Quietus Albums Of The Year 2021 (In Association With Norman Records) | The Quietus (2024)

48.

Ruth GollerSkyllaVula Viel

47.

Japanese BreakfastJubileeDead Oceans

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Ed Power

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While Coil might serve as Hawthonn’s spiritual locus and Nurse With Wound a frequent comparison, the sound they’ve reached on Earth Mirror sees them seep stylistically outward. And while there’s no denying that this is an esoteric and decidedly uncommercial release, it’s one that has the power to draw fans of other experimental genres into its puzzling orbit. Occasionally, for instance, you get the sense that the album could serve as a dark, disintegrating inversion of the bucolic cheer to be found within Virginia Astley’s From Gardens Where We Feel Secure. At others you get a hint of how Labradford’s quiet sorrows might have sounded if they were transplanted to some chilly British moor and force-fed a lifetime’s worth of folkloric weirdness. Sometimes, the strongest links seem to be those occupying the further-flung fringes of modern heaviness.

Alex Deller

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Drawing on the sultry throwback energy of ’90s and ’00s R&B, Erika de Casier’s second album is a subtle masterpiece. Working with frequent collaborator Natal Zaks (AKA DJ Central, of Denmark’s Regelbau collective), the pair look to a number of trademarks of the R&B that defined the turn of the millennium, drawing as much on the acoustic guitars that appeared on classic Destiny’s Child and Brandy album cuts as the overall oeuvre of Sade’s best work. Crucially though, Sensational isn’t simply a pastiche affair, as de Casier refines the smoky afterhours energy of her 2019 debut LP, Essentials, and builds ever more confidently on the music of her upbringing.

Christian Eede

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Split into four tracks – two 20-minute passages of dense instrumentation with equally dense titles (the record opens with ‘A Military Alphabet (five eyes all blind) (4521.0kHz 6730.0kHz 4109.09kHz) / Job’s Lament / First Of The Last Glaciers / where we break how we shine (ROCKETS FOR MARY)’), and two shorter cuts – G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END! is ironically Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s least dystopian record to date. Church bells chime under layers of driving guitars and militaristic drums, and amongst the AM radio static that fills the background, there’s birdsong and, whisper it, a sense of hope. As the album’s opening track comes to an end, it’s punctuated by distant explosions; they could be gunshots, but also, they could be fireworks.

Mike Vinti

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There is something of the atmosphere of a Pipilotti Rist installation about this collaboration between Orange Milk label founder Seth Graham and Austin multi-instrumentalist More Eaze. Woozy and psychedelic, oneiric and melancholic, these nine short tracks combine ambient electronics and frantic orchestration with a liberal and highly expressive use of autotuned vocals. Flurries of squawking woodwinds dance around android torch songs, and strange murmurs hover in the middle distance, but perhaps the most important element here is luxurious use of space and silence. The Heart Pumps Kool-Aid manages to feel dramatic – even overwrought – yet incredibly intimate, whisper close.

Robert Barry

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With New Long Leg, Dry Cleaning have put away childish things, and as for the production, the imagery, the craft on display: they’re all the better for it. To start, there’s certainly more time to fill here. Florence Shaw’s formerly rapid delivery now allows for instrumental breaks, encouraging Lewis Maynard and Nick Buxton to build loftier soundscapes. A two-minute pause in ‘Every Day Carry’ envelops the listener in the band’s own biosphere, completed by Shaw’s references to the flora, fauna, fatbergs and firearms that have all been accumulating in her lyrical repertoire since the heady-days of 2019.

Nancy Collinge

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It’s very easy for an artist with such an obviously well-stocked larder to throw the entire plate of spaghetti at the wall – meatballs, sauce, and all – and see what sticks. Ed Dowie’s minimalist instincts temper those potential excesses. The Obvious I never swings for the fences and misses, never over-reaches, and doesn’t outstay its welcome. It’s sculpted and contoured to within an inch of its life. At the same time, such admirable restraint occasionally stops the record from living up to its promise. ‘Dear Florence’ could soar into something huge and stirring but is content to stay modest, even meek. Closer, ‘Robot Joy Army’ grows some teeth but never has the conviction to truly sink them into anything.

Marc Burrows

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Shade is made up of songs spanning Liz Harris’ career, providing evidence that for as prolific as she has been — this is her twelfth album in 15 years — there was still something left in the vaults. The record stands in stark relief from recent Grouper output, first and foremost for its production qualities. Those familiar with older Grouper recordings will recognise the swampy reverb of ‘Followed The Ocean’ or ‘Disordered Minds’ that characterised her early work but have been absent in later years. There is an overall lo-fi aesthetic to all of the recordings which helps to tie the newer and older songs together cohesively. Nothing sounds out of place, nothing sounds too conspicuously clean.

