2021 Albums of the Year; 10–1.
10. Arlo Parks — Collapsed In Sunbeams
A Warm Flourish
There is something so appropriate about the record opening up with a poem. This is one of those records that, like poetry, is constructed carefully, line by line, with each segment having an impact as it stands alone and bears a solitary strength but as a whole completes a thorough diagram of emotion that’s worth portraying as its sum. From a far away perspective, this is mostly a contemporary pop album, one with single after single that sing powerfully and enjoyably. But the jazz of every track stands out when you sit beside it, when you let each song breathe its full beauty into you. It reminds me, not stylistically, but instead reputationally(?) of the Nelly Furtado album Loose from 2006, where each song was more of a surprise than the last, the way that every song had a feeling like this was going to be the new greatest thing, like I had the sense that I was going to be following the artist through everything she did. And sometimes, the truth is they happen to just capture this very special writing moment in a bottle and it all comes together in a perfect vision. I can’t speak for the future with Parks, but this record in this present is absolutely brilliant. The closer you listen to the lyrics show a guardian of friends, of loved ones. Someone standing from the sidelines trying to coax the love from herself into the eyes of her People, to keep them from harm, to keep them in love, to keep them alive. Her accent is heavy in so many of these songs, and with its sensual delivery, it’s tough to remember that these are songs about pain and about trying to instill hope. There lies a delicate sensibility throughout the record that feels vulnerable throughout the fight as well, the notion that hers is but one voice, and that the subjects do need their own strength to overcome their demons, their oppressors, but she is willing to do all it takes to help them find that it sits inside of them. This delicate sentiment is hidden behind hooks that stay with you for days. This one dropped in late January and stuck with me all year, one of those albums that made it twelve long months needled deeply into my head, and I’m so glad to celebrate it on this list.
Check Out: Black Dog
9. Perturbator — Lustful Sacraments
Hurt Painted Dark
It’s strange to say that there’s a fun goth album out there that gets me revved up basking in the building shadow of a hexed bonfire, but this is it. I can draw a direct throughline that connects my discovery of The Sisters of Mercy during my 10th grade “goth” trench coat phase and the enjoyment of this record. The sound of dark and rain-soaked streets, the chunkiest and most robust synths, the melodrama, the commitment. This is all absolutely the kind of hard and miserable music I wanted to represent me. But there’s still a sense of kineticism surrounding the record, a way to feel a bounce in the step. There is such an appreciation for the 80s leather jacket, tall blond spiky hair, sunglasses at night, UK goth night club sound that it sounds like there is no way that it came out in the last 365 days. The control of sound is immaculate, bordering on the vision and execution of Nine Inch Nails if they had gone in a darker direction as opposed to taking on the more cinematic. The long and winding backdrops of keyboards create such an incredible ambiance for the driving drum patterns and the echoing and reverbing chrome guitars. These are environments built for brooding. I love this record not only for what it’s doing today, for the deep and textured sounds that construct a dark aesthetic by way of nest-building and applying a multitude of layers and sounds, but also for what it makes me feel for a style that I heavily connected with in my formative years.
Check Out: Messalina, Messalina
8. Spiritbox — Eternal Blue
Dichotomy
I’ve been following this band for a couple of years. They released a massively strong EP in 2017 and there has been a slow trickle of tracks over the few years that followed. So to say that this full length felt like a long time coming is an understatement. It was an incredible feeling to see them really pop off with Holy Roller, a song that turned a ton of heads. It was a video from the summer of last year that, even if you didn’t catch the song itself, saw Courtney LaPlante doing her vocal part for the song, roaring into a microphone in a studio, absolutely flooring its viewers. Size is of critical importance to what makes these tracks special, as they seem to stretch to arena sized anthem and take few chances to turn down their scope. When the guitars aren’t chugging, there are lots of synth and electronics at play, the verses produced either screamed or sung to be heard in a room the size of a banquet hall. I feel like this band is primed to become enormous. They remind me of PVRIS just moments before getting recognized and then being catapulted onto soundtracks and into a huge new spotlight. If this record, these songs, get in front of the right people, it’s only a matter of time. There’s enough appeal for contemporary listeners to fall in love just the same way early adopters have. The goosebumps I feel at the beginning of Holy Roller is such an incredible constant, the robotic prayer which invokes the spirit of a decimating track to crush the supplicant… so rad.
