Best Of 2024 – Dan Obstkrieg: A Blazing Ruthless Love

Sainted friends and lovers, it has been a year. But, you know this, right? You feel it. Things are everywhere just a little out of joint. Like me, though, maybe you’re mostly here to see about the music. If you’re here at all, thank you. It might be customary to say something like, “If you weren’t here reading, we wouldn’t be here writing,” but – speaking at least for myself – that’s not exactly true. Whatever combination of brain chemistry and life experience led those of us who can’t shake music to be as we are, that compulsion is not audience-bound. If I weren’t writing these words on this page for the ghostly ‘you’ that might be out there somewhere, I’d be writing them on the inside of my mind, rehearsing the same conversations and trying to find just the right words to do some small measure of justice to the restorative power of art. But for you, out there, whoever you are: I hope that it is well with your soul.

But music? It’s everywhere. Right now, writing these words, I’m sitting in a dark auditorium listening to a high school choir and orchestra concert. They’re not all in tune. Some of them probably don’t really want to be here. Voices crack and reeds squeak and slip off pitch. And… it’s perfect. Think of it: humans, together, making a noise that strives at beauty. That noise reaches, grasps, yearns for consonance and synchrony. Whether it ever arrives is immaterial. Maybe it never can arrive. But we do it anyway. 

I suspect, if you read into the literature on sociology or anthropology or evolutionary psychology, that people have lots of things to say about the functional, instrumental, adaptive properties of music and music-making. And I believe that they are probably right. But I also like settling my mind into a space where it thinks about music not as a thing you use but as a thing you do. Think about fire, for example. Whichever of our common ancestors first made fire, I’m guessing they weren’t thinking, “Okay, so if I carefully apply force between a rock and this other special kind of rock with some dried leaf and stick bits nearby, I can create a source of heat that I can use to cook my food.” I bet they were thinking, “What the fuck? Are you seeing this? WHAT IS THIS?”

I like to think about music the same way. And all of us, as music-makers or listeners, readers or writers, lovers or fighters… we’re all tending that same fire.

SOME OF THAT REAL GOOD SHIT

20. Lichen – Spear & Stone

Sometimes when people say “no frills,” it sounds like an insult. Something that’s basic, dull, merely serviceable. Not so with Virginia’s Lichen, whose debut LP is “no frills” in the sense that it rejects anything gaudy or inessential in order to cut deep and strike true with 37 minutes of black metal bluster. Beautiful Finnish-style riffs, rich tones, and an utterly savage drum performance make this some of the rippin’est, flippin’est, shit-kickin’est black metal of the year.

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19. Mother of Graves – The Periapt of Absence

So, here’s a weird angle to take about the second album from Mother of Graves: even though it is still steeped in the melodic doom/death miserablism of the Peaceville 3, The Periapt of Absence kinda sounds like these dudes are… having fun? Okay, so maybe “fun” is a stretch, but there’s more lightness in the playing, a few more musical influences (e.g., some wonderful post-punk drumming and plump bass in the back half of “Shatter the Visage”), and perhaps a greater feeling of the peculiar sort of joy that can emerge out of the communal expunging of pain.

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18. Thy Catafalque – XII: A gyonyoru almok ezutan jonnek

Whatever you’ve heard about Thy Catafalque, it’s pretty much all true. The two stages of listening to Tamás Kátai’s shapeshifting project are: Step 1 – “Oh my goodness there are so many styles happening here what is going on,” and then Step 2 – “Oh my goodness there is no other way for these songs to be.” Album number twelve from Hungary’s foremost musical polymath leans perhaps a bit heavier into folk metal melodicism, but the entire album is a slipstream into which the listener cannot help but slide, intoxicated and enraptured. Oh, and the Giant Fuck-Off Riff at 2:19 of “Mindenevő”? Thy catafacking awesome.

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17. Aluk Todolo – Lux

Listening to Aluk Todolo is an alchemical experience. Bass, drums, guitar, and that’s it, and yet the French trio unspools entire universes of tension and release, attack and retreat, dark corridors and subtle daybreak. Lux is an even more taut and muscular exercise than Voix (which landed in this particular knucklehead’s top spot in 2016), but it mines the same territory: blackened drone, psychedelic post-rock, motorik math rock, jazz by any other name. The music is both tactile and intensely visual. I see a slowly rippling lake of liquid mercury, or a vast alien lung suspended in the deep of space, expanding and contracting on the winds of solar radiation. This is music for losing yourself and for finding yourself anew, newly strange.

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16. Theurgy – Emanations of Unconscious Luminescence

Imagine, if you will, friggin’ Johann Sebastian Bach at his harpsichord. His wig just so. His coattails artfully draped over the bench. His loins, we assume, fastidiously powdered. A rift in the time-space continuum opens in the drawing room, and “Thaumaturgic Studies of the Glittering Resplendency Beyond” wafts through. Does ol’ JSB… A) suddenly realize this was the inspiration he had been searching for all along and compose the entirety of The Well-Toileted Clavier in one manic sitting, or does he B) shit his entire brain-mass out through his nostrils? Theurgy knows: he doesn’t have to choose, and neither do you! This preposterous album is a collision of busted sewer pipe brutal slamming death and Mithras-styled squiggly tech orgasms, and if you don’t know how you feel about that I invite you to Brandenbug off.

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15. Vemod – The Deepening

Some absurd nincompoop had this to say about The Deepening early in the year: “Vemod’s black metal is atmospheric, hypnotic, and reverent, with lengthy songs that evolve slowly and feature a few key sections or themes that are mined for all the expressive depth they can muster. Compared to the distant, ghostly sound of the debut album, on The Deepening the production is significantly richer, live and naturalistic and warm. Blix’s drums have an appealing looseness, especially in the faster sections, and Kalstad’s bass is beautifully plump and rolling. Blix’s powerful harsh vocals are even more central in the mix this time around, and in an excellent new twist, Åsli provides stirring clean vocals at several points across the album.” I would add simply that we are now entering the second winter with this latest Vemod as companion, and its echoing, roiling depths create a paradoxical stillness that befits the season. Magical.

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14. Malconfort – Humanism

Some unreconstructed dingdong said this about Malconfort earlier this year: “Stylistically, Malconfort plays an avant-garde black metal that is so far removed from black metal’s origins as to be nearly unrecognizable, like an image photocopied again and again and again until it blurs into a pulpy silhouette. You can think about other edge cases like Dødheimsgard, Fleurety, Code, and Virus, but with Malconfort’s sparse atmosphere, jazz- and electronic music-indebted drumming, and dubbed-out basslines, they will surely also appeal to fans of later Chaos Echoes and Aluk Todolo. The music’s oddness, however, is driven by its shape and execution rather than instrumentation…”

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13. Polterwytch – De Profundis… Howls from the Abyss

If you’re here looking for sophistication, take a goddamn hike: Germany’s Polterwytch plays lo-fi sleaze exclusively. I am on record as an inveterate dungeon synth disrespecter, but don’t let that tag turn you away. Polterwytch’s music is instead a delirious slurry of horror punk, gleefully schlocky organ, and black metal, so if you’re picturing something like the brain-damaged offspring of Misfits, Stooges, Urfaust, and Ildjarn, I think it means you and I are now legally married.