Amanda Farah

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There are elements of the many avenues that Shackleton has explored over the years on the seven pieces that make up Departing Like Rivers, his first solo album since 2012’s Music For The Quiet Hour. Within the first four minutes of 13-minute opening track ‘Something Tells Me / Pour Out Like Water’ alone, you’ll hear the thunderous bass pressure of those early Skull Disco releases on which the artist first built his name, rubbing up next to the live instrumentation and almost shamanic percussion and vocal play that has characterised much of his collaborative work in more recent years. Across a series of extended cuts, and a couple more quickfire ones too, Shackleton draws on that deeply psychedelic quality that has always tied together his work, and on Departing Like Rivers, it feels as though he’s found a breathtaking sweet spot between the last decade’s output and all of those groundbreaking early productions that made me fall in love with his work in the first place.

Christian Eede

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Considering the hundreds of press releases that end up in my mailbox daily, most of them blatantly hyping the next big thing, in the case of Pool, it was really refreshing to just get a totally unexpected new record. The absence of a press release, an industry standard that has unfortunately come to define how most people write about music, opened up a possibility for everyone to develop their own intimate relationship with the record. (I must add this has been the case with most Ilian Tape releases.) Be sure to take 100 minutes off for this one — it’s a beast of a record. You’ll know what I mean when you hear the ’80s hair metal solo in the track ‘Harrison Ford’.

Jaša Bužinel

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On the surface, Shirley Collins has returned to her beginnings as a folk singer, something denied to her for much of her life, but she is now a very different singer from her younger incarnation. When she was travelling with Alan Lomax in the Appalachia and American South during 1959 collecting songs, she was the outsider bringing an anthropologist’s eye to other cultures. Now, she is the culture. She has become the singer she searched for in her youth, someone soaked in the song of the place they belong to. We rarely hear the singing voices of older people on professional recordings, and Collins’ voice is now reminiscent of field recordings made by early folk music collectors in pubs and farmhouses – people singing the songs they knew, the way they sang them.

Tom Bolton

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Space Afrika’s debut for Dais Records is every bit as sprawling and captivating as 2020’s self-released Hybtwibt?, which proved to be a breakthrough release for the Manchester duo. Across 19 cuts – many of them brief interludes of around two minutes or less – the pair build on the ambient framework of past releases, delivering what they describe as “a homage to UK energy” that channels variously the most minimal, fractured elements of Actress, Burial at his most heartbreaking, and the murky trip-hop of ’90s Tricky.

Christian Eede

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Just the six tracks in total, there is an air of familiarity to For The First Time. Rather than a collection of new music, Black Country, New Road have recorded the best songs from their live set into one cohesive and satisfying package. (With the notable exception of ‘Track X’, which has been part of Isaac Wood’s solo live set as The Guest occasionally for some time.) Indeed, for the indoctrinated, this debut is low in surprises, but the songs are very sharp and done a great justice by the production. It’s rare that a band this noisy, an album where chaos reigns, is recorded with this much clarity. There are so many different musical ideas, and none of them get lost along the way.

Cal Cashin

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The last time we heard from Mich Cota she had just released her debut album, Kijà / Care. Back in 2017, that record dealt with trauma, oppression – and also love. Now she has re-emerged as Kìzis. In her Algonquin language, Kìzis means ‘Sun’. This is a fitting name to perform under as her music is filled with light vocals that drift over bright melodies. Her latest album, Tidibàbide / Turn, is fearless and proud, featuring over 50 artists, including Beverly Glenn-Copeland, Mabe Fratti and Owen Pallet, spread over 36 tracks and three hours. Yes, this will be a long ride.

Nick Roseblade

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Billed as both a mixtape and a debut album, ioulus’ oddkin hedges its bets. If you take it as a mixtape, you needn’t rationalise its quicksilver 16-minute running time and head-wrecking restlessness. See it as a fully realised set though, and it really has to be something special to justify its short stay. Still, that’s the most rewarding choice. Succumbing to oddkin as a complete album lets you marvel at how much can be crammed into such a small space, a trinket box of wounded feelings and musical invention.

