Albums of the Year 2020; 10–1.

10. Hayley Williams — Petals for Armor
The Big Confession

Hayley Williams is now a woman. I don’t think it took a divorce to prove this. I don’t think it took a record release to prove this. I think there was a shift somewhere along the way, something imperceptible to the naked eye, where she took the step from Front Woman of Paramore to Hayley Williams Who Is Also In Paramore to the even bigger elevation of Hayley Williams. For me, for many of us, she arrived with ‘All We Know Is Falling’ and for anyone who missed that one, maybe they caught on with ‘Misery Business’ or ‘Decode’ or ‘Still Into You’. For anyone who hadn’t yet caught on, she was The Girl With the Hair or maybe That Hot Topic Chick. Well listen, man. The same way That Girl That Played Hermione Granger has become a Goodwill Ambassador and a Women’s Rights Activist is the same kind of ascension that Williams is poised to undergo. This record is that jumping point. All of the big, fun, altruistic anthem rock is gone. Stripped down for this record, we are face to face with Williams. We are under the skull, deep in the neurons, tangled in the imagination of where she wants to go with music. Reckoning with what Williams believes music to be. The same sorts of walls that artists like Bjork and Karen O and Mike Patton have been breaking down for decades are allowing her to discover new boundaries for herself here. Vocals spiral and dance on walls and ceilings like laser light shows. Words don’t often sit in chorus railways or verse structure. Instead they get coaxed out by the sentiments in the sentence that precede it. Some of it feels like poetry that comes out in rhythm and note form. Some moments feel a bit scared to come out in their raw form, so they return to the standards but find their way along broken roads out to bigger vistas where they can flourish. There’s a sadness being liberated on a lot of these tracks, an intimacy that’s being shared in bold and vulnerable ways. There is no harsh light to put it on display, there is no irony or tongue in cheek. This is a sadness that feels like low energy one on one conversations long after a life changing event, examining it all in a quiet aftermath. But there are also whispers of new love, hot and shadowy, secret and exciting. I can’t help but root for her. She has long seemed to me like she was considered a mascot, or “just one of the guys”, or something in between and outside of her friends and her fans, ultimately just a representative of a marginalized minority in a monotone and single serve demographic. I’m looking for this record to become a seed, a platform to hoist Hayley Williams, her peers and all of those she inspires to new heights.

Check Out: Simmer

9. Waxahatchee — Saint Cloud
Chants From the Heart

I think in the biggest most fundamental picture, all singing can be traced back to chanting and rituals. But there is something in the core of the songs that Katie Crutchfield performs that gives me this feeling specifically. It isn’t rudimentary by any means but instead, in the drawn out luscious catchiness of her tunes. The voice rolls naturally out of her throat, trembles passionately, catches fire in the air, and has a wilderness within it. Spirits old like the age of the earth. Folksy and rustic guitars build cat’s cradles of twangy framework over which she seems to build an adlib liturgy to someones, someplaces, somethings. Listening to these tracks seem to connect me to something buried beneath the present, something beneath the detached future we march towards. This is a channel to some feeling before tenements and before creature comforts. It feels like sitting beside someone and forgetting they aren’t immortal, ignoring the fact that they aren’t the center of an entire universe. It feels like flame in dark.

Check Out: Can’t Do Much

8. Thundercat — It Is What It Is
You Gonna Feel Good As Hell

Many records in modern hip-hop have interludes and beats and bridges that bring classic R&B and soul into play to cast an eternal nostalgic light on the soundscape. Thundercat is the new voice of that sound, wielding a bassist skill set that is second to none and a sound that is completely fresh while still giving a nod to the legacy of the genre. Sadly, I don’t personally relate to this style of music. I don’t have roots in it, I didn’t have a youth that was able to glow within it. This isn’t my culture. But man. As I’ve gotten older and allowed a ton of different influences into my life, opened my mind in huge ways and allowed myself to become empowered by every style of music imaginable, I think this is the genre I want to learn the most about. It has influenced so many of the great pop artists and songs, and it feels like as far away from the core of the style we get, there are always new artists pulling from this voice. There is a lightness in a lot of the lyrics for the record, a lot of laughs and while the music is funky as hell, I had to throw a lot of strange eyebrows up while I was hearing some of the stuff he was saying. For me though, this doesn’t make the record any less appealing. Not everything has to be written from some clandestine part of your soul, not everything has to be awakening some new essence of your mind. This record sounds like it was an absolute blast to make and I will absolutely be blasting this record on a frequent basis for many many years. This shit just feels good as hell.