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12. Slimelord – Chytridiomycosis Relinquished

The basic thing about death metal is that it is very good and cool. Coincidentally, Slimelord’s debut album is also very good and cool. The swampy, woolly, shambling way in which these seven songs slime their way along lands the band squarely in death/doom territory, but given that 3/5ths of the band also does time in the techy death/thrash band Cryptic Shift, even the most clogged-pipe passages ripple with surprisingly dexterous playing. Perhaps the best thing, though, is how – much like their 20 Buck Spin labelmates Worm – Slimelord peppers these otherwise gristle-chewing songs with hauntingly eerie melodicism. Get yourself slick with the slime, slim.

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11. Candelabrum – Transmutations

Some kind of jingle-jangling ignoramus waxed on about Candelabrum like this: “…from the very first listen to Transmutations, its intoxicating mystique grabbed hold of me. The first thing you hear is a smear of synth and a simple drum beat, but moments later when the drums kick into standard – if beautifully controlled – blasts and the vocals attack with a pained yowl, those synths stay with you. In fact, across the taut 34 minutes of this album, there’s hardly a moment where those ominous, floating synth tones are absent.”

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SOME OF THAT EVEN GOODER SHIT

10. Abhorration– Demonolatry

If there was an award for Thing That Was Most Definitely Said About This Album On This Website, one of the nominees would be: “The most satisfying thing about Demonolatry is how it lives simultaneously in two spaces. On one hand, everything is extremely meticulous – the instrumental performances are ferociously tight, with each of the many transitions thoughtfully composed and executed in seamless lockstep. But on the other hand, the entire thing bursts with such malevolent energy that it sounds like the band is always on the verge of flying straight off the rails. It’s the sort of energy that comes from a band that knows exactly how shit-hot their songwriting is that they want to leap out of the speaker to shake you by the shoulders and share the besotted glee of how goddamned sick heavy metal can be.” It’s true: heavy metal like Abhorration? So goddamned sick.

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9. Doedsmaghird – Omniverse Consciousness

Some industrial-strength wet blanket had this to bleat about Doedsmaghird, ehrmagherd: “The core of Omniverse Consciousness is rapid-fire black metal that has been touched by the blighted hands of dozens of degenerate angels. Look one way and you see the machinic industrial anarchy of Satanic Art and 666 International, but turn back again and the picture has shifted imperceptibly. The electronic elements are there, sometimes in a full-tilt pummel, but there’s an earnestness here, a yearning, searching drive that twists even the album’s most jagged sounds into a slipstream that goes down smoothly.”

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8. Seven Spires – A Fortress Called Home

Seven Spires play an obsessively detailed but unusually explosive (and occasionally extreme) form of symphonic metal on their dynamite fourth album. Guitarist Jack Kosto and vocalist Adrienne Cowan are both Berklee-trained, so these baroque songs are crafted with plentiful opportunities for each to display their virtuosity. Although Seven Spires has much in common with flagship symphonic acts like Nightwish, Avantasia, or Kamelot, there’s plenty of power metal (with passages that evoke Unleash the Archers, Angra, or A Sound of Thunder), not to mention the intensity of spit-shined ‘arena extreme metal’ like Keep of Kalessin or recent Cradle of Filth. If it sounds a mess, it actually all hangs together wonderfully on the strength of the songwriting and the overall passion that animates the performances. In fact, the mid-album duo of “Love’s Souvenir” and “Architect of Creation” might be the most powerful twelve minutes of music this year. In particular, every time I find myself at the 2:44 mark of “Love’s Souvenir” (and, friend, I do believe you’ll know when you hit it), I am perfectly and ferociously uplifted.

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7. Replicant – Infinite Mortality

I wish I had something more eloquent to tell you here, but the unavoidable truth is that Infinite Mortality kicks an entire luxury yacht’s worth of ass, and I wish that could be enough for you. Similarly reductive and ultimately unhelpful? I could tell you to listen to it like Tom Morello had joined Gorguts for an album that lands halfway between Erosion of Sanity and Colored Sands. Would you like me to irritate you more? Replicant plays death metal with the sass dial cranked to 11. You know what that means: none more sass. Truly, Infinite Mortality is a thrilling album that moves with impossible fluidity between juddering breakdowns, nimble sprinting, and spidery hooks. If, like me, you’re a jackass, you can think of it as intensely rude and stupid music played with absolute finesse and incredible smarts. Quit reading, Einstein, and shove this in your ears yesterday.

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6. Black Pyramid – The Paths of Time are Vast

Some kind of delusional jackanape had this to say about Black Pyramid in our Missing Pieces feature: “Black Pyramid’s not so secret weapon is the Big Fuck-Off Riff, these massive, impossibly catchy granite slabs of gritty melody that bowl you over but pull you in at the same time. “The Crypt on the Borderland” and “Take Us to the Threshold,” in particular, take an almost unseemly amount of pleasure in setting the listener up for the drop of these heaving, titanic themes. But it’s really Black Pyramid’s songwriting skill that makes The Paths of Time are Vast a fully unmissable album, and one whose 70 minutes truly fly by in what feels like a fraction of the time.”

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5. Chapel of Disease – Echoes of Light

Some kind of having-opinions-ass prima donna said the following about Echoes of Light: “The primary vector of chapel disease here is mainman Laurent Teubl, who handles vocals, bass, keys, and – most notably – all lead guitar. The core of Chapel of Disease’s songwriting style is cut from the same cloth as fellow wanderers Tribulation, Morbus Chron/Sweven, Venenum, and perhaps even a bit of In Solitude circa Sister. Does this mean that Echoes of Light is just as well-suited to skulking around dilapidated city streets wearing eyeliner and a cape as it is to emerging from a wood-paneled van in a haze of bongwater and lava lamp glow? Mister, I sure wish you would quit your hypothetical jawing and just crank this sucker up. Tight tunes, tasty licks, and basically just the down-home dirty business of electric guitars making excellent sounds.”

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4. Oranssi Pazuzu – Muuntautuja

Finland’s finest inner-cosmonauts return with one of their most potent offerings yet. Oranssi Pazuzu’s finely honed psychedelic/hypnotic black metal is still firmly in place, but Muuntautuja ratchets up some industrial elements and spends a significant amount of time wandering down shadowy alleys of musical noir like a more menacing version of Ulver’s Perdition City. Make no mistake, the album is still nightmare fuel through and through, but it paces and stalks just as much as it attacks outright. The menacing industrial dub that creeps in is closer to Mick Harris’s Scorn or some of Justin Broadrick’s non-Godflesh projects than anything black metal. The album is a dizzyingly detailed plunge into a black hole, freezing the listener in slow-motion awe at the sheer density of its richness.

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3. Moisson Livide – Sent Emperi Gascon

Some kind of vraiment incroyable enfant terrible said this about Moisson Livide: “If you think folk metal is too soft and sappy, there is plenty of rocket-fueled black metal intensity. If you think black metal is terminally self-serious, the album brims over with warmth and chest-thumping exuberance. If you think metal loses its way when it fetishizes extremity, Moisson Livide loves a good heavy metal gallop and twin guitar lead. If you hate power metal, well… either crack a smile or take a hike, because there’s power metal aplenty here. Moisson Livide starts from a core of folk metal but radiates outward into wherever the songs need to go: black metal, traditional metal, melodeath, pure folk, punk, cinematic atmosphere, power metal, and more.”

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2. Stagnant Waters – Rifts

Some kind of short-circuiting Teddy Ruxpin blooped and bleeped these words about Stagnant Waters early this year: “Although the band’s roots are in black metal, their compositions jitter stylistically between industrial, black metal, math rock, avant-garde rock, contemporary classical, and experimental electronic. More so than any particular musical formula, though, what primarily defines Stagnant Waters is a madcap, anarchic ethos. Yes, the attentive and well-moisturized listener will find much in common with Dødheimsgard, Axis of Perdition, and Dodecahedron, but any visitor to the peculiar landscape of Rifts will likely find themselves sketching a personal map of the terrain.” Having recently – finally! – acquired a physical copy of Rifts (which includes one version of the album on the LP and the entirely different version of the album on the CD), I can confirm that the utterly peculiar and beguiling overload of Stagnant Waters has lost absolutely none of its charm. Please, for the sake of that poor, startled deer, listen to Stagnant Waters.

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1. Madder Mortem – Old Eyes, New Heart

In music, “heavy” comes in a lot of forms. Slowest, fastest, angriest, filthiest, downtuned-iest, whatever. Madder Mortem’s heavy, though? That’s bone deep. Norway’s preeminent prog/alt metal luminaries returned this year from a six-year gap with the powerful Old Eyes, New Heart, and with band siblings BP Kirkevaag (guitars, backing vocals, production) and Agnete Kirkevaag (lead vocals) having recently lost their father (and longtime Madder booster, also responsible for the artwork) Jacob, these ten songs hit even harder than usual. 

If you’re new to Madder Mortem, I suppose you might consider approaching them by way of Katatonia or The Gathering, but in truth, there’s really no other band quite like them due to the raw and almost impossibly epic vein of emotion that they have tapped into consistently over the past 25+ years. This is due primarily to Agnete Kirkevaag, who during that time has been – and remains – one of the most unique, charismatic, versatile vocalists in all of heavy music. Her voice switches from waifish lightness to piercing wails, and from aching vulnerability to walloping defiance as needed, but even that undersells the sheer POWER of her instrument and delivery. Still, even the finest vocalist can’t rescue an album if the songwriting is subpar, and that’s where Madder Mortem’s not-so-secret weapon lives: every song here is a near-perfect composition of shifting moods, technical complexity and wicked chops, and outrageously catchy hooks. 

The heady opening salvo of “Coming from the Dark” is followed by the dusky Americana twang of “On Guard.” The deliciously proggy “Unity” gives way to the triumphant indignation of “Towers” (“Give me the joy, the hate, the tears, not fucking platitudes”). But the ultimate knockout blow here – and the finest song of 2024, bar none – is “Cold Hard Rain,” which speaks more eloquently of the experience of depression than nearly any song I can name, with plainly delivered lines like “there’s a crack in the world where the colors drain out.” The lyrics throughout are addressed to an unnamed “you,” but I have felt, at many times this long year when I needed this song to grab hold of me entirely, that it’s just as likely the singer is speaking to a loved one suffering as it is that the singer is speaking to themself. This makes the song’s climax heart-rending no matter which way you interpret the perspective, but it has brought me to tears, broken me down to bits, and empowered me more than any other single thing this year:

“But there’s hope in the dark / and you’re not all alone.
You’ve been sinking for years / but I’m breaking you out.
I have patience and strength enough / to wear down the stone,
And a blazing, ruthless love. / I won’t leave you to drown in the
Cold, hard rain.”

A blazing, ruthless love. I can’t imagine a more perfect phrase, and for me, this year, in this life, I can’t imagine a more perfect album.

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THAT REAL NICE SHORT SHIT

Sometimes I think to myself, Everything should be an album. Most of the time, I want to listen to a band making An Official Statement, and the album seems like the right venue for that. Counterpoint: I am an idiot, and these ten slammerjammers below are great. Great is good, no matter the running time.

10. Squelch – Eternal Hiss of Hatred: Onomatopoeitic Californian duo Squelch plumps out 20 minutes of organ-fondling doomed-out death metal sickness. It mostly goes slow, and then sometimes goes fast, and keeps it low and gross no matter what. This is music for when you think Coffins is too sophisticated.

9. Culmen – De un Soplo la Creación: The cover art makes Esoteric’s Epistemological Despondency seem like a relaxing massage for the ol’ rods and cones, but De un Soplo la Creación is a tremendously bizarre little EP of weirdo Peruvian black metal. Trippy and mechanistic, Culmen’s peculiar racket is a little like a blackened version of Supuration.

8. Owl – Ghosts of Summer: Germany’s Owl is still Valborg-y enough for a pepped-up Godflesh beat but cranks up the vicious, death-industrial blasting to work the listener up into an uneasy lather. Hooooo could resist?

7. Void Column – Descend Towards the Abyss: Void Column surely wins this year’s “most heinously potent production in a Canadian EP” prize, because Descend Towards the Abyss is 15 minutes of crusty and disgustingly heavy death/doom from Quebec. If that’s not enough to sell you, friend, then we are rowers on entirely different streams.

6. Tatterdemalion – Carrier: No, I don’t really know much about the folks behind Washington state’s upstart Wergild label/collective, but Tatterdemalion’s Carrier is a richly satisfying slice of longform, melancholic, atmospheric black metal that hews to no particular established template. Maybe call it a more crudely pretty demo version of Weakling falling down a mineshaft?

5. Solemn Imagist – Cosmic Keys to the Mourning Mystique

I mean no disrespect to Indonesia’s Solemn Imagist, but the one and literally only question you need to ask yourself when considering whether to dive into their latest EP is, “Do you love Emperor’s In the Nightside Eclipse?” Solemn Imagist’s Emperor worship is hardly subtle: in addition to featuring a Gustave Dore engraving on this latest missive, it’s also called COSMIC KEYS to My Creations and Times the Mourning Mystique, for crying out loud. Nightside Eclipse is great; this sounds exactly like it: QED.I mean no disrespect to Indonesia’s Solemn Imagist, but the one and literally only question you need to ask yourself when considering whether to dive into their latest EP is, “Do you love Emperor’s In the Nightside Eclipse?” Solemn Imagist’s Emperor worship is hardly subtle: in addition to featuring a Gustave Dore engraving on this latest missive, it’s also called COSMIC KEYS to My Creations and Times the Mourning Mystique, for crying out loud. Nightside Eclipse is great; this sounds exactly like it: QED.

