heart.

Nearly ten years later and I’m now the proud father of a four-year old girl in our cozy first house. Everything should be perfect. I now have the things I’ve always wanted, yet nothing could prepare me for the anxiety and fears that threaten to weigh down the joys of parenthood. If this sounds familiar, it’s because I’ve essentially just described the general theme of The Wonder Years’ 7th LP. The Hum Goes on Forever is passionately centered around Dan Campbell’s unfamiliar experience as a father — his doubts amplified by the most condensed and crisp guitars from the band in years. Witnessing the absurd crack in his voice as he belts through each angst-fueled track has me wondering if he’s even more out of control than I am with this whole being a dad thing. I’m still working on it — running in the dark most days — but it’s wild how often TWY’s lyrical narratives always seem to be written on the same page as my story. I wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s not until you’ve sacrificed all your sleep and space for a mini version of yourself that you can fully appreciate a lyric as equally dumb and biblical as “I’m growing out my hair, but who gives a shit.” –Atari

5. Black Country, New Road – Ants From Up There

[Official site] // [Spotify]

Have Black Country, New Road taken more shit than they deserve? Perhaps, but more importantly it’s been a beautiful year for out-of-sorts millennials, whose jittery self-awareness, part-time irony hopscotch and longstanding imposter syndrome now somehow command enough cultural capital to find themselves analogous with critical acclaim of the highest altitude. Rock as a cocky boyzone is dead: we hate being ruled by brainless young men, but boy do we still love chaps whose verbosely manifested intelligence is itself ruled by insecurity.

Accordingly, this gaggle of goofballs have discarded the polarised lenses and detached non-sequiturs of yesteryear (see BC,NR’s fetid sister project Jockstrap for this, but not on this list, honey). Ants From Up There weaponises the flippancy that once encumbered their songwriting; unwieldy Warhammer 40k and Bloodborne references actually enrich the mise-en-scène, elucidate our protagonist’s (read: real human being, Isaac Woods) playful side, and establish good reason for an audience to empathise with any and all ensuing plights. It might seem a small thing, but it means that when the knife is twisted — Woods’ tragically unrequited love and crippling codependency bubbling up through his wavering inflection — it inflicts pain on the listener too. So far, so good.

So what do the other sixteen members of this sillily named collective do while the Misery of Modern Man is catalogued? Um, well things are jauntier than you’d expect; you probably won’t glean much of the emotional heft of Ants in the cheeky lil horn-centric intro track or the “YEAH“s that line the chorus of “Chaos Space Marine”, but the angst and uncertainty finally take off alongside “Concorde”. This track alone forms the coming-of-age moment the band’s psychological stew and constantly feinting dynamic hijinx have been desperately craving ever since we first heard them; sure, the payoff here comes via a climax linear as a chemtrail, but the flight path in question is so streaked with air palaces metaphorical and heartbreaks very much real that the journey very much does posit an equal reward. Hell, the pining lonesomeness behind that central “Concorde” metaphor (do not fall in love with a plane, friends) rings true enough to warrant the cheap facsimile foregrounded so mordantly on the record’s artwork — no mean feat, even by our noble site’s temperamental standards of appraisal. The song’s a treasure — final proof that this band can make treasures! — or, in the words of half your authors’ dear fathers, reminds me of the annual Mtech recruiting lecture, but is pleasant enough in its simplicity. Ladies and gents, that seatbelt sign just lit right up…

Having proved their long-elusive cruising altitude is in fact attainable, the band do the proper thing and follow through with further songs of individual note and value. We shan’t enumerate them in full because — actually y’know what referencesreferencesreferences fuckit, roll out the track-by-track: “Bread Song” is exactly the right kind of patient pathos for boosting reading speed and tears-per-minute in tandem; “Good Will Hunting” is unafraid to pull tricky aerial stunts despite the mascara stains blurring the pilot’s grimacing mug; “Haldern” sidesteps from [bad Slint reference] to emo-Bark-Psychosis with delightfully dextrous despair; “Mark’s Theme”‘s eponym is situated anywhere but in its remarkability; “The Place Where He Inserted The Blade” might just be a genuine anthem but it scares me a little; “Snow Globes” is a baffling and busy sojourn into Tudor England; either “Basketball Shoes” is a patchwork diorama of everything that preceded it, or the rest of the album is actually a result of reverse-engineering its lurching grandiosity (crippling codependency at its finest either way). Great album any% 58:46 we love it. As has hopefully been inferred through cheeks brimming with tongue (and in the words of the other half your authors’ dear fathers), it’s more than just a little plain.

