Formulas are not inherently a bad thing. That’s a statement that I don’t think should be controversial, but it’s often a commonly heard credo amongst the music community that sticking to the same sonic formula leads to albums sounding same-y, which leads to disinterest, which leads to declines in quality. Naturally, I disagree, and the reasoning behind that lies in the separation between stagnation and consistency. See, stagnation is the same thing without any minute evolutions or creative variations; it’s what happens when the same thing becomes boring. Consistency is the ability to make something that sounds similar but feels fresh upon each listen. And you might be wondering, “What the fuck does this have to do with a deathcore album?” The answer is quite simple: Fit for an Autopsy are living proof that a band can create the same general sonic concept album to album while preventing the next from sounding stagnant and stale.
The Nothing That Is is an album that, realistically, probably isn’t all that different from The Sea of Tragic Beasts and Oh What the Future Holds, putting aside the slightly increased focus on clean vocals. The same heavy djun-djuns are here, Joe Bad still growls like a beast (he is the product of his fucking environment), and the lyrics still paint grim portraits of modern
The word ‘supergroup’ tends to draw some worried glances when brought up in music discussions. It seems like, for every A Perfect Circle or Audioslave, there’s just as many where the individual talent of the group’s members never really adds up when brought together. How lucky we are, in that case, that Better Lovers, formed from former Every Time I Die members, vocalist Greg Puciato of Dillinger Escape Plan, and ultra-prolific guitarist and producer Will Putney, escapes the jaws of mediocrity to deliver one of the year’s finest metalcore efforts. Granted, the band had already proven themselves in 2023 with their debut EP, but holy crap does Highly Irresponsible ever live up to those grand expectations. Jagged riffs meet howled vocals that have somehow managed to match and even exceed the best of Puciato’s work with Dillinger. Whether it be the groovy, full-speed ahead riffs of “A White Horse Covered in Blood” or the shocking amounts of genuine emotion present in “At All Times”, there’s something here for all metalcore fans, and it promises…
Although Bloodflowers has its champions, The Cure released what many considered their last great album in 1992 with Wish. Robert Smith had been promising new material, but few were optimistic that we would ever again hear anything worthwhile from the legendary band. And then new songs began creeping into live performances: in October 2022, Latvia witnessed the debut of two tracks that would eventually bookend the new album – “Alone” and “Endsong”, which opened and closed their main set in Riga, and surprisingly, they didn’t sound out of place at all. Two years later, Songs of a Lost World was released, and Cure fans were almost uniformly satiated: “Their best since Disintegration,” was the general consensus, and after living with the album for two months, it is hard to argue the sentiment was hyperbolic.
“Alone” and “Endsong”, like most of the songs here, feature extended instrumentals before Robert Smith’s ageless voice enters, evoking desolate portraits of loss, isolation and mortality. I read somewhere that Smith now looks indistinguishable from the writer’s “ageing, alcoholic great-aunt”, but whatever pact he made with demonic forces to keep his voice sounding so young is clearly working, it is truly astonishing how vital his vocals remain.
While the album lacks a pop highlight like “Just Like Heaven” or “In Between Days”, it doesn’t need one – it’s not that kind of album. The placement of “And Nothing Is Forever” early in the tracklist is a masterstroke;…
London folk artist Luke Sital-Singh certainly remains under-the-radar of most indie-goers, making him a prime candidate for this feature. “Still Young” is a beautiful single that comes in advance of Sital-Singh’s upcoming LP, Fool’s Spring. The song blends pastoral acoustics with crystalline production and Luke’s soothing self-harmonizing, resulting in a Sufjan-adjacent vibe that still manages to feel distinct in its own right. It feels like a glowing ember in the middle of a cold, harsh winter. Fool’s Spring releases February 21, 2025.
This is the final week where the new release list is relatively quiet, so take that time to play catch-up while checking out the few new releases available. Here’s a list of major new releases for the week of January 10, 2025. Please feel free to request reviews for any of the following albums from staff and/or contributors.
– List of Releases: January 10, 2025 –
Ethel Cain: Perverts
Genre: Dream Pop / Ambient Label: Daughters of Cain
Franz Ferdinand: The Human Fear
Genre: Indie / Post Punk Label: Domino Recordings
The Halo Effect: March of the Unheard
Genre: Melodic Death Metal Label: Nuclear Blast
Moonchild Sanelly: Full Moon Genre: House Label: Transgressive Records
Obscure Sphinx: Emovere
Genre: Post Metal / Prorgressive / Sludge Label: Independent
Stick to Your Guns: Keep Planting Flowers
Genre: Metalcore Label: Sharptone Records
Tremonti: The End Will Show Us How
Genre: Hard Rock / Thrash Label: Napalm Records
Emily Bowen’s debut album Hate Me For This hits like a series of unfiltered diary entries. The songs were written with the intent of tapping into some of Bowen’s deeper emotions, and the only way for her to access them was to abandon all pretenses and simply write exactly what she was feeling, in the exact words that came to mind during that moment. “Room 17” is a prime illustration, with an admittedly non-poetic lyrical approach that hits harder because of it. The song adopts a confessional indie-pop style that also explores a soft-to-loud aesthetic juxtaposition, and the result is a piece that sounds as powerful as the emotions the artist is attempting to convey — even if she can’t quite find the words. Hate Me For This was released on January 3rd, 2025, and can be heard in its entirety here.
Tucked away between the rural, easygoing strums and hypnotic, swaying vocals of “Barn Nursery” is one haunting message: “If I could’ve changеd your mind / I would’ve ran that fucking light / I would’ve watched you grow up right / And never have to say goodbye.” In what appears to be an ode to a friend who ended their life, the new single from up-and-coming indie darlings hey, nothing cuts deeper than its floating atmosphere or ephemeral runtime suggests. The duo, consisting of Tyler Mabry and Harlow Philips, spans indie folk/rock and midwest emo, having released their 2023 debut LP We’re Starting to Look Like Each Other and an EP last year entitled Maine. If “Barn Nursery” is an indicator of their future direction, then their best work to-date may be just over the horizon.
Greetings, party people! Once again, it’s time for you to have your say: voting is now open for the Top 50 LPs (and 10 EPs, Live Albums, and Compilations) of 2024 community feature!
This will be the first second year we’re going to try to pull this off without the forums, and based on the… delightful feedback from last year about Google forms, we’re hoping this will be a smoother experience. Still no underscores, at least!
Ballots will be open until January 2nd, 11:59PM ET (-ish). For all intensive porpoises, please consider submitting your ballot earlier than that.
Ballot Rules
If you would like to submit an LP ballot, please review the guidelines before submitting your ballot officially (it’s not a race!):
Your ballot must have exactly 10 LPs on it (and, if opting-in to the EP, Live Album, and Compilation ballot, exactly 3 in this category)
You are allotted 100 points to divvy up across your 10 LPs (30 points for the EP/Live Album/Compilation ballot)
Suggestion 1: just give 10 albums 10 points each and call it a day
Suggestion 2: give more points to your S-tier albums and then fewer points to your A-tier albums
The maximum number of points that can be assigned to any one LP is 30 (21 for EPs/Live Albums/Compilations)
The minimum number of points that can be assigned to any one LP and EP/Live Album/Compilation is 1
Let me be honest: it’s actually very hard to describe this album in words. Oak Lace Apparition often feels more like a journey through time and space than it feels like music — and with regard to atmospheric quality, this album stands almost second to none. I could come up with a million different metaphors or similes in a poor attempt at describing the tapestry that Oak Lace Apparition weaves, but it would not do Toby Driver and Alora Crucible justice. I don’t have a better option, though (sorry, Toby, I’ll try to be as poetic as possible about this), so here goes:
Oak Lace Apparition ranges from being as spacious as the universe to being as naught as gossamer passing over your fingertips. The sonic textures are so rich you can practically feel them — like the sharpness of Oregon air when you live in Los Angeles or the softness of fine velvet. At times it is as desolate as being stuck inside on an icy winter morning, and other times it is as stunning as the view of the city from that one secret spot that only you know about. If you can think of a concept with how to describe music — whether that be melancholy, beautiful, isolated or magnificent — all of it can be found on this album.
Brittany Howard’s name alone carries enough weight to make Alabama shake. What Now finds the genre-hopper in a surreal dalliance with soul-adjacent stylings, melding her voice into the music in a way that will affect you even if you struggle to get soulful without a lump of peyote percolating in your gut. No matter where in the stereo field her voice erupts from, no matter which spacious avenue of her range she’s occupying, no matter how her vocals are masked, processed, and extensively multi-tracked, they have an urgent and emergent quality that will sound familiar to anyone who has dabbled in the subconscious warp of improvising. Her voice manages all this while effectively emoting a primal ache for love, a history of heartbreak, and a desire for unity, without ever upstaging or even slightly stepping outside the bounds of each track’s atmosphere. The theatrics come natural, and the production shapes every sound and colour into a precisely sculpted whole.
This is further streamlined by the way Howard only writes the best parts of songs, skipping past languid contextualising and slow builds: the first big Musical Moment of the album, wherein Howard falls into a reverie picturing her name falling from the mouth of somebody that might as well embody love itself, comes a mere minute into the album, 20 seconds of which was basically just chimes. Many such…
Listening to Cindy Lee feels like stepping into a lucid dream where past and future blur together, where nostalgia and invention mesh into a vivid hallucination. Diamond Jubilee is a massive, two-hour-long psych-pop suite that sounds like a transmission from a lost VHS of a world that never was. This lo-fi haze isn’t just aesthetic; it’s the emotional core, draping everything in a bittersweet fog of memory and longing. Cindy Lee (a.k.a. Patrick Flegel of Women) manages to transcend this retro-nostalgia by performing in drag, embodying a non-binary persona that disrupts the rigid norms of the eras the music evokes. Here, drag bridges retrofuturism and modernity — a way to revisit and reclaim the past while reshaping it through a transgressive, forward-thinking lens. This duality makes Diamond Jubilee feel timeless and impossibly new, tethered to the past but endlessly forward-reaching. It’s a sonic time machine for a world that only exists in dreams — and in Cindy Lee’s singular vision. –dedex
49. Vijay Iyer, Linda May Han Oh, Tyshawn Sorey – Compassion
It may only take three people to form a jazz trio, but the likelihood that three virtuosic musical egos powered by academic rigour and already-bustling careers will have genuine, equilateral chemistry when they start playing together is slim. Enter Vijay Iyer, Linda May Han Oh,…
It’s been a long, long year of compiling tracks — some obvious selections from albums I rated very highly, some one-off singles, and others that were merely gems buried on practically unheard-of releases. Those who know my tendencies on Sputnik may be aware that while I certainly have my genre preferences (indie/folk/rock/pop), I’ll listen to practically anything. This list is at least somewhat reflective of that, with selections from all over the genre spectrum. Rather than ranking all 100 tracks — which (1) is always way more difficult than it seems and (2) I unfortunately don’t have the kind of free time to accomplish — I decided to alphabetize the songs with the hope that you’ll pop this on shuffle (or play it alphabetically if you’re built for 6 straight hours of sowingcore) and either relive some of the best moments of 2024 or otherwise discover music that you otherwise wouldn’t have known existed. They’re not the definitive objective “top” 100 songs, but simply my favorite 100 of the year. Give it a spin and feel free to discuss in the comments anything you love, hate, or have discovered thanks to this list. Happy holidays, and see you all in 2025!
Here’s a list of major new releases for the month of December 2024. These releases have been condensed into one post as, historically, December is a slower stretch for new music. In the meanwhile, our staff will be working on compiling their highly anticipated “Top Albums of 2024” feature, so stay tuned to see what we anoint as the album of the year. With regards to the below releases, please feel free to request reviews for any of the following albums. We wish you and your loved ones a safe and happy holiday season. We’ll see you in January!
– List of Releases: December 6, 2024 –
Aara: Eiger
Genre: Black/Doom Metal Label: Debemur Morti Productions
Hey everyone! Hope you’re all doing well. Here’s a list of major new releases for the week of November 29, 2024. Please feel free to request reviews for any of the following albums from staff and/or contributors. Cheers!
– List of Releases: November 29, 2024 –
Busta Rhymes: Dragon Season
Genre: Hip Hop Label: Conglomerate / Hitmaker Music
Crippled Black Phoenix: Horrific Honorifics Number Two(2) Genre: Progressive Rock / Post-Metal Label: Season of Mist
The Gates of Slumber: The Gates of Slumber
Genre: Doom Metal Label: Svart Records
Gorgon: For Those Who Stay
Genre: Black Metal Label: Osmose Productions
Good Morning: The Accident
Genre: Lo-Fi / Alternative Rock Label: Good Morning Music Company Worldwide
By all accounts, what Blood Incantation has done with Absolute Elsewhere shouldn’t work. A core of sophisticated, tasteful death metal (yes it exists, shut up), a big gulp of Pink Floydian psychedelics and a cheesy science fiction sauce, blended together roughly and without much stirring. It has all the ingredients for a disaster that’s just sour all over. Yet apparently yuck-face and stank-face are in close proximity to one another, because despite its shortcomings, it delivers a fucking marvel.
You could make the argument that a lot of good parts individually does not a good album make. The metal and ambient parts aren’t so much mixed together as bluntly glued in a way that shouts whiplash city for any other band with even a smidge less skill. It creates heroes out of riffs and passages that border on the grandiose. I could go on, there is a lot to critique here. And yet it’s still a close frontrunner for my album of the year. The normal rules go out the window when everything on my plate just tastes so god damned awesome. Whether it’s the breathtaking conclusion of “Stargate [Tablet III]”, the fast drumming over the clean broken chords sprinkled throughout “The Message [Tablet I]” or the blissful guitar solos in multiple songs, Absolute Elsewhere has so many highlights on offer that it doesn’t need to become more than the sum of its parts to be amazing. Yet it still manages to become more by…