Check Out: Black Qualls

7. The Casket Lottery — Short Songs For End Times
Chugging Inertia

What a record. I remember this band being a name that just never really rose to the top with a lot of the other bands I was learning about in the late 90s and early 00’s, but there they sat, a band that many of the bands themselves were either touring with or backing their latest albums. They were always on the tail of the list of bands I wanted to check out but never quite made it to. And this year while cruising through a “new this week” playlist, ‘Born Lonely’ came on and my eyes lit up, needing to know who the band was. This is a record that keeps me coming back, with such luscious and deliberate riffs, heavy enough to add an edge but with restraint that shines some light on the cerebral nature of the songs. Every time I come back to it I am impressed by something new, some different hidden nook or cranny that was tucked away in the production to be found by a keener ear. I knew this was a good record when I first heard it, but the more I find, the more years I know I’ll be spending with it.

Check Out: Trust As a Weapon

6. Stay Inside — Viewing
An Old Language Revisited

This is a sound that might only be relevant to people that came up with bands like Brand New, and the way Jesse Lacey wielded his remarkable storytelling with the stoicism and earnestness of a traveling monk. Maybe bands like Alexisonfire with the frenzy and urgency, the fire and earth of George and Dallas’ rat and lamb vocal duality. Maybe bands like As Cities Burn who applied the drawling southern blues and injected a wicked soul to it, screaming and speaking until the fates would listen. And while that company is somewhat broad in nature, it seemed that there were always venn diagrams that included a bit of all of us within a certain mindset. This is a record somewhere shot off of the roots of those many sounds, full and robust as a fruit picked from that sundry vegetation. With a record like this, it’s so wildly set in its beliefs and performance of the material that unless you’re committed, unless you speak the language of a specific time, it might seem like it’s an upturned box with a clutter of turmoiled artifacts. But if you know, if this is a sound that shaped you, a sound that you can still revisit like a favorite book or film, Viewing is a record that somehow feels dropped out of a time machine. It’s easy to choose one off songs to try and coax you into listening. But there are so many wild influences to be found, such a sprawling collage of emotion and tone that I would love for you to sit with the entire deck and pull each card from the top and let the hand play itself out. No detail was spared its due attention and while we got a half hour of music, this is a record of folded pages and footnotes, of underlines and scribbling in the margins. There are ideas here that feel ripe for more, like a b-side record or a director’s commentary.

Check Out: Monuments

5. END — Splinters From an Ever-Changing Face
Ruin

I love getting towards the top records of the year and how often I get to write about heavier and heavier music. In fact, I write about a lot of heavy music throughout the year and I don’t think any hit quite the same as END’s particular breed of raw plutonium level instability. The band is so certain of their style, their weight, their absolute presence that they do not turn down the onslaught for one second. It continues to plow ahead like some colossus of war, some immortal phalanx that will not end until it reaches the shore. The screams grip your heels and rattle through to your skull. The guitars batter your ribs. The drums whittle your teeth. It’s a punishing assault. Where many records with this theme tend to have a feeling of darkness or evil, I feel that END replaces those and all emotions with a forward sense of inertia, gravitational summoning towards the core of the earth, swallowing all who bear witness to its residence. The swarm feels nothing. And when a track ends, you can only place your hands on your face to wait for more. I can’t imagine containing this type of energy in a live setting, whether on or off the stage. All engaged in this ritual will depart having seen a new indescribable shape, something all of the room will have shared and something that many will try to illustrate for the ears of those absent. And when the fury comes back to invite the initiated, all they can do is try to build the fraternity and welcome them in.

