The Tomo Awards 2021 — Midway Review
Well, July is upon us and that means we’ve had exactly 6 months of music so far this year. So rather than making a definitive list of worst to best, I’d rather just reflect on this strange year in music so far with 5 standout releases so far in no particular order. I’ll also embed my “Best Songs Of 2021” Spotify playlist at the very bottom of the article.
As of right now, it’s possible that these would be my top 5 albums of the entire year were tomorrow the beginning of 2022, though as usual, my feelings change. So far, I’m feeling pretty confident with my picks from last year. Seiko Oomori’s Kintsugi holds up unbelievably well and I still consider it doubtlessly my favorite release of 2020. Not only that, but I feel even more strongly in my pick than I did 6 months ago in January when I made that list. In that time, the album has only gotten better to my ears, and with possibly 4 more Seiko Oomori albums coming out this year — namely a possible but not fully confirmed solo album that she started work on the day Kintsugi came out due to her dissatisfaction with that album (what a self-critical legend), a confirmed-to-exist reworked version of her highest-selling but least-acclaimed album from 2018 Kusokawa PARTY, an album by ZOC, the idol group she produces and leads that released earlier this month , and a self-cover album releasing on July 7th— it’s looking like my list come December might once again be dominated by Seiko Oomori
In regards to other choices on that list, some have held up similarly and others less well. I think that the GING NANG BOYZ’s Ne- Minna Daisuki Da Yo might have deserved the #2 spot for AOTY. It’s truly one of the most incredible Japanese punk rock albums in recent memory, and could go toe-to-toe with any of their other now-legendary albums. I also frequently find myself returning to The Midnight’s 2020 effort Monsters and feel like it deserved a much higher spot than #15.
Before I even get into my proper list, let me talk about a discovery I made in early June that I want to add to my AOTY list despite feeling a little weird to add a video game soundtrack to it. I must have heard about it prior to its more in-depth spotlight at Geoff Keighley’s Summer Game Fest on June 10th, as when I went to follow absolutely every SNS account associated with the adventure/rhythm game UNBEATABLE, I found I had already been following them on Twitter and already liked it on Facebook for some reason (very possible I might have a friend associated with the soundtrack’s remixes and that could be why). When I went to check Steam, I saw a demo for the game was already available to download for free, and I immediately went in.
The demo for the game, soundtracked by the band Peak Divide with vocals provided by Rachel Lake, makes one hell of an introduction with the tutorial song ‘Familiar’ leaving an absolutely badass and in-your-face first impression for the soundtrack. It reminds me of so many things but I can’t necessarily put my finger on exactly what. It could easily fall in line with things like The Pillows, Death From Above 1979, and even the fictional bands from the (ugh) Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World movie soundtrack. So after playing my second song in the UNBEATABLE demo, I immediately headed over to BandCamp to check out the demo soundtrack and dropped $20 on it. What this short selection of 9 songs offers is astounding for simply a rhythm game soundtrack, but I feel like I can’t make an article about the music I’ve enjoyed the most this year without mentioning this absolute gem. You can check out and support UNBEATABLE here.
So with that out of the way, as far as my early impressions for studio albums released this year go, what’s it looking like? Well, let’s get into it. Here are my 5 favorite releases of 2021 so far. Three paragraphs each, max.
Porter Robinson — Nurture
While Porter Robinson can certainly be a divisive figure both for his overly-rabid fanbase and “soft boy” aesthetics, there’s no denying both his musical prowess and evolution as an artist, beginning with an EDM festival-ready debut EP Spitfire released a full decade ago in 2011. In 2014, he released his debut full-length album Worlds, a record that still remains in so many hearts and forged so many friendships through its nostalgic and innovative sounds, combining Perfume-esque electronic production values with Vocaloids and even soundfonts of instruments ripped directly out of video game soundtracks, particularly The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time; Robinson often uses the game’s ocarina, harp, and choir samples to play an interpolation of the ‘Song Of Storms’ at his concerts during the bridge of ‘Sad Machine’. Porter’s evolution as an artist from Spitfire to Nurture is especially impressive and complicated after facing writer’s blocked spurred on by what he described as a deep depression in the time since his debut album released in 2014. This kept him out of the studio throughout the pivotal year of 2015, where most artists would spend time locked away in the studio trying to up their debut.
While Porter would eventually find enough inspiration to release the 5-track Virtual Self EP (under the alias Virtual Self) in 2017, it wouldn’t be until early 2020 that we would hear solo music from Robinson again, releasing Nurture’s magnificent, organic lead single ‘Get Your Wish’, which sat as my single favorite song of 2020 until Seiko Oomori’s Kintsugi released at the very tail end of the year.
I have a strong feeling that Nurture will end up quite high on my list come this December, so I’ll keep this short so as to leave the juicy details until then — to put it simply, the album follows in suit with the wistfulness of ‘Get Your Wish’, straying far from the digital sounds and anime iconography of the worlds era, and into something more naturally rooted in both the visuals and sounds; real acoustic drums, more “traditional” drum machines, heavier sample-work that reminds of Kanye West’s peak sampling era, and imagery that revolves more around the beauty of nature, as the album cover makes clear. ‘Mother’ is my favorite song of 2021 that has an album associated with it so far.
Origami Angel — Gami Gang
Let’s get this out of the way — I hate most albums with this many songs. I’m particularly not fond of this trend in today’s current popular hip-hop landscape. Nobody needs 20 DaBaby songs on a single album, especially when they all sound the same. Thankfully, what Origami Angel — leaders of what’s shaping up to be a “fifth wave of emo” alongside other great new bands like Glass Beach — does with their sophomore album Gami Gang is nothing like a bloated Lil Baby album (DaBaby and Lil Baby are actually two different people, despite the fact that they both share the incredible talent of only being able to write the same exact song over and over again and also having the word “Baby” in their aliases).
Gami Gang is an emo album, sure, and it has all the clichés of emo albums like the whiny tenor voice and the corny, sad, nostalgic lyrics, but they also bring forward a level of cohesion I haven’t quite heard in an emo album in quite a long time. This is especially important because I can pretty much count the emo bands I grew up listening to on both hands, maybe even only one hand, which for some reason still is not freeing my punk rock band The Boring Twenties from being hailed as an emo unit. Great.
Every track on Gami Gang smoothly flows into one another like an intricate DJ set, each song featuring crisp production, catchy hooks, and pretty wild mood swings, as evidenced by the intro track literally just being a trap beat that transitions into a dissonant almost post-hardcore double kick drum opening set of bars on ‘Self-Destruct’ before quickly cutting into the sliding capo’d Fender guitars associated with midwest emo. Add Gami Gang to the list of albums longer than 15 full-length songs that manages to be captivating from front-to-back. ‘Caught In The Moment’ stands as one of my favorite album songs of the year as well.
Tyler, The Creator — Call Me If You Get Lost
How does he keep doing it? How does he keep topping himself like this? Tyler, The Creator is one of the most boundary-pushing artists of my generation. He burst onto the scene with his debut album Bastard way back in 2009, full of profanities, raw but talented self-production, and brutally violent and homophobic lyrical content, which proved to almost be something like a closeted shield, as Tyler has all but “come out” as of his 2017 masterpiece Flower Boy, years after his Odd Future bandmate Frank Ocean came out himself. Tyler, despite these shielded “homophobic” lyrics getting him banned from entering several countries, was one of the first people to show undying support for Frank Ocean’s outing.
Tyler’s music has followed a breathtaking evolution both in music and storytelling; Tyler has been no stranger to theatrics throughout his career. His first three albums — Bastard, Goblin, and Wolf — are a trilogy that tell a story about Tyler Haley, an alter-ego of Tyler’s attending therapy session hosted by another one of his alter-egos named Doctor TC, and detailing his rivalry with Wolf Haley, yet another alter-ego of himself. His 2019 album IGOR saw him portraying a guy with a blonde bowl cut named Igor, who finds himself in a heartbreaking romantic triangle with another man and his girlfriend.
On Call Me If You Get Lost, Tyler returns as Tyler Baudelaire, with the cinematics taken up to an 11 in this era’s music videos and live performances. While IGOR was Tyler’s boldest adventure to date, being a borderline artpop album, Call Me If You Get Lost finds Tyler returning to his stylistic routes in rap music while borrowing musical DNA from all of his eras. There’s even a reggae song on the back half, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, but my favorite song on this entire album has a fucking NBA YoungBoy feature taking up over half of its runtime.
ZOC — PvP
What else can I say about Seiko Oomori that I haven’t already written an article that takes 30 minutes to read about? Seiko Oomori’s level of consistency could go toe-to-toe with any other artist around, she is in my eyes without a doubt the most consistent artist in the entire world. I believe the count for her career is now 8 solo albums, a solo EP, 2 collaboration albums, 2 compilation albums, technically 2 albums with ZOC as this is considered a double album, and countless demo tapes. Hot off the release of her previous album Kintsugi this past December — which sat atop my list as my favorite album of 2020 — and not even a single month before the release of her self-cover album PERSONA #1 at the beginning of July, Seiko released PvP with her personally curated idol group ZOC.
ZOC was formed by and is entirely managed and produced by Oomori herself, who also features as the group’s center member. It wouldn’t be a stretch to even say that ZOC is essentially a glorified solo album, a “vanity project” if that phrase didn’t have a petty connotation. Seiko’s voice features prominently on it. I don’t really know or care much about the other members despite being a fan of some of their previous groups like Meltia, but Seiko’s voice stands out high above any of theirs, featuring prominently in the center mix during group choruses and giving herself a liberal spotlight during the verses.
PvP is anything but petty however. It’s an embodiment of Seiko’s humility as a solo artist — it’s a double album that she released not even 5 months after her last solo album and a month before her next solo album. ZOC’s existence has been something of a mess, and even if this is the only album we’ll ever get from them, that’s okay with me. At least we got this. PvP is a double album and it actually works incredibly as such — each side feels like its own separate album, with a perfectly-paced tracklist with meaningfully-written opening and closing tracks to each side. Seiko did it again. ‘DON’T TRUST TEENAGER’ is another one of my favorite songs from an album this year.
Meishi Smile — Ressentiment
Meishi Smile’s music has meant a lot to me and my friends over the 2010s, with many of the remix tracks from her mYSTERIOUS sUMMER vACATION EP from 2013 soundtracking as highlights of countless DJ sets over the past 8 years or so, particularly ‘L/M/B/W/Y’, her astounding remix of ROUND TABLE’s ‘Let Me Be With You’ which slightly more experienced anime fans know as the intro to Chobits. Meishi’s electronic trajectory lead to her colossal underground smash debut of an album LUST in 2014, once again soundtracking countless DJ sets and spearheading the golden age of her netlabel ZOOM LENS, which featured landmark cult classics like Slime Girls’ Vacation Wasteland, LLLL’s Paradice, and even Yeule’s self-titled debut EP.
Mostly escaping from club room electronic, her followup album in 2015, …Belong, saw the project enter into more gorgeous and lush ambient on tracks like ‘Us’, to hardcore (electronic) on tracks like ‘Star’, as well as 80s-inspired synthpop on ‘Pastel’, as well as a slight dive back into her origins in noise music and hardcore (punk) on the title track, which offered an early glimpse into what would come 6 years later on her third album Ressentiment.
Meishi Smile make no compromises on Ressentiment, and have shifted their sound dramatically to that of a band, rather than an electronic solo artist. These songs are punk rock and industrial through and through, with influences like Nine Inch Nails and Slipknot shining through on songs like ‘Hate Floods Slow’ and ‘Data Base Animal’. Every song here is intentional, sitting at a short but sweet 8 songs as well as a “bonus track” I like to tack onto the end of the album in the form of the band’s recently-released cover of The Chainsmokers’ obnoxious hit single ‘Closer’, which they managed to turn into something incredible, fitting in incredibly well with the album’s vibe. ‘To Die Like Dazai’ is another one of my favorite album songs this year so far.
Singles Without Albums (So Far) That I Think Are Fantastic Too
Now with all that talk of albums out of the way, I do want to give a bit of attention to 5 exceptional singles that are either non-album tracks, are from smaller bodies of works like EPs, or are featured on an upcoming but still-unreleased album. Two paragraphs each.
At the top of these tracks and my favorite song of the entire year so far is ‘Rainforest’ by Noname, slated as the lead single off her hotly anticipated album Factory Baby, the follow-up to her critically acclaimed 2018 album Room 25, a record that I consider to be the greatest rap album of all time, full stop. Continuing hotly off the political importance of Room 25, Rainforest packs a devastatingly honest lyrical punch that demonstrates both Noname’s versatility as a lyricist and activist, serving as the anti-capitalist anthem of the new age. Noname once again proves herself to be the unchallenged greatest rapper of our generation, if not all time, regardless of what some fucking twit like Jermaine Cole and his rabid fanbase of braincels would have you believe.
While J. Cole was sitting in his penthouse for the last year recording mediocre diss tracks (I’m not linking them, fuck J. Cole) that avoid the point but still try to mansplain Noname anyway, Noname was out fighting the good fight, starting a book club that offers black-authored books and educational resources for free to both underprivileged communities and incarcerated people, not even focused on rap save for the 68-second response track she made that utterly bodied Joseph Cole’s pathetic 4-minute “diss track” where he said literally nothing besides “feel sorry for me”. On ‘Rainforest’, Noname owns her humility (even owning up to the fact that she believes a select lyric on this song is classist; we love to see growth like that) and ethics while calling out the capitalist overlords who are currently telling NYC residents to turn their AC off during a heat wave while refusing to take the financial blow from advertising partners by keeping Times Square as brightly-lit as ever. We’re fucked, but at least we have a leader as bright as Noname leading the charge.
It’s no secret that my favorite band is Perfume, and anybody who’s been in the fandom for more than a few years will remember the somewhat-disappointment of their rather un-unique 2018 effort Future Pop, drawing influence from the by-then-dead future bass sounds that dominated SoundCloud and even a bit of the mainstream radio from 2014–2015. That’s not to say that Future Pop was without its moments (see: ‘Tiny Baby’, ‘Mugen Mirai’), but it left a lot to be desired from Japan’s most boundary-pushing innovators.
Thankfully, the post-Future Pop era is looking bright between their last double-A side single ‘Saisei’ and ‘Time Warp’, as well as their latest song ‘Polygon Wave’, which takes a lot of ques from every era of Perfume’s discography, with the syncopated electric pianos and neo-Shibuya-kei drum loops found on GAME, the hard bass and auto-tuned/vocoded vocal layers of ⊿, and the futuristic lead synth stylings of LEVEL3. Perfume is back on top.
AINA THE END — Kare To Boku No Hondana
I was one of the first people to be aboard the BiSH hype train back in early 2015 with their debut single ‘SPARK’, which captured my attention not just for being a (let’s face it, a pretty disappointing) successor to anti-idol pioneers BiS, but also for one specific voice that shined high above the other members of the then-anonymous group. This of course ended up being Aina Iitani, better known by her stage name AINA THE END who has since gone onto rightfully become BiSH’s most popular member, likely due to her uniquely husky voice and powerful vocal range. The prospect of an AINA THE END solo album was promising, but as all prospective solo albums go, there’s always margin for failure, and as such, her debut solo album earlier this year, THE END, was bogged down by a plethora of sleepy ballads and mostly forgettable songs that failed to take advantage of and otherwise spotlight her incredible voice.
Not even a month later, AINA followed the album up with the Naisyo EP (or Naisho, that’s my personal romanization preference) which managed to do what her 12-track album mostly failed to do by showcasing the ferocious range of AINA across 4 wildly different songs. Among these is the funky, city pop influenced ‘Kare To Watashi To Hondana’, a stark contrast to the edgy punk and metal aesthetics of BiSH. While her full-length effort may have been disappointing, the Naisyo EP offers a glimpse at what could have been were WACK not the worst agency in all of Japan.
æspa — Next Level
SM Entertainment’s latest K-pop girl group æspa’s premature 2020 debut with the song ‘Black Mamba’ was a disappointment on so many levels for so many different reasons. æspa seemed to have been a replacement for SM Entertainment’s biggest cash crop and most consistent girl group in the game, Red Velvet, after a shady controversy (that opens up a wider discussion for another time about South Korean media’s treatment and conditioning of women in society) forced SM to make a quick move to debut a new group to cover up for the bad PR. SM are no strangers to this, as Red Velvet themselves were debuted as a coverup for a controversy involving their previous flagship group Girls’ Generation with a similarly aimless single in the form of Happiness, so undercooked that they debuted the song with only 4 of the 5 members of Red Velvet.
Much like Red Velvet however, their follow-up is an immediate improvement with a clearer focus on what the group is intended to be. While Red Velvet would eventually release the electrifying R&B cut Ice Cream Cake to cement themselves, æspa have taken things to the ‘Next Level’, with an experimental and bass-heavy banger that samples one of the Fast & Furious soundtracks and also happens to have an effortlessly smooth beat switch to give Frank Ocean’s ‘Nights’ a run for its money (this is a lie, Frank Ocean’s ‘Nights’ is the greatest song of all time, but ‘Next Level’ is still pretty good). Of course, this experimental nature immediately turned the die-hard fans off of this song, which is kind of hilarious how a group with one mediocre song could even have die-hard fans at this point. But I digress, as ‘Next Level’ is an incredible showcase of what a little bit of time in the oven can do for an undercooked trainee group that was debuted a few months too early.
WILLOW — t r a n s p a r e n t s o u l
I’ve been known to be an avid defender of the musical ventures of Will and Jada’s children, especially with Jaden Smith’s incredible experimental hip-hop duology of albums SYRE and ERYS in the past few years. While Jaden was making criminally over-hated maximalist hip-hop masterpieces, Willow had been working on her own criminally underrated project in the form of a self-titled indie rock album in 2019. Following that up this July with her yet to be released album Lately I Feel Everything with the furious and edgy pop-punk banger ‘t r a n s p a r e n t s o u l’, assisted by Blink-182 and former Aquabats drummer Travis Barker. While most artists who foray into punk rock as a gimmick (see: Vic Mensa, Trippie Redd, Machine Gun Kelly) end up embarrassing themselves, what Willow does here surprisingly doesn’t fall flat by any stretch of the imagination, and the song’s positive response from listeners and critics alike hint at a potential return of pop-punk sounds as dictated by the 20-year trend cycle (record labels I’m begging you, sign me, make me and industry plant, let me sell out, I can’t work at fucking Starbucks ever again).
‘Transparent Soul’ (don’t feel like typing all the spaces in between anymore) feels surprisingly honest, with Willow herself even learning how to play guitar from Michael Cera of all people just for this project. Every part of the song feels well-written, with a catchy lead guitar melody played by Willow, pounding drums from Travis Barker, and a catchy shouted chorus that will have you singing along by the third time around. Like all good punk songs, ‘Transparent Soul’ also never overstays its welcome, sitting at a snug 2:48 in total runtime. I think Willow’s forthcoming album is shaping up to be a great one if this is anything to go by.
If my taste in music interests you at all, here’s my constantly-updated personal playlist of my favorite songs of the year listed in relatively-accurate order, which currently sits at just under 100 songs by 100 different artists and just about 6 hours in total. Hit shuffle and find something new to listen to:
