Albums of the Year, 2024; 20–11.
20. Hey, Ily — Hey, I Loathe You!
A Tremendous Collage
When the first track to this record came on after hearing a recommendation for them, I heard the Scott Pilgrim, Anamanaguchi sort of vibes to them, and I thought I had it all figured out in a clean bow. I figured “okay, this is a band who is into SNES-era soundtracks and they have the musical chops to have a good time and make it sound rad.” Halfway through that same track, I realized that they had far more blood in their teeth and dreams in their mind to make a record that spans an enormity far more expansive than the pigeonhole that I dug for them. The second track rips directly into a These Arms Are Snakes style vicious rock sound and the groove and funk that this song brings with it still manages to keep the head in the clouds while still clenching the jaw angrily tight. Across the 35 minute record, Hey, Ily jams a billion ideas into such little time that it feels like the 11 tracks spread out over at least twice that amount of time, and it’s hard to look away as each new idea that erupts keeps me guessing as to what’s around the next corner. This is a brilliant record for the ADHD era with a kaleidoscope of musical ideas to be pulled from. I promise this record will never bore you. The marriage of electronic protojoy and gnarly guitar grind is one to be celebrated here.
Check Out: Feel Good Forever
19. Chelsea Wolfe — She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She
An Animal Inside
She Reaches Out to She… is brimming with feminine wile, with the power of the earth, with the power of She. There’s an interiority of the sounds and music on this record that form dissonance and irrational noise which somehow simulate the static that roils just outside of the mind, boiling on the inside near our guts, in the phantom pains that hound our auras, in the lining of our organs. These songs follow the design of thought and ritual far more than they do the traditional form of music. Wolfe’s vocals take on aspects of possession and disassociation, an aural presentation of the eyes rolling back into the skull, going white. At times Björk, at times Fiona Apple, this record constructs itself from the spiritual summoning of ethereal vitality much more than from time spent forging songs in a studio. And I love that. It feels like we’re watching something we’re not meant to see. It feels like watching alchemy.
Check Out: Eyes Like Nightshade
18. J Mascis — What Do We Do Now
Gnarled Folk
It’s the ugliness of this record that endears it to me. The warts-and-all approach to how this record presents is such a way that it shares its transparency with you. You can see the scraped knee of Mascis’ emotions, the shredded door frames and warped window panes of the house that he’s constructed with the production of this record. The way that his voice stretches and thins out like butter over too much bread expresses an eternal human element which is vibrant in the way the guitars feel like stellar celebrations and the drums pop forth with a mellow joyfulness, content and full. Known for much of his work in Dinosaur Jr., the guitar work on this record is primarily acoustic and holds the songs together as a latticework of rich and clean tones, but many of the tracks boast pedal steel and Mascis’ own electric guitar solos, most of which have a sound of their own, very at home on a Sub Pop record, with the imperfections once again being played and utilized as part of the abstract style of the sound. The instrument yowls and groads in conflict with the user, trying to stay in tune and yearning to find its way back into a more contemporary sound, but the expertise to make it still sound great in its unloveliness is an art form. Recently, I was asked about my opinion on The Counting Crows and I gave an answer that was likely a bit longer than I really needed to offer, but most of what I was saying was that I believed that their sound might have been a bit more of the “you had to be there” for what set their sound aside from a lot of other bands who were making rock music at the time and that Adam Duritz’ earnestness might come across as a little long-limbed if you’re not fond of his brand of storytelling or song crafting. I think What We Do Now might fall under that same kind of characterization, where if his languid and overborne expressionism finds its way into your hands, it will be just as hard to let it go as it is to share with someone else.
Check Out: Right Behind You
17. Pile — Hot Air Balloon EP
Afloat Below
This is an indie rock EP that seems to throw me back to when isolated songwriters seemed to be on the cutting edge of creation. Bands like Modest Mouse and The Shins were pulling from some protoplasmic well, where they were making songs exciting from their rawest emotions and songs that were constructed like weird and abstract paintings. Pile’s record falls into that same kind of miasma where the music they make is abstract and angled in strange ways. There’s a low drone over the five songs that descends low and slow like a bathysphere into the inverted night. This is one of the most interesting releases of the year for me, as these songs don’t have a traditional structure, yielding instead to an amorphous evolution through each of their constructions, summoning themselves into a reveling glow at times after trudging through cement fog and swirling neon molecules. It takes a long time for songs to take shape, but the dialog, the conversation within the songs continues to wash against the battery. There’s plenty of mood in these constructions, built by tingling outer ephemera, foundational rotating synthesizers, and economically used guitar. But the star of the entire record, the Thing that fuels this record’s soul are Rick Maguire’s austere and alien vocals. These songs are deceptively large, finding depth behind darkness, detail below long descent. The final track on the record, ‘You Got to Decide’ drags the listener to its lowest, the bassiest, the molten core of the trench only to show it new designs of life, new terrestrial colors. This record feels like a band stretching themselves to a creative limit, making something in the shape of their own galactic design, bringing their emotions to the brink and finding some new alien sound within it.