However, there remains one final reservation to overcome (Jesus, what a gauntlet it’s been): where does this freshly-affirmed Great Album leave us? As irony would have it, it’s our infatuation that has proved the overbearing one in this dynamic: our morbid desire to witness the bottomless agonies of the intelligent and sensitive modern man have scared said man back out of the public eye — skittish creatures are we. That’s no indictment; those who come into fame tend to affirm that they wouldn’t wish it on their worst enemy. I’d certainly rather work at the local cake shop than earn my crust spilling my innermost frailties to anonymous throngs. ¡¿And in this economy?! Cripes. Frontman Isaac Wood’s decision to bash a confident fist at the eject button deserves praise, and I wish him the best — and if we’ve now heard our full share of his best, then gawd how much more delicious is an erudite sadboy with a morsel of pride amidst his good gravy? –JohnnyoftheWell & MiloRuggles

4. Alvvays – Blue Rev

[Official site] // [Spotify]

It’s coming up on my birthday as I type this, and I am sad, tired and defeated. These are easy adjectives to reach for describing life under the last choking gasps of capitalism and the undefeated passage of time, but it does not make them any less true and they’re getting truer by the day. I should be savouring the opportunity to write this blurb, to celebrate my favourite album and albums of the year with friends and writers I respect and admire. Instead I open up a blank Word document, put on Blue Rev, and feel nothing but defeated.

No-one’s interested in my diary entry, and if it didn’t feel like my chest was being crushed inside a cider press today I’d tell you about all the ways that Blue Rev is the best album of the year. I’d talk about its fourteen slices of pop perfection, the effortless way they play one after the other, never feeling overly precious or curated. This album is truly important to me, and I’d say it has everything to do with the way these songs make whatever fucked up shit I’m feeling on any particular day bounce right off, like light curving off water. I’d probably force out some overwrought metaphor about how Blue Rev is multifaceted, a diamond emitting different wavelengths of light depending on the angle it is held at, but that feels like a disservice to an album like this. Blue Rev is not subtle or sneaky in its greatness, and neither gives nor demands any overriding context or justification to make you fall in love with it.

In our time of Big Statements, when albums need to come preset with a marketing hook to justify your attention, this lack of such is a statement in itself. Blue Rev‘s only gimmick is sheer fucking excellence, whether that’s the effervescent hook of “Easy on Your Own?” transforming the room you’re in into a stadium, the sepia-toned nostalgia of “Many Mirrors”, the dreamy serenity of “Velveteen”. Molly Rankin’s incredible voice is the main draw here, and never in better form — just listen to that insane final note on “Velveteen”, the laugh-out-loud key change in “Belinda Says”, the increasing desperation in her vocals teasing out the underlying darkness of the whole album in the final moments of “Lottery Noises”. But she remains an astute cartographer of relationships and social awkwardnesses in her lyrics too, summing up every 1975 fan you’ve ever met on a forum in the savage “Very Online Guy” only to spin the same relationship dynamic into a heartbreaker on “After the Earthquake” (Molly Rankin *shaking hands emoji* Conor Murphy, crying into their milkshakes).

I don’t know: again, it feels kind of pointless writing this many words about an album that, to me, is so blatantly great it feels self-defeating talking about it. I’ve closed out this blurb now, three days after; my birthday’s been and gone and I’m 26, older but absolutely no wiser, just as aimless and tired as I’ve been since I stopped being a kid. But the morning after, I rolled out of bed, threw some bacon in the frypan, turned the speakers up too loud and blasted Blue Rev. The world I’d been dreading to face every morning, the one that seemed so overwhelming and tedious all at once, suddenly looked good, smelled great and sounded even better. For 38 minutes and 58 seconds, time could be defeated. I was back in my only true home, on my childhood couch, some episode of The X-Files on the TV beating on my half-closed eyes, sublimely still and completely at peace. –Rowan5215

3. Saya Gray – 19 MASTERS

[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

Talk about unlikely triumphs from uninspiring places: Saya Gray’s extraordinary debut is the most fascinating and rewarding thing to emerge from contemporary indie folk in a punishingly long while. The record takes a scalpel to the faff, clutter and stolid songwriting that have suffocated countless Boygenius-generation retreads, all while interweaving a dizzyingly creative range of palettes through orations both confrontational and evasive. Gray’s MASTERS are strewn like stray pages from a shredded diary, each as poignant for the heartbreaks and reminiscences they explicate as for the jagged contours that mark their abdications from once-unified narratives, which lurk portentously in the background all the while. These songs are almost bullishly discontinuous, vividly episodic in a way that first scans as haphazard, but is underpinned by an uncommon sense of discipline: Gray makes her most confident songwriting decisions with a swish of her scissors and is far more prone to demand her audience follow the flow of her imagination in realtime than to cosset them with unnecessary repetitions. It’s rare to find an album so keenly aware of the preciousness of its every passing second, but 19 MASTERS turns economical into its own artform and brims so ostensibly with ideas that we are all the richer for it.

There’s an obvious boldness here, and it finds itself matched by Gray’s willingness to draw from a slew of disparate sounds typically remote from her realm of plaintive singer-songwriterism. 19 MASTERS carries echoes of everything from ’90s slacker lo-fi to new age ambience to Bach to Billie Eilish, yet the whole package achieves delirious unity through Gray’s androgynous vocals and mercurial personality. To this end, she stands alongside the rest of 2022’s absolute finest (Yeule, Material Girl), creating entirely new possibilities out of sounds long since templated, bulldozing fixed forms and fashioning her own from the rubble. The affirmative label ‘musician’ suits her far better than the comparatively tentative ‘songwriter’; for her, the established motions of what-‘songwriters’-do are less a rigid roadmap and more a trampoline over which she floats like a benign goddess of antigravity, suspended in the field of her boldest decisions. The occasions on which she does touch base with the ground are marked with everything from zany flirtation to suspicion to outright irreverence: a single cryptic verse will unwind into a seven-minute centrepiece (“TOOO LOUD!”); a flat-handed refrain as simple as Don’t call me, played over chords quotidian as fresh bread, will dish out a devastating emotional knockout under compounding layers of noise (“LITTLE PALM”); autotune abuse offers a vulnerable window of cagey catharsis (“S.H.T.”); the record’s strongest hooks blossom out of nowhere and disappear the moment they’ve cemented themselves as such (“N’SUFFICIENT FUNDS”).

Things may follow their own logic on the structural and stylistic fronts, but the album’s emotional candour never makes anything less than piercingly direct eye contact. Saya Gray turns unlikely excerpts into vital statements in such recurrently disarming fashion that the very thought of pinning her work down in static, ungainly prose makes a mockery of well-intentioned square-specs journalism. For almost two months, I’ve been various degrees of fixated on this album, attempted formulations of its value and attraction turning in my mind all the while, and yet sitting here giving the whole critical-expression schtick a second honest shot, I feel as though I’m grinding my keyboard into dust just trying to scratch the surface of how it comes together and pulls apart so enchantingly, let alone what it is and represents. 19 MASTERS is too slippery, too wily, too multi-faceted and too damn original to offer a tidy unpacking this close to its initial blast radius. What can be said with absolute concrete certainty, however, is that Saya Gray is now one of the most exciting artists to watch and has quite rightly taken our entire combined taste spectrum by storm. This record is one that demands to be followed by a legacy-in-the-making, and it opens a Daedalean glut of paths down which this might manifest. Get on board at the earliest convenience. –JohnnyoftheWell

2. Big Thief – Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You

[Official site] // [Spotify]

I remember the first time I heard the raucous third track on Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You, “Spud Infinity”, with an incredible level of clarity. I was in Boston to attend a hiring conference for private school teachers, splayed between different career paths, internally divided, deciding not to decide. But then, shortly after missing an important meeting, I exited the Westin at Copley Place and walked onto Huntington Avenue and that pleading fiddle started sounding its cry and Adrianne Lenker pleaded and cried along with it “WHAT’S IT GONNA TA-AAAAAAKE” and I wondered at the boundaries of things: how the subtly irregular pounding of the drums finessed so well the distance between improv and design; how Lenker analogously modeled the imbrication of love and conflict, especially when it comes to loving someone who’s very much not okay. I don’t know if this is exactly what “Spud Infinity” is about, but in the Boston chill I felt like Adrianne was singing to me — not only a deeply emotionally gratifying phenomenon in and of itself but also proof that Big Thief have the power, for me, to resuscitate forms of creative encounter between artist and audience that had long hardened into cliche: you felt like she was singing to you? Yes indeed I did, and the aesthetically mediated therapy session I engaged in with Lenker secured even further my feeling that Big Thief, everywhere in their discography but very much especially on Dragon New Warm Mountain, function as philosopher and magician and bard at once, wondering themselves at the boundaries of things, following the profound fluctuations of their complex hearts.