Check Out: Hesitation Wounds

4. Hum — Inlet
Godfathers of Space

Nothing quite illustrates this band’s influence on the genre quite like the immediate first sound you hear when Inlet spins up. It’s a cymbal that’s produced way in the back while the guitars heave up with a sparkling generation, building into a wall of fuzz and chugging distortion. When you hear this family of sounds, you know it: they’re back. To surprise release this record at a time when we all needed it, in the middle of the COVID summer, was a move that honestly shocked me. For me, it was revealed that a new song was available and in digging just a layer deeper, the entire record was available on bandcamp as well. I didn’t discover this band when I was “supposed to”. Instead, they were “those guys that played that song Stars” in the 90s. It wasn’t until I collided with two friends through our mutual deep romance with Hopesfall that I found out more about the production of that record. In fact, this conversation not only revealed that particular tree of influence to me, but also was one of the earliest ways that I started to understand how a lot of music works. How producers influence the sounds of records, how there is a very intimate relationship between the band who writes the music and the person who sits in with them while recording and directing those sounds. It opened my eyes to a lot. From there, I dove into their ‘Downward Is Heavenward’ and ‘You’d Prefer an Astronaut’ and found new sounds, new ways to love this massive sound, this aural experience of floating in heavy space not as something light and free, but instead at the pull of all things that the outer atmospheres can press upon you. This record is heavy in different ways than most records, stripping most of the aggression from the weight of the guitars. It feels like the depth of the ocean instead of the heat of a flame, the pull of gravity instead of the impact of the fall. Talbott’s vocals are an integral part of the sound, the forlorn and dismissive introspection creating a compass to the massive ocean of noise, and often it can be his absence in the times of largess that speaks louder than his presence. When Hum simply allows their music to speak without being guided by a voice, I believe this is where they find some of their most transcendent moments, delivering profound vibrations that shake the aura from the sternum, release the retina from the optic nerve and helps the listener find some protozoan chant that wakes from the medulla. This is the closest a heavy record has come to the Tibetan Singing Bowls Meditation sensation since Palms’ record back in 2013.

Check Out: Desert Rambler

3. Loathe — I Let It In and It Took Everything
Gravity’s Rainbow

I came out of my first listen to this record in an Abed Nadir sense of blithe acceptance, a fully mentally digested “Cool. Cool cool cool.” I knew what I had heard, I felt what I had heard, but it didn’t all fit in a bag. It didn’t all fit into a compartment that I wanted to accept immediately. Much like Limbs record from a few years ago, it started as one thing, it presented as another and ended up on the other end of my experience with it in a shape that didn’t quite amount to the sum of what I’d experienced. An alchemy is in play here. There is aggression and eye watering intensity. But the degree at which Loathe pulls back and shows a wildly different facade is captivating. It’s like hitting a ramp at full speed. The G’s are different, the weight is different, the way your breath feels held in your lungs is different. The range that this band is capable of is remarkable. They use understanding of the shinshin of immense space alongside the calamity of the grindstone of misery to make both implications sound that much more impactful. Going forth to create a record like this, between the patience it takes to set wildly different themes and levels to the restraint it takes to turn one song into the next is remarkable. And the way one song will end with majesty in the shape of a black hole to collide with the beginning of the next in the shape of a hand caught in a metal machine is just another way that they use sound and transition to elevate the tone of the two elements. So many moments of “how did I get here?” arise as we are hearing one punishing delivery melt and morph into something round and intangible the next. The band uses the aural medium to its maximum, not only force feeding us powerful industrial and metal beatings but intercutting dialog, intercutting concussion protocol soundscapes. This is an album that wants you to close your eyes to it, to forego any visions you might be having, to omit any expectation and allow yourself to ragdoll along the program they’ve installed. Without question one of the most interesting records I’ve heard in years.

