In alphabetical order, here is some good music that was released this year.
Admission of Guilt – Boot Camp Demonstration
Admission of Guilt has put together a great beatdown hardcore release with Boot Camp Demonstration. Riff-wise, the group smoothly alternates between a groovy bad-boy swagger and menacing knuckledragging chugs. The star of the show is vocalist Zack Bastard, sounding menacing on the mic while strapped with legit pen-game and clever wordplay that steer clear of the generic “turn-your-back/stabbed-in-back” rhymes that I’ve found tiresome in some corners of heavy hardcore. I’ve had the pleasure of seeing this group several times over the summer. The pit violence they’ve stoked has engaged a fight-or-flight response in me every time, so you know they’re doing something right.
April Magazine – Wesley’s Convertible Tape For the South
There are daytime dream pop albums and nocturnal dream pop albums that both suggest a certain wakefulness, and there are dream pop albums like this one that conjure the surreal pseudoconsciousness of falling to sleep. Like conversations and surroundings falling out of attention as one’s eyelids flicker, much of the music here is a blurry haze in the distance, either stumbling along with a laconic drum beat or swirling in an ambient mist. It’s beautiful and ghostlike in a comforting way, as if the droning swells are just another blanket to cloak you in before fully succumbing to nighttime rest.
billy woods & Kenny Segal – Maps
Look, you’ve probably heard it from many people before that this is one of the greatest hip hop records of the year. I don’t think I’ve got much new to say about it, but I’ll offer a couple observations. I’ve heard detractors whine that woods’ flows aren’t on the beat, which to me sounds like the modern-day broccoli-haired equivalent to all those white critics who said Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz wasn’t real jazz. Woods’ lyricism, in tandem with Segal’s production, paint vivid imagery of those greasy spoons and green rooms they hang out in while tapping into the emotions and introspection that occurs while being out on the road. Also, come on, you can’t tell me you weren’t moved by that final verse on “As the Crow Flies.” It and the album end abruptly before fading out, working to great effect. The relative lack of closure, while maybe not ideal if we envision albums as closed pieces of work, is far more reflective of our day to day lives. Life goes on and we keep traversing the landscapes that maps are drawn for.
Broken Vow – Anthropocene
I was lucky and financially irresponsible enough to travel to France for two months this summer. While there, the temperature got up to 40 degrees Celsius on multiple days. It was difficult to sleep and the hot air felt thick and viscous in the daytime. Everyday, despite having some of the greatest travel experiences of my life, felt like a battle to avoid succumbing to dehydration. Back home in Alberta, things were not quite as hot, but the much drier climate further from the ocean led to a summer full of smoke and flame as forest fires ravaged Western Canada.
I can only fear that summers get dryer, hotter, and more dangerous from here on out due to man-made contributions to climate change. This fear is, in large part, why I so much appreciated Broken Vow’s Anthropocene, as an album that expresses feelings of rage while fighting the sense of despair caused by the violence that post-industrial society has inflicted upon that natural world. It goes without saying how urgent the need to reverse course is, and like vocalist Tommy Harte and featuring guest Jess Nyx on “Propaganda of the Deed,” many more are increasingly realizing that the climate crisis is not a problem that can be solved by pretending it doesn’t exist or opting for a greener capitalism. The call to destroy the machines and forge widely adopted understandings of the need to maintain relational accountability to nature, due to humanity embeddedness within it, are absolutely necessary. Lyrical themes aside, this record is instrumentally heavy as fuck too, and Harte gives arguably the best hardcore vocal performance of the year during the pre-breakdown bridge of “1.5”. His voice radiates with the kind of anger perfectly justified by knowing that the onward march of economic rationality and extractivism are existential threats to everything and everyone we hold dear.
Chung & Cotola – CHUNG SHUI II
Here is an album that sounds as lush as it is grimy, courtesy of the gorgeous production by Cotola and the ice cold bars of Montreal-based emcee Chung. The rapper’s flows float through the sample-based beats with an seemingly effortless swagger, like long smooth strokes of a paintbrush, with hooks and one-liners that wriggle into your ear. The menace is implied and threatened; you see Chung brandishing the blade and know you best not do anything to be on the receiving end of its fury.
Closet Witch – Chiaroscuro
Chiaroscuro is a solid album in terms of what you might expect from a well-done grindcore record, but it stands out in offering some surprises too. Most notably, the closing track “To The Cauldron” starts out nasty and pummeling before switching tonal gears in the second half via a particularly moving chord progression and heartstring-pulling melody emerging from the groaning guitars as Molly Piatetsky shrieks ruthlessly. This band is a powerful beast on tape, and live based on the footage I’ve seen.
drive your plow over the bones of the dead – demo
Frantic and desperate, this Vancouver-based emoviolence band plays urgently and unhinged as throat-shredding screams, jagged guitar lines, and punishing drums hammer confrontationally with incessant force. The low fidelity production works to its advantage because the performances are so raw and so real that studio trickery would only hamper the impact that is brought forward. “when what once worked suddenly breaks” feels like the centre-piece, as its extended middle passage is the first point at which there is any point to catch your breath and recover from the record’s feverish first five minutes. It’s not so easy to make out what is expressed in the vocals or in the samples used, but what is conveyed so powerfully here is a feel of harrowing bleakness and anger. I’m not dead, but consider me driven over by the crushing plow of this band.
Flooding – Silhouette Machine
On this release, Flooding goes far above and beyond the slowcore stylings of their first album. While the plodding tempos and arpeggiated plucked guitar lines remain at times, they are contrasted and overtaken by hard knocking drums and enveloping noisy riffs. Vocalist/guitarist Rose Brown provides a dynamic and powerful presence, switching from softly cooed melodies and nasty harsh screams. The production cloaks everything in a scummy dirt, adding even more rawness to what is already a harrowing performance. “Slit” features the most sinister guitar chord I’ve heard in my life, you’ll know it when you hear it, while ‘Silver Gilt,” easily my favourite song of the year, contains the best riff and single best scream of the year. From an emotional standpoint, this album sounds awful, and I mean that as a compliment.
Fold – Demo 2023
Of the new Wild Rose hardcore groups to crop up this year, Fold lead the pack by going back to the HC fundamentals. In a scene more often represented by heavier/metal-tinged groups, this group stands out with a punk-influenced two-step-centric sound. Already a hit amongst local audiences, the group brings undeniable energy to the live show and not-so-secret catchiness to their raw and furious songwriting. Singalongable and danceable. Fuck Marineland.
full body 2 – infinity signature
Having already put out two solid demos and a handful of sweet singles, this Philly band continues to be at the forefront of groups building on the lineage of incorporating electronica with shoegaze guitars and ethereal melodicism. At their most synthetic is where they sound most exciting on this EP, with “nokia login” and “self heal” melding glistening tones evoking pixelated skies above churning drum loops. This band has a knack for songwriting excellence whether they go more immediate and catchy or when they stray more abstract. With the playful experimentation and sonic world building they have conjured so far, I am very curious to see what bold statements this group could make with a full-length release.
Full Of Hell & Nothing – When No Birds Sang
This is my favourite 9/11-themed shoegaze/sludge metal album of the year. It seems readily apparent at which parts each group takes the lead, particularly in how the most delicate elements of Nothing are contrasted with the jagged shrieks of Full of Hell’s vocals and overdriven amps. This push and pull makes for a dynamic ride throughout that is not always heavy-sounding, but is thoroughly heavy-feeling.
Hannah Jadagu – Aperture
In my nascent adulthood throughout the mid-2010s, I spent many days off during the summer riding my bike throughout various parts of the city. Such experiences were usually solitary and thus necessitated a soundtrack full of sunny sounding music with lyricism that leaned towards introspection. These rides were largely destination-less, and I would leave and return home after several hours, with my mind having travelled just as far as my body had.
Hannah Jadagu is a young singer-songwriter, currently around the age I was then, and on Aperture she offers up bright dreamy indie pop carrying along lyrics depicting the feelings of coming of age and trying to figure out who you are as an adult. This is the type of stuff that would’ve fit perfectly on that biking playlist. While I have a better sense of who I am and who I want to be than I did in my early twenties, I’ve still got miles to go, places to see, and things to be. The process of becoming involves a dialogue with your present and past, and the light shines through the aperture.
JEROMES DREAM – The Gray in Between
I began the year having little thoughts on Jeromes Dream, having listened to Seeing Means More Than Safety once a couple years ago, and finished the year now believing that they have created two of the crowning jewels in the hardcore pantheon: the aforementioned record and this year’s The Gray in Between.