Matthew Horton

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Play With The Changes signals a slight departure from the forward-leaning fusion R&B of the singles ‘How U Want It’ (2017) and ‘Fill Me In’ (2019), towards gleaming dancefloor anthems that celebrate life and reflect both the rich history of UK club genres and R&B mutations brought about by artists like Kelela and FKA twigs. The album, produced by KLSH, Jimmy Edgar and Machinedrum, who’s been working with Rochelle Jordan since 2015, stylistically transmutates from track to track in a flawless manner. Shifting between liquid D&B, UK garage-infused R&B, shuffling breakbeats, inspired feel-good house, bedroom trap, subdued lovers rock, and so on, here you’ll find some of the finest pop tunes of the year, light-years ahead of many other artists’ current hackneyed disco nostalgia. Jordan’s feathery but round voice makes her part of a long lineage of R&B divas, but instead of retracing the same old paths, she bets on a fully contemporary sound.

Jaša Bužinel

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This might be blasphemy, but when I hear an MBV or Dinosaur Jr. track, I don’t think, “This has got to be the loudest live band in the world.” I’m not sure they need to be. It’s arguably an ancillary thing. The opposite is true of Part Chimp, easily one of the world’s heaviest guitar squads. Pop on Drool and it’s altogether likely that you’ll immediately reckon something along the lines of, “I bet the sheer, unholy thunder of these knuckleheads playing in a cramped bar could explode an unlucky dove just like a 2001 Randy Johnson fastball in a spring training game against the Giants.” Well, maybe you wouldn’t think that, exactly, but the point is it comes through on record. It is immediately evident. You don’t even need to imagine it, to suss out how their gigs might go. You just know it to be true. Would it even work otherwise?

Bernie Brooks

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There is an element present in club music that goes beyond knowing and becomes about sensing, which though intuitive, appears to be interlinked with experience. HARD FEELINGS’ move sure-footedly towards a philosophy of overlapping senses, which, as best articulated by Michel Serres, hinges on the mixing and mingling of bodies. “Absent, ubiquitous, omnipresent sound envelops bodies,” writes Serres in his book The Five Senses. “Practically all matter, particularly flesh, vibrates and conducts sound.” HARD FEELINGS’ Joe Goddard and Amy Douglas here prove super-conductors channelling sound deep into the body.

Ronnie Angel Pope

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Anthony Child and Dan Bean’s well-named The Transcendence Orchestra returns with All Skies Have Sounded, which from the first track, ‘Having My Head Is Felt’, on exudes a sort of trippy, oozy warmth. Indeed, that title sums up the record rather well. Apparently inspired by, or a channeling of, “Gonzen, uminari or retumbos” – mysterious sounds that come from the heavens – the record recalls Coil, Tangerine Dream and, weirdly, Brian Eno, but the interludes on the ’70s ‘pop’ records rather than his ambient moments. There are even Stephen O’Malley-esque guitar lurges, weird subsurface watery gloops and beautiful drones. It’s highly recommended for long mountain valley drives, or a summer wander with a pot of honey imbued with the magical bounty of Dartmoor’s close-cropped sheep pasture for company.

Luke Turner

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Now four albums deep, Sometimes I Might Be Introvert sees Little Simz invite fans deeper still into her backstory. As she serves up some of her most confessional songwriting to date, frequent collaborator Inflo’s production sets the rapper’s acute lyricism against grand, orchestral strings and horns on singles such as ‘Introvert’ and ‘I Love You, I Hate You’. Elsewhere, she subtly looks to Afrobeats on the Obongjayar-featuring ‘Point And Kill’, sets her sights on the dancefloor with ‘Protect My Energy’, and nods to trap-inflected grime on ‘Rollin Stone’, all with excellent results.

Christian Eede

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still slipping vol. 1, Joy Orbison’s debut full-length effort, bounces effortlessly from one style to another, from the intricate 2-step of ‘swag w/ kav’ to the melancholic house of ‘better’. There’s a nod to ’80s post-punk on ‘playground’, and gloriously throaty verses from James Massiah and Goya Gumbani on ‘swag w/ kav’ and ‘playground’ respectively. Rather than a bold new direction, the mixtape feels like a peek behind the curtain, turning the dancefloor monolith into somebody we can all relate to, with Mum calling up to be sweet about something she doesn’t quite understand. “Yeah, yeah. there’s something in it that you can latch onto,” she says about his new single. “It’s got, well… it’s not a melody… but it’s got something you can almost hum to. No, no, I really liked it.”