Dragon New Warm Mountain‘s genre eclecticism, roping in folk, country, ambient, shoegaze, and I’d argue hip-hop (on “Heavy Bend”), indexes this desire to, per the album’s wispy and adorable cover art, describe and formalize the experience of total oneness with everything. I can’t see how someone wouldn’t get stoked at the most elegant manifestations of this lofty artistic project, like this holy-shit cool and freaky opening stanza from the profoundly moving late-game solo acoustic ripper “The Only Place”: “What if all the worlds in space / Would melt into one single place / And intertwine the human race / With other kinds?” Does not that level of poetic contemplation speak for itself? But also, fuck: “What if all the time between / The words we say and what we mean / Would roll as softly as a stream / That we could ride?” And oh good Lord: “We’d ride the bend from source to mouth / I want a friend from north to south / To build that question as a house / Where we’d reside”. Folks, these all come from the same song. As much as she is thinking outside the box of material things and toward a grasp of the forces we can’t see that motivate the evolution through time and space of those we can, Lenker also wants to ground her metaphysics in a comprehensive consideration of the diverse array of behaviors and actions taken by human beings to manifest some one internal sensation we call by the name of love. And this lady, this legend Adrianne Lenker, this fucking queen, just slides to and fro these wildly disparate modes of engaging with the world and that which lies beyond it like it ain’t no thing — just another day at the office. The rest of the band, incredibly, is able to follow her lead and sometimes even takes over: Buck Meek’s gorgeous tenor on “Certainty”, the exceedingly tactile percussion on “Time Escaping”, the inimitable swing of closer “Blue Lightning”.

This list of full-band highlights brings me to my most important point: for an album that is 20 tracks and 80 minutes long, Dragon New Warm Mountain runs like a fucking machine. Shit is straight fire all the way through. Big Thief’s hard-to-categorize slate of defamiliarizing lyrical strategies and subtle inflections on the level of songcraft and production generates the illusion that they’re all one person, like a pair of talky protagonists in a Beckett drama or Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann in Bergman’s 1966 mindbender Persona. More than just the band themselves, though, Dragon New Warm Mountain served to oh-so-gratifyingly bring us all together, standing in mutual awe: my mom, who works as a teacher at the local nature center; my friends from high school, upgrading from their early Lumineers fandom; my dude friends with whom I watch the NBA on weekends; a number of women on whom I was once or am still crushing. You play the opening drum patter of “Simulation Swarm” for any of these people and — moreso than any song I can remember in recent years — they stop what they’re doing. They stop what they’re doing. I swear to God: Adrianne sang to me while I was walking around in Boston.

Big Thief were already a great band before the release of Dragon New Warm Mountain — I voted for the still-glorious U.F.O.F. as my album of the damn year in 2019. But this double LP, an act of artistic heroism to me and so many others, feels like a spiritual-corporeal necessity, like it emerged fully woven into the fabric of human nature, immediately occupying a layer somewhere between “food” and “shelter” on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You isn’t just my personal album of the year — it’s one of the most awe-inspiring albums ever recorded. –robertsona

1. Ethel Cain – Preacher’s Daughter

[Official site] // [Spotify]

Ethel Cain’s Preacher’s Daughter is a subversion of the American Dream — are we close to becoming fatigued of that phrase? “Subversion of the American Dream”. With good reason, most art in a post-Trump America seems to want to topple that dream that says no matter who you are or where you come from, we all have equal opportunity for success in this country. Pushback against that ideal isn’t tied to only our era, as artists have essentially been trying to either subvert or double down on American exceptionalism since the birth of the country. Ethel Cain’s Preacher’s Daughter certainly holds this message. (A large spoiler alert for the story of the album): She begins by wanting to escape her small town, which she has felt joy in, but is also suffocated by. She leaves it to experience the world, to outrun the trauma from her childhood, to pursue a life where she can find a partner, find love, find success, change the world. Is this not the potential life most of us are sold? It sounds lovely, but in reality, most people end up like Ethel: Lied to, defeated, destroyed, cannibalized by the system that we are told is supposed to save us (although the cannibalism Ethel has to be concerned with is far more literal than what I am implying).