I don’t usually have a run-away favourite album of the year, but The Gray in Between is just far too incredible that I feel I can’t withhold the fact that it surpassed everything else I laid ears on. This is a massive immense sounding record, and undoubtedly a triumph as far as late career albums go. Jeromes Dream has found ways to reinvent themselves with every album they’ve released, while staying true to a manic signature sense of intensity. This one of the best sounding records I’ve heard in awhile: Jack Shirley’s production aids in bringing out the most overwhelming and blownout aspects of this band’s songwriting. The rhythm section is heavy as fuck when Erik Ratensperger’s kick drums pound out in unison with Jeff Smith’s bass stabs. Sean Leary’s guitar-playing compliments them perfectly while operating in tones that produce deliciously shrill feedback in spades. This is precisely how I want a rock record to sound. Ugly and violent.
Matching the noise and Ratensperger’s blastbeat fireworks, Jeff Smith and his recently rediscovered harsh vocals further add to the intensity. As well as they’ve ever done, the band occasionally pulls everything down from 11 to reveal a delicate beauty that always underlies their songwriting, even at its most frenetic and calamitous. The feather-light and ephemeral piano of “Cosmos in Season” is just as much complimented as it is contrasted by the hair-raising and heavy pulsing rhythms of the following track “AAEEAA.” This is a record that demands and deserves seemingly hyperbolic language, because it really did leave me awe-struck and inspired in a way that few other albums have.
Jim Legxacy – homeless n*gga pop music
Melancholic guitars and blunt lyrical vulnerability form a musical core alongside UK drill samples, Latin and Afrobeat rhythms, and some wildly touching flips of mega pop stars. Legxacy produces to be as much a force as a producer as he is able to write and deliver crushing lyrics that navigate the complexities of heartbreak, growing up, and dealing with expectations to maintain a certain level of masculine hardness throughout all of this. With an already well-established unique sonic fingerprint and knack for writing songs and lyrics that deliver heavy blows to the heart, I think the sky is the limit for this artist with a potentially game-changing sound.
Obelisk Ruins – Thought | Vision | Doubt
Thought | Vision | Doubt is a sample-heavy past-referential release. But it is unlike others that remember a promised future that never came, or naively recreate some idealized past that didn’t really exist. What makes it a compelling record is that it acts as a dialogue between the present creative practices of Obelisk Ruins and the Chicago music scene its members were a part of in the 90s. Freshly cut percussion and bass clarinet performances wander amongst fragments of Andrew Petzold-Eley’s collection of old demos and tapes released by his friends’ bands in the Windy City’s shoegaze/folk/experimental underground. As is often the case with the best releases in the trip hop and illbient canon, the record is cloaked in a eerie nocturnal atmosphere, evoking the nighttime side streets and alleys one might have to walk down to find the entrance to the dingy basement venues these bands played in.
Øjne – Sogno #3
With next to no knowledge of the Italian and Spanish languages, there was little for me to pick up lyrically from this record upon my initial listens. But what hit me right away was the emotion pouring in cascades from this band’s melodic riffs and passionately screamed vocals. A feeling I come away with is one of resilience, as we’ve been put through the ringer but still we stand and continue moving forward. I owe it to myself to learn how to sing along with the infectious gang vocals during the chorus of “Le Vite Degli Altri,” one of multiple incredible tunes on this ambitious six-song EP.
Pink Siifu x Turich Benjy – IT’S TOO QUIET..’!!
I’ve been championing the art of Pink Siifu for a while over here. In professing my admiration for 2021’s GUMBO’!, one thing I under-communicated was how much I enjoyed Turich Benjy’s contributions to that record. Obviously, I was delighted to hear the two had dropped an album together. Siifu, of course, being as versatile as he is, sounds great on here, and Turich exudes charisma whenever he is on the mic. Compared to other rappers and artists in the “Siifuverse”, Benjy’s style is reminiscent of contemporary trap or Atlanta sounds, but sounds innovative rather than derivative due to his energetic presence and creative bars. The chemistry between these two is undeniable and the bouncy production only adds to the infectious fun radiating from this record. On the scales of pure entertainment value and good times, few albums I’ve heard this year hold a candle to this one.
Seasons Worn – A Flower in Faith
I missed out on seeing this Vancouver-based mathcore/post-hardcore band by one day due to an ill-advised scheduling of a flight, and that remains one of my biggest goofs of the year. Throaty screams slice through headsnapping rhythms and somersaulting guitarwork. This band rips, and I hope they’ll come through town again sometime soon.