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4. Writhen Hilt – Ancient Sword Cult

Some turgid word-burglar had this to say: “Dual guitar leads, beautiful ear-worm choruses… some truly kingly riffs, and powerful, epic-leaning songwriting already mark Writhen Hilt as a band to watch, but perhaps best of all is the overall atmosphere. There’s a blessedly musty character across these songs, a thin but burnished gold in the production like shafts of light piercing a long-sealed secret chamber for the first time in centuries.”

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3. Kryatjurr of Desert Ahd – Unforgiving Heatwaves of Psychosis and Deforestation

Australia’s Kryatjurr of Desert Ahd – implausibly enough, given how fully formed they emerged just two years ago – just keep getting better. Their latest, the Unforgiving Heatwaves EP, sandwiches one disorientingly blazing and lengthy black metal cut between two engrossing, cinematic elegies. The production here is smashed and smeared, blurry and harsh just like the pitiless cover art. Whether protest or resignation, Kryatjurr’s noise is a deeply disquieting and visceral response to climate catastrophe.

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2. Xanathar – Thunders Over Waterdeep

Some impossible clown who wouldn’t stop singing ‘Xanathar’ to the tune of ABBA’s “Waterloo” had these thoughts: “…epic doom in the mold of Solstice with an extra Viking flavor by way of Ereb Altor, merged with a bit of Beverast-flavored blackened doom and a touch of the atmospheric black metal of Summoning or Caladan Brood. Subtle keys, a hugely powerful stomping main riff, barrel-chested clean vocals, and some searing guitar leads fill out a song that might feel overstuffed if the pacing and execution weren’t so beautifully done.”

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1. Acero Letal – Legiones

Some things, they just feel right. Chile’s Acero Letal, on their first (though long in the gestation) EP Legiones, nail that sense of “everything exactly as it should be.” Speed-obsessed heavy metal in the old way, brimming with passion and striving, pounding the world like a battering ram. It doesn’t sound exactly like Iron Maiden s/t and Angel Witch s/t and Balls to the Wall, but it feels like it sounds like it, and it sounds just goddamned great.

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YNOT THAT REAL YAZZ SHIT

At its best, a music built on deeply improvisational foundations like jazz has the ability to respect the individual personhood of each player. Sure, just like anything else, there’s as much shitty jazz as great jazz out there, but even where it can falter in execution, it’s hard to fault its intent. It’s listening, right? That’s it. You sit in and hear what someone else is saying. You might not like it. You might have something to say back to them. But in that wild, free zone where everyone is hearing everyone, radical things can happen.

15. Patricia Brennan Septet – Breaking Stretch

Patricia Brennan’s vibraphone sets an excitingly left of center tone on this full ensemble outing, with pedals and effects that sometimes twist her vibes into turntablist scratching. Two saxes and trumpet fill out the front line, and with both drums and auxiliary percussionists in the ensemble, Brennan’s unit bulks up these rich, sultry tunes into party jams for twilight moods.

14. Charles Lloyd – The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow

Charles Lloyd’s latest (and relatively stripped-down, featuring “just” an all-star quartet) for Blue Note is maybe the legendary saxophonist’s most “ECM-sounding” album not released on ECM. For unreasonable soreheads, that might mean some irritation at the overabundance of calm, restrained, gospel-soul ballad playing, but those people are not me. Yes, “Sky Valley, Spirit of the Forest” is so spare and shy across its 15 minutes that it becomes ambient, but “Booker’s Garden” sees Brian Blade goading things along with a fiery sly hand while Lloyd turns to the flute. It truly is a balm.

13. Nicole Mitchell & Ballaké Sissoko – Bamako*Chicago Sound System

The vibrant, conversational music captured on this lovely album was recorded in 2017 and it is frankly absurd that it took until now for it to see release. Nicole Mitchell’s flute and Ballaké Sissoko’s kora take the top billing here, but the full band (including two vocalists whose contributions are equally essential) carries the dance in this merging of Black diaspora and West African musics.

12. Tord Gustavsen Trio – Seeing

On this latest of the Norwegian pianist’s excellent trio albums, Tord Gustavsen digs even deeper into the ECM label’s hallmark of pristine, wintry Nordic jazz. For lack of a better term, Seeing is a rather church-y album, with some Bach selections and hymns mixed with the originals. Each finger strike, each barely drawn bow, each deliberate ride cymbal tap bespeaks an inner stillness.

11. Fire! – Testament

Testament is, ugh, yes, it’s a fiery showing from the Swedish trio Fire!, recorded live to tape with Steve Albini. Fire!’s lineup of bass / drums / saxophone is equally poised for gutter squeals and stately echoing, but the pieces on Testament are mostly spare, sometimes funky, and sometimes spooky free jazz that leans into post-rock. At times, Fire! sounds like the late and much lamented Peter Brötzmann getting down with a Bill Laswell dub jam, and I’m not sure I can offer you much higher enticement.

10. Alan Braufman – Infinite Love Infinite Tears

You could look at it two ways, I guess: either Alan Braufman’s latest is one of the freest straight-ahead jazz albums of the year, or one of the most straight-ahead free jazz albums of the year. I mostly lean toward the former, I think, but the fun of Infinite Love Infinite Tears (other than the wickedly deep bench of talent that includes, alongside Braufman’s alto, James Brandon Lewis on tenor, Patricia Brennan on vibes, and Chad Taylor on drums) is that you can point your ears at either angle and come out with a fresh listen.

9. Wayne Escoffery – Alone

It takes approximately three seconds of album opener “Moments with You” to understand that it is exactly the juice you need next time you’re looking for your consenting sex partner to disrobe. Hello, that’s rude, but Wayne Escoffery’s Alone spends so much of its time in slow, deeply searching soulfulness that you might already be pregnant from listening. The living legend Ron Carter is always welcome, but Gerald Clayton’s piano is the ringer that gets all of Escoffery’s signals. Essential late night tunes, by yourself or (hopefully) with a friend.

8. Dave Douglas – Gifts

Well, this is just a hell of a thing. Greenleaf Music founder and trumpeter Dave Douglas assembles an unusual quartet rounded out by James Brandon Lewis on sax, Rafiq Bhatia on guitar, and Ian Chang on drums for a set almost evenly balanced between Douglas originals and Billy Strayhorn classics. I particularly love the slightly menacing, almost drunken wobble they bring to “Take the ‘A’ Train,” but the album throughout is contemplative, questing, gently experimental. Bhatia’s guitar on “Blood Count” slowly gathers in the storm clouds with writhing distortion atop Chang’s barely-there cymbal flailing. Riveting work.

7. Nala Sinephro – Endlessness

You’d have to be a particularly clotted asshole (hi, hello) to be a bit miffed that Endlessness is the jazz album this year most likely to be repped by indie snobs who suddenly think they know dick about jazz. The thing is, goddamn, it’s so good. For anyone who fell deep for the Floating Points/Pharaoh Sanders collab album, this should be your new favorite thing. Sinephro’s compositions are free-standing, but the album flows as a through-written suite, with her synthesizers and harp sketching a balsa-light frame and also painting a shifting sand of flowers at your feet. Nubya Garcia (whose own Odyssey this year is notably strong) adds an essential flavor with her sax, but in truth, this album only succeeds when it becomes a whole arc, its constituent elements rendered indistinguishable by the completeness of its vision.