It makes sense why this theme of flipping the American Dream on its head is heralded, as well as why it’s the art that I personally often seek out: Why would we want stories of a picturesque life that is far from reality for most of us? (To be transparent, I write this as I sit with my two dogs on my lap in a modest home, living far from the literal pain many of these artists describe). However, the conundrum becomes: How much exposure to this message can we take? How often can a person hear “That life that was promised to you is a lie” before they want to yell back “PLEASE STOP REMINDING ME.” It’s the classic argument of art as escapism as opposed to art as a reflection of life. Preacher’s Daughter ultimately succeeds in this subversion by not telling the listener how we already know we feel, but instead by giving us a remarkable foil to commiserate with.

Preacher’s Daughter is a voyeuristic southern gothic opera that gives full insight into the destruction of a human being. It plays into the sympathetic and heartless side of the human spirit, in which hearing someone’s trauma triggers dual thoughts of “Oh how horrible for them” and “Thank God that’s not me”. You can’t look away — but you also don’t want to. Fortunately, when listening to Preacher’s Daughter, it is that third sensation of empathy that wins out, as it often does for humanity. Hayden Anhedönia, the mastermind behind Ethel Cain, uses that wonderfully human sensation in two ways — asking listeners to feel empathy for her character, but also allowing us to relate our pain, even if it is much smaller, to Ethel’s. This creation of empathy is done through moments of musical genius. There are instances of excitement and intensity, such as the pop cut “American Teenager”, which is a perfect portrayal of aging out of a small town, or the literal shriek in the middle of gothic rocker “Ptolemaea”. There’s the heavenly moment where guitars enter in “A House in Nebraska” and the equally heart-wrenching moment when they leave, accompanied by a whispered “I feel so alone“.

Oftentimes there is anger behind albums of this ilk, or sadness, or at least disappointment. Preacher’s Daughter instead offers a mix of lo-fi ambient pop, dream pop, straight up pop cuts, gothic rock, and more — a meld of genres that largely equal slow burn seven-minute-plus-piano-driven songs. That is not to say the album is not without emotions, as it is the most emotionally raw album I have heard, arguably ever. Preacher’s Daughter is a story of religious trauma, of family, of love and heartbreak, of betrayal and death and murder, that leads listeners on an emotional journey without insisting that it holds your hand. The story of Ethel Cain is not exactly the story of Anhedönia, but it is also not not her story. I have not experienced 99% of what the character Ethel Cain experiences in Preacher’s Daughter, nor have I experienced 99% of what Anhedönia herself has lived as a trans woman from the Bible Belt. However, I have certainly experienced many of the emotions in Preacher’s Daughter. Or, at least, Anhedönia convinces me that I have through her wonderful ability to craft musical empathy.

So yes, Preacher’s Daughter is yet another subversion of the American Dream. Even if it was a mediocre album, tackling that theme is never bad. However, reflecting on that concept also requires me to step down from the soapbox I am so clearly standing on and clarify that completely dismissing the pursuit of the American Dream can create a “holier than thou” attitude, one that can be used to scoff at the hopes of individuals, to say “Everything is fucked and nothing matters”, which is neither fair nor healthy. Preacher’s Daughter certainly does not end with that message. On the closing tracks “Sun Bleached Flies” and “Strangers”, (again, spoiler alert) Ethel is literally eaten and sent to the afterlife. There is sadness and regret in these songs, yes, but also reflection on the hope and joy and love that was experienced in her life. That desire to find joy in darkness is yet another wonderfully human ability. I share this to say that you don’t need to be devoid of hope to appreciate this album. There’s a possibility that there will be no moment of deep emotional resonance for you in Preacher’s Daughter. Between the music and the story, Preacher’s Daughter already fully had its claws on me far before this (likely pretentious) interpretation hit me. Maybe my cynicism escapes you and you still fully believe in the American Dream and are cursing my name as you read this. To you I say — still give Preacher’s Daughter a go. Enjoy the wonderful music. Enjoy the gripping story. And long live Mother Cain. –dmathias52

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List of participating writers (alphabetical order): 204409, AsleepInTheBack, Atari, Athom, AtomicWaste, BlushfulHippocrene, Dewinged, dmathias52, DrGonzo1937, Gnocchi, granitenotebook, Greg., insomniac15, JesperL, JohnnyoftheWell, Jom, Kompys2000, manosg, MiloRuggles, mynameischan, plane, robertsona, Rowan5215, Sowing, Sunnyvale, TalonsOfFire, theacademy, TheNotrap, Trebor, Voivod, Willie, Xenophanes