Some Albums I Liked in 2018

This is a Mitski-free zone.

15: Your Queen is a Reptile
— Sons of Kemet
(jazz, Afrobeat)

This album is really none of what I usually look for in jazz. My preference tends to be for jazz that is free-form, rock-inflected, dissonant — none of which really applies to Sons of Kemet. Instead, what attracts me to this album is its tight, danceable grooves and the percussion that drives them, the inventiveness of its cross-genre borrowings (from Afrobeat to dub to grime), and above all the sheer amount of fun everyone playing on this thing seems to be having.

Highlights: ‘My Queen is Ada Eastman’; ‘My Queen is Harriet Tubman’; ‘My Queen is Albertina Sisulu’; ‘My Queen is Doreen Lawrence’

14: Suspiria — Thom Yorke
(musique concrète, krautrock)

It undoubtedly feels strange to include a soundtrack album — for a film I haven’t even got around to seeing yet, no less — on a list like this. But hearing Thom Yorke give free rein to the experimental and cinematic tendencies in his music is something special. The album cycles through a few different styles, with vocal pieces ranging from poignant piano ballads to uneasy psychedelic dirges, while the instrumental pieces vary between low-key soundtrack music, droning ambience, and the fantastic avant-garde noise assault of ‘Volk’. Not an album I’m ever likely to turn to for casual listening, but an otherworldly experience in its own right.

Highlights: ‘Suspirium’; ‘Open Again’; ‘Volk’; ‘The Universe is Indifferent’; ‘Suspirium Finale’; ‘A Choir of One’

13: Last Building Burning
— Cloud Nothings
(post-hardcore)

After last year’s wilfully bland Life Without Sound, Cloud Nothings made a striking return to form this year with the tight, ferocious pack of songs on offer here. This album leans heavily into the rough edges that have always been the best part of the band’s music. From the rip-roaring noise rock of the opening track through the spacious structure of ‘Dissolution’ (essentially this album’s answer to ‘Wasted Days’) to the anguished vocal performance of ‘So Right So Clean’, the whole album feels like a self-conscious attempt to recapture the energy of the band’s breakthrough, Attack on Memory. And they completely pull it off.

Highlights: ‘On An Edge’; ‘The Echo of the World’; ‘Dissolution’; ‘So Right So Clean’

12: Bad Witch
— Nine Inch Nails
(industrial rock)

Marketed as the last instalment in the ‘trilogy’ that started with Not the Actual Events, Nine Inch Nails’ latest album (or EP, if you like) feels much more focused and consistent than its predecessors. Opening with two punchy industrial rock songs shot through with influences from ’90s electronic music, as immediate as anything Reznor’s released this decade, the album then delves into more experimental territory. For one thing, the saxophone is incorporated in a big way, and somehow never feels out of place. The two instrumental tracks feel like extensions of the kind of music I loved on Ghosts I-IV, while the remaining songs are clearly channelling latter-day Bowie records like Blackstar. The album’s short run-time ensures it’s never anything but brilliant — there’s no filler here. Probably the best NIN album since The Downward Spiral.

Highlights: ‘Play the Goddamned Part’; ‘God Break Down the Door’; ‘Over and Out’

11: Idol — Horrendous
(progressive death metal)

You could describe Idol as a technical death metal album, but you might get the wrong idea about it if you did. The spin Horrendous put on death metal is decidedly not the stomach-churning technical cruelty of Gorguts or Ulcerate. Instead, this album is full of proggy theatrics and powerful, soaring melodic passages. It’s also brutal, of course — although the vocals on the album are not your typical death-growl but rather a sort of feral, unpredictable yelp that brings to mind Weakling. More than anything, Idol sounds like someone unearthed a lost Death record. I can’t give it a bigger endorsement than that.

Highlights: ‘Golgothan Tongues’; ‘Devotion (Blood for Ink)’; ‘Obolus’

10: Room Inside the World
— Ought
(post-punk, art rock)

If I had to pick the single most beautiful song of 2018, I wouldn’t hesitate in picking ‘Desire’. The centrepiece of Ought’s latest is a gorgeous, emotionally potent song held together by an unabashedly over-the-top vocal performance from vocalist Tim Darcy. It’s impossible not to sing along. Listening to it feels like receiving a really warm hug. Elsewhere, the album trades in melodic rock songs that often take sharp turns halfway through, like the clarinet-inflected explosion at the end of ‘Disgraced in America’ or the driving motorik rhythm of the middle section in ‘Take Everything’. It’s an album that cements Ought, alongside bands like Preoccupations and Protomartyr, as important creators of intricate, inventive post-punk.