6. Matthew Shipp Trio – New Concepts in Piano Trio Jazz

Maybe you see a classic format jazz trio (piano / bass / drums) and think, “Yep, I know that sound.” I promise you, with Matthew Shipp, you don’t. The way Shipp approaches harmonic structure and rhythm on this brilliant set can come across like Thelonious Monk at math camp, and that’s a great thing. Shipp’s piano and Michael Bisio’s bass lock into tumbling synchrony and then pull each other apart on the hushed and evocative “Sea Song,” and on the culminating closer “Coherent System,” Shipp pounds out aggressive left hand with sustain while Newman Taylor Baker’s drums try to ping and pepper and pull him out of it. This is awe-inspiring, adventurous work.

5. Black Art Jazz Collective – Truth to Power

Tenor saxophonist Wayne Escoffery (double ups on this year’s list) founded the Black Art Jazz Collective around ten years ago, and the membership (much like Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, from whom they must surely draw influence) has shifted somewhat since then. On Truth to Power, the collective plays a set entirely of originals, with composition credits spread across six players. The approach here is thoroughly modern but rooted in classic hard bop – the title track in particular features some fiery trumpet tradeoffs from Josh Evans and Wallace Roney Jr – yet each song resonates with an individual mood. For the best of a newer generation pointing the way to the future and honoring their proud lineage in the past of Black American music, you can’t do better.

4. Isaiah Collier & the Chosen Few – The Almighty

Lotta folks these days like to toss the tag “spiritual jazz” around. I, a guaranteed dummy, have done the same. But when we do it in reference to bland, milquetoast, watered-down jazz, we dilute its connection to the ferocious artistic legacy of John and Alice Coltrane. Chicago’s Isaiah Collier has not forgotten. The young tenor saxophonist leads his Chosen Few ensemble to astonishing heights of expression on The Almighty, with plenty of nods to Pharaoh Sanders as well as some similarities to Kamasi Washington, but Collier follows most directly in the “ecstasy as worship” approach of post-Love Supreme Coltrane. Still, for as sharp and coiled as Collier’s wailing sax gets, the not-so-secret weapon across The Almighty is drummer Michael Shekwoaga Ode, who – in all seriousness – levels the room with a performance that’s wilder, harder, and more unrelenting than the drums on any metal album this year. Collier’s Almighty is God; mine is music as being-in-the-world: with this album, we pray side by side.

3. Arooj Aftab – Night Reign

Arooj Aftab’s latest album is, unbelievable as it seems, even more of a nocturnal glide than 2021’s outstanding Vulture Prince. Aftab’s vocals – and hushed, understatedly dramatic lines delivered in both English and Urdu – remain the glittering jewel of the album, but there are a few more collaborators – Joel Ross, Moor Mother, Elvis Costello, Vijay Iyer, and more – brought into the tent this time around. Aftab’s Pakistani heritage continues to shine through in both the winding, ululating vocal melodies and Urdu lyrics, but the lines here between jazz and world/folk music are so blurred as to become invisible. For whatever reason, here’s what I keep coming back to: imagine that you’re woodworking, using a very fine-grit sandpaper to smooth out bare wood. You work the grain with the sandpaper, shaving off sawdust in slow plumes and bringing out the underlying form. You finish, and set the paper aside. Run your finger across the plane now, clearing away the residue. That’s what Night Reign sounds like.

2. Amaro Freitas – Y’Y

The Brazilian pianist and composer Amaro Freitas’s fourth album is one of the most spiritually rooted albums you might hear this year. Inspired by time spent in the Amazon rainforest, Y’Y is split into two distinct halves that are nevertheless unified by Freitas’s unique piano vocabulary. The A-side (first five songs) is played entirely by Freitas, primarily on piano but with some hand-drum and auxiliary percussion accompaniment, while side B widens the circle to welcome guests like Shabaka Hutchings, Brandee Younger, Hamid Drake, and Jeff Parker. Freitas’s style, especially on side A, is slippery but intensely percussive, with hard staccato breaks on treated piano keys. The eight-minute “Dança dos Martelos” is the most virtuoso piece here, and the way it leads directly into “Sonho Ancestral” is breathtaking. Y’Y has a mystical approach, like birdsong and rainwater trapped in amber, but it is also grounded, earthen, and stirringly present in this time.

1. James Brandon Lewis Quartet – Transfiguration

Two things can be simultaneously true: 1) James Brandon Lewis is simply too busy, and 2) I am too easy a mark for the tenor saxophonist’s style. Lewis cracked my favorite jazz albums list twice last year, and although he appears on three different albums in this year’s list (with Dave Douglas and Alan Braufman), he played on at least two others (the taut, testy session with ex-Fugazi group the Messthetics, plus an ECM session supporting the pianist Giovanni Guidi). Transfiguration is his fourth album (following two studio and one live) with a quartet of Chad Taylor/drums, Brad Jones/bass, and Aruán Ortiz/piano, and again features all Lewis original compositions in his “molecular systematic music” method. I’m too unschooled in music theory to elaborate, but these eight pieces are often dense, knotty tangles of sound that whip and curl back around, buttressed by Jones’s ever-buoyant bass (particularly on the lengthy, recursive Latin standout “Per 6”). Ortiz’s solo on “Black Apollo” is like a flock of birds startled en masse out of a cornfield, swooping and diving in organized chaos, while Taylor’s busily evocative drumming flares up and outward on the lashing waves of the tumultuously beautiful “Empirical Perception.” Lewis’s melody on album closer “Elan Vital” feels linked to the gospel standard “His Eye is on the Sparrow,” but his playing throughout is equal parts muscular and exploratory, questions in search of answers.

YNOT SOME YELECTRONIC SHIT

I’ve said it, and I meant it: I don’t listen to dance music for dancing. The styles I seek are sad or soft or deep or weird, and if you could find yourself dancing to some of them, that’s hardly my fault. I’m just here for the sound, and here’s what sounded great.

15. Jasper Byrne & Sonic – Mirrors: Downcast shoegazing slowcore a la Slowdive collides with classicist drum and bass and goth-tinged guitar.

14. Four Tet – Three+: As an on-record doofus, I was initially disappointed by the more downtempo-oriented material on Three. I should have trusted the process, though, because Hebden’s craft is razor-sharp no matter the style.As an on-record doofus, I was initially disappointed by the more downtempo-oriented material on Three. I should have trusted the process, though, because Hebden’s craft is razor-sharp no matter the style.

13. DJ Poolboi – Into Blue Light: Beautifully melancholy house meets ghostly rave like Burial covering early Moby.

12. Jonny From Space – Back Then I Didn’t But Now I Do: Murky dub, slow-mo breakbeat, aquatic ambiance combine for a self-guided tour of a celestial swamp.