Check Out: The Summit
7. Tigers Jaw — I Won’t Care How You Remember Me
Amber In the Night Sky
At the end of 2020 when Tigers Jaw dropped the single Hesitation, I think I knew at that moment that this record was going to be special. It’s such an unbelievably uplifting sound, with the pop energy moving everything in effervescent ways, the pauses, the halts, the moments in the song that make every molecule in me want to head to a live show and absolutely lose my mind. There is a sense of power and mastery of the style that shines a special light on the way that the band is writing these songs, the way the guitars are produced to sound full and robust, it feels like a record that the band has made to place a crown atop all of the work that they’ve done over the years they’ve been together. I remember going to see this band with a friend before I moved to South Carolina and he was so excited, gushing about the way the band has a bunch of songs that were deeply important to him. And while I was at the show, I never was able to decode exactly what made it hit for him, but watching him glow in front of them was something that planted a seed for me, something that made me know that there was something, some eventuality that the band’s music and I would eventually sync up. And this is the record that grew from that seed. There is a run of songs from Cat’s Cradle through New Detroit, from Lemon Mouth to Commit, that are sheer joy, a light spot in this year of all years that is a welcome rush of positivity, a wave of brightness that has been a welcome passenger in many a car ride with me since this album’s release.
Check Out: Hesitation
6. Couplet — LP1
[Your] Warm Center
Many bands have tried to recreate the lush, analog and thick hum of The Postal Service’s ‘Give Up’, but none have come close to capturing the same snow-crunch, coiled cable, perfect headphones rock record until this one. The endlessly stretching key sounds commute deeply into the ears, creating a sound that can only read as temperature warm and cozy. One can measure the electricity, can picture the outlets and connections that the instruments have used to traffic their sounds. These songs feel like closed eyes, comfortable chairs, original framed paintings. Right down to the record design, everything has a place. Everything is a nod to tangible components, to design we are meant to hold and examine, to find its place in our lives, even if in its imaginary pulse and reflection. In the bubble of slowly vibrating keys, we can find loops and strokes that feel just as deliberate as they feel a chaotic remnant of the space in which they were manifested. And while I think the massive synths do take the spotlight for me, I don’t know if enough can be credited to the way the drums are dotted through the record, carrying a massive amount of the weight at times when it’s least expected. They bring a feeling of kinetic energy when all else is in a meditative state. Every song on this record feels great, sounds great, but I think they all reach their maximum capacity when listened to as a whole half hour dip, a float in a chamber that will straighten out the folds.
Check Out: Irons
5. Glassing — Twin Dream
Inverting the Sky
My first indication that Twin Dream was going to be a record to reckon with was its full hand of styles within the first track that introduced me to them (Burden). And listening to the record front to back, we are served a veritable banquet of aggressive arrangements. The opening track has all that we can bear with a stoner metal riff as its main course and a screeching roar that hovers over the landscape, eventually subliming into a drifty introspection with about a minute remaining, reflecting back at us a modern prog-core(?) part reminiscent of something out of the Night Verses camp. The massive scale of this record never lets up. And listen: I know that comparing anyone to Daryl Palumbo is immediately begging for contradictions, and that’s fine. But the vocalist, to me, sounds like if the Glassjaw singer was pushed to the absolute limit, to the absolute brink of extreme music and was unleashed into a metalcore band, and was somehow restrained from implementing his masterful technique of writing hooks. This is a constant barrage of manic style changes, of mania, of fever. This is one of those bands that must be an absolute dream to experience live, trying to navigate the dichotomy between wanting to throw your body into vicious shapes, to embrace the inner untamed beast inside, while also wanting to witness the majesty and size of the songs the band is creating. The drums keep up, but guitars are truly the gods in this machine, crafting galaxies and painting enormous murals with their bombastic strokes, with their towering ambition. Moments that make me cover my mouth with how absolutely godlike the sweeping destroyer’s gaze is, like at around 1:17 of ‘Doppler’ when things build to critical mass and the eyes roll back, and there’s a heft that fills the sky which is unmistakable, a punishing terror that soars above all things and spares us from going much heavier, from going beyond just staring into the wicked abyss and letting us live beyond it. This is a stunning record, one which I’m so glad that I stumbled upon purely by mistake.
Check Out: Doppler
4. Genghis Tron — Dream Weapon
The Glow From Within the Chrome
At a time, Genghis Tron represented some fringe experiment where they took the extremity and fierceness of grindcore and married them with fat synths and electronic samples and the marriage of the two had a level of creativity and brilliance for most and a feeling of novelty to some. This record brings the band back to the front, clearly having spent time refining their sound and maturing their take on the aggressive and electronic genres, equipping many more weapons under their belt, all of which they are sharply adept at integrating. The first two tracks show a new level of restraint, a different spirit at which the band is approaching their songwriting, but it’s on the title track where the vision and the scope truly come together. Their language becomes present. It’s massive and easy to unravel your mind into. A metronome the size of a skyscraper, throbbing in vibrating neon. The two songs that follow wear the same pulsing cloaks of color, a galactic fluidity ribboning widely in leviathanic shape and size. The deeper you allow yourself to sink, the broader the universe that the band has created in this album becomes. And true to the title (and what a sick fucking title), this has embodied the essence of a Dream Weapon on many tiers, a REM-cycled descent into a place where everything is armed and primed but nothing is going to go off, nothing is going to hurt you, and most impacts are going to feel like punching a ghost. The drums are enormous, produced by Kurt Ballou to sound like a blend of war march and massive orchestral soundstage. Where I believe the trend is currently to distort, derange and damage the digital sounds and effects you’re going for, Genghis Tron has instead polished it all to a fine sheen, a glowing obsidian prog record that I think could only have come from their own personal history of knowing when and where to utilize the crushing blow, one that never comes if you’re waiting for the shoe to fall, instead creating a glass haven to indulge in the parting of the light as you pass its threshold.
Check Out: Alone In the Heart of the Light
3. Lord Huron — Long Lost
A Phantom In Time
This album perfectly recreates the same kind of unlived nostalgia that I have for the frenzy and excitement of The Beatles on Ed Sullivan, for Elvis on black and white television, and for all the shows that Johnny Cash would play that would have women screaming and bending at the knees. Most of that can be contributed to the throwback interludes that sound like we’re hearing television performances, nightclub appearances and late-night interviews. But this would not be able to be pulled off without the very authentic and stripped-down production of simple guitars, the toe-tapping bass guitar and the barebones drum kit sound. This all works to heighten the discovered lonely wanderer persona that Ben Schneider embodies throughout this record. I’ve never heard a delivery of a voice that so embodies the word forlorn. For all of my adoration and praise for the depth of sound and the layered contours of the music that I’ve loved this year, it’s difficult to refute the mastery of simplicity present on this record. This is a record for an easier time from an era now where there is so much to muck up the world that something this straightforward, something this pure seems like an anomaly. This reminds me so much of high-waisted slacks and white t-shirts, of beat poets, of open road and the rundown bars you’d find on your way to the coast. If there were going to be a men’s answer to the persona that Lana Del Rey has created over the past decade, I believe this will be it. And to be honest, as often as I’ve referenced and linked and recommended the song Not Dead Yet, I’d be remiss if I didn’t once again mention that it may very well be one of the three greatest songs to be released all year. It’s the sound of revelry on the smallest scale, a triumphant little jukebox jam that feels like a massive celebration when it’s listened to among its record mates. The record closes with a huge send off, a big dreamy track that feels like buffalo, massive plains, the peaks of mountains and a cup of steaming coffee in a tin cup while sitting beside a fire. In a way, I feel like it feels a little bit like a eulogy to the star of the record, a look into and back through the life and mind of the star that was meant to be at the center of the record, a way to spread out a massive blanket that could roll up our lives into one aural sentiment, the quilt made of the fabric of a life well-lived.
Check Out: Not Dead Yet
2. Halsey — If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power
Digital Fire Elemental
There’s so much to say about this record. There are layers here that I can explore from song to song that I constantly feel engaged and impressed by. Words are chopped and rippled, poltergeists of old sounds hang deep in the channels and paint the walls with their trace. I hadn’t considered checking this album out at all, but when I heard that Reznor and Ross were on board, I absolutely had to jump in, and while I considered this a pop album at first, I completely understand why this has been categorized as being encapsulated within the alternative genre. While genre means next to nothing at this point, I love that this record can be considered in so many different lights, prismatically shining at different frequencies based on the angle of the light that’s shined through it. Reznor’s fingerprints are throughout every song, the way that he destroys sounds in one hand while crafting angelic tones in the other. His ability to shatter and refract the backgrounds allow Halsey to take the songs in any direction, darkly slithering through a serpentine abyss on one track and then basking in a washed-out sunbeam in the next. This is one of those albums that can launch interest in an artist, as when I started reaching out to friends about it, many of them had been on the Halsey train already, some were in the same boat as I was and eagerly subscribed, and others even reached out to me to see if I had checked it out. I loved that this record had people talking. There can be dozens of positive reviews, but I think there is no more earnest praise than the burning desire for its listeners to want to spread its gospel. This one is worth evangelizing. ‘You asked for this’ is not only one of my favorite songs of the year, but one of my favorites of the decade so far. Such a fuzzed out sound with spectral flames fringing on the edges, such a doped up vocal delivery. This record goes many places, it wears many skins and does so with an arsenal of approaches. One of the key elements of this record that really dictates its position is that it was the first record of them all that sort of set the tone for what I was looking for in a top tier record, and also one that I kept wanting to listen to again and again while I was supposed to be going back over the rest of the albums from the year. Can’t recommend this one highly enough.
Check Out: You asked for this
- Frontierer — Oxidized
A Strobing Omniscience
I grew up in a time when, against all better judgment, I believed in wrestling’s reality. Men, wild and savage men, were from beyond the grave, were from Parts Unknown, were invincible giants from the amazon. And while it was easy to question this, extraordinarily easy to stare at these events and look at the world around me and know that this wasn’t real, it was easier and more fun to believe in the myth. All of this to say that some of this philosophy applies when I listen and wonder to Frontierer. I discovered them years ago during their Orange Mathematics phase when I was searching for bands and sounds that were like Car Bomb’s record ‘Meta’ and this band shredded my teeth away. And here I will preface: it’s now easier than ever to do the research and get the story exactly right, but I will live on in the myth as I remember it. I believe when this band was first coming together, it was a singular vision of the guitarist Pedram Valiani who had singer Chad Kapper do vocals over compositions he had made on his own, while other members were added to fill out a live show. I watched a bit of a documentary about the band doing some touring and one thing is for sure, years later, this is still all Pedram’s vision and his universe that the band creates. And I believe that Oxidized is a product of a vision fully coming into its own, a reality of years of knowing the ins and outs, knowing the physics of the planet you’ve terraformed. I had wild expectations for this one and I kid you not: when I heard the first song from the record, my eyes were running with tears. They fucking did it.
There is nothing coming up for air in a Frontierer record. Things never blink. All things are turned up to an unsustainable stake of survival, as all existence is devastation. It feels like being in a car wreck that never resolves, like freefalling into a groundless chasm. Your natural feelings and your inherent thresholds disappear. Strobing pedal effects pan in both channels as menacing double basses seizure, vocals plead and command. If this is your first time in a Frontierer song, it’s tough to tell where the gravity’s center is. Everything is happening at an alarming pace. There are familiar elements, sentiments that will remind you of music, will remind you why you’re here, and I think it’s best to treat it like the open ocean: wait for the breakdown, and use it as a buoy to ground yourself, then build out from there. Learn the language of the machine. Know the white hot sizzle of the electric burn that sits below the surface. Sink deeper, enter the conduit and know the boundless chaos of hallucination, the sounds that exist past the musical structure. Then lower yourself one more layer, and find the peace that goes beyond understanding, find the godless core of the songs that will reset your expectations for what is possible to exist as a song. These tracks are all experiences. The sounds of what you expect a guitar to make are challenged beyond its limits, a sentient and robotic voice coaxed out of the instrument which is used to establish new norms.
New sounds as new labyrinths, and we are the minotaur. There is a moment in each song that sounds like an invention. In Stereopticon, there’s a moment where it sounds like the guitars are fed through a tesla coil. The noise on each track is altered on a molecular level.
This album does not let up. There are no songs that are meant for you to share with your friends to see if they can get into it. You will enjoy this or you will hate it. It is extreme in every way, meant for fans of metalcore and industrial music who have always wanted to know what it would sound like if you could strip the insulation from the wire and plug it directly into yourself. It’s for hardened addicts who experienced the heaviest breakdown they’ve ever heard, saw a white light of salvation but let it slip away, and have been chasing it ever since. This is the heralding of a new species of heavy music.
I feel great listening to this record, like being baptized in a glow not meant for our skin’s digestion. I feel altered in ways that mimic defragmentation, like the code within me has been stripped of its excess, like through some extramodal refraction the pilot in the cockpit is one with the vehicle. There is a basic clarity found through the decimation of the clutter, open horion and open ground with all that’s been extracted and removed. It’s a purity through the flashing light.
Check Out: LK WX