Liam Inscoe-Jones

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Alexander Tucker has innovated a novel way of processing signal on XMIT, cutting and splicing segments of speech into time-stretched non-sequiturs, a disquieting technique used to effect, for example, on Simon Fisher Turner’s outing, entitled ‘OCT’. ‘ABII’, with Astrud Steehouder, elasticises the album’s most classical vocal elements, whilst orphan electrics are set to gurgle and bray in the background. Nik Void’s contribution, ‘ILN’, is the record’s most straight-ahead knees-up, an analogue, heavyweight raga built for the world’s abandoned dancefloors. At its best, XMIT nods adroitly to Radiohead’s woofer endangering ‘Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors’, and adeptly advances the wild forward/backward vocal simultaneity of ‘Everything In Its Right Place’.

Ryan Alexander Diduck

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As an improviser, Ben LaMar Gay possesses a keen sense of freedom in music. But like The Art Ensemble Of Chicago of old, he understands this freedom not as a license to skronk and overindulge in excessive techniques – when heard, his cornet is subdued – but as a lightweight abandon in using whichever element he sees fit. Case in point, ‘Bang Melodically Bang’ flows along like a fusion of hip hop and jazz, before coalescing into an emphatic chant. ‘Aunt Lola And The Quail’ wobbles through a swarm of elastic sounds chased by a brass texture and frolicking flutes. Meanwhile, ‘I Be Loving Me Some Of You’ assembles a bricolage of Ethio-jazz from synth jitters and wonky beats.

Antonio Poscic

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The second album by Evangeline Ling and David Wrench’s audiobooks is decidedly more focussed than its predecessor, 2018’s barmy and freewheeling Now! (in a minute), but that doesn’t mean it’s any less thrilling. The interplay between Ling’s shapeshifting vocals – sometimes tender, sometimes terrifying – and Wrench’s dynamic wonky-pop instrumentals that makes them so great has only got tighter; whereas before their music was based around the sparks that emerged when their two styles clashed against each other, Astro Tough sees everything burst in unison into flames. Throughout the record, they’re still firing in a thousand different directions – grizzly dub on ‘The English Manipulator’, blasting melancholy synth-pop on ‘First Move’, gorgeously tender on ‘Farmer’, manic on ‘Lalala It’s The Good Life’ – but always attacking in tandem. Each song is a vastly different part of an extremely satisfying whole, and further proof that they’re two of the most forward-thinking pop artists of their generation.

Patrick Clarke

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It’s in lucid shifts between genres – dissolving, looping, spiralling between BPMs and octaves – that Quivering In Time reaches its peak. Powerful, swerving transitions have long been a fixture of Eris Drew’s sets, a style that she’s spent many years perfecting. In the late ’90s and early 2000s, while working a corporate job and training to become a lawyer, she cultivated a taste for breaks, garage and bassline, going against the mainstream penchant for tacky house and the hegemony of smooth mixing. Quivering In Time is a testament to these pivotal years, fuelled by precious memories and past experiences. Yet the album as a whole is far from nostalgic.

Hannah Pezzack

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The day after I got my jab I felt a bit washed out; nothing serious, but enough to make me shrink from any, well, serious listening. This album was a salve, it got me out of bed into clothes and out of the house for a walk. Natalia Beylis picks out simple piano and organ lines, an easy fluency that caresses the resonant warmth of Eimear Reidy’s cello running breathy and low. These three tracks are about trees, prompted by Robert Frost’s ‘Whose Woods These Are’, which moved into the public domain this year. Beylis and Reidy imagine a utopia where the trees go public domain (imagining the disintegration of land ownership by proxy). There is much space to breathe here and those who crave more might be similarly settled by hearing the seasons unfurl in the monthly sessions Laura Cannell and cellist Kate Ellis are recording and releasing throughout this year.

Jennifer Lucy Allan

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David Lynch likened creative ideas to fishing – you wait and when they start biting, it’s showtime. Keep in the shallow waters and you’ll catch the small ones. But “down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.” Creatively sincere, their instincts radically open, black midi pack a bucketful of pretty big catches on Cavalcade. The concept revolves around a series of third person narratives where each tells their oddly allegorical story in a procession. Each track is a universe of its own, doing what art should do: using its own virtual space as an experimental testing ground to try those limits of taboo and impossibility that remain limited IRL.

Danijela Bočev

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Considering its density of sound and complexity of feeling, it’s a wonder that Ngủ Ngày Ngay Ngày Tận Thế is only 27 minutes long. Each musical idea lingers only as long as it needs to. RCĐ gestures at their encyclopedia these little bits of musical synecdoche: a pointillistic sweep here summoning Curtis Roads, a dembow rhythm there recalling Shabba Ranks. Like the V-2 rocket in Gravity’s Rainbow, these moments serve to illustrate a greater whole: in Pynchon’s case, the destructive capability of twentieth century mathematics and engineering, and for RCĐ the vast range of musical knowledge that the internet has made widely available.