11. Illuvia – Earth Prism: Illuvia is Ludvig Cimbrelius’s ambient drum and bass alias, and on Earth Prism his hybrid form is in full effect. The bedrock here is a misty, floating ambient that feels like an airplane finally breaking through the cloud layer during ascent, and the counterpoint is a skittering, lightly drilling d&b that laps at your feet like waves on a lunar ocean’s shore.

10. Nidia & Valentina – Estradas: Starkly entrancing rhythms delivered almost entirely through acoustic instrumentation. Sometimes the vibe is a bit reggaeton, and sometimes it’s almost like a bizarro universe tropicalia version of Test Dept-style industrial.

9. Loidis – One Day: Loidis’s One Day serves up sumptuous deep house shot through with rich veins of oceanic dub.

8. µ-Ziq – Grush: Planet Mu boss Mike Paradinas turns in one of his best albums of the century with Grush. The bits and bobs are as expected here, but across the board this is excellent, drums-forward IDM that manages to be both playful and wistful at once.

7. Lake People – Foreverer: Foreverer is a frankly incredible little platter of limber, deep-leaning house from Germany’s Lake People. The tones and burbles are sometimes aquatic and sometimes cosmic, but the best thing of all is the tremendously live-sounding drums that buttress the listener through life’s turbulent stream.

6. Xylitol – Anemones: Xylitol’s Catherine Backhouse has crafted a knockout swoon of an album with Anemones. The order of the day is cheerful and utterly charming hybrid jungle/IDM on Planet Mu. Imagine the playful electro-Kraut of early Mouse on Mars with the jungle drums cranked to 11 and you’re on your way to a mile-wide smile with Xylitol.

5. Arcologies – Ocean-Deep

The story with this lovely Arcologies album is similar to the Illuvia listed above: this is fully atmosphere drum and bass floating atop angelic ambient. The order of operations is flipped here, though: the Illuvia foregrounds the ambient with d&b a fluttering underbelly; this Arcologies is more straightforwardly classic d&b, wrapped in and succored by ambient haze.

4. Priori – This But More

This But More is a beautiful but rather melancholy album of ambient, deep techno, light dub, and flutterings of understated IDM. “Learn to Fly” is emblematic: spacious, rolling beats, deep dubby bass, and a hauntingly nostalgic atmosphere, while “Like It Shouldn’t” flashes and dives like Skee Mask by way of Four Tet. Gorgeous stuff.

3. Saphileaum – Exploring Together / Banana Leaf Paradise / Mirage

Saphileaum is the alias of Tbilisi, Georgia-based Andro Gogibedashvili, and in 2024 he released three albums across three different labels. Taken together, though, they form a unified sound vision of pure tripped-out relaxation. In truth, there’s much in common with the Tegu albums that landed on this year’s ambient list above, but there’s ever so slightly more percussive weight to Saphileaum’s music to make it a reasonable pitch for a dance-adjacent list. New Age pads, tribal percussive loops, and laidback melodies intermingle to warm the listener beneath a late-afternoon sun of tropical folk ambient/house. Truly restorative.

2. Globular – Lifts the Curse of the Grey Goo Assimilators

Top marks, first of all, to the lurid comic book-style artwork here. Globular’s latest LP is a full-on headtrip into blissed-out, world fusion psychedelia. The clear antecedents would be the experimental ambient/house of the Orb or Banco de Gaia’s more world-dance focus, but Lifts the Curse is a lush, dubby, psytrance and worldbeat-infused journey all its own.

1. Monolake – Studio

Monolake began as the duo of Robert Henke and Gerhard Behles, who, in addition to making some of the finest ambient/dub techno of all time, worked together on creating Ableton Live. Monolake has been Henke’s solo project since around the turn of the millennium, and his latest album, Studio, is Monolake’s best since 2005’s Polygon Cities. At its best, Studio’s hyper-pointillism reminds me of Monolake’s Interstate, but the album covers enough terrain that it can’t be siloed solely into minimal techno, dub techno, IDM, industrial (check “Stasis Field”), clicks and cuts, or any other micro-genre. “Global Transport” might be the showiest piece, with voice recordings from various transportation facility PA systems (airports, train stations, etc) chopped and sequenced into vaguely melodic snippets, but opener “The Elders Disagree” skitters across the, ahem, stereo field while riding a two-chord oscillation that feels reminiscent of Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman (For Massenet).” I love listening to Monolake because it feels like entering a universe where beats and drums are the primary language, and they communicate not only rhythm but also color, mood, tone… in short: life.

YNOT COZY UP WITH THAT YAMBIENT SHIT

If ambient music were A Singular Thing, do you suppose it would be pleased or distraught that it gets used for its low distraction quotient or for self-soothing rather than for its musical merit? I guess the whole thing was already baked into Eno’s ad nauseam-repeated definition of the ideal state of ambient music, but it’s worth examining, the next time you sink into warm synth pads and low, glacial drones: it’s wonderful to see what the music is doing for you, but should we lift the hood a bit more to see what it’s doing?

15. Giselle – The Air is Here, The Air is Everywhere

Equal parts hushed and haunting, this languid album crackles with the granularity of manipulated field recordings. Wordless vocals often lilt beneath the surface, and while there’s lots of room for stillness – almost stark silence – the waves sometimes swell to overwhelming heights.

14. Innesti – Diaphanous

Diaphanous, as the Brits like to say, does what it says on the tin. (The Brits also, however, pronounce “aluminum” with an absurd extra syllable, so they’re not to be trusted with the soft metals.) This is the Illinois artist Innesti’s first album on the storied ambient label Past Inside the Present, and its low swells and soft drones are like gentle flickering lamplight seen through drawn curtains. A centering balm.

13. Anthéne – Seven Pieces for Harmonium

Brad Deschamps is no stranger to gentle, restorative ambient music. In fact, in addition to this beautiful little experiment of an album, he has released probably a half-dozen other albums this year. Seven Pieces for Harmonium is particularly stirring, as Deschamps coaxed all of these songs from a harmonium and various delay pedals. The organ-like instrument adds a slightly reedy overtone to these drifting, pearlescent pieces.

12. Ariel Kalma / Jeremiah Chiu / Marta Sofia Honer – The Closest Thing to Silence

To file under: “most surprising thing on International Anthem this year except that we should probably stop being surprised by the organic unpredictability of International Anthem.” The Closest Thing to Silence is an ambient-leaning New Age collaboration that, yes, still sits comfortably(ish) on a mostly jazz(ish) label, but with these gentle electronic experiments with woodwinds and strings, with the excellent textures that yield to a calm and slow unfolding, with the soft ASMR of these miniatures, Closest Thing to Silence is an extended bit of breathwork.

11. Purl – Himmelsandar

Purl’s Ludvig Cimbrelius also appears above on the electronic list (as Illuvia) with an album that might more properly be called electronic, while Himmelsandar landed here as an ambient album that might more properly be called electronic. Go fig. The kicks are muted and buried deep in the mix here, so I suppose you could imagine it as a dub party for sea cucumbers.

