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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…

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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…

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50. Crippled Black Phoenix – Banefyre

[Official site] // [Spotify]

2022! What a year, huh? It feels like the tide has finally washed ashore all those records that were created during that long hibernation period that was the Covid pandemic. Crippled Black Phoenix are no different, and Banefyre‘s one hour and a half running time is good proof that the British squad have done their homework. Now with full-time singer Joel Segerstedt sharing vocal duties with Belinda Kordic instead of featured singers (which was a great idea by the way!), the band struck back this year with a behemoth of an album. Banefyre sounds BIG and mighty, all without losing the Phoenix’s prowess for mesmerizing melodies and suspenseful build-ups that have become the band’s seal. This is, no doubt, an imposing album — but also an incredibly rewarding experience if you have the time and the will to let it flood your senses. And I know you do; otherwise, why would you be reading this list in the first place?! –Dewinged

49. Orville Peck – Bronco

[Official site] // [Spotify]

“Consensus” means that I have to write about my personal album of the year as if it belongs in the 49th spot. Bronco sands down the weirder edges of Orville Peck’s debut album in favor of grandiose songwriting that makes full use of…

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10. The Killers – Pressure Machine

[Official site] // [Spotify]

How did we get here, to The Killers dropping one of the most conceptually sound, consistently affecting albums of 2021? If the solid-but-safe Imploding the Mirage was a whisper of a shift in their sound towards a revitalised version of their classic-rock worship, Pressure Machine is a whole fucking sea change, a tidal wave reshaping the entire geometry and geography of The Killers’ landscape.

God only knows what Brandon Flowers has been through in the intervening years. It’s hard to believe the man whose lyrics seemed like they were written with fridge magnets is the same one sculpting the journey of Pressure Machine. With a semi-self-aware Springsteenian eye for detail, he shifts his focus to the imperfect lives of damaged people in a small town that resembles the one he was born in, a gambit that pays off in the form of a portrait that will be achingly recognisable to anyone from a similar place. The album wanders along discursive paths, touching on the glamourisation and demonisation of teenage beauty (“the chute opens, bull draws blood, and the gift is accepted by God”), the opioid crisis (anyone who thinks Flowers narrates this album from a remove missed the righteous anger that creeps into his voice singing “somebody’s been keeping secrets, in this quiet town”) and the sacrifice it takes to simply get up day…

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30. Alora Crucible – Thymiamatascension

[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

Toby Driver is still the most reliable Renaissance man of our times, and his latest project a majestic netherscape of translucent haze and dreamless sleep. In many ways, it’s been a while coming: while Driver’s albums as Kayo Dot play out as vivid forays into esoteric fantasies, there’s something out of time and almost ritualistic in his sparser solo outings. They Are The Shield is an obvious touchstone, but his rather overlooked dance piece Ichneumonidae sums up the quality in question, too: something graceful and expansive unto itself, but so clearly estranged from familiar reality that it carries a distinct sense of claustrophobia. It’s cleansing and alienating in equal measure, “ritualistic” in steady rate at which it metes out demands and dividends for a patient listener, and eerily beautiful and meticulously detailed each step of the way. As far as Sounds go, that ain’t too shabby a foundation.

Alora Crucible does a marvellous job of taking the most palatable side of this atmosphere along with Driver’s exemplary solo violin arrangements, transposing both over a delicately synth-padded, dryly guitared new age palette. Primarily instrumental and never more than understated, its composition retains obvious depth, but the subdued (and quite lovely!) tones of Driver’s chamber arrangements together with his serene dynamics make for the closest thing to easy listening he’s put his name to. Don’t get hung up…

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50. Coevality – Multiple Personalities

[Official site] // [Spotify]

Multiple Personalities — and, well, Coevality in general — came out of nowhere and hit me like a ton of bricks at the beginning of the year. The first release of an otherwise unknown band, Multiple Personalities harnesses big Cynic energy sans robot vocals and with more of the wandering cosmic spirit you see in the album’s artwork. A wholly instrumental experience curated and performed by only the trio comprising Coevality — guitarist Jon Reicher, bassist Derrick Elliott, and drummer Andy Prado — all of whom move boulders in terraforming a composite prog landscape on Multiple Personalities.

While that’s feat enough on its own, it really is worth hammering home just how tactfully interwoven and interlaced Multiple Personalities is without becoming an immemorable headache. In fact, it’s quite the opposite — with theme and melody always blazing the trail and making it a memorable journey that’s easy to recall and revisit. And with so many exciting variations strung along in each piece of the composition, there’s always something new and interesting to uncover on each return trip as the unconscious mind follows the familiar and the conscious digs into sidewinding paths of fretless bass, frenetic drumming, and fascinating guitar. –AtomicWaste

49. CHVRCHES – Screen Violence

[Official site] // [Spotify]

Screen Violence is too damn…

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10. Ichiko Aoba – Windswept Adan

[Official site] // [Spotify]

This album could be Ichiko Aoba’s identity crisis, though on the subtlest of terms. I could be projecting. There just seems to be less of… her on it; but, in all fairness, that’s contingent on the singer being personally defined by a voice and permeable space, not also the denser surrounding arrangements and instrumental narratives. Which might be a bit unreasonable. While I’ve mostly known Aoba’s music to feel cloistered — burrowed in contentment, mostly alone — this album is one of a select few cases where the singer achieves a sort of induced wanderlust, though still often doubling back on the realization of self. “Prologue” sounds like meditating mid-air in a failed zeppelin as it disintegrates in slow motion, and pardon the silly specificity. “Pilgrimage” sounds like a world’s worth of joy failing to directly resolve a deep, esoteric personal anguish, and instead fortifying the gaps around it. “Dawn in the Adan” is resilient, and one of the more grounded pieces, even as Aoba’s voice soars. It’s weird to say this as someone who’s made a bit of a hobby of overanalyzing songs, but Windswept Adan is somewhat of a rare case, where superfluous words can indeed do a disservice (more so than I’d normally admit, anyway). I don’t want to talk about it much, as I’d much rather listen to it; and, I don’t…