James Gui

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There’s a funny thing that happens on As Days Get Dark. Wretched misdeeds and thoughts slip more thoroughly into the third person. There’s a sense of remove. Aged, the lecherous scumbags seem more pathetic than ever. They’re much too old for wherever they are and whoever they’re creeping, just barely louche at best. You can almost smell the flop sweat of the dude in ‘I Was Once A Weak Man’ as he tries to convince himself that his behaviour isn’t deeply, deeply embarrassing – at minimum. Other tracks are nightmarishly parabolic. A grease-stained god of nocturnal dalliances sweeps up the nightlife in ‘Here Comes Comus!’; doomed foxes seek refuge; the past haunts a train traveller in the first-person ‘Sleeper’. Is it possible there are lessons to be learned here? Maybe even a little bit of wisdom?

Bernie Brooks

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There is a refreshing intimacy to Colourgrade, almost as if the recording process simply consisted of leaving a microphone in the shower and then editing out the trickling water in the background. Like the lyrics started off as simple poems on steamed-up glass. In contrast to Tirzah’s distinctively candid poetics, most of the record’s production, with the exception of the guitar-drums combo of ‘Send Me’, or the never-ending carousel vibes of ‘Sink In’, feels like it comes from a darker, less innocent place. Like a void encroaching on a perfect world. In ‘Beating’, lovers miraculously find each other in that void, and even create life. “I found you. You found me. We made life,” Tirzah half-sings as static hisses and grainy loops churn like ashy stratus clouds. The generally somber sonic palette feels like a kind of liminal space where memories swirl and swim, waiting to be plucked out.

David McKenna

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When Valentina Magaletti’s oblong tank drum cycles emerge from the dark to form a tuneful skeleton for ‘Idioma’, the opening cut of Tomaga’s final release, it’s a sound at once known and unknowable, evolved from 2016’s The Shape Of The Dance, yet embedded with a deeper meaning in light of Tom Relleen’s passing. On Intimate Immensity, the breathless reverberations of his Buchla synthesiser are just that bit more incisive than before as they saturate the sound space and grow emotional branches around echoing polyrhythms. Bass textures bubble up and wash over lurking, shy noises with newly discovered weight. An electronic pulse whistles for the first and last time.

Antonio Poscic

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Each song on Fatigue ​​is preceded by an interlude to piece the emotions of each cut together. The first of those interludes, ‘Fly, Die’ asks us, “What have you done to change?” This is the key question that the album as a whole sets out to explore: how do we change and expand ever outward? Across the record, L’Rain envisions a kind of psychic city, each dominion anchored to distinct emotions. We fly through it, amongst the buzz of city life, roads with police sirens and the resistance of air. We catch glimpses of people’s interactions on the street, hear their laughs, hums, cries, claps, stories and feelings. In L’Rain’s genre-subverting world, emotions do not exist in singularity.

Georgie Brooke

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It’s a mark of The Armed’s deftness and intelligence that their fandom can remain both obsessive and inclusive at the same time, never bordering on the weaponised toxicity that has scarred ‘Stan’ culture elsewhere online. What elevates The Armed from the enjoyable to the essential, however, is the extraordinary strength of their art. The driving force behind all their fans’ energy is music that feels genuinely vital. ULTRAPOP is an attempt to take the intensity of the hardcore music the band grew up on, and by injecting it with modern pop’s forward-facing maximalism, up its energy even further still, emerging with a brand new genre from which the album takes its name. In the process, they’re gleefully undercutting the hypermasculine nonsense that can sometimes dog heavier music. Sneer at their ambition if you will, but they’ve succeeded in that mission. ULTRAPOP is as bold, dynamic and addictive an album as you’ll hear all year.

Patrick Clarke

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I have an admittedly unevidenced suspicion that people are reluctant to reference other bands when describing Divide And Dissolve’s music, on account of the duo’s Sylvie Nehill and Takiaya Reed avoiding this. That’s arguably good practise in many ways, but I do wish to emphasise that this is a really good sludge record: striking and individual, but not an unheard vanguard in sound or anything (though certainly D&D’s most fully realised release to date). Reed’s tone – “going deeper and deeper into the swamps,” she’s called it – has echoes of Steve Brooks’ in Floor on ‘Denial’; Burning Witch on the wretched tectonic slippage of ‘It’s Really Complicated’; a Godflesh-type industrial monotony on album closer ‘We Are Really Worried About You’, whose guitar sound is slightly cleaner than on previous songs, all things being relative.