10. Luciano Michelini & Lorenzo Dada – Lucifer

Truthfully, I don’t quite know how to describe this album, except to say that A) it is a very unusual style for Kompakt and B) it is very neat. More than anything, Lucifer is a journey, an arc that unfolds naturally as it crosses synth, ambient, classical, and techno elements. But it is never just one thing. On “Requiem,” for example, voices play in counterpoint, one popping in repetitive arpeggio and the other elongated underneath, while strings tremulate and a muted trumpet mourns. It’s all a bit like Max Richter meeting Steve Reich at a Kiasmos gig, but it’s fully – and only – itself.

9. Inhmost – Future Research Journal Entries (Part I)

I suppose if you were a no-fun dingdong, you might make fun of ambient music as little more than gauze-thin warbling for planetarium shows. As Mary J said, though, we don’t need no hateration, holleration, in this spacery. Inhmost’s latest trip is, yes indeed, perfectly cosmic ambient drifting tunes for gazing into the heart of the inky black of space and listening for the sound of dead stars just now striking your optic nerve, millions of years after they went dark.

8. PJS – Flora

A dumb thing about me is, I don’t really know how music like this gets made. The info on Flora’s Bandcamp page (via the ever-reliable Dronarivm) says “All music recorded live without computer sounds or screens.” I assume this means the duo of PJS (also responsible this year for the excellent Alchemy album) are set up with some kind of modular synth setup, but what comforts me in my appalling ignorance is that, whatever the method, these long, patient, burbling hymns feel like watching time-lapse photography of a new-growth forest.

7. zakè & Tyresta – The Worlds We Leave Behind

I am a certified mark for the rich, blanketing ambient that zakè and Tyresta make separately, so it is hardly surprising that their second collaboration (after last year’s Drift) is a droning, lilting, gently chiming blissout. “You Will Become a Song” suggests an orchestra’s worth of strings with its treated guitar, while “Speaking Without Words” could have been lifted straight from prime Stars of the Lid. Impossible depths here.

6. Polypores – There Are Other Worlds

There Are Other Worlds is more active than a lot of other ambient music, and in truth it has a lot in common with the more kosmische side of Tangerine Dream and their acolytes. Shimmery, cooking modular synth arpeggios where the downbeats almost get you moving, but it’s a sort of cracked sideways movement, like tipping your beach chair over on purpose.

5. Contours – Elevations

Man, this is just wonderful. It’s mostly a slow-moving, subtly shifting undercurrent of ambient, sure, but there’s a beautiful dusting of both contemporary classical and light-touch jazz going on throughout. “Elevation 2,” in particular, is a Philip Glass-like sheen of meditative xylophone and strings, while “Pots” is like a dub-infused tabla drum noir? I don’t exactly know what the hell is happening at any given moment here but I am in love with it all.

4. Six Rivers National Forest – Folklore

So, I guess Folklore is spooky? Maybe it’s dark ambient, which I am typically mostly allergic to? I shouldn’t overstate it, because whatever Six Rivers National Forest is doing across this mystical sprawl of an album, it’s still light enough to listen to in the dark. The centering pull of the album is, maybe unsurprisingly, the sound of the forest, with wide-spectrum recordings of birds, hushed static, rushing waters. The album feels in tension with its aims, but productively so: conveying the deep green still of the dense woods through tactile sound in overdrive.

3. Tegu – Forest Hills / Owl Island

Florida’s Hunter Thompson featured in this same space last year with two albums under his Akasha System alias and a third as DJ Panthr. In 2024, his more ambient-oriented project Tegu released two excellent outings. Anything resembling a beat has been stripped back, but the New Age-lean remains. It’s not exactly “pan flutes at the mall kiosk,” but I won’t fight you on it. The best thing, though, is that Thompson has found a vibe and rides it straight and true, with vaguely murky, tropical, lightly dubbed-out ambient haze that defies the slop known as vaporwave. I sound angry, but with Tegu, I can regulate.

2. Piper Spray & Lena Tsibizova – Debtor of Presence

Debtor of Presence is one of the widest-ranging albums on this list. The Australian duo pull together arpeggiating synth, harshly haunted noise, field recordings, ambient drones, and muted dub for an album of altogether unexpected nooks and crannies. “Spell,” for example, sounds like a field recording of nocturnal creatures skittering across glass. Each of these 14 pieces is intensely rich and granular – a bit like a photo-negative of something on the typically plaintive 12k label – but the overall impression is of two people wandering a landscape strewn with cultural detritus and finding beauty in what has been cast aside.

1. Adnata Ensemble – Oku

To me, ambient music is primarily an invitation to a type of different, deeper listening. The music of Adnata Ensemble might be more readily classified as jazz or contemporary classical music, but the effect of sitting still and listening to – and listening with – Oku is as palpably pure an experience of suspension as I have had this year. The music in this short, superficially modest album is made entirely by a quartet of double-bassists, which means that the tonal possibilities are both intentionally restricted and also unexpectedly limitless. Fingers on plucked strings, bows drawn slowly, wooden bodies tapped and thumped, other sounds and gestures that feel unknowable. “Dinah” sounds like a stable of horses impatiently waiting the dawn. But the feeling that I have not been able to shake since I first listened to Oku is, this is music of the trees. It feels like sitting in a forest clearing and hearing the trees speak. Roots drinking deep, leafed canopies arcing to sky, the low, deep, beautiful rapport of old and fragile things.

YNOT YOTHER SHIT TOO Y’ALL

There’s so much music out there – music of almost every conceivable stripe – that one could easily decide on January 1st of a given year, “This is what kind of new music year I’m planning to have.” You want an all psych/rock year? Go for it. An all dubstep year? Sure thing. Only want cybergrind R&B? There are probably twelve bands per week in twelve garages per country making just what you seek. We are agents of chaos, crashing through the algorithm in pursuit of our “give me what I want to be mine to hear.” Here’s how I steered myself through other waters this year.

15. Mohama Saz – Maquina de Guerra

If you want to rock yourself into a calm trance, Maquina de Guerra is just the ticket. The fifth album from the Spanish psych-rock trio Mohama Saz is exceedingly lovely, spilling over with mellow, Eastern/Turkish melodies and the delightful desert tones of the baglama saz. Imagine a more chill version of Blaak Heat and you’re on your way.

14. Khruangbin – A La Sala

Khruangbin’s music is just nonstop vibe. On Mordechai they overcooked the approach with too much vocal for my taste, but the Ali collab with Vieux Farka Touré was a fiery reset. A La Sala, for its part, sometimes lays so far back on the beat it looks fit to fall over, but that’s just fine in my book. Dusty grooves for days, and if you don’t swoon for the soul on “Three From Two,” kindly get thee to a nunnery.

13. Hannah Frances – Keeper of the Shepherd

Hannah Frances is probably tired of hearing it, but her voice is older than her years. That’s no knock on her rich, golden midrange singing, but meant to underscore the yearning but careworn ache with which she floats above her own subtly snaky guitar work. She often reminds me of Laura Marling, which is to say she often reminds me of Joni Mitchell, which is to say Keeper of the Shepherd is beautiful and brilliant.

