2023 album picks

Les Rallizes Denudes more than any other band has almost entirely existed as a mythical cult band, never released any studio albums making their entire fanbase’s exposure through often lofi official bootlegs that were despised by guitarist Takashi Mizutani. you get the idea from the bootlegs that everything sounded must have sounded faded & muddy even in person, that they somehow sounded instinctively lofi just from the sheer noise even if that doesn’t make any sense.  The best archival releases in general in recent years have to be the remastered & recovered LDR recordings & this is the best one so far, the highest quality live recording of LDR shatters the mythical idea of their shows from bootlegs. for the first time you can hear every instrument clearly & appreciate the rhythm section, you can hear how the rest of the band keeps everything grounded in contrast to Mizutani’s guitar freakouts often by keeping to the same progressions for up to 40 mins. Mizutani’s noise guitar is what made them mythical & this might be the best artifact out there of his playing now, you can finally hear his actual notes vs the bootlegs where no mic was able to capture Mizutani’s playing without ridiculous amounts of clipping. you get the idea from the bootlegs that everything sounded must have sounded faded & muddy even in person. This is a great introduction to the group & perhaps the first real recording that gives an accurate experience of their shows.

I’m a big fan of all of Lou Barlow’s work & his sideproject Folk Implosion is his most underrated. Folk implosion at its most basic were two guys just trying to have fun making music without any pretense of success, some of their best songs including a surprise top 40 pop hit were made just for the soundtrack of Harmony Korine’s Kids. The hit single Natural One is the obvious highlight, trippy 90s alt that surprisingly I haven’t heard anyone try to copy yet. As it’s a soundtrack, it’s mostly instrumentals with some repetitive long songs but that includes some great haunting instrumentals like Jenny’s Theme & Raise the Bells. Included on here are also some songs from ‘Dare to Be Surprised’ which may have been written during the making of the Kids & are great songs too but were easily accessible outside of this album. 

idk how to classify this, it’s a compilation of singles Lil Ugly Mane put out almost all in 2022 but almost everything on here are some of the best songs of the past few years. LUM is a musical genius who never wanted to be pigeonholed into any genres & all his recent singles show his versatility going from shoegaze to country to trip hop & indie pop. I think LUM’s biggest strength is his production, he’s made some of the most unique hip hop beats, they're always very layered & the most interesting part of his new music is how he constructs rock songs the same way. it’ll be much easier if he got a band together & recorded it that way but it’ll probably lose the personal touch & creativity these songs are filled with. Easy Prey is one of my favorite songs of the decade so far & maybe the best ‘pop’ song LUM wrote. 

forgotten 90s indie band I would never heard of before this recent Numero Group compilation. a melancholy mix of 90s emo, shoegaze & slowcore, 20 years before it was trendy to mix those sounds. The bassist in particular is great on this. I love his bass tone.

One of the best new punk bands, MSPAINT uses synths instead of guitars & the synths on this are great, they're so distorted at times I assumed at first they must have a guitarist too. some fresh sounding basic punk is hard to come by, there really isn’t that much that hasn’t been done by now but for some reason real synthpunk is still a pretty unexplored area, closest comparison I could make to MSPAINT is the late Jay Reatard’s Lost Sounds sideproject. it’s aggressive, direct & got hooks that will stick in your head.

this is my favorite album of the year & i’m surprised no one likes it as much as me. Dod Mark is Yung Lean’s Swedish language rock project with Gud, they started out making very aggressive synth heavy punk/post-punk, there’s still some punk songs on here but it’s much more varied, soundwise. the slower & quieter songs on here are some of the most beautiful songs Lean’s made, a lot of the unorthodox productions additions like strings, what keys are used on Min väg & the female backing vocals on Öga 4 öga keep what’s a very cold sounding album from feeling depressing. I've been a fan of lean for almost 10 years now, i feel like his music has grown as i’ve grown up. I've seen him go from a teen whose music was treated like a joke to this, maybe his most mature work. i enjoyed it a lot without knowing any swedish but looking at translations of the lyrics did get me to appreciate it more.

Yikii is a very prolific Chinese artist whose music kinda defies classification beyond it all being dark, eerie sounding electronic music focused mainly on the atmosphere you get from the music. She’s very influenced by video game soundtracks & this album could be thought of as an imaginary soundtrack to a horror movie, she includes a lot more sound effects than most artists, but I think like any real creative artist their music is an experience that takes you somewhere. A lot of parts in this album builds this eerie & haunted world from Yikii’s eerie childlike whispery vocals to the soundscape she creates mixing different samples & sound effects within songs where everything almost always feels off, like you’re about to go off the edge. For an hour long album it’s filled with very interesting & creative instrumentations & production that never feels repetitive, going from dark interpolations of traditional Chinese folk music on the first track to mixing orchestral & midi vocal samples sounding like something JG Thirlwell might make on Tragic Sublime to the surprising bright & happy instrumental, Sweet Gem Berry Farm. This is the type of album you probably have to be in a specific mood to put on & enjoy but I really recommend this if you’re prepared to enter Yikii’s unsettling dreamworld.

Lane Shi, otay:onii, is one of the most talented artists I know, her music by itself is hard to divorce from the performance, she puts an incredible amount of work into her live shows. Her music has always been an intersection between artsy pop & industrial with Dream Hacker more on the pop side. Most of the album is sung in Mandarin Chinese & I recommend looking at the translations of her lyrics she has on bandcamp while listening. The album is in part based on dreams & like The Crow-Cyan Lake takes the listener to a dream world. I interviewed Lane Shi here at When & she emphasized how much she treats vocals as an important if not the most important instrument, explaining how “I want my voice to reflect life” regarding her vocal style. You can hear how she values vocals on this, you imagine the way she comes up with the delivery is more than just following the melody of the instrumental, she comes up with arrangement the same way you do with other instruments. 

Jeromes Dream were one of the old 90s screamo bands that influenced the sound of that scene a lot & this album might be better than anything else they put out. Keeping in mind the idea of voice as an instrument, the vocals on here are screamo at its best. The singer in Jeromes Dream was famous for how much he stretched his voice to it’s limits 20+ years ago, not using mics on stage he’d just scream really loud for everyone to hear. This resulted in him having to stop screaming for the most part on their later albums, instead yelping into some kind of voice box. This is the first album still their first where he’s doing full screaming on this & it sounds great. The whole album sounds dark, the production is big & punishing, the guitar tone when it’s at it’s noisiest & most distorted is nasty & matches the vocals in intensity.

Shoegaze revival right now is pretty saturated, most of the modern shoegaze bands aren’t bad per say but a lot of end up sounding the same. Out of all the bands labeled shoegaze today, Hotline TNT are one of the best & most memorable. Will Anderson, the one real member of the band, avoids relying on effect pedals, recording all the guitars straight, getting a wall of sound by instead layering a bunch of guitar tracks. He also cares a lot about songwriting which honestly a lot of other shoegaze are lacking now, they just want you to hear cool guitar sounds with not much focus on lyrics & everything else. There’s a lot of power pop influence on here with great hooks, this is real noise pop. This isn’t related to the album but go see them live, they tour constantly & he has 3 guitars in the lineup. They always put on a good show & they’re loud af.