Sign Language – Madison & Floral
On Madison & Floral, Sign Language stands out because it feels like they are really going for it. The songs sound massive, which is as much a credit to the reverberating and hard-knocking production as it is to the way this group writes anthemic songs and delivers them with such an intense vitality. The passion that explodes from this record feels so monumental and honestly necessary as an antidote to the mundane numbness that seems to hang over a considerable amount of daily life and popular culture. To discover and fall in love with music like this seems like a reminder not to lose any drive to live with vigor and passion. This record reminds me of what is worth living and striving for.
untitled (halo) – towncryer
A dream pop/trip hop record with a nocturnal tinge by a band with three vocalists could not be more tailor-made for me. towncryer has been one of most played releases this year and how could it not be? “el prado freestyle” is built around one of the best loops ever put to tape: soaring melodies contrast with a mangled bass tone seemingly determined to derail the song from trudging forward, like downtown traffic held back by stumbling bleary-eyed clubgoers jaywalking towards a cab. “oblique butterfly” overtakes me like blinding city lights rushing by in a rain-streaked window on a car ride. The wheel have left the pavement. The destination is no longer home but maybe the moon or some other place beyond the clouds.
Valeska Suratt – Nameless
Valeska Suratt describe themselves as a mathy emoviolence band, and the music on this record takes on a harrowing cold tone reflective of the winters of their Minnesota surroundings. A chilling sample sets the pace seized upon by songs that twist and turn devilishly. One standout feature is the shrill “bird-call” vocals that sound like a haunting ghost wailing through the pines of a forest shrouded in darkness. I’d also recommend peeping this great performance of theirs in a very cool looking (attic?) venue full of people moshing (as people often should but don’t always do for screamo acts). Bass tone during this set is also CRAZY, and makes me wish that its big slithery anaconda-like presence was just as beefy on this recording. But the EP whips ass anyway, so all is still well.
Wednesday – Rat Saw God
I’ll keep it brief as this is an album receiving plenty of coverage and year-end recognition. Wednesday built off their very rad 2021 album Twin Plagues to deliver another great indie rock record with big noisy riffs, alt-country slide guitar goodiness, and more of Karly Hartzman’s incredibly vivid storytelling songwriting. I thought Twin Plagues went a little underappreciated in 2021, so I’m glad to see them getting some well-deserved flowers now.
Zoon – Bekka Ma’iingan
Again, Zoon drops a great record, which might be even better than 2020’s Bleached Wavves. Daniel Monkman remains one of the most exciting and innovative artists within the shoegaze/dream pop space. Just listen to that opening riff in “Care,” and tell me it isn’t one of the best delightfully warped and mangled guitar tones you’ve ever heard. In addition to the sonic beauty of this album, the songwriting also shines through the carefully crafted earworm vocal melodies on tracks like “Gaagige” and “Manitou.” Monkman, as is noted by Stuart Berman, “reminds us of the implicit radicalism of shoegaze: After all, more than any other subgenre, it has always been about blurring binaries, by dissolving the distinctions between the male and female voice, between rock formalism and avant-garde experimentation, between noise and tranquility.”
Zulu – A New Tomorrow
It was funny seeing how this record broke the brains of some of the doofus-oriented minds in hardcore, because it is only heavy, and only musically hardcore, some of the time. This is a statement record by a creative band pulling from an eclectic variety of influences, and it didn’t take that much intellectual labour by a dumb white guy like me to understand what Zulu was doing with their weaving of metalcore, hip hop, soul, and reggae on a record. In emphasizing that Black people are more than the pain and hardship they have endured through ongoing systemic racism, Zulu incorporates sampling and other referential techniques to draw links between themselves and Black musician/activists that came before them. An emphasis on Black love, creativity, and resilience factors prominently into the lyrics delivered songs like “Crème da Cassis By Alesia Miller & Precious Tucker” and “We’re More Than This,” and via the sampling of Nina Simone’s “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black” (1970) on “Lyfe az a Shorty Shun B So Ruff”. Simone, Curtis Mayfield, Zulu, and the many other Black musicians who appear on this record as collaborators, by providing vocals that were either recorded for this album or by being sampled for this album, are united in their quest of celebrating Black solidarity, love, and creativity while building A New Tomorrow. In bringing fellow current day Black hardcore artists such as Pierce Jordan of Soul Glo, Obioma Ugonna of Playytime, and Bryanna Bennett of Buggin alongside soul and reggae artists of earlier generations, Zulu connects the past with the present so that there is no way of denying the Blackness inherent to their hardcore. Also, I gotta add, that last riff on “Fakin Tha Funk (You Get Did)” has such a nasty nasty groove. I love it.