Allan Gardner

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The Apple Drop boasts a rich sonic palette that brings in string arrangements, embraces the guitar in a way this band hasn’t for more than a decade, and pushes Laurence Pike’s crisp, martial drumming to the front of the mix. It sounds absolutely massive. One of the many impressive things about the album is that while it joins the dots between Liars past and present, it never feels like a straight-up retread of those early records. Instead, it suggests a fascinating future for Angus Andrew and a now presumably flexible line-up of co-conspirators. It’s a beautiful, weird, heartfelt and uncanny album – exactly like the nine records that preceded it and also entirely unlike them.

Will Salmon

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If you’ve already come across drone-folk monsters France then Tamz Mein Heinz are their slightly less monofocal cousins, with Mathieu Tilly and Jeremie Sauvage (who also runs the Standard In-Fi label) appearing in both. While France will plough a single furrow for the entirety of a release or a show (thrillingly, I should add), Tanz Mein Herz – who here also include Ernest Bergez (AKA Sourdure), Alexis Degrenier, Guilhem Lacroux, Pierre-Vincent Fortunier and Pierre Bujeau – have a more wide-open sound, while still keeping faith with the hypnotic power of repetition. Even by their previously excellent standards, Quattro is pretty monumental – the shortest track is just over seven minutes, and the longest clocks in at over 26, but what’s striking isn’t so much duration as the tension between savagery (of the drones and the see-sawing fiddle) and the poise of the milky guitar arpeggios, plunking bass and rumbling drums that draws you in as the grooves intensify and trails of synth start to glow like comet tails.

David McKenna

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Listening to Gazelle Twin’s Deep England is like being rocked to sleep by a werewolf dressed as a Morris dancer. Throughout her career, composer and producer Elizabeth Bernholz has demonstrated a devastating talent for burrowing under the skin and conjuring a body-horror dread. There is, in her fantastical and luxuriantly creepy soundscapes, something of a fairytale gone horribly amiss. She shapes her music into especially distressing contours on this companion piece to 2018’s Pastoral, recorded with six-piece all-female electronic drone choir NYX and originally debuted in 2019 as a live performance project. The subject, as it often is for Bernholz, is England and the ancient darkness stirring beneath the topsoil of the present day.

Deep England takes its name from a strain of identity diagnosed by academic Patrick Wright as "this deep-frozen English nationalism." It unfolds like chapters in a bedtime story that’s taken a plunge into the uncanny, as Bernholz deploys a shifting palette of wind instruments, textured shrieks, horror-movie FX, and lurching techno. Chiming church bells usher in opening track ‘Glory’, which quickly whips itself into a terrible rhapsody of female voices, like the ghosts of England’s unresolved sense of self swirling through all at once.

Ed Power

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When else in history have the purportedly censored sounded so unbearably loud? Political correctness – that fusty old Enlightenment idea of making an effort to treat people fairly and equally – is castigated as the worst possible tyranny imaginable. Any act of human kindness, however great or small, is dismissed immediately as “virtual signalling.” Not even Marcus Rashford can save us now.

This is the sorry state into which Sleaford Mods’ latest album announces itself like a punch in the belly from a stubbly stranger outside the small Sainsbury’s. Recorded quickly under lockdown, the music feels urgent in an almost skeletal way. The very bass lines themselves groan and sigh with both exasperation and aggression. Crucially, they still contain just enough swing to get the old hips swaying from side to side. The beats are harsh, icy and precise, with extra electronic embellishments used slyly and sparingly. There are barnstorming guest performances too, from Billy Nomates and Amy Taylor from Amyl & The Sniffers. As for Jason Williamson’s always engrossing lyrics, there is little point in quoting any of these gems directly. They might look great on paper but they have to be heard first-hand to be properly enjoyed and absorbed. A large part of the pleasure of hearing any Sleaford Mods album is in the sheer accumulation of Williamson’s poetic dismay, as well as the perfect positioning of a particularly cathartic rant or foamy mouthed slur.

JR Moores

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All five of the guests on Tewari, as well as DJ Scotch Egg himself, are uncompromising artists, yet in very different ways; Lord Spikeheart’s sprawling screams, MC Yallah’s punchy staccato bars, and Swordman Kitala’s ferocious dancehall flow all mine the same depths of intensity, albeit through different routes. The album that came out of their sessions at the Nyege Nyege villa, Tewari, is a record that embraces that shared penchant for extremity.