12. Papangu – Lampião Rei

Papangu’s lightning-stark debut Holoceno was already metal in only a most nominal sense. On album number two, the Brazilian freethinkers have blossomed outward and backwards, plugging in to the broader soil of 70s prog and jazzy fusion. There are still elements of metallic harshness (most often in the vocals), but this fascinating, wide-ranging album is high-concept Prog through and through. Holoceno was most striking at its most savage; Lampião Rei is, to my ears, most interesting at its softest: this suggests Papangu has still more breadth we have yet to see.

11. Skraeckoedlan – Vermillion Sky

Fun fact: I can never remember just what in the hell kind of color vermillion is supposed to be. Thanks to Sweden’s Skraeckoedlan, though, now I’ll never forget. (Look at the cover. It’s red. Vermillion is a red. Red.) Even better, though, is that Vermillion Sky is supremely excellent stoner/psych (not quite metal). These tunes purr heavy fuzz like an engine idling in the sky, but it’s all shot through with enough dreamy psych elements to shimmy yer jimmies.

10. Genevieve Beaulieu – Augury

As the vocalist for Montreal’s Menace Ruine, Genevieve Beaulieu has long used her sharp, curiously resonant voice in overlapping tension with black metal and industrial-tinged neofolk. On Augury, the music is stripped back to spare, haunting folk songs on nylon-string guitar, but Beaulieu’s voice loses none of its hypnotic power.

9. Senyawa – Vajranala

Sometimes there’s no other way to put it: this band is really cool. Senyawa is an Indonesian two-piece making avant-garde industrial / drone / noise / what-the-fuck-ever music. The imposing structure featured on the cover of Vajranala was built by the band members as an art installation to accompany the music, but the fact that you might catch a vibe as if early Einsturzende Neubauten was interpreting Sepultura’s Chaos A.D.? Sign me up.

8. Beyoncé – Cowboy Carter

Look, I can’t tell you anything about Cowboy Carter you couldn’t read elsewhere, and if you’ve listened to it, you know where you stand. I lay no claim to any Big Conversation. As a certified knucklehead who has, more often than he should, engaged in “yes, but is it metal?” argumentation, I can’t fault anyone who wants to bleat a “yes, but is it country?” line. “16 Carriages” still gives me chills, and that’s just fact. It’s a fucking great album, folks. Get in or get gone.

7. Zeitgeber – Fellow Prisoners of the Splendour and Travail of the Earth Part 1

Australia’s Zeitgeber has been a shapeshifting project since day one, but their latest album moves away from some of the more electronic elements of earlier work into acoustic instruments and organic tones organized in looping, mathy post-rock configurations. The key work is done by piano and clarinet, but it’s the shuffling, lockstep-shifting drums that nudge us ever forward, and hopefully upward.

6. Godspeed You! Black Emperor – Untitled as of Feb-13-24

To be honest, sometimes I belly up to a new Godspeed album with an attitude of, “Christ, won’t these folks ever lighten up?” But they don’t, and they haven’t, and they won’t, and that is as it should be. The album “title” and liner notes and artwork are clearly conceived by way of protest of the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas, and the seriousness of the subject matter informs the solemn density of the music. But as with much of GSYBE’s best recent work, the beating heart of the sound is the keening, folk-inflected melodies that push and pull at the droning crescendos. The untitled ambient piece on the D-side is eminently well-placed to ease us back before the starting needle drops and the world is born again, screaming anew as always.

5. The Smile – Cutouts

The Smile put out two full albums this year. I didn’t care for Wall of Eyes as much because it settled into too much quiet, but Cutouts rights the ship wonderfully by reinjecting plenty of the percussive twitchiness of last year’s debut. If you ever find yourself needing to explain the legacy of the Radiohead family to a perplexed alien, I guess you could do worse than “Thom Yorke yelping about Windows 95 in 2024 but it’s great.”

4. The Cosmic Dead – Infinite Peaks

Sometimes I feel the need to orchestrate fancy words to paint a picture or illustrate exactly why something or other is good or novel or worthy of your time. But my goodness, this Cosmic Dead album? It’s just plain great. Two sidelong tracks and no bullshit is what animates the awesome instrumental heavy psych from this Scottish band, and if you feel that being told Infinite Peaks is “Godspeed You! Black Emperor by way of Earthless” is reductive and arch, kindly stopper thine ears and take a goddamn hike. The rest of us are enjoying ourselves.

3. Vestbo Trio – Out of Place

Out of Place is, more than any other single thing, cozy. It’s, in fact, a very cozy and quiet instrumental album from this Danish trio (and a few guests), with the style landing mostly in a twangy, improvised sort of rock with slide guitar and generally beautiful, tactile sounds recorded live in a theater. It requires, perhaps, closer and more careful listening than one is always able to give, which makes the gifts it unfolds all the richer.

2. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – Wild God

Nick Cave has sounded old since he was young, wild even when hushed and tamed. The arc of his career with the Bad Seeds has been improbable if not unpredictable, primarily because anyone who gnawed through those early days with the heroin-waif mania of Cave might not be expected to live long enough to reach elder statesman status. But he sang about it twenty years ago, about chasing that muse – the one realest Muse of art – about begging for someone to “send that stuff on down to me.” Wild God is, yeah, wild and reverent, elegiac and oddly hopeful. It pushes outward from the starkness of Skeleton Tree and even the muted technicolor devastation of Ghosteen, and it explodes – again, again – like that same gospel spirit of Abbatoir/Orpheus, electric with grief and love and awe.

1. delving – All Paths Diverge

So, I don’t know about you, but sometimes… life is hard. It can feel like nothing comes easy. All Paths Diverge, though? It’s easy. Eeeeeeeasy. I don’t mean to suggest that this second album from Elder frontman Nick DiSalvo’s project Delving is simplistic, or to underplay the skill and effort and dedication it took to produce it. But as a listener, nothing is easier than to sit back and bob in the wake of this warm, mellow, friendly instrumental psych-rock dream. And really, it can feel like a dream: Delving’s music shares with Elder these long, loping melodic grooves that stretch across measures and fold back under, so it’s easy – maybe even expected – to drift in and out of focus while listening, to bathe in the neon chime of the guitar and the patient waft of the Rhodes, and to find yourself somewhere different when you come back around. The magic of All Paths Diverge is its understated depth: it doesn’t ask anything of you, but offers so much.

Thank you, deeply, for being here with us and reading any of our foolishness throughout the year. You are important, and the world is better with you in it. Do good, be kind, be well.

“So open your arms to me now, there is room for that here.
I’ll hold you as long as it takes you to know that it’s real.
‘Cause the roar of the emptiness dwindles away when it’s shared,
If we should dare to hold on to this.”

(from Madder Mortem’s “Long Road”)

Posted by Dan Obstkrieg

Happily committed to the foolish pursuit of words about sounds. Not actually a dinosaur.

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