Check Out: Screaming

2. Pinegrove — Marigold
Jersey’s Best Crooners

I don’t really know how this record came out of New Jersey. The more I think of it, maybe there’s some level of late Chris Conley influence on the delivery? But this record sounds about as close as I’ll ever come to a straight country record. This one got so many spins this year, not only from a song or two at a time by choice, but also having the CD in the car, a bygone artifact behavior that contributed to a sense of familiarity with the album, track by track, and the way that hearing it as part of the commute, the day-to-day, makes it feel like a favorite sweater. The swell of some of the ballads possess me in ways that few songs can do. Most of its impact is based on the diary-honest lyricism, ways that Evan has observed his reality and the way I can lay it across my own like laminate, drawing parallels that evacuate breath and curl the edges of my heart. And while his twang-laced delivery is a heavy portion of what gives these songs a country soul, it’s a lot of the rustic production of the loose and knowing smile of the drumming, the ancient butterscotch bending of lap steel and sharp iron barrel sound of the guitars. I was supposed to see this band twice in the past couple of years, one tour getting cancelled to a personal affair and the next due to 2020’s infamous tide of changing life as we know it. However, I’m certain (eyes locked, shoulders squared certain) that seeing this band perform some of their songs would have sent me into some different emotional terrain, loosed like some caterwauling medium along with the words and the menagerie of the contents. There’s a sunrise moment in the final track, a long organ tone that runs on what feels like forever, a time to cast a raw and eager eye across all that you are able to survey. A single noted reminder to bask in It, whatever It may be, to swallow the golden moment, to feel the ground beneath your feet and know it’s there, to examine the shore you’re standing on and not to dwell on the ocean that stands between the next.

Check Out: Moment

1. Misery Signals — Ultraviolet
Metalcore In Its Purest Form

This one was special for me. I’d known about Misery Signals, but it wasn’t until 2006 and the release of ‘Mirrors’ that I really fell in love with them. At the time, Karl was their singer and he ended up really becoming the sound for me. Going back to ‘Of Malice and the Magnum Heart’ and hearing the less throaty vocals felt like they were a different band. This guttural roar was the defining Misery Signals sound through several records. So when Jesse came back for this one, I felt nervous as hell that this might sound something like the band I knew and adored, but with a different spirit. Near immediately, my nerves were calmed by the delivery of that scream. The sound was in tact. And not only that, but it had a more diverse lean to it, staying in the pocket of Karl’s style, but intermittently bringing back small moments of the sound that Jesse was known for. Outside of that shift, the band still sounds exactly what I wished it would sound like. The Morgan brothers remain fraternally tied to one another, writing riffs and drum parts that rattle back and forth off of each other like tethered neurons blasting across psychic chasms. The breakdowns slide in effortlessly without the need for the cardboard cut out of build up, silence, then eruption. As if through sleight of hand, parts grow heavier then compose and become intricate tapestries of angular sound, only to go back into the heaving and punishing well. I never thought this band would record another record, and assumed that the 7” with Sunlifter would be their final work. I wanted to include it on a mix, but it was nowhere to be found. I had a friend rip it to his computer via his record player. Hearing it get a true release on a full length album is just one of many triumphant feelings of this record making it to my hands, and while there were many phenomenal records, outstanding songs and more new artists I’ve discovered than I’ve been able to name on this list, it comes as no surprise to me that this record was my favorite of the year. I am in awe, but am not surprised that they are still writing parts on this record that still make me have to sit straight up in my seat, to make the “ugly man playing chess” face, and to cover my face with both hands at how their parts come together. The more I pay attention to this record with each listen, the more I find, the more layers I find that are building on one another’s inertia. The band feels like they are still as passionate about their work as they were when they were fighting to bring their first record to kids in small local spaces. Not only do I love this record, but I am eternally thankful for it. There is absolutely nothing like one of your favorite bands releasing yet another record that you know you will spend the rest of your life revisiting.

Check Out: Old Ghosts