Highlights: ‘Disgraced in America’; ‘Desire’; ‘Brief Shield’; ‘Take Everything’

9: Dead Magic
— Anna von Hausswolff
(gothic rock)

For a while now, Anna von Hausswolff has been releasing albums that sort of sound like if Kate Bush got into Swans. Dead Magic doesn’t buck that trend but takes it to another level. In a series of five elaborately theatrical and often monstrously large compositions — the best songs on this album are 12 and 16 minutes long respectively — von Hausswolff leans into the theatrical, gothic, progressive and proudly immoderate side of her music. None of these songs are the sort of epic that just languishes for much of its run-time; rather, they’re full of big, cathartic moments that leave you gasping for air.

Highlights: ‘The Truth, the Glow, the Fall’; ‘Ugly and Vengeful’

8: Double Negative — Low
(dream pop)

On Double Negative, Low by no means stop doing what they do best — writing beautifully sad songs — but they do something revelatory with the way they produce these songs. Almost everything on this album is shot through with sharp, bright shards of electronic noise. Compositionally, everything remains pretty straightforward — these are beautiful pop songs, but not structurally adventurous for the most part. But the shifted sonic palette turns out to be transformative, as witness the waves of noise and vocal distortion which threaten to overwhelm ‘Always Trying to Work It Out’. A poignant and overpowering record.

Highlights: ‘Quorum’; ‘Dancing and Blood’; ‘Fly’; ‘Always Trying to Work It Out’; ‘Disarray’

7: Love in Shadow — Sumac
(post-metal)

Sumac’s collaboration with Keiji Haino earlier this year apparently rubbed off on them. Their new album is relentlessly noisy, improvisational and chaotic. The four epic compositions that make it up flow freely between gigantic, pummelling riffs and strongly jazz-influenced passages of quieter experimentation. It’s a dynamic that produces an incredible sense of motion.

Take the first half of ‘Attis’ Blade’, which begins with an incredibly tight, menacing groove, which builds and builds until it dissolves into a pure noise rock freakout. This too dissolves, briefly replaced by a guitar melody no less ominous for its minimalism. Then the explosion comes screaming back to life for another two minutes of pure power. By this time you’re ten minutes into the song. It’s this bold, supernaturally patient compositional technique that characterises Love in Shadow. Like its cover art, the music on this album is dark, seemingly chaotic, but incredibly unified in tone — a thing of foreboding beauty.

Highlights: ‘The Task’; ‘Attis’ Blade’

6: Safe in the Hands of Love
— Yves Tumor
(experimental pop, noise)

There were few albums less predictable than this one in 2018. Across ten consistently fascinating tracks, Yves Tumor creates a new sort of pop music that sounds variously informed by R&B (‘Licking an Orchid’), The Alchemist (‘Faith in Nothing Except Salvation’), early 2000s pop (‘Noid’), 90s emo bands (‘Recognizing the Enemy’), vaporwave (‘Economy of Freedom’), and Throbbing Gristle (‘Hope in Suffering’). Somehow — and it’s not easy to describe how — all these influences come together to create a heady, absorbing collection of songs, one which plays with your emotions as much as your expectations.

Highlights: ‘Honesty’; ‘Noid’; ‘Licking an Orchid’; ‘Recognizing the Enemy’; ‘Let the Lioness in You Flow Freely’

5: You Won’t Get What You Want — Daughters
(noise rock, no wave)

Daughters had been gone for a while, and I’m so glad they’re back. You Won’t Get What You Want is about as good a comeback as you could have asked for. Now fully leaning into the noise rock sound they’d been drifting towards pre-hiatus, Daughters have delivered a truly frightening album. Alexis Marshall’s vocals sound constantly mid-psychotic episode. The guitars and electronics wail and moan.

Besides ragers like ‘The Flammable Man’ and ‘The Lords Song’, the band indulges in more ambitious compositions, including the supremely unsettling ‘Satan in the Wait’ — a song, incidentally, not much shorter than the band’s entire first album. Elsewhere they channel Nine Inch Nails on the album’s moody centrepiece, ‘Less Sex’, and let loose on the gloriously unhinged ‘The Reason They Hate Me’. Throughout, the sheer manic energy of the album ensures that it’s never anything less than gripping.