On ‘Omuzira’ and ‘Juice’, Ishihara creates a thick, heavy, but somehow spacious beat that’s tailor-made for Yallah’s terse flow, and on ‘Nfulula Biswa’ provides Swordman Kitala with a pummelling, industrial dub track redolent of Kevin Martin at his finest. It’s the three tracks with Lord Spikeheart that are most uncompromising of all – Ishihura’s fiery beats merge with Khanja’s merciless grindcore screams to create something so oppressive and claustrophobic that it becomes thrilling, like a headrush after being starved of oxygen.

Patrick Clarke

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Combined, the supergroup of Richard Dawson and Circle eggs each other on into increasingly fantastical territory. The songs are all themed, however loosely, around plants, via ghosts and perishing fungal spores. But they’re also about humans trying to make-do in worlds that never fail to be hostile. Wading through mythological terror and Day Of The Triffids-esque horticultural horror, the characters of Henki always seem doomed to spend their days feeling lodged in a Sisyphean nightmare.

On ‘Ivy’, it’s a "poacher of men" seeing his son swallowed by malignant vines. The eight-minute narrative spirals out like a horticultural Moby Dick, turning into a full metal gallop as the protagonists’ lives slip further into violent tragedy, one of them eventually "torn limb from limb by his own mother." This strange epic mixes mythologies: a touch turning everything to stone here, a ride into the underworld with a panther there. The narrative takes some unpacking to find coherence, but the sense of desperation is always palpable.

Daryl Worthington

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Like Loraine James’ last album, Reflection is dizzying in scope. She re-imagines classic elements of dance and club music with drill, R&B, grime, dub, electro and trap. Drill and R&B feel more predominant here than the other genres this time round, something James herself feels has seeped more into her work after a time spent listening to both forms throughout the early part of 2020. Her last album, whilst not overtly political, explored what it was like to be a queer, Black woman from a working-class background in a rapidly disappearing area of London. Here, there’s more of that too but with a greater urgency and boldness, like on ‘Simple Stuff’ and album centre pieces, ‘Insecure Behaviour And f*ckery’ (which features Nova) and ‘Black Ting’ (made with frequent collaborator Le3 bLACK).

With Nova, for instance, James explores the objectification of women in the #MeToo era. "Just hold my hand when we drive off the cliff / Bold to see justice it’s just a myth" feels like a Thelma and Louise-like nod to female friendship and empowerment in a world where gender equality is still a world away. "Smacked on the butt since birth / and during the pregnancy," Nova raps over this urgent plea for respect, sung over a techno beat and a clever Drexciyan chord progression. James’ adept mono auto-tuning of Nova makes the message sound both confrontational and weary: it’s a demand for equality but one with a long sigh wondering why women are still asking the same questions.

Elizabeth Aubrey

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2019’s Your Wilderness Revisited relayed a kind of outward inspection that included lyrics like “I went for a walk” or “I felt it cement my place in it all.” Doyle refigures this into an emotional introspection on Great Spans Of Muddy Time. Whereas Your Wilderness Revisited is focused around outside frameworks like architecture, suburbia, and parks, a song such as ‘Who Cares’, with its mantra-like repetition of ‘who cares what they say?’, is like an emotional rewilding that rings out within an immersive, almost claustrophobic bed of glittering electronics. Doyle’s voice sounds clear and true, with the sentiment arriving at an almost elemental emotional state: an absence of care. This song is like a 21st century mechanical music reimagining of Lesley Gore’s ‘You Don’t Own Me’ or ‘It’s My Party’.

Although 1960s girl groups don’t immediately spring to mind when listening to William Doyle, there’s something about the emotional honesty of some of the lyrics and singing on Great Spans Of Muddy Time that recalls how groups like The Ronettes, The Girlfriends, or The Crystals could sing songs wreathed in uncertainty and doubt, using plain language in a heartfelt, direct delivery. In the stunning lead single, the compact, kaleidoscopic pop symphony of ‘And Everything Changed (But I Feel Alright)’, the passionate repetition of the line ‘I feel alright I believe’ in the chorus suggests a narrator trying to convince him or herself of something; the word ‘believe’ can imply both conviction and faith/uncertainty.

Will Ainsley

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Having immersed herself in the calamities of the climate crisis, Tamara Lindeman uses that as an anchoring theme on Ignorance for ten pensively and poetically painted narratives. Here, no stone is left unturned in the Toronto-born songwriter’s deft ruminations on her relationship with the wider world and her place within it.