Check Out: Scaling Walls
16. Gouge Away — Deep Sage
Menace
Deep Sage is filled with a warmth. There’s an organic hum to the whole record, like you’re in the practice space, in the writing room, on the side of the stage, too close to the lights so you feel the heat, too close to the amps so you hear sounds in overwhelmed static. Every so often you’ll hear the rattle of the bass guitar as it falls out of step with the rest of the sound around it. Every so often you’ll hear Christina Michelle’s vocal expression drag her into a trance that she follows around in a spiral. Guitars wander. Drums fade into a withered darkness then roar back with teeth. Gouge Away’s intensity comes across in so many ways, but I think it’s at its most apparent when they’re performing songs that don’t try to get in your face. ‘A Welcome Change’ feels like it’s on the verge of turning a demented corner, like you’ve wronged someone and you’re waiting for them to make eye contact. These songs all feel like a winding and terrible road, rain slick and mispaved. Nothing’s come up foul in the headlights just yet, but the tension has mounted. And that’s really it: these songs are tense. Taut. So even in the quiet moments, it feels like you could cut the air with razor wire. It’s heavy in ways you don’t expect. Raw and bare and gashed. There’s a coiled feminine power here as well, something that I don’t think any other band could have pulled off in exactly the same way. It fucking rules. Cherry on top of all of these gems, all of these smokey analog punk jams, is ‘Dallas’ another one of their composed manias, taking us along for the ride of a paralyzed introspection, one that sounds just as in control as it does in shambles.
Check Out: Maybe Blue
15. Cola — The Gloss
Making the Most With Less
Cola’s last record, 2022’s Deep In View, came to me by surprise. A stripped down rock record with mostly clean guitar lines with modest drumming and bass lines sewn together by Tim Darcy’s casual cool vocal delivery got draped over my mind for weeks. It became a record I would revisit as it vanished over the horizon of my mind, and somehow this record has the same kind of effect on me. There are no fireworks, no melodramatics, no over-the-top experiments. The production is clean and honest. This is just a rock record that delivers on every promise that the three-piece makes. On some level, if you know one Cola song, you know where the rest can go. It ticks onward like a trust wristwatch. And yet it makes me feel like more for having heard it, for spending the time with it. There is a mineral effect to these songs, something that feels like it fortifies the core of my music taste, like it props up all those bands and albums that sit around it. I feel like there’s something about this album that will time travel with me, with its retro feeling but also post-punk modernity stretching me in two directions on a timeline, The Gloss is going to be a timeless exploration of what guitar music can and will always be at its height. Its authenticity is tough to surpass, as with so few ingredients, the through line is pure and direct. ‘Bell Wheel’ and ‘Bitter Melon’ close the record off with more or less some of the more complex and cerebral tracks of them all, and they tend to lean towards the more segmented and proggy side of things, and even those don’t recede into any psychedelia or strange time signature. The biggest thing that stands out from those two are the drifting sounds and repetitive metronoming that both songs offer, each graduating a bit away from the center of comfort that the previous eight songs had initially expressed. I always feel like I’m a bit cooler for having listened to Cola, and I hope I can offer you this opportunity as well.
Check Out: Pulling Quotes
14. Catcher — 30 Million Windows
Tar
I am so excited about Catcher. Their music is black as pitch, dark and obtuse, unconcerned about how its listener digests it, unbothered about how it feels to consume. Their music is presented as a writhing blackness, a driving and churning sludgy rock band with a suffering violin sinew bending around its blooded flesh. The first two songs off of this EP have claws, teeth, and worse, eyes. The songs take shape slowly over the course of their runtime, like piecing together full images using sonar, using radar but otherwise blind. Fur, hair, scales, always an animal warmth. This band’s ability to build music from the viscera outward is a feat. They manage to find fear in reverse, trying to soothe with aggression. Austin Eichler’s vocals are exposed, ugly, groaned; perfect for this EP. I wonder what it must be to look into the eyes of this band, to find the limits of where they converge horror and humanity. This music feels like they’ve gone beyond the borders of ‘what feels bad’ and trailblaze in a direction towards the middle of the spiral. I can’t help but feel something while listening to these songs. To feel uncomfortable, and awful and actualized. I’ve been having a lot of conversations recently about the Whys of listening to music. I often can’t ‘relate’ to lyrical content, to the words as they’re written, to the way that notes are chosen within theory. But when music makes me ‘FEEL’ something, that’s when I tend to graduate towards the center of those cores. I am unable to look away from the way this EP makes me FEEL, no matter how uncomfortable, or sticky, or foul… I can’t help but continue to let this in, to swallow the rope, to white my knuckles. These five songs each feel like things you’d find in a hidden box, appalling to exhume. Abandon.
