Another year and once again I’m trying to avoid the feeling that I didn’t spend enough time writing about music or doing all the things that smart and sensible people advise you to do with your Substack in order to build your brand and audience. But hey, a new year is just around the corner and so here at the end of 2024 is a series of short thoughts about some of the records I’ve enjoyed the most over the last twelve months. It’s tempting to try and narrativize, to do the immediate historicism of the present culture but I’m not aiming that high this time. I’m not sure I was all that attuned to a vibe or have much to offer about what music might have been saying to us. All I know is that I listened to these records a lot this year and really enjoyed them - maybe you will too. Please do let me know what you’ve been listening to, and what you are excited about hearing in 2025.
However, my dear friend, colleague and brother in arms
also has a list of music up - we have a great deal in common but have managed to avoid much of the overlap, though if (like me) you enjoy Waxahatchee you’ll find plenty of additional recommendations on their list. One thing particularly good about Kyle’s list is the way he' manages - like always - to contextualize who he is though the intersections of culture and memory. He is, in my opinion, a really special writer and if you are reading this you should absolutely add Kyle’s newsletter to your rotation.Finally, thank you so much for being here and I hope whereever you are, and whatever you are doing, you have a happy new year. Here’s to more screams from the haunt - if you enjoy this pease do subscribe or share it (see, I can do self-promotion, I just choose not to)
Mk.gee: “Two Star and the Dream Police”
A lot of people talk about the music of Mk.gee in terms of vibes, a sort of affect that cuts across both nostalgia and memory. I get that but I do think reducing him to the sound of an alternative and dehistoricized 1980s does the quality of the song writing a disservice. Generally mainstream guitar music has been in a bit of a slump for a while, drifting along and unable to shake the feeling that rock had hit a creative slump after the revival of the 2010s. Is the guitar even all that relevant for mainstream music? This album provides the most interesting affirmative answer to that question I’ve heard in a while. The album is short (less than 40 minutes) and is full of textures - psychedelia, funk, lofi pop and electronica all cut with some extremely distinctive guitar playing and glitchy production.
The best way I can think about describing the record is that nothing else I listened to this year sounded like this. However, there is nothing nostalgic about this album - despite the influence from the 80’s it genuinely feels like modern music with its own particular sound. This isn’t the place to rehash a Mark Fisher style argument on the hauntological possibility of contemporary pop, but, whisper it, here is something that recognizably takes from the history of music but in a way that isn’t simply parody. This album is maybe the music that made me the most excited about the possibilities of production from this year as it blends historical details like the faint tape hiss you can hear that makes it sound like analogue recording with his own clearly very technical and precise production style.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor: “No title as of 13 February 2024, 28340 dead”
Something I’ve tried to say again and again over the past couple of years is that hope isn’t a feeling, or rather, that hope isn’t just a moment of feeling because if it were then nothing could be so cruel, and we would be better off without it. The feelings help, that’s for sure, but to take hope seriously as a philosophical and political category is about a commitment to rethinking our philosophical commitments. Hope is hard: it has to be built. Or, to put this another way, hope is material. It is something forged through the processural outworking of human agency responding to the latencies, tendencies and possibilities of history itself.
Another thing that it requires is a kind of fidelity to the Event. In less philosophical terms, hope - and this is what GY!BE make very concrete - is about an insistence that the world should not be like this. To denounce what is as unjust is also, if only implicitly, to insist that it could be otherwise. In an era when a genocide can be live streamed, when the forest burns, when the institutions of law and global politics are revealed to be so much blood smeared hypocrisy, when you have to watch as bombs fall on frightened children and starving mothers whose only crimes is to be who they are, where they are then hope is the insistence that the world is not right. Given the context in which this album was made and written it would be so easy for it to be solely chilling, depressing and downbeat but there’s so many moments of this album which sound like what could be, beyond the dust and the horror and the endless, needless death.
One of the final songs is called GREY RUBBLE - GREEN SHOOTS.
As the liner notes for the album end,
this new century will be crueler still.
war is coming.
don’t give up.
pick a side.
hang on.
love.