Opening with ‘Robber’, the record’s most intricately layered and intriguing arrangement, Lindeman expresses fatigue with capitalist-induced corruption. On our first taste of the sumptuous expansion of The Weather Station’s sound – now featuring two drummers, brass, strings, and synths – the sonic ambition on display is immediately arresting. Crawling like a cloud swollen with rain, the arrangement bears the weightiness of an imminent storm that will culminate in a thundering crash of cymbals. Its propulsive beat provides a steady base for the sinisterly intoned textures; sweeping strings and a slinky sax part reminiscent of Bowie’s Blackstar (an influence which remains intact on ‘Atlantic’). The song is a hallmark of the maturation in The Weather Station’s previously more folk-leaning compositions.

Zara Hedderman

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In contrast with its predecessor, Black Metal 2 is anti-dynamism. There’s far less formal f*ckery. It’s a headstate record, all gully no peak, with swells of intensity that then ebb away. You’ll find nothing like the brash shoegaze of ‘Heavy’, an avalanche of crystal chimes and debris. What’s it sound like then? Well, it sounds a fair bit like some other songs on 2014’s Black Metal, that same blurring of samples and instrumentation. A track like ‘100’, which was road music for the A107, blissed out indie with a current of Hackney dread.

"Here we are, back on the guitar," sings Blunt on ‘SEMTEX’, while ‘VIGIL’ has the same midi strings that gave The Redeemer its shoddy grandeur, and sees the return of long-time collaborator Joanne Robertson, contributing guitar twangs and vocals. There’s a potent presence of Mazzy Star, the dubby dream world of AR Kane, also Felt and The Pastels – the socially acceptable alternative to C-86 type jangle. They’ll even steer dangerously close to emblems of US slackerdom, Kurt Vile and the like. A well known tradition in all these kinds of music is the hiding of depression behind jaunty tunes, but on Black Metal 2‘s ‘DASH SNOW’, Blunt sounds properly dejected over the summery instrumental. It’s tears and sh*t co*cktails on a grotty garden patio. All aftermath, contemplation.

Eden Tizard

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On aya’s debut album for Hyperdub, vocals represent a flexible musical tool. Through her poetry, she conveys concrete images and succulent metaphors (“burned by the yearn I roll a rock frontside”), and by using electrifying vocal modulations, she provokes various effects, both alienating and sublime. I experience her extended cyborgian voice as the kind of shiver-inducing vocal psychedelia Kit Mackintosh describes in his recent book Neon Screams. It has a post-humanist dimension as if produced through a robotic larynx with prosthetic vocal cords (the track title ‘OoB Prosthesis’ – short for ‘out of body’ – points in this direction). But it is also about phonetics, inflections, rhymes, wordplay and alliterations (“A sharp scratch and we start with the scalp”). Her language is full of unexpected turns.

Listening to vocal tracks, like the sombre earworm ‘what if i should fall asleep and slipp under’, or self-described ASMR drill of ‘Emley lights us moor’, my mind constantly shifts focus. There are the vapour trails left by the voice(s), perpetually varying in pitch, depth and texture, like those DeepDream videos, and the multidimensional productions floating in the background – HD sonic tapestries interwoven with crumbs of sound, subtle nuances of timbre, and dramatic synth pyrotechnics that feel out of joint. A true sonic contortionist, aya is always looking for new ways to squeeze sound into unknown forms.

Jaša Bužinel

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Looking back on The Bug’s fourth album, 2014’s Angels & Devils, it was almost as if the Banner and Hulk dichotomies were jostling for prominence. On the LP’s earlier and mellower tracks, the Banner superego tried its best to hold onto the reins, luring listeners into a false sense of security, before later cuts like ‘The One’, ‘f*ck A Bitch’ and ‘f*ck You’ let the wrecking ball loose. With Fire, that irrepressible Hulkness, pent-up over lockdown and eager to return from hermitic isolation to red-lit rooms full of sweating, dancing and juddering bodies, is back to wreak full sonic mayhem again. The ideal live show, Martin says, should “alter your DNA, or scar you for life in a good way.” The material offered here is guaranteed to succeed.

In many ways it feels like a more direct sequel to 2008’s London Zoo, described by at least one critic in unintentional Hulk-ian terms as "tense," "angry" and "ferocious, but always triumphant," adding that it "threatens to bust out your windows and rip holes in your speakers." Fire‘s ingredients are similar to those of London Zoo, but all the measurements have somehow been upped. The mutant basslines are deeper than a humpback anglerfish, and almost as ugly. The tracks are packed with apocalyptic rumbles, industrial clankery and sepulchral beats, decorated with inner-city sirens and other smog-ridden reverberations.

Martin has stopped overthinking things, he has said, going with his instincts instead. By relaxing his self-confessed "maniacal control," he’s letting the music breathe for itself and teem out more naturally. The Hulk is on the loose.

JR Moores

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