Check Out: Skipdrag
13. Been Stellar — Scream From New York, NY
Urgent Rock
The first time I listened to this record, I was on my way to get a tattoo. It was with an artist who had done my last few, but they had moved venues, and I was driving to a town that I knew was already hanging off the map, but then even beyond that (I worked in an adjacent town, and even those people had said that the neighboring area ‘felt so far away’). And as I drove down country-wide unknown roads with just me and the trucks and the road signs for law offices I’d never need, I finally came up on a style of strip-mall civilization and a man was physically dragging a massive cross, probably twice his size, up the side of the highway. This record, if only for becoming the soundtrack for this drive, for this moment, would stick with me forever, but there’s something more ‘important’ about what they have going on than just The Album That Played During A Waking Dream. These moments surrounding this music made me pay a deeper attention, as if reality itself had become a drug. Been Stellar has the broad and determined creative vision that seems to get their entire arms around Rock Music at large, not only demonstrating a relevancy to bear on modern music, but also a sense that they have been able to adapt the powers from bands like Bends-era Radiohead (even coming danger-close to OK Computer tones on the track ‘Shimmer’) and Carnavas-era Silversun Pickups. This is music that feels ready for bigger and a more global takeover than this modest record declares. I find that listening to this album is an exercise in cataloging the tip of an iceberg with fathoms and knots more to come. Much like many of my all-time favorite records, the songs contained on this record don’t feel like they’re simply capturing singular emotional moments in their play, but instead cartographing the early road map for a legacy. Jangly, infinite rock fans, please pay close attention. This is a band that you have a chance to get in on at the bottom floor, and this elevator is going to rise quickly. I had this record a bit far back on this list, and the more I listen to it, the higher I rank it, each and every time. This is a special record that, like good television and good film, gives me a feeling of excitement and anticipation when I think about listening to it later in the day and giving it my complete attention.
Check Out: Sweet
12. Fly Over States — Ghosts
The New Blood
Four tracks. Under nine minutes. In this short amount of time, Fly Over States hit me right in the face, just like the first time I saw Alexisonfire open up for a bunch of local bands at a small bar in Amityville. Every note felt important, every emotion felt deconstructed. This is an EP that feels like a throwback to that exact time, some kind of mid aughts screaming frenzy where the band leaves absolutely everything on the floor. Where it feels simultaneously like there is no stage that can hold them, but also the kind of hero that the underground and the counterculture needs. These songs rip and it’s one of the hardest releases that I’ve had to choose just one song to recommend to listen to, as they’re all just so rad. Fast and on fire and furious, these songs feel like live footage of a stampede, like trying to catch a waterfall in a wine glass, like smashing atoms. I’ve said it many times over the course of the year, but this Montana band is the most exciting band I’ve heard in a very long time. Pure, raw, and passionate, I can’t believe that such a short EP has had such a profound impact.
Check Out: Exits
11. Trauma Ray — Chameleon
Generating Eons
It wasn’t until about 3 or 4 songs into Trauma Ray’s record that I knew the band was on to something special. The record opened up with two proficient and satisfying tracks which represented the grunge revival sound very respectfully. But with the four songs that follow, from ‘Chamelon’’s lively heft, ‘Bardo’’s continuum bending riff/glamour dichotomy, ‘Bishop’’s huge airy cosmic break (one of my favorite songs of the year) and then ‘Elegy’’s starry reverb night, this four song stretch both constructs then dismantles some sort of astral pillars, creating one of my favorite stretches in the musical galaxy of spacey, heavy music. Typically, music like this gets wrangled into the “aggressive” category, but the easy and celestial method that Uriel Avila sings with keeps the gnarly riffs from feeling like they’re banging down on you, and instead give a sense of uplifting and ethereal levitation. Can I go back to ‘Bishop’ for a second? Because this is really the moment that this record became something monumental to me. It buzzes along in the crackled and staticky ether to begin, pulsed with a withdrawn delivery, small punctuations of vocal sprinkle. As the fever of the song picks up right before the two minute mark, one can feel something shifting, tilting, rising, and at 2:15 the drums roll into this IMMENSE tunnel of fractals. Even the interlude track ‘Flare’ has some of my favorite sounds ever, especially that starburst stroke that opens the song. This is a record for fans of Hopesfall and Hum and I make these comparisons NOT so lightly. With momentum like this there are big big things ahead for them.
Check Out: Bishop