Highlights: ‘City Song’; ‘Satan in the Wait’; ‘The Lords Song’; ‘Less Sex’; ‘The Reason They Hate Me’

4: Some Rap Songs
— Earl Sweatshirt
(jazz rap, experimental)

This is a weird album. After 2015’s devastating Solace EP, I didn’t know what to expect next from Earl, but I knew I was excited to hear it. Some Rap Songs turns out to be 15 brief songs adding up to just 25 minutes of music. Its nonchalant title and hilariously low-effort cover don’t lead you to expect there’s much here. But there is. There’s magic here.

The album’s unusual lo-fi production is the thing that immediately strikes you. The claustrophobic minimalism of ‘The Mint’; the crisp, angelic soul samples of songs like ‘Azucar’; the Disintegration Loops-esque avant-gardism of ‘Playing Possum’ and ‘Peanut’ — Earl, who handled production for most of the album himself, invariably does a lot with very little. Lyrically the album picks up where Earl’s relentlessly neurotic 2015 releases left off. Though he seems at peace more often here than on any previous release, he never shies away from discussing the dark times he’s endured on the way. A fragmentary, poignant treasure of an album.

Highlights: ‘Shattered Dreams’; ‘Cold Summers’; ‘Nowhere2go’; ‘Ontheway!’; ‘Azucar’; ‘Eclipse’; ‘Riot!’

3: Пользa (Usefulness)
— ГШ (Glintshake)
(post-punk, avant-rock)

I don’t speak any Russian. Consequently, I have no clear idea what Glintshake’s songs are about. But that doesn’t make them any less fun to listen to. Listening to them, a variety of associations spring to mind: first the lovably oddball new wave of Talking Heads; then, as they delve into the more experimental side of things, self-consciously avant-garde bands like Art Bears and This Heat.

Whatever their influences, the formula works fantastically well. The boundlessly creative pieces on Пользa generally begin as fairly conventional, extremely catchy post-punk songs, driven by the infectious, brittle power of vocalist Kate Shilonosova’s often subtly menacing performance. Then they blast off into equally compelling left-field territory, often accompanied by jazz and classical instrumentation — the slow build of the title track’s back half; the dazzling and seemingly inexhaustible climax of ‘Недолж’; the closing track’s Godspeed-channelling conclusion. There’s not a moment on the album that doesn’t feel like genius at work.

Highlights: ‘Симпатичный мужчина’; ‘Недолж’; ‘Что-то случится’

2: A Laughing Death in Meatspace — TFS
(punk blues, psych rock)

Tropical Fuck Storm, Gareth Liddiard and company’s sensationally named successor to previous band The Drones, are even better than that band. On A Laughing Death in Meatspace, every previously half-indulged crazy impulse is pursued to its logical conclusion. You could call this album punk, psychedelic, noise rock, electronic, without ever coming close to capturing the sound on display here. It sounds like the future.

But TFS envision a particularly nasty future. The music is consistently animated by a bitter, furious energy, the sound of disappointed expectations. From the opening track’s pained reckoning with someone who just can’t stop letting you down, through the album’s various darkly funny takes on contemporary political ferment (‘all this scot-free moralising’s got me quite demoralised’; ‘valley engineers called the end times meatspace’; ‘if you ain’t worried that they’re gonna do your work for you, you’ll recall they said the same thing about farming too’; ‘plutocrats and idiots, big on firm handshakes and eye contact’), TFS never betray a hint of optimism. Moments like the elegiac coda to ‘Soft Power’ and the emotionally overwhelming balladry of the title track are just as resonant as their noisier neighbours. An album which captures the apocalyptic mood of our time better than any other.

Highlights: ‘You Let My Tyres Down’; ‘Chameleon Paint’; ‘A Laughing Death in Meatspace’; ‘Rubber Bullies’

1: ONLY LOVE — The Armed
(hardcore, art rock)

The Armed are not interested in half-measures. From start to finish, ONLY LOVE is a technicolor avalanche of noise. It is a synth-drenched catastrophe. It should come with an epilepsy warning. It is the maximum amount of noise that can be made. Police warn that it is still at large. It simultaneously gave and cured me of a headache. It has arpeggios. It is on various drugs. It has downloaded several viruses onto my computer. It is entropy incarnate. It punched me in the head and then gave me a hug. It sounds like if God made a hardcore album.

Highlights: ‘NOWHERE TO BE FOUND’; ‘FORTUNE’S DAUGHTER’; ‘LUXURY THEMES’; ‘HEAVILY LINED’; ‘MIDDLE HOMES’; ‘ON JUPITER’