GY!BE
I get that I’m coming late to Waxahatchee, I do - but this is maybe the album that surprised me the most this year. There are so many small perfect moments or details on this album that I am just in love with - here’s a list of just a few. The production which makes the most of room tone, and the warmth and immediacy this gives the acoustic guitar. The slight twang in Katie Crutchfield’s vocals on the line “take my money, I don’t work that hard” that opens the track “Evil Spawn.” The goosebump inducing harmonies between Crutchfield and MJ Lenderman on the single “Right Back to it” (which is also maybe the most romantic song I’ve heard this entire year) The subtle and perfect playing from Brad Cook, Phil Cook and Spencer Tweedy all of whom provide superb arrangements that bolster Crutchfield’s acoustic strumming without every over powering it,.
I said that duet was a romantic song, but this brings up the messy complexity of Crutchfield’s brilliant lyricism. She’s such a good writer, alive to the reality that we can always hurt those we care about even if we didn’t mean to, that even our self can be this stranger that we have to come to understand and not idealize. “Bored” is such a great song about exactly this, which recognises in it’s lyrics the necessity and need to still the self for a while, to just be and yet even if we try and do that what happens? “I got bored” as the refrain of the song runs. Or, as she sings on “Lone Star Lake” I get caught up in my thoughts/for lack of a better cause/my life’s /been mapped out to a T/but I'm always a little lost.” Really, I think the only way to compare this album is to reach for analogy - when talking about Middlemarch, Virginia Woolf said that it was “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people" - this what Tigers Blood feels like too - an album for grown-up people.
Los Campesinos seventh album feels like a miracle, the kind of story you would see in a feel good film about the band you started with your friends while you were all at university together. After a big breakthrough back in 2007 they’ve just kept going. Their seventh album is entirely self-produced, self-released and self-promoted. According to the band, the marketing spend for the record was around £200 and they made it to the UK top 20. As Gareth, the lead singer said on stage at a sell out gig at the QMU union in Glasgow, this wasn’t supposed to happen, we were supposed to fall off. There isn’t another UK band as consistently good as LC and they’ve done this for fifteen fucking years. For some, the band comes off as overly verbose insufferable twee romantics but I love everything about this record and I’ve absolutely loved this band since I first heard “You! Me! Dancing!” in a cold, damp and thoroughly shitty student flat in the middle of Scotland. Seeing them with their most successful record in years is a reminder that sometimes the things that weren’t supposed to happen, can happen. It’s all true, sometimes you can just start a band and keep going. Another way really is possible.
Some things LC love: non-league football, drinking too much at the pub, being sad about your breakup, wishing for the end of capitalism and the inevitable triumph of socialism. Not for nothing do they describe themselves as “the UKs only emo band” who make “sleeper hits for weeping dipshits.” This album, which took seven years to make, has left the band never sounding this good. They are an intensely millennial band of course, but this new record means they are making the most of the emo revival of the last five years too. They still have the same sense of humor - as Gareth sings on one track “do you still have that one tattoo/that’s how it works of course you do,” but they are also making songs about punching fascists with your friends (that they titled “To Hell in a Handjob”) I kind of grew up with them: “No children and no profession/walking dead at thirty seven.” If we’re going to hell, I’m with them. Los Campesinos! for life
Laura Marling: “Patterns In Repeat”
Simplicity is hard to do, requiring a willingness to let things be what they are. It gives little to hide behind and takes a kind of vulnerability that I think many artists would prefer not to embrace. After all, what is a personae is not a means of mitigating the vulnerability of the self that artistic expression requires? This is a very simple album in some respects - the production is simple and depends on some strings and Marling’s finger-picking guitar. The songs are straightforward, foregrounding Marling’s lyrics. Domesticity, like simplicity, requires that same willingness to let things be as they are.
This is an album that was made at home - in her own studio and you hear the sounds of home in the background. You hear a baby gurgling away, snatches of conversation and all the minutiae of home life as the just off stage action to the songs themselves. And what songs they are - “Child of Mine” - a song I think every parent on the planet will listen to with eyes full of tears and a sense of recognition. Or, “Looking Back”, a song originally written by Marling’s father and covered very beautifully here. Rather than aim for something grand, Marling has said that her songs are always aiming at truth. But even in the small repeating patterns of domesticity comes something sublime.
Chat Pile fucking rule - “Gods Country” was a ferocious, visceral record about the nightmare ruins of capitalism in OKC, ranging from homelessness, to the opioid crisis to a psychotic break thanks to the amazing song grimace_smoking_weed.jpeg. The focus was tight, the music was sludgy, grimy and heavy as fuck and the lyrics were angry and lurid, rife with horror imagery. There was a grounded specificity to the first album, the sense of people finding themselves in a meeting point, caught between the toxic piles of chat drawn up from the earth by extractive capitalism on the one hand, and the post-modern soup of American culture on the other. That said, though I think this album is a continuation and further intensification of the band’s themes, both lyrically and sonically, there is an attempt to widen their gaze. Raygun said in an interview "Part of me doesn’t want people to think of Oklahoma as the armpit of the world…The world is full of armpits.” As a result, their songs keep the intensity of the previous album but the themes are aiming to be a little more universal. I wrote about Masc earlier this year and that kind of proves my point. Or take “Shame” - “In their parents arms, the kids were falling apart/ Broken tiny bodies, holding tiny still hearts.” It’s an anti war song, but it’s tied into the wider systems of violence that sweep across all of us, not just those in OKC. The album title is instructive - they made a record about God’s own country and now there’s this record, covering the rest of the world (no longer all that cool in an era of climate collapse -a point the album closer “No Way Out makes explicit)
There’s also a greater range musically here - it’s still all heavy and brutal but they draw in more styles too taking inspiration from punk to nu-metal bass tuning. The riffs are heavy and the horrors persist still. See you all in the pit.
I remember the very first time I went to the Pacific Northwest. I was staying with friends in Seattle, and on the first morning they drove us downtown to see the city. But on that drive you don’t really see the city, or not just that - you see forests, the Puget Sound and looming above you, Mount Rainier. I turned to my partner and said, “there’s a problem. I’m going to love this place.” A few years later, we were back - and the friends we stayed with that first time had fallen in love. They got married and so we came from halfway around the globe to witness it. They married on the San Juan islands, so we drove up to Anacortes, which for many years has been the home and creative workshop of musician Phil Elverum.
If you’ve never been up that way, it is a place so beautiful as to almost seem unreal, a collection of old-growth forests and a coastline that leads you to the sea and a sky that seems massive. The whole region is awash in second homes, money coming in for the high season but it all recedes through the winter. The region, like many of the most beautiful natural spots across the world has a reputation for being “untouched” but it is deeply vulnerable to climate change - here in these communities that people visit is the sharp edge of the anthropocene. Look at the water, and you’ll see oil slicks on its surface. Talk to the fish and they have mouths full of plastic and blood poisoned by chemical runoff. Of course, Anacortes isn’t really called Anacortes - the San Juan islands have an older name given to them by the Samish nation. As Phil sings on Non-Metaphorical Decolonization:”All we have is stolen and can’t be owned/This America, this old idea, I want it to die.” Head down to the shoreline at Friday Harbor, and look up at the big, seemingly endless horizon, place your hand in the water and listen to the susurrations of water on skin. Thank you. Phil.
Honorable Mentions
Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross - Challengers (Original Score): Music to make you feel like you have to run through a wall. Like watching Titane: sexy, panic inducing, deeply stressful and cool as fuck.
Rosie Tucker, Utopia Now! - Sorry but “I hope no one had to piss in a bottle at work to get me the thing I ordered on the internet” is maybe my favourite opening for any song this year. A whole album of indie bangers shot through with the desire for a new and better world.
Bill Ryder-Jones - Iechyd Da:- An incredible (and surprisingly hopeful) album that features a reading from Ulysses, some beautiful choir arrangements and some 60s pop inspired indie songs. “There’s something great about life”, sings Bill, and “there’s something not quite right.”
The Cure - Songs of a Lost World: - Majestic. Feels almost geological in the time, weight and space given to each song. Something so deeply focused about this record, trimmed of the bloat that can creep into some of their later albums. Robert Smith’s voice remains an instrument of incredible clarity and power, testament to a genuinely impressive longevity, but here soaked in a gothic splendor and weary, aching grief. In terms of instrumentation Simon Gallup’s bass playing gives the whole thing shape and force in a way that makes the whole thing so utterly cohesive. “This is the end/Of every song that we sing,” sings Smith and this year of all years, nothing could have sounded more fitting.
Vince Staples - Dark Times - Smart, funny, introspective lyrics, some solid beat choices and great song structures. Worth a place here for the hook on “Étouffée” alone.
Father John Misty - Mahashmashana: Bleak, yes, but also beautiful - we’re facing the end of everything (even ourselves) and yet art still remains, maybe if only because we don’t know what else to do.