The Tomo Awards 2021
My Top 21 Albums Of 2021
So before we get into it, what constitutes an album? For me, I believe an album in this medium of writing should be defined as whatever the norm is for major bodies of musical work in its country of origin. By this standard, an album is…well, an “album” in most countries. However, when it comes to South Korean music, I find that the term “album” can also used as a descriptor for extended plays (EP) which are the most common bodies of work. It’s very rare for particularly K-pop artists to drop a full album. Take for instance one of the artists featured on my list this year, TWICE.
TWICE happen to be one of if not the biggest girl group in Korea right now. However, when you look at TWICE’s discography, you’ll find that their album featured on this list is only technically their third, despite an extensive and prolific discography starting back in 2015. Their second album only released just last year. Before that, their discography was almost entirely comprised of EPs — 11 of them, to be precise — which have longer runtimes than any of the three bodies of work Kanye West called an album from the two final years of the last decade. It would be criminal to not count records housing pop masterpieces/cultural touchstones such as ‘KNOCK KNOCK’ and ‘Like Ooh Ahh’ as major bodies of work. It’s with that in mind that I — as I usually do every year — will be including EPs from South Korea as “albums”. However, because EPs are not the musical norm in Japan, I won’t be including Perfume’s nearly faultless return to form, the Polygon Wave EP, as unbelievably badly as I want to. Two whole paragraphs to justify a single EP occupying a spot on my list this year. We’re off to a great start.
I also will not be including singles on this list for obvious reason. This is unfortunate because some of my favorite songs this year have been singles, like the two I’m about to mention as well as PUP’s phenomenal ‘Waiting / Kill Something’ double A-side single. However, I state all of this because I would hate myself for not talking at least in short about my favorite two songs of the entire year, Noname’s ‘Rainforest’ and THE SPELLBOUND’s debut single ‘HAJIMARI’. On ‘Rainforest’, Noname pulls no punches in her brutal critique of capitalism (with some bars going so far that she even had to apologize for them as she hadn’t realized at first that her critique of wealth also happened to indirectly shame poor people; we love the accountability and growth). While it’s looking more and more like Noname might never release another album, ‘Rainforest’ in such a case would be the perfect capstone to her musical career as she shifts her focus instead towards real, genuine activism.
On the other hand, we have one other song tied for my song of the year. Less politically charged and more personally motivated, THE SPELLBOUND unleashed their debut single ‘HAJIMARI’ back in January, with four other singles following it monthly until May. ‘HAJIMARI’, which means “the beginning” in Japanese reads more like a new beginning. You see, THE SPELLBOUND aren’t just some brand new band from out of nowhere; they’re made up of THE NOVEMBERS frontman Yusuke Kobayashi as well as Masayuki Nakano and Yoko Fukuda, the surviving members of BOOM BOOM SATELLITES, whose frontman Michiyuki Kawashima tragically passed away five years ago after releasing their final EP, LAY YOUR HANDS ON ME. Continuing off of BOOM BOOM SATELLITE’s signature electronic-rock sound, THE SPELLBOUND — which take their name from a BBS song — make a powerful and nostalgic debut with a fresh new voice and dreamier production thanks to Kobayashi’s experience with making the shoegazey post-rock THE NOVEMBERS themselves are still known for. ‘HAJIMARI’ is both wildly catchy and well-produced, showing the beginning for a worthy successor to one of the world’s greatest and most underrated bands taken away from us too soon. I know this would make Kawashima proud, and I can say with utmost certainty that their debut album releasing on February 23rd 2022 is my most anticipated release of the entire year, withholding the slim annual chance of a new Frank Ocean project.
One of the other small caveats for this year is that these lists usually start being written at the beginning of December, when there are still often a few straggler releases that work their way into the year. I find it unfair to include albums like this, as some require many repeat listens to fully grasp and therefore just don’t have enough time to really find a comfortable spot on the list. Therefore, I will also define “2021 albums” as albums that also happened to release in December of 2020 after all of the major outlets had already published their lists. Once again, a full paragraph to justify a single album’s placement on this list, but also a caveat for the possible inclusion of Japanese indie rock outfit Lucie,Too’s highly anticipated debut studio album FOOL — which releases on December 8th, 2021 — as well as Beach House’s half-unreleased new album Once Twice Melody which will be released in monthly quarters from November 2021 to February 2022—on my 2022 list as well.
Another small little rule is that I will not be including the “deluxe edition” of any album featured here, only the albums as they were released on release date and intended to be. Thankfully, I believe only one album on this list even has one of these frankly unartful “deluxe versions” as far as I’m aware (we had a talk about this trend last year, as my #20 album was both Lil Uzi Vert’s Eternal Atake as well as its “deluxe version” Lil Uzi Vert Vs. The World 2, which still stands with NAV’s Brown Boy 2 as one of the only actual high-effort “deluxe versions” in this greedy age of streaming services.)
As usual, we’ll work our way up from my “least favorite favorite albums” to my “most favorite favorite albums”. Spotify links embedded as well. Let’s begin.
21. Neon Bunny — “KOSMOS”
One album that almost didn’t make this list is Neon Bunny’s KOSMOS. What ended up changing my mind was revisiting this album with a more critical mind, a magnifying glass. I’ve developed quite a reputation for touting Neon Bunny’s 2016 effort Stay Gold as the greatest Korean album of all time. Its sound is as melty and regal as the album cover, a blend of influences ranging from Billie Holiday to BoA, its presentation as effortless as any other album you’ve ever heard, and a blend of perfectly-produced tracks ranging from dreamy downtempo to electro-trap. Her debut album Seoulight beat out IU’s breakout album Last Fantasy at the Korean Music Awards back in 2011 and even had a bit revolving around it featured on an episode of “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver” in which he jokes about a story that claimed the South Korean military was blasting K-pop over the DMZ border at the North Korean army and how they “probably weren’t even playing good K-pop like Neon Bunny”. IU herself has gone onto achieve international fame and has been pretty widely regarded as one of Korea’s biggest modern day soloists. Neon Bunny however remains in total obscurity both in Korea and abroad, only receiving her due credits in underground music circles rather than topping the Gaon charts.
So how does one follow up on such titanic albums as Stay Gold, Seoulight, and even the more club-oriented Happy Ending EP? Was she even self-aware of that kind of pressure? Well, a lot has changed for Lim Yoo-jin, the artist behind the moniker of Neon Bunny. For starters, she’s since gotten married to the object of her affection who occupied her obsessive poetry on Stay Gold back in 2016, giving birth to their first child this year as well. Neon Bunny isn’t quite as young as the average K-pop star, and while that’s of course not a bad thing, the industry itself unfortunately favors fresh young talent, with members of the recently debuted group IVE hosting members as young as 14. At 38 years old, Neon Bunny embraces her age in her music as all great artists do — with absolute and unadulterated finesse.
KOSMOS is a subtle and restrained album, reflective of Lim’s maturity and personal experiences of late. Shy of the standout track ‘Twilight’ which may actually be her most club-ready song since 2013’s “Happy Ending” EP, KOSMOS is incredibly mellow and as my experience with revisiting it has shown, requires your utmost attention for any returning fans. The lyrics are less up-front and have a lot more air to them, the production is minimal and quiet as a mouse throughout much of its runtime. It requires a patience and an understanding that this is less of an unfolded presentation of majestic sounds like Stay Gold and rather a deep reflection of Lim’s inner self akin to Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds’ most recent works like Ghosteen and Skeleton Tree.
While nothing on KOSMOS really truly does it for me on repeat listens the way individual songs like ‘All I Want Is You’, ‘Room314’, or ‘Romance In Seoul’ still absolutely floor me half a decade later, it instead provides a cohesive front-to-back album experience that demands to be listened to in full each time rather than allowing for individual songs to be returned to with bated breath. While Stay Gold and KOSMOS are both best described as “dreamy” and “hypnotic” albums, they reside on opposite sides in a way — Stay Gold is maximal and warm, whereas KOSMOS is minimal and frigidly cold, and for that, I think KOSMOS has truly earned its title as a worthy follow-up to what I still believe is the single greatest Korean album ever put to record, and with that kind of pressure, feels like the most that could have been humanly done.
Neon Bunny once again delivers a powerfully emotional experience in an entirely different way than her previous works.
Biggest Highlights: ‘Twilight’, ‘Bloom’
20. Deafheaven — “Infinite Granite”
Let’s get back to keeping things a bit shorter until we get to the top albums, alright? Deafheaven stands as one of the most acclaimed and innovative metal bands of the 2010s. By merely even calling them a metal band, you open up the opportunity for purists to burst a blood vessel. Deafheaven’s magnificent 2013 masterpiece Sunbather was an effortless blend of ambient shoegaze and ferocious black metal, full of swelling guitars, violent blast beats, and of course shrieked vocals; it’s a style that’s since gone on to exemplify a genre that’s become known as “blackgaze”, and though Deafheaven were hardly the first band to do it, many would argue that they’re the best at it. While this sound carried over a bit darker to its 2015 followup New Bermuda, 2018’s Ordinary Corrupt Human Love saw Deafheaven if not briefly ease up on the intensity and let the songs breathe a little in the beauty rather than the harshness, even offering a few clean chants towards the end of the track ‘Canary Yellow’.
On this year’s Infinite Granite however, Deafheaven take the approach of ‘Canary Yellow’ to the opposite, by featuring almost entirely clean vocals in a shift to what could be better described as a post-rock sound rather than black metal, with a small few songs (‘Great Mass Of Color’, ‘Villain’, ‘Mombasa’) featuring a small amount of ambient screaming buried in the mix towards the end of. The rest are entirely sung, something that frontman George Clarke struggled with during the process of writing Infinite Granite, finding a welcomed challenge in crafting memorable and catchy choruses while still leaving an air of mystique to the band’s sound. This is still unmistakably Deafheaven, but they keep things more subtle. The change of sound certainly turned a handful of fans off, but it overall feels like a natural progression for the band, if not one that won’t last forever, and certainly a more natural progression from aggressive sounds to cleaner tendencies than something like Ceremony’s The L-Shaped Man was back in 2015 for instance.
The lead single ‘Great Mass Of Color’ is unfortunately the best song on Infinite Granite in my opinion, something I often find a little disappointing when the song meant to merely preview what’s to come on a full-length ends up being the pinnacle of it rather than a taster. The being said, there are other fantastic moments on here, like the ambient synth interlude ‘Neptune Raining Diamonds’ and the climaxing slowburn ‘Villain’.
The closing track ‘Mombasa’ features the only blast beat on the entire album during its final 3 minutes, possibly signaling that Infinite Granite is merely a temporary detour rather than a permanent shift in sounds. Regardless of where they go next, I find Infinite Granite to be an excellent addition to Deafheaven’s beloved discography.
Biggest Highlights: ‘Great Mass Of Color’, ‘Villain’
19. Kanye West — “DONDA”
Let’s get everything we know about Kanye West off the table right away. Okay, now that all of that is off the table, are we ready to talk about DONDA? What, you thought I was going to go through every little controversy from even the last 4 years of his career? Come on, that alone would be a higher word count than every other entry on this list combined. We all know what one of the world’s biggest celebrities did and said, so it just needs to go without saying here. I’ve told myself over and over that I would hate to not include an album this
So let’s begin the list with my usual tradition of “I wanted to keep the earlier entries short, but this very bottom album on the list is too complex to leave at just a paragraph or two”. DONDA is a monster of an album, and if I had to be honest, I think if it came out in 2016 it would be pretty highly regarded in Kanye’s discography exactly as it is. But in 2021, 5 years after the deconstructed minimalist-maximalist beautiful mess that was The Life Of Pablo, the charm of that kind of album has waned quite a bit. How about a metaphor? TLOP was a Jackson Pollock painting, a mess of colors splattered intentionally into an abstract work of art. On the other hand, DONDA is merely an extremely detailed sketch, but still just a sketch at the end of the day. It shows off the potential of what could be the best album of the entire year despite all of Kanye’s recent shortcomings and disappointments to his dedicated fanbase.
The openers ‘Donda Chant’ and ‘Jail’ demonstrate the consistent and powerful opening to what could be an album-like-a-Broadway-musical. But as the third track ‘God Breathed’ shows us rather quickly, this isn’t the maximalist work that it could be. No, of course, this is a modern era Kanye West album; it’s no longer his brainchild, but rather an idea he started and let an army of others finish (or frankly not finish) for him. The beat is sparse, the arrangement is baffling, the features feel a little bit like heavy-lifting Kanye’s own shortcomings, and it sounds like there could even be an open verse entirely which lasts for the entire last 50% of the song. (A bit of a side-rant, an “open verse” is a term in hip-hop used to refer to a portion of a beat left entirely instrumental with the intention of having another featured artist come into the booth and record their own verse there.)
Things do pick up rather quickly with the fourth track ‘Off The Grid’, a bold song that compliments every single voice featured on it, while also proving that if Kanye had the energy and passion, absolutely still could keep up with the new generation if he really wanted to. ‘Off The Grid’ is a stroke of genius in the modern era of Kanye West, the kind of track that again would be praised to the stars and back by everyone just a few short years ago. Kanye sets the song up with a speedy hook right off the bat, with the exact kind of beat you’d expect in the tail-end of the trap era as Playboi Carti makes himself heard as the songs first feature, delivering the exact kind of chaotic and breathless verse you’d expect before passing the mic back to Kanye for the second chorus. This is where things get interesting and the genius peeks through again — as a sampled drum fill (think the sample of King Crimson’s ‘21st Century Schizoid Man’ on ‘Power’) carries us back to the chorus, it also sets us up for a subtle but innovative beat switch as the hi hats evolve from the steady pace of trap to the dragging rhythm of a Brooklyn drill beat. This change in the drums seamlessly welcomes Fivio Foreign, a Brooklyn drill rapper himself, to deliver the song’s second verse. But the most surprising thing of all is how Kanye himself delivers the third verse over this same drill beat, proving his versatility even to this day, spitting hard bars without missing a single step. And mind you, these aren’t Ye (2018) bars; these are legitimate and complete thoughts, the kind of “I’m hungry and need to get signed” kind of bars that a young rapper would be desperately shouting.
Of course, Kanye’s recent obsession with half-baked and frankly cringe-worthy lyrics about religion find their way onto DONDA as well. ‘Praise God’ once again muddies the tracklist with some weak songwriting from not just Kanye, but also Baby Keem and Travis Scott. Immediately after however, Jonah is a gorgeous and ambient 808s & Heartbreak-style throwback that however reads more like “Vory — ‘Jonah (feat. Kanye West and Lil Durk)’” rather than a Kanye song featuring Vory and Lil Durk. ‘Jonah’ is however still an excellent addition to the tracklist and would absolutely work its way into my own personal edit of the album were it up to me to cut the tracklist in half. We’re not gonna talk about ‘Ok Ok’ or ‘Junya’ as funny as ‘Junya’ is.
Skipping a few tracks ahead is another favorite of mine, ‘Remote Control’, which was a highlight of one of DONDA’s many pre-release listening events, my personal favorite moment of the entire album’s rollout cycle. You see, ‘Remote Control’ features an moody lowkey beat with bit-degraded, pitched drums, a sparse synth pad and bass (likely played by synth-wizard Mike Dean), a gorgeously dynamic guest verse by Young Thug which even features a few moments of his voice running through a vocoder (likely also by Mike Dean’s hands again), and an eerie whistling passage. The song is however capped off by a bizarre sample of a religious children’s film Strawinsky And The Mysterious House of a character known as the “Globglogabgalab” (don’t bother trying to pronounce it) who begins rapping other words as nonsensical as his name. It’s here that my favorite moment of DONDA’s rollout happened at its third listening part where during this part of ‘Remote Control’, the camera pans over to Marilyn Manson in full makeup sitting on the stage set looking stone-faced and bored as hell as this nonsense sample plays. While it only lasts for a short 10 seconds or so on the original cut of DONDA, this sample was extended to almost a full minute on the album’s deluxe version.
Following ‘Remote Control’ is ‘Moon’, an interlude that serves as a Kid Cudi-fronted reprise of the Weeknd-assisted ‘Hurricane’ from much earlier on in the album. Mind you, we are now 13 songs in, 10 songs past ‘Hurricane’, and still not at the album’s halfway point. This is the disaster of pacing that prevents DONDA from being the excellent album it could be. ‘Moon’ being an extension of ‘Hurricane’ absolutely begs to be put directly preceding or following it, as it finally does on the deluxe version of the album, which despite this seemingly positive step actually manages to make the tracklist even more disjointed and bloated.
While there are a few more excellent tracks of note in between, this segment is getting far too long, not unlike DONDA’s nearly 2-hour runtime of 27 songs. The remaining highlights here are the surprisingly powerful ‘Jesus Lord’ which shows that Kanye is also capable of still writing emotionally powerful songs about his faith that read as genuine and human rather than corny and unartistic. The 9-minute song finds Kanye battling with himself, conflicted over topics of his religious struggles, suicidal ideation, drug addiction, his mother’s untimely death, the realities of underprivileged American neighborhoods, and various other topics over his 4-minute long verse. While Jay Electronica also delivers another powerful verse, the song’s real weight lies in Larry Hoover Jr.’s emotional spoken word message at the end about the American prison industry complex’s unfair treatment of his incarcerated father and Kanye’s attempts to help free him. It’s the type of powerful sociopolitical message you wouldn’t have expected to hear so soon on a Kanye song after his open endorsement of Donald Trump.
Finally the album’s penultimate track (before the final string of glorified “Part 2”/remix bonus tracks) ‘Come To Life’ caps off what could again be an extremely heavy closing song. It’s in my humble opinion that after nearly 20 years, ‘Come To Life’ is without a doubt the most beautiful, emotional, well-written, well-produced, lyrically and musically powerful, best song in Kanye’s entire discography and my favorite song featured on any full-length album this year. You would be right in assuming that the Kanye West of 2008 would not be able to pull off a song like this. While 2008 found Kanye drowning in Auto-Tune on 808s & Heartbreak, fully admitting he doesn’t have a great singing voice, ‘Come To Life’ in 2021 proves that he does now, delivering the most gorgeous singing seen on the entire album, singing guest features be damned. There is no Auto-Tune here, just pure voice over what starts as just an organ but progresses into a massive climax of delay-effected layered piano arpeggios, gritty (but tamed) synth basses, and harmonies assisted by none other than Tyler, The Creator only on the deluxe version of the album which unfortunately places this magnum opus of a song in the early middle of the tracklist as opposed to its genius placement on the original version of DONDA as the climactic and tearjerking (I’m crying right now as I write this listening to it) closer. ‘Come To Life’ is Kanye West’s best song. Period. No hesitation. No second thoughts. It is his best song ever by a wide margin.
As I put it in a tweet a few weeks ago, “You’re not giving yourself enough credit for applying more than just passing thought to a record like this. It’s the kind of album that feels like it needs to be critically thought about deeper than just listening to it [once and passing it off as mid], like it needs to be both questioned and thought about.” DONDA is going to require a lot of heavylifting to get the most out of it, and I still feel like the journey with this album isn’t quite over yet. Where the heck is the actual album artwork, Kanye? Regardless, even if its rollout isn’t quite done yet, DONDA already feels like the kind of album that despite the mess will go down as another classic if not another frantically experimental checkmark in Kanye’s already experimental and messy discography.
Biggest Highlights: ‘Come To Life’, ‘Off The Grid’
18. Succumb — “XXI”
This is an album that I’ve been desperately waiting for what feels like forever for. Succumb’s sophomore followup to their self-titled 2017 album is everything I wanted from it; it’s violent and intimidating and it takes the extremity and production to the next level. One of Succumb’s defining traits as a band is the way they blur the lines between death metal and black metal, but not in the same ways a band like Behemoth by combining traits of both, but rather creating an androgynous blend of both styles where the intent isn’t really to figure it out; it’s simultaneously both and neither. One thing that XXI definitively is however, is brutal and dark to the core.
One of Succumb’s defining traits is vocalist Cheri Musrasrik’s unique voice. When I first discovered Succumb’s debut in the ‘ol YouTube reccs’, there were quite a few confused comments about her vocal style. I remember one in particular describing Musrasrik’s performance as “[sounding] like the anguished laments of a kid stuck in a well” and frankly that descriptor is only a pro in my eyes (ears), not a con. While her vocal delivery on XXI is far more in your face and less reverbed out than it was on the debut and feature more traditional screaming (the debut had none), I think that her voice still remains wildly unique, giving Succumb a distinct and unmistakable sound as a band.
Biggest Highlights: ‘Smoke’, ‘8 Trigrams’
17. Trippie Redd — “Trip At Knight”
I’m shaking at the thought of typing out the words that follow. Oh god…here we go…I…well, I genuinely think that a Trippie Redd album is one of my favorite albums of this year. There, I said it. And with that melodrama aside though, I think Trippie Redd really delivered without a doubt his most fantastic and colorful album to date with Trip At Knight. I don’t know too many genuine Trippie fans and I wouldn’t even really consider myself one despite having followed his career since A Love Letter To You 2. I still find his trajectory and story fairly interesting, however. Trippie Redd at his “peak” wasn’t nearly on the level of popularity that emo rap’s top 3 biggest stars at their own respective peaks were — those figures being Juice WRLD, XXXTENTACION, and Lil Peep respectively. But with all three of those legends having unfortunately all passed away far too early now, Trippie Redd finds himself going from the #4 biggest emo rap star to #1, in a way effectively plummeting the genre’s trajectory, ending its dominance. Trip At Knight even has posthumous features from two of those three artists.
While I found myself able to enjoy plenty of Trippie’s previous records like LIFE’S A TRIP and especially his pop-punk experiment NEON SHARK — which I think might be the best foray into the style among his contemporaries, towering over disasters like Vic Mensa’s 93Punx and especially Machine Gun Kelly’s embarrassingly bad Tickets To My Downfall — I never thought he’d release an album truly worthy of praise the way I’m about to speak about his latest effort however.
But Trip At Knight is a fantastic album, though its sound quite clearly bites off the success of Playboi Carti, Pi’erre Bourne, SoFaygo, and the (ughh) “hyperpop” movement appropriated from the efforts of PC Music legends like SOPHIE (may she rest in power) and A.G. Cook as well as the recent surge in popularity from artists like 100 Gecs and Glaive (whose All Dogs Go To Heaven EP would easily sit at #2 on my best EPs of 2021 chart were I to make one). Every song puts on display the kind of woozy, video-gamey synth-laden sounds you’d find all over an album like Die Lit or even 1000 Gecs. This sound remains entirely consistent until the final two tracks, holding onto an otherwise wildly colorful and spacey vibe full of vibrantly-produced beats, exciting hooks and guest verses, and quotables all up until that point, like the song ‘Super Cell’ which lyrically is comprised entirely of pretty surface level Dragon Ball Z references which still manage to be funny and memorable despite their simplicity and absurdity (see: “I travel galaxies like a god, I’m Lord Beerus” and who could forget “she suck them dragon balls bitch I feel like Cell”).
Frankly, I think Trip At Knight only has two conceivable flaws that Trippie would be capable of fixing. They’re realistic things; I don’t expect Trippie Redd to get poetic and outwardly political with his lyrics or anything, nor do I expect him to innovate an entirely new sound, though I find Trip At Knight despite being “derivative” of Playboi Carti’s old sound to be at least a little innovative as it’s a sound I still frankly don’t hear any other artists doing right now. And why do we have to say that an album like this is derivative of someone else while giving a pass for nearly every other generic trap record that tops the charts these days? What makes Lil Baby anything but derivative of all of his other contemporaries but yet nobody bats an eye at it?
Tangent aside, the two things I think that would fix Trip At Knight would be to reinclude Mario Judah’s feature on ‘Miss The Rage’ as well as to either cut those final two tracks from the album entirely or replace them with new tracks that would fit the album’s tone and close it out dramatically. The final two tracks, ‘Rich MF’ and ‘Captain Crunch’ are frankly completely out of place on Trip At Knight, escaping the album’s consistent oozy video gamey synth-driven sound by instead being two generic trap cuts that wouldn’t feel out of place anywhere on any other Trippie Redd album. The same can not be said for the other 16 songs, which would find themselves feeling just a little out of place on another Trippie project.
I’m frankly just impressed with the fact that Trippie Redd of all artists managed to make such an impressive and colorful album (colorful is the first word that came to mind when I heard LIFE’S A TRIP as well) that’s managed to keep me coming back over and over again since release, and I’m equally astounded that ‘Miss The Rage’ might even become a bigger hit for him than ‘Love Scars’ or ‘Dark Knight Dummo’ were. I dare say I’m actually excited to see what he has down the pipeline, as his second album ! is the only record of his I’d consider a total miss. Hopefully the assumed A Love Letter To You 5 manages to keep this momentum up, but until then, I just can’t stop returning to Trip At Knight for a fix of pure hyper-powered fun.
Biggest Highlights: ‘Betrayal (feat. Drake)’, ‘Miss The Rage’ (don’t forget to check out the infinitely better unreleased Mario Judah version as well)
16. TWICE — “FORMULA OF LOVE: O+T=<3”
Korean pop powerhouse TWICE’s sophomore full-length effort EYES WIDE OPEN also featured on my list last year, and they once again return with the more brainily titled FORMULA OF LOVE: O+T=<3. While EYES WIDE OPEN saw TWICE shifting into more synthpop and retro sounds, FORMULA OF LOVE finds them dabbling back a little more into their girlcrush-era K-pop roots than they have in recent years. The genius (it’s a pun if you want) opener ‘SCIENTIST’ is the very definition of a smash hit title track. Its produced just like the kind of mad scientist of love it describes, a true product of passion with wobbly synth basses accented by thick and steady kick drums and whirling together into a wonderfully bouncy, sassy chorus before slowing the dynamics back down into the second verse, building it back to that triumphant chorus, and keeping the energy up for an absolute girlboss power move rap duet by Dahyun and Chaeyoung (I’m sorry, I had to use the word “girlboss” at least once in this list).
The following track ‘MOONLIGHT’ is the exact kind of sugary B-side-following-the-single you’ve come to expect from a K-pop album and it’s exactly what makes this album so special. It’s the K-pop “formula” perfected. ‘MOONLIGHT’ wouldn’t feel at all out of place with Bruno Mars singing it. A personal favorite of mine is the Dahyun-penned fourth track ‘CRUEL’ (can you tell which TWICE girl is my favorite? I’ll give you a hint, she had a girlboss rap verse on ‘SCIENTIST’, wrote ‘CRUEL’, has an evil toothy grin, and has been wearing her hair up like antennas while promoting this album).
FORMULA OF LOVE is also topped off by TWICE’s debut English-language single ‘THE FEELS’, which was released as a seemingly standalone single almost a month before the album was even announced, helping the album debut at #3 on the Billboard 200 album chart and remaining on the chart every week since, a rare feat for a K-pop group. This helps show TWICE’s organic success through catchy tunes, rather than a rabid fanbase who campaigns to get the album to debut at #1 at release and completely fall off the chart altogether come week two.
TWICE is the last bastion of K-pop’s big three, and with a late-game album as wonderfully catchy as FORMULA OF LOVE: O+T=<3 and album sales as organically high as theirs, it doesn’t look like they’ll be slowing down any time soon.
Biggest Highlights: ‘SCIENTIST’, ‘CRUEL’
15. Baby Keem — “The Melodic Blue”
One album I’ve found myself revisiting more and more this fall has been California rapper Baby Keem’s debut studio album The Melodic Blue. While I was impressed at moments of Keem’s breakout mixtape DIE FOR MY BITCH back in 2019, especially subverting tracks like the pop-punk and emo influenced track ‘MY EX’ and his breakout hit ‘ORANGE SODA’, I wouldn’t have called myself a true fan until The Melodic Blue released this September.
The Melodic Blue further cements Keem’s status as an outsider in the hip-hop mainstream, tackling multiple genres, styles, and unconventional song structures and vocal deliveries and defying expectations every step of the way. The opening ‘trademark usa’ features a beat switch as soon as the song picks up, not unlike the jarring movements of Travis Scott’s ‘SICKO MODE’ back in 2018, though this song is assisted by an uncredited ROSALÍA feature rather than an uncredited Drake feature.
Right off the bat however, the wackiness reveals itself on ‘range brothers’, which features Keem’s cousin Kendrick Lamar on its tail end goofing around with his cousin on the track rather than delivering the hardest bars possible, which the pair do return to do further on in the tracklist with the hit single ‘family ties’ where Kendrick declares that he’s “smoking on your top 5” so hard that anybody who thinks they can oppose him should instead throw their single and album in the garbage and burn their hard drives altogether. Back to ‘range brothers’ however, Kendrick instead greets us with a sudden beat switch and a repeated off-beat “top ‘o’ the mornin’”, which went viral when the snippet leaked a few days before the album’s release and turned into a meme, which surely helped boost the album’s sales. The power of comedy. Despite the goofiness of it though, ‘range brothers’ is a crazy fun song with some insane orchestrated accompaniment to the production.
Following up ‘range brothers’ is the powerful ‘issues’, in which Keem seemingly sings to his mother about the pain that her substance abuse has brought upon Keem and his grandmother who raised him. It’s a stark contrast to the hard rap songs the album has given us so far, and it’s not the last time on The Melodic Blue that Keem will get — well, melodic and blue on the mic.
Another highlight similar to ‘issues’ is ‘scars’, which coincidentally follows ‘family ties’, another hard Kendrick-assisted track. ‘scars’ finds Keem questioning why God has decided to make his life so hard and forcing his hand to make difficult choices that leave him with titular scars. For the third and final time in the tracklist a few songs later, Keem follows up another Kendrick-assisted track (this one uncredited however), ‘vent’, with another melodic piece, the closer ‘16’. ‘16’ most notably features an almost vaporwave-esque drum beat and swollen analog-sounding synths as he sings about a failing relationship and the ways that wealth and lack thereof effects it.
Baby Keem shows his range (ughhhh I’m sorry for the puns) on The Melodic Blue and it frankly baffles me that the critical response to this album has only been “positive” rather than “universal acclaim”.
Biggest Highlights: ‘range brothers (feat. Kendrick Lamar), ‘16’
14. ZOC — “PvP”
Another album with a bit of a troubled history, it’s only fair that we talk about what’s going on here a little bit as Seiko Oomori is unfortunately not that ultra-worldwide celebrity that Kanye West is. So a few years ago, Japanese acoustic-punk legend Seiko Oomori found herself starting an idol group of her own, ZOC, which is short for “Zone Out of Control”. ZOC originally found themselves covering songs from Seiko’s oft-maligned 2018 metal-pop experiment of an album KUSOKAWA PARTY. Fast forward a few singles and a controversy involving Seiko rightfully kicking out a member of the group who may have possibly outed herself for using LSD on an Instagram story (Seiko was in the right here, drug use is not a joke in Japan’s public eye the way it is in the west. America doesn’t have an actual industry-wide blacklist for “disgraced” celebrities the way that Japan does. I believe that the girl in question was found to have not actually done this, but Seiko made the right preparatory call for such a situation, as she could have ended up blacklisted herself by mere association and managing an artist; need I remind you all of Pierre Taki’s removal from the 2018 Yakuza series spinoff Judgment?)
Come 2021, ZOC with a slightly adjusted lineup are finally ready to release their debut double-album PvP, which is in practice a glorified Seiko Oomori solo album, which I personally can’t complain about, seeing as Seiko’s own latest solo album Kintsugi was my Album Of The Year in 2020. While there are certainly other singers here and a strong emphasis on gang vocals as any idol group has, it’s apparent that Seiko herself takes the lead on a lot of the verses as her voice also cuts through the mix during a lot of the gang vocals, though I find that to me more of a byproduct of her voice’s unique shrill rather than an actual mixing decision.
The beauty of PvP also lies in Seiko’s work ethic, having released her best solo album to date half a year prior, another solo album (consisting of rearranged self-cover versions of songs she penned for other artists) a mere month after PvP, and having produced another album for the new idol group MAPA lead by ex-Maison Book Girl/BiS member Megumi Koshouji in November, among rumors that she had already been working on Kintsugi’s followup as early as January 2021 and rerecording a more punk-styled version of KUSOKAWA PARTY as well. Oomori’s work ethic is truly incredible for producing albums as high quality as she has this year.
Unfortunately, there’s also very little excuse for what would come in August, as an audio leak of Oomori screaming at ZOC’s most popular member surfaced, with Oomori seemingly addressing how some unknown subject could ruin both of their careers. Of course, Oomori was quickly “cancelled” by fans of this precious ex-ANGERME star who simply could do no wrong. A few months later however, it was further leaked that the girl in question was in a relationship with WACK founder, noted creep, and infamous abuser Junnosuke Watanabe, who happens to also be over a decade older than this girl in question and has formed idol groups with underaged members with fun family-friendly names like “ANAL SEX PENIS” (this is not a joke, this is a real thing and it’s frankly putrid). With the reveal that ZOC’s corporate side had also been contracted to move into an office adjacent to WACK’s and that they would be collaborating with WACK’s flagship group BiS (who I refuse to acknowledge as the same group as the original BiS who lasted from 2010 to 2014), it all began to make sense. Frankly, I would scream at my friend too if they were dating a noted abuser but refused to cut it off with them.
With all of this out of the way, I can finally feel a little bit more comfortable putting ZOC’s PvP on this list, as a few months ago before the seemingly-final kicker of Oomori’s controversy this year, I honestly wouldn’t have felt okay platforming this album anymore. Frankly, I’m still a little off-put, not by Oomori, but by the the other girl involved in this incident who I’ve been avoiding naming due to a rabid and blindly-following fanbase out to slander anyone who praises Oomori. Oomori herself has had a pretty rabid fanbase herself over the years, and there are plenty of people who had been waiting for a moment like that to see her fail.
Onto the music side of things, to keep it brief, PvP is a double album and truly feels like it could be two separate albums. Each side has a consistent beginning, middle, and ending with highlights all over. Neither really distinguishes from one another sonically, though I at least find myself enjoying the first disc a bit more for triumphant and cathartic tracks like ‘family name’, ‘DON’T TRUST TEENAGER’ (my personal favorite), and ‘Nou♡kou♡Ses♡shoku’. I find the B-side to be a little more subtle, but I also just don’t want to have to listen to ‘ZOC Laboratory’ for the billionth time, as it’s a cover of one of Seiko’s most obnoxious solo songs from KUSOKAWA PARTY.
Overall, ZOC’s debut double-album offers something pretty unique for idol groups in this age of appropriating punk aesthetics without the bite, but it also offers something that I’d also say is totally essential for fans of Oomori’s solo work.
Disc 1 Biggest Highlights: ‘family name’, ‘DON’T TRUST TEENAGER’
Disc 2 Biggest Highlights: ‘SHINEMAGIC’, ‘REPEAT THE END’
13. Halsey — “If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power”
If you told me last year that I at some point in 2021 would have considered a Halsey album to be the single greatest album of the year, I think my circuitry would have shorted. However, what Halsey brings to the table on If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power is nothing short of incredible and frankly underrated. For an artist who’s played with “edgy” imagery for most of her career despite only ever keeping things within the edges of a cookie cutter for the rest of her career, Halsey’s fourth album is an incredibly bold move that I absolutely have to commend, especially seeing as this is not the kind of album that’s going to carry her career for very long unfortunately.
If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power is in fact produced entirely by Nine Inch Nails, the type of left-field curveball I could have never expected from such a milquetoast pop singer, but it’s a formula that absolutely works and sends my heart aflutter, having religiously grown up on albums like The Fragile and With Teeth, both of which slightly bare their fangs on Halsey’s greatest album to date. It’s become a bit of a thing within hip-hop music to talk about how many rappers are merely “carried” by the best efforts of producers — you hear this a lot regarding artists who’ve even since proven that this isn’t the case, like the accusation that Playboi Carti was carried by Pi’erre Bourne’s production despite Bourne’s lack of presence on his 2020 album Whole Lotta Red. And while Halsey isn’t hip-hop, this false idea could very easily work its way into the discussion. Thankfully however, Halsey brings an equally strong game to the table by matching the moody production you’d expect of a Nine Inch Nails record with the razor-sharp pop hitmaking that Halsey built herself on.
The result of this blend of polar opposites is an exquisite if not slightly inconsistent collection of songs ranging from darkly ambient moments similar to what was found on The Downward Spiral or The Fragile to more punk-styled moments that draw more comparisons to the likes of With Teeth and The Slip. On opener ‘The Tradition’, Halsey brings a dramatic vocal performance over darkly sweet pianos mixing musical modes, immediately bringing to mind Nine Inch Nails’ ‘Hurt’. This lowkey sound carries over to the second track, the album highlight ‘Bells In Santa Fe’, which reminds more of the NIN sideproject How To Destroy Angels; it frankly wouldn’t be out of place to hear this song sung by HTDA frontwoman Mariqueen Maandig in Halsey’s stead. By ‘Easier Than Lying’ however, the band instrumentation comes in and Halsey delivers an energetic pop chorus delivery when it all kicks in together. It’s one of a handful of songs on here that would certainly be able to chart with more pop-centric production, but Halsey remains adamant about letting Reznor and Ross work their gritty magic instead, and this vibe continues for quite a while.
The acoustic track ‘Darling’ unfortunately breaks the album’s pacing at its halfway point, reading more like Taylor Swift than Trent Reznor. The sound fortunately picks back up into the dark, synthy NIN-like territory on ‘1121’ and carried us back into the more punky tendencies on the following ‘honey’. Despite being one of my favorites on the album, ‘honey’ also breaks up the vibe just a little too much for breaking out of the dark just a little bit more than I’d have liked. That doesn’t change what an effortlessly catchy song it is, which Halsey claims to have demoed out originally while trying to show her brother how she writes a song, and goddamn if it isn’t a hit.
It’s almost a bittersweet album to listen to because it kind of hurts to know that Halsey will likely go back to more generic pop territory after this, though I can only hope that making an album as against the grain as this would spark her interest in breaking out into even further experimental territory.
Biggest Highlights: ‘Bells In Santa Fe’, ‘honey’
12. STAYC — STEREOTYPE
On their debut EP (third overall release), STAYC make a compelling argument for who gets to fill the shoes of K-pop’s big three as the generational torch is passed down. As we see BLACKPINK slowing their music output once again to low-effort solo releases and an overall crawl in favor of promoting luxury brands they know damn well their fans can’t afford (a quick browse of the majority of Lisa’s Instagram posts will show this well), Red Velvet on the other hand is in the process of dying altogether after Irene’s controversy last year as well as the debut of AESPA, Red Velvet’s rollercoaster-disaster of a successor. While TWICE shows no signs of slowing down and have successfully picked their career up off the ground after a few subjective fumbles after the departure of in-house JYP production unit Black Eyed Pilseung, it leaves the question of who will pick up the pace with the big three ready to crumble.
It’s through Black Eyed Pilseung’s own new group STAYC that the answer is clear. I couldn’t say it better than NME did in their own 5/5 review of STEREOTYPE: “STAYC ooze pure confidence over a layer of sickly sweet pop melodies”. That’s the real kicker here. STAYC truly have a level of confidence and energy that most rookies could only dream of. They sound like a group that’s already been kicking around for years despite still being in-training before the pandemic. The expert songwriting from Black Eyed Pilseung’s end is surely responsible for much of this, but it still takes a lot of talent to be the actual faces, bodies, and voices representing the group on-stage, and STAYC have it. There’s even a level of confidence in the tracklist itself; sitting at a toasty 4 songs, you’d expect STEREOTYPE to follow in suit with other K-pop EPs of this length by putting the single first, the hopeful high energy B-side second, the underrated B third, and the slow song to close it out. But rather than giving into that titular “stereotype” of K-pop, the slow song ‘I’LL BE THERE’ immediately follows the opening single, without a doubt a sign of the aforementioned confidence that these masterclass rookies flaunt.
Were this a regular K-pop EP however, I think it would go without saying that the third track ‘SLOW DOWN’ would be that hopeful high energy B-side that follows the single, with its lush tropical house production, woozy synth basses, rattling bongos, thumping kicks that sit beautifully in both the top and low ends of the mix, and a tiny guitar embellishment during the chorus with such a gorgeous tone and precise place in the mix that just the sound of it could make me emotional. And that’s just the instrumental — anybody could sound “good” over an instrumental this immaculately-produced, but it takes a truly special collaboration of songwriters and performers to get vocals as genuinely infectious as SLOW DOWN’s, from its intro, outro, melodic and rap verses, and the pre-chorus that you just know could only lead into a chorus as explosive as this.
If you’re even remotely interested in K-pop you’re doing yourselves no favors by ignoring STAYC any longer by the time you finish this sentence.
Biggest Highlights: ‘SLOW DOWN’, ‘COMPLEX’
11. Converge — “Bloodmoon: I”
Hardcore legends Converge’s long-awaited “soft” album Bloodmoon: I (we’ll just call it Bloodmoon from here on) has been a long time coming, and its collaborative nature featuring another legend in their own right — goth-folk Chelsea Wolfe — as a credited member of the band was a pleasant surprise. The very idea of Bloodmoon contrasts much of Converge’s career, featuring a much softer sound out of left field for a band known for albums as unrelentingly heavy as Axe To Fall and The Dusk In Us.
Converge had been playing with the Bloodmoon concept for a few years before its release, with sets since 2016 being billed as “Bloodmoon” concerts, featuring stripped down arrangements of the more subtle tracks from their back catalogue. My personal favorite Converge record You Fail Me (Redux), the infinitely superior 2016 remixed version of their underrated fifth album from 2004 — itself a release that couldn’t quite live up to the hype coming after 2001’s Jane Doe, widely regarded as the single greatest metalcore album of all time — featured a handful of comparatively quiet moments scattered in between the viscerally brutal hardcore that made up its core that would often come up in the band’s Bloodmoon sets of the past few years. And while Bloodmoon is a far different record than You Fail Me, I’m happy to report that the Bloodmoon album successfully captures the melancholy beauty of tracks like ‘In Her Shadow’ and the back half of the titular ‘You Fail Me’.
Bloodmoon isn’t all soft though, it’s got a handful of moments akin to their hardcore roots like on the very brief 16 second intro to ‘Viscera Of Men’, which feels like it could very easily fit into place on All We Love We Leave Behind, before immediately shifting into a sound very akin to funeral doom metal outfits like Bell Witch or Ahab. Songs like ‘Flower Moon’ and the following ‘Tongues Playing Dead’ on the other hand take on more of the You Fail Me kind of territory, with prominent electric guitars and eerie harsh-clean vocals interspersed throughout refrains of screaming over pounding drums and clean passages while the band plays down a bit more.
It almost reminds of stoner metal with a bit more pep in the step, akin to something a band like Boris in particular would do when they’re not droning out for half-hours on end (think Pink or Flood’s ‘Part III’), while also frequently reminding of Chelsea Wolfe’s own heavier moments from albums throughout her career, with the brutal heavy doom of 2017’s Hiss Spun as well as some of the softer moments from her earlier material like Apokalypsis and her most recent Birth Of Violence. But rather than just being stuck in that bubble, Bloodmoon tries something altogether differently by still keeping Converge’s hardcore tendencies if only briefly throughout a handful of its tracks. Wolfe also frequently takes the mic herself throughout the album, mesmerizing Bloodmoon’s more quiet moments with her voice’s moody croon often compared to a gothic Lana Del Rey.
On Bloodmoon: I, Converge finally deliver the long-promised album for the “Bloodmoon” era, fittingly accompanied by Chelsea Wolfe, and seemingly only the first part of a possible series of Bloodmoon albums. Here’s hoping to Bloodmoon: II not being far off.
Biggest Highlights: ‘Viscera Of Men’, ‘Failure Forever’
10. BROCKHAMPTON — “ROADRUNNER: NEW LIGHT, NEW MACHINE”
I’ve been a BROCKHAMPTON fan about as long as the rest of us, having jumped on the bandwagon the day SATURATION II released back in 2017, the second of their trilogy of SATURATION albums released that year, propelling them to overnight stardom and a record contract with RCA that they as of writing have one album left for, having subsequently released iridescence and GINGER the following two years and giving us a break throughout 2020 with only a handful of songs as part of the “unofficial mixtape” TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES released throughout the year leading us up to ROADRUNNER in April of 2021, announcing with it that they would be breaking up after releasing their final album later in 2021. BROCKHAMPTON founder Kevin Abstract has since gone on to tease that said final album will be PUPPY, announced all the way back in 2018 which was intended to be released instead of iridescence before abuse allegations against ex-member Ameer Vann lead the group into a quick downward spiral.
While I frankly find iridescence to have been their best album until this year, many found it disappointing, especially in the shadow of early snippets from PUPPY as well as the three singles they released in anticipation for it over the summer of 2018 (a sentiment I do find myself agreeing with, still finding ‘1999 WILDFIRE’ to be the best song in BROCKHAMPTON’s catalogue). iridescence had a far more raw and watery sound than the SATURATION trilogy, more akin to their own take on Kanye West’s divisive 2013 industrial/punk-inspired opus Yeezus, and in the shadow of PUPPY its understandable why fans would have been disappointed, despite PUPPY-era leftovers like ‘TONYA’ working their way onto the tracklist. 2021’s
ROADRUNNER: NEW LIGHT, NEW MACHINE picks up where iridescence left off, skipping over the more stripped-down “back to basics” sound of 2019’s disappointing GINGER. To many fans, ROADRUNNER is what they felt iridescence could have been, featuring a similarly organic production style while honing in more on lyrics highlighting individual group members’ personal issues such as on standouts ‘THE LIGHT’ and its reprise ‘THE LIGHT PT. II’ which sees fan-favorite member Joba traumatically detailing the graphic moment he discovered his father had committed suicide and his religious struggle following such a harrowing event. It’s the kind of “real storytelling in lyrics” you’ll often hear older generations often racistly complain about being missing from modern music, especially hip-hop, and its that authenticity that manages to make BROCKHAMPTON still one of the most exciting things in music to this day, even if the hype has worn off a bit since 2018.
My biggest gripe with 2019’s GINGER was its seemingly out of place guest verses by artists like Ryan Beatty and especially Slowthai. I’ve often felt that a group like BROCKHAMPTON, which already features 7 vocalists (8 before the departure of Ameer Vann) doesn’t need guest verses as they already have enough members to cover the ground of any track, often only letting 2 or 3 of them on any given track and very rarely giving every single member the floor throughout an individual song. And while I still feel this way, I find the guest verses on ROADRUNNER far more inviting than I have on previous releases (though Jaden Smith’s surprise appearance on the iridescence opener ‘NEW ORLEANS’ is still incredible). For instance, the second verse on the entire album is furiously delivered by industry heavyweight Danny Brown, who’s frantic voice manages to fit in with the eclectic BROCKHAMPTON vibe effortlessly. The second track ‘CHAIN ON’ — which had a solo version premiere last year as part of the TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES series — finds JPEGMAFIA delivering a guest verse, while A$AP Rocky of all people subtly features on ‘BANKROLL’ as well, though if you’re not paying attention it’s completely possible to miss his voice.
‘I’LL TAKE YOU ON’ sees BROCKHAMPTON re-entering boyband-inspired pop territory as they often do at least once on each record, and it’s the kind of smooth and buttery melodic track that offers a brief respite from the otherwise hard-hitting hip-hop of the album up until this point. In fact, the following three tracks ‘OLD NEWS’, standout track ‘WHAT’S THE OCCASSION?’, and ‘WHEN I BALL’ all feature more stripped down instrumentation and melodic tendencies before kicking it back up a notch with the banger ‘DON’T SHOOT UP THE PARTY’, which immediately reminds of BROCKHAMPTON’s hype-infused comeup on albums like SATURATION III.
ROADRUNNER is frankly BROCKHAMPTON’s greatest body of work to date, and with the reignited hope that we’ll someday soon see the release of the long-awaited PUPPY, it’s a fantastic record to hold us over until then.
Biggest Highlights: ‘THE LIGHT’, ‘WHAT’S THE OCCASSION?’, ‘DON’T SHOOT UP THE PARTY’
9. NECRY TALKIE — “FREAK”
What’s left to say about NECRY TALKIE that I didn’t say last year, which saw their fantastically zany album ZOO!! take the frankly low #17 spot on my 2020 list. “Fun” is the best word I can use to describe a group like NECRY TALKIE, whose cheerful and unpredictable sound contrasts the Japanese mainstreams recent shift towards more dark song topics which frankly has lead to one of Japan’s most boring musical years in recent memory (looking at you, YOASOBI and Tricot).
Instead of boring us with the generic edgelord J-rock so many bands have brought to the table these past few years, NECRY TALKIE bring back the whimsy and — again — fun that the genre has been sorely missing throughout the latter half of the 2010s. I believe last year as well in my writings on ZOO!! I also overused the word “fun” and I think I’ll have a hard time avoiding that once again, because that’s what FREAK is. It’s pure, unfiltered fun.
The opener ‘Kininatteiku’ (roughly: “starting to worry” or something along those lines, Japanese verb conjugation is a mysterious beast indeed, functioning as single words in Japanese but needing full sentences to translate to English at times) is exemplary of just what makes NECRY TALKIE such an idiosyncratic and eccentric band. It begins right off the bat with singer Mossa’s signature squeaky voice and sparkly telecaster leading us into a ridiculously cartoony punk-ish song with an upbeat tempo and adorned by what sounds like a marimba layered with a lead guitar carrying the melody of the song’s goofy refrains, which further into the track find themselves layered again with crowd vocals singing “daba-daba-da daba-daba-da”, total nonsense adding to the childlike whimsy of the song.
NECRY TALKIE is the kind of band that makes it hard to not smile and even laugh while listening to. There are few other musical artists I could describe like this — we often listen to music to relate to deeper emotions like sadness, regret, love, that sort of thing, but very rarely are there artists whose intentions are to exhibit smiles and laughter outside of music expressly made for children. But NECRY TALKIE isn’t a children’s band. There’s still a layer of seriousness to their music, and despite the — here it is again — “fun” nature of their usual sound, there are a handful of more serious tracks on FREAK that shows the band’s surprising range.
You wouldn’t expect a band who makes songs as silly as ‘Yumemiru Dobunezumi’ (roughly: ‘Dreaming Dormouse’) to also be able to feasibly pull off a serious sound, but several times throughout the album, the band manages to pull off emotional heavy hitters like on ‘Daijinakoto wa Daijinidekitara’ (roughly: ‘Taking Care Of The Important Stuff’) the band settles down their sound, eschewing the goofy instrumentation and Mossa toning down the eccentricity — to maybe a 2 or 3 still, as opposed to their usual 11 — for an emotionally potent piano-driven song early on in the tracklist. The album’s final track ‘Yume wo miteita’ (roughly: ‘I Was Dreaming’) stands out in particular and functions as an exceptionally potent and sleepy closer while still keeping the band’s childlike charm with what sounds like the entire band sitting around the microphone on the floor singing in unison. It reminds almost of a lullaby at the end of the day, an excellent way to end an album like this.
FREAK is in every possible way a better album than ZOO!! was last year, which was something I had a hard time even imagining. NECRY TALKIE continues to surprise me with every release; for a band whose sound has been consistently described by me as “childish” and “fun”, their talent as truly dynamic songwriters continues to surprise me. For example, the single ‘CHAKAPOCO’ finds the group chanting this nonsensical call and response hook throughout most of it, throwing traditionally song structure to the wind and just kind of going with whatever happens, and if that isn’t the beauty of music I really don’t know what is.
‘Crab dance’ on the other hand finds the group bringing the volumes up and down over and over again with the instrumentalists trading off almost progressive solo passages back and forth with each other to create cohesive melodies, harmonies, and unpredictable dips into silence before bringing it right back in. Another favorite of mine, ‘FROG QUEST 2' clearly brings the cultural childhood memories of video games — particular JRPGs like the legendary Dragon Quest and of course For Frog The Bell Tolls/Kaeru no Tame ni Kane wa Naru as I’m sure the title alludes to — with an 8-bit chord progression likely from a Nintendo Entertainment System or GameBoy tracker carrying the intro of the song before the band majestically erupts into a royal sounding passage that draws the mind to the kings and queens and castles and dragons of games like Dragon Quest and Chrono Trigger. Any fan of this era of video games will find this track endearing.
I fully expected FREAK to just sound like more NECRY TALKIE and nothing else, but the album’s range of sounds and influences is beyond impressive and leaves me highly anticipating how exactly they’ll managed to throw another curveball on their next album, and after FREAK, I’m really expecting them to. FREAK has cemented NECRY TALKIE as more than just “that silly band” and shows that you can’t expect what turn they’ll take next. If you’re looking for something on this list that sounds unlike anything else you’ve ever heard before, FREAK is absolutely that.
Biggest Highlights: ‘Kininatteiku’ (track 1), ‘CHAKAPOCO (Album EDIT)’ (track 5), ‘FROG QUEST 2’ (track 11) [track numbers included cause I guess the song titles aren’t in English on Spotify yet — get over it]
8. Lil Nas X — “MONTERO”
MONTERO’s release felt like such a massive pop cultural happening, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the 2018 release of Travis Scott’s seminal modern classic ASTROWORLD. Lil Nas X’s career is so fascinating because he’s proven every single argument thrown against him wrong; he so easily could have been a “one hit wonder”, something that he actively acknowledges and struggles with throughout MONTERO’s 41-minute runtime. He could have “fallen off” or ran away with the money he made off of his smash hit ‘Old Town Road’ back in 2019. The even more fascinating thing is how ‘Old Town Road’ itself bore itself like a novelty. Sure, it was a fun and year-defining song, but it was one that he clearly made as a joke, certainly not expecting it to become one of the highest selling songs in history. And even further than that, his manipulation of the music industry is a force to be reckoned with. Had Lil Nas come out as eccentrically gay before the fame, fortune, and especially massive record label contract, it’s just unfortunate reality of this shithole country that he wouldn’t have gotten any of that.
On MONTERO, Lil Nas X faces all of this head-on all over it, from the songs, to the album cover itself. Songs like ‘DEAD RIGHT NOW’, ‘THAT’S WHAT I WANT’, and ‘TALES OF DOMINICA’, Lil Nas proves that he’s far more than just a joke artist making a song about a horse — he proves that he can write an emotionally heavy and infectiously catchy pop tune. The album’s leadup track and namesake ‘MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name)’ was one of the first signs of this authenticity as a songwriter, having previewed it on social media almost a year prior to its official release to fans rabidly demanding for it to drop. When it did, it became another smash hit sensation for him akin to ‘Old Town Road’, though this time it was a song with his genuinity slathered all over it; it was proof that Lil Nas X was more than just the horse song TikTok meme guy.
Even more impressive though, and the song that had me fully anticipating his debut album to be a classic, was the followup single ‘SUN GOES DOWN’, where Lil Nas more concisely tackles his experiences as a gay black man in modern America, detailing his struggles with racism, homophobia, and the suicidal urges that dealing with these things had at a time brought onto him. On top of his fantastic pen game, ‘SUN GOES DOWN’ is both immaculately produced and written, with a gorgeous high-pitched guitar carrying the song’s brilliant “I wanna run away…” hook towards a cinematic climax lead by layered background vocals and an orchestral arrangement.
While MONTERO could certainly be described as a hip-hop/pop-rap album, much of the album rather plays with the idea of being an almost art-pop album; and while he’s seemingly not the multi-instrumentalist genius of a St. Vincent or Ringo Sheena, the ways in which he takes these sounds on is fascinating nonetheless. ‘LOST IN THE CITADEL’ would certainly not read as a hip-hop or rap song in any way whatsoever. It’s one of the album’s many emotional moments, perfectly following up on the Elton John-accompanied ‘ONE OF ME’, where he dives into the doubts cast upon him following the success of ‘Old Town Road’, with an emotional recounting of a failed relationship over an indie rock inspired beat.
Another track I absolutely adore is one that I rarely see any love for, the album’s penultimate ‘LIFE AFTER SALEM’, which completely shakes its head at the pop formula, instead going for a dissonant goth rock inspired track that could have been the result of a Bauhaus reunion. Of course, because of this dark and dissonant sound it’s the one that’s recieved the least fanfare from the average pop fan of this demographic. It’s the black sheep of the album, but it’s also one of the very best it offers as well, and it’s the kind of risk that makes Lil Nas X the true artist he is, not needing to appeal to the pop audience 100% of the time; it’s further defiance of the expectations of the meme song guy.
MONTERO is of course full proof that Lil Nas X isn’t just the meme song guy anymore and he never was, and it’s a brilliant debut for what I hope will be an equally brilliant career going forward.
Biggest Highlights: ‘LOST IN THE CITADEL’, ‘SUN GOES DOWN’, ‘LIFE AFTER SALEM’
7. Kyary Pamyu Pamyu — “Candy Racer”
It’s kind of an interesting thing that Candy Racer, Kyary Pamyu Pamyu’s first true step towards making a “mature” album, manages to nail the landing at actually being her most experimental, unhinged, and fun album to date. It’s a kind of insane juxtaposition when you consider her career up to this point was wholly based around her unhinged, fun, childlike, over-the-top, and colorful persona.
Candy Racer is proof that Yasutaka Nakata, Kyary’s producer as well as the mastermind behind countless other acclaimed Japanese artists like Perfume, CAPSULE, MEG, Natsume Mito, NAGISA COSMETIC, and COLTEMONIKHA among others, is back on his A-game after a short lull in his career beginning with CAPSULE’s 2015 album WAVE RUNNER and progressing downhill until his disaster of a solo album DIGITAL NATIVE in 2018. However, since then, it’s been a climb back uphill for Nakata, with Perfume’s Polygon Wave just a short month prior to Candy Racer’s release proving that Nakata is back with a vengeance.
The album’s first two tracks (excluding the usual minute-long intro native to every Kyary album) ‘Candy Racer’ and ‘Dodonpa’ are dancefloor bangers that could give even the hardest hitting Nakata-produced songs like CAPSULE’s ‘JUMPER’ and Perfume’s ‘Party Maker’ a run for their money. While ‘Candy Racer’ feels like an experimental cut for Kyary, it still reads like classic Kyary track behind its uniquely processed vocals. ‘Dodonpa’ on the other hand really feels like especially new territory for Kyary, being an almost entirely instrumental maximalist hardcore house track which Kyary finds herself frantically scatting into the mic over.
On the other hand, songs like ‘Gentenkaihi’ (roughly: ‘Origin Avoidance’) sees Kyary taking on her classic style in an almost tongue-in-cheek effect, with the song’s title and music video alluding to her attempts at escaping her past self. The music video in particular finds her attempting to outrun a human-sized hairbow, with massive hairbows being an essential part of her signature look towards the beginning of her career. It’s a wonderfully catchy song that really puts Kyary’s struggles with her career’s success front and center in an endearing way.
Another returning staple of every single Kyary Pamyu Pamyu album is a cover of one of CAPSULE’s early-career songs, this time featuring ‘World Fabrication’, one of the finest tracks from their 2005 album Nexus-2060. It’s always a treat to hear that Nakata is still capable of making the kind of carefree Shibuya-kei tunes he came out of the ground making. Serving as the album’s closer, Kyary’s cover of ‘World Fabrication’ is a lovely and faithful interpretation of the original song.
One of the most intriguing choices on Candy Racer is the penultimate ‘Natsuiro Flower’ which has an almost city pop-inspired sound. I describe this as intriguing because of the unsubstantiated rumor circulating last year that Yasutaka Nakata was thinking of trying out making city pop music with Perfume. It’s lovely to see his attempt at the style come to life and with Kyary nonetheless.
With time, I see Candy Racer winding up as another one of Yasutaka Nakata’s most respected masterpieces and without a doubt Kyary’s finest and most matured album to date. I personally believe that Candy Racer is without a doubt the best album in Kyary’s discography despite my extremely nostalgic connection to 2012's Pamyu Pamyu Revolution. Candy Racer is a fantastic sendoff to the Kyary of old, possibly serving as a final tribute to her previous sound and hopefully giving way to a followup album some day with an entirely different genre altogether.
Biggest Highlights: ‘Dodonpa’, ‘Gentenhaiki’, ‘Natsuiro Flower’
6. Young Thug — “Punk”
Young Thug once again finds himself in a completely unique place in the landscape of music as a whole, after what was starting to seem like a bit of a slump in recent years with underwhelming projects like So Much Fun, both Slime Language compilations, and a plethora of mediocre features on other artist’s songs. It felt like the dynamic innovator responsible for the multi-genre masterpiece JEFFERY back in 2016 was all but falling into the trappings of many other established hip-hop artists, growing comfortable in recycling the same flows over samey beats for the rest of his career. But it’s frankly an underestimation of Young Thug’s greatness to expect him to not come at his own solo album with an unmatched precision. Sure, his guest verses lately have been on the weaker side, but there were some serious gems on last year’s (ughh) Chris Brown collaboration mixtape Slime & B like ‘Big Slimes’ that showed that Young Thug’s keen ear for liquid cool melodies has shown no signs of deafness when it comes to his own canon output.
Thankfully, this idea of beautiful and infectious melody is exactly what fills Thugger’s misnomer of a sophomore studio album Punk to the brim. And let me just go on a tangent real quick — when I say “sophomore studio album” and then talk about Young Thug’s pedigree of innovation and influence over the 2010s despite his debut studio album releasing in just 2019, there’s a bit of a caveat. Young Thug has always had a troubled relationship with 300 Entertainment, the label for which he’s signed to. His original plan was to release a debut studio album called HiTunes back in 2015, while eager fans saw the release date get pushed back every year since until the name itself became nothing more than an urban legend, despite Thugger referring to it by name still as recently as 2019. Back in 2017 when he released Beautiful Thugger Girls, his country-folk-rap experiment of a mixtape, it was announced as an album, not a mixtape. 300 has essentially kept Thug releases in a loop where if they underperform, they’ll be referred to as a “mixtape” even if it was announced as an album — we saw this happen again with his 2018 release ON THE RVN being reduced to an EP after not moving enough units to satisfy the labelheads. So despite Punk being referenced as only Thug’s second album, he has a deep back catalogue of fantastic mixtapes which parallel and often surpass the quality of his studio albums (see: JEFFERY, Slime Season 2, Beautiful Thugger Girls, and Barter 6).
So with that tangent out of the way, Punk is classified as Thug’s second studio album. Where was I? Right, the beautiful, intricate melodies of recent hits like ‘Big Slimes’ and the Elton John-assisted ‘High’ are present all over Punk, which is a hard album to give a proper genre label to. Sure Young Thug raps, but he also sings and croons and scats and rants in a spoken word style. Sure there are hip-hop beats, but there are also lush acoustic guitars, emotional pianos, and light percussion throughout many of its 20 tracks. And you’d think 20 tracks would be too many for a project by Young Thug, as it was on his previous album So Much Fun, as well as most modern hip-hop albums in the age of low-payout streaming which tempts rappers to jam-pack their albums with as many songs and deluxe editions as possible to turn a maximum profit (see: The Kid Laroi’s Fuck Love, which boasts a total of 35 songs over 3 separate deluxe editions — mind you I had to pull out a calculator just to add this ridiculous number up). But somehow nearly every track on Punk sticks the landing.
While So Much Fun opened up with an immediately hard-hitting trap beat the instant you hit play, Punk opts to lull the listener in instead with opener ‘Die Slow’, with nothing but a simple electric guitar slowly staggering a individual notes through reverb while Thug himself calmly sets the scene for us — he’s recording this song in a penthouse on an Italian waterfront, remarking that he can see boats passing by below. It’s a frankly meta and shockingly honest way to open up such a highly anticipated album, but it’s the exact kind of unpredictable oddball move we’ve come to love from Young Thug, and it helps us get into the solemn mood for the story he proceeds to tell. When the song opens up in earnest — and mind you for the entire runtime of ‘Die Slow’ there’s no beat drop, drums and 808s never kick in, the guitar never attempts to play more aggressively — Thug in a blend of spoken word and gorgeous Autotune-less singing begins to describe his family’s hardships, talking about what he went through to get his brother, fellow rapper-singer Unfoonk, out of a life sentence in prison after serving 11 years, how the ills of America’s wealthy fuel a system that upholds the ideals of segregation in a more nuanced classist way than simply separating which bathrooms blacks and whites can pee in, how his father shot at an Atlanta sheriff who was having an affair with Thug’s mother, and how his mother survived a separate altercation which lead to her being run over and surviving a subsequent stroke. ‘Die Slow’s’ mix of nervous spoken word, deconstructed stream-of-consciousness singing, dreamy guitar, and background crooning by Strick is the perfect gateway into the kind of melodic left turn that Punk has to offer down the pipeline.
The effortlessly blending two-parter ‘Stupid/Asking’ finds Thug once again sing-song rapping-singing over a hand-strum acoustic guitar that wouldn’t feel out of place on a Jack Johnson or John Mayer album of all things. Light hand percussion assists the track where Thug questions irresponsible financial decisions made by those around him before the track switches into its second half ‘Asking’, where Thug unloads his frustrations and woes with a partner who seems to not reciprocate his love languages. The following ‘Recognize Real’ exemplifies one of Punk’s other finest points, being the way that the featured artists, in this case Gunna, all manage to keep up the melodical pace with Thug himself. It’s not unheard of for Thug to leave the other artists on a given song behind, at times even stealing the show when he himself is the featured artist on somebody else’s song. But on ‘Recognize Real’, another song that’s entirely comprised of no drums, just guitars and singing, Gunna manages to match Thug’s pace and sharing in the soft-singing vocal duties, trading verses back and forth as we’ve come to expect of this mentor-student duo in recent years.
This strictly melodic sound carries on through almost the entire album, save for a few stragglers like ‘Rich N***a Shit’, posthumously assisted by Juice WRLD. A song like this or ‘Bubbly’ featuring Travis Scott and Drake would have fit more comfortably on So Much Fun or Slime Language 2, and while they’re by no means bad songs — especially the latter, which is even courteous enough to offer an entire beat switch for Drake’s verse — they do happen to interrupt the otherwise relaxing vibe of Punk. But this slight hiccup simply doesn’t hinder the fact that Punk is an otherwise fantastic album, if not a tad inconsistent, which is unfortunate in the shadow of 2016’s JEFFERY which saw Thug on a similarly melodic odyssey. However, after ‘Bubbly’, it’s a straight line of consistent vibes all the way to the end of the album.
I still remember hearing the penultimate ‘Hate The Game’ on one of Thug’s Instagram stories maybe even as far back as 2019 (Punk was originally slated to release a mere month after So Much Fun but was of course likely delayed by 300) and practically foaming at the mouth for an official release or at least a leak (Thug’s top 5 best songs to date are all unreleased leaked songs of which there are upwards of 2000 — yes, two-thousand leaked Young Thug songs). I couldn’t have been more ecstatic to see ‘Hate The Game’ wind up on Punk’s final tracklist after being performed in full at Young Thug’s flawless Travis Barker-backed NPR Tiny Desk Session over the summer. Its chorus is one for the books, an incredible achievement of both catchy melody and emotional honesty. What follows to close the album is the album’s final emotional curveball, ‘Day Before’ which features another posthumous verse by the late Mac Miller. Mac’s posthumous catalogue is intricately curated, and unlike Juice WRLD who has seen two albums of posthumous leftovers released before the completed album he was barred from dropping just two days prior to his untimely death in 2019, Mac Miller’s estate is incredibly cautious and selective with who they give their blessing to. Rather than just a stamped-on cash-grab with a deceased artist (posthumous XXXTENTACION features reek of this) Day Before is rather a song he and Thugger likely made together in the studio with intent, even more hauntingly recorded the titular day before Mac’s passing, being the final song he ever recorded. Even foregoing all of that, the mere quality of the song itself will tell you the same, carried by a slightly out of tune guitar with Mac essentially recapping his life and how he found his success. It’s an eerie way to end the album, but a fitting one due to its emotional rawness in the wake of Mac’s passing and the similar nature of the album’s opening track.
While it’s no JEFFERY, I still didn’t quite expect a modern Young Thug album to impress me as much as that mixtape did back in 2016, and I think Punk stands up among Thug’s finest and most profound works to date despite a few hitches in its consistency made up for by the incredible production, mastery of all things melodic, and its expertly curated guest verses.
Biggest Highlights: ‘Die Slow (feat. Strick)’, ‘Hate The Game’, ‘Day Before (feat. Mac Miller)’
5. Playboi Carti — “Whole Lotta Red”
While it is a 2020 album, it’s only fair to include Playboi Carti’s highly anticipated followup to his 2018 modern punk-rap classic Die Lit. It released on Christmas Eve and was therefore excluded from most album of the year lists including my own because of it. A late Christmas gift, Whole Lotta Red confused and polarized for a good month after its release before finally receiving unanimous and acute agreement on its fantastic achievement of sound in the modern hip-hop landscape polluted by uninteresting and uninnovative songwriting and beats that sound utterly generic at the tail end of the trap genre’s current lifespan as we await the next big thing to dominate hip-hop’s trajectory in the 2020s. And while we wait, we have Whole Lotta Red to keep us entertained with its unique unofficially double-disc nature.
It’s exactly this “double-disc” style that made Whole Lotta Red so polarizing on release. As I’ve likely been over dozens of times already, the current landscape of popular rap music is polluted by bloated albums of 20+ songs, made for gems to find their own way out of the bloat and keep the streams high as the fans dig out the next single for the label. These often make for terrible listening experiences — I’ve listened to Drake’s 25-song Scorpion in full maybe twice since its release week, meanwhile I’ve listened to KIDS SEE GHOSTS’ 7-song debut from a few weeks prior hundreds of times since. It’s often a quality over quantity kind of thing, and very rarely do we see an album like Whole Lotta Red manage to make 24 full songs keep you on the edge of your seat for an entier hour. So how does WLR do this?
Well, to start, it essentially splits the album down the middle. This is what lead to its initially poor reception, as the first “disc” was an entirely new sound for Carti, highlighted by his aggressive new flow that sees him sounding like he’s gasping for air through most of his words. The second “disc” on the other hand, beginning with ‘Vamp Anthem’ finds Carti in much more familiar melodic territory akin to ‘Die Lit’ and his self-titled 2017 mixtape. This jarring new sound on the front half combined with the album’s fairly-criticized length led to a bit of a divide from fans on release night. I remember this vividly and would be lying if I said I too wasn’t a bit disappointed at first especially based on the familiar sound of the non-album single released in April 2020 ‘@MEH’.
While it took me a good few weeks to warm up to the violent, blood-coughing tendencies of the first disc, it was only the day after that the second side clicked for me and I came up with this idea/theory that WLR is a double album of sorts. ‘Rockstar Made’ which starts off the first half is instantly hard-hitting, with gritty distorted bass that feels easily out of the mid-2010s Florida SoundCloud scene (think Lil Pump and SmokePurpp, XXXTENTACION and $ki Mask The Slump God, Ghostemane and KirbLaGoop). The hooks are as repetitive (this is not a bad thing, many good hooks as far back as the mid-1900s are) as anything from that SoundCloud scene, often repeating refrains and phrases while the beat booms underneath. The album’s first immediate left turn however is on ‘Go2DaMoon’ which saw a rare 2020 appearance from Kanye West, who executive produced the album, rapping over an eerie and slowly vibrato-ing violin which gives way to a more traditional Carti-style beat at times. The following ‘Stop Breathing’ continues this aggressive new style for Carti and features one of the album’s most quoted and meme’d lyrics: “Ever since my brother died, I’ve been thinking about homicide”. It’s one of those lyrics that an artist would hold the mic out to an audience to scream back to them, and Carti seems to know this, opening up every show he did this year with the song.
This “new rockstar” sound continues up until ‘Vamp Anthem’ and I immediately felt that the stretch from here to the end could stand as a short album of its own. As its name would imply, it opens up with a stereotypical “vampire organ” of the iconic motif from Bach’s legendary ‘Toccata And Fugue’, before flipping the pacing of that sample into a trap beat as Carti begins rapping about his new army of vampire (his fans, I think). This vampire aesthetic has been the core of Whole Lotta Red’s promotion cycle as evidenced by its album cover. I frankly think ‘Vamp Anthem’ could have even been the opener to the entire album and would have made a lot more sense, and putting this half of the album first would have made the album’s reception go a lot smoother on release night. A few songs later finds one of my favorites on the album, ‘Control’, where Carti finds himself back on an unbelievably catchy and melodic beat that rises out of a sample of DJ Akademiks discussing rumors about Whole Lotta Red. ‘Control’ finds Carti talking about spiraling out of control and wanting to get his life together for his girlfriend, professing his love and claiming he’d do things like “wear a business suit and speak proper” or “get on my knees and give you a diamond ring, all sorts of things” to ease her doubts about him.
Down the line we return to the vampire aesthetic with ‘King Vamp’, another banger where Carti claims “when the sun goes down, yeah, it’s time to creep” and spells out “K.I.N.G. V.A.M.P.” for its hook. Further down is the flawless ‘Die4Guy’ with Carti reminiscing on how he looked up to his brother Reggie Carter who was an admittedly bad influence but nevertheless wanted to be “a damn thug” like him and how he would die for him and furthering his new rockstar image claiming “we some rockstars, we the new Black Flag” which I frankly can’t argue with, especially seeing how reminiscent the mosh pit culture behind Carti’s live concerts have been, a familiar sight to anybody familiar with hardcore punk.
The closing track ‘F33l Lik3 Dyin’ is another rare emotional cut for Carti, with a chopped Bon Iver sample carrying the beat similar to the kind of things you would have expected 40 to produce for Drake back in the early 2010s, but Carti nevertheless carries his own weight while not running parallel to Drake in any way whatsoever despite the beat’s similarity. It’s a perfect closer to an incredibly consistent album that changes its aesthetic from raw and violent halfway through in favor of more harmonic moments like ‘Over’ and ‘ILoveUIHateU’.
The more I think about it, the more I feel like Whole Lotta Red is this decade’s Yeezus. Its gritty, minimal, industrial, experimental approach to things has kept us entertained all year after an initially underwhelming impression. It’s a slow burn that rewards patient relistening and recontextualizing.
“Disc 1” Biggest Highlights: ‘Stop Breathing’, ‘No Sl33p’, Teen X (feat. Future)’
“Disc 2” Biggest Highlights: ‘Control’, ‘Die4Guy’, ‘F33l Lik3 Dyin’
4. Meishi Smile — “Ressentiment”
Meishi Smile’s 2014 album LUST is an all-time internet classic, a Yasutaka Nakata-influenced electronic album which carries a deep weight of emotion and colorful digital synth design throughout. While Meishi Smile started as the solo electronic project of LA producer Fae Yim, the project became a band just this past year, and its a shift that couldn’t fit Yim’s genius any better. Meishi initially hinted at this kind of sound back on their sophomore release …Belong, but it comes together in full on Ressentiment.
While LUST and …Belong could best be described with genres like technopop and ambient, Ressentiment is a different beast altogether, fusing styles of punk, industrial, hardcore, and emo with a touch of the electronic tendencies Meishi started with years ago. The opener ‘Passion’ into ‘Hate Floods Slow’ makes these influences all but apparent, with pounding real drums, distorted electric guitars, and gritty synths. Adding to it all is one familiar string of Meishi’s past work — vocoded vocals, though they only appear briefly on ‘Hate Floods Slow’ during the chorus before a verse opens up which finds Meishi screaming over the drums blaring away. ‘To Die Like Dazai’ follows in suit, with similarly heavy drums, guitars, and synths but keeps thing a fair bit more melodic with the vocoder staying on more; there’s even a handful of samples drum breaks connecting sections of the song together, hinting back a little at Meishi’s roots.
‘Saint Joan Of Arc’ almost feels like it could be a LUST-era Meishi song rearranged for a punk band, with its simple, short, and sustained lyrics leaving a lot of room for the mix to breathe. There are very few other artists I could even think of sounding like this. Meishi’s influences and foundational works all culminate into an entirely new sound and it sticks the landing without so much as an indication of stuttering. ‘Flowers (Under All My Shadows)’ strips things back just a tiny bit with a strummed acoustic guitar which is compressed and mixed to almost give the song a late 90s-early 2000s vibe, carrying the core of the track while the vocoded vocals keep you reminded that this is a song from 2021, not 2001.
The closing track ‘Worms (In The Futility Of The Senses)’ carried a menacing and steady beat, as Meishi sings more simple yet effective lyrics seemingly speaking to a romantic partner about honesty, doubt, and trauma. It’s a heavy way to finish out the album, and the production once again remains heavy and rooted with one foot firmly in punk and the other in electronic.
Ressentiment is far and away one of the most unique albums I’ve ever heard, blending punk and electronic in ways that other bands who blend the styles in their own ways could only dream of. Its a testament to Meishi’s status as internet legend and worldwide underappreciated genius.
Biggest Highlights: ‘Hate Floods Slow’, ‘Saint Joan Of Arc’, ‘Worms (In The Futility Of The Senses)’
3. Tyler, The Creator — “CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST”
Tyler, The Creator is far past the point of “possible” at this point when thought of as an all-time great. In just over 10 years, he’s officially proven that he is one of the all-time greatest rappers, producers, and overall artists to ever live, bar none. His consistency is unparalleled, towering over many of the other purported “greatest”. Tyler’s revered mentor Kanye West himself has not had a string of albums as universally acclaimed as Tyler’s. Even 2015’s seeming stumble Cherry Bomb feels like its finally gone on to get the respect and love it deserves since its polarizing release, and it feels like Call Me If You Get Lost is part of the reason. Many would describe Tyler’s latest effort as the “full realization” of what he “attempted” on Cherry Bomb, and while I absolutely can see the reasoning behind a statement like that, I find Cherry Bomb to still be its own unique masterpiece in its own right.
So where did Tyler cement his legendary status? It’s not exactly something that happens over night. It’s something we all likely felt years ago before we even said it. There was never any doubt that Tyler was going to have seven perfect albums in a row under his belt eventually, but it’s still an unbelievably rare feat for that to happen. We often times forget that the reception to nearly every Kanye West album since 2013’s Yeezus has been polarizing. Even then, 2008’s 808s & Heartbreak was initially panned by many fans as well, disappointed by Kanye’s abandonment of rapping in favor of autotuned singing and R&B tendencies. Kanye’s seventh album The Life Of Pablo — among my top favorites in his discography — similarly received polarizing reception, losing him many fans as 2018’s Ye, 2019’s Jesus Is King, and 2021’s DONDA further have. Tyler has never had to face this. While it’s possible some fans may have fallen off after Cherry Bomb, it’s crystal clear that the following Flower Boy brought everyone’s attention back and grabbed the attention of newcomers as well. 2019’s IGOR might have been the moment that cemented Tyler as an unpredictable legend, however. Its analog production values, emphasis on pitched singing over rapping, and effortlessly smooth sampling lead it to full and unanimous acclaim once again from fans and critics alike. How could he possibly follow that up, what new thing could he do?
Well, maybe not new, but it’s certainly been a long time since Tyler emphasized rapping. It’s been since 2013’s WOLF, in fact. WOLF was only Tyler’s third album, still following a concept album storyline that his previous efforts BASTARD and GOBLIN started. He was still playing a character the last time he rapped hard, he was still in the closet, still using homophobic slurs, still trying to tell a story about unlikable characters. But WOLF was also one of the earliest moments of Tyler’s expansion into something greater, putting a heavier emphasis on consistent visuals than ever, expanding his musical palette to incorporate more intentional jazz stylings in his beats. Cherry Bomb’s vocals were deliberately mixed quietly to let the music do the talking, Flower Boy saw Tyler sitting in the producer’s chair and letting guest features do most of the talking, only occasionally stepping back up the mic to deliver some honest and charmingly amateurish vocal melodies and the very occasional rap verse, while IGOR saw him going entirely into a new persona, singing for much of the album. On IGOR, Tyler’s voice didn’t even deliver a straight unaltered rap verse until its 7th track — everything until that point was either sampled or sung with one guest verse by Playboi Carti on the 2nd track ‘EARFQUAKE’.
So it’s been over 8 years since we heard Tyler truly step up to the mic and rap with intent as he does on 2021’s CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST. This deliberate choice is emphasized by the album’s inclusion on almost every single song’s intro and outro of DJ Drama, perhaps best known as the labelhead of Generation Now records and even more-so for his series of Gangsta Grillz mixtapes, the legendary series that Lil Wayne’s highly regarded The Dedication series is a part of. Tyler even tweeted all the way back in 2010 that he wants his own Gangsta Grillz mixtape, though the series — a staple of late 2000s rap culture — is essentially no more these days. That however doesn’t stop DJ Drama from introducing many of the tracks with his signature “Gangsta Grizz-ills” tag, despite the album’s classification as, well, an album, and not part of the series.
Despite 9 of its 16 songs featuring other artists, CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST is a surprisingly solitary album, with only a few of these features truly standing out. Among these, two were most surprising to me. Track 4, ‘WUSYANAME’ features the meme-of-the-moment YoungBoy Never Broke Again (worst name in hip-hop right now by the way — I also can’t convince myself that people who say shit like “YB better” on Twitter actually mean it). It’s most surprising because he absolutely bodies his verse and delivers a surprisingly melodic offering to the smooth sunny day love song. A few tracks down the line on ‘HOT WIND BLOWS’, we’re surprised to a verse by none other than Lil Wayne himself, confirming that this truly is an unofficially official Gangsta Grillz mixtape. And this isn’t the slightly above-average 2020 Funeral/No Ceilings 3 Lil Wayne — Weezy brings the fucking heat, delivering one of his best verses since Tha Carter V (released in 2018 though recorded in earnest as early as 2012).
One of CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST’s greatest moments is the expected two-part track 10 ‘SWEET / I THOUGHT YOU WANTED TO DANCE’. Every Tyler, The Creator album has a two part tenth track with a little slash in the title dividing the songs up. ‘SWEET’ is a fully R&B love song, akin to something he could have done on IGOR or even Cherry Bomb’s latter half — think ‘FUCKING YOUNG/ PERFECT’. Around halfway through however, Tyler does something he’s never ever in his career done before: ‘I THOUGHT YOU WANTED TO DANCE’ is a straight up no frills reggae song continuing on ‘SWEET’’s story of Tyler pursuing somebody, only to struggle in realizing that they’ve chosen someone else over him.
Tyler’s last two albums have left us scratching our heads and saying “how in the hell is he going to top that?” only for him to come back less than 2 years later each time to top it without so much effort in doing so as lifting a finger. So rather than leaving us off with that, I’ll simply wonder…what exactly will Tyler do next to inevitably top himself again?
Biggest Highlights: ‘CORSO’, ‘WUSYANAME’, ‘SWEET / I THOUGHT YOU WANTED TO DANCE’
2. Origami Angel — “GAMI GANG”
If there’s any album I found myself returning to more often this year than any other, it’s Origami Angel’s sophomore double album GAMI GANG. If there’s any album I’ve tried pushing on friends this year, it’s GAMI GANG. If there’s any album that will find itself sealed away in legendary status, it’s GAMI GANG.
Following up their beloved 2019 debut Somewhere City, GAMI GANG takes everything Origami Angel did right on their debut and its preceding EPs and mini-albums, hones it, amplifies it to an 11, and spits it back out at mach speed. It’s strange how I’ve said several times this year that I hate long 20-song double albums, but goddamn if there haven’t been some great ones this year. GAMI GANG is the best of them all, though.
An electrifying mix of songs that all seamlessly transition into each other from start to finish, GAMI GANG opens with a hilariously corny trap beat, though it becomes important down the line, which immediately morphs into the furious opener-in-earnest ‘Self-Destruct’, starting with a dissonant almost heavy metal motif complete with double kick drums before morphing into the exact kind of beautiful hammer-on and pull-off tapping guitar riff that singlehandedly defines the mid-west emo sound. The songwriting on every track here is dynamic, often blending different time signatures and tempos, covering so much ground within just one same song as ‘Self-Destruct’ does, opening with that dissonant riff, moving to a straight forward verse, exploding into an reminiscing and singular chorus, taking off into a dreamy interlude, and concluding with a reprise of that intro riff as the song takes us into ‘Möbius Chicken Strip’ (awful pun song titles are a staple of Origami Angel albums) and continues in the style ‘Self-Destruct’ starts us with while singing lyrics about nerdy nostalgia like “So grab your GameBoy, get in the car, you can be the king and I’ll be the czar”, a common theme throughout GAMI GANG.
One of the album’s standout tracks, ‘Isopropyl Academy’ also follows ‘Self-Destruct’’s formula of “dissonant opener”, building to a climax before erupting into a similarly fun mid-west emo riff with another singalong chorus and concert-ready instrumental. Part of what makes GAMI GANG work so well as a double-album is just how short yet full and dynamic most of its songs seems to be. Its littered with breath-catchers like the soft acoustic ‘Greenbelt Station’ clocking at just under 2 minutes and the even shorter yet more experimentally heavy ‘[spoons rattling]’, ‘Dr. Fondoom’, and ‘Bed Bath & Batman Beyond’ which all peak under 90 seconds. None of these songs feel like filler however, often serving as a ways to catch a breather from the otherwise nonstop hard pop-punk bread & butter of the album or otherwise blend these songs together.
The album’s crowning achievement is its 15th track, ‘Caught In The Moment’, a nostalgic track about missing the days of childhood, staying up late, binge eating Taco Bell, and watching the original Pokémon anime. Its another song that goes through several different motions before its climactic gang vocal bridge, slightly changing up the chorus lyrics before exploding into one final homestretch of a chorus. The album’s finale, ‘gg’, likely a double entendre for the phrase used in online video games after finishing a round (itself an abbreviation for “good game”, of course) as well as “Gami Gang”. This is brings us back to the album’s namesake opening track — remember the cheesy trap beat I mentioned earlier? — by reprising its melody into its emo stylings. While on the intro track this melody is menacing and in a seeming minor key, on ‘gg’ it instead utilizes one of my favorite musical techniques by superimposing elements from a major key’s parallel minor key to create a unique blend of sounds (it’s a bit more complicated than that, but I’m not going to spend a paragraph detailing advanced reharmonization in music theory) to close the album out in a 100% intentional way. And if you don’t like that, you don’t like NBA basketball.
GAMI GANG is relentless, simply the crowning achievement in this supposed “fifth wave of emo” and frankly, even more well-written than some of the most championed albums from every “wave of emo”, Americ Anfootball be damned. I’m just gonna go forthright and just gatekeep right now: if you were an emo kid, if you’re an emo adult now, and you’re not listening to Origami Angel, you’re fucking up, you’re not emo and I’m telling everyone. It’s not Glass Beach, it’s not Slaughter Beach Dog, it sure as hell is not Mom Jeans; it’s Origami Angel, the crowned champions of the “fifth wave”.
Motherfuckin’ GAMI GANG.
Disc 1 Biggest Highlights: ‘Self-Destruct’, ‘Isopropyl Academy’
Disc 2 Biggest Highlights: ‘Caught In The Moment’, ‘gg’
- Porter Robinson — “nurture”
Here we are. Here. We. Fucking. Are. So…the best album of 2021 is far and away, with no competition whatsoever, electronic music producer Porter Robinson’s insanely anticipated sophomore album nurture. While it’s stylized in all lowercase, I’m gonna start capitalizing it from here on just to make things a little easier to read in my already messy, run-on sentence-laden writing style. I’m gonna go out right now and spoil my conclusion — Nurture is an unmatched masterpiece, a result of tireless work, frustration, doubt, and restored wonder. It’s an album so bright and airy that you wouldn’t expect it on the surface to have been written throughout a bout of depression-induced writers block, you wouldn’t notice how dark the lyrics can be unless you had context. And you certainly wouldn’t expect Nurture to completely topple over its preceding body of work which was already cherished as an all-time great within electronic music.
So why is this such a big deal? Why was Nurture so highly anticipated? And is it really worth the hype? Did it live up to expectations? Well simply put, yes to the latter two. To the former two however, we need some context. Porter Robinson came onto the festival music scene in 2011 with his “complextro” EP Spitfire, releasing on Skrillex’s OWSLA label, a fairly okay record for its time, and it certainly was just that — a product of its time, though he showed great potential in it. A few years later in 2014, Robinson released a drastically different debut album Worlds. Worlds went on to become nothing short of a massive cult-classic, with a rabid fandom to the point of turning off people who would otherwise enjoy Robinson’s it, with its blend of anime aesthetics, Nintendo soundfont instruments, Vocaloid vocals, and Perfume-influenced electronic sound. Worlds began to take on a life of its own in the arms of its fans, and that pressure got to Robinson.
While he managed to release the equally beloved ‘Shelter’ in 2016, a collaborative single with Madeon — sharing a stage together to tour for the release — as well as an EP under the alias Virtual Self in 2017, Porter found himself with too much pressure to take, and wound up in a deep depression which led to writer’s block. He claimed to have not made any music at all from 2015 to 2017 save for ‘Shelter’. After remaining dormant and starting up his own festival during the early stages of writing Nurture, Porter was finally ready to unleash it at the beginning of 2020 with the lead single ‘Get Your Wish’. But was Porter going to fumble and remain a thing of the past? Many years had passed since Worlds, and the sounds of the time had changed.
‘Get Your Wish’ opened up fairly strong with a good melody, what sound like possibly live drums, and an emphasis on Porter’s own pitched-up vocals, which he uses like a shield to hide his shyness behind, something I completely understand as I often hide behind vocal effects in my own music. But as the chorus kicks in and the one-three kick-snare pattern of early 2010s brostep make themselves heard, I got nervous. More than that, I was disappointed. But then it happened — this drum pattern was a trick meant to decieve us into this exact thought. As the chorus begins to repeat for a second time, a drum fill leads us into a blistering and colossal four-on-the-floor beat instead revealing that Porter’s sound isn’t stuck in the past, it has in fact trailblazed ahead into the future, skipping the present entirely, much like Porter’s main inspiration in Japanese technopop wizard Yasutaka Nakata, whose work with Perfume and CAPSULE had predicted and preceded the electronic festival music trends of the mid-2010s as early as 2007.
After Nuture’s ambient intro ‘Lifelike’, ‘Look At The Sky’ welcomes us with open arms, as a sunny as the album’s cover. The sounds of Nurture are in line with what Robinson established himself with on Worlds, utilizing instruments ripped directly from Nintendo 64-era video games while also continuing to use similar sounding synth patches in brand new ways; it’s familiar yet different. While Worlds relied on guest features, samples, and Vocaloids for its hooks and verses, Nurture is an almost entirely independent project by Robinson save for a super special bonus track I’ll mention later and one other prominent feature on ‘Unfold’. His voice is all over the album in different forms — autotuned, natural, pitch-shifted, formant-shifted. On top of this, Robinson’s talent for writing catchy songs is more apparent than ever on songs like ‘Look At The Sky’ and ‘Get Your Wish’. With how good these songs are, you’d be hard pressed to believe he struggled writing them, as they feel nearly effortless in their execution, like they’ve always existed and been in our minds our entire lives.
The single ‘Musician’ proves Robinson’s talent with sampling, utilizing a sample of ‘Think (About It) by Lyn Collins, the iconic “hey! woo!” sample from ‘It Takes Two’ by Rob Base & DJ E-Z Rock. On top of that, the entire song is carried by a chopped sample of an unreleased collaboration between Porter and Kero Kero Bonito, with a chop of Sarah Bonito’s voice being the main “instrument” throughout the entire song. A personal favorite of mine, ‘Mother’ follows down the tracklist, with an immaculately mixed drum kit holding the ballad up at a mid tempo as Robinson sings of his mother’s undying support for him.
The second to last track, ‘Unfold’ features TEED, a British electronic artist who accompanies Robinson’s vocals throughout the track which could otherwise fit in place back on Worlds, with its distorted breakbeat drums and video gamey synth sounds. One of the album’s most special moments unfortunately only appears on the Japanese version in the form of a bonus track, ‘fullmoon lullaby’ which has a featured credited as Wednesday Campanella, the Japanese electronic/pop/hip-hop powerhouse. However, in reality, this feature is KOM_I, the stage name for the band’s previous singer Misaki Koshi. You see, this song released after KOM_I had quietly departed from the band in January, only making a statement of it and offering a replacement in the form of a new singer named Utaha back in September. So despite this being a Wednesday Campanella feature, it’s more realistically KOM_I, whose idiosyncratic vocal style of which I could only compare to Young Thug despite the lack of similarity helped make waves in Japan and abroad with Wednesday Campanella in the mid to late 2010s. Her signature fragile and airy voice dominates the majority of ‘fullmoon lullaby’, making its emotional climax feel almost like a swansong for her era of Wednesday Campanella, who played at the first iteration of Robinson’s Second Sky music festival.
Nurture is far and away one of the greatest album’s I’ve ever heard in my life. I don’t like to come off as one of those rabid Porter Robinson fans, but with music this good, it’s hard not to see some overlap. I want to scream Nurture’s praises to the world. If there’s any singular album worth checking out this year, please make it Nuture, even if you’re one of the naysayers. It won’t waste your time. Please make it a point to listen to this album in full if you are reading this.
Biggest Highlights: ‘Look At The Sky’, ‘Get Your Wish’, ‘Mother’, ‘fullmoon lullaby (feat. WEDNESDAY CAMPANELLA)’
So to recap, my top 21 albums of 2021 are:
- Porter Robinson — nurture
- Origami Angel — GAMI GANG
- Tyler, The Creator — CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST
- Meishi Smile — Ressentiment
- Playboi Carti — Whole Lotta Red
- Young Thug — Punk
- Kyary Pamyu Pamyu — Candy Racer
- Lil Nas X — MONTERO
- NECRY TALKIE — FREAK
- BROCKHAMPTON — ROADRUNNER: NEW LIGHT, NEW MACHINE
- Converge — Bloodmoon: I
- STAYC — STEREOTYPE
- Halsey — If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power
- ZOC — PvP
- Baby Keem — The Melodic Blue
- TWICE — Formula Of Love: O+T=<3
- Trippie Redd — Trip At Knight
- Succumb — XXI
- Kanye West — DONDA
- Deafheaven — Infinite Granite
- Neon Bunny — KOSMOS
Runnerups:
- ITZY — “CRAZY IN LOVE”: ITZY’s earlier 2021 EP GUESS WHO managed to feel a little disappointing and generic in the face of its two precursors, the sassy Not Shy and the masterfully experimental IT’z ME which featured certified hits like ‘WANNABE’, ‘NOBODY LIKE YOU’, and ‘24HRS’ which was one of the last songs produced by the late SOPHIE, her first and only foray into K-pop before her tragic passing at the beginning of this year. While GUESS WHO slightly stumbled, Korea’s next big girl group completely recovered only a few short months later with their debut full-length album CRAZY IN LOVE, flaunting effortless hard-hitters like ‘LOCO’ as well as more sugary bangers like ‘Sooo LUCKY’. Unfortunately, I just find that these songs as good as they are don’t have the impact of anything that made the full list. Let’s call this album #23 out of 21.
- St. Vincent — “Daddy’s Home”: I wish I could have loved Daddy’s Home more, but I find myself not returning to Annie Clark’s sixth solo album as much as I would like to. It’s certainly an astounding record and worthy of every drop of acclaim it’s gotten this year, though I still find it like most of her albums to require far too much attention to truly understand until a few years have passed by. To add to that, it’s also far less hook-focused than any of her prior work, though lush and beautifully-produced. While sitting at just 44 minutes, the same length as her debut album Marry Me, I find myself struggling to get through Daddy’s Home often, whereas Marry Me is over a decade later still an effortless and inviting listen.
- King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard — “L.W.”: A continuation of the Australian cult legends’ previous album released a few months before, LW continues even further as a “part 3” of sorts to their “microtonal” album series that started back in 2017 with their acclaimed Flying Microtonal Banana, and while it doesn’t reach the heights of that album (which frankly, isn’t even the best of the four other albums they released in 2017), it’s still a damn good successor. Maybe this album could have made the list if I gave it more time, because it’s incredibly dense, well-produced, and does that they King Gizz loves to do where the songs blend into each other. Unfortunately, the microtonal stuff requires a certain mindset for me since I don’t do drugs, and it’s one I only find myself in every so often, and with so much other great music this year, I really didn’t have time to give it a longer chance.
- Weezer — “OK Human”: I’ll be damned, Weezer finally has another fantastic record under their belts. Were OK Human a little less focused on the gimmick of being an acoustic-orchestra album, it might have even cut the list with how fantastic some of the songs here are. Unfortunately, the album has warranted too many replays from me, as I still find myself returning to the White Album or frankly just the GING NANG BOYZ or Car Seat Headrest whenever I’m in a Weezer mood these days, which is growing more and more rare the older I get. After three disasters of albums though, OK Human feels like River Weezer — the frontman for Weezer — is still capable of writing a good album, but only when he wants to.
- Peak Divide — “UNBEATABLE: DEMO TAPES”: If I could consider the currently unreleased 2022 rhythm game UNBEATABLE’s soundtrack sampler album UNBEATABLE: DEMO TAPES an album, rather than a demo sampler, I think it would be one of my favorite albums this year. There’s a raw energy found here that American indie and punk bands often lack when compared to Japanese powerhouses like The Pillows and Asian Kung-Fu Generation, and those influences are clear as day here. The game’s theme song ‘Empty Diary’ immediately brings my memory to the emotional times of hearing albums like Little Busters and Kimi Tsunagi Five M for the first time. Never have I ever heard a western band capture that exact spirit so well without outright ripping it off. I absolutely can not wait to hear the final product and play this game when it releases hopefully in December of 2022.
- the GazettE — “MASS”: Modern visual-kei legends “the GazettE” continue their recent string of consistency that started with 2015’s absolutely astounding DOGMA with their latest output, MASS. While I wouldn’t necessarily say MASS is album of the year material, I think it’s proof that the GazettE are just getting better at creating full album experiences, having previously been a mostly singles-centric band (despite what some of their diehard fans might insist about 2007’s STACKED RUBBISH or the following DIM in 2009). Their first album not written together in the same room due to the pandemic, MASS still feels like it was written with the ferocity of a band thirsty for a major record deal despite being one of the biggest metal bands in all of Japan at the moment. While still not necessarily scratching the output of the oft-compared and eclipsing rival band DIR EN GREY, MASS is still a fantastic album with great hooks, punchy metalcore production, and a lot of heart. Well done, GazettE. Keep it up.
- CHAI — “WINK”: On everything I wanted WINK to be one of my favorite albums of the year, but CHAI’s followup to 2019’s PUNK feels just a little too anticlimactic by the end of it to make it into my top 21 albums, though were this my top 30 albums I think it would find its way around the late 20s. For one, ‘Maybe Chocolate Chips’ featuring an unexpected verse from commercially underrated Chicago rapper Ric Wilson happens to be one of my favorite songs of the entire year, with a melty and hypnotic beat that gives off subtle notes of both Chicago hip-hop and even a bit of early Pizzicato Five (think This Year’s Girl). Other standouts like ‘Nobody Knows We Are Fun’ and ‘IN PINK’ unfortunately don’t make up for more forgettable tracks like ‘END’ and ‘Miracle‘”’, nevertheless leaving me remembering WINK as CHAI’s best album to date, but unfortunately not by much. Anyways, I’ll be upset if their next album isn’t called WUNK.
- Turnstile — “GLOW ON”: I get the hype around Turnstile’s GLOW ON, an album which allegedly coins the term “dream punk” despite other east coast punk outfits like my own band The Boring Twenties and the thankfully now-defunct Beach Slang cultivating that sound nearly half a decade prior. I do get the hype, but it just doesn’t do it for me the way it’s been for everyone else. The first listen was fantastic, but repeated listens begin to feel stale quickly and despite GLOW ON’s short runtime still feels like a slog to sit through at times. Their sound instead makes me rather revisit old favorites of the early 2010s like Ceremony or World’s Scariest Police Chases. It’s the kind of album that had it come out in the early 2010s I probably would still be considering an all-time classic, but it just feels a few years too late to feel truly innovative.
- Gojira — “Fortitude”: Another album I wish I could have given more time but didn’t, Gojira’s Fortitude feels like it skipped over the progression the band made on 2016’s prior Magma and continuing off of what the French post-metal outfit started on 2012’s L’Enfant Sauvage. While that may read as a bad thing, that couldn’t be further than the truth and I truly don’t mean it that way. Gojira’s sound since their 2005 opus From Mars To Sirius has been entirely their own and further explorations of it are entirely welcome. While Magma found Gojira getting more subtle, introspective, as well as even a little experimental with their usage of whammy pedals and pitch shifting, Fortitude picks up where L’Enfant Sauvage left off and brings all the power and heaviness that they showed on that record. Gojira still continue to be the kind of band that metalheads pretend that Metallica and Megadeth have ever been. Frankly, this one almost made the list. Fortitude is #22 on a list of 21 albums.
- Parannoul — “To See The Next Part Of The Dream”: The relatively unknown and anonymous Korean shoegaze artist releases an incredible sophomore album that wows on the first few listens but sadly leaves me a bit tired upon revisits and kind of gives off “RYM-core” vibes.
- Lucero — “When You Found Me”: The Memphis country-punk outfit release one of their dreamiest and actually emotional albums in almost a decade, yet it still doesn’t reach the emotional power that albums like Tennessee, That Much Further West, and 1372 Overton Park did in the 2000s.
- Night Tempo — “Ladies In The City”: On this surprise late-year release, Night Tempo steps back from the sampler and over to the analog synths, as he produces his most ambitious album to date by collaborating on every track with some shockingly hard-to-get names like ex-Morning Musume darling Sayumi Michishige, the thought-to-be-retired Bonnie Pink, and even Shibuya-kei pioneer/legend Maki Nomiya of Pizzicato Five fame. Unfortunately, Ladies In The City doesn’t exactly live up to its title’s prediction of the kind of future funk and city pop Night Tempo came up on, and ultimately falls just a little too flat throughout its tracklist. It’s nevertheless a wonderful listen, but its novelty wears off as soon as you realize…that there is no novelty anymore.
- Lil Yachty — “BIRTHDAY MIX 6”: It’s surprise that Lil Yachty’s latest birthday mixtape of unreleased songs blended together happens to be his best material since 2016, as the previous 5 birthday mixes also carry that same weight. It’s just a shame he doesn’t have the self-awareness to do the opposite and release all of his official music in this capacity and release these songs as his official music. He could still be dominating the trap scene if this was the type of music he was releasing officially.
- Silk Sonic — “An Evening With Silk Sonic”: I was so excited for this one. Silk Sonic, a superduo comprised of Anderson .Paak and Bruno Mars, were set up to absolutely own the summer of 2021 with this album after sunny singles like ‘Leave The Door Open’ and ‘Skate’, but after the summer came and went, the album released in November, with only 5 new songs (a total of 9, the first being merely a one minute intro) and completely fell flat on that promise. While the album is still quite fantastic, I feel like its release both underdelivered in content and on its promise. Here’s hoping Anderson .Paak has NxWorries 2, Carpinteria/Summerland/Santa Barbara down the pipeline soon to recover, because this is not enough content for the teases and the wait.
- Vince Staples — “Vince Staples”: A self-titled album is always bold statement, and Vince Staples’ is no exception. As usual, Vince ventures into completely new sonic territory here while remaining grounded and humble in his lyricism, while also picking up something resembling singing on here which often sounds a little ironically funny in conjunction with his usual lyrics about the horrors of living in a marginalized neighborhood as part of a system that wants people who look like him suffering, profiting off of, or dead. At a brief 22 minutes, Vince Staples finds itself in funny labeling, being considered by Vince himself as a studio album despite also considering 2019’s FM! — which shares a runtime of only a few second longer — an EP. My issue with Vince Staples that had it removed from its spot at #21 on my list at the very last minute is that it’s a bizarre and moody album that makes no attempt at being fun. While on one hand I consider that a pro as an artistic statement, I also find it to be a con as I find myself already revisiting it less than his experimental 2017 opus Big Fish Theory and 2015’s similarly dark and moody Summertime ’06. Despite this, this album is still worth every drop of your attention and continue Vince’s near-perfect track record, if not only being considered a slight fumble. If Big Fish Theory was Vince’s Mona Lisa, then Vince Staples is his Vitruvian Man, a deconstruction of sounds that’s both raw on its surface but still carries deep artistic weight worthy of no